a day ago
Forget The Salt Path – this tale of Britain's ancient stone sites is superb
Stay awake all night, and you'll find that euphoria hits you with the dawn. It was with a similar euphoria to the one Fiona Robertson describes at solstice festivals that I finished her poignant, scholarly and poetic book.
Stone Lands is about ancient standing stones and their cultural significance. Robertson has hunted down megalithic sites all her life, and for 20 years she shared this enthusiasm with her husband Stephen. After his early death from cancer she continued to visit them; as such this is also a memoir about that loss and the beginnings of her recovery. The Greek poet Michaelis Ganas wrote that 'duration is passion', and Robertson's book is cleverly crafted to explore that principle both in the survival of extraordinary neolithic monuments and the relationship with her husband, cut short in their 50s.
In episodic travels, she visits stones in Avebury and Pembrokeshire, the Isle of Mull and Dartmoor, the Medway and Taransay, the Scilly Isles and Iona. She's more fascinated by druidical and pagan groups than part of them, and at solstice events she's an observer, like most travel writers – no bad thing. But when it comes to megaliths, she's absolutely part of the movement. She knows her stones, the places they sit, the reasons that they sit in the ways that they do. She knows about the websites like the megalithic portal (try it: it's endless fun), and the difference between the sandstone and the granite, the slate and the quartz.
She also knows the theories and stories about the stones' making. These are mysteries so deep they'll never be solved, but some speculate that megalithic sites were places of healing pilgrimage – a kind of neolithic Lourdes – or stone family trees. Most famously, stones such as Stonehenge which align with the sun of the winter solstice are believed to map the turn of the year towards spring, or even, in the case of the Calanais site on the Isle of Lewis, to provide a landscape-size tool for measurement of the lunar calendar. I would have enjoyed even more speculation about the reasoning behind the efforts of man to build these structures, but perhaps the tenuous evidence doesn't justify it.
Still, she writes lucidly about the archaeological histories of the stone circles. Here Robertson adds all the layers of interest stamped on the ground by writers and artists who have been inspired by standing stones; their writing maps some of the cycles of interest and destruction that the stones have gone through. There's the archaeologist John Aubrey, for example, whose book Monumenta Britannica marks him out as 'the first true stones obsessive' in the 17th century; then there's the physician William Stukeley, who fought against the spoilage of stone circles for use in building. Finally, she quotes Paul Nash, bemoaning the restoration of Avebury henge which left it 'dead as a mammoth in the Natural History Museum '.
Robertson is at her most impressive as a writer describing her love for Stephen. Most people, I suspect, can sympathise with both the love and the horror of illness and loss which is so painfully and beautifully described here. But what is more unusual is how Robertson reflects so profoundly on the ways that places add to that love and passion, and provide anchoring points across the years of a relationship. The couple's first long walk along the Ridgeway in high summer to Wayland's Smithy, with blisters and light hearts, can be directly compared to her emotions on an autumnal visit after the failure of Stephen's chemotherapy, and to Robertson's May visit after his death.
Philosophical it may be, overblown it isn't. There's a beautiful reality here – Robertson's children come with her on these trips, not expunged as other writers' children might have been – and we see them kicking their heels on megaliths and eating chocolate biscuits in the rain. Sometimes the stones are impossible to find, or so small they seem completely insignificant. It's also hard to write well about death: most writers are dragged under by the weight of its profundity, and entangled in the seaweed strands of its macabre and almost disgusting sentimentality. It's easier, perhaps, to write about love, but not love of duration and happiness. Robertson manages to do both with originality and clarity, and can occasionally be very funny too. Mostly, though, her book has the purity of one about holidays, and so deals with death in slices of pure feeling. That's how you link the deeply personal, with its sometimes confusing detail to the transcendent weirdness of the landscape over 5,000 years ago.
It is in the mists of this parallel world that the book ends, not with a miracle of 'healing', but with euphoria: how strange it is that our ephemeral ancestors left landscapes which can help us confront our own mortality, Robertson reflects, and so gave us temples to hope.
