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Until recently, I had never heard of the Knowe of Moan, in West Mainland, Orkney. I was searching for something else online when an image of what had once been a rather beautiful gilded bronze mount popped up on my screen. It was labelled as coming from the Knowe of Moan. I liked it so much that I decided to make a drawing reconstruction of what it probably looked like before it lost most of its gilding and the insets dropped out. I enjoy doing that kind of drawing.

Further research (mostly online) revealed that in fact that particular mount did not come from the Knowe of Moan. According to a 2021 National Museum publication by Adrián Maldonado (“Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom”), it is unprovenanced, so it might not even have come from Orkney. But it is a rather attractive object. However there are a handful of other interesting objects from Moan, including a different mount or brooch. These finds do not come from an excavation where standard records were kept and deposited in a proper archive, nor was there a museum or university department in Orkney where people could report stray finds they had made and be asked relevant questions about the find at the time. They were made in the late 19^th century, before archaeology was an established profession but a time when scholarly gentlemen were starting to take an interest in finds from the past. So the records of who found what at Moan, when they found it, and exactly where they found it, are a bit confusing.

There are some facts which appear to be generally agreed, and others which are not.

1. Most sources agree that in 1886, a farmer called George Flett ploughed up a small stone cist on a hillock called the Knowe of Moan, in the parish of Harray on mainland Orkney. The hillock may originally have been a Bronze Age burial mound or barrow. Mr Flett had knocked the lid of the cist off, and squashed open the ends and sides, pushing them away from the filling of fine black earth.
2. Finds were collected at the site by Mr Flett himself and some local children over a short period of time.
3. They consisted of beads , a small cruciform metal object, a bronze spoon, 3 small bronze fragments, a small piece of slag, a piece of flint (which isn’t native to the area), and a white pebble.
4. Some of the beads were found inside the cist, some outside, and the other objects were all found outside. Whether they were ever inside is a matter of debate.
5. It is further agreed that no human remains, cremated or otherwise, were found. Whether this is because there weren’t any, or because an acid soil had destroyed them, or because the farmer and children didn’t notice little scattered pieces of burnt bone, is impossible to say for certain.
6. Mr Flett gave the finds to a friend of the antiquarian James Cursiter, authorising the friend to pass them on to Cursiter, who was making a collection of archaeological finds from the county.  Cursiter published them as part of a report in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1887(Notice of the Bronze Weapons of Orkney and Shetland, and of an Iron Age deposit found in a Cist at Moan, Harray’ PSAS 21, pp339-46).
7. These finds are now in the Hunterian Museum, with the rest of James Cursiter’s collection. The beads are really beautiful, and the metal object is also quite attractive. If you go to their collections website there are some good images of some of the beads.

From this point onwards, there are disagreements in the various accounts that I have found so far.

1. Some people consider that the cist was probably the cremation burial of a female Viking, and there were originally human remains that have not been recovered. Others consider that the deposit was a hoard, and cite other examples of Viking bead hoards.
2. The beads are stated to be made of glass and amber in most sources, but in the original 1887 publication Cursiter mentions only glass beads. The amber is said to come from the Baltic.
3. The number of beads varies from 55 in the 1887 report to 62-64 in later reports.
4. The cruciform metal object is variously described as a mount or a brooch or a mount recycled into a brooch. It is believed to originate in Ireland and is 9^th century.
5. And according to two separate exceedingly respectable websites, everything at Moan is Bronze Age!

Sorting all these contradictory accounts out is a fine way to spend a wet afternoon, as was drawing what I think the mount/brooches must have looked like originally. I should love to see the original objects one day.

“But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.“  Robert Louis Stevenson, “In the South Seas”, Chapter 1

Thus wrote the 19^th century author of ‘Treasure island’ in his account of his arrival in the south Pacific islands where he spent the last years of his life. It is something I have found myself thinking about recently. For much of my life, I lived and worked in an area (Hertfordshire) which had been under the control of Rome for four centuries after 43CE. I studied Latin at school there. I started in archaeology there. Travels in England and the continent introduced me to the rediscovery of Greece and Rome during the Renaissance. When in later life I visited Rome itself and stood among the ruins of the Forum, it was like coming home. I almost expected to see Horace or Pliny walking across the street. To me, having the Romans around was the natural order of things. But like Stevenson, I have come to realise how much living in the area of the former Roman Empire has conditioned my thinking.

