In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  From Paisley a railway line runs west along the southern shore of the Clyde estuary, designed originally to bring workers into Glasgow and take day trippers to the seaside. From the windows of the train the hulking fist of Dumbarton Rock (Alt Clut in Brythonic: Rock of the Clyde), fortress of the British kings of these parts in Bede’s day, appeared across the water.

  I still feel a childlike sense of excitement at a ferry port and in climbing aboard a ship: the prow pointing towards the future and to adventure; the long wake of ruffled water aft a memory-cleansing refugee trail, like Ariadne’s ball of string in the labyrinth of the minotaur. From Wemyss Bay to Rothesay on Bute is less than an hour across the Clyde, but the sun was setting, the light golden against dark clouds, and we had only the pure, uncluttered trail ahead to think of. I say uncluttered: by that I mean that the walker, unlike the driver or the traveller by train and plane, never has to wait; never has to rely on anything but his or her own wits. You start walking when it suits you. You stop for a pee when the need arises, for lunch when you find an agreeable spot or shelter. Your arrival at a day’s destination is perfectly timed to coincide with you finding the right spot. You can’t be late except on your own terms.

  Even so, there’s nothing like a good breakfast and a shower to set one up for the trials ahead; so we indulged in a room overlooking Rothesay harbour. Bute is a self-contained paradise, a short remove from the industry, bustle and energy of Glasgow; and yet, many Glaswegians have never been there. It is a comfortable island, sheltered, well watered and rarely suffering damaging frosts; twenty miles or so long, narrow in the waist and nestling between two long-flooded fjords at the southern end of the Cowal peninsula. Nowhere does the land rise above a thousand feet. It is famous, like Ireland, for its dairy and beef herds. The farms are prosperous; and yet, as we walked along Rothesay’s seafront in an ultimately fruitful search for fish and chips, the town played us a pianola song, in a minor key, of lost Edwardian grandeur. We saw faded advertisements for bespoke headboards. The drab shop windows could have been used as a seventies film set; we struggled to find a postcard; the older buildings set back from the shore were falling into disrepair. In this sense Bute has more in common with Eastbourne or Filey than with Scotland’s vibrant Silicon Glen. It has suffered a sort of genteel neglect; and that is part of its charm. Perhaps post-Roman Britain, far from the desolate, ruinous, plague-ridden chaos of Gildas’s portrait, was a genteel, faded seaside town of a land. Perhaps.

  Our first day’s walk took us south towards Dunagoil and Kingarth. In spite of its well-behaved fields and pastoral somnolence, there is something ghostly about Bute’s landscape. Prehistoric chambered cairns and tumuli, stone circles, cup-and-ring-marked rocks and duns—small prehistoric or Early Medieval forts—lie as if scattered by a giant’s hand across field and wood. Labour invested in monuments and field boundaries is evidence of agricultural surplus and of social hierarchy. Bute’s richness must therefore stretch back deep into a prehistory when the heavens were populated with hunters and bears and the rocks, trees and springs of the land by the ancestors. There are so many burial sites distributed across Bute—many, many more must have been lost—that one is tempted to think of it as a sort of island of the dead. The ancestors were everywhere, watching us. Even as we left the last houses of Rothesay behind, we came across a medieval chapel almost overwhelmed by the graveyard of its nineteenth-century replacement and dozens of rows of tombstones, their inscriptions etched sharp in bright early sun. A holly and a yew reminded us of ideas of the eternal; of the blood sacrifice of prophets; that symbols of death transcend religion.

