In Ullapool, on the Scottish mainland, I waited for the ferry to Stornoway, the only city on the isle of Lewis, the northernmost of the Outer Hebrides, the western islands. It takes two and a half hours to cross the Minch, the forty-narrow mile that formed 1. 2 billion years ago when a meteorite destroyed a canal between what are now the Highlands of north-west Scotland and those outlying islands. Once flooded with the reminiscence of being here before, in Ullapool, on the same line, waiting for that same MacBrayne Caledonian ferry, the same boat, in fact, in what would be at the end of December 1975.
I and my sister Franki and her boyfriend, Martin, in their reheated car with the tarnished windows, and we were heading to the ruined farm that they, marxist hippie settlers, were rebuilding in Callanish (as the case may be). returned it to the Calanais), just below the designated menhirs, the so-called Stonehenge of the North. Ullapool already the northern me then, however we went further, crossing the water in an unexplored void, I thought. with Franki, then it’s the vacancy of the possible, not the void.
The void came here two decades later, on an unusually warm afternoon, on December 8, 1994, when the phone released in my two-bedroom apartment in New York on the fourth floor of a building on 10th Street, west of Second Avenue. It was my sister Emma, who told me that Franki had died, unannounced, after a haemorrhage under anesthesia at Edinburgh Hospital giving birth to twins. So now let’s go back to Ullapool for the first time in many years, and seeing the same shattered buildings, the same gray water, the same postcard port, the same narrow streets, all probably unchanged but now made completely different through worries. The time, I remembered that when I answered this call, the symbol that flooded my brain was that of the hillside of Franki’s house: the climb to the stones, there in the dark, over the rock, over the sea, over his house, facing the hills, on the island of Lewis, the northernmost of the western islands.
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Lewis is impressive in his sadness. The seventeen-mile adventure around Stornoway Island to Calanais took thirty minutes, but I continued to warn, forced to prevent through calm, silence, the undeniable force of the views.
Hugh Raffles
The Isle of Lewis, Scotland, July 2013
Lewis is a small place, but his story is immense. Four hundred and 40 thousand years ago, the ice, almost a mile thick, covered this land, transforming the Outer Hebrides into something similar to the north of present-day Greenland. through the Minch to and from Scotland; flowed west into the ocean to Santa Kilda, more than 40 miles off the coast. He transfigured the islands, swept and set off the rocky bed, dug valleys and hills, advanced and receded until warmer temperatures and heavy rains gave the impression of around 7000 BC. The landscape that left irregular and dramatic: shy rocks, whale loons, cliffs and . . . tail, rock and tail and pinnacles shattered by frost; erratic giants and smaller blocks have moved away from their origins; the desolate nooc-y-lochan moors that trap the northern sun in countless puddles like a broken mirror.
As the ice melted, the swamp that now covers much of Lewis began to develop. This peat, consisting mainly of sphagnum moss and heather, buried and compacted in acidic and waterlogged soils above the impervious glacial tillage, which was once the only fuel for the island’s crofters; and even today it is cut and stacked to dry in dark piles that look like cairns. The peat here is possibly 4 thousand years old and deep enough to disguise or completely cover the ancient monuments. And below, under the glacial rock, is the bedrock, Lewis’s gneiss, some 3 billion years old, among the oldest rocks on the planet, a rock that began life as churning magma. tens of kilometers underground in the mantle of the earth, cooling, solidifying. Array and crystallizing into igneous granites, granodiorites, tonalites, basalts and gabros, then buried, reheated, shorn and recrystallized, crushed, twisted, stretched, pressed and bent in at least two The first occasions of construction of metamorphic mountains occurred on 1 , the next five billion years, distorted and remodeled in such a tortured way that their original features, the features of the protoliths of those islands, were completely erased.
The Lewis gneiss, in the words of archaeologist Colin Richards, is “a rock that, once detected and manipulated, is never forgotten. ” Returning from Calanais one summer afternoon, I picked up two modest hand-length blocks on a jagged hill strewn with glacial debris, as if I had arrived here after a planetary collision. As I write, they are seated across from me at the table: rough, coarse-grained granite rocks, one with thick, fuzzy layers of pale pink, the other larger and darker, “stone. Houndstooth” that Seamus Heaney might have called, ruthless and demanding, he might have said, array of black and gray dots, fine parallel pink veins. A billion years ago, after millennia of uplift and erosion, the gneiss pierced the surface with its psychedelic waves and baroque bands: the gray and pink of quartz, feldspar and granite; the dark green and black of hornblende and biotite mica. Resting on the fringes of the Terranus of the Hebrides, a promontory of the Laurentia craton of North America on the fringes of the long-closed ancient Iapetus Ocean escaped the tectonic drama of the Caledonian orogeny and thus preserved evidence of much older geological events. Training
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The most powerful rocks are heavy; wary of defrauding them, I squeeze them hard and think of them traveling through the frozen land, the floating land, the molten land, the places where they have been, the life they have seen, two-thirds of the way back to the departure of the planet, far beyond the Ordovic with their horseshoe crabs, their cartilaginous fish and their massive marine extinctions; far beyond the Cambrian with its trilobites, logo new chords, and paradigmatic explosion of multicellular organisms, the first eukaryotic cells and atmospheric oxygen accumulation; beyond the Proterozoic and archaic, the formation of the first bacteria and continental plaques, a volatile planet and still cooling into shape under an environment full of ammonia and methane; preventing just before the edge of the void, the tip of what geologists believe as a liquid surface of swirls of gas, sulfur and fire, the Hadean hell.
