In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Outside, the heavy squalls that dogged us all morning had blown away on the wind; now the day offered a panorama of blue sky and the vast, thrilling disc of the western sea spread out to our left as we walked northwards along the peninsula. Jura, now blasted by a great white squall, now shining orange and grey in the distance; Eilean Mòr, closer at hand, wind-torn but like a gem against the deep blue; jagged ridges of hard ancient rocks scattering towards the south-west, showing the line of the great geological fault that thrusts the Highlands against northern Britain; and opposite us the half-connected tidal Isle of Danna at the southern end of the Tayvallich peninsula. The tide races here are fearsome and spume trails betraying conflicting currents stretched away across the open sea. From our elevated path it was easy to see how interconnected the maritime archipelago of the Western Isles once was; how hermit, saint, warlord and farmer brought their own culture and traditions together and created a matrix of complex relations borne on the sea between them.

  It was a long hike up the eastern side of Loch Sween; wear and tear were slowing us down. We stopped by the shore to look at the tree-graced slopes across Loch Sween. We snacked on dried fruit and cheese, nuts and oatcakes; and an otter charmed us with her exuberant fishing antics no more than thirty yards away. At Castle Sween, a lumping great medieval fortress, we passed an incongruous caravan and holiday park (no campers). On again, sustained by chocolate and the odd swig from a flask of the water of life, we passed an unassuming stone cross in a field, divorced from the ruin or landscape that would have framed its story.

  It was not easy to see where we might stay that night; there are no campsites at all in Knapdale and the comparative urbanity of Lochgilphead and Crinan were beyond our capabilities for that day. Everywhere was soaking wet. Sarah was feeling rough. More than once I consulted the map, hoping to identify the sort of spot where we might pitch early, not attract too much attention and get a good night’s sleep. Kilmichael, no more than a group of houses, offered nothing. More miles. The track became a narrow road, busy with trippers’ cars. The odd house passed by; fences and walls everywhere: this is an owned, proprietorial landscape. At Achnamara, according to the map, there was a school. Might there also be a bus? There might; but this being Scotland’s half-term, it was not running. Only Tayvallich, tantalising across the bay, offered civil society and transport. Sarah saw a chance, in a woman bringing shopping in from her car, to gather intelligence. The thought crossed my mind, ridiculously, that in the Early Medieval period each woman would have immediately assessed the other by her hair, her clothes and above all by the design and quality of her brooch—a penannular iron or bronze ring with a pin which slots through the gap and which, with a twist, anchors brooch to cloak. A brief conversation ensued. Sarah walked over to where I was sitting by the packs, a resigned look on her face. No buses; no taxi will come out here.

  A minute or so later the husband appeared with his car keys; would we like a lift up to Barnluasgan, where the four o’clock bus would take us all the way to Lochgilphead? We would. We did not get around to learning his name (too busy thanking him, Sarah’s natural chutzpah and nameless saints). We were left at the bus stop, or at least outside the house where the bus was said to stop, and in a state of modest complacency ate the last of our chocolate, congratulating ourselves provisionally on another huge slice of luck. The bus came. In fifteen minutes it brought us out onto the Crinan road. Here we had our first view of the extraordinary lowland bog landscape that is Mòine Mhòr and beyond it the encircling hills of Kilmartin Glen, sensuously bathed in warm but vibrant yellow evening light. Crossing the bog was a joy to be savoured for the next day. The bus, meanwhile, crept along the line of the Crinan Canal with its neatly numbered locks and equally neatly numbered lock-keepers’ cottages. The canal was the late eighteenth-century product of the minds and energies of John Rennie, Thomas Telford and hundreds of Irish and Scots navvies, designed, like the former portage across Kintyre at Tarbert, to speed passage from the Atlantic and the Western Isles up the Clyde, avoiding a hazardous passage around the Mull of Kintyre. The line of the canal bypasses Lochgilphead, which ought to have been a strategic port but which sits wearily at the head of a muddy bay, thirty years behind the rest of the country. Here we were deposited by the bus in the hope of finding a bed for the night. Cut off from Scotland’s infrastructure, it ought to be the gateway to Kintyre; but there’s no money on the peninsula either. The damaged sign on the wall of the drab S-ag Hotel just about said it all. It is hard to get here from anywhere and we wondered, walking through its down-at-heel streets, if it might not be better to put Lochgilphead out of its misery. That is a little unfair; it does have a certain faded charm.