  From here to the southern tip of Bute was no more than an eight-mile walk, the first part along the banks of Loch Fad where we watched two fishermen casting from a white-painted rowing boat against the blue-black of the water and a rich late-summer green fringe of woodland behind them, so still that they might have been figures in a painting. An enterprising industrialist once fed this loch with aqueducts to power his cotton mill; but there are no mills on Bute these days. Beyond the loch was a more open land of whins and rough pasture; we realised we were following an old route, a droveway that kept to the modest ridge which is Bute’s spine. Far to the south-west the mountains of Arran brooded beneath impenetrable grey clouds that we kept a sharp eye on all day. Above us the flying V of a flock of geese heading in the same direction told of the coming season. For the present, in early autumn, Bute was good country for the forager. We munched on Sunday-lunchtime water mint and handfuls of blackberries from passing hedgerows. We must have looked a slightly misplaced sight, tramps mingling with the dressed-up folk of Kingarth arriving at their village cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of loved ones. A little further on, following a mark on the map, we poked our heads into a conifer plantation where three giant monoliths, one of them held up by a jerry-rigged iron tie-bar, were all that remained of a once monumental stone circle. Memorial, it seemed, was the theme for the day.

  Dunagoil is a whaleback massif of metamorphic rock that rises, not unlike Bamburgh in Northumberland or Dumbarton on the Clyde, almost out of the waves. A prehistoric fort once stood here. Somewhere on its east side are the remains of a small fortlet occupied from the Bronze Age to the Medieval period: our first bona fide Dark Age site. A small excavation in the late 1950s produced longhouse-type buildings and sherds of both Roman Samian pottery and exotic imports from later centuries. These are tell-tale signs of an Early Medieval kingly entrepôt, like Dunadd on a smaller scale. Such a site is irresistible to the archaeologist, so we had planned this as our first stop. Now, looking down from the farm track at the glowing orangey-green hill against the wine-dark sea and Arran’s late afternoon battleship grey, and with grim weather looking like it might arrive from the Atlantic at any time, it seemed as if it might be a bleak place to spend the night. It was a treeless land.

  The omens weren’t good: I failed to spot the wires of a powerful electric fence, ‘accidentally’ earthing through the farm gate and I received a punch in the arm that stopped me in my tracks. Slightly disconcerted, we made our way down to the shore in the lee of the giant natural ramparts. Our luck was in: here was shelter. A small brook a couple of hundred yards away offered water for boiling up and we found plenty of flotsam and jetsam to gather for fuel. The rain held off. We pitched in a discreet spot in a little natural bowl of rough grass looking out magnificently onto the Sound of Bute. Neither the sheep nor the oyster-catchers paid us any attention. As we busied ourselves setting up stove and bedding, a curious seal, who was to follow our fortunes for three days, bobbed its grey head out of the water to see what we were about.

  I am not one for fancy technology on a walk; too many gadgets can wear out or run out of fuel. So I cook on a Wild Woodgas stove. It is light and simple, cannot fail or break. It is fuelled with sticks that one finds lying about on almost any campsite, leaves no trace behind and cooks beautifully; and I always carry with me a bag of dry birch bark—the perfect waxy kindling, light as paper. There being two of us, we had indulged in the luxury of a storm kettle too, for nearly instant hot water. It’s no more than a small aluminium chimney with a water sleeve around it and a fire tray at the bottom. It will light in just about any weather and for a quick, morale-boosting cuppa laced with whisky it is hard to beat. We ate well, and in the fading orange light I went off to explore the remains of the fort. In truth, humps and bumps in the landscape are not always much more revealing for the archaeologist than for the casual tripper. I had already read the site report, however, so I knew what to look for: rectangular stone foundations and the grassed-over remains of a timber-laced rampart which had enhanced the natural battlements of this rocky fortress.

  What counts, on this sort of journey, is the sense of place, the passing of time. There is no better way to insinuate oneself into the Dark Age mind than to camp close to the ramparts of an ancient fort on the edge of the limitless sea and ponder the spiritual and secular worlds of those who built it. To properly underst
and these people, if that is possible, it helps to have read the literature, and there is more of that than one might think. But the key to Dunagoil was not just in the notes of the excavators, nor even in its striking setting and naturally defensive architecture. The secret lay just beyond the next hill.

