Francis Pryor
PATHS TO THE PAST
Encounters with Britain’s Hidden Landscapes
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2018
Copyright © Francis Pryor, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design: Richard Green
ISBN: 978-0-241-29999-9
To my niece, the artist and archaeological illustrator Chloe Watson
In the late autumn of 1967 I found myself heading north along the A1, driving flat-out in an aged Ford Popular that could just do 50 mph. Many hours after leaving Cambridge, we arrived at our destination: a chilly, flat and foggy field in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. My two friends were wildly enthusiastic and headed down the cart track as if they were approaching Valhalla. I trudged along behind them, head down, trying not to feel too sorry for myself. I have to confess, my first visit to the iconic site of Star Carr was less than memorable.
The Vale of Pickering is a wide, steep-sided valley that was sculpted by Ice Age glaciers. Flat and low-lying, it drains the higher land that surrounds it: the North York Moors to the north, the Wolds to the south-east and the Howardian Hills to the south-west. The natural drainage pattern meant that the rivers that flowed through it – principally the Derwent – would have emptied directly into the low-lying plain that would shortly become the North Sea. However, when the Ice Age climate warmed, one of the glaciers moving through the Vale began to retreat. Glaciers are famous for leaving distinctive U-shaped valleys in their wake, formed by the immensely powerful, plane-like action of slow-moving ice. Flowing glaciers scrape and bulldoze their way downhill, pushing a huge bank of rocks and earth before them. When the glaciers then stop or retreat, this bank is left stranded and can form a natural dam, known as a terminal moraine. The terminal moraine at the eastern end of the Vale still blocks all drainage into the North Sea, just south of Scarborough, with the blocked rivers forming a lake on the western side of the moraine, known to archaeologists and geologists as Lake Flixton. Today the lake has been completely drained and the land is given over to agriculture. Star Carr, the ancient settlement site the three of us visited all those years ago, lay on the shore of the onetime glacial lake.
I described Star Carr as iconic, which indeed it is, because it has revealed some of the earliest evidence for human settlement in Britain after the Ice Ages. The site was discovered before the war by local enthusiasts who had spotted flint tools lying on the surface, but it was not excavated until the early 1950s. Its archaeological importance is immense because of its location on ground that is still partially waterlogged, despite recent drainage. Waterlogging has meant that organic materials, such as wood, leaves, seeds and even pollen grains, have been preserved in the peaty muds that once formed the bed and foreshore of the glacial lake. Analysis of the pollen preserved in these peats has allowed botanists to reconstruct the changing environment at the time the site was occupied.
As a student, three lecturers inspired me. All were hands-on excavators. The best-known of them, Graham Clark, I regarded as something of a God. Admittedly, he was quite a dry and scholarly sort of God, but then deities don’t always have to thunder, point doom-laden fingers, or sport imposing beards.
Clark’s most famous excavation, done in the early 1950s, was Star Carr. I remember Professor Clark would frequently repeat that ‘excavation without publication is simply destruction’. For me, it still remains the ultimate archaeological sin. Living up to his words, Clark ensured that his site was promptly and thoroughly reported and it illustrates very well how perceptions, interpretations and knowledge can change through time, with even the most rigorous, disciplined, science-based research.1
I’ve often wondered at what point did Clark and his team of specialists from Cambridge begin to realize that they were making what were to prove internationally important discoveries. I certainly have started to dig sites which had splendid potential, but then turned out to be ordinary, even disappointing. But was there something different about Star Carr? First of all, its location is superb and although my first trip there was less than auspicious, many subsequent visits have always proved exciting. As you head off the road and out into the peaty fields you get a distinct feeling of descending into a vanished lake. The shoreline of the glacial lake is hidden in summer when the crops are growing, but after ploughing in the autumn it is easily discerned. The landscape changes are subtle but clear, which is why Clark knew exactly where to dig. Had I been in his shoes, I’m sure I would have made precisely the same decision. My own feeling is that the whole team would have known they were on to a winner from the very beginning, which may help to explain why the project generated such excitement at the time.
