The Ned Wood Archive

Secret secret, never seen

The beginning of October.  Summer’s gone.  My trip collecting bits of mud from the Po Valley is over.  I’ve had a great time, apart from the two legs of the European Cup first round, that is.  I was sitting with my Italian colleagues having lunch on more or less the last day of the trip and I remember them expressing surprise that Forest had been knocked out.  That wouldn’t have happened a couple of years before.  No-one would have known or cared about Forest.  The end of an era.  The last days of Clough’s first great Forest side. 

It was a fun summer what with the festival and that trip to Italy.  I’d had folk up to visit me in Edinburgh: folk from back home, folk from Southampton, all keen to sample the delights of Auld Reekie at its best.  I’d been down to see some old mates, too.  Dusty was working in Hawick, doing a summer placement or something at Pringle or some fashion house, so I went over a couple of times.  Jo threw a party in Chamberlain, so most of the old gang met up there.  And then Victoria came up for the film festival like I was saying.  And we went over to see the faces at the Royal Circus Bar.  And the paintings on the wall of Peter Perrett and the angel had both gone.  Did that mean anything?  

And then, right after the festival, I’m off across England, France, and Switzerland to collect rocks in Italy.  I met some fine people out there.  Our Stalin loving host from Reggio Emilia who adored his food even more than he adored Uncle Joe and made sure I always ate well.  The student couple in Parma who put me up in their flat rather than let me stay in a hotel.  His Dad owned a cheese shop, so he gave me some really strong Parmesan to take home: Parmigiano stravecchio.  Lovely stuff.  The family out near Lovere on Lago d’Iseo that welcomed me into their home and let me share their dinner, having to do charades before I understood that we were eating rabbit.  Wonderful people.  Same as when I went down to Chile.  Same as whenever I’ve met up with locals on my travels.  They are all friendly, inclusive, welcoming, and helpful.  They want to show off the best of their cuisine.  They want to make you feel accepted and one of them.  They are genuinely interested in what you are and what you are doing. All of them, great folk to be around.

Mind, it wasn’t all fun and games.  I needed a year’s supply of samples from various riverbanks up and down the Po tributaries, so that was me collecting them every day.  And not every evening was spent being entertained by the locals.  Some evenings I ended up on my own in a B&B.  Sometimes I’d explore.  Sometimes I’d just sit and read.  Luckily, I’d brought the handful of old books that I’d been collecting.  The Island of Doctor Moreau – interesting if only to see where Devo got their inspiration from.  Apuleius the Golden Ass – surprisingly good fun.  Descartes – clear and supremely confident philosophy.

And Albion Britannicus by Octavius Letocetus.  Another one of those old Penguins with an arty purple cover.  Not in print any more, but you can probably find it on second hand book sites.  Not the easiest read – some dated 1950s translation – solid uninspiring text, which is why I started it twice and then only went back to it that summer after I’d finished the easy stuff.  But I struggled through it and found sommat really interesting after about eighty pages: this Roman general or someone living in the Midlands having battles with the local Brits – tribes with names like the Cornovii that the Romans were busy ethnically cleansing, viz driving them west into Wales.  He’d found out that they used a stone to identify their chiefs and he’d managed to half inch that stone in some raid or other.  He called it the Sword Stone which may have been a dodgy translation, but the description was of a stone containing a sword.  So Mallory or whoever probably half inched his idea for the sword in the stone from this old story. And that mosaic from back home in me Dad’s photograph and this history of this Octavius Letocetus chap must be linked.

And then it was time to leave the Po and its fine tributaries and their muddy banks and leave all the new folk I’d met and their fine food and their political heroes and drive back.  When I drove out, I used the opportunity for a bit of tourism.  The usual stuff: spent a day in Paris, including a hairy spin round the Arc de Triomphe in the old Renault.  Motored down those long poplar-flanked French back roads you always see in the movies.  Met up with a colleague in Geneva.  Broke down on a Swiss motorway.  Drove up the Alps and got out to admire the view.  Took my time.  

