“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine/ Blowing through the jasmine of my mind,” as the Isley Brothers optimistically sang during the long, hot summer of 1974. And I thought of those words, not without some bitterness, as I watched the gale-lashed rain spatter the window and shake the doors last weekend. I’d taken a couple of days off work to make the most of the good weather before the frosts of autumn came, only to run head-first into a deep low barrelling in off the Atlantic. It was wild, and not only blew through the jasmine of my mind, it also trashed the joint and left us looking like shipwrecked sailors who’d unwisely gone hunting the white whale in the Moray Firth.
In between deluges we decided to go neolithic-relic spotting, down to the unusual stone circle-that’s-a-horseshoe at Achavanich and the reconstructed cairns at Camster. It still amazes me that Caithness has Stone Age ruins just lying by the side of the road. Anywhere else there’d be fences, kiosks, entry fees and a gift shop (correction, a “gifte shoppe”). Here the stones just sit in the landscape, much as they’ve done for four or five thousand years; and what you make of them is entirely up to you.
I sometimes wonder what it was like to live at the point when the Middle Stone Age became New. I imagine it must have been like when I was at school in 1976 and punk rock was happening: back then there was no internet, and all you had was tantalising rumours in the playground of a new type of music, new attitudes, new hairstyles. Did Mesolithic man suddenly find his hairstyle and music being derided in the popular press of the day? Or was it like when the New Romantics came along in the 1980s, after we’d had to endure thousands of years of Mesoromantics?
Of course, neolithic is the term archaeologists use for the period when humans began to create permanent settlements, domesticate animals, and start farming, marking the transition away from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. This was before the age of metals, when society started to evolve into recognisable units like states and countries, and stone was still (literally) cutting-edge technology. Historians have wondered for centuries why they clung on to stone for so long, with their thick stone dwellings half-buried in the earth, but I’ve got a simple explanation: come out with me next Bank Holiday Monday for a walk in the driving wind and rain, and I think you’ll begin to see the attraction…
“Summer Breeze” was the theme of my high achool prom (though sung by Seals & Croft) which will give you some idea of how ancient I am.
Hi Wendy, it’s a great song. Mind you, when I was born “My Old Man’s a Dustman” was number one…!
You are racing along on that cheery red gansey! It’s already big enough to keep your lap warm.
Here we are still watching to see whether DC will have a 100-F day.
Our Neolithic structures are not greatly commercialized, but we do have them. I leave the archaeologists to fight about 12,000 versus 37,000 years for earliest so far.
Hi Tamar, what’s a few thousand years between friends? At the end of the day, they’re pretty much just rocks in a field, or as Pink Floyd might say, “all in all, they’re just another brick in a wall…”
It is for the same sort of reasons people build underground houses in places like Coober Pedy in this country…except of course here they are escaping the heat!
Hi Cat, fair point. I like to think we had prehistoric little pigs who built houses of straw and sticks but they got blown over by the big bad Wolf, so in the end they resorted to stone…