The site’s setting in the landscape may have been evident, but its archaeological significance has become a matter for hot debate. These are not dry academic discussions about recondite details. Rather, it’s a question of whether we’re talking about a tiny population of wandering hunters living in temporary camps, or was something altogether more substantial taking place? There have since been a number of important new research projects in the Vale of Pickering and we now understand very much more about the nature of its landscape some 10,000 years ago. But how were people earning a living there? What was the population? These were the basic questions that needed to be answered, with new information from the ground. It has not proved to be an easy quest and there have been many false starts and dead-ends, but at last I think we are now approaching an answer – and if you had suggested that to me ten years ago, I would probably have thought you were joking.
As was the practice at the time, Clark opened relatively small, hand-cut trenches. From them, he and his team established that Star Carr was extremely ancient and could reliably be dated to the first few centuries after the Ice Age. Today, we know that the North European climate warmed by some 10°C around 9600 BC, and it did this very rapidly, maybe over just fifty years. Then the graph naturally levelled off.2 The period between the return of people to Britain after the Ice Age and the arrival of farming around 4000 BC is known as the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. The Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr is currently dated to around 9000 BC, close to the start of the period.
Clark believed they had recovered the remains of a temporary hunting camp along the edges of the old glacial Lake Flixton, whose boundaries have since been mapped out in some detail. The Star Carr ‘camp’ was on the gently sloping southern shore of a freely draining sandy promontory on the western side of the lake. Using botanical and other evidence, Clark and his collaborators concluded that the camp was probably occupied by bands of hunters, on and off, during the wetter months of winter. In summertime they would follow their prey up on to the higher land that skirts the Vale of Pickering. Clark’s finds included many worked flints, together with shaped bone or antler tools and hunting spears. But the finds that brought the site to national prominence were a pair of antler head-dresses, known to archaeologists as frontlets. These consisted of the uppermost skull of a red deer stag, with the antlers still in place. The rough bits on the underside of the skull had been filed or scraped off and two holes had been bored through – presumably for hide thongs to tie the headdress on to the wearer’s head. Most prehistorians now agree that these frontlets were probably worn by shamans during rituals to do with hunting.
After Clark’s time, research into the area continued. Some twenty-five Mesolithic sites have so far been detected around Lake Flixton, and they have revealed some of the oldest wooden artefacts in the world.3 The most recent research project, an excavation at the edge of Clark’s old site at Star Carr, has made some truly astonishing discoveries, including copious evidence for woodworking, a substantial artificial timber platform along the lakeside, and a settlement of some five acres. This settlement, of perhaps twenty-five houses, includes hundreds of thousands of worked flints and the foundations of what is now Britain’s earliest house, fashioned from posts and brushwood, probably with earthen or hide walls and a roof thatched with the reeds that grew plentifully along the lakeside. Its earth floor, packed with hundreds of rejected flints, may well have been carpeted with reeds; evidence remains of a small fire, though cooking would probably have happened outside the building – to avoid accidents.
So we have come a very long way from Clark’s seasonally occupied temporary hunting camp. The latest excavation suggests that Star Carr, far from being a seasonally occupied hunting camp, was lived in all year round. Our understanding of Britain’s earliest-known settlement site has been transformed, and we can only assume that Star Carr wasn’t unique: many of the sites around Lake Flixton would have been of comparable size and longevity. It is also hard not to think that the landscape around the lake would have been divided up between the different villages, each with its own territory. What we witness in Star Carr is the start of the parcelling up of the landscape, a process that would eventually give rise to the parish boundaries and field systems of our own time.