On the way back, it’s a sprint.  Get back asap.  Back over the Alps – this time using the short  cuts that they’d helpfully drilled through the mountains, through northern France, over the channel, and home.  And now I’m back at the flat.  Pall’s back but he’s out somewhere.  Gav’s back.  And he’s excited.  He wants to show me something.  Tells me he’s got his old man’s car for the weekend to ferry some stuff around and he wants me to go with him and we need to set off early the following day. Sounds like I’m in for some heavy lifting.

So the following morning we’re up and out earlyish.  Probably 9:30 which is early for Gav.  Now he tells me he’s promised to go over to pick up Fi and Cat and drive them back here with more of their stuff.  I begin to wonder exactly what his motive is.  

Anyway, it’s out to Queensferry and over the Forth Road Bridge.  (The Forth Bridge is the first bridge.  The rail bridge.  The Forth Road Bridge is the second Forth bridge and the first Forth road bridge.  There is a third Forth bridge now, but there isn’t a fourth Forth bridge unless you start including the ones up the Firth of Forth at Kincardine in which case there’s a fifth as well.  My old mate Colin Firth told me about the fourth and fifth Firth of Forth bridges.)

I soon fall asleep while Gav is headed across Fife and Perthshire over the hills to Comrie.  I don’t recognise where we are until we reach the centre of the village and pull up outside the old school where Fi lives.  But we aren’t just fetching the girls and their stuff.  There is something Gav wants to show me and Fi is in on the game.

So after we pick the girls up, after we say hello to Fi’s old dears, and after we thankfully accept the lunch we’re offered, we turn around and head off. We take a right next to the church and drive over the bridge, down this long straight road – I hadn’t realised the place was so big last time I was there  – and out into the countryside for a couple of miles, past a few fields and a bit of woodland, down a narrow lane, past what Fi tells me is a PoW camp.

“You never told me about this place last time I was up,”  I say.

“It was all I could do to stop my Dad from locking you up here,” she replies.

It’s still there.  All Nissan huts and stuff.  And it looks busy – at least it looks like it’s still used by squaddies.  They must be filming some old war movie again.

Then we stop.  There’s not a lot of room to park on the verge, but Gav finds somewhere that doesn’t look like it’ll block too much traffic.  Not that there is any traffic.  We get out and walk up what looks like a farm drive or what could be the back entrance to the PoW camp.  For a moment I get a flash of panic as my brain comes up with a weird conspiracy story.  I’m gonna be locked up by the Scots Nats and held for ransom!

But, no, we turn off the track to the left where there are a few trees towards the river. Away from the farm.  And then there’s a wall and what looks like some old stones and I realise we’re in an old graveyard.  Overgrown, but not as bad as Newington.  Not as good as Newington either: no angels, just fallen gravestones, 

“We used to come along the river and play here as kids,” Fi tells me.  “I never thought it was up to much until Gav told me about your postcard.”

I’d sent Gav a card from Italy telling him about my discovery of the Roman bloke in Mercia.  He’d shown it to Fi and had told her about the festival play we’d seen. When she’d laughed at him, he’d told her some more about our discoveries and showed her his drawing.  Bad as it was, Fi thought she recognised it. 

She takes me to a corner of the graveyard, near the wall, behind a tree.  She lifts up an old gravestone that is propped up against another and parts the long grass growing around it so we can all see what’s underneath.  There’s a boulder, maybe two foot, two foot six wide, a foot and a half high.  Like a foot stool.  Or one of them things you put your feet on when you’re watching TV. A grey stone.  Crystalline.  Granite.  I kneel down to get a better look and the familiarity makes me laugh.  An old friend.  It is just like Glacial Boulder.  I’d recognise that rock anywhere. Not quite as big and a little more rounded than Glacial Boulder, but the exact same rock type.  

“Take a closer look at the back,” Gav tells me.  

