CHAPTER ONE


FROM THE BASEMENT OF TIME


‘I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men’s bones.’

Liam O Flaithearta




So, where to begin?


The first words of this history of Scotland go to an Irishman and his thoughts of Inis Mór, largest of the Aran Islands off Ireland’s west coast. But there is a way of feeling about a place, about home, that transcends nationality and geography. Sometimes the right words are found in the wrong place and remembrance - the reach of memory - matters as much as history.


Before memory or history - beneath everything - is the rock. We are shaped and tested by it. Just as we are of the people we call family, so we are of the land we walk on every day. Magic is elusive stuff, but in the ancient landscapes of Scotland there is the genuine shimmer. It’s also a tough and demanding place - much of it made more of storm-swept rock than anything sun-baked. This is important. It is the landscape that has authored the story of this place, and this people, far longer and more indelibly than any work of our own hands.


The most enduring reminders of the first people are made of the stone - freed from the bedrock and raised towards the sky; used as canvases for works of art; piled high as houses of the living and of the dead; scorched and cracked by home fires of long ago; chipped and polished as tools. But it is not enough to start with the people who used the stone; the correct place to begin is with the stone itself. In the very creation of the bedrock - and the coming-together of a few battered, well-travelled fragments of it to form a patch of dry land that would one day be called Scotland - is a message, a premonition maybe, about the making of the nation, and its future.


It does not matter what moment you choose to begin a story like this: there will always be someone who says you have come in too late. So, to counter that particular criticism, this history of Scotland begins four and a half billion years ago when the planet was formed. Half a billion years before that a dying star had exploded, filling a corner of the universe with super-heated gas and vapour. Amid the chaos a new sun sparked into life and around it swirled the steadily cooling wreckage of its predecessor, the stuff of worlds and Scotland and us. Hot clouds cooled, condensing into clumps and clots. Some came together to make this earth, an object with sufficient gravity to hold, eventually, a thin silk of life-supporting atmosphere around itself.


Long before the advent of anything like atmosphere and life, an object not much smaller than earth smashed into the young world, pulling away a great dollop of it. The mystery assailant continued on its way, hurtling onwards in its orbit of the sun, or elsewhere into infinity, but the gobbet was held in place by earth’s gravity. The force of the collision had raised the temperature of the debris to boiling point and at first it was a glob of liquid that was trapped in our orbit. In time it cooled and solidified as the moon. Aeons later men and women living in the land before Scotland would count the phases of that silvered travelling companion and track its passage across the sky. They would raise huge stones, in circles and avenues, to help them remember and predict its comings and goings. But all of that would have to wait. For now there were billions of years to pass and thousands of miles for the rocks to travel before they could come together as a land for Scots to walk upon.


Earth had reeled drunkenly back from the blow that made the moon. The axis around which our planet spun was now askew for all time - leaning at a jaunty angle - but it kept on spinning like a wonky top. The ceaseless rotation makes of earth a giant dynamo, generating an electrical-magnetic force field that protects all life against the deadliest of the sun’s radiation. The Aurora Borealis - the Northern Lights that can be glimpsed in Scotland when the conditions are right - are an effect of the relationship between that crackling cloak and particles from the sun.


The same magnetism dictates where on earth the North and South Poles are positioned. These are not constant and have moved around the planet many times, causing chaos on each occasion. But individual rocks remember where north was located at the moment they were made and carry a permanent echo of it within themselves. Geologists listen to the echoes and tell where on the surface of the globe the various bits and pieces of Scotland were at the moment when each different type of rock came into being. If geology is the birth certificate of a rock then it is the restless magnetic field that has carefully filled in the box marked ‘place and time’.


Earth’s orbit of the young star had been altered too by the moon-making collision, reshaped into a regular oval called an ellipse. The warmth of the sun would no longer be constant on this planet for the duration of each of our yearly circumnavigations; we would be further from the fireside at some times than at others. In that moment the cycle of seasons was ordained.


The monstrous temperatures caused by the collision had made earth mostly liquid again as well. As it cooled, concentric layers formed and, on the outside of the ball, a thin crust hardened. The material beneath remained liquid and as the heat circulated, rising to the surface and then sinking back down towards the interior, the currents and flows contrived to keep the outer shell in perpetual motion. Composed of continent-sized scales, the crust proved to be a violently unstable casing. These thin scales, or ‘tectonic plates’, ground together at their edges like pieces on a constantly moving jigsaw; or were pulled apart to create fissures from which the molten interior could ooze like albumen out of a cracked egg. The plates slid on top and underneath one another, allowing the uppermost to harden in the cold universe outside while the lower was pushed back into the Hadean furnace below.


But while the complete history of the country and nation of Scotland would chart the shaping of the rocks from the time of earth’s messy birth, the fact is there is no physical evidence at all of the place - of the rocks it is made of - for a whole third of the planet’s existence. Only after a billion and a half years does the geology of the northern third of the land now known as the British Isles begin to reveal how it got where it is today and, more interestingly, where it had been all the while.


The oldest of the rocks beneath the feet of Scots are the Lewisian gneisses. These form the basement bedrock of Lewis, the rest of the Western Isles, the Inner Hebrides and some parts of the seaboard of the north-west. They were formed deep beneath earth’s crust three billion or more years ago. Calanais stone circle on Lewis was built of monoliths of Lewisian gneiss nearly 5,000 years ago. But the rock of which it is made - the rock of which Lewis is made - began its journey towards that time and that place at least three thousand million years before that.


As the endless years ground past, so more of what would be Scotland’s bedrock formed - the ancient Torridonian sandstone, some of it a memory of times when desert blanketed the land; limestone laid down first as sediments by long-lost rivers and vanished oceans; great sheets of basalt and granite that spewed, as magma, through tears rent in the gneiss to form the heart of the Harris mountains; yet more granite took shape as the Cairngorms, and parts of the Southern Uplands. Hellish temperatures would, in time, cook some of the limestone to marble and some of the sandstone to quartz.


The various fragments of landforms that would eventually join up to make Scotland are on an endless journey across the globe. As the plates moved across the face of the earth - great rafts of stone afloat upon a molten sea - so the parts that would become Scotland moved with them. For most of the time they were located south rather than north of the Equator. Yet more aeons passed while the disparate building-blocks of this country moved around the South Pole or floated north towards the Equator and beyond. The rock that would be Scotland has been home to tropical forests, deserts and swamps as well as to verdant grasslands and uncounted acres of temperate woodland; it has borne upon its decks lizards and dinosaurs, lions and wolves, hippos and elephants; bears and giant elk, as well as human beings of ancient vintage - the passengers boarding when the climate suited them and getting off again when it did not. The land has frozen beneath ice miles thick, been set free and then frozen again.


The unimaginably powerful forces driving its passage across the face of the globe also twisted, buckled and folded the rock of Scotland like so much toffee. For a hundred million years most of it was submerged beneath a tropical sea. Tiny animals lived and died in the soupy water and when the countless trillions of their bodies sank to the bottom they formed layers of chalk hundreds of metres thick. Millions of years later that same chalk would be scoured away by glaciers, leaving scarcely a trace.


Five or six hundred million years ago some of the rocks of Scotland were on the edge of a continent known by geologists as Laurentia. On the other side of the so-called Iapetus Ocean - a body of water at least as wide as the modern Atlantic - lay the continent of Avalonia and the rocks that would, one day, form England and Wales. For the next two hundred million years the movement of the plates caused that ocean to close up, its waters consumed or pushed elsewhere by the process.