Years ago, a letter from a fellow student at university who had gone on to become a museum curator in his native Pakistan, introduced me to the idea that there were Roman finds in the Indian subcontinent. During the early 1^st century CE the Romans learned to use the monsoon winds in summer to sail to what is now India and Pakistan, and the reverse winds in winter to bring them back. They imported luxury goods, such as spices and aromatics, especially various forms of pepper. They went crazy for pearls and Chinese silk. Exotic animals for the arena such as lions and tigers were another sought-after commodity in Rome. The Indians wanted, among many other things, gold coins, not as coinage but for the metal itself, and were keen on the bright red forms of coral that the Romans could supply. They also liked wine, transported in amphorae, glassware and high quality pottery. I found it interesting, as I wandered past the showcases full of stacks of Samian tableware in the Verulamium museum, to think of similar stacks somewhere on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a pioneering archaeologist of the years between the two world wars, who excavated at the Roman town of Verulamium and founded the museum where I worked for many years, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s. He worked at the South Indian town of Arikamedu, which produced many finds representing the trade with Rome, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, gems and pottery.

I am currently living outside the frontiers of the Roman empire. It is easy to forget that even in the British Isles there were areas where the Romans never penetrated. The far north of Scotland is one of them. Southern Scotland was controlled by the Roman army for short periods several times: under Agricola between 77 and 85 CE, again under Antoninus Pius between 142CE and c.165CE, and under Severus between 208 and 211CE. During Agricola’s campaign Roman military constructions were built as far north as Moray and Aberdeenshire. The Antonine Wall was built in the early 140s CE and ran for 60km, from the Firth of Clyde north-west of Glasgow, to the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh. It only lasted for about 20 years, and as it was made of turf on a stone foundation, there isn’t much of it left for viewing. This bit is in a Glasgow cemetery.

Orkney, where I live now, does not have a single Roman monument, nor is there any evidence that the Romans ever set foot here. They certainly knew it was there, from at least the time around Claudius’ invasion of southern England in 43CE, and they knew that it was an archipelago with many islands. Agricola’s fleet sailed round it in 80CE according to Tacitus. There are some extremely vague and unlikely claims by poets and a 4^th century historian that it became part of the empire, but that is all.  During the 1^st to the early 5^th centuries CE, the period when England and Wales were part of the empire, the people of Orkney were non-literate, prehistoric farmers, often living in or next to brochs, circular stone tower-like buildings with small clusters of houses around them. They had to wait until the Norse settlers in the 11th century for their first towns.

But sometimes Roman artefacts are found in Orkney, usually at broch sites. They are the sort of objects, few in number, which were likely to have been passed from person to person as occasional gifts or curiosities, rather than part of a regular trade in olive oil or high-quality tableware, as happened in the south of England. Things like the broken neck of an amphora which once held foodstuffs like olives or wine; fragments of Samian ware; a glass cup in a burial; a bronze patera (handled dish); glass beads; and small groups of coins. They mostly date from the late 1^st and the 2^nd centuries CE, the period when the Romans penetrated farthest north in Scotland.  My favourite object is the exquisite carnelian intaglio from the broch at Howe, a gemstone carved with the figure of an eagle, which would have been set in a ring. You can see this in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

I also like the fragment of a Samian mortarium (Dragendorf 45) with a lion-head spout from Oxtro broch. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but unfortunately their catalogue does not seem to have an image. There are also some objects which were probably not of Roman manufacture but were influenced by Roman design: tweezers, a sandstone lamp, and my third favourite object, a brooch in the form of an insect with outspread wings, made of tinned bronze and found at Howe broch, Stromness. This is also on display in Orkney Museum, along with several other Roman objects.

What the Iron Age inhabitants of Orkney had heard about the Romans, and what the Romans believed about them, apart from them being unfortunate barbarians who didn’t have the advantage of being civilised, we will probably never know. But I myself have had to look at history from a different perspective.

Many thanks to Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, for allowing me to use the two images from their collection

M

I have finally, alas, had to say goodbye to my entertaining job as a tour guide at the Tomb of the Eagles, closed permanently because of the Covid pandemic. It was such fun: not only was I working with a group of really nice colleagues in a beautiful piece of countryside but I was actually being paid to talk for hours about my favourite subject to a captive audience (well, they could have walked out if they were bored). It was sad to say goodbye to the familiar artefacts – the beautifully crafted stone mace head, the terrible pottery (I could do better myself), and especially to the three skulls we used to hold up and explain to the public, ‘Jock Tamsin’, ‘Granny’ and ‘Charlie Girl’. They had almost come to seem like friends.

