Kathy: Are you leaving? Driver: I’m taking a client to Kilwood
I have hugely enjoyed the Aldebaran cycle of bandes dessinées by Leo (Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira) and thought this might be worth a try. The story is by Leo and Rodolphe (Rodolphe Daniel Jacquette) and art by Bertrand Marchal. I had not realised that it’s actually the start of a fourth series of albums about the adventures of Kathy Austin, a British secret agent at the end of the 1940s; previously she has visited Kenya, Namibia and the Amazon.
Here she goes to Scotland to visit the house that she has inherited from her aunt, only to discover that it has been badly damaged by a fire and that her aunt’s suspicious death has not been investigated properly; incidentally there are Soviet agents and alien artifacts hanging around too.
It would be very easy for a (mostly) French creative team to slip into stereotypes here, and I’m glad to say that they have avoided it at least with regard to the humans of Scotland, with a reasonably sensitive depiction of rural and small-town folks dealing with Kathy’s return from years away. The landscapes are beautifully done, with Kathy brooding in front of a loch on the cover. The first four of the five in this series are out, and I’ll work through them. You can get Scotland, Épisode 1 here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Fortified Settlement in Northern Pictland”, by Gordon Noble):
The 5th and 6th centuries in northern Britain are a key period when historical sources increase in frequency for the societies that had lived north of the Roman frontier (Chapter 2 of this volume; Evans 2008, 2014; Fraser 2009a; Woolf 2007b). The literary sources suggest that this was a transformative period with the emergence of more developed systems of rulership and social structure. Important changes can also be identified in the archaeological record in this same chronological horizon: for example, after more than 1,000 years of very limited burial evidence, the dead become a more prominent part of the archaeological record (Chapter 5 of this volume; Maldonado 2013; Mitchell and Noble 2017). As well as cemeteries, memorials to the dead and traditions of monumental carved stone monuments emerged and played notable roles in creating and maintaining new forms of personal and group affiliation (e.g. Forsyth 1997a, b; Goldberg 2012, 155-9; Henderson and Henderson 2004; Samson 1992).
A short book of essays about the Picts, more specifically the archaeological remains that exist in the land to the south of the Moray Firth as far as Aberdeenshire, the ancient realms of Fortriu and Ce. I must say it is surprising just how little is known about this culture; there’s a little bit of “No one knows who they were or what they were doing“. They seem to have left no written records of their own at all. One of the few contemporaries to write about their attitude to Christianity was very negative:
…ecclesia plorat et plangit filios et filias suas quas adhuc gladius nondum interfecit, sed prolongati et exportati in longa terrarum, ubi peccatum manifeste grauiter impudenter abundat, ibi uenundati ingenui homines, Christiani in seruitute redacti sunt, praesertim indignissimorum pessimorum apostatarumque Pictorum.
…the church mourns and weeps for its sons and daughters whom the sword has not yet slain, but who were taken away and exported to far distant lands, where grave sin openly flourishes without shame, where freeborn people have been sold off, Christians reduced to slavery: slaves particularly of the lowest and worst of the apostate Picts.
That’s St Patrick, in his Letter to Coroticus, from the fifth century; though it’s clear that the Picts ended up Christian like everyone else.
The single most fascinating artifact for me is the Rhynie Man, found at what seems to have been a major political/cult centre along with other decorated stones, a life-sized figure carved onto a megalith, now casually sitting in the headquarters of Aberdeen Council. All ancient art is interesting, but human figures are particularly compelling; was the Rhynie Man a portrait? a memorial? a deity? all three? Fourteen centuries on, he is ignoring us and ready to use his axe – on what?
Though the Gaulcross Hoard is fascinating as well, a hundred or so worked silver pieces from the end of the Roman Empire; and the Rhynie Man is but the most striking of many Pictish symbols stones. But it makes you think of the Silurian hypothesis; the Picts had a thriving material culture and presumably everything else that goes with that – yet we do not even know their name for themselves with certainty.
In Glasgow last weekend, with a hired car, and with the help of the Megalithic Portal website, I thought it might be interesting to find three megalithic monuments to the north of the city. Spoiler: I found only one.
The Machar Stones
The Machar stones (far left of the map) are in a Forestry Commission plantation, just west of the Carron Valley Reservoir. Alas, it proved impossible to get very far into the Forestry Commission territory from the B818 which skirts the northern edge of the reservoir. The western edge, at Todholes, was completely closed off. The eastern entrance, which looked more promising at first, was also closed off before you got much further.
There is an educational medieval village at the eastern end of the reservoir, and it has some mock standing stones.
They wobble when you touch them; made of fibre-glass (at best). So that was that.