  The first night on a trail can be strange and disorienting. You are not quite sure where you are when dawn breaks and the only sounds are those of sheep munching the grass next to the tent and the odd bird calling overhead. At Dunagoil the night was so peaceful that even the rhythmic lapping of waves on the shore did not disturb us. One of the many pleasures of walking with Sarah is that, being a Scot, she will make porridge for breakfast come hell or high water. Oats are the best trail-setting food: full of slow-release carbohydrates; light to carry and easily flavoured with honey, hedgerow fruits or hazelnuts.

  I was keen to get started: I wanted to see St Blane’s church, which lay hidden behind a bluff immediately to the east of Dunagoil. None of the pictures or plans I had seen gave much idea of its setting. By nine o’clock in the morning we were tramping along the small path that led off a narrow road through a field of dairy cows. Our breath was cloudy but the sun was up and the air perfectly clear. The church was invisible until the last few yards, when the subtlety of its location became apparent. A key component of that location, inevitably, was its proximity to Dunagoil. Encircled by two walls which have created a sort of concentric terraced citadel, the monastery was set in a natural bowl sheltered by hills and trees but with a narrow view out to sea and easy access to the protective fort. There was, and is, open pasture near by, and the year-round fruits of the sea; and early monastic communities were nothing if not handy when it came to farming. The church, built in the sixth century like Iona Abbey, much altered and enlarged in a twelfth-century rebuild and now partly ruined, is nevertheless a jewel in the Early Medieval landscape of Scotland’s west coast. Stone-built cells, a chapel, burial ground, the core functions of an early monastic foundation, were later complemented by guest house, bakery, workshops, a scriptorium, perhaps, and the lodgings of the abbot. The beach at Dunagoil gave access to the water; not just to the coast of Bute but to its Kyles with their fine fishing and to other monasteries and centres of power sited on the hundreds of miles of Argyll’s shores. Ireland, Erin, lay three days’ sailing away.

  This is now an obscure landscape; few pilgrims or seekers of ecclesiastic and royal patronage come this way today. In Colmcille’s day, such prestigious spiritual sites were often located close to contemporary seats of secular power. Lindisfarne’s relationship to the ancestral fortress of the Northumbrian kings at Bamburgh is similar. It is that between a sun and its planet. The same goes for many fortress/monastery combinations across the British Isles, and one of the keys to understanding the Dark Ages is interrogating this relationship. The Early Medieval saints’ lives, or hagiographies, tell us about elites, and especially how kings and holy men managed their expectations of each other. Other records, mostly genealogies, survive and tell of the so-called ‘erenachs’ —lay patrons of many of Ireland’s churches, and tribal sponsors of holy men. It is easy to see how a fashion for having such intellectual lodgers might catch on. Monks prayed for their patrons, for their dynastic successors and their souls. They brought learning and kudos and provided convenient careers for those of the Irish elite who were either not disposed towards the alternative (fighting; an early if glorious death; life in the testosterone-fuelled mead hall) or who might otherwise present a threat to the chosen line of succession. They healed the sick and sometimes saw into the future. In return, monasteries benefited from the protection of their lords and were provided with lands which could not, like those held by warriors, be taken back. Monasteries patronised by kings or lay patrons were freehold and each one, because of the stability conferred by its status, acted as a sort of seed corn for agricultural, artistic and artisanal investment. At Nendrum monastery in County Down (see page 321), a corn mill powered by the tides on Strangford Lough was constructed in the seventh century: hard evidence of the benefits of such capital investment, and by no means unique. The monastic movement which brought monks together in cenobitic communities—that is, communal life—beginning early in the sixth century, was a stabilising feature in an unstable world, like tough grass holding a sand dune together.

  ST BLANE’S

  In key places along Argyll’s coast, the same relationship between aristocratic or kingly duns and important early church foundations is repeated. As it happens, St Blane’s and Dunagoil are exceptional: they are the twin foci of royal power. The Scottish historian of this period, James Fraser, believes that Dunagoil was the princely seat of Conad Cerr, warlord chief of the Cenél Comgaill in Cowal and very briefly king of all Dál Riata in the year 629. The abbots of St Blane’s were his holy men. Dunadd, our destination, was the seat of the Cenél nGabrain, the dominant kin group during Colmcille’s day and up until the mid-seventh century.