This gave rise to a curious thought. For 53 years I have been “playing with my forefathers’ joints”, as it were (William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” Act IV Scene III). I dug up my first skeleton in a Roman graveyard at the age of 17, closely followed a few months later by an Iron Age chieftain’s cremated bones. The skeleton was a bit of a disappointment, as it was the only one in the cemetery that had any grave goods, and since I was a relative beginner they took it away from me and got someone else to finish digging it. The chieftain I principally remember because it was the depths of winter and we all had to kneel on ice-cold chalk around a circular hole containing the bones and goodies, passing a golfer's hand-warmer round to unfreeze our numb fingers.

When I went to work at the museum in St Albans, I was greeted every morning by our three Roman skeletons, displayed in their coffins in the “Death and Burial” section with their grave goods on shelves around them. They were part of my life for decades and they, too, came to seem like friends. They were later joined by the amazing grave goods from a pair of Romano British graves discovered a few miles away. One contained what would normally be considered female grave goods and the other what would normally be considered male ones. Unfortunately, the bones had been cremated, which makes it difficult, although not always impossible, to identify the sex. Very few of the fragments from the “male” grave had been recovered, which made it even more difficult. There was considerable academic argument as to whether the “male” was a male or a warlike liberated Celtic female. Oh dear…

There were many boxes of human bones behind the scenes in the museum stores, since there had been many excavations on graveyards, Roman and medieval, in and around the town, and we were responsible for storing the lot. Those presumed to be Christian had to be given a Christian reburial after study; we had an arrangement with a local vicar (I hasten to add that all human skeletons were treated with respect.) One of our staff had a special interest in human bone and used to give lovely talks, illustrated with examples of pathological specimens. He was particularly keen on leprosy and syphilis, but my favourite was a medieval skull with a large slice taken out across the top, which was considered to be the result of a sword cut by a mounted soldier cutting downwards at someone on foot, possibly during the Wars of the Roses. We did have two battles in the streets of the medieval town.

As for their teeth, from the Neolithic to the early modern period, before and after the availability of lots of sugar, I have seen things in ancient jawbones that would make your toes curl. Like Granny, the old lady from the Tomb of the Eagles, who had half the roof of her mouth eaten away. NEVER miss your appointment with your dentist, and be thankful that we now have anaesthetics and antibiotics. Be very thankful.

Those of our bones and our bags of crunchy cremations which came from relatively recent excavations were carefully stored in standard boxes on the shelves of roller racking in a store with proper security and environmental controls. On one occasion, however, we did discover a forgotten cache of bones from an early excavation, stored in a basement below the next-door public toilet and forgotten about for decades. They were infested with dry rot and had to be decontaminated by one unfortunate member of staff, garbed in special protective clothing.

Not so dry bones.

Giving evening lectures to local interest groups was part of my work as a museum curator. The subject matter was usually interesting enough in itself (Roman toilets), the objects beautiful enough (medieval decorated jugs and illuminated manuscripts), to make it easy to hold the audience’s attention. Well, they only went to sleep on one occasion and the organiser reassured me afterwards that those particular members usually did so. I did get some good tips from my father. He was a microbiologist specialising in rabies vaccines, and he once showed me a slide he used to jazz-up a lecture, which I assume consisted mainly of tables and graphs. It was the front page of a French magazine, a sort of Gallic “Hello” or “OK”, and showed a curvy young female on a beach having her bikini pulled off her behind by a mad dog. The title was “La Rage sur la Plage”.  This inspired me to buy a few stills from the film “One Million Years BC”, with cave men and women fighting dinosaurs, to enhance my next lecture on Stone Age Hertfordshire. They went down a treat.

But the best trick I ever saw was when I was a student and attended a conference on bog bodies. The last speaker of the day was from Scandinavia, an area rich in well-preserved human remains recovered from peat bogs, where the acid soils slow the decomposition of organic material, and preserve such dramatic finds as human skin with wounds, hair and clothing, stomach contents, and other things which you don’t usually find on your average excavation on a redevelopment site in the town centre. The most famous bog bodies all have names, which any archaeology student will know, such as Tollund Man, Lindow Man and so-on. At the end of his lecture, he whipped a small black object out of his trouser pocket, and held it up, announcing “And here in my pocket is the finger of Grauballe Man”.

How cool is that!

1% of 67.1 million = 671,000 

A very small percentage of a very large number is a pretty large number in absolute terms. Last autumn while the pandemic and lockdown were still in force, someone expressed their opinion to me that lockdown should be lifted and the covid virus allowed to run its course naturally, because only 1% of the population died of the illness and lockdown was causing too many people to suffer from mental health problems. I was so taken aback by this statement that I couldn’t think of a really good reply until afterwards.

One percent means 1 person in every 100 people. The population of the UK in 2020 was estimated by the Office for National Statistics as 67.1 million people. 1% of 67.1 million is 671,000. If drought and famine were killing nearly 700,000 people in Africa, we would all, quite rightly, be fundraising for Oxfam.