By four hundred million years or so ago, Laurentia and Avalonia had drawn close together. One plate slid beneath the other as they came on and the violence of their advances forced above the surface of that ocean an offshore arc of islands. These in turn were sandwiched and enveloped by the final coming-together of the two continents, their peaks and valleys forming what would eventually be the Highlands of Scotland. For the first time the lands that would be chiselled out as Scotland and England were joined together as one. Long since torn asunder, geologists refer to this huge continent as the Old Red Sandstone Continent and it sat somewhere south of the Equator. As well as the future parts of the British Isles, it also contained Greenland and America.


Scotland still had thousands of miles of lazy meandering to go. By three hundred million years ago all the continents of earth were fused together - a vast landform called Pangaea, or ‘all-earth’. The whole huge lot of it drifted northwards, with the building-blocks of the British Isles land-locked deep in its interior. For part of this time the rocks of our land were covered in a desert that was home to early dinosaurs. The footprints they left long ago in sediments are still being uncovered in Scotland today.


The world kept turning and the plates kept slipping and sliding. Pangaea split along its several seams and, as a new rupture got under way, the salt water that would one day be the Atlantic Ocean began to collect in one great abyss. Something like sixty million years ago, as the Atlantic continued to widen, the rocks of Scotland parted company with the landmass that would become North America. Left behind on the eastern side of the ocean, they were from now on parts of the future British Isles and Europe. Sea levels fell and for the first time the outline of the British Isles was revealed, although just a rough sketch.


It had been no amicable divorce; the rending-apart of continents had put earth’s crust under unbearable stress. Temperatures rose beneath the tortured skin and a great chain of volcanoes burst into life. Among others these would come down to us as Ailsa Craig, Ardnamurchan, Arran, Mull, Rum, Skye and St Kilda. By the time the rocks arrived where they are today - a position no more permanent than any other they have held - they amounted to the most battered and ragged parcel of flotsam imaginable, unrecognisable even to its sender.


All in all, it is a tale almost impossible to be believed but it bears a message and a reminder: just as the emergence of a nation, a political entity called Scotland, was never inevitable, so the cohesion of its rocks - four or five shards of four or five different landmasses - was anything but preordained.


The places we know as the Western Highlands; the Northern Highlands; the Central Highlands; the Central Lowlands and the Southern Uplands are just leftovers from other times and other places: parts of a work still in progress. The shards came together by chance, a whim of pressure and time. It could all have been so different and in a hundred million years or so it will likely all be different again. Nothing is or ever has been permanent; everything is on the move and the only constant is change.


From about thirty million years ago the forces of glaciation were at work around the world. During the past three million years they have sculpted the whole of our land with an energy and violence akin to the wrath of God. The ice has formed and thawed, again and again: long cold periods called glacials followed by shorter warm periods called interglacials. We still live in the Ice Age and during the last three-quarters of a million years the cold periods have been more intense and longer in their duration than before - around 100,000 years each. It has been the advance and retreat of the ice that has ground Scotland’s mountains down to broken teeth - mere stumps of what they once were - and bulldozed millions of tonnes of rock out of the valleys into the lowlands and sea beyond. The last signature to be written upon this land before ours has been that of the ice.


Modern humans, people indistinguishable from us, lived first in the southern-eastern parts of Africa. A suitcase-full of bones is all that remains to testify to the emergence there of Homo sapiens sapiens something like 100,000 years ago. From that warm cradle they spread northwards and then east and west, gradually moving out in all directions until every part of the old world felt their feet upon it.


The earliest evidence of the presence of modern humans in the British Isles is from Kents Cavern, in Devon. The jawbone of a woman was recovered from the limestone cave and radiocarbon-dated to around 30,000 years ago. She is the sole survivor of her time - of the world of the British Isles before the last glacial - and despite the millennia between her and us, we are one and the same. Bones from other sites in England - at Swanscombe in Kent and Boxgrove in West Sussex - reveal the presence of ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years older. These were early humans of the type that predated even Homo sapiens neanderthalensis - Neanderthal Man - and recall a time when the people who came before us hunted giant deer and rhino in a climate much kinder than our own.


But of Scotland’s first humans - those who lived in the northern third of Britain in the time before the onset of the last glacial - not a trace has been found. It’s safe to assume they were here but every hint of their physical presence - be it tools, shelters, butchered animal bones, artworks or their mortal remains - all of it has seemingly been erased by the ice.


The last glacial began around 25,000 years ago. Perhaps the planet wobbled on its axis, tilting the northern hemisphere even further from the warmth of the sun; maybe its orbit was altered again, becoming more elliptical and straying further from the life-sustaining rays at both extremes of its journey. Whatever the trigger, the deterioration in the weather would have been rapid enough for any humans living in the land before Scotland to notice the change.


Over the course of a few generations the temperature dropped markedly. There was seldom rain any more - especially on the high ground - just snow that grew deeper and deeper until its own weight compacted the lower layers into ice. Huge domes of snow and ice formed and grew within the mountain ranges of the north, rising and enveloping the tallest peaks. As the ice sheet spread, a vicious cycle was established. More and more of the northern hemisphere turned white and reflected the heat radiating from the sun, accelerating the cooling process. Less and less water fell upon the land as the ice claimed and drew towards itself whatever precipitation was forming in the atmosphere. Sea levels began to drop for the same reason and all the while the great domes of ice grew thicker and heavier.


Too great to be contained within the mountains, the ice spread out into the landscape around and below. Where it touched the land a scum of watery sludge became a lubricant that enabled the frozen mass - several miles thick - to nudge and grind southwards. Rock trapped in the lowest layers and in contact with the land surface acted like the coarsest-grade sandpaper imaginable. On Skye’s Cuillin the smoothed and polished scars etched deep into the rock reveal the direction the ice sheet took across the bedrock. The weight of the ice pushed the very land itself down into the crust below. At the height of the glacial, parts of northern Europe would be many hundreds of metres lower than they are today, depressed like one end of a couch beneath a fat lady’s bottom.


The ice drove all before it. Humans and animals alike migrated ever southwards, beyond its reach. Great glaciers grew out from the mountains of snow and ice and pushed through valleys, making them deeper and wider. Uncountable tonnes of rock were quarried out of the mountains and bulldozed into the valleys below. Beyond the Highlands and towards the south the glaciers left a gentler, less spectacular landscape of rolling hills and river valleys. As well as scouring and quarrying, the ice sheets deposited new material. Silts and gravels in vast quantities were spread out across the lowlying terrain - deposits that would develop into some of the most fertile farmland in the British Isles.


Around 16,000 years ago the last glacial was at its peak. The ice sheet had reached as far south as Wales and the midlands of England and all traces of human habitation had been wiped from the land as completely as chalk dust from a blackboard. From that time onwards, however, temperatures began to rise. Maybe the planet tipped back up on its axis, increasing the effect of the sun’s warmth; or maybe our orbit took on a more circular path. In any case earth began to warm up and so the ice melted and receded.


Valleys cut by ice, rock and time filled with melt water. As vast volumes of water returned to the sea, so the waves lapped higher. Over centuries and then millennia the coastline we recognise took shape. The unmistakable outline of Scotland’s western seaboard is what happens when the sea floods troughs excavated by glaciers. The fjords of Lochs Alsh, Broom, Duich, Eriboll, Fyne, Hourn, Laxford, Linnhe, Long and Torridon and more were all cut and sculpted by the ice before being drowned in the rising sea.


Inland, beyond the reach of the tide, other huge, ice-cut scars filled with melt water to create lochs like Affric and Arkaig; Luichart and Lochy; Monar and Mullardoch; Morar and Ness. Great rivers flowed out of the Southern Uplands to water the fertile plains below. The Firths of Clyde, Forth and Tay offered easy access deep into the interior.


