derives from Old Welsh, the language spoken by native communities before Cuthbert and my Anglian ancestors brought early versions of English, and it means ‘the old fortress’. It was attached to one summit, to Eildon Hill North, and it is closest to Brotherstone Hill. The name described a long perimeter of double ditching dug some time at the outset of the first millennium BC. But it cannot have been defensive. Probably topped by a palisade of wooden posts, the ditching runs for a mile around the crown of the hill, and instead of one or two gateways it has five. A huge force of defenders would have been needed to man these ramparts, especially the weak points at the gates, and if they had, they would soon have been thirsty. There is no spring or source of water other than what fell from the sky.
Eildon Hill North was not a fort but a temple, and a place of spiritual and temporal power. Inside the long perimeter, more than three hundred hut platforms have been found, enough to house a population of about three thousand. Lack of water and the need for all provisions to be lugged up the steep slopes probably meant a temporary occupation of these huts, almost certainly for significant points in the year; times of celebration, worship, perhaps sacrifice and perhaps propitiation of whatever gods were believed to govern the lives of mortals 3,000 years ago.
The oldest calendar in Britain revolves around the half-forgotten turning points in the farming year of the native Celtic peoples. It begins at the end of October with Samhuinn – in Gaelic: ‘the end of summer’. It is now Christianised as Hallowe’en and seen as the beginning of winter and the moment when the clocks change. But the remnants of ancient, pagan practices still survive and versions of these would likely have been enacted by those who climbed Eildon Hill North on Samhuinn Eve.
Originally, guising at Hallowe’en did not involve outlandish dressing-up but a simple daubing of ash from the great bonfires that blazed in the darkness to effect a symbolic disguise, the cue for all sorts of licence between men and women. It persisted for millennia and in the 1796 Statistical Account for Scotland, kirk ministers in several parishes were complaining about ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing in a very unseemly way.’
There is persuasive evidence that belief in late prehistoric society attached great significance to the human head, perhaps as the repository of essence, of what might have been seen as the soul. Roman historians reported that European Celts were fond of collecting the heads of their enemies as grisly trophies, sometimes attaching them by the hair to their saddles, even preserving them in cedar oil. In Scotland, skulls have been found at several sites and their arrangement suggests that they were displayed in some way. As late as AD 70, the priests of Venutius, the native king of the Brigantes, a federation of Celtic kindreds on either side of the Pennines, set up a row of skulls to defend a rampart against the assault of Roman legions. This has been described as a ghost fence.
These ancient beliefs still sound a distant echo at Hallowe’en. When hollowed-out turnip or pumpkin lanterns have a candle placed inside and are set on a windowsill, it looks very much like a relic of paganism; a ghost fence still flickering in the early dark of winter.
At Imbolc in February, fires blazed once more inside the precinct on Eildon Hill North. The festival has been Christianised as St Bridget’s Day and it was the moment of first fruits, when ewes began to lactate in anticipation of lambing. In early May, Beltane signalled the beginning of the time-worn journey of transhumance, when flocks and herds were moved up the hill trails to summer grazing. This was celebrated in Scotland as late as the early nineteenth century with ritual meals washed down with a liberal amount of alcohol. Not surprisingly, the kirk wagged its finger at what ministers knew to be a relict of paganism. The final nodal point came around in August. Lughnasa is now pronounced as ‘Lammas’ and a famous fair is held in St Andrews. This was the time grass-fattened beasts were bartered for slaughter or breeding, and the clustering of agricultural shows at that time in the calendar remembers the pivotal importance of the old Celtic feast.
All of these turning points revolved around the behaviour and needs of domesticated flocks and herds and the rhythms of a stock-rearing society. Weather mattered to our ancestors even more than it does for modern farmers. Three thousand years ago there were no large byres to overwinter cattle, there was little or no shelter from the winter’s blast other than the folds of the land or the leafless trees of the wildwood. Severe snow, ice and cold, wind-driven rain saw many animals die and a parched summer could mean that they did not put on condition. To judge their prospects, farmers looked to the sky, and it seems that by the first millennium BC it was also where they looked for the gods that would help them rear their beasts and bring home their harvests safely.
Priest-kings climbed Eildon Hill North on the Celtic feast days to be nearer to their pantheon and to be seen by the divine beings who in some way controlled what happened on the Earth, who sent good and bad fortune, who sent snow, wind, rain or sun. They were sky gods, and the great enclosure on Eildon Hill North was not a fortress but a sky temple.
The Brothers’ Stones do not stand on the highest part of their hill. To the west, there is a rocky outcrop, which hid the second stone as I approached up the farm track, and I sat down there to look at and think about the relationship of the great temple and the stones, if there was one. And how all of this might have been understood by Cuthbert.
The stones were probably dragged up Brotherstone Hill a long time before the ditches were dug on Eildon Hill North, perhaps a thousand or even two thousand years before. But I cannot think that this concentration of monuments was an accident. Perhaps the link was simple – the sky. Thunder, lightning and the drama of the weather have long been associated with the gods and their moods, and on Brotherstone Hill there is no better place to watch it change or settle, not even from the sky temple. Eildon Hill North does not have all-round panoramic views. Instead its longest vistas stretch to the east, to the twin stones and the Cow Stone at the foot of the slope. They felt and looked to me like a gateway, the doors of some sort of lost perception. I am very sceptical about all of the musings of those who follow ley-lines and other invisible trigonometry in the landscape, and I know I am straying perilous close, but there did seem to be some sort of alignment between the summit of Eildon Hill North, the Brothers’ Stones and the Cow Stone.
Cuthbert cannot have been insensitive to the ghosts of the pagan past that swirled around the hill where he tended sheep. Both the Anonymous Life and Bede’s speak of his missions of conversion, his attempts to defeat pagan belief in the Borders, in the hills around Melrose, persuading country people to turn away from amulets and incantations and back to the love of Christ. And yet the stones may still have been venerated in some way. Perhaps the young shepherd saw Brotherstone Hill as a Christian sky temple, a spiritual vantage point over the valley of the great river, the place where he could clearly see angels descend and ascend with the glowing orb of fire that was Aidan’s soul. What modern eyes might have seen as an eclipse, a rare Blood Moon, where the sun turns its milky white surface to red, might have seemed like a vision to Cuthbert, metaphor rather than reality, the Earth and the celestial phenomena around it as themselves divine.
Turning over these half-formed notions about the sacred earth, the hallowed ground, a place where saints had walked, I sat for a long time by the old stones, watching cloud shadows chase across the sunlit fields before disappearing into the folds of the hills. Even though the account of Cuthbert’s vision is infused with biblical tropes, from Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven at Bethel in the Old Testament to the shepherds tending their flocks at night on the eve of the Nativity in the New, I was thinking about something beyond the scriptural. Below me, on the lower slopes of the hill, a flock of newly shorn ewes were bent over the sweet grass of fresh pasture, the lambs almost as big as their mothers. Thirteen centuries since the boy woke his fellow shepherds to tell them what he had seen in the sky, sheep were still grazing on Brotherstone Hill. And the skies above were still immense and dramatic.
When I ask myself a pressing question, more and more pressing on the threshold of my eighth decade, about what I believe, the provisional
