Laurie King - The Language of Bees

As Mrs Ross had said, it being August, the facilities for tourist entertainment were laid on in strength. Shops sold knitted wear or cheese made from local cows, tea houses posted banners advertising their authentic Orcadian cakes, and coaches waited to transport visitors to the sites of Orkney.

One of these caught my ear, an enterprising coach driver trying to turn the waning day into a bonus rather than a disadvantage. “See the Ring of Brodgar in the rich light of evening, when the sun throws shadows far across the loch,” he was calling in a stentorian voice.

One glance at the sky drew his thrown shadows into question, but in fact, an evening trip was precisely what I required. An added benefit was the handful of tourists he had already attracted, three earnest Dutch couples and an adolescent belonging to one of them. I gave the man my coin, took my seat, and we were soon away.

The benefits of concealment in numbers had been suggested by my first look at the Ordnance Survey map, and was the reason I had carried a pair of field glasses in my bag all the way. As we approached, with our driver cheerfully shouting over his shoulder all sorts of misinformation about Vikings, Celts, and Druids, it became ever more apparent that my only options for concealment in daylight were to hide in plain sight among a group, or to dig a hole in the turf and pull it over my head.

From the hills down, the land was bare as an egg.

I could see at a glance why this remote site had been marked as holy by the early Orcadians. It was a between-place: neither sea nor land, neither Britain nor Europe, a stretch of solid ground between two wide lochs, one salt, the other fresh. For four thousand years, the residents had built temples in this low and brooding marshland, from the giant stone ring that capped a rise at one end of the causeway separating the lochs to the smaller but more dramatic circle nearer the road. Christianity, too, had a toehold, with a small church and cemetery laying claim to its ground in the midst of burial mounds and standing stones.

Even modern-day religion was represented, in the person of devoted anglers, scattered along the shores of the lochs.

The driver-guide pulled his coach over to a wide place near the smaller stone circle, whose dark granite slabs resembled shards of broken window-pane dropped by the gods, and informed us that these were the Stones of Stenness. On a low hill to the north-west, across the causeway, rode the Ring of Brodgar (where, he did not tell us but my telegram had informed me, cremated remains had been recently scattered). To the north-east, beyond the church, was the pregnant belly-mound of Maeshowe, where a slaughtered sheep had been found on the May full moon.

The Dutch contingent were kept occupied translating and commenting upon what the guide had to say about the artefacts we walked past: first the Stones of Stenness, then a couple of pencil-thin pillars jabbed into the ground, and the now-destroyed Odin Stone (which had been one of those venerable objects that inspire courting couples, entertain amateur antiquarians, and infuriate the farmer on whose land they lie-hence this stone's demolition). We crossed the causeway, passing farm buildings and more standing stones, until the ground began to rise, revealing the size of the lochs on either side. Ahead of us lay the wide, low Ring of Brodgar.

I left the others to their misinformed lecture and circumnavigated the ring on my own, feeling the press of ground beneath me. Many of the stones were fallen or missing entirely; those that remained were cracked and uneven; nonetheless, the original Ring had been perfectly round. Perhaps that was why, despite its wear, it retained the feel of a precise mechanism, a circle tightly calibrated to enclose and concentrate any worship carried out on this barren and wind-swept hillock. It reminded me of an ancient brass-work device in a museum, whose function remained unimpaired by the surface ravages of time.

Standing in the centre, I looked down to see traces of ash among the grass.

From the Ring's heather-grown perimeter, which had once been ditched and banked to form a henge, I studied the countryside. Water stretched out before me and at my back; to my right, the peninsula between the lochs was littered with standing stones, brochs, and earthen mounds. To my left, peninsula narrowed into causeway before joining the road; on one side were the Stones of Stenness and Maeshowe; on the other lay the burnt-out anglers' hotel. A brief spill of sun showed boards across its windows.

The Dutch were being led away by the guide, tempted after his conversational carrots that seemed to link Vikings and Druids-although I might have been mistaken, I was not listening very closely. I dawdled among the stones, allowing the others to pull ahead, before following them down the causeway towards the Stones of Stenness.

Perhaps it was the approaching dusk coupled with the racing clouds and biting wind. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, somewhere near, a man with a knife waited to loose blood on the earth. In any event, I was aware of an atmosphere here such as I had seldom felt before: not at Stonehenge, a gloomy and isolated huddle of stones, nor even Avebury-what metaphysical authority it once possessed had long since been overbuilt by barns and homely cottages. This place held another kind of aura entirely: One could feel it brooding.

The Stenness stones had been a henge as well, although this site's ditch and bank were more elliptical than the Ring, and what had once been a stone circle was little more than a collection of slabs. They were tall, one of them nearing twenty feet, and unbelievably thin-it seemed impossible that they had stood here for millennia without snapping off in the wind. One of them jutted out of the ground at an angle, then turned sharply back on itself, like a directional arrow for giants.

In their centre was the restored altar. According to a guide-book in Mycroft's study, some twenty years ago a well-meaning enthusiast had decided that the half-buried stone in the middle of the circle had originally been an altar-stone, and had raised it, stretching it between a stone that lay to one side and a pair of stones that had been cracked and mounted upright with a gap between the halves.

Although the position of the cracked stone seemed to have a significance beyond that of a support-the gap between its halves would frame the mound of Maeshowe-the massive three-legged table was, nonetheless, most impressive. It did not require the imagination of a Sir Walter Scott to picture it as a sacrificial altar, longer than any man, fenced in by the towering grey granite shards.

My tour companions had been marched away to Maeshowe, our guide having clearly decided that I was unappreciative of his expertise. Alone, I made a slow circuit of the Stones, memorising the arrangement of the upright rocks, letting my feet learn the low depression of the ditch-works and the ground-level bridge that had once passed through ditch and bank.

Under the guise of studying waterfowl, I took out my glasses and aimed them at the saltwater loch to the south. Three swans stretched their wings and thought about dinner; seagulls darted and cried on the wind. A pair of fishermen occupying the shallows between me and the hotel had begun to work their way back to the shore, no doubt with dinner on their minds as well; behind them, I could see where the flames had been doused before they ate into the fabric of the hotel. The windows on this side of the building showed the backs of curtains-the fire must have started at night.

Its inner rooms, while not cosy, would be liveable.

Snatches of voice warned me of my companions' return, and I let the glasses wander along the shore-line for a minute before packing them away. I turned for a last look at the nearby proto-circle.