Seawater and melt water alike revealed, in the manner of a highlighter pen, ancient fault lines and geological schisms. Loch Maree and Loch Broom, Loch Shin and Loch Laxford were cut by glaciers that exploited the north-west to south-east grain of the Lewisian gneiss. The Great Glen - running contrariwise from north-east to south-west - follows the path a glacier took along the massive geological fault line between two tectonic plates that cuts across Scotland like a sword wound. These landforms, shaped first by geological forces and then modified by ice, are marks deeper and more profound than any yet made by humankind.


Long before any human foot made its imprint, geology and ice conspired to ensure the land of Scotland would be split in two. The thin, acid soils that gradually formed in the valleys and rugged slopes of the north and west would only ever be suitable for the least demanding of domesticated animals, the toughest crops. South and east of the Great Glen would form the much richer soils that, in time, were turned into a ‘bread-basket’ of arable farming. The destinies of the peoples who would eventually reach and settle these two quite distinct terrains were pre-determined, at least in part, by the nature of the land itself.


All of that lay in the future. As the climate improved and the ice receded - from around 12500 BC onwards - tundra gained a toehold. The sub-soils remained frozen all year round but during short summers a thawing of the topsoil allowed a greening of the landscape for the first time in thousands of years. Grazing herd animals came then, lured north by the promise of food. Mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, giant fallow deer and reindeer - all of them walked the land during a time when Scotland was embraced by a sub-Arctic climate. It was a tough life but one that suited hardy animals that thrived in the chill and enjoyed wide open spaces where predators could be seen from afar.


The land continued to warm up and the seeds of other species arrived from the south, borne on the winds. More came in the guts of the herd animals themselves until, in time, woodland replaced the open plains. Animals that had felt secure in the open - like the reindeer and the bison - left for green pastures elsewhere or fell to extinction. In their place came beasts that preferred the cover of trees and browsed among the shadows of the forest floor.


Scotland drew across herself a cloak of aspen, birch, elm, hazel, lime, oak and pine and through the dappled gloom moved all the creatures of the woods - wild cattle, boar, deer both red and roe, elk. Through the canopy above moved polecats, martens and birds. The rivers and streams wending their way towards the coasts harboured beaver, otter and wildfowl as well as all manner of fish - and where there were prey animals there were hunters like fox, bear, wildcat and wolf.


If there ever was a time when animals had the place to themselves, it could not and did not last. Beasts to hunt and wild foods to gather - these were lures that drew another opportunistic predator into the northern lands, the deadliest and most implacable of all. The ice retreated, life returned to the land and so came man.


It is impossible to be certain when the first people reached Scotland after the ice - but they found an environment still in flux. The thaw had caused a rise in sea levels at first, but as the weight of the glaciers diminished, the land began to rise faster than the water. Freed from the pressure of the fat lady’s bottom, the couch started to regain its shape. The land slowly reared up out of the sea in a process that continues to this day - indeed Scotland is still on the rise while England, at the other end of the couch, dips steadily into the Channel.


Just to complicate matters, after the first few centuries of warming, the ice returned to northern Britain. The so-called ‘Cold Snap’ set in some time after 10000 BC, recklessly undoing all the good work. From a central point somewhere between Loch Lomond and Rannoch Moor, the glaciers established themselves once more and advanced through the valleys all over again. All life - plants, animals and perhaps humanity too - was driven out for yet more centuries until a final thaw set in.


By around 8000 BC the Cold Snap was over and the last of the ice had melted. The water returned to the oceans. Sea levels rose once more and a complicated dance began between the rebound of the land and the rising of the sea - sometimes the one gained most ground, sometimes the other. All around Scotland there are ‘raised beaches’, cliffs that once edged the sea but are now far inland. Elsewhere divers have found undersea shelves that once were dry land before the waters rose and swallowed them.


In any event, for the first settlers this was a land made more usefully of water than solid, open ground. For thousands of years much of the land was covered by trackless forest and they would have travelled by river and sea. If the first traces of human habitation were on the coasts and riverbanks, then the rivalry between the rising sea and the rebounding land - until around 4000 BC - will have obliterated many of the first footfalls.


Geologists and geographers say the islands of Islay and Jura, off Scotland’s west coast, may have been at the centre of an area that became - and remained - ice-free comparatively early. In 1993 an archaeology student taking part in a field-walking project at Bridgend near the Bowmore Distillery on Islay found a stone arrowhead. It was made and lost around 11,000 years ago and proves people were keen to exploit the northern territories of the British Isles as soon as the retreat of the ice made that possible - perhaps during or just before the time of the Cold Snap. Finds from the earliest periods are rare indeed but the absence of evidence is hardly evidence of absence and no doubt other traces await discovery.


The island of Rum sits like a dumpy diamond 15 miles or so offshore from the north-west coast port of Mallaig. It measures 8 miles north to south and roughly the same east to west, amounting to around 10,000 hectares of land that is almost entirely mountainous and barren. In the whole of the 28-mile coastline there is only one inlet - Kinloch, at the head of Loch Scresort, on the eastern side - and it is here that pioneers would have made landfall, just as visitors to the island do today.


At least as early as 9,000 years ago, people found their way to the place - perhaps from Islay and Jura, off to the south. Anyone who has spent time in a little boat in the waters off Scotland’s western seaboard will know the way land and water combine in a confusing muddle. Sea lochs merge with the sea itself; islands and islets appear on all sides, or is that the coast? Unless you are looking at charts all the while, it is easy to lose track of whether it is mainland or island ahead.


The modern obsession with cars gives a view of the landscape that is utterly at odds with that of our ancestors. Where we see a river, firth or channel as an obstacle to be crossed by bridge or ferry, people who travel mostly by boat see highways, even short-cuts. For pioneers travelling in boats the concept of an island would be meaningless a lot of the time. Who cared if the destination was on the ‘mainland’ or not, when the best way to travel was, anyway, via the water?


That said, there is something about Rum, something at once compelling and forbidding. It is a gloomy, looming presence that casts a spell now and surely did all those thousands of years ago. Gavin Maxwell got it right in Harpoon at a Venture:

Rhum is a strange place, eerie and haunted if ever a Hebridean island was. It is all mountain - hills as dark and savage as the Cuillins themselves, and falling for the most part steeply to the sea. The hills even carry the name, the Cuillin of Rhum, but they seem to have a different soul, something older and more brooding … If there is a place where I could believe every Gaelic folk-tale and wild superstition, it is in their shadow.



I quoted that passage in my undergraduate dissertation, written over twenty years ago now, when Rum was still spelled the way prudish teetotal Victorians preferred - with an ‘h’. I had taken part in an excavation of the so-called ‘Farm Fields’ overlooking Loch Scresort in the summer of 1986 and I wanted to be part of the excitement the finds had generated - at least among archaeologists. Forestry workers employed by the Nature Conservancy Council had noticed large quantities of chipped stone, as well as a beautiful barbed and tanged arrowhead, during ploughing - and archaeologists had come to investigate. What the foresters had stumbled upon was, at the time, the earliest known prehistoric settlement site in Scotland.


The stone chips and tools - over 150,000 of them were found in the end - were the work of people who lived in a time classified by archaeologists as the Mesolithic. Labels like Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic - Old, Middle and New Stone respectively - are often as much of a hindrance as a help but they give some sense of order within what would otherwise be an even more confusing chaos of artefacts of different ages and styles. But people do not go to bed Mesolithic on Friday only to get up on Monday Neolithic, having decided over the weekend their lives would be better if they embraced a new technology. Changes and advances of such importance do not happen uniformly, far less overnight, and people with different approaches to life and work would have existed side by side for centuries or longer.