The Broadgate Stone
This was the only one of the three that I was actually able to reach: conveniently beside the A891, just east of Strathblane. Some doubt has been expressed about whether it’s a genuine megalith, or possibly commemorating a 16th century murder. I thought it was nicely shaped to mimic the outline of the Dunglass volcanic plug across the road.
And the view in the other directions was good too.
But it’s actually rather small, maybe 1 metre 20 in height? All these pictures were taken crouching in the wet grass.
The Dumgoyach Stones
This looked promising, though it was a bit of a walk; I parked in a layby beside Dumgoyach farmhouse, and walked in a light drizzle along the West Highland Way (marked by the green diamonds on the map), passing many campers and a few non-campers who were out taking the weekend air, around the hill of Dumgoyach, which is really striking.
I hoped to find the row of half a dozen megaliths on the next rise. One of them was at least visible from the path, so I know that they exist.
But there was a small river and a large fence between me and the hilltop, and I realised that to get over to the stones I would really need to have had much better boots, or to be twenty years younger, or both. So I gave up and went back to the car.
An additional deterrent was provided by scary notices about the local wildlife.
At Edinburgh airport on the way home, I bought two venison haggis, which seemed like fine revenge (and was also not expensive).
I am in Glasgow for a preparatory meeting for this summer’s Worldcon, and for complex reasons arrived on Thursday evening and did my day job from the hotel yesterday. I took a long lunch break though for a cultural excursion in two parts.
First stop was the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a splendid structure abut 15-20 minutes’ walk from the conference centre.
The big draw was an organ recital – the Kelvingrove organ is massive (and therefore open to much double entendre) and the sound fills the main hall well. I particularly liked the video feed of the organist’s hands and feet.
The art gallery is rather special too; the painting that particularly spoke to me was a Belgian refugee from the first world war, painted by Norah Neilson Gray. (I took my own photo but this is the official gallery one.)
Gray, Norah Neilson; A Belgian Refugee; Glasgow Museums; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/a-belgian-refugee-84289
The second leg of the trip was to te end of the Roman Empire. When I watched the Oscar-winning film Gladiator back in 2021, it transpired that the Antonine Wall has a bit of a marketing problem, at least among my Facebook friends (click through for vigorous discussion):
The Antonine Wall ran from what’s now northern Glasgow to northern Edinburgh. It was made of turf rather than stone, unlike the much better known Hadrian’s Wall, so almost nothing survives of the actual structure. It wasn’t actually the northernmost limit of the empire: there were the Gask Ridge Forts north of Edinburgh, and also the mysterious temple-like structure near Falkirk (which gave its name to Stenhousemuir), known as Arthur’s O’on and destroyed in 1743.
In Bearsden, now a northern suburb of Glasgow, the foundations of a Roman fort were found in 1973, and the excavated foundations of the bathhouse are visible in a little park by the road (whose name is “Roman Road”). It’s 15-20 minutes by car from the convention centre in normal traffic.
Often these sites amount to little more than a big pile of stones, but there are several decent interpretative signboards featuring manly men using the facilities.
You can imagine how the Gaulish soldiers, after a hard day’s patrolling in the rain, would have loved to settle down in the heated room and hang out with their mates. The flags and underfloor channels behind which heated air circulated have also been well preserved.
I was educated by nuns in Belfast, and although the school itself was a modern building, the convent (which we spilled into occasionally) had been built in 1874 by an engineering magnate who installed the first central heating system in any house in Ireland. A century later, it was very noisy and probably unsafe – I hope it has been replaced by now! The Roman system looks very attractive.
The Baptist church across the road is on the site of the main section of the camp, and boasts a “Roman sound garden” and a large wooden statue of a legionary.
Edward Gibbon, in one of his eloquent but inaccurate and prejudiced passages, wrote of the Antonine Wall in the context of Agricola:
Before his departure, the prudent general had provided for security as well as for dominion. He had observed that the island is almost divided into two unequal parts by the opposite gulfs, or, as they are now called, the Firths of Scotland. Across the narrow interval of about forty miles, he had drawn a line of military stations, which was afterwards fortified in the reign of Antoninus Pius, by a turf rampart erected on foundations of stone. This wall of Antoninus, at a small distance beyond the modern cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was fixed as the limit of the Roman province. The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.
The Romans did of course press quite far north of the Antonine Wall before they gave up on what is now Scotland, and the source given for the last sentence is Appian, who actually says: “Crossing the Northern ocean to Britain, a continent in itself, they took possession of the better and larger part, not caring for the remainder. Indeed, the part they do hold is not of much use to them.” That last barb about southern Britain is somehow omitted by Gibbon.
