69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (19 page)

We’d travelled as far west as we were going and I turned east off the service road onto the A93. I retraced the route I’d taken to Aboyne as far as the turn off to Glassel. I parked opposite Glassel House and we walked west along a forest footpath to a burn. The circle was marked on my OS map as being close to the water and somewhere to our south. Locating stones on Forestry Commission land can be a time-consuming business, since it is difficult to orientate oneself by landmarks and the monuments are hidden amongst trees. We walked down a riverside path but after a few minutes we doubled back and worked our way through the trees. There was quite a wind blowing and several pieces of uprooted timber were swaying precariously in the breeze. It took us about five minutes to find the circle. It was in a clearing at the edge of the forest and our goal was illuminated by a burst of sunlight moments after we’d located the stones.

Nancy suggested we have sex and I had to explain that being a ventriloquist’s dummy I didn’t have a tadger. She said not to worry, then she lay down in the middle of the circle and proceeded to masturbate while I watched. As she adjusted her clothing, Nancy said her orgasm had been extremely intense so she figured the stones must be sited on a very powerful ley line. I told her better was to come since most of the remaining circles I wished to visit that day were recumbents and they’d give her an even bigger thrill. There was a path leading in the direction of the car and it brought us out onto the track we’d taken earlier about 100 yards from where I’d parked. As we sped through Banchory and then onto some back roads at Strachan I mentioned
Memoirs of a Sword Swallower
by Daniel Mannix as an example of an excellent, if obviously unreliable, autobiography.

We talked about Trocchi briefly. Nancy asked me if I’d ever read
The Blue Suit
by Richard Rayner. I’d found both the narrative and the prose tedious in the extreme. Mannered middle-brow bollocks. The skinhead novels that Canadian hack James Moffatt wrote under the name Richard Allen are mentioned twice, and on the second occasion Rayner gets the name wrong and renders it Martin Allen. Besides, even Rayner’s literary tastes betrayed him. Hemingway, Camus and Anthony Burgess. The same went for philosophy, where Rayner was given to name-checking Bertrand Russell. An unforgivable sin. Likewise, Rayner’s interest in John Aubrey was as a biographer, whereas I knew that Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
could have been much improved by being made briefer. Of course, Aubrey could not be ignored but what required confrontation was his work as an antiquarian. It was Aubrey who had first floated the absurd theory that stone circles were Druid temples. It was to be regretted that having engaged James Garden in correspondence about the recumbent circles of Aberdeenshire, Aubrey diverted the theology professor into countering his Druid hobbyhorse at the expense of a detailed description of these megalithic sites.

My discourse was interrupted by our arrival at Nine Stanes, also known as Garrol Wood. The site was on Forestry Commission land but, being located very close to the roadside, it is easy to find. We picked our way through the long grass to the stones and sat down on the recumbent. I explained to Nancy that the earlier recumbent circles tended to consist of twelve stones, while later ones such as this contained only nine. We didn’t hang about long, since there were still a good many more sites to be visited that day. Doubling back, but only as far as the first turning, we found Esslie the Greater in a boggy field. Just up the road in the next field was Esslie the Lesser, smashed up and overgrown. Our next stop was Cairnfauld, where I parked the car at the top of a muddy farm track. We walked down the lane and since crops were growing in the first field, we cut uphill through the second, which was covered in grass. At the brow of the hill we slipped into a waterlogged and heavily furrowed field, where we were confronted by the stones.

I took one look at the ruined monument and turned around. On our way down the hill Nancy asked me how I’d got interested in stone circles. I decided to use a bit of discretion and made no mention of
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
Instead I bamboozled my companion by mentioning my ongoing research into Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy
A Scots Quair.
When we got back to the car I pulled an omnibus edition of the work from the glove compartment. This was a 1998 edition put out by Penguin for Lomond Books that I’d picked up for a quid in a remainder bookshop. I pointed out the passages I’d highlighted on pages 23, 26, 43, 52, 54, 55, 89, 97, 104, 140, 158, 182, 191, 192, 193, 203, 275, 300 and 332, all of which concerned stone circles. Nancy being Nancy asked me why I’d also highlighted a sentence on page 55 in which a gravestone is described as having a skull and crossbones and an hourglass engraved on it. She became quite indignant when I explained that this was a Masonic grave, claiming that I had no proof!