The importance of the site at Kinloch was confirmed by radiocarbon dates that revealed just how long ago those pioneers had begun spending time on the island - over 7000 years BC. Other evidence from the dig - shadowy traces of shelters and fires - revealed they had not just been day-trippers either. On the north-west coast of the island is a mountain called Creag nan Stearnan, Bloodstone Hill’, and it was this that made Rum a particularly useful destination for the bands of hunter-gatherers who pulled their boats ashore at Kinloch all those millennia ago. Bloodstone is a chalcedonic silica that can be flaked and worked into sharp tools, much like flint, and the chalcedony of Creag nan Stearnan is particularly good-quality. It was ideal for making small blades - microliths - that could be mounted in shafts of wood, horn or bone to create a serrated edge. (Archaeologists identify these microliths as the defining characteristic of the tool-making practices of the Mesolithic - hundreds of generations of people, classified just by tiny chips of stone.)


As well as coming to the island to collect supplies of the raw material and to work some of it into tools, the bands of hunter-gatherers stayed on Rum - perhaps for weeks or months at a time. Nodules of bloodstone were collected at Guirdil Bay, below the mountain, and finds there showed the stone was quality-checked in situ before ‘blanks’ were worked up for completion back at a well-established and well-organised campsite at Kinloch.


To make their stay more comfortable the travellers erected substantial shelters similar to tipis - frameworks of branches harvested from the hazel, birch and willow trees known to have grown on the island at the time, and covered with brushwood or animal hides. The people who lived upon and exploited the land before Scotland, 10,000 and more years ago, were the same as us in every way. In terms of their potential, their physical and mental abilities and their appearance they were fully modern human beings indistinguishable from any person alive today. Their circumstances differed from ours enormously, their achievements limited by their technology. They are separated from us only by time.


If they arrived early enough in the story to hunt the reindeer and caribou of the Scottish tundra then it is worth comparing those first forays, into the wild lands of the north, to lives lived just beyond the reach of memory.


Their bodies were covered with fur and soft tanned leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible … But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.


These are Jack London’s words in White Fang, as he imagines the hardships of prospectors in Canada’s Yukon in the late nineteenth century; men in search of gold.


‘But under it all they were men’: this is the certainty we should have in mind when we picture Scotland’s first adventurers - people made small by the enormity of a land newly forged, yet undaunted and ruthlessly determined in the face of it. Judging by human bones found elsewhere in northern Europe, the first people to arrive here after the ice were probably slightly smaller in stature than today’s average. The men would have stood between five feet six and five feet nine inches tall, the women no more than five feet five. People learn over time to make the best use of available resources and those ancestors would have been equipped with skills acquired and passed down through thousands of years.


They might have been new to Scotland, but modern humans had been at large on the planet for at least 90,000 years before any of them went there after the last glacial. Their material culture - the things they made and used to exploit their environment - would have been the products of ancient experience and experiment. They may well have been more skilful, and better equipped to take on The Wild, than any nineteenth-century prospector.


Since they would have wanted warmth and protection from the elements they would have worn well-made, neatly fitting clothes and footwear of animal skin and fur, fastened by buttons and toggles of bone, horn, wood or stone. Stone survives best, after millennia buried in the earth, and so archaeologists tend to recover more things made of that material than any other. But stone would have been no more important to the early settlers than any other material, perhaps less. Their tool kit would have included spears and knives for hunting; cords and ties for fashioning snares and traps; equipment for cutting, for preparing skins and hides, for maintaining their clothes - needles for stitching and mending - as well as bags and baskets for collecting wild foodstuffs. They would have carried the means to make fire. They wore jewellery and other symbolic items - totems declaring who they were, how they related to each other, how they mattered to each other. Most important of all, they would have carried in their heads the practical wisdom of countless generations of their forebears.


On arrival in Scotland, after 8000 BC at least, they would have found themselves surrounded by natural riches beyond the dreams of avarice: animal prey of all kinds; wild foods of every sort. The rivers - and the seas around the coastline - teemed with fish and shellfish. It was a cornucopia and would have provided a diet and lifestyle healthier in many ways than any we know today. Disease and injury would have posed ever-present threats to life and limb, but what those people lacked in drugs and treatments we take for granted would have been compensated for by the fruits of a wholly different understanding of the natural world.


The bands of hunter-gatherers would have touched every inch of the coastline during the thousands of years when their way of life was the only way of life. The ghostly traces of lives lived suggest those first people were nomads - wanderers rather than settlers. They kept no animals - except dogs perhaps, for security, for company and for the hunt - and farmed no crops. Instead they moved from place to place, on a seasonal round dictated by needs and appetites, probably along routes established long ago and handed down through the generations. They penetrated the interior of the land as well, taking advantage of rivers and streams that were navigable by their small boats. But the islands off the west coast would have been particularly attractive, so accessible are they even by the smallest craft in the hands of able mariners.


It is the modern concept of remoteness that has made those islands so interesting and so rewarding for archaeologists. While much of mainland Scotland has been developed by farming and forestry, as well as by urbanisation, industry, road-building and the like, the Inner and Outer Hebrides as well as the islands of Orkney and Shetland have seen much less in the way of destructive interference with the landscape. It is for these reasons that so many more ephemeral traces of early habitation have been found offshore, often sealed beneath peat that has grown undisturbed for thousands of years. Artefacts and other traces recovered from sites on islands like Colonsay and Oronsay, Islay and Jura, as well as Rum, give just a glimpse of the whole picture.


While the island fastnesses have kept safe a great deal of material from the earliest periods of human settlement in Scotland, many sites of Mesolithic activity have been found on the mainland too. At East Barns, near Dunbar on the coast of East Lothian, archaeologists were called in to examine fields soon to be consumed by a limestone quarry. They found traces of a large, oval-shaped house built of stout posts. Organic material was radiocarbon-dated and showed the ‘house’ - a large tipi-like structure - had been built and occupied around 8000 years BC. Further west, at Cramond on the southern coastline of the Firth of Forth just outside Edinburgh, stone tools, made of chert, were found alongside burned hazelnut shells, an abundant food source. Dated to around 8500 BC, these slight remains are the earliest proof of human habitation found in Scotland so far, older even than the campsite on Rum. The hunter-gatherers at Cramond had chosen well. They made their tools and gathered food where the River Almond meets the Forth, giving them access to both marine and freshwater foodstuffs.


Something like a thousand years later, around 7500 BC, a family used a natural rock shelter at Sand, near Applecross in Wester Ross. They made tools of stone, animal bone and antler and used them to hunt red deer and birds. They collected shellfish and piled the empties into a large rubbish dump, or midden. More intriguingly, they fashioned jewellery from cowrie shells and the tusks of wild boar, and collected red ochre and a kind of dog whelk shell that produces a purple dye. Abundance of food clearly left plenty of time for the finer things in life.


It will never be known how large - or how small - was the population of hunter-gatherers who lived out parts of their lives in Scotland in the first thousands of years after the ice. None of the higher estimates go beyond the figure of a few thousand and the lower guesses dwindle into the hundreds - but we have learned enough to say Scotland was a familiar and well-used environment soon after the final thaw set in, ending the Cold Snap of 8,000 years or more ago.


Regardless of fluctuations in the weather, the restless readjustments of the sea level, Britain would have been viewed as a worthwhile destination. People would have moved in both directions - both towards as well as away from the rest of Continental Europe - and word would have gone back to similar populations in other parts, of rich hunting and easy fishing, of a dizzying range of wild foods ready for the collecting, of a tolerable, even pleasant climate. Over generations and then centuries, people would keep coming.


The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is one that demands large amounts of territory for each comparatively small group of people. New arrivals from the south and east would be greeted cautiously - and likely invited to keep heading north and west. Each successive band of travellers would have seen the wisdom, even the necessity, of moving on in search of empty land. This is not population pressure - it is what has been best described as like day-trippers armed with picnic hampers and rugs walking further along a beach to get to a clear spot where they can spread out their things.