You have to pick your way over a couple of broken headstones, mind where you tread, and avoid the nettles, but you can get a good look if you’re careful.  Suddenly it hits me.  It looks exactly like the stone I remember from the picture of the Anglo Saxon cross.  There is the shape of a sword across the face that’s now toward me, slightly off the horizontal, the blade upwards to the right.  Looking closer, I can see it’s really just a couple of largish hornblende crystals, fairly unusual, pretty freakish in size, but remarkably like a sword when you are about three or four feet away.

“What d’you reckon?” asks Gav.  “That is exactly like that drawing I told you about from Teviot.”

Now this is too much of a coincidence. How often do you get crystals forming like that? They’re not like clouds where you can read anything into them cos they’re changing every minute. Once crystals form, they’re fixed. There can’t be that many lumps of stone of any type with crystals shaped like a sword. I need to claim this one for myself.

“You’re kidding!” I tell him.  “It is exactly like the stone from that Anglo Saxon book I saw in that old book shop.  And what’s more, I know where this stone came from.  You ain’t gonna believe me, but this rock is just like the ones you’d see at Loch Arthur near Dumfries.”

“No mate, this came from Iona.  This is what was used at Scone,” he says.

“So how come it’s here?”  To be honest, I couldn’t see how any glacier would bring this over from Dumfries.  They were all one way traffic going south. But you’ve got to admit that we’re in the right place for this to be linked to Gav’s drawing. Did someone see this in the graveyard all those years ago and sketch out a tale of kings and coronations?

But Gav’s convinced this is his Stone of Destiny. He’s convinced of the truth of the old story about the locals hiding it from Edward the first and his thieving cronies. And he’s got Fi starting to believe. I don’t think it is so well hidden, but Fi’s got a theory.  “If you wanted to hide something like this, where would you hide it?  In plain sight!   If this is your Stone of Scone, then the best place to hide it would be amongst a group of other stones.  It’s only about thirty miles up the road.  Whether or not it came straight here in 1296 or whether it has been moved a couple of times, it could easily have been overlooked, especially as it was your dumb old English king looking for it.”

“Norman,” I say.  “We already agreed that Edward was Norman, not English.”

We put the bits and pieces of headstone back and rearrange the foliage to make it look as undisturbed as possible and head back to the car.  Fi’s Mom makes us a cuppa back at their place before we head back to Edinburgh.  Gav, Fi, and Cat have got a second year to get into and lectures to get back into the swing of.  I’ve still got some unpacking to do and some rock samples to start measuring.  In the car on the way back we’re still debating what we’ve seen. Gav repeats what he said about the likeness being so close, that it must be the same stone as was recorded from Iona.  Fi is prepared to go along with this being something to do with Scone but she’s sceptical about it having anything to do with what I was talking about. She reminds us what we’ve been saying all along: these myths could have been created and copied.  It’s possible someone saw this rock and made up a story about it and then that story was copied by someone else.

“Everything gets ripped off sooner or later,” she says.

They debate what to do.  Gav thinks he’ll become famous by sharing his discovery with the world.  Fi wants him to leave it where it is saying no-one will believe him.  Cat finally gives us her opinion which seems to convince everyone to let sleeping dogs lie; at least for the time being:

“Just ask yourself what folk would do with it even if they did believe it was your stone.  Would they give it to the people?  No. Would they give it to the cleared crofters from the highlands?  No.  Would they give it to any of the schemies from Niddrie?  No.  Would they give it to John McLean and his friends o’er in Glasgow?  No.  Would they even put it in the High School up on Calton Hill when we get our Parliament back?  No, they won’t.  They’ll put it in the castle with the crowns and sceptres and swords and guns and the rest of all the monarchist crap they’ve got there.  It’s better off staying where it is.” 

And me: I’m trying to work out how some rock from Loch Arthur took a trip down to the fair county of Staffordshire and spent the odd few hundred years entertaining the Brits and the Romans and the Saxons and maybe even the Vikings before retuning home to Bonnie Scotland before I doze off again and catch up a bit more of the sleep I’m due.