I started the car and laughed about the blurb on the back of
A Scots Quair.
This claimed that Grassic Gibbon had been compared to Joyce. Unless the comparison was unfavourable it seemed unlikely. The Aberdeenshire scribbler was no modernist and while Joyce was first and foremost a craftsman, the latter’s obsession with technique forced him to adopt a progressive world outlook even if he did so without applying conscious thought to the implications of his project. Grassic Gibbon’s work was an anachronism, harking back as it did to the output of 19th-century Scots vernacular writers such as William Alexander.
¹¹
Of course, the stones Grassic Gibbon describes as standing beside Blawearie Loch are fictional but they stand in well enough for all the stone circles of Grampian Region. In the course of ‘Sunset Song’, the first book in Gibbon’s trilogy, the stones are initially identified with the Druids, then brought up in a sermon, before being converted into a war memorial. The minister of Gibbon’s fictitious Kinraddie even holds a service at the simultaneously old and new war memorial. A symbolic representation of the ongoing desecration of pagan shrines by Christians.

We were speeding south-west on the Slug Road towards Stonehaven at the time I said this to Nancy. I had to admit that ‘Sunset Song’ was almost competent as a pastiche of the Victorian novel but since the trilogy had been written in the early 1930s there was no way of avoiding the fact that aesthetically it was every bit as reactionary as Gibbon’s reprehensible Stalinist politics. ‘Cloud Howe’ and ‘Grey Granite’, the other novels that made up the
Scots Quair
trilogy, demonstrated that like all forms of nostalgia Gibbon’s literary revisionism operated according to a law of diminishing returns. Likewise, this clown’s metaphorical use of the stanes in ‘Sunset Song’ would have worked far better if he’d avoided erroneously identifying them with the Druids. Since Gibbon wished to document the end of the old agricultural modes of life that began with the Bronze-Age farmers who erected the first standing stones, he’d have done better not to link these monuments with a religion that didn’t exist when they were built. Despite being a cornball cliché, the symbolic use of Bennachie as a marker at the end of ‘Grey Granite’ at least had the merit of being considerably more astute than Gibbon’s use of stone circles.

As we got out of the car at the bottom of the lane leading up to West Raedykes farm, I thought it pertinent to mention that Nan Shepherd – another Aberdeenshire author active at the same time as Gibbon – opened her first novel
The Quarry Wood
with Martha Ironside playing on a great cairn of stones. There was a mist where we’d parked and it thickened as we marched up to the farmhouse. The track was muddy and at one point, on a corner where the ground around was absolutely sodden, it had been overlaid with concrete. Lights were on in the farmhouse but we didn’t bother knocking at the door to ask permission to go up to the circles beyond it. The fog was getting thicker and you could barely see the farm buildings from halfway up the field behind them. We were still moving up hill and from this point on there were boulders strewn all around us. We examined clumps of bushes and stones and it took us 15 minutes to find the line of ring cairns.

The fog became so thick that it was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead. I had no sense of the landscape in which the stanes stood. I might as well have been looking at an archaeological re-creation in a museum. I told Nancy we should head back down the hill. She said she wanted to look at the Roman fort that lay just across from the stone circles. I told her she was welcome to do so, but I was going back to the car. Nancy saw sense and followed me. Although I had an OS map it didn’t do me much good because I couldn’t see anything in the fog. I kept silent about the fact that I’d left my compass in the car and strode off in what I hoped was the right direction, with Nancy struggling to keep up. My bearings were off and I corrected them when I spotted a couple of poles to my right which had been that side of us on our way up. Having got down to the farmhouse, it was simply a matter of following the lane until we reached my Fiesta.