The greatest frustration is that while we have been able to build up a fairly detailed picture of the practicalities of hunter-gatherer life, we know nothing about what those ancestors thought about the world. But if the spiritual lives of Scotland’s first inhabitants are lost to us, we can at least wonder at evidence found elsewhere. At Vedbaek, in the north-east of modern Denmark, archaeologists found a settlement used by Mesolithic people around the time of the earliest expeditions into Scotland. Traces unearthed there suggested the site had been visited again and again, perhaps for centuries. Most beguiling of all, however, was the find of a cemetery. The handful of burials confirms, as nothing else found from that period either before or since, that people have always looked with bewildered awe into the abyss.


In one grave painstaking excavation recovered not just the mortal remains of a woman, but also a keepsake that spoke of someone who knew and loved her. Around her neck had been a string of stags’ teeth collected from more than forty different animals. Did she have a son or a husband or a father who was a great hunter? Was it thought that by wearing such a thing she would be recognised elsewhere as a person of status, a woman who had known the protection of a hero? And if the burial party acknowledged and honoured that relationship in death, surely they felt the same way about such unions in life.


Beside her was the skeleton of a baby - perhaps her baby - laid on a swan’s wing. A little stone knife, a token, was beside the baby’s waist. Other occupants of the graveyard had been buried with their heads or feet cradled in the crowns of deer antlers. How and why had these people died? Were they the victims of a tragedy that devastated a community, taking several of its members at once; or had they died singly, over a long time? Was there a battle, a murderous raid by rivals, an outbreak of disease? And what of the mother and baby placed in the ground with so much care and imagination? Was the bird’s wing there just for comfort’s sake, a lining placed in the grave by someone left behind who couldn’t bear the thought of his baby being cold? Or is it about a tiny soul taking flight, following the flocks of migratory birds towards a warmer place half remembered and far away?


It is not much of a stretch to allow for ideas like those of the people of Vedbaek having been shared by Scotland’s first inhabitants. Until the fourth millennium BC, the British Isles were connected to Europe - indeed, they were not ‘isles’ at all but part of the main. As well as making for the coastlines of Britain in their boats, early would-be settlers could also have walked dry-shod. It is hardly controversial to imagine people living in the territory that would one day be Denmark, having had connections with people who journeyed either by land or by sea to Britain, taking their spiritual ideas with them.


The rich fishing grounds of Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, have as their bed the submerged landmass of Doggerland. In places the water there is only 10 metres deep and from time to time trawlermen have pulled up in their nets ancient man-made tools and animal bones. Not so very long ago this was another country - not just a bridge between Britain and Europe, but also a destination in its own right. ‘Dogger’ is a Dutch word for a kind of fishing trawler and it is salutary, in times of global warming and predicted sea-level rises, to note that what was so recently a huge, rich territory populated by people and animals is now 10 metres beneath the hulls of fishing boats and car ferries.


The weather was improving all the while. By about 4000 BC, around the time when Doggerland and the rest of the bridge to Europe was finally inundated and overwhelmed by the deepening North Sea, the temperatures were a good deal higher than today. The climate was warmer and drier and sea levels were so high that Scotland was all but cut in two. The Firths of Clyde and Forth were at their deepest, penetrating the interior from west and east until only 10 miles or so of dry land united north and south.


The way of life of the hunter-gatherers was pursued for thousands of years - longer than any other that has evolved since. In the right environment it provided plenty to eat, comfortable shelter and warmth while demanding relatively little work. There would have been plenty of time for leisure and family life, conversation, playing with the kids - as well as thoughts about the mysteries of life itself. It is hard to imagine why people would ever swap such a lifestyle for a regime of daily toil. But that was exactly what some would have been advocating in Scotland from around 4000 BC onwards, the time described as being ‘of the New Stone’ - the Neolithic.


No one imagines any more that the switch to farming - crops or animals - happened rapidly or as part of a uniform process. Archaeological evidence from the so-called ‘fertile crescent’ of the Near East - in the Levant and Mesopotamia around modern-day Iraq - shows farming was established there by around 9000 BC. It then took all of 3,500 years to reach the Mediterranean and at least 2,000 more to make the crossing to Scotland and the rest of the British Isles. Farming may not have been the majority occupation in Scotland until as recently as 2000 BC. Conversion was no overnight sensation and it was not foisted upon work-shy hunter-gatherers at the point of a pitchfork either. Instead the benefits of the alternative lifestyle - food stores for lean times, animals ready to hand without the need to hunt them down, a permanent home - gradually won people over.


Both ways of life existed side by side for hundreds or thousands of years. Some hunters may have tried the new way only to revert to old habits out of simple preference; likewise, some farmers may have seen the virtues of nomadic hunting and gathering and thrown down their ploughs in favour of the easy life being lived by the wanderers they saw passing through the fringes of their territory every once in a while.


Inundation by rising sea levels may have provoked a change in the way people viewed the land. The loss of territory in some areas - the final drowning of Doggerland, for example - was rapid enough for people living nearby to realise what was happening. Perhaps they began to wonder whether or not a day would come when there was no dry land left at all. Under such circumstances it may have seemed wise to start caring for the land, tending it rather than taking it for granted. Spokesmen evangelising about the benefits of farming could easily work in a few lines about the need to stay put, to take possession of the land, to grow crops and keep animals on it - or risk losing it for ever beneath the next tide.


The notion of immigration by farmers - of large-scale movement of people from a steadily over-populating east towards the empty west - has been in and out of fashion over the years. It was an early explanation by archaeologists for what they interpreted as the abandonment of nomadic hunting and gathering in favour of permanent settlement among cultivated fields. Then others began to argue that farming is knowledge, a set of skills that might simply have been passed across Europe by word of mouth without the need for any great movement or invasion by the farmers themselves. Most recently, in light of the study of human DNA, it has become apparent that if there was a spread of new people into the west, out of the east, it involved relatively few incomers.


Scientists led by Professor Clive Gamble of Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor Martin Richards of Leeds University studied the DNA of ancient human remains from sites across western Europe. Oxford University’s Professor Bryan Sykes, a member of the team, examined DNA collected from a tooth belonging to the skull of so-called ‘Cheddar Man’, a modern human skeleton found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset in 1903 and later radiocarbon-dated to 7000 years BC. The DNA sequence he recovered was compared to the DNA of pupils and teachers at the nearby Kings of Wessex Community School - and found to match that of two children and one man. History teacher Adrian Targett and Cheddar Man were connected, across 9,000 years, by an unbroken strand of DNA. What this meant in simple terms was that the people living around Cheddar Gorge now are of the same stock as those hunter-gatherers who came to Britain after the ice melted.


Despite the passing of millennia, the arrival of one foreign culture after another, no real watering-down of British DNA has taken place in the last 10,000 years. Tests across the wider population of these isles have returned the same result: something like 80 per cent of us have the DNA of the hunter-gatherers. Whoever arrived after the hunters - the first farmers, Romans, Anglo-Saxon colonists, Viking raiders, Norman conquerors or anybody else - they never came in numbers sufficient to alter fundamentally the bloodstock of the resident population. We are mostly the same people we have always been.


In some parts of Scotland - the mountainous north and west for example, with its thin, acid soils - farming must have been tough. The climate was continuing to change too and not for the better. By around 3000 BC cooler, wetter conditions were developing. These were circumstances less suitable for the forests, and trees would have begun to find it hard to grow, particularly in the Highlands. If the trees were failing, what hope for crops, or for animals that needed something to live on. Tough or not, farming took root throughout the land. If the forests were being thinned out by changes in the weather, farming would shortly diminish them further still. Arable crops require cleared fields and from 4000 BC onwards the sound of stone axe upon green wood became increasingly familiar.