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The A859 road to Calanais follows the black river current through north Lewis, staying close to what is probably the main land direction towards the monument in the Neolithic.
Approaching the east, a succession of circles obviously looms opposite the sky in the hills and outcrops over the valley. Colin Richards and his team traveled in this direction and a moment on their way to the main monument of Calanais. a “unpacking process,” a theatrically structured and choreographed adventure in which concealment gradually provides the path to revelation as the central protected area approaches. Richards and his colleagues made the decision that the sites they were visiting looked like cinemas, monument drills, circles flattened into ellipses to build the visual have an effect from below, steeds determined by their prominent reflective quartz veins located to capture the sun, giant stones held through blocks rather than fixed on plinths: fast structures built in jerry in an architecture of deception and illusion.
Hugh Raffles
Stoned, Lewis, 2013
However, since the arrival of publisher Martin Martin in 1696, visitors have identified that the central monument and its satellites were built to last. Martin, up close to the town of Skye, went to Lewis at the urging of the antiquarian, collector, and founding benefactor of the British Museum, Hans Sloane, then secretary of the Royal Society. Martin, who speaks Gaelic, graduated from the University of Edinburgh and is a tutor to the clan leaders of the Highlands, may move between two elites: the ideal envoy to a region as remote, primitive and exotic to Scots as London was. literate. Calanais, he reported, was “a cult post in the days of paganism” where “the Druid leader or priest stood near the giant stone in the center, from where he addressed the other people who attended him. On its broad ridge , the site had a cruciform design. An imposing street leads to a small circle ruled through a giant monolith about fifteen feet at the top; additional shorter streets make both sides larger, and to the south a line of stones single women once stretched to Cnoc an Tursa, a giant outcrop of Lewis’s gneiss, the rocky rock thirty meters above the point of the sea that he used to climb from Franki’s house.
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I had carried a heavy red backpack belonging to researcher Margaret Curtis as she walked temporarily past me among the stones. The monument was placed around 3000 BC, and soon after, a mojón with cameras was built in its center. Between 1500 and 1000 B. C. , the site was looted and then destroyed, probably through Bronze Age farmers, perhaps to neutralize and nullify its strength, and has fallen in centuries unused. The five-foot-deep peat accumulated here for millennia after this abandonment until in 1857 the island’s owner, Sir James Matheson, ordered his men to remove the peat and local farmers and to erect a platform over the newly discovered mojón so that his wife and visitors can see the newly raised stones and their tidal markings.
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Matheson had bought the entire Isle of Lewis in 1844 for 190,000 euros, a fraction of his fortune in Jardine, Matheson
My sister Franki was a photographer, and she turned out to be Lady Matheson, an association at a time when it was rare, but not unknown, for rich women to adopt the new technology. Franki made documentary photographs, almost exclusively of women, photographs with a strong ethnographic sensibility, occasionally of women running, in Russia, China and Israel, but especially in Scotland, emphasizing strength, the power of permanence Array resilience, solidarity, but also social precariousness – photographs produced in collaboration with left-wing Scottish campaigns and organizations. Many of Lady Mary Jane’s photographs were also of women, friends and relatives, visitors to Lews Castle, portraits taken in the park using heavy raindrop plates, salt paper and prints. Albumin that opens an enigmatic window into a global dream of picnics, shooting parties and board games created through other people who have actually wondered incontinually why they had chosen to live their life on this remote island that Array, a few years after its arrival, was affected. through plague and hunger.