  What Kintyre needs is a revival of the Dark Age superhighway that made it a centre of maritime and cultural activity. In these days when the sea is no longer the arterial hub that it once was, this place wants a railway. The roads are narrow and slow, clogged with heavy vehicles, caravans or tractors. It’s an economic backwater and no amount of central government subsidy will drag it up by its bootstraps. Fishing is dead and so is any business from across the Atlantic. Only fresh-laid iron tracks and a visionary giant like Telford might pull it off; but who will pay? Just look at Argyll and Kintyre on a map: topography and history are against them: suppression, exploitation, clearances, clan rivalries, political and economic remoteness; mountains, lochs and rivers; and very little infrastructure for the traveller wanting to discover it. Kintyre seems to be having its own Dark Age. We are still only forty miles from Glasgow as the seaplane flies; we might as well be a thousand away. The irony of all this is that for several thousand years Kilmartin Glen was one of the busiest places on the island: it has the greatest density of surviving (and buried) archaeological monuments in Britain.

  In the morning, only a little less sore but drier and cleaner, we recce’d the bus times on the town promenade (for want of a better word). They were all a year out of date. The driver of the bus that took us over the canal and onto the Oban road was no wiser than the timetable. When was the last bus to Oban (train station; civilisation)? No one knew. So we began our trek across Mòine Mhòr in informational, if not spiritual, darkness. But there was no mistaking the rocky rump of Dunadd, one of the most famous Dark Age fortresses and seat of the legendary kings of Dál Riata. I had seen so many pictures of this place and been to so many lectures about it, read of it in so many articles and books, that I feared the reality would disappoint. It did not. Mòine Mhòr was a great flat expanse of bog, now very much drained and tamed, but in the days of Colmcille a marshy, oft-flooded plain with an amphitheatre of rocky hills surrounding it. Out of this lowland morass rises the clenched fist of Dunadd like an underwater leviathan bursting to the surface through infinitely deep waters.

  It is approached by a tarmac road which must once have been no more than a wooden causeway across the peat. From a distance the shelving plane of the rocks give the impression of a sort of spiral, rather like the castle rock on Lindisfarne, curling up and around (I was hungry: a Walnut Whip came to mind). A small cluster of cottages nestles at its base. They would not get planning permission now, one imagines. There is a car park. Up the twisting narrow path through its ramparts and the deliberately awe-inspiring rock-cut barbican, once topped by a stone curtain wall that leads to the first terrace: much larger than I had imagined, and evidently the principal defended enclosure. It is large enough to contain a significant domestic set-up. Now grassed over, the site was excavated in the early part of the twentieth century and then briefly in 1980 by Leslie Alcock, the great Early Medieval scholar. From this first terrace, artificially flattened and containing a rock-cut well, another steep, narrow spiral path leads around the twin-domed fastness that makes its outline unforgettable. Up here, visible for miles in any direction, once stood the great hall, the feasting barn conversion that was the hallmark of the Early Medieval fortress.

  Three things make Dunadd unique. Its setting, evident from the highest point (a hundred
and fifty feet above the plain) even on a wind-blasted grey day, is sublime: flatness on all sides as far as the sea, with which it may have been directly connected in its heyday; south to the canal and to Kintyre; east to the wooded hills of Argyll and north to Kilmartin Glen. The lazy meander of the River Add encircles and defends it.

