Travels with Tom

Our travel guide visits the ancient Gaelic region of Kilmartin, home to one of the most significant collections of neolithic and Bronze Age finds in the country

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Tom runs a cultural tour company in Scotland

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Kilmartin Glen is home to hundreds of pre-historic monuments Kilmartin Glen, in mid Argyll, is home to an extraordinary profusion of prehistoric monuments laced with important sites from the more recent past. What links these places? And how did the people who built them view the earlier structures?

The glen – fringed by beautiful mature woodland and rocky hills with glimpses of the sea all around – is as full of mystery as it is of the remains of the ancient past, which makes a visit a fascinating exercise in historical puzzle solving.

Although it’s on the main road between Oban and Campbeltown, the glen felt quiet when I visited in peak-season August.

All along it are hundreds of rock carvings, burial cairns, stone circles and standing stones. The Kilmartin Museum (currently being refurbished) publishes excellent guides with walks between them. Many of the best ones are also easy to access by car.

What struck me was the huge gulf in time between the various prehistoric structures. The rock art – sequences of rings, cups, and swirls – is about 5,000 years old. Standing stones were erected up to 2,000 years later, with the various cairns (some complete with eerie burial chambers) and stone circles remodelled for different uses throughout.

This suggests that the people who made each cycle of stonework cannot have known what their predecessors’ intentions were. In some cases, they reused the work of their forebears. At Nether Largie, rock art seems to have been cut from the bedrock and propped up as standing stones. There is something reminiscent of Ancient Egypt here in the vastness of time encompassing the glen’s use as a centre of political and religious power right into the historic era. With no inscriptions, though, there is less real evidence to go on. Many have speculated that the cairns and stones are aligned with the stars or the moon and sun. The inner cynic might emerge as you step around the stones – could you not align these with pretty much any celestial presence or notch in the hillside? Are the obsessions of today transcribed onto the unknowable minds of the ancients?

We do not even understand the symbols on the much later medieval funerary sculptures nearby. One of them looks like a pair of garden secateurs. The glory of Scotland’s ‘Valley of the Kings’ is that we can speculate with nearly as much knowledge as the experts. Carnasserie Castle – a Renaissance bishop’s fortified house at the head of the glen – affords a beautiful view to the south. Then, Kilmartin Church juts out on its terrace overlooking the cairns and standing stones. It is host to a wonderful collection of medieval decorated crosses and grave slabs. As if on steppingstones into the past I ended the day at Dark Age Dunadd, looking back up the glen from its rocky crag. The fort was the first capital of the Scots after they crossed over from Ireland and is famed for the carved inauguration stone near the summit, with its Pictish-style boar symbol, Ogham inscription and evocative footprint. Many have speculated that the Supposedly it was filled with the soil of the king’s subjects so that he trod on the land of all his people at his coronation. cairns and stones are aligned Dunadd is mentioned in the early chronicles, but it was with the stars only in the last century that archaeologists found gold, expensive dyes, and pottery. But despite its impressive location, there are few physical remains. The arrival of the Vikings thrust asunder the Scottish and Irish halves of the Gaelic world. Religious and political power fled long ago from the coasts into what is now central Scotland. We are left with clues in stone carvings, from the neolithic through to early modern times. Is there a link between them all? Were people drawn towards Kilmartin by a recurring sense of sanctity? I left inspired if not fully enlightened. S

Tom Miers, Finlaggan Pursuivant, acts as Herald to the Chiefs of Clan Donald, and runs tour company Clans & Castles (clansandcastles.scot)