If those farmers understood the value of fertilising the fields - with seaweed and with animal manure - then they would have been able to take several harvests from the same ground before having to clear more. If they learned the benefits of rotating their crops, that too would have prolonged the fertility of any patch of land. But eventually - and as more and more of their neighbours abandoned the hunt in favour of the farm - more and more fields would have been required, more trees felled. Once farming took hold, deforestation became an irreversible process and humankind had begun to make its first significant impact upon the landscape.


On the kind of diet provided by simple farming - cereals for porridge and bread, milk and cheese, occasional meat - the population of Scotland began to increase. People depended upon specific patches of land in ways that had been unknown during the millennia of hunting and gathering - and with that dependence came a sense of ownership. For the first time, families and clans felt the need to stake a permanent claim on the fields they worked and therefore controlled; boundaries appeared, marked by hurdle fences perhaps, or lines of boulders. Group identities became increasingly important, along with an awareness of home turf - what land do you belong to? And then … what land belongs to you?


During the fourth millennium BC, the Early Neolithic, people began building houses for their dead. The first tombs were of timber, the later ones of stone, but the function was always the same - the storage of bones. The custom was to leave the corpses of the dead exposed in the open long enough for the flesh to be picked off by scavengers or lost to decay. Once the remains had been reduced to mere bones, the skeleton was gathered up and placed within a purpose-built structure. Although the bones of men, women and children - people of all ages and both sexes - were placed inside the tombs, there are never enough to account for all of the community’s dead. They hint at an egalitarian approach to dealing with the dead, but only a small percentage was ever selected for that particular burial rite - everyone else, the vast majority, must have been disposed of elsewhere.


Although the bones were stored in the tombs this was not the end of the matter. The tombs stayed open, accessible to the living. Over long periods of time, even centuries, the bones of more members of the group were placed inside. From time to time the ancestors were returned to the light of day for rituals that reminded the living just how long their people had been laying claim to the territory. Our ancestors were comfortable with - comforted by - the physical remains of their dead relatives.


It is ironic that the most noticeable relic of the culture of the earliest farmers is houses built not for the living but for the dead. That said, there have been some famous finds of homes of a handful of those first farming communities. Just as tools of stone are more likely to survive the ages, so too are homes of stone. Timber would have been a common building material in the past but is unlikely to last anything like as well as stone in the archaeological record. Homes built of posts and stakes, of wattle and daub are largely absent, appearing just now and again as shadows and stains that only the most diligent digger will spot or ‘feel’ with a trowel while excavating. It is therefore the structures of the infinitely more durable stone that have survived - and these can easily colour and distort our image of the homes of the majority of our ancestors.


At Knap of Howar on the island of Papa Westray on Orkney, archaeologists excavated two well-built houses that were occupied for half a millennium either side of 3600 BC . They are built close together - roughly rectangular in shape, though with rounded corners - and are of dry-stone construction. The entrances are low down, probably for protection from the wind and weather, and a further passage connects the two buildings. Animal bones recovered from the site suggest the farmers kept cattle, pigs and sheep and also grew a small amount of cereal crops.


By 3100 BC a farming community was up and running at Skara Brae, close to the Bay of Skaill on the west coast of Mainland Orkney. The site came to light in 1850 when a storm took a great bite out of a bank of sand dunes close to the sea. Revealed beneath the sand and grasses was a cluster of houses that had been enveloped by the dunes unknown centuries or millennia before (it is possible that a severe storm and consequent inundation by sand may even have been the reason the village was abandoned in the first place). Seven self-contained buildings survive, along with an eighth structure that was probably a workshop. In its original form the village may have had more homes - houses lost to earlier erosion by sand and sea centuries ago - and it was occupied continuously for at least 500 years before it was abandoned.


Visitors view the houses from above, by walking on carefully tended turf that has been allowed to grow along the tops of the walls. It is impossible not to marvel at the skill of the builders. Into an enormous midden of their own rubbish, they burrowed passageways and excavated house-sized chambers. These tunnels and spaces they lined with elegantly constructed dry-stone walls built of the naturally occurring Orkney flagstones. As the walls passed above head height, the builders stepped the successive layers of stonework inwards so that they began to close over. The passageways and houses could then be topped either with capstones or with roofs of timber accordingly.


The passageways linked the houses, one to another, to create a veritable warren, snugly insulated against the weather. The midden would have smelled a bit rich in warm weather - especially from the point of view of our modern, deodorised sensibilities - but the protection it afforded from the elements would have made it indispensable. The atmosphere may have been ripe but for folk gathered by roaring fires while storms raged all round, they would have been the cosiest homes imaginable. Inside each was a stone ‘dresser’ upon which valuables could be displayed. Sleeping spaces were marked out with stones and a large hearth occupied the centre of each home. There is even evidence for a running water channel passing by each of the houses to create what may effectively have been flushing indoor toilets.


Looking down on Skara Brae is a surreal experience, like a glimpse of something more than just the work of people - something grown in the earth rather than built; or like a giant wasps’ nest cut in two to reveal cells and passageways within. The preservation - and ongoing conservation - gives a look of manicured perfection that suggests the whole place might have been built just a year or two ago as a film set.


Sometimes it feels like its inhabitants have just this minute walked away. On a day when it is busy with tourists the murmur of many voices serves to remind you the village would have teemed with life and industry. It is at such moments too that you cannot help but wonder what the inhabitants would have sounded like. It is supposed their language would have been something akin to Gaelic or Welsh - an ancient tongue that had travelled across Europe from east to west before arriving in these lands along with the first hunter-gatherers. Whatever it was, they left no written trace of it. We do not know what they thought of the world around them. We do not even know what they called themselves. So the village of Skara Brae is a silent, voiceless place, fossilised within a silent, voiceless world.


As farming became the norm the increasing population - made possible, even inevitable by such a lifestyle - put pressure on the land for the first time. All the ground that could be exploited for crops or animals was steadily claimed, cleared and occupied, not just the fertile lowlands and valleys, but the higher terrain as well - all of it was eventually put to use. As the third millennium BC wore on, tensions between families, clans and tribes reared their heads for the first time. After centuries and millennia when there had been room enough for people to keep out of each other’s way, from now on the farmers were forced to find means of coping with one another.


Whatever tension the increasing population generated was undoubtedly exacerbated by a deteriorating climate. From around 3000 BC onwards Scotland became ever cooler and wetter. Blankets of peat had been forming in the dampest areas since the middle of the eighth millennium and now they advanced more rapidly, reducing the amount of land suitable for crops. The advance of peat is still not fully understood but seems to be triggered by an excessively wet climate. When dead vegetation and fallen leaves become waterlogged on the ground surface rather than decaying and fertilising the soil, a steadily thickening organic mat starts to form. If this pattern continues for years, peat is the result. The whole process may also be triggered, or at least made worse, by large-scale clearance of woodland - either by climate change, disease or the hand of man. No one really knows.


If there ever had been a time of Utopian peace - balmy weather, plentiful resources, and a near-empty land basking beneath endless skies - then it was over for ever by around 2500 BC. By then the landscape was dotted with a new kind of monument - places of religious and magical importance that were, for the first time, off-limits to the hoi polloi. These were the henge monuments - tall, usually circular banks and deep ditches built to enclose areas and conceal rituals from prying eyes. Sometimes an earlier, communal tomb is enclosed inside the prohibited area - but hidden now, its entrance obscured and visited only by those qualified or entitled to do so.


