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, the hippie Marxist settlers, were rebuilding in Callanish (as the case may be). returned it to Calanais), just below the designated menhirs, the so-called North Stonehenge. Ullapool was already the northerner me then, but we went further, crossing the water in an unexplored void, I thought. But I and Franki, that’s why 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 back to Ullapool for the first time in many years, and seeing the same buildings beaten, the same gray waters, 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, turning the Outer Hebrides into something similar to the north of present-day Greenland. The ice flowed east through the Minch to and from Scotland; It flowed west into the ocean to St. Louis. Kilda, more than 40 miles from the coast. He transfigured the islands, cleaning and dividing the rock bed, tilling valleys and hills, advancing and receding until warmer temperatures and heavy rains gave the impression of around 7000 a. C. The landscape he left was rugged and dramatic: fluffy rocks, whale bones, cliffs and tail, cliffs and tails, and pinnacles shattered by frost; erratic giants and smaller rocks have fallen far from their origins; the desolate moors of Cnoc-et-Lochan 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 be difficult to understand 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 gabbros, then buried, reheated, shorn and recrystallized, crushed, twisted, stretched, pressed and bent in at least two the primary occasions of metamorphic mountain building happened above from the 1. 5 billion years later, distorted and recast 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 scooped up two hand-length modest rocks on a jagged hill strewn with glacial debris as if they had come from a planetary collision. As I write, they are sitting 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 could have called, relentless and demanding, he might have said, matrix 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 Hebridean terrain, 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 the 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 earth, the molten earth, the places where they have been, the life they have seen, two-thirds of the way back to earth. departure from the planet, far beyond the Ordovic with its horseshoe crabs, cartilaginous fish and 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 direction towards Calanais follows Black River Creek through North Lewis, remaining close to what is probably the main land direction leading to the Neolithic monument.
Approaching the east, a succession of circles obviously looms opposite the sky in 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. It was as if they were evolving into a “Unpacking Process”, a choreographed and theatrically structured 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, mock monuments: 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, close to Skye, visited Lewis at the urging of the antiquarian, collector, and founding benefactor of the British Museum, Hans Sloane, then secretary of the Royal Society. Martin, a Gaelic speaker, graduate of the University of Edinburgh and tutor to Highland clan leaders, may move between two elites: the ideal envoy to a region as remote, primitive and exotic for Scots as the was London. Array 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 while temporarily walking in front of me among the stones. The monument built around 3000 BC. and, at a later time, a cairn with a chamber built in its center. Between 1500 and 1000 BC , the site looted and then torn apart, probably by Bronze Age farmers, perhaps to neutralize and nullify its strength, and fell into centuries of unused use. 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 cairn, so his wife and visitors could see the newly lifted stones and their tide. brands.
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Matheson had bought the total island 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 to remain Array resilience, solidarity, but also social precariousness – photographs produced in collaboration with Scottish feminist and left-wing 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 with heavy raindrop plates, salt paper and prints. Albumin that opens an enigmatic window into a global dream of picnics, shootings and board games created through other people who have actually wondered incontinually why they had chosen to live their lives 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 a crisis in Ireland, and which in the highlands and islands, although less extreme, produced many of the same effects: famine, lockdown and emigration Effects aggravated by the agricultural 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 a revenue stream that freed them from the legal responsibility of valuing their assets – colonial trade, industry, and the professions – who swept away hereditary secularists and the old way of life. With the scourge presenting a vast opportunity for transformation, Matheson developed migration systems for coastal peasants and peasants in arrears, as well as for the population of communes situated 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 accompanied me 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 can simply witness the huge full moon, low on the horizon at this latitude, grazing the hills to the south , disappearing, then dramatically “resplfinishent” in the circle passing through a deep notch of the Clisham hills to the north. The official sign on the main site reads: “The objective of the stones remains a mystery. . . Elsewhere, developers have obviously oriented the monuments according to astronomical occasions such as sunrise and sunset in the middle of winter. We don’t know if 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 lifted it.
Then, while having tea and cake at the visitor 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, Native American mediums and healers he met here, his intense reactions to the place, his visions of processions of menstruating women in flowing blue dresses. As I spoke, I learned that Franki’s space had been demolished to make way for the glass-walled cafeteria we were sitting in. “It’s the holes in the circle that count, not the stones,” Margaret said, as if to tell me she thought, and took a picture of a giant red moon pouring a 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 spread here from the circle. it now separates it from the main site, but once the indicated alignment, the prestige of the rock as the focus and focal point of the entire complex is indisputable. Cnoc an Tursa is divided by a crack that passes through it. The bureaucracy a direct line that, as Margaret shows me, goes out into the southern hills. From the front, he approached the circle, the groove is 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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