The Ned Wood Archive

I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things

Anyway, I thought about that angel a lot over the days that followed. I managed to drag Gav back to the cemetery the following week but we couldn’t find the angel and he said he’d never seen it in the first place. I figured the folk at the Circus Bar had been to the cemetery themselves and had copied it for their wall, so we went there, me, Gav, and Pete, but the face had been painted over. Pete said I was dreaming. Pete said I’d been taking my geology too seriously and had fallen in love with a stone. Maybe it was true. Pete said you shouldn’t take stones too seriously and that anyone who went chasing stones was stupid, but then Gav got hot under the collar and went on a rant which actually, may have been Pete’s intention.

This was later, when we were back at the Doric. We were sat in the TV room/lounge/ whatever. There was a dining room at the hotel where we had breakfast. And there was a room with armchairs and a TV. I think they were separate rooms, the lounge on the first floor, the dining room on the ground floor. I may be wrong. They may have been the same room, just different uses depending on the time of day. We went back later that term, after we’d all left, because we wanted to watch a James Dean film. Probably Rebel Without Cause. I think the girls were still staying there. We’d often sit in there of an evening, catch a bit of TV, have a natter. Always watched Top of the Pops, out of habit. They were probably playing Police Message in a Bottle or that Buggles video about video killing the radio star, or the usual suspects like the Jam, the Specials, or the Undertones.

Anyway, this is the evening that Gav goes on a rant about stones and introduces me (and Pete) to the story of the Stone of Destiny.

“You can fall in love with a stone if it represents something more than just rock,” says Gav.

Pete raises his eyebrows and says “Oh yeah?”

“Aye. The Stone of Destiny. The stone which means everything to every Scots man and Scots woman and you lot have stolen it,” is Gav’s response. At times such as this, Gav is like one of those wee pots that you use to cook on a camping stove. The water has been heating up slowly and is starting to simmer and the lid of the pot is lifting every so often with a little pop. And that’s Gav, making a wee popping sound as he tries to get the words out to explain the history of the Stone of Scone. The heating up is coming from Pete who thinks this is all a joke. The simmering is coming from Gav who wants to get his point across, but isn’t yet able to discuss important stuff, stuff he gets emotional about, with folk that he doesn’t know too well. Eventually he manages to tell us the traditional story of the Stone of Scone being used to crown all of the ancient Scots up until Edward II took it south. He tells us about it coming over with all of the ancient Scots from Ireland but he gets a bit flustered again at this point because he knows that the stone that Edward lifted was quarried a couple of miles down the road from were the coronations took place and has nothing to do with Ireland, the Irish, or any ancient Scots coming over from Ireland.

Gav is getting redder and redder as he tells us how we English took his stone, holding me and Pete personally responsible which makes Pete’s smile even broader because he knows that he’s managed to press Gav’s button. However, Pete gets over confident and presents Gav with an open goal.

“Gav, maybe it isn’t your stone,” says Pete. “Maybe the stone we’ve got is the old traditional English stone that was used for English kings like Arthur. Maybe our stone is the one Arthur got his sword from.”

For once, Gav has an answer. “You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? Arthur wasn’t English. He was a Celt. One of us. He fought the English.”

For a moment, Pete looks unsure of himself. Not only has his knowledge been questioned, but he’s also given Gav get some confidence. Then he fights back. First with an unsubtle claim that possession is nine tenths of the truth.

“Well, we’ve got the stone, so it’s ours now.”

Then his memory catches up.

“Hang on,” he says. “Who says he fought the English? The knights of the Round Table were English. They crusaded against the French and everyone. You’ve seen the film.”

Gav hesitates, because he’s seen the film too.

So this is interesting. Gav is talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur. The Arthur from the sixth century who battled the Angles and the Saxons and loads of other peoples besides. The Arthur of Tintagel. Pete is talking about Monty Python’s Arthur. The Arthur of TH White and Malory and Robert de Boron. The Arthur of Winchester. Actually, a Norman Arthur, from the end of the 12th century. Who probably came over with William the conqueror and who may well have fought the English.

They’ve each chosen the Arthur they most identify with. They’ve each started to fight the corner of their chosen Arthur and then realised, deeper down, that there may be another Arthur and that, therefore, they are both of them on less firm ground than they thought they were on.

After that, Pete goes away and does some thinking and possibly some reading. Or maybe he watches the film again. Whatever. A couple of weeks later he announces that he is Sir Pete of Knaresborough and that he is on a quest for the “Stone of the Sword”. He argues that the weight of evidence is in his favour.