  The second remarkable feature of the fort is its famous footprint, supposedly carved into the bare rock to act as part of a ceremony of royal investiture. Colmcille was said to have been the first holy man in the west to perform anything recognisable as a Christian royal inauguration or anointing, although historians have their doubts and in any case Colmcille had the kings of Dál Riata come to him on Iona, not the other way around. But here was the footprint. Or rather, under here: what we saw was merely a facsimile, the original being too important for humans to touch and in recent years buried a foot deep beneath us. But there is more than just a footprint: laser scanning of the original stone before its interment showed faint traces of a carved bull, decidedly Pictish in style, and a line of ogham script. (More of ogham later—see page 266.) For the archaeologist, what is so striking about Dunadd is the amazing wealth of material culture which excavation has yielded (if not always using scientific techniques).

  From Dunadd9 the kings of Dál Riata were able, in the sixth and seventh centuries, to lay hands on objets d’art from across the lands of the former Roman Empire. They commissioned gold- and silversmiths to create jewellery and weapons of exquisite finery and technical brilliance. They knew how to acquire a super-valuable purple dye which could only be obtained from the mucus of the Atlantic dog whelk Nucella lapillus. They drank from glass vessels imported from a thousand miles away on the Continent.10 And they ate from (or perhaps just coveted) the best tableware that Africa or Francia could produce. They were able to call Colmcille, the greatest of early saintly potentates, their royal priest, ambassador and chief legitimiser. Through his monastic successors on Iona and through their own canny dynastic fostering of princely exiles, these kings amassed sufficient political capital to send protégé athelings11—of whom the most celebrated and influential was Oswald Iding (see pages 179 and 231)—back to Northumbria to expand their influence over the islands of Britain. In turn, Áedán mac Gabrain (c.574–609) and his successors as kings protected Colmcille’s earthly interests and fostered the expansion of his spiritual empire, the Ionan paruchia. In theory, at least, the kings of Dál Riata were able to summon fifteen hundred men in two hundred curraghs to go raiding among the islands of the Hebrides and to Ireland where they claimed lordship over the kings of Ulster. They were a formidable force; and more, because they had the vision to see in the rational, stabilising and everlasting model of kingship constructed by their saint a new sort of political reality that would survive the person of the king. These were the kings, borrowing from their priest’s invocation of the Old Testament, from whom the medieval idea of divine right springs.

  Descending from this rocky citadel, this one-time Tower of Babel, Sarah and I set out along the dead straight causeway roads of the bog towards Kilmartin Glen. During the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, before Mòine Mhòr became wet and peaty under the influence of the warm Atlantic Drift, the glen was a potent focus of ancestral memorial and power. A miles-long processional route led from the glen out onto the fertile plain at the sea’s edge. Great standing stones, their broken-shoulder profiles a figurative nod to the giants of their own past, litter the now-drying tamed peat lands. Hundreds of cairns and tombs have been uncovered and excavated here.

  But whatever ritual landscape came into being in this place, it was eventually consumed by peat accumulating over a thousand wet summers. Back home, pondering Dunadd’s place in this vale of ancestral tears, I asked a colleague, the distinguished palynologist Richard Tipping, if the kings of Dál Riata would still have been able to see these monuments poking ghostly out of the peat; to sense or in some way tap into their potency for their own psychological ends. Yes, he told me, the monuments would still have been visible. And in that realisation of a self-doubting society tapping into a source of power at once visceral, mythical and untouchable, I suddenly thought of the stranded, emasculated Napoleon staring at the pyramids in Egypt in 1799, and the words of a sonnet came to me:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.12

  At the time, after a couple of hours’ stiff walking along unforgiving back roads and wishing only that we could reach our destination at Kilmartin (a café, and the bus to Oban beckoned), Shelley was not in my thoughts. We had left art, mystery and pathos some miles back and only irony remained. We passed a road sign, pointing along another dead straight, featureless road towards some unpromising destination. It said ‘Long walk’. No shit, I thought.

