No replies to this topic

[Mike Williams]

The recent discovery of High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye again highlights the Iron Age tradition of interacting with subterranean spaces. Here, people had carved steps leading down into a limestone cave, where they deposited butchered pig remains and, just before sealing the entrance at around 100 BC, deposited a woman and her two children, one newborn and one a foetus.

The excavator called the steps an entrance to the ‘underworld’ and it may be that by descending their course people did feel as if they had entered an alternative reality. High Pasture Cave is not alone, however.

As is well-known, at Howe on Orkney, a broch was positioned directly over a Neolithic chambered tomb. This was no accident since the entrance to the broch aligns exactly with the entrance to the tomb and people even dug an access to the burial chamber and cleared out its contents. As if to acknowledge that this remained a place of death, however, the Iron Age occupants left a cup-marked stone in the passage they dug (a design long associated with mortuary use) and they may have even buried their own dead there. This mirrors High Pasture Cave where the symbolism of death was also introduced into the space. At Quanterness, another broch in Orkney built over a chambered tomb, the original entrance passage into the chamber was retained and even the ancient human remains were left in place.

However, there is a subtle difference between the two classes of human remains. The dead that Iron Age people introduced into these places were likely known to them – the woman from High Pasture Cave was certainly local – whereas the existing bones in the chambered tombs would have been unidentifiable and recognisably older.

Some tombs that were not covered by later houses, such as the Calf of Eday, also in Orkney, seem to have been the focus for feasting during the Iron Age, as copious pottery and animal bones were discarded around them. Moreover, at Unival on North Uist, the chamber of a tomb was incorporated into an Iron Age roundhouse and used as a cooking pit. This also matches High Pasture Cave, with its collection of butchered pig remains.

Cooking and other food preparation may have been seen as a process of transformation, where something raw and inedible, becomes something cooked and life-sustaining. However, there may have been even more at stake. Receiving food that had been cooked in a place associated with the dead may have been equated with taking life out of death and is striking that the brochs themselves emerge from an unproductive, almost dead zone, between the cultivated land and the sea. The two themes seem to mirror one another.

Even where brochs did not cover burial chambers, people sometimes dug steps leading to small cisterns, often naturally filling with water. Whilst these may have been wells, it would surely have been far more convenient to dig a conventional shaft and use a bucket rather than risk dark, slippery steps. Moreover, a similar well was dug into an actual burial mound at Mine Howe on Orkney; the small cistern at its base again filling with water. But perhaps people did collect their water from these places, once again drawing sustenance from an otherworldly location.

In each case, it seems that different themes are interposed and, to an extent, contrasted. The subterranean caves, cisterns, and tombs were places where things could move and transform from one state into another. Animal carcasses became food, raw became cooked, and the newly dead of the Iron Age communities became one with the ancestors of aeons past. Visiting these places, interacting with the themes that were represented there, and then emerging back into this world must have been a powerful experience, laced with symbolism and meaning. Like Aeneas’ experience recorded in Classical mythology, here were journeys to the underworld, except that these particular visits occurred in Iron Age Scotland.

For those interested, more information on High Pasture Cave can be found at High Pasture Cave