A history in stone

John Hannavy explores more of the rich heritage passed down to us by our ancestors.

I started this series by looking mainly at some of the marks left by men in the last couple of hundred years, but this time my focus is on traces left by the people who lived here twenty to forty centuries ago. The Scottish landscape is dotted with the relics of their lives – some of which we understand pretty well, but the meaning of others has been lost in the mists of time.

In Galloway, overlooking Wigtown Bay, the remains of two chambered tombs known today as Cairnholy I and Cairnholy II – long since stripped of their protective covering mounds – were built overlooking one of the finest views in the area. This reminds us that in ancient times, the ritual of burial, at least for important members of tribal society more than four millennia ago, was a significant ceremonial event closely connected to the landscape, the sun and the sea. When discovered and excavated in the late 1940s, these tombs revealed many tantalising links with the ancient peoples who lived and worked in Southern Scotland. People have lived, worked and died on the Scottish landscape for thousands of years, and generations of them left their marks – sometimes obvious, sometimes more elusive.

If you know where to look, there are a surprising number of reminders that people lived in and worked our landscape several thousand years ago. Some of the marks they have left behind are so obvious they cannot be ignored – like the magnificent standing stones at Callanish on Lewis, or the huge burial moun...

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• By : John Hannavy
• In : Scotland Landscapes
• Issue : 51
• Page : 18
• Words : 1,019