In 1846 and 1847 the potato, the subsistence cultivation of cotton subtenants who made up almost part of the population of some parts of the Hebrides, failed almost completely. The prolonged rainy weather provided ideal situations for Phytophthora infestans, the potato blight that was causing crisis in Ireland, and which in the highlands and islands, although less extreme, produced many of the same effects: famine, lockdown and emigration, effects exacerbated by agriculture. reforms that Matheson began to enact upon his arrival in Lewis. Three-quarters of the properties in the highlands and islands had replaced their hands during the first 40 years of the 19th century. And it was men like Matheson, with sources of income that freed them from the legal responsibility of valuing their assets – colonial trade, industry, and professions – who swept away hereditary secularists and the old way of life. The scourge that presents ample opportunity for transformation, Matheson developed migration systems for coastal peasants and peasants in arrears, as well as for the population of communes located on land suitable for grazing sheep. Between 1851 and 1854, the Stornoway Sheriff’s Court issued 1,200 eviction notices to an island of fewer than 19,000 people. In the decade of the famine, nearly fourteen thousand more people left the Hebrides to begin an unknown life in North America.
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Margaret Curtis took a minute to retrieve the wooden board on which she had pasted an 1854 engraving through James Kerr, Matheson’s painting manager, showing idealized farmers collecting peat in a deep notch along the east row of the monument. wind with a giant stone, gneis dotted with bright black bakblenda, and scrambled in the giant backpack on my back. In the summer in Lewis, the wind blows a gale: Margaret’s long white hair shakes merrily with the wind.
Hugh Raffles
With Margaret Curtis, Archaeology Researcher, Callanish, 2013
Margaret needs Calanais to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. He juggled maps and tables, drawing diagrams and photographs of the backpack as a prestidigitator, indicating alignments and azimuths, perspectives and backgrounds, problems and variations of the horizon, sky, landscape and stone. She showed me how she used surveys produced through Martin Martin and those who followed her to hint at the story of a monument that has fed on her since she arrived here in 1974, fleeing rural Suffolk with her first husband, disillusioned by urbanization. of the English countryside and move to a space less than a mile from the stones, where, like Franki and his Martin, they pursued “a farm lifestyle with chickens, goats, sheep, vegetables, hay and peat size”, as described in one of the books they later wrote about their studies on stones.
Margaret made me walk around the stones, presenting the case of the monument as an astronomical temple lined up so that every 18. 6 years, when the monthly movement of the moon is wider, a spectator state at the northern end of the street. you can witness the huge full moon, low on the horizon at this latitude, touching the hills to the south. Array disappearing, then “resplfinishent” dramatically in the circle passing through a deep notch in the hills of Clisham to the north. the main site says: “The goal of the stones remains a mystery . . . Elsewhere, developers have obviously oriented monuments in reaction to astronomical occasions such as sunrise and sunset in the middle of winter. It is not known whether this is the case in Calanais. But Margaret wasn’t discouraged. She showed me the sticky tip of a damaged stone that I had discovered embedded in the wall surrounding the site, and some other stone that had been buried until she discovered it and had risen.
Then, with a tea and cake in the guest center, he told me about the worshippers of the goddess and the believers in the mysteries of the Earth who have flocked to Calanais since he began his work, the mediums and healers of the Amerindians he met here. , their intense reactions to the site, their visions of processions of women menstruating in blue dresses. As I spoke, I learned that Franki’s space had been demolished to make way for the glass-walled café we were sitting in. “It’s the holes in the circle that counts, not the stones, ” said Margaret, as if capturing my thought, and drew an image of a giant red moon pouring its chimney into the monument.
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At the southern end of the monument, the stones lead to Cnoc an Tursa, above Franki’s house. Margaret Curtis and Colin Richards agree that, at some point, a row or alley of stones would have extended here from the circle. now it separates it from the main site, but once the alignment indicated, the prestige of the rock as the focus and focal point of the entire complex is indisputable. Cnoc an Tursa is divided by a rift that runs through it. The bureaucracy is a direct line that, as Margaret shows me, goes out to the southern hills. From the front, she approached the circle, the slot being a dark opening, a hollow that, as Richards says, turns out to be a front in the rock itself.
Hugh raffles
Cnoc an Tursa, Lewis, Scotland, July 2013
At one point, a wonderful monolith stood directly in front of this opening, although then removed, there is evidence of chimney and other activities in the same place and two burial mounds at the maximum sensitive of the rock. If, as many archaeologists believe, Calana is the center of the Hebrides and a Neolithic world of the North that encompasses Orkney, the Boyne Valley in Ireland and Carnac in Brittany, perhaps Cnoc and Tursa the sacred center of Calanais. Perhaps everything has driven here, however, some other rocky slit in some other global deciphering, the sulphurous Hadeano, the faded albumin footsteps, the cursed energy even of the maximum dead things, yet some other mundi axis that unedes globals as inaccessible today as they were five thousand years ago . . . Unattainable and unstoppable, but no more, to me, than the twenty-five years since my sister’s death. Standing in the driveway, I felt it somewhere. If I only knew the required rituals, maybe this slot would open wide and swallow me too.
The essay is adapted from the author’s e-book The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, through Pantheon Books, an impression by Penguin Randomhouse.
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