Archaeologists really do have the best jobs in the world. I know that’s a big claim — each to his own, and all that — but I ask you, who else gets to travel through time?
That might be stretching things a tad, but until Professor Brian Cox and co finally manage to invent the flux capacitor and then fit it into a sports car to let us hurtle back and forth through the millennia, it’s us archaeologists who’ll be getting to reach out and touch the past, or at least brush at it with our fingertips.
I read this week about the team from Glasgow University who’ve identified, once and for all, the remains of St Columba’s humble little writing studio on Iona.
Tradition had long pointed to one particular spot, a rocky outcrop called Torr an Aba. A later abbot of Iona, named Adomnan, wrote a biography of Columba 100 years after his death, and described him at work in a little building there.
However, in more recent times, the idea had been dismissed as no more than folklore, a story for the tourists.
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Now a new set of radio carbon dates have confirmed that a little wooden hut really had sat on Torr an Aba — a name that means “the mound of the abbot” — smack bang in the middle of that time when Columba is known to have been busy establishing a monastery on the island, nearly 1,500 years ago.
It seems that we can almost certainly establish where the man himself sat, and prayed and wrote, at least for a few of his years.
“I’ve handled musket balls fired at Culloden and Killiecrankie
Maybe it’s just the way I’m wired up, but the thought of it almost makes me tremble. Finding places and objects that are actually connected to named individuals from the distant past is extremely rare, even for my lot.
Columba — a nickname meaning “Dove of the Church” — is credited with having done much of the heavy lifting that brought the newfangled religion of Christianity to Scotland during the second half of the 6th century.
However, the years that have passed since he was alive on Earth have seen him turned into something unreal: St Columba, otherworldly and mysterious, the stuff of legend.
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So to be able to visit the spot where he had his humble little wattle and daub cell — where he toughed out the draughts and the drips and got on with his work of converting the great unwashed — is enough to perform the magic of turning him back into a flesh-and-blood human being. Only archaeology can do this.
The remains on Torr an Aba were first excavated in 1957, by the archaeologist Charles Thomas, an expert in the study of early Christianity in Britain and Ireland.
Among other traces, he unearthed fragments of burnt hazel wood. Those rare organic remains had been buried under a layer of beach pebbles. Cutting through it all was a hole, perhaps the setting for a post.
It therefore seemed to Thomas that, at some time soon after Columba died, the hut burnt to the ground. After all was said and done, the scattering of beach pebbles was laid over the structure’s charred stumps — maybe to protect them — and the location was marked, perhaps with a cross.
Radio carbon dating was in its infancy in 1957, but Thomas had the foresight to hold on to the precious fragments. Wherever he worked, in whichever university around the country, the little box containing his finds went with him, along with the careful notes he had made during his dig. After he retired, he stored it all in the garage of his home in Truro.
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Five years ago, a team from Glasgow University began a new project at the abbey on Iona. Professor Thomas was duly contacted about his discoveries there, and he happily handed over his burnt offerings for modern testing.
The results indicate that that wooden hut was standing on Torr an Aba between AD540 and AD650. Columba died on Iona in AD597.
Although the results vindicated Professor Thomas’s interpretation of his discoveries, he did not live to see them. He died last year before the dates were returned.
I have my own small claims to fame. I’ve handled musket balls fired at Culloden and Killiecrankie. I’ve tossed from hand to hand a cannonball, big as a child’s fist, that was fired from an English cannon and towards the massed Scottish schiltrons at Flodden. I’ve held the bones of Princess Arsinoe, murdered by Mark Anthony on the orders of her sister, Cleopatra. I’ve even cradled part of the pelvis of King Alfred the Great.
I’ll hope to be back on Iona soon, and I know where I’ll be going. No Tardis required.