A Fondness for Rocks

The stones here have lived their own lives for a long, long time. Waves of Vikings, Picts, Romans, and refugees from all over the world have passed through here. Stones from older sites are often recycled or buried for a few thousand years and then reclaimed by the wind or the water or a new wave of immigration. A friend has a viking long house in her back yard. Every summer the archaeologists come back and dig some more, but they have to make choices: excavating all of the viking layers would come at the expense of all the layers on top.

On my first visit to Scotland, we were told of a homeowner who wanted to replace the old paving stones with a more modern floor. She dug up the stones only to discover underneath a Pictish grave yard. She simply put back the stones and made peace with the Pictish ghosts.

One of three brothers farming in the Bu ("main farm", derived from old Norse) of Hoy disappeared. A sudden disappearance was not that uncommon with the Scottish diaspora, but questions about where he had gone persisted for many years until again, a floor was raised, a skeleton exposed, and again peace was made with the ghost.

The life of the stones is not just in the stories they hold and the secrets they keep. Each stone hosts a world of moss and lichens. And a chink between stones is a universe unto itself with whole classes of plants included under the name of "stonecrop. "