The need to have a home-base in which to raise a family is a part of being human, and the people who lived in those early round houses at Star Carr, at the end of the Ice Age, were identical to us, and not just physically. If you could have spoken their language and worn their clothes, you would soon have felt at home, sitting around their family fire, while supper gently bubbled on a spit. Soon you would be joining in, teasing the children and stroking the dogs. At a very basic level, certain places can be transforming: merging the past – even remotest prehistory – with the present.
The first time I came close to visiting the Orkney Islands was in the spring of 1961. I was sixteen and aboard a North Sea trawler, battling its way through the high seas of the Pentland Firth, the narrow strait which separates Orkney from the mainland, and where the currents of the Atlantic meet those of the North Sea. We had set out from Grimsby and were sailing towards the then disputed fishing grounds off the north-east coast of Iceland, during what was later to be known as the First Cod War. I had no idea of the dramas that awaited us inside the Arctic Circle. My only concerns were in the here-and-now. When I wasn’t suffering bouts of violent sea-sickness, I was terrified about passing safely through the notorious Pentland Firth. Storms had been forecast, and they had arrived.
There are about seventy islands in the Orkney group that lies off the coast of Caithness, at the north-eastern tip of the Scottish mainland. From the 1500s the islands were served by a ferry, which was established by a Dutchman, Jan de Groot, who is commemorated in the name of the little port he set up: John O’Groats. Today the main ferry to the Orkney port of Stromness leaves from Scrabster, near Thurso, a few miles to the west. I would always recommend travelling to Orkney by sea, as the approach to Stromness, past the mountainous island of Hoy, with its dramatic rocky stack, the Old Man of Hoy, is spectacular.
The two principal towns of Orkney, Stromness and the capital, Kirkwall, with its superb medieval cathedral of St Magnus, are both on the largest island, Mainland. Mainland forms the northern side of the sheltered anchorage of Scapa Flow, which played an important part in the naval campaigns of both world wars. The southern Orkneys are bounded by Hoy and the hills of South Ronaldsay. The group’s northernmost limits are marked by the lower lying islands of Westray, Papa Westray and North Ronaldsay. The island of Mainland, which lies at the centre of the Orkneys, is more hilly than mountainous; it has numerous lochs and includes some of the most important prehistoric sites in northern Europe.
Orkney is an accident of history, or prehistory, to be more precise. Now bare and open, the Orkney Islands were originally covered with shrubs and trees in all but the most exposed places. Then, when the first farmers became established, after about 3500 BC, the tree cover was quite rapidly felled, probably for firewood and to clear grazing. The fierce Atlantic gales prevented young saplings from ever becoming re-established.1 The result is the largely treeless landscape that greets the modern visitor. After this, though, why didn’t people throw up their hands in despair and just move somewhere else?
The answer is the Old Red Sandstone that occurs widely across Orkney at, or just below, the surface. It is a superb natural building material: easy to quarry and even simpler to shape, it is strong enough to resist gales or accidental damage by humans and animals. As far as fuel was concerned, there were plentiful supplies of dried peat, as well as the driftwood that occurs commonly around the coasts of the Scottish Isles, some of it ultimately deriving from North America via the Gulf Stream.
Orkney possesses some of the finest prehistoric tombs and shrines in Europe. Sites like the great chambered tomb at Maeshowe, the henges and standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar, or the Stones of Stenness are extraordinary structures and have rightly acquired an international reputation. The great grass-covered mound that covers Maeshowe can be seen from great distances across lakes and fields, whereas the two stone rings that are part of the same huge landscape are very different. The Stones of Stenness are tall, sharp and in a tight group; the Ring of Brodgar is much larger, its stones evenly spaced around the edge of a huge ditched circle. Another superbly preserved complex of shrines and temples has recently been revealed at the Ness of Brodgar, the narrow spit of land that separates the lochs of Harray and Stenness, on Mainland Orkney. Here the shrines are more densely packed together, and seem to have been miraculously preserved beneath banks of sand and soil. Many of these sites were placed in landscapes on the edge of, or just beyond, land that was suitable for farming or settlement. Sometimes it was too rocky, high, marshy or tidal. These were liminal locations, places believed to be gateways to other, spiritual realms, just beyond the threshold of our own familiar world.
