CAIRNPAPPLE HILL
The wind is the first thing you learn on Cairnpapple, and the last thing you forget. It is a soughing, shaping wind that comes barrelling over the Bathgate Hills, a west wind that has crossed a continent to scour this summit clean. To climb the hill on such an August day is to enter into a long conversation between land and sky, your own body the fleeting subject. The grass is flattened to a pale nap, and the larks, if they dare to rise, are snatched sideways and upwards, their song unspooling like thrown thread.
The hill’s modern crown is a dome of concrete, a grey helmet buckled over its Bronze Age heart. It is a stark intrusion, yet a necessary one, a shell to guard the kernel of deep time within. To enter is to stoop, to leave the roaring day behind. You duck under a heavy lintel and the world shifts. The gale is instantly muffled to a low, subterranean thrum, the sound of the world’s turning heard from a deep place. The air is suddenly cellar-cool, freighted with the scent of damp earth and stone that has not felt the sun for millennia.
Inside, your eyes adjust. The structure reveals itself not as a single thought, but as a series of overlapping memories laid down in stone. First the henge, its circle of posts long rotted to shadows in the soil, then the cairn, a mound of patient rock. And at its core, sunk into the hill’s very bedrock, is the cist. It is why you have come. A box of four great sandstone slabs, a hollowed memory. You stand at its edge and look down into the void where a body once lay, knees drawn to chin, folded back into a seed-shape for a journey into the dark soil.
There is no body now, only the stark geometry of its absence. Yet the space feels occupied. You can almost feel the pressure of that crouched form, the weight of the capstone that sealed it in. This was a chamber not of rest, but of transformation. A place to become other. You place a hand on the rim of the cist and the stone is colder than you could imagine, a cold that seems to radiate not from the August air, but from the Iron Age, from the deep past itself.
To emerge back into the light is a kind of birth. The wind hits you with the force of a physical blow, and the view rushes back in, a dizzying panorama from the Pentlands to the sea. The same wind that tugs at your coat once worried at the burial shroud of the man or woman in the grave. The hill holds its secrets not in silence, but in this constant, rushing sound. You walk back down its flank, feeling the ancient stone beneath the turf, and know that you have been inside the hill, and that for a moment, the hill has been inside you.