Once I’d caught my breath I drove to the Slug Road, then headed south-west towards Stonehaven before swinging north up the A90. Just before Portlethen I took a left and rode the back roads, parking at the top of a lane that led down to a stud farm. We trotted along the farm track and cut across a field. There were two stone circles, Auchquhorthies and Old Bourtreebush close by each other and lying just five miles south of Aberdeen. One of them had two circles of stones, whereof the exterior circle consists of 13 great stones, besides two that are fallen and a broad stone towards the south about three yards high above the ground, the uprights stand between seven and eight paces distant from each other. The diameter is 24 large paces, the interior circle is about eight paces distant from the outer, and the stones of the smaller circle stand about three feet above the ground. Towards the east from this monument at 26 paces distance, there is a big stone fast in the ground and level with it, in which there is a cavity partly natural and partly artificial, that will contain, as I guess, no less than a Scotch gallon of water, and may be supposed to have served for washing the priests, sacrifices and other things esteemed sacred among the heathens.

Old Bourtreebush stone circle is fully as large and lies about a bowshot distant from Auchquhorthies. It consists of three circles with a common centre. The stones of the greatest circle are about eight feet and those of the two lesser circles about three feet above ground, the innermost circle is three paces in diameter and its stones stand close together. One of the stones of the outer circle on the west side of the monument has a cavity in its top, considerably lower at one side, which could contain an English pint without running over. Another stone of the same circle on the east side has at its top a narrow cavity about three fingers deep, into which is cut a trough one inch thick and two inches broad, with another of the same depth crossing it and runs down the length of the stone a good way. Nancy suggested that we have sex in the circle but once I’d reminded her that I didn’t have a wanger she walked dejectedly back to the car.

We cut up towards the Dee and, remaining south of this river, visited Clune Hill stone circle, another beautiful recumbent. We parked at a forest gate and a couple of posh girls out riding on their ponies greeted us as we stalked up the hill. Nothing worthy of commemoration took place during this visit or those to various other sites around Insch and Alford. We took in Kinellar Kirk and gazed at the stone in the kirkyard wall that had once been part of a circle now destroyed and replaced by a church. I talked about Oxford and its corrupting influence. One only had to look at a novelist like Simon Mason, who’d been a student at Lady Margaret Hall and gone on to work at the Varsity Press, to know that Oxford must be condemned. Mason’s father might have been a professional footballer but one would never have guessed it from the odious descriptions of Oxford in his mediocre second novel
Death of a Fantasist.

After visiting Tyrebagger Hill we took a wander around the airport and Dyce village. The parish of Dyce lies from five to eight miles north-west of Aberdeen. The origin of its name is unknown. It is bounded by Newhills on the south and south-west, Kinellar on the north-west, Fintray on the north, New Machar and Old Machar on the east. Its length is about six miles, its greatest breadth about three miles. The figure of the parish is nearly oval, slightly curved at the narrower extremity, and lying from north-west to south-east. The north-west, or broader, end of the oval is formed by a low hill called Tyrebagger, which extends downwards to the south-east nearly three miles, or half the extreme length of the parish, after which, rapidly descending, it merges with the adjacent plains.

Rather than talking to Nancy of geology or zoology, I said that although there were a handful of brilliant English novelists such as the London-based Welshman Iain Sinclair, overall Americans showed a greater aptitude for sculpting our shared language into fresh forms. Nancy told me to shut up, she was bored with my conversation and said that if I couldn’t fuck her, she wanted to murder me. I had to explain that being a ventriloquist’s dummy I was inanimate and that therefore I couldn’t be killed. Nancy rejoined that she might not be able to slay me but she could, at least, give it her best shot. My companion took a gun from her pocket and ordered me back to the car. I was made to open the boot and get into it. I found myself trapped in darkness and thinking of Jennifer Lopez in the film
Out of Sight.
Actually, I wasn’t so much thinking about Jennifer Lopez as about a specific part of her anatomy. To be more precise I was thinking about her bottom. It was enormous and I didn’t so much like the shots of George Clooney touching it once he’d got Lopez trapped in the trunk of a car, as those scenes after Jennifer was injured when she had on a pair of sports shorts. The film itself was quite forgettable, one of those dot-to-dot crime thrillers adapted from a crummy Elmore Leonard novel. But Jennifer Lopez’s bottom was something else. Art and nature hadn’t combined to produce such pleasing results since the hosing-down sequence at the beginning of the Pamela Anderson vehicle
Barb Wire.
There isn’t much to do when you’re stuck in the boot of a car, which I guess is why my thoughts were wandering.