Because the prehistoric structures were always built from stone rather than more perishable wood, their preservation is most remarkable. This applies to ordinary, domestic buildings too. Some five miles to the north-west of Maeshowe, and overlooking the Bay of Skaill, with the open expanses of the Atlantic beyond, is the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, which boasts what are arguably the best preserved prehistoric houses anywhere in Europe. They appear to be nested together against the Atlantic gales, with walls still surviving to shoulder height. Even the furniture – all in carefully shaped stone – survives, with niches in walls, central hearths, even box-beds for bracken mattresses and remarkable shelved dressers.
In 2003 an unusual stone slab was discovered by local farmers on Orkney on the narrow spit of the Ness of Brodgar. The farmers realized it was probably prehistoric and potentially important, but nobody could have imagined how remarkable the site that it revealed would soon prove to be. The archaeologist who visited the site that day was Nick Card, who has subsequently directed an extraordinary series of research excavations that are still producing results that even the most hardened of prehistorians (including myself) are finding difficult to digest.2 The wealth, complexity and preservation of the religious buildings revealed within the deep layers at the Ness of Brodgar are almost beyond belief. I first stood inside one of the buildings on a sunny, and almost windless, July morning in 2013. The site was empty because the archaeologists had just gone for their tea break, but the stone walls were so sharp, crisp and fresh, it seemed as if it was the Neolithic masons who had just left, and would return any minute to answer the questions that were filling my head. In reality, of course, their last break from work had been taken some four and a half millennia ago. The latest radiocarbon dates suggest that the shrines and temples at the Ness of Brodgar were in use for about a thousand years, from 3200–2300 BC.
I strongly suspect that the shrines and monuments that even today crowd the Orcadian landscape were originally visited by hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. Everything about the constant building and modification of sites like the Ness of Brodgar suggests they were well and frequently used. Access was normally quite good and individual shrines were enlarged and modified frequently. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while the landscape they inhabited might have been liminal, it was far from remote or deserted.
Much of the evidence suggests that this ritual landscape may have been a destination of pilgrims, but it was also a place where people lived, fished and farmed. The teeming waters were, I imagine, very probably what attracted people there in the first place. But we should be careful of assuming that people were attracted to these places merely because they were spectacular. As we have seen, the Ness of Brodgar separates two lochs. But there was more to it than that. The Loch of Harray would have been freshwater, whereas Stenness was always open to the sea, and consequently salty. The two lochs were joined at the Bridge of Brodgar (not far from the Ness) but saltwater from the Loch of Stenness never penetrates in sufficient quantity to affect the freshwater plants of the Loch of Harray.3 To ancient communities, this close juxtaposition of fresh and saltwater would have been remarkable and seemingly inexplicable. Fresh and saltwater lochs provide very different resources in terms of fish and plant life. A reliable supply of freshwater was essential to communities surrounded on all sides by the sea. Buildings, such as the houses at Skara Brae, even featured stone-lined water supplies that anticipated modern pipes and drains.4
Of course we will never be sure about what fresh or salt waters signified in the distant past, but we can be certain that it would not have been simple. There would have been realms of symbolism attached, whose richness and complexity we must never under-estimate. The more we understand about the details of life in prehistory, the more we realize that it was just as intellectually complex as ours today. People did indeed inhabit the real world, but they must always have been aware of other, more important realms, just over the horizon. This is apparent in the many parallels between the religious buildings of the Ness of Brodgar and the domestic houses at Skara Brae. You can even find echoes of domestic dwellings in the structure of tombs such as Maeshowe, or earthworks that accompany the Stones of Stenness. This raises questions about the separation of religious and secular life that are highly relevant today. At a very profound level, the ancient sites of Orkney can enter our lives – and change them.