(Click on thumbnail images to obtain whole picture.)Not finding a path where I expected one, I took a long way round rather than go across someone's field. I had a lovely talk with a woman in the nearby hamlet -- farm workers' houses associated with the Malcolm family estates -- about the old house and how it had been, and the extreme disjuncture between the life of the 'family' and those of the people living around: especially the women, who would come out, with their parasols, to be the ladies-bountiful, and a smile or kind word them from them was presumably intended to make the farm workers happy and grateful. One thing she said was fascinating: that in some ways the house, ruined, was now far more theirs, part of the locality, accessible to the local people, than it had ever been in the days when it was occupied by those ones who would come out, once a year, and smile; and never let the local people inside.
But on this day I was there for artefacts that were 5000 years old. She directed me up a road and around, up a narrow path; I would pass through someone's garden on the way, and she suggested I knock at the door of the cottage. The occupant, however, was in her garden, and I called a 'hello', to a charming woman, a retired archaeologist (so the farm woman had told me), who gave me directions including which fences I should climb over, or through, to avoid problems of barbed wire or multiple fences to climb. Which led me, of course, back to the field I hadn't gone through, and I realised I'd been only five minutes away from my goal. But the walk, and the human contact with these two women of today, was worth it.
I had realised something about this attempt to explore at least part of the Kilmartin valley on foot: I was becoming part of the environment, connected to the earth, to the fields of cows and sheep, to the trees that I passed. My notes from that day say:
Getting around on foot is interesting.I've been thinking about how it 'inserts' me into the countryside, as I become aware of trees, birds (and cattle) etc, far more so than going by car. And the terrain. I'm constantly amazed by how beautiful it is.
Beautiful -- ah, yes. I hadn't been in the West Highlands for five years, and then briefly, in rain, I had driven up the valley, stopping at some sites on the way. Now I could take time to spend with the ashes and sycamores. I wasn't going anywhere that day, except to these carvings, map in hand.
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And finally, there they were. Just a small outcrop, with its carved circles. Yesterday I'd seen far more, in the brightness of the sun, up in the hills. Today, the clouds were drifting over, and the circles were shadowed, then bright again. And yet, this, in its way, not marked out by the fences and signposts of the better-known tourist attractions, held as much, if not more, meaning.
And nothing, no sign of people, except the people that had farmed the fields and erected the fences: and the people who had made these carvings. Both known by the traces they had left, use of the land. No tourists, nothing to clean up from here. The woman of the farm had told me that two years before, archaeology students from Edinburgh, she thought, had been here, and put something on the stones to 'show the markings better' for photographic purposes. The local people had been most disturbed, wondering who they should complain to. But the next rains had washed it all away.
I sat by the markings, quietly, reflecting, meditating. Finally I poured a small libation, on the grass and the buttercups, from my water bottle.
One of the markings had a deep centre cup, like that of the lone cup-mark shown in a (highly problematic, I consider) paper in Shaman's Drum on 'Celtic shamanism', which I'd taken as the starting point for a critique at the Canadian Anthropology Society conference, two months before. But here it was, an offering-cup, maybe, on the rock, in company of others: part of a community of meaning, even if that meaning might not clear to me; and I found myself thinking of the processes, and people, who might have been involved with its making, and in the silence, broken only by birdsong, I could almost sense them, touch with my mind a person, a woman, who sat there so long before. It seemed to me that she spoke, that I could sense her in these green plants around, that if I could only see through the veil of time, she would be there still: crouched, busy, long brown hair hanging as she worked, preoccupied yet stopping to push it back: or was that my own gesture as the breeze blew a veil of hair, dark and bright, before my eyes and before the stone?
The walk back, by a different route, was long, and hot, and I was glad of the remaining water in my bottle. When I reached the museum, I talked about the article showing the cup-mark, and my response to it, with people there: I had experienced it as an appropriation of meaning that was unacceptable, and my experiences of that day had only confirmed this feeling. I ate a late lunch, and prepared to spend the late afternoon down by the stones of Kilmartin Cross.
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