september 15

Day 15

I was afraid to have bad weather in Scotland, but I’ve been lucky so far. Yesterday and today we had beautiful days in Glasgow, apart from a short cloudy mid-day interlude.

I went to the station, where I bought the ticket for tomorrow (I hope Inverness prove to be a good choice). Actually it would be better to go to Orkney Islands, but I have this will to see some more of the lands of Scotland besides really worried about the weather. Orkney is reputedly the most important place in Scotland pre historical society.

In my map Inverness is not in bad position though, as it contains a lot of Neolithic monuments. It can be interesting, I am just not sure. Nearby there is the world famous Loch Ness, where I expect NOT to see any monster around.

My day in Glasgow was not meant to find anything relevant to my research, I must admit. I just wanted to see the city and walk around, see some of the collections here, nothing serious, really. I am in a this new place and I want to enjoy it at least one day.

I went to St.Mungo’s Cathedral, built around 1277, unusually a bit excentric to the city center. The Cathedral is being reformed, but it was possible to visit. Although a truly 13^th century building, it don’t show the usual medieval allegorical exuberance in stone carvings. Mostly are merely decorative, exception made to some detail in the outside and a ruined Green Man that is on display amongst other stone pieces in the sacristy.




Nevertheless the Cathedral is a beautiful building, with some nice spaces, like underground chapels and accesses.


The most important collection in Glasgow besides the Hunter Collection, is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which is not very far from the University.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

It contains mixed yet well organized items that goes from Second World War airplanes and skeletons of extinct animals to Dutch, French and Italian paintings, sarcophagus and a design center. This miscellanea include some pre historical material very interesting to me: flints, stone balls, and other specific Scottish pre historical objects.

red deer, now extinct

It is necessary to say that the human settlement in Scotland is not perceptible until some time after the end of the Ice Age. The land was too frozen to allow permanent human settlers to survive. At this period, before agriculture, life depended largely on seasonal products like nuts and fruits, hunting and fishing. The society was always able to move whenever necessary to take advantage of the distinct resources of food.

In a frozen Scotland man could only arrive after 11.000 years ago, and first traces of humans are found around 8.500 B.C., as the climate was warmer.

So the first humans there were already modern humans, organized in a hunter-gatherer society. In Scotland the fishing and oyster collecting were crucial for the survival of those first settlers. The trade with Ireland and England was effective and it is possible to find flint objects from distinct places, as far as Central Europe.

In time is possible that this society have received the new concepts of agriculture and farming animals in the Bronze age era, but it seems that in Scotland while some of the these innovations were quite fast to spread like pottery, others like farming took a while until being absorbed by the society. This can reflect that some of the necessities were already fulfilled. Whatever the reasons the society of Scotland, as in Ireland, Wales and England evolved in their own distinctive way, although is possible to note that there were trade between them.

In Scotland like in Ireland there is a remarkable number of stone carvings and cup marks (round marks in the stones), while there is not such a feature in England, and only a pair in Wales.

Again the graceful stone balls are found in the collection, quite similar in size as in pattern of those I’ve seen before in London, Wales, Ireland and in Glasgow Hunterian Collection. At Kelvingrove there are three of them.

The equivalent to them in the architecture would be the Brochs, round towers which is only possible to find in Scotland and in distant places like South Italy. These round towers are not to be confounded with the Irish round towers that date from early Christian times, in general around the years 700 and 800. The Scottish Broches are from the Iron age, barely a thousand years before, and are quite distinctive. The Brochs are much wider in the base, and have a double wall inside. It was suggested that it was built in a way to shelter the animals when necessary, and the people would stay in a higher floor.

Other original feature were the Crannogs, houses from the Iron age built in artificial islands in lakes, making it quite inaccessible from the outside unless you reach by boat.

I hope I will be lucky enough to see some of those it in the next few days.