Some of the dead were being treated in a different way as well. Where before the tombs had acted as communal storerooms for the bones of many people, now certain individuals were granted burial in tombs and graves made just for one. For the first time there is the suggestion of hierarchies and elites. Some people and their families were deemed special - deserving of special treatment in death as in life. The great tomb of Maes Howe, near Tormiston Mill on Mainland Orkney, was built on a site that had earlier been marked off and enclosed by a henge. The tomb is an architectural marvel constructed of enormous stones, some weighing as much as 30 tonnes but fitted together without the need for mortar. This was a last resting place not for representatives of all of the society’s dead, but for a special few. It is the advent of them and us.


Close by Maes Howe, and related to it, are the stone circles of Stenness and Brodgar. More sites - fragments of a long-lost religion or science - are all around. What a place Orkney must have been when that whole landscape of ritual and ceremony was complete and in use. For people tending their fields, herding their animals, the ritual and ceremonial places would have been a constant and unavoidable presence. Throughout the day, as they went about their business, they would find themselves near one or other of the monuments. Carefully sited to be visible from miles around, those circles of stone, tombs and processional ways between them would catch the eye and hold the attention again and again. Here was a world where daily life and spiritual life existed side by side. There can be no doubting, either, that a ruling class had emerged with the clout to demand and organise the building of such places.


Stenness and Brodgar were half a millennium old by the time the henges and circles of Avebury were built in Wessex. The rest of the henges thereabouts are similarly young, by comparison to those in Orkney. Whatever the new religion was, it emerged first in the far north. Only the earliest phases of Stonehenge are as old, suggesting that the idea for circles made of ditches, banks and stones may have been passed from north to south. Calanais on Lewis suggests the same presence - of an elite inspired by a new way of interpreting the mysteries of the world; so too the awe-inspiring ritual landscape of Kilmartin Valley, in Argyll.


By the middle of the third millennium BC a new alchemy was abroad in the land - the ability to make jewellery, tools and weapons of metal. Bronze, the metal in question and the one that gives the age its name, is an alloy of copper and tin. This posed a very specific problem for those people in the northern third of Britain who were keen to wear and bear things made of it: copper occurs naturally in Scotland but tin - the metal that hardens soft copper enough to hold a sharpened edge - does not. Since tin had to be acquired from many hundreds of miles away, on the south-west tip of the British Isles, those wanting it had to be able to obtain some sort of surplus for trading purposes. They also had to be in the business of making and maintaining trading links over large distances.


Elites that had emerged to control the building of - and access to - the magical places in the landscape - the tombs and henges - now found ways to control both the jewellery that displayed their status and the weapons required to enforce and perpetuate it. Bronze items began to appear in individual graves, adding to the impression that here was a special person. Not only could he or she afford the jewellery or the weaponry in life, they could also take it with them into eternity.


As the Bronze Age continued, so the population increased. In some areas, farmers were laying claim to the uplands - territory that had previously been overlooked in preference to the more easily accessible and more fertile lowlands. But the move into the harder terrain was undertaken while the climate was continuing to worsen. Those forced to live on the fringes - on the thin soils of the uplands - would be the first to feel any pressures. Lives already made difficult and tenuous by less productive land were especially vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.


Metalworking technology continued to develop and by the advent of the first millennium BC it was tools and weapons of iron that commanded most respect and required greatest control of surplus and trade. As some parts of the uplands became impossible for farming, the dispossessed descended into the lowlands to face land squabbles that would be settled by warriors armed with iron swords and shields. The wheel, too, had trundled into the north by 1000 BC, making possible wagons for work but also chariots for warfare.


Precious metalwork was being thrown into lochs, rivers and mires as well - sometimes in startling quantities. These were no accidental losses, but deliberate offerings. It seems that from the moment people mastered the making of metal objects, they found a need to give some of them up - to nature, to God, to someone unseen but whose presence was unmistakable and undoubted. In Duddingston Loch in Edinburgh a cache of fifty-three bronze knives, spearheads and swords was recovered in 1780. The whole lot of it - a collection of inestimable material value to those who sacrificed it - had been thrown in at one time and one place. Many more of the same events would occur once iron was available too.


Offering up valuables to the invisible was a practice that endured for centuries, or longer. Perhaps it was about ‘re-seeding’ the land with what had been taken from it. Ore was harvested like any other natural crop and so it might have made sense to give some of it back to ensure supplies did not run out. Watery locations may have been chosen in an attempt to appease or appeal to the weather. Perhaps a gift of powerful weapons and valuable jewellery might persuade the rain gods to do the bidding of the priests.


While the hills were emptying in the north and west of Scotland, the ruling elites in the south and east began enforcing control of their own uplands by building grand hill forts on top of the most prominent summits. The effects of climate change were not uniform throughout the land, and the uplands of southern Scotland may have remained attractive for longer than those in the north. Eildon Hill in the Borders had space for as many as 6,000 people but its severely exposed location, coupled with the absence of a water supply, make it obvious the place could never have been permanently occupied on such a scale. It is more likely Eildon and other similar forts were places for gatherings and festivals - and where people from the surrounding area, together with their livestock and other valuables, might retreat to in times of acute strife. Partly defensive and partly for show, these lofty residences speak loudly and clearly of control - control of a population large enough first of all to tackle the building jobs and then to maintain and occasionally defend the places.


As the first millennium BC drew towards its conclusion a unique type of building emerged in the north and west. For a few centuries either side of the time of the birth of Christ, the individuals and families that mattered were using brochs as homes and as symbols of power. These great cooling-tower-shaped structures appeared on the coast at places like Gurness and Mousa - and at hundreds of other locations besides - and suggest the lives and ambitions of powerful landowners, even petty kings. They also suggest specialist builders, called in and then moving on when the job was completed. With thick circular walls rising many metres in height and enclosing a fairly small internal space that was easily defended, the brochs were a way of underlining and displaying power, even if only on a local scale. Consider too the impact on the locals - farmers used to building and living in simple homes of wood, turf and stone - of seeing these alien towers grow up on headlands and other prominent positions around their coastlines.


By the time of Christ, those living in the northern third of Britain were under a fair amount of pressure - pressure that was at least in part of their own making. The land could not comfortably support many more people than were already living on it and yet the population was continuing to grow. The climate had been on a steady downward spiral for longer than anyone could remember - colder and wetter - and land that had once been fertile was barren or inhospitable now. With living space at a premium, control of it had become the major preoccupation for those able to demonstrate power and authority.


Dominant individuals and families had emerged long ago - able to exercise their will over the masses, to lay claim to surplus crops and animals, to cajole or coerce large numbers of people into building great monuments, ostentatious defences. They bore jewellery and arms in life and took them to their graves with them when they died. In this way, men and women of ambition had consolidated their control over their own patches of territory, their own turfs, their own tribes and clans.


Networks of commerce and trade had made possible the import not just of goods and weaponry, but also of new ideas from far and wide. Soon it would not be a matter just of new ideas, but also of new people. Internal pressures would have been building for some time; no doubt different groups vied with one another, testing the limits of power. Scattered across the land was a patchwork of disparate tribes and clans, each with their own separate identities. There would have been local allegiances and loyalties as well as petty squabbles about territory; but each was an entity in its own right, largely independent of its neighbours.


Underneath it all was the rock, the land itself, forged and proved by billions of years of fire and water and ice. Only very recently - in the last few moments really - had people made their presence felt upon it. But in those few thousands years - no time at all in the lifetime of the rock - they had pushed the place towards a natural limit. For now it was a tolerable limit, but a limit just the same.


At the end of the first millennium BC, the people of the land before Scotland existed within a status quo that had evolved to fill the space allotted to it. It was a sophisticated world of inter-related yet largely autonomous tribes and clans. Local chiefs might command local respect - but none had yet found the clout to reach further afield.


