The people at the dawn of history
I was enchanted by mystic Walls Hill long before I discovered it had been an Iron Age fort.
The craggy escarpment, with its rocky ridge and steep-sided cliffs, cast a spell the first time I saw it while cycling along the moorland road between Paisley and Howwood 50 years ago.
Protected by valley bogs and marshes on three sides, the towering hill echoed hauntingly to the melancholic trill of curlews and mournful wail of peewits.
Later, I learned the mysterious mound – known archaeologically as an oppidum – was occupied by a prehistoric Celtic tribe named the Damnonii.
In its heyday, between 300 BC and 500 AD, Walls Hill – the fourth biggest fort of its kind in Scotland – was crested by a wooden-staked palisade, encircling clusters of mud, wattle and turf-topped huts heated by peat fires.
On the wonderful wings of time, I travel back through the centuries whenever I visit the hill and remember long-forgotten people who lived and died there at history’s dawn.
Flitting past in phantom file are
Mine of information
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
This article was first printed on August 18, 2003.
the gaunt ghosts of long-dead, moustached, fair-haired men in long woollen trousers and chequered cloaks frontally fastened with bejewelled brooches.
Emerging from stone-studded, earthen graves glide the sombre spectres of long-haired, shouldershawled women in colourful, loosefitting gowns, gathered at the waist with buckled belts.
The phantom women stand spinning and weaving yarn at upright, wooden-framed looms and grind golden grain with circular stone querns.
Ghostly farmers plough furrowed fields – where today their bleached bones are preserved in the peat – with translucent teams of snorting oxen.
Flaxen-haired children gather berries, chase crows from crops and play with straw dolls and stonehewn marbles.
But their cherubic cheeks whitened by death’s grey pallor reveal they are visitants from the Otherworld.
On sultry summer nights, the scarlet sun sets beyond the purpleheathered, western hills.
Gloriously gilding golden water lilies float on a nearby shadowspeckled tarn.
Paths are shared by the supernatural shades of acountryside community which, several centuries ago, lived in harmony with nature and the land.
It‘s as if the Sluath – the Heavenly Host of the Dead – has been reborn in Tir-nan-Og, the Land of the Eternally Young.
The Celts who lived and died at Walls Hill have risen from their tenebrous tombs to wander again the happy haunts of their earthly pilgrimages.