Diary: Val McDermid, Deep Winter
Three scenes from Scottish midwinter
Midwinter solstice at the Clava Cairns, Scotland. Photograph © Julian Paren
The winter solstice arrives just before Christmas, on the 21/22 December. It marks the turning of the year and that same promise—the light will come back.
It’s an understanding humans have needed for thousands of years. If we want proof of that then it’s there in physical form in the layout of the many prehistoric stone circles in the Scottish Highlands and islands. A classic example sits on a terrace above the River Nairn near Inverness. About a mile south of the desolate Culloden battlefield, where Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army was famously routed in 1746, hidden in a grove of trees is the Clava Cairns. Viewers of the TV series Outlander will recognize their more recent rebranding as Craigh Na Dun. But they had already been standing there for the best part of four thousand years before that decisive April defeat of the Highland army.
Walking through the trees, you come upon the chambered tombs almost by surprise. The scale is almost shocking: the main cairn consists of a wide outer ring of stones more than twenty meters in diameter, encircling a central space five meters across. It’s impossible not to be struck by the atmosphere—the air seems still, untouched by the winds that sweep across Culloden moor from the nearby Moray Firth. The structures feel alien, almost as if they’d dropped from space.
Back in the Bronze Age, these stone tombs were painstakingly built by people who had no mechanical assistance and only rudimentary tools, a remarkable feat in itself. The circular cairns sit on a raised earth platform amid strategically placed standing stones, some almost three meters tall. The cairns themselves are aligned along a southwest/northeast axis; when the sun sets on the midwinter solstice, its rays shine down the passageway into the heart of the tomb itself and illuminate the back of the chamber. It’s an awesome feat.
And the builders didn’t just assemble the cairns from a random collection of stones. They were deliberately arranged not only in order of size but also by color. Towards the southwest, they chose red and pink sandstone. In the light of the setting sun at midwinter, they appear to glow red, the color intensifying till the sun sinks and they grow dark. Conversely, the stones on the opposite side, the northeast, have seams of quartz running through them. As the sun rises at midsummer, the first thing visible in the dawn light is the sparkle and glint of the quartz. It seems these seasonal events mattered back in the Bronze Age. They were reassurance, I suppose. With no other way of measuring time, those dramatic moments must have served to remind people of the change of seasons and the need to pay attention to the next phase of the year.
Christmas wasn’t that big a deal in Scotland in the 1950s. Before the Reformation of the church in 1560, Christmas had been a religious feast day. But the all-powerful puritanical Kirk insisted on turning its back on anything that reeked of Roman Catholicism, so the feasting was closed down. And in 1640, the Scottish Parliament passed a law to make the celebration of “Yule vacations” actively illegal. Even baking the popular spiced and fruited Yule bread was a criminal act.
In spite of the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne and celebrating Christmas returned to the English calendar, it was still frowned upon in Scotland for a long time, which is why Hogmanay and New Year celebrations in Scotland became so important. Christmas was formally and informally banned for four hundred years—it was informally celebrated for decades, with church nativity services and Christmas trees, but it wasn’t made an official holiday in Scotland until 1958. I remember my dad having to work on Christmas Day right into the early 1960s, though he usually got the afternoon off.
As a child, I’d get one big present, a selection box of sweets that invariably contained at least one disappointing item (I dreaded the packet of Opal Fruits) and a stocking that included a wind-up toy of some description, a wee orange, and a florin. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, there would also be something pointless from my aunts—bath salts in fragrances that made me sneeze; insipid notelets so I could write a thank you for the gift itself or age-inappropriate soft toys that I’d surreptitiously regift to the next church sale.