  DUNADD

  Interlude Gilsland to Haltwhistle

  Early spring—surviving Dark Age winters—food renders—population—Early Medieval environment—strangers in the landscape—Wall and Stanegate

  IT WAS MARCH of a new year before I got out to the Wall again. We had seen barely a flake of snow all winter; already lambs were gambolling in the fields and a few tentative spring flowers were trying their luck in the hedgerows of western Northumberland. A woodpecker drummed in an unseen copse. The light was dead flat. It was as if the season’s forward march was held on pause, sensing the coming change but not daring to tell the land. At this time of year cloud cover keeps new growth down but insulates the land through the long, dark hours. Clear skies bring sunshine and warmth during the day, encouraging leaves and blossom; but at night they bring sharp frosts. These can be cruel months: promises withheld or betrayed, the rewards for survival just out of reach. There is tension in the air.

  At Gilsland village spring tends to come late anyway, and the sense of time lag is sharpened by its halfway-house location between the oceans, its jumble of houses, yards, paddocks, garages and sheds, all slightly down-at-heel and endlessly interesting to the archaeologist. As if to reinforce the air of unconventionality a lugubrious horse, which had itself seen better days, stood four-square on top of Britain’s second, most famous monument—hoping, perhaps, to be rescued from boredom by a tourist passing with an apple or the butt-end of a carrot. In the background a stolid brick Victorian villa with part of its roof missing seemed to have spilled its contents onto the paddock through which the Wall ran: rubbish littered the matted grass and mud. Hens rooted around for scraps of grain among dilapidated coops. Upended plastic chairs, bits of fencing, tarpaulin, buckets, rolls of barbed wire, corrugated iron and an enamel bath completed an apocalyptic picture of neglect. The archaeologist in me tends to overread rubbish: one man’s abject laziness is not evidence for social catastrophe.

  As I walked east beneath the railway arch of the Newcastle ​to Carlisle line and out of the village into airier countryside (past Milecastle 48, clinging to the edge of a steeply falling burn), I contemplated what life must have been like up here, at this season, in the Early Medieval period. March was the lunar month Hreðmonað, which Bede says was named after an otherwise obscure goddess, Hreð. For farmers it was, and is, the month for digging and sowing, for optimistic lambing and watching the skies for signs of late, dangerous snows. What did the peasants and lords of the Dark Ages eat during this lean time when aut
umn’s surplus was running low or, after a poor harvest or bad winter, had run out? There is little direct contemporary testimony. An obscure monastic tale tells of paupers huddling in the discarded hot ashes of the monks’ fires. Many of the monks we hear of seem themselves to have been half-starved; there were winters of desperate cold. And a story, famous in its day as an example of kingly munificence, tells how King Oswald of Northumbria gave his Easter feast to be shared among poor supplicants at the door of his hall; and then gave them the silver dish on which it had been served. The Old English word for a lord is hláford, a provider or guardian of bread.

  Archaeology supplies the infrastructure for storage: the excavated remains of hundreds of sunken-floored huts whose plank superstructures allowed grain to dry and stay mould-free through winter; the late seventh-century Laws of King Ine of Wessex, in listing the render demanded of a farm of ten hides (that is, nominally ten family farms), includes among the bounty of the land honey, cheeses and hay, supplies that could be stored right through winter. To those we can add dried, smoked or salted meat (slaughtered in the viscerally named Blotmonað: November) and fish, the bread and ale that came from stored barley and wheat; perhaps fresh-slaughtered small livestock such as hens or geese. Peas and beans, turnips, leeks, onions and apples would be available until partway through the winter, but must have been in a poor state by this time of year. These domestic products were supplemented by wild food: birds and fresh fish, berries and nuts. We know that in the later Medieval period a form of agricultural insurance was practised. The division of open fields ensured that farmers shared the best and poorest land in a community. The corduroy ridge-and-furrow ploughlands that still grace the rural landscape more or less guaranteed some sort of harvest: in a wet year the corn grew better on the ridges; and in a drought it grew better in the furrows. And a wide variety of grains was grown: oats, barley, rye and more than one strain of wheat. How far back we can project these strategies is not yet clear.