Sightlines

Sightlines cover image courtesy and copyright The Experiment 2014

In this collection of fourteen essays, writer Kathleen Jamie explores her native Scottish surroundings and the North Atlantic. She surveys the landscapes of the Hebridean islands of St Kilda and Rona, examines whale skeletons in Norwegian museums and watches the northern lights from an iceberg-strewn fjord off Greenland. Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World (The Experiment) is part nature writing, travel, poetry, memoir, and autobiography and it extends across Kathleen's wide range of interests: the natural world, archaeology, medical humanities, and art. 

One of Scotland's foremost poets, she turned to essay writing with her previous book Findings in 2005, "Like most poets, I needed a second string to my bow and this [essay] form appealed to me. I think writers, like athletes, have got distances they're good over and I'm certainly not a marathon runner. Five, six, seven thousand words, that was the limit I could go. And you can do things in it you can't do in poems, a bit of narrative extension for one. A lot of the things I learned as a poet I put into these essays. A lot of the imagery and matching images and a bit of assonance and consonance in the writing. That's all it takes to lift it off the page." Sightlines is the recipient of the 2014 Orion Book Award in the nonfiction category and the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book. Listen to an author reading. 

An excerpt from "The Woman in the Field," an essay documenting Kathleen's summer volunteering on an archaeological dig in Perthshire in the Scottish Highlands. 

I was a teenager when I first became aware of the past, manifest as relics in the land. A teenage antiquarian, thrilled by standing stones, tumuli, ley lines and all that; what their aficionados grandly called 'earth mysteries.' Questing after a well or earthworks was what got me out of my parents' overheated living room and off into the local byways and hills. Near to our modern housing scheme on the outskirts of the city were the remnants of two, three, five thousand years of occupation. 

There must have been an exchange of letters and directions. I must have seen an advert recruiting volunteers, applied, and been told to turn up at this mid-May date. I remember nothing of that except that I had to bring a trowel. What was being excavated was a 'henge.' The word first applied to Stonehenge, with its great stone lintels, had come to mean any Neolithic circular enclosure. This one, on a farm called North Mains. The site was already well under way. There was a Neolithic monument, it had lain in the earth for four thousand years. Mostly I worked within the inner sanctum, carefully and, with the trowel, scraping away just a centimeter's depth of the hard-packed subsoil which formed the interior of the enclosure. Several of us did this. You learned to feel, or hear, the grind of an earth-hidden stone or pottery shard before you saw it. 

What actually happened at that place so long ago, at what time of year, and who traveled how far to attend, and what they called the place, and whether they came by boat or on foot, and if there was a distinction between those deemed fit to enter the inner enclosure where we worked, and those who, like a crowd outside a cathedral, where obliged to stand at a remove, we have little way of knowing.

You could lose yourself in that minuscule landscape. It often surprised me, when I leaned up to rest my back, that I was in a field in Perthshire. There was a reason these 'ceremonial enclosures'  were constructed where they were. Prehistoric people may not have had airplanes to reveal the face of the earth to them, but they could certainly read a landscape. The director in his report calculated that a hundred people would have been required to build the henge, probably organized in gangs. A similar team, organized in gangs over two seasons, dismantled it again. It was easy to feel unhooked from time, to be uncertain which era one was alive in. In the earth, a Neolithic henge, which was now beginning to yield Bronze Age artifacts too. The past, the various pasts, were all present. 

'Features' were the great excitement. Features happen when, a something, you know not what, a true earth mystery, begins to loom up. Feature 455 began as the scratch of a stone under the edge of a trowel. An oval area, a sort of paving, had emerged about five feet long and four wide. It was in an important place: well within the ancient enclosure but not at the exact center. Each newly revealed layer was cleaned of earth, drawn on paper plans, removed. To add to the odd sensation of inhabiting several different times, there was also this process of dismantling; of running the narrative of construction backwards. The next layer down consisted in just one huge grey boulder. It had presence, and everyone now knew it was a capstone for a cist, a Bronze Age cist burial. Dig and dismantle--there would be nothing left. Evidence suggests that many Neolithic sites and chambered cairns were not merely forgotten, but ritually closed. Rings of posts were burned in situ, or stones heaped over the entrances to burial mounds. This work seemed an equivalent. A ritualized undoing.