for the people living in that part of Orkney at that time. Presumably the bird performed some sort of funerary or shamanistic role for the community, perhaps in accompanying the dead on their journey to the afterlife, perhaps in assisting shamans in their magico-religious ceremonies. The importance of birds in shamanistic rituals is well known and there are archaeological examples from different cultures around the world of birds being involved in ceremonial and mortuary practices. In Alaska archaeologists unearthed a grave from a proto-Eskimo settlement at Ipiutak in which an adult and a child had been interred alongside, amongst other artefacts, the head of a loon (a species of diver). Strikingly, the diver’s skull had lifelike artificial eyes (carved ivory for the white of the eye inlaid with jet for the black pupils) placed in its eye sockets. It’s possible these ivory eyes served as a prophylactic to ward against evil (some human skulls from the settlement also contained artificial eyes). Equally, the eyes may have been placed in the diver in recognition of the belief amongst circumpolar peoples that the loon, a totemic bird for these cultures, was a bird with the power to both restore sight and also assist shamans with seeing into – and travelling through – different worlds.
In the museum a mile from the tomb some of the skulls have been given names: ‘Jock Tamson’, ‘Granny’, ‘Charlie-Girl’. Beside the skulls there were pieces of pottery, fragments of bowl decorated by the imprint of human fingernails. The nails had scratched the wet clay and left a pattern like a wavy barcode around the bowl’s rim. I picked some of the sea-eagle talons out of their case and held them in my palm, running my fingers over their blunted points. They were smooth to touch, like polished marble, their creamy colours flecked with rust.
The human bones, in contrast to the eagle and other animal bones in the cairn, were found to be in poor condition, noticeably bleached and weathered. This weathering suggests that the human dead were excarnated, given ‘sky burials’, their bodies exposed to the elements on raised platforms to be cleaned by natural decay and carrion feeders like the sea eagle. Besides the eagle bones, which were by far the most numerous, there were also bones of other carrion-feeding birds inside the tomb: two greater black-backed gulls, two rooks or crows and one raven. Once the excarnation process had been completed, the human skeletons – their bones scattered by carrion birds and bleached by the sun – would have been gathered up and interred inside the tomb.
That the sea eagles were involved in the excarnation of the human dead on Orkney is almost certain given that the bird is such a prodigious carrion feeder. Excarnation: the separation (of the soul) from the body at death, the opposite of incarnation, where the soul or spirit is clothed, embodied in flesh. Excarnation is not just a method for disposing the dead (to excarnate means to remove the flesh). It was also, for some societies, the process by which the spirit or soul could be released from the flesh. Tibetan Buddhists believed that the vultures summoned to a sky burial were spirits of the netherworld come to assist the soul on its journey to its next incarnation. In parts of the Western Highlands of Scotland it was unlucky to kill seagulls because it was believed the birds housed the souls of the dead. For what better, more natural place to rehome the soul – the restless, fidgety soul – than a bird, whose shape and movement, whose own restless flight, could be said to resemble the soul? Perhaps the Neolithic peoples of Orkney believed something similar, that when sea eagles, this great totemic bird, cleaned the bodies of their dead, the person’s spirit, which after death still lived on inside the flesh, was taken in by the eagle. The spirit or soul transmigrated to the bird, lived on inside the bird. Human and eagle fusing – literally, ceremonially – each one inhabiting the other.
II
The Flow Country
A man is walking south from Aberdeen to London. The night before he leaves his home in Aberdeen he dreams of birds, row upon row of birds perched in their glass cases in a locked museum. He walks along the museum’s deserted corridors, his footsteps scurry ahead of him. He wants to slow the dream, to pause and study every specimen. When he looks at a bird he looks inside it, thinks about the mechanics of it, how it works, the map of its soul. But the sterility of the place makes him itchy and the dream begins to tumble into itself as it rushes towards its closing. The birds wake inside their cabinets and start to tap the glass with their beaks. The noise of their tapping: it is almost as if the birds are applauding him. Then some of the cabinets are cracking and the birds are prising, squeezing through the cracks. A mallard drake cuts itself on a shard of glass and he sees its blood beading black against the duck’s emerald green. Then birds are pouring past him and the museum’s roof is a dark cloud of birds. And he – William MacGillivray – is flickering awake.
It is 4 a.m., a September morning in 1819. William MacGillivray is twenty-three, fizzing, fidgety within himself. He writes: I have no peace of mind. He means: he is impatient of his own impatience. Often he is cramped by melancholy. In his journals he checks, frequently, the inventory of himself; always there are things missing and the gaps in his learning gnaw and grate. Travelling calms him, it gives him buoyancy, space to scrutinise his mind. And so he walks everywhere, thinks nothing of a journey of 100 miles on foot through the mountains. He recommends liniment of soap mixed with whisky to harden the soles of restless feet. His own feet are hard as gneiss, they never blister.
He is not unlike a merlin in the way he boils with energy. He once watched a merlin pursuing a lark relentlessly over every twist and turn. The pair flashed so close to him he could clearly see the male merlin’s grey-blue dorsal plumage. The tiny falcon rushed after the lark, following it through farm steadings, between corn-stacks, amongst the garden trees.
He lives his own life much like this, restless, obstinate, plunging headlong after everything. Not unlike a merlin, too, in the patterns of his wanderings, seasonal migrations. Leaving his home on the Isle of Harris to walk – at the beginning and end of every term – back and forth to university in Aberdeen, sleeping under brooms of heather, in caves above Loch Maree. Most of what he knows about the natural world – in botany, geology, ornithology – he has learnt from these walks. He can name all the plants that grow along the southern shore of Loch Ness. Often his walks digress into curiosity. He will follow a river to its source high in the mountains just to see what plants are growing there. Other times he eats up the distance, 40–50 miles in a day. If he stops moving for too long it’s not that his mind begins to stiffen, rather that it trembles uncontrollably.
And now this long walk to London. Because: his mind is a wave of aftershocks and he is desperate – has been desperate for weeks – to be away from Aberdeen, to be out there on the cusp of things. In his house in the city he is tidying away his breakfast, crumbs from a barley cake have caught on his lip. Then a final check through the contents of his knapsack. He calls his knapsack this machine. It is made of thick oiled cloth and cost him six shillings and sixpence. Inside the machine: two travelling maps, one of Scotland, one of England; a small portfolio with a parcel of paper for drying plants; a few sheets of clean paper, stitched; a bottle of ink; four quills; the Compendium Flora Britannica … He picks up the knapsack; its cloth is stiff with newness, like a frozen bat. For a while he tries to knead the stiffness out of the straps. His hands smell like a saddler’s.
Five a.m. Outside in the street the light is like smoke, pale the way his dream was lit. He thinks about the dream, the brightness of the egrets in the grey rooms of the museum. Which way is it to London? It doesn’t really matter, he has no intention of taking the direct route. London is 500 miles as the crow flies from Aberdeen, but before he has even crossed the border into England he will already have wandered this distance, following his curiosity wherever it leads him. There are things he needs to see along the way, plants and birds to catalogue, places he has never been. Also, he is reluctant to leave the mountains too soon. He knows that once he descends out of them, on the long haul to London,
