Sixty Degrees North Read Online Free PDF Page B

implies more than simply defence. Its massive size seems beyond necessity, and the sheer extravagance of it suggests that, if security was the primary concern, it must have been built in a state of extreme paranoia. So perhapsa more likely possibility is that the brochs were built not for defence alone, but as acts of self-glorification by Iron Age chieftains. They were status symbols, born of a bravado much like that which created skyscrapers in the twentieth century: a combination of functionality and showing off.
    That this particular example has survived so perfectly for so long is partly a result of its remoteness, and partly because nobody has ever had the need to take it to pieces. While other ancient buildings have been plundered for useful material over the millennia, Mousa’s beaches are still crowded with perfect, flat stones, providing all the material the island’s inhabitants ever required. The rocks which helped to create such an extraordinary structure have remained plentiful enough to help ensure its long life. And today, those rocks are protecting other lives too. Press your ear to the walls of the broch and you will hear the soft churring and grunting of storm petrels, the tiny seabirds that patter their way above the waves by day, returning to the safety of their nests at night. Seven thousand storm petrels – eight percent of Britain’s population – nest on this island, on the beaches and in the broch itself. The building seems almost to breathe with the countless lives concealed within: past and present hidden, sheltered among the rocks.
    The people who built this broch, who lived in and around it, seem far out of reach to us today, an enigma. Archaeologists and historians examine the available clues carefully and they make assessments, suppositions. But in our desire to eradicate mystery from the past, and to understand and know these people, we forget one crucial point. We miss the real mystery. Sitting on the grass beneath the broch, looking back towards the Mainland, I scratched my wrists and brushed the midges from my face. There was no wind, and the insects were taking advantage of the opportunity to feed. The clouds hung low over the sound, and draped softly onto the hills across the water. What struck me then, as I leanedback against the ancient stone wall, was not the great distance and difference that lay between now and then, nor was it the tragedy of all we do not know. What struck me was the sense of continuity, and the deep determination of people to live in this place.
    Rebecca West once wrote that certain places ‘imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy’. This stamp is what Lawrence Durrell called ‘the invisible constant’; it is the thread that holds the history of a place together, the sense of sameness that cuts through the past like a furrow through a field.
    In Shetland, human society has evolved in both gradual and sudden movements. For a few hundred years people built brochs, and then they stopped. In the two millennia that followed many other changes took place. New people came, bringing a new language and a new religion, before they too disappeared when the Vikings arrived in the late eighth century. Yet despite these changes, despite all that came and went in that time, always it was the land that dictated the means of survival. The Norsemen arrived as Vikings, but they became Shetlanders. They became fishermen and farmers, just as the Picts had been, just as the broch-builders had been, and all those before them. Crops were sown and harvested; sheep and cattle were reared and killed. The land scarred the people, just as the people, in turn, scarred the land. If there is an ‘invisible constant’ or identity bestowed by a place upon its inhabitants, it could only be found there, in that relationship,