“Galahad and Lancelot and the rest of the knights were your actual, real knights with armour and jousting and Henry VIII and all that jazz and therefore were around in the 14th or 15th century or whenever it was.”

This would have been around the end of the month. About the time he bumped into me and the students on the Meadows. That was when I first heard that Pete’d joined up with Arthur and the rest of his Knights of the Round Table.

See, one of the things I do at the University is take some of the 3rd year practicals. Practical geophysics classes showing the undergrads how to do stuff like map gravity or conductivity and stuff. As a result, we’re on the Meadows doing a seismic survey to find out how deep the lake sediments are, because, as you all know, the Meadows was South Loch before South Loch was drained so that Hibees and Jambos could start playing football there. Because that’s where they played before they moved to where they are now.

What we’re doing on the Meadows today is measuring seismic waves. What we do is create a miniature earthquake. Not even that, we just hit the ground with a hammer. Only we have to do it when there isn’t any traffic going round the Meadows on Melville Drive cos cars and stuff can generate their own waves and mess up the results if you mix up hammer strikes and traffic vibrations.

Waves from the hammer travel across the ground so we set out a line and we measure when these waves arrive at various points on the line. The Meadows is an old lake. That means that it’s basically some old mud on top of harder rock. What happens with our hammer waves is that some of them travel across the surface, through the mud, and some travel down into the harder rock, then back up. These are refracted waves, which means that they hit the bedrock at the right angle to get refracted along the surface of the bedrock and then get refracted again at the right angle to travel back to the surface. The waves travel faster through the harder rock, so some distance away from the place where we hit the ground with the hammer, the waves from the hard rock start to arrive earlier than the waves travelling through the surface mud. It’s a bit like using the tube. For short journeys, you are better off walking on the pavement, but at some point, it’s much faster going down to the tube, riding the underground, then coming back up to the surface. And by looking at the different times for how long the waves take to arrive and by plotting them against the distance from the hammer, we can find out how deep the rock is. It’s a pretty simple approach with pretty simple equipment. They use the same theory with much more expensive stuff to catch oil.

Anyway, we’re taking it in turns to swing the hammer like a glorified test of strength competition, when Pete rocks up and watches.

He’s got some news to tell, you can tell by the way he dances around, but he’s playing it cool, so he starts grilling me about what is going on. And I explain to him just like I explained to you lot just now and I give him a chance to swing the hammer himself and test his own strength. He’s intrigued about what I say about finding out what’s below the surface, but he’s disappointed because I tell him there are no results to show him yet and that we’ve got to go back to King’s Buildings and plot the numbers up. I tell him we won’t be able to measure his strength either at which point his mind starts to wonder and he slopes off again before there is any carrying of equipment to be done.

However, he grabs me that evening because he’s still got that news to tell me.

“Ned, I got that book about Arthur out of the library. The one about him founding the Round Table and about Galahad and Lancelot and the Holy Grail. Did you know that his cousins were Scottish? Gawain and Gareth and the rest. Plus he had a son called Mordred who hung out with the Jocks and betrayed him. He died after fighting them.

“Everyone knows that the last thing he did was have his sword flung into a lake. Excalibur. And that this dame in the lake caught it. Well, that bit’s made up, obviously. But you know what’s behind this getting the sword from a stone and the sword going back to the lake. Merlin had told Arthur that in the lake was a rock and that was where they kept the sword. So there’s something behind that. It’s just that the telling gets corrupted as it goes from mouth to mouth until it‘s all a bit mixed up when they write it down in that book. Or maybe it’s metaphor or embroidery. But it is based on solid foundations. I reckon this stone he got his sword from must have been in this lake of his. Arthur’s lake.”

“Or analogy,” I say. “Metaphor or embroidery or analogy.”

“What? … Anyway, I reckon that this lake must have been somewhere up here near Arthur’s Seat. Makes sense – he was always coming up here to fight the Jocks. And why else would they call it Arthur’s Seat? I mean, it isn’t Mordred’s Seat or Lancelot’s Seat is it?

“So I was going to suggest we walked up to have a nose around. And then, seeing what you were playing at today, it got me thinking.”

He smiles. When he’s in one of these romantic moods, he can be quite charming. He’s way off on some tangent that he’s dreamt up, but part of me is infected with the idea that there may be something behind what he says. A small part, perhaps. But, then the other 95% of me is taken with the game of treasure hunting up on Arthur’s Seat. Like I always used to say to Alex or Bernie back in the day: It’ll be fun.