  From Kingarth at the extreme southern end of Bute, we turned north-west along the coast. All the while Dunagoil was visible behind us, protruding into sea and sky, making as bold a statement as could be imagined of the power and status of its lords. On Loch Quien we saw the low, rush-covered mound of a crannog,6 an artificial island that would have supported a pile-driven circular dwelling. Such places, summer retreats for a transhumant elite, are known to have existed from the Iron Age onwards, right into the high Medieval period. But we did not pause on the trail. Our destination today was another monastic establishment, much more modest than St Blane’s but in an equally evocative setting. St Ninian’s chapel lies on a rocky plinth at the end of a narrow spit of sand dunes halfway up Bute’s west coast. The spit shelters a cove where boats can be drawn up onto the strand; in turn it is sheltered from westerly gales by Inchmarnock. St Marnock’s7 island is a special place, and I would have liked very much to go there; but perhaps seeing it from across the sound was enough. Most of what we know about Inchmarnock comes from a campaign of survey and excavation which revealed that it was once an important monastic school. It has yielded the largest number of inscribed slates from any site in the British Isles. One of these records the founding saint’s name, Ernán; another appears to show a monk kneeling at the feet of a warrior, perhaps imploring a Viking for mercy or being carried off into slavery. Eight gaming boards were also found here: evidently the monks relieved the boredom of long winter evenings on the island by enjoying a game of Nine Men’s Morris, or merels, whose origins can be traced at least as far back as imperial Rome. The relationship between St Blane’s foundation and that on Inchmarnock is intriguing to contemplate: were they competitors for the patronage of the Cenél Comgaill, or twin aspects of a single entity with one a sort of feeder school for the other? We may never know. Archaeology can be very successful at revealing what happened; rarely can it say why.

  You could be forgiven for missing Ninian’s chapel on the spit: it looked more or less like an abandoned drystone hut, now grassed over and with walls only standing a couple of feet high, swaddled in the tough, wiry machair grass that clings to the sand and rocks and defies autumn and winter gales. Excavations in the 1950s revealed that it sat in a small circular cemetery containing inhumations on a north–south orientation, overlain by graves in an east–west, more obviously Christian alignment. At the east end of the chapel stood a stone altar with a box-like cavity for holding the bones of its founder (perhaps Ninian, but much more likely another local worthy whose name has been forgotten and absorbed into the geographical mythology of one of the Atlantic West’s celebrity saints).

  Next to the chapel, on the leeward side, stood a small single-storey holiday cottage, once presumably a fisherman’s hut. On our way out there, with the evening drawing in and the sky once again looking menacing, we passed a herd of dairy cows trooping wearily back from a day’s paltry grazing, and a man walking his dog who pointed at a small hollow beyond the cottage, suggesting it would make a good bivouac. Neither tide nor wind would r
each us there, he said. Travellers gather intelligence where they may; and he was right. The pitch was soft, close to the water’s edge and just out of the wind, so even if it blew a gale we should be all right. Our only mistake was not to have filled our water bladders (a neat twenty-first-century reinvention of ancient technology, with plastic substituting for sheepskin) at the last spring we’d passed: so it was rice boiled in salt water for supper; and since that night’s protein was provided by a dried, cured chorizo sausage, it was a salty meal all round.

  The sky cleared as it darkened. A three-quarter moon rose in the east, its tilted asymmetry perfectly imperfect. The moon is a traveller’s friend: on these bright nights its light is sufficient for navigation—sometimes even to read by. The experienced sky-watcher knows that the full moon lies due south at midnight; that each day it rises forty-eight minutes later than the night before; that broadly speaking it follows the same east–west path as the sun: so here is a night-time compass, clock and calculator in one. Only when I am sailing or on the trail do I come to know instinctively the phases of the moon; and on such a journey as this, accompanied by the sea, the state of the tide also becomes part of a subliminal dialogue with the earth and stars which must have been so much more intimate and wondrous a part of the Early Medieval mind and soul than it is of today’s amateur voyagers.