As I scaled an ancient castle wall on the Island of Rousay in the Orkneys, I looked outwards from a craggy defile of gathered rock and observed the wall of stone, dark, wet, tessellated, the crashing waves, and the steps worn smooth by millennia of use, I pondered the power in this history lesson.

It reminded me of the Cornish Engine House at the old gold mines in Fryerstown Victoria, Australia. (sketch) We’d take visitors there, re-learning the story of mining and the industrial revolution in one easy step.  We delighted in walking over it, balancing on the lintels, walking into the mouth of the furnace, and gaze upward at the chimney, and the bright disk of light, heaven’s portal as a subtext for gold, immigration and the craftsmanship of the Cornish.  Its message is eternal, in stone and expresses a gravity of construction and optimism. It lived.  As a structure that “spoke” it was irredeemably Cornish in scale and texture.

Then, one day we returned and it was fenced off.  Pronounced dead!  More stuffed than Pharlap. (The champion Australian racehorse whose taxidermic form is the prize display in a major museum)

The perimeter fence is affronting – like those around jails, detention centres or government buildings in remote Australian Aboriginal communities.  And with the cordoning off, the whole has been spoilt, degraded, decontextualised, trivialised. You cannot appreciate one without the other.

In the Orkneys, on Rousay, you can only get there by boat… It’s all there in front of you. A burial chamber five and a half thousand years old, a structure which is always open to the public with a cover built by the Whiskey magnate Walter Grant, “God bless his Soul”, to protect it from the weather, and that’s all there is.

The rest, a few signs, invite you to explore, touch, feel, the memory of lives lived, through generations on the windswept coastline beyond Scotland.

We crawled through crevices into chambers, scaled walls, and delighted in the discovery, the sheer physicality of crawling on dirt into the darkest recesses, part cave, part labyrinth, Theseus would’ve been very happy here.  The most overgrown and the most inconsequential, buried, and now opened, just slightly enough to admit one at a time.  No exclusionary fences, no issue with pubic safety, just the nobility of sharing the real with the romantic.  The absence of interference, interpretive signage, sponsors logos, interpretive walks, brochures, kiosks, accessories, special packages, fly overs, membership offers, group packages, unit processing, visitor metrics, satisfaction surveys, the ongoing and unstoppable processing and commodification of digestable, packaged vignettes into a glutinous over-processed pap.

I get emotional about this because you cannot understand history unless you have an affinity beyond the mere visual of what went on, you need to touch it and to feel it. It then becomes intuitive, and then, only then can you decipher the clues, and make a form of contact with those who went before.

You can’t get that at Stonehenge, where, strangely, the new interpretive centres, the carpark, the streaming, and the vehicle circulation render sympathetic interpretation impossible.  It’s like Borats’ interpretation of America, “In U.S of Arrr everything BIG”!

At the Orkneys they’ve solved it…. You need a boat, and a good pair of legs, and even then if you arrive on the road, you must walk the best part of three quarters of a mile down the hill and then up again.  In doing so you see the ruins, you understand the geography, topography and natural history enough to understand how they and the much more recent Celts flourished, until they were removed in the 19th Century by the Clearances.  This part is shared in Scotland, and in Ireland, the buildings rendered roofless, their walls standing as tombstones for a forcibly evicted community, the link unbroken those thousands of years now severed for ever.  The ruins describe a multiplicity of individuals and a multiplicity of voices.

Afterwards you walk back the five miles to the little dock and you realise, that history, like humanity, is based on interpretation, self exploratory, self defined, and eternal.

For those who are aesthetically dead the interpretive centre and the wire exclusion beckon, but beyond that there’s a real world that invites exploration. Seek and ye shall find.

Quentin Cockburn.