Читать книгу The Isle of Skye. Graded walks and scrambles throughout Skye, including the Cuillin онлайн

15 страница из 69

History

The history of Skye is quite simply a fascinating and time-consuming interest, and is nowhere better explained than in the immense and awe-inspiring detail of Alexander Nicolson’s History of Skye. That is the work to consult: what follows here is, by comparison, a mere crumb from the table of this absorbing topic.

Wherever you go on Skye you will encounter structural relics, ruins of houses, forts, tombs, and so on. The Island is almost littered with chambered cairns, hillforts, duns, brochs, hut circles, souterrains and Pictish stones, all, virtually without exception, dotted along the Island’s tortured coastline. These are all that remain to tell us about the history of man on Skye before the days of the written word, and many of them date back more than 6000 years.

Standing stone, Boreraig village (Walk 2.5)

Imagine, if you will, the scene during the last Ice Age, when Skye lay buried beneath enormous sheets of ice that even then were shaping the landforms with which we later became familiar. As climatic conditions warmed, so the glaciers retreated – a gradual, grinding process that ended between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. As the incredible weight of ice disappeared, so the land began to rise, and improve as tundral conditions gave way to woodland and mixed vegetation. These conditions suited early stone age (Mesolithic) man, who moved northwards and settled around the new coasts and among the islands. The presence of Mesolithic Man on Skye has not yet been proven; the earliest evidence is from later stone age (Neolithic) times, although carbon dating of finds on the nearby island of Rum to 8000 years ago, the earliest such evidence in Scotland, suggests the possibility that Mesolithic Man did find his way to Skye, and that the evidence of his presence is yet to be found, or has already been lost.