0.1% of 67.1 million = 67,100  

Hopefully, with most people now vaccinated, the pandemic is on the way out, but it has left another problem which relates directly to that population of 67.1 million. Everybody wants to escape from their cells and go on holiday. They are being told that their mental health requires them to go on holiday, preferably somewhere where they can immerse themselves in “nature”. Women’s magazines, social media, travel agents, are all spreading the message. Since it is still quite difficult to go abroad, what with the price of covid testing, and the unpredictability about possible weeks in quarantine, many people are opting for a staycation within the UK. This is a perfectly reasonable wish. The trouble is, there are 67.1 million of us.

Wild camping is the current fashion. I have already posted a blog about the problems caused by so-called wild campers  in remote Scottish islands. Recently I read a very detailed blog post about the problems caused by wild campers in Caithness. It has led to so much misery for the locals that caravans have been pelted with eggs, and camping associations are discouraging their members from using that route.  I found a BBC article on similar problems in Pembrokeshire (Wales). I have found others describing the problems in Devon and Cornwall and Cumbria. Cornwall council has banned people from sleeping overnight in mobile homes and caravans in 17 council-run car parks.

All of these beautiful rural areas are reporting the same problem: the sheer numbers of people on the roads using facilities which cannot cope with them. They are used to tourists, they welcome tourists, but not in these numbers. Single-track roads with passing places and cattle grids which were never intended for campervans, let alone a steady stream of them; highway maintenance crews which have been cut over the years and now can’t keep up with the potholes caused by the volume of heavy vans; campers spending the night in passing places on single track roads or in village car parks;  barely-regulated ‘pop-up’ campsites; the inadequate number of countryside rangers; overflowing rubbish bins which are not big enough or emptied frequently enough.

It is constantly stated, and I am sure it is true, that only a small percentage of these holidaymakers behave that badly. That is the problem. A small percentage of a very large number is a pretty large number itself.  Shall we make a wild guess and say that less than 1%, maybe 0.1%, of the population of the UK are antisocial enough to drop their litter and go to the toilet in a car park? That means one person in every one thousand people. 0.1% of 67.1 million people is 67,100 people.

Worst of all is the lack of sufficient public toilets, which has resulted in public areas being fouled with excrement. Does no-one remember that during the 19^th century, before modern sanitary measures, there were constant epidemics of diseases related to poor disposal of human waste? We’ll be lucky if it’s just the norovirus that gets loose.

0.01% of 8.982 million = 8,982

It gets worse. Even if they don’t want to go on holiday, people want to escape from confinement and start socialising. They want to go out for meals. They want to go out for a drink with their mates. They are told that it is now safe and are encouraged to do so. As a result people in cities are now suffering many of the same problems as those in rural areas. I have recently read a post from the Guardian newspaper, describing the situation in Soho this summer. The government is so keen to support hospitality businesses trying to recover from the pandemic, that they are allowing streets to be pedestrianized and cafes to expand into them. These people are as closely packed together as sardines in a tin, and the noise is so bad that local residents have to keep their windows shut all the time. Furthermore they are treated to the sight of drunken customers urinating and defecating on their front doorsteps. And they have to clean up the excrement next morning themselves. It’s not that people haven’t done this before on a Friday night. It’s the sheer numbers of them who are doing it at the moment.

The population of London in 2019 was 8.982 million. Let us make another pure guess and say for the purposes of argument that only one in 10,000 Londoners would behave like this. 0.01% of 8.982 million, i.e. one in 10,000 people, makes 8,982 people. Nearly 9,000 people pooing and peeing in doorways is really no joke. The sight of streets or urban parks full of people packed together in these numbers, shoulder to shoulder, not because they all have to be at work at the same hour, but because they are desperate to get outside their homes again and socialise normally, is terrifying. There are just too many people in the UK now.

When I was a young woman working in Greece, there was a petrol shortage. The government decreed that cars could only be driven on alternate days of the week. I can’t remember if it was done by the registration number or the owner’s surname. If we are not careful, our government will have to organise a similar system for when UK citizens can go on holiday. Unless of course you are wealthy enough to export yourself abroad, where you can give the locals in some other country the pleasure of coping with you. I visited Rome in 2016 and couldn't get near the famous Trevi Fountain because there were so many of us trying to view the historic site at once.

I think this summer should be a wakeup call to make us think seriously about two problems. One is the overpopulation of the British Isles. The other is the fragility of an economy which relies so heavily on tourism and hospitality, a bubble just waiting to be burst.