For most people the daily concerns were what they had been since time out of mind and would be for centuries to come - making sure there was food for the table, that the fields and animals were tended, the boundaries maintained. There were loyalties to be kept, relationships to nurture, rivals and foes to be borne in mind at all times. There were also attempts to understand and tame the fickle forces of the world. Religions - or something like them - had been evolving for thousands of years to help people control the uncontrollable.


Here in the northern third of the British Isles was a society and a civilisation that was a going concern - that had been so for thousands of years. No one up here was sitting around waiting for outsiders to arrive and tell them how to live, how to think, how to be. There was no centre, no dominant identity and no nation. But that was because no such concept had yet been required.


The land before Scotland functioned perfectly well. It was complex, it was sophisticated and it was whole - a busy world in its own right. In the end it was a pressure from without, from beyond the familiar horizons, that would change everything.


The boats set sail from the Orkney mainland in the spring of AD 43. The trip in prospect could hardly have been completed in one go - the distance was too great, the boats designed for coasting from one safe harbour to the next - but it was a routine undertaking just the same. In the end it would have taken several weeks to cover the distance, but posed no unfamiliar risks or problems.


Boats had been plying up and down the length of the long island for thousands of years carrying people, livestock, surplus crops and other trade goods, as well as the news and gossip from elsewhere that is the stock in trade of people on the move. In 325 BC the geographer Pytheas had been sent out by the leaders of the city of Massilia - Marseilles in modern France - to explore the origins and destinations of their various trading goods. When he wrote up his travels a few years later, in a work he called On the Ocean, he described a journey round the coastline of Britain that took in, among other near-mystical places, the Orcas, or Orkney Islands.


It was via journeys such as these that the science and magic of the henges and stone circles had been passed from north to south three millennia before. If that religion had depended upon travel overland it would likely still have been on its way south in the first century AD, lost in a wood somewhere or bogged down in some trackless mire. Stonehenge, Avebury and the rest might never have been built.


If there was anything out of the ordinary about the trip south from Orkney during the April and May of AD 43, it was the importance of its principal passenger. Any loss of life at sea was to be regretted but the consequences of losing a king did not bear thinking about. It was also vital the trip be completed in good time because the man the king needed to see would not be in Britain for long. He had considerable interests elsewhere, to put it mildly. It would not do at all to be late for such a man - in fact the possible repercussions of that breach of etiquette might be dire.


Thanks to the skill and experience of the seamen in charge of the little flotilla, the journey was completed in good time. So it was that the King of Orkney arrived in Camulodunum, the place we know today as Colchester but for long the capital of the Trinovantes tribe of southern Britain. Along with ten other British kings he bowed his head to Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and conqueror of Britannia. Such a rendezvous, dependent upon keeping up with the news in distant places and being able to stick to a complicated and demanding schedule, might sound remarkable for a man living in Orkney in AD 43. But Claudius only stayed in Britain for sixteen days, so the king’s knowledge of the itinerary had to be detailed and precise - to enable him to leave home long before the emperor even arrived in Colchester.


It is tempting to imagine the first-century inhabitants of the far north of Britain as somehow cut off and existing in a vacuum, a primitive space in which they knew and cared little about the world beyond their horizon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever else they might have been, the people of the land before Scotland were not primitive, neither were they cut off. While people, goods and information travelled more slowly than today, they moved with just as much urgency and determination.


The existence of Rome and her empire - ceaselessly on the move and covering more and more of the world with the shadow of her hand - would have been common knowledge among the tribes living the length and breadth of the British Isles. No doubt even in Orkney - and certainly around the hearths of the royal palace of Gurness, where the king made his home - people would have remembered the stories of the last time the Romans had made landfall on the British side of the English Channel.


Emperor Julius Caesar had tried invading Britannia on two occasions, in 55 and 54 BC, determined to place this northern land under his thrall - but to no avail. He was forced to pull his forces out on both occasions. In 44 BC he was murdered by his fellows - at least in part because they feared he was about to make a foreigner, an Egyptian named Cleopatra, Empress of Rome. Did word of that legendary beauty, even just her name, make it to the cooking fires of Gurness in the last years of the first millennium BC ?


The Romans of 54 BC had observed, among other things, how the locals in Britannia painted their bodies with blue woad so that their very skins declared their identity and their place in the world. It was a practice the Roman soldiers had noticed again and again among the so-called barbarians, people of many different names who had sought to defy them all across northern Europe. It is yet another sign of the long-distance connections and relationships carefully cultivated and tended by Iron Age Britons. It was also an observation of local custom that would prove telling more than a century later when another Roman emperor sent his soldiers across the water.


So the decision by a King of Orkney to travel hundreds of miles in order to bend the knee before Emperor Claudius of Rome comes as no surprise. All kings, or at least those who want to survive longer than the ceremonies that name them as such, are politicians. It made sense for that local ruler to put himself in front of the most powerful man in the world. If he had differences of opinion with tribes on the British mainland, it might have suited him perfectly to try to ally himself with the man who might well prove to be the new leader.


Until recently the only evidence for the meeting was revealed in relief on a fragment of a triumphal arch in Rome. Even so, many historians were convinced the mention of a King of Orkney was no more than a mistranslation, a misunderstanding. More recently archaeologists working at Gurness unearthed fragments of Roman pottery. To be more specific, they found shards from a style of amphora, clay bottles used for transporting wine and olive oil, which had gone out of use completely by AD 60. If the trading connections were moving fine Roman wine and oil to a powerful man living in Gurness before AD 60, then it is possible that news of a visit to the southernmost territories by the Emperor of Rome himself reached that man as well.


So when the time comes to imagine the first forays by Roman soldiers into Scotland, it is important to remember it was not a case of wide-eyed local primitives suddenly coming face to face with an alien culture of which they knew nothing. This was not the arrival of Martians for a one-sided war of worlds but a clash of two civilisations, each of which believed they were morally superior to the other. By the time the Romans arrived here in about AD 82, the people of the north knew those would-be invaders very well.


Julius Agricola had been appointed Governor of Britannia in 78 AD. As soon as he landed he embarked on an ultimately successful campaign to crush the tribes of Wales. By the following year he had the north of England firmly under control as well. Roman domination of the British Isles was travelling north like a rising tide. In AD 80 the legions moved northwards again for a campaign Agricola believed would complete the empire’s conquest of Britannia. Within two years Roman rule was established as far north as the line across the country marked by the Clyde and Forth rivers.


As a Scot, it is hard to think about what happened next without feeling some spark of ancient defiance light up in the brain. You know it is wrong, something left over from the honour rituals of the playground, but it is there just the same. The fact is that north of the Forth and Clyde line, the Romans encountered a stubbornness on the part of the locals that they never managed to overcome.


Among the southern tribes of Scotland - the Damnonii; the Novantae; the Selgovae; the Votadini - were peoples that became fully Romanised before the end, accepting of and grateful for the lifestyle afforded by being clients of the empire. In the weeks and months after those initial conquests of the more co-operative tribes, the Roman soldiers took care to build the usual forts and fortlets that would let them sleep easy in their beds. They knew enough about the ways of barbarians to understand the importance of covering their own backs, even in settled territory.


But north of the two great rivers that narrowed the land to a mere strip of solid flatland between mountain and mire were tribes of a different sort. These were people the legionaries often lumped together under one name - Caledonians. Right at the start there was a taste of things to come when the Legio IX Hispana was attacked at night by tribesmen who came howling down upon them out of the darkness. Only the last-minute intervention of large numbers of Roman cavalry avoided a wholesale rout.


The Caledonians favoured tactics that would work well down through the millennia for soldiers from these parts faced with overwhelming numbers - hit and run. Agricola, determined to draw towards him a combined enemy force that he could tackle and annihilate in one go, set about harrying the population. Winter was approaching and the Romans busied themselves capturing every food store they could find.