2008 Diary Samples Page

Shopping > Calendar and engagement diary 2008

Kilnaish is on no one’s map of Argyll any more. Its name has fallen into the same kind of disrepair as the stones of any burial ground of uncertain antiquity. It is coastal Argyll, a gentle hillside of Knapdale, and enclosed by a shoulder-high stone wall, handsomely clad in furs and rags of moss and lichen.

The stones stand in uneven rows, mostly 18th century and small and plain and slim, a few 19th century, but there is also an easy-to-miss incised cross on an upright stone that may just be 9th century. A few graves are simply stones planted on end, uncut, unlettered, unshaped. These say only that a life began and ended without saying whose life or when it had been lived.

Most enigmatic of all was one of the smallest stones, no more than two feet high, on which had been cut in careful capital letters these words: HEIR LIES THE CORPSS OF. But the sculptor hadn’t judged the size and the spacing of the letters too well and the words CORPSS began to run out of room at the letter R because the angled top of the stone intruded there. So the P and the first S put a downward curve on the word, with a second S alongside the first as if to fill out the line. The word OF begins a second line, but such is the profusion of lichen on the stone that no other letter is decipherable. Or perhaps none was ever carved. Perhaps the sculptor prepared a batch of such stones (others nearby introduce their corpsses with the same form of words), and due to pressure of work, or an epidemic perhaps, he forgot one. Perhaps it is the sculptor’s own stone to which he hoped a later hand would add his name. Perhaps it is an empty lair and no corpss lies here at all. Only a traveller coming curiously, 300 years later, feels cheated.

The rampant beauty of moss and lichen slowly erases the detail of commemorated lives from the stone, nature reclaiming the fruits of its own seed, an exquisite and exquisitely appropriate deterioration, earth to earth. Stone workers who laboured here would know that the way of all lettered stone is the same as the way of all flesh, albeit longer lived. Stand the stones open to the sun and the sea wind, the rain and the frost, the lichens and the moss, and they too die bit by bit, and at nature’s pace.

Ah, but there have been double standards at work at Kilnaish. One uphill corner has been cordoned off by a high-walled mausoleum, a quoined and finialed and spike-gated monument to how the other half died. But the gate sags open, its iron is rusted, and nature – no respecter of pompous gate pillars – has planted a rowan tree on top of each finial. The fact that one thrives and the other straggles only adds a cheerful and unimpressed lopsidedness to something designed and built to impress.

The joyful thing is that it doesn’t matter. The guests in the mausoleum are no less dead than the unlettered hoi polloi beyond its walls. Besides, it was not the morbid quest of the hunter-of-the-dead I brought here to Kilnaish, but rather I had paused to run an appreciative eye over this small treasury of the stone-worker’s art.

The burial ground has a neighbour, a croc, a low, rounded hill. Stones gather about its highest curve, as though something had been built there once, not a house, an ancient dun perhaps. But its crowning glory is not the stones, nor even whatever the stones may once have been. From the midst of that loose spillage a tree grows, and what a tree! It is not tall, not by the standards of great oaks and mighty beeches and jaw-dropping pines. But it stands alone on the croc’s highest bareness and from the burial ground below it stands against the sky, and by the standards of hawthorn trees, it is peerless. The day I found it, it was so laden with white blossom that there was hardly a green glint of foliage. It had a great swelling of blossom at its waist, as though it might be pregnant, and another vigorous spread at its crown. Between waist and crown was an intermediate tier of blossom, seven or eight smaller clumps girdling the widest spread of its limbs. It must have been a great age by hawthorn standards, for despite its exposed stance it was taller and wider-flung than any I have encountered, and I count myself an avid student of hawthorns, albeit in a small and amateurish way.

So it was a white blaze against a blue sky, and its trunk was black and grew out of rocks, and it so imposed itself on the burial ground because of the way it compelled you to look up at it from among the small headstones, that you might wonder if it had been planted there on purpose...

Jim Crumley

Return to Calendar and Engagement Diary 2008