Upon a White Horse by Peter Ross review: 'a book of traces and absences'
Subtitled “Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland”, Peter Ross’s new book takes in everything from stone rings and chalk carvings to bog-bodies and the Sycamore Gap, writes Stuart Kelly
One of the characteristics that makes Peter Ross a fine journalist is his capacity to be unobtrusive. He does not showboat nor monopolise the story, letting others speak instead. Conspicuously, the contents have a telling phrase as well as a title for each chapter, and each time they are the words of someone else. It makes the moments when he does appear all the more significant. In the sixth of the 11 essays here he writes: “Since childhood I have been drawn to tombs and suchlike places. I love their dank old names – howes, cairns, fogous, sou-terrains – and seek them out whenever I can”. That would hardly be surprising given his two books prior to this were A Tomb With A View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards and Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church.
Upon A White Horse is subtitled “Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland”, which undersells it to my mind. What unites the pieces – starting with a necessarily secret shrine and working through stone rings, henges, the Ballachulish Figure, chalk carvings, Sutton Hoo and bog-bodies, the Boa Island Janus, Mên-an-Tol, the Antonine Wall and the Ness of Brodgar, and concluding with the Sycamore Gap – is a sense of memorialisation and deathliness. As with all prehistoric investigations, we understand that we are dealing with acts of deliberate commemoration, but have no idea what the meaning so assiduously enacted was. To end with the Sycamore Gap seems judicious, since so much of the book is about traces and absences.
Ross is not writing an archaeological treatise – there are accessible academic works on many of the individual sites, and books like David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave covers the theoretics of neolithic culture, while Rosemary Hill’s Time’s Witness is a good introduction to the antiquarians who first turned our attention seriously to such monuments. But if there is a presiding spirit, it must be the frequently quoted Jacquetta Hawkes, author of A Land: indeed, she would be an admirable subject for Ross to write her full biography (since it would take in the Festival of Britain, CND, repealing laws against homosexuality, marrying JB Priestley and the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England).
In most cases, Ross is not just writing about a specific place or feature, but the people associated with it. It’s a gallimaufry of encounters, and “breathes life into” the topic as much as the imaginative ponderings. It is a method familiar from his previous works, Daunderlust and The Passion of Harry Bingo, his “dispatches from unreported Scotland”. He approaches the subjects with quiet respectfulness. It would be too easy to draw the druids, “King Arthur”, the members of “Stone Club”, modern day Vikings and suchlike with wry irony. But there is a political dimension to the politeness. Allowing in such myriad voices – however eccentric – effectively short-circuits any attempt to invoke some pure, chthonic, blood-and-soil history.
Another clever strategy is counterposing the sites. In the first major piece, which is instigated by Stonehenge, Ross describes the Sighthill stone circle, a 1979 piece of civic art. There are parallels and significant similarities; there is also a reticence about back-writing modern affections onto Stone Age psyches. A later chapter contrasts the “distance slab” of the Antonine Wall with a modern steel sculpture at Croy of a centurion; the seemingly precarious Pentre Ifan dolmen is placed alongside the “Cofiwch Dryweryn” graffiti. It is a way to interrogate not just the present meanings but the accreted and shifting meanings.
We are still monumentalists, after all, and future generations (if as a species we are remarkably lucky) might well ruminate over the Angel of the North, a wind-turbine, a pylon, the Selkies.
Ross knows the telling detail. We might never know why the nipples were cut off from Oldcroghan Man, but it is more imbued with significance than any number of DNA tests and C-14 dates. The prose is usually crisp, sonorous when necessary, with only a few journalistic “grab ’em” opening sentences or puns to make a chief sub-editor wince. Sometimes I hoped Ross would push on with a line of thought further. The very fact that the act of excavation becomes an act of destruction or desecration – the Vindolanda tablets, the Sutton Hoo ship burial – might stand metonymically for a great deal of our engagement with culture and memory. What is an mp3 player but a miniature graveyard of unheard tunes?
The most autobiographical glances and snatches are the most moving and revealing of the book, and account for its haunted nature. Almost fleetingly – and that is almost appropriate – he mentions his brother Liam, who died at 14 months. There is a photograph of him, “much younger than I remember being”, “a few days from becoming a brother again. A wee boy who would soon have too much to carry”. (There is a stone child’s coffin in the church where I grew up and I have often thought about how impossible it must have been to carry, not just physically).
I don’t know if Ross considers A Tomb With A View, Steeple Chasing and Upon A White Horse as a trilogy. They do, as a whole, chart a route into a very British folk horror – there are almost obligatory references to Children of the Stones and Stig of the Dump. That too might be a curious vein for Ross to explore.
Upon A White Horse, by Peter Ross, Headline, £22. Peter Ross is appearing at the Wigtown Book Festival on 5 October.
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