ANCIENT WISDOM
Modern life and technology can make us anxious and unhappy. Neil Oliver finds a balm for the soul at some of Britain’s most atmospheric and venerable sites
Neil Oliver finds balm for the soul at some of Britain’s most venerable and atmospheric sites.
Humanity has a problem, according to biologist Edward Osborne Wilson: “We have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology.”
For millions of years we were hunters of one sort or another. Our own species Homo sapiens, together with all those variations on the theme of humanity that went before – Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo
Australopithecus – depended upon their ability to seek and find food and shelter. Our own sort has been abroad upon the Earth for around 200,000 years. A few recent centuries of science, industrial revolution, internal combustion engines and smartphones have changed the way we live beyond anything that might be recognised by those hunters of old, but our physiologies and cognitive abilities are essentially unaltered. For all the complexity of our societies and the cleverness of the machines with which we have surrounded ourselves, our own onboard computers – three pounds or so of pale pink meat kept safe beneath thin caps of bone – are still running hunter software. Such technological powers have we gifted ourselves
that our ancestors might think us God-like right enough. But here in the West, there are too many unhappy people. Too many rattle with antidepressants and beta-blockers. Too many are stressed and unhappy, self-doubting and self-loathing, hopeless and nihilistic. In hope of finding a cure, I went looking in the past, in search of old places and old stories that offered hope and balm to anxious souls in times past.
Some are places and stories that I have known about for a long time and others I learned of and visited more recently. I find comfort in them, even just in the thought of them, and I realised that in many cases their message to us was about the enduring importance of the simplest things: family and home, love and loss.
1. LOOK TO THE SKIES The Langdale Pikes, Lake District
Great Langdale is a valley near the village of Ambleside in the Lake District in Cumbria. Its broad outlines were sculpted thousands of years ago by glaciers during the last Ice Age. On the skyline, two jagged peaks – Harrison Stickle and Pike o’ Stickle – called out somehow to our ancestors during the Neolithic, the time of the first farmers. They climbed to perilous ridges and ledges and there collected greenstone, made long ago when the mud and sludge of volcanic ash were transformed, by pressure and time, into something hard and also lovely. From that raw material, those farmers made polished stone axes, known now as Langdale axes. Something like a quarter of all the polished Neolithic axes found anywhere in Britain are from those two peaks in Great Langdale.
Heart-stoppingly lovely though such artefacts are, they might never have been used for chopping down trees. Much of their visual appeal comes from the way lines of rock of other colours are marbled through each axe. Eye-catching for sure, and yet such features are also flaws – lines of weakness. Used for the heavy work of felling trees, such axes would have been apt to break on impact. It seems some at least were valued not for their efficacy as tools but rather on account of the source of their raw material.
The first farmers were people who stopped burying their dead, preferring to cremate the loved bodies. Archaeologists have speculated that those in Great Langdale noticed how the smoke and ash of the transformed dead rose into the sky, never to return. It seems possible it was then that the thought occurred of a place high above the world where the spirits of the dead gathered together – nothing less than
heaven itself. The shattered peaks were the last of Earth to be touched by passing souls and so the very rock of them was made sacred by that contact. Were those farmers moved to struggle to precipitous heights in search of material made holy by the passing of their ancestors’ spirits? We cannot know for sure but in that thinking I find comfort. Even the possibility that those people chose to think that way – to ease their grief by conjuring and telling such a story, the story of a heaven – makes the hairs rise at the nape of my neck.
2. TOUCHING ETERNITY Callanish Stones, Lewis
At Callanish, on the Isle of
Lewis in the Western Isles of Scotland, farmers raised a circle of stones on a ridge of land overlooking a sea loch. That inspiration came 5,000 years ago and the Callanish stones have beguiled ever since. The rock of which those rough stones are made is called, by geologists, Lewisian gneiss. Cooked deep in the heat of the Earth, it rose to the surface perhaps 3.5 billion years ago. Lewisian gneiss is some of the oldest rock in the world and a person might never in their life have the opportunity to touch anything remotely as old.
Now, in this 21st century, there are plans to move elsewhere in the Solar System. Scientists prepare for travel to Mars and elsewhere.
Some are working towards transferring the consciousness of human beings into computers. This is the science of Transhumanism, which imagines a time when we might upload our essential selves to the Internet and then download that data into artificial bodies, endlessly repaired.
This is the promise of immortality that used to be the preserve of faith. We are slipping our moorings, readying ourselves to leave Earth, or to migrate from flesh and bone to circuit boards and synthetic bodies beyond the reach of death.
I have touched the ancient rock of Callanish and decided, long ago, that that connection to the deep time of the Earth and the universe is the only immortality I will ever need or want. I will stay here.
“Connection to the deep time of the universe is the only immortality I will ever want”
3. A MOMENT IN TIME Loch Doon, South Ayrshire
As well as finding hope and reassurance in timeless rock, I have caught glimpses of the same in things made only of moments, fragile as gossamer and carried on the wind.
My first archaeological dig, in 1985, was by the shores of Loch Doon. We were in search of traces left by Mesolithic – Middle Stone Age – hunters, several thousand years ago. One day, the dig director walked me to a patch of ground he had excavated some time before. He showed me a scale plan he had made of all the little flecks of chert he had unearthed. Those had been the product of flint knapping, the work to make or sharpen a stone tool.
He had me look at the plan and asked if I could see “the pattern”. I could not and said so and then he pointed out what I had overlooked: four blank patches, two large and two small, forming a square in the centre of that chaos of flakes. He pointed at the two larger gaps and said, “Those were left by the knees,” and then at the two smaller and added, “and those by the toes.”
I was looking at the spaces left free of debris by the kneeling knapper. Even after all the thousands of years, it was possible to find and see precisely where someone had knelt for a few minutes to put a sharp edge on a stone blade. Afterwards that person had stood up and walked into the invisible. I was stunned then and have remained slightly stunned since.
How will each of us be remembered after we are gone? After thousands of years, will there be anything at all to say each of us was ever here? Loch Doon taught me it is not for us to decide. I learned that day and never forgot that the
most ephemeral moment, unmarked by us even as it happens, may last for all the years as the only evidence of our passing through.
4. STORIES THAT MATTER Lindisfarne, Northumberland
The British landscape is a tapestry of stories, every thread a life. There are too many to count, like stars in the night sky.
In the British Library are the Lindisfarne Gospels, written upon calfskins and as heavy as an adult badger. They are a wonder of the world. They tell stories, of course – four versions of the same story, in fact, by the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The gospels were made to keep that story safe for all time, and have done so, so far. They are a reminder that our species has depended on stories for longer than the reach of memory. We may always have needed stories, of one sort or another, simple stories about hope and about love that transcend death.
There are so many more stories that matter, and so many more places. Over and over again they are about the simple stuff we need above all: family, home, meaningful stories and love. I am comforted by those places and stories, tucked safe like seeds in countless folds of the landscape. They are there to be found.