ABERLEMNO STONES
The gloaming comes late to Angus in high summer, a slow seeping of indigo into the wide sky above Strathmore. I walked the verge of the B-road, the air still holding the day’s warmth, the drone of the last homeward car fading into the buzz of the insect-thick grasses. Ahead, they stood: the Aberlemno Stones, time-deep and silent, their grey flanks catching the last of the sun.
To stand before them is to feel the centuries concertina. By the kirkyard wall, the great cross-slab holds its vigil, a sermon in sandstone. Its western face is a lattice of Christian iconography, worn by a millennium of wind and rain. Angels hover with wing-stiff reverence. David wrestles his lion. But it’s the knotwork that draws the eye, those endless, looping interlaces that speak of a mind-set, a way of seeing the world as a series of threads, woven and re-woven, with no true beginning or end. I laid a hand on the stone. It was cool now, but held a phantom heat, the ghost of the afternoon’s blaze. The lichen, a cartographer’s dream of ochre and verdigris, mapped its own slow kingdoms across the carved surface.
A short walk away, where the road bends, the true enigma resides. Here, a tall, slender stone is incised with figures that feel older, wilder. This is the language of the Picts, a grammar of symbols we have yet to fully parse. A serpent writhes, a double-disc floats, a Z-rod cuts across it. These are not decorations; they are statements, potent with a meaning that now lies just beyond our imaginative grasp.
On its reverse is the famous battle scene, a freeze-frame of ferocious energy. Men on horseback charge, spears are levelled, a raven pecks at a fallen warrior. The detail is astonishing, the storytelling urgent. Historians whisper of Nechtansmere, the decisive battle of 685 that halted the Northumbrian advance and arguably forged the very idea of Scotland. Is this it? A stone monument to a nation’s violent birth? The figures are stylised, almost spectral in the fading light, their silent clash echoing in the quiet of the evening. They are both a record and a riddle.
As darkness finally pooled in the hollows of the land, the stones became monoliths, their intricate stories folded back into the shadows. They ceased to be texts to be read and became presences, pure and simple. They have kept their watch through frost and sun, witnessing the slow turn of seasons and the fleeting passage of lives like my own. They do not give up their secrets easily. They ask us only to stand, to look, and to feel the immense, weighted quiet of the past pressing gently against the present.