“Pete, mate, have you heard of Hunter’s Bog?” I ask him. “It’s an old lake up between the top of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. Towards St Anthony’s Well. Sounds like the ideal place for keeping your swords and stuff.”

He sounded interested, so I suggested we go and do some seismic refraction surveying which was what I thought he’d been angling towards. I arranged it with the prof, telling him that I wanted to redo the practical with a couple of the students who’d missed the afternoon on the Meadows and, anyway, some of the results were a bit noisy because of the traffic going past.

This bloke called John Pike was up at the department and had a good laugh when he saw what we were doing, me and these students. (I’ll tell you a bit more about Pike in a minute. Basically, he’s mouthy like Pete, but he doesn’t have Pete’s boyish charm or sense of fun. Mouthy and negative. Not someone to get into conversation with.) I made the mistake of saying that I’d promised someone I’d help them find the Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone stone on Arthur’s seat.

First Pike said: “Look, just because you said you would doesn’t mean you have to.” But, actually, he’s wrong. It does mean I have to.

Then he said: “Arthur’s Cornish. He was an ancient Brit. They got kicked out when the Anglo Saxons arrived. That’s why they’re in Wales and Cornwall: they got pushed into the corners.”

“Yeah but we’ve inherited the traditions and the stories,” I said “Arthur and his Round Table is one of our national myths.” I don’t know why I engaged with him. I was tempted to play devil’s advocate. Normally my tactic with Pike is to say as little as possible.

“Speak for yourself” he said. “I’m pure English. My family are Anglo Saxon. That’s where the English come from.”

“How can you prove that?” I asked. “Just because you come from a part of England that the Anglo Saxons invaded, doesn’t mean that you’re pure. The kings and queens of the Brits and all of the other rich Brits probably ran away when the Anglo Saxons invaded, but I bet a lot of the ordinary folk stayed. Just like when William the Conqueror came over. He brought his nobles with him and he changed a lot of the way things got done, but he didn’t kill off everyone who wasn’t a Norman. The people that live in England are descended from everything that went before. We are a rich mix. You and me both.”

He just replied that “All that stuff about Arthur is still bullshit.” He’s probably right on that front.

So we load up the department land rover, me and these two students, Amy and Rob, and head out to Queen’s Drive. We legged it up past St Anthony’s chapel with the hammer and the measuring tapes and the geophones and stuff and set up behind Salisbury Crags. There are some wide grassy patches where we can lay out the geophones. I’d told Pete to meet us at 2:30 but I wasn’t totally confident that he’d turn up. It didn’t matter. Like I said, it might be fun to explore and I’d got two students to teach and I was getting paid by the hour. Not much, maybe just enough for a couple of singles, but useful extra pennies nevertheless. And, who knows, we may even find an old discarded sword.

We laid out the line of geophones, a straight line, one metre apart. They are all attached to a cable which allows us to catch and record the arrival of each wave at each geophone. Another metre on from the end of the line of geophones, we place a chunky metal square, maybe six inches wide, and I make sure it is firmly embedded in the ground by forcing it down into the soil with my heel. We’ve also got the sledgehammer wired up so that we can start our recording of the wave arrivals at the exact time of our seismic event (which is our grand name for the hammer hitting the metal plate).

It’s better working with just a couple of students because there is something for each of us to do and there is no standing around. We take three readings at each place we put the hammer to reduce the amount of signal noise and then move our gear to another spot. We use the tapes to create a grid of runs and do reverse measurements on each run cos the rock layers are never flat and you are going to get different depths in each direction. I reckoned on doing about six different runs in total – there wasn’t really space to do much more. Pete turned up about half way through – fair play, although he spent more time trying to chat up Amy than helping out with the work. When I said we were done, he bugged me to tell him what we’d found. Of course, you couldn’t tell from the numbers – you had to plot them on a graph and join the lines up. He was happier when I got the kids to agree to go back to the department with me and work through the numbers with the time we’d got left that afternoon. Easy enough to persuade them as they were a couple of days behind the rest of the class and really needed to hand the work in by the end of the week.

We didn’t find anything, of course. Just a layer of lake sediments on top of the sandstone that underlies that part of the park. Pete wasn’t deterred, though.

“It’s important that we keep on searching. It’d be great if we found it. You know, this stone of Arthur’s has huge historical significance in English history. This is the stone that embodies the English nation. The old boys transferred to it the ability to convey power to their monarchs. It was symbolic. So when they came to write up the bit about Arthur standing on the stone to claim the crown, they tarted it up a bit. However, the fact remains that it is Arthur’s Stone. Our Stone. Our Stone of Destiny.”

See. Like I said. Random words in search of a sentence.