Welcome to Argyll, a different place. It doesn’t match the Highlands with their tall mountains and deep glens, or the Lowlands, where men have cut the landscape and thrown cities in the air. No, Argyll tells quite a different story. Here, long tongues of sea lick at the land, and ragged promontories stand like flags stripped by westerly storms. The rock and the water have made an uneasy truce, and those who call this place home must be at one with both.
Kilmartin Glen, on the western fringes of Argyll, is widely regarded as the birth of Scotland’s people, according to the evidence here and on the nearby islands. Only Orkney can rival it for prehistoric treasures. The story is exciting. Men and women migrated north and west up the British mainland hot on the paws of bears and wolves and wild boars, who themselves followed the retreat of the ice. The Neolithic peoples fished skilfully, and hunted silently, and learned what they could pick to eat and what might kill them. They had no artificial light, no telephones, and no shoelaces. Instead, they had an understanding of the landscape, the cycle of the flora and the habits of fauna in ways we cannot even grasp. Otherwise they wouldn’t have survived.
An adventurous past
But I’m not a historian, nor an expert on the area. I am really just a tourist passing through, accompanied by my amateurish perspective on human development. It was easy to make assumptions as I drove about and admired the views, but an hour or so with archaeologist Dr Sharon Webb at Kilmartin House Museum has blown all my ideas out of the drink. When I show my photographic proof of a ‘brilliant new find’ up on the hillside, she lets me down with good grace: it was just a rock with a hole in it. But, she explains, new things are found each year. There are now eight hundred sites of interest, twice as many as listed by the Royal Commission on their official survey. These include standing stones, and others more subtle, such as bunches of mysterious cup and ring marks for which Kilmartin has gained an international reputation.
The evidence here, she tells me as we walk through the small museum, crosses every major human period. The Neolithic is preserved in shellfish dinners on Colonsay and flints and awls and needles close to Oban. They worked with bone and stone and wood, but we can only imagine how these people dressed, and what they thought, and how they organised themselves.
My host points out of the museum window at Glebe Cairn, one of a series of huge burial mounds set in a unique linear cemetery that makes its own pilgrimage along the glen. It’s from the Bronze Age, says Sharon, and excavation in 1864 unearthed two rings of standing stones: this was a tribute to someone very special, telling of a definite hierarchy and perhaps even a matriarchal society. The people must have been trading when they built this, because to make bronze you need copper and tin, and neither is local. As I leave to visit the rest of the glen, she tells me to visit Temple Wood, one of her favourite sites.
Only a few miles south is the rocky knoll which spies across the peaty flatlands of Moine Mhor. A short climb leads to the top of Dunadd, where the Pictish kings of Dalriada held seat, and to whom St Columba brought Christianity, and to where an influx of wealthy Irish came, sailing up on the back of the great tidal races. These people called themselves the Scotti. It marks the start of reliable dates, and of writing, and where history lessons usually begin.
Slowly, I start to understand. It’s the immediacy of this place, with the evidence right here, and the explanations so simple, and you only need to look outside. There are the striated, quartzy rocks, and the glaciated moraines as flat as railway embankments and, if I climb back up the hillock of my fraudulent discovery, I can view the alluvial plain and the sea just around the corner. It’s a rich, inspiring landscape, that can help us find some connection with our ancestors, with their struggles, and with their world.
Kilmartin House Museum is the place to start, or end, or to visit in the middle of your stay. But it shouldn’t be missed. Even if you don’t like history because you had a rotten teacher, the friendliness of the staff in the gift shop, the quality of the cake and coffee, and the panorama from the café window cannot be faulted.
Conservation now
The sites and their contents are protected, and Kilmartin shares exhibits with the National Museum, and duties with Historic Scotland. Further down the glen, there is another type of protected landscape that it is also very unique. The Moine Mhor is a National Nature Reserve and a prime example of lowland bogs. Of the original habitats of this type in Scotland, only 10% remain, and this is one of Britain’s best examples. John Halliday, of Scottish Natural Heritage, oversees the management of the Great Moss. It’s a big area requiring very subtle skills, and as ranger he also maintains the Glasdrum Wood near Creagan Bridge and the Taynish oakwoods close to Tayvallich.
The main work, John told me, is to maintain the high water levels in the Moine Mhor. It was slit and drained several hundred years ago to tame and make way for cultivation, but our philosophy towards the landscape has shifted. SNH aims to return the area to natural conditions, and so John has to block or slow the run-off by artificial means, often by piling in small dams. By doing so, he hopes to recreate the perfect conditions for sphagnum mosses, which in turn build an environment for marshland insects and birds, the largest of which is the hen harrier and short-eared owl. It turns out everything is delicately balanced, because on the other side of the bog lies the sea, where there a different ecosystem plays.
The reserve does not cover the entire wetland area, and John negotiates with local farms to improve the marginal lands which border the bog. Part of this includes re-establishing grazing at the sidelines to reduce the cover of rough vegetation. There are no volunteers working on Moine Mhor at the moment. The objective would be to use local people, who already understand and have a connection with this habitat.
There are currently 8000 visitors a year to the reserve, many of who visit the interpretation area towards Stockavullin, and others who might admire it from the Crinan Canal or the rocky viewpoint of Dunadd. John admits that the popularity of the Great Moss has benefitted from the archaeological work at Kilmartin Glen, and it is fitting that this is the case, as there are similarities. Both the bog and the prehistory are a result of the retreating ice, and both use modern techniques to help us preserve them.
Inspiration for tomorrow’s visitors
So what is there to do in Kilmartin and the area? The archaeological museum itself is award winning, and Tony Robinson of the Time Team is a fan. Workshops are run for adults and children through the year, visitors are welcome to trek the new footpath down the glen past numerous sites, and the hills are always free if you want to find your own archaeology: there’s bound to be more out there. But even if history does not float your coracle, it is hard to pass through and not for one second imagine how other people lived, and celebrated, and honoured one another. Perhaps because it’s in this glen, with its glaciated features not much older than the first people here, that it feels so raw, and so encircling.
For fans of travelling on two wheels, there is plenty of mountain biking in the hundreds of hectares of forestry commission land. The new purpose-built Fire Tower Trail starts near to Lochgilphead, and on a near infinite combination of trails and quiet roads south of the Crinan Canal you can twist your way through less-visited parts towards Loch Sween and Knapdale. If you’re a more sedate cyclist, the canal gives a colourful ride. It is exactly nine miles in each direction, and almost flat.
But for me, it did come back to the history. Not the dates, or the arrowheads, or the markings on the rock, but through some inexplicable spirituality. Though these people had different technology, and other values, their brains were not so different from ours, and they had to have found inspiration and solace and entertainment from something. It cannot have only been hardship and fighting or making bronze-aged babies. Perhaps they smacked wood onto on hollowed out rock, or got excited when the flame brightened, or saw patterns in nature and copied them with sticks on the mud. Maybe this was their music, their fireworks, and their art. I felt it must be so, for these things fire up our souls, no matter where we live: they are universal, enduring, human. And in Kilmartin Glen, you can breathe this.
For once I followed advice, and early next morning I found Temple Wood entirely quiet, as the mist cleared and spidery dew clung to the ground. The bluebells had come late this year and were out in force. Ahead were the rocks in their ragged circle, like the hours of a clock, just as they have stood for thousands of years. The sun threw long shadows to cast its mark in some other time.
This article first appeared in Scotland Outdoors magazine.