Does the world really need another podcast?

My name is Matthew and I am a middle aged man with a podcast. 

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Did the world need another podcast, like the one I’ve released where I travel to Scotland’s neolithic sites by bike? Why did I decide to add to the sonic landfill of middle aged men indulging their hobbies?

Well the purely practical reason is that, by chance, I have the things you need: editorial skills and audio production skills. 

I began my working life as a newspaper reporter and still head a team of journalists producing daily news and analysis, albeit in not in newspapers any more.

And, bored at work 20 years ago and after years of playing in bands of varying quality, I took myself off to a recording studio to learn how to record and produce music in a studio environment. I’ve dabbled ever since in little bits of my own music (I made all the music you hear in Stone Me), and I’ve been producing podcasts at my day job since 2006.

I was idly thinking one day last year: what would my dream job be? This is something I’ve thought about surprisingly little, having always enjoyed the jobs I had. But I gave it some thought and decided I would love to go around making esoteric little half hour radio programmes about things I was interested in and probably not many other people were. But who on earth would hire me to do that? Nobody, surely.

It was a few days before I realised - I didn’t have to wait around for a radio station to ask me. Podcasts exist - I could just do it myself. 

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I could combine my love of bikepacking with a growing interest in neolithic Scotland by travelling to these amazing places and trying to piece together their stories, with some expert help. 

Many podcasts are just lightly-edited open microphones where people shoot the breeze to a loose structure, often at great length. 

That approach didn’t appeal. I love how good radio transports and envelopes you, immersing you in another world, taking you away from yourself completely in a world of noise, atmosphere and words. 

So that was my aim, to make something that I would want to listen to, to try to keep it short and concentrated (30 minutes is the aim) and to give the listener a little taste of the sights, smells and feelings I experienced on my amazing journeys.

Does neolithic ‘Scotland’ exist?

Why do people mostly talk about ‘Britain’ or ‘Britain and Ireland’ and not ‘Scotland’ when discussing the neolithic period? It’s complicated.

You’ll hear the experts and me in the podcast Stone Me talk about the neolithic place these monuments are in as ‘Britain’ or maybe sometimes ‘north Britain’ rather than Scotland, and usually they’ll say ‘Britain and Ireland’. Why is that?

All the names we have for these places now are anachronistic - they didn’t exist at the time we were talking about so are in some ways inaccurate. So why choose one anachronism, ‘Britain’, rather than another, ‘Scotland’? And why always include Ireland?

We have no evidence about the language of neolithic people in this part of the world, nothing to suggest if and how it was written down and obviously nothing to record how it was spoken. So we have no idea what they called places. 

So we use later names - Britain derived from the Briton people who lived in various parts of Wales, England and southern Scotland in the Roman period and up to about 500AD. They were first given the name by a Greek geographer in 320BC but of course they didn’t spring into being just because some Greek guy gave them a made up name. They had been Iron Age people living a culturally rich life on these islands for thousands of years. 

The blue-grey land rising out of the heat haze is Ireland, as viewed from the south of Arran. The areas we’re looking at in Stone Me were connected by the sea. Photo: Matthew Magee

So the name Britain is the name for this place that most closely relates to the oldest name for the place or people that we have. If we’re going to pick an anachronous name it makes sense to pick the oldest one. 

It also helps that Britain is quite close to being a geographical, rather than a political, name. The geographical name for the islands occupied by the UK and Ireland is ‘The British Isles’ and ‘Great Britain’ is the name for the bigger of the two islands.

Nobody actually says ‘Great Britain’ any more so ‘Britain and Ireland’ has the character of a geographical, rather than national or political, description.

But why always tag on ‘Ireland’ at all? Can’t we just talk about the neolithic period in the bigger island? 

We can’t because neolithic culture in Ireland and Britain were so similar. They were the same people; they arrived in the same wave of population movements at the same time, bringing the same farming culture with them. 

Sure, monuments in Sligo are different to those in Argyll. But monuments in Argyll are different to those in Wessex. Each area developed its own culture, but that culture came from the same source and connections were maintained for thousands of years through the kind of travel, trade and shared ritual that we see evidence of at the sites examined in the Stone Me podcast. 

It’s worth remembering that travel through a road-less and heavily forested landmass of 800 miles was close to impossible, so people travelled by sea. This meant that travelling from Wales to Orkney was indistinguishable in terms of duration or difficulty from travelling from Ireland to Orkney. Going from the Boyne Valley to Arran was a similar journey in nature, length and complexity to going from Arran to Lewis. The border that we imagine in the sea just doesn’t appear to have existed. 

So: Britain and Ireland it is.

Five days in the saddle: to Calanais and beyond

How long would you travel for to get a one hour interview? Does five days seem too much? 

I thought so, but after my round trip Glasgow-Skye-Harris-Lewis-Ullapool-Inverness-Glasgow I felt it was about the exact right amount of time.

My aim with my podcast about neolithic sites in Scotland, Stone Me, was to travel by bike as much as possible, but I do have a job and a family so taking, for example, more than a week to actually cycle to Orkney and back, while a delightful idea, was not possible. So I took trains and boats and cycled the last leg of each journey, sometimes getting off trains earlier to give myself more riding time in places I hadn’t been before.

That’s all fine until you get to planning the trip to the Stones of Calanais in Lewis, possibly the most beautiful ancient standing stones in Scotland, and one of the highlights of neolithic Scotland. This really is the far north western tip of Lewis. There’s not-permanently-inhabited St Kilda out there, and Iceland if you take a sharp right turn, but after that it’s Canada.

I got to planning and found first to my horror then to my delight that it would take me five days to get there and back. I baulked at first then realised: trips like this was the whole reason I was doing the podcast.

Day one

It began with one of the most beautiful train journeys on earth, Glasgow to Mallaig. As soon as you’re out of Glasgow the Clyde opens up to your left, expanding into a broad, calm estuary and water is suddenly everywhere. These are exactly the waterways that neolithic people used as highways to travel the hundreds of miles we think they navigated to trade, participate in ceremonies and probably engage in diplomacy, politicking and fighting. Through Helensburgh and you’re soon soaring above Loch Long on a precarious ridge towards Arrochar, The Cobbler mountain looming ahead of you, a sheer drop sweeping down into the water below on your left.

By the time you are gliding down the west side of Loch Lomond you’re feeling inured to the grand scenery, the mountains reflected in the calm waters of the deep icy loch, the train picking its way between cottages, ruins, roadside inns and clumps of forest.

My packed bike at a lovely spot 3 miles shy of Inverness - next stop was the pub.

Then you’re up through the desolate moorlands where there are no roads, no settlements, just a railway line, heather and empty air. Oh Corrour station, and the remote outpost immortalised in Trainspotting’s ‘it’s shite being Scottish’ scene.

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it or how cool you think you are, if watching Harry Potter films was any part of your youth then crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct, the bridge used in the journeys to magic academy Hogwarts in the films, is a special experience, even if the cringey bagpipes-in-the-lift treatment over the tannoy is a bit cringe.

Nothing will prepare the first time traveller, though, for the sight as you hit the coast. Sky-skimming craggy peaks are everywhere. The peaks of Rum look dramatic until you spot Skye, which looks great until you set your eyes on the hulking, lowering, almost sinister bulk of the hills around Torridon. It’s dazzling.

Mallaig is the end of the line, it’s just a short ferry journey of about 40 minutes to Armadale on Skye. I had about 40 miles to ride to Skye’s biggest town Portree to my hostel bed. On the main road it was beautiful but didn’t take in many of the sights which draw people from all over the world to the island.

Day two

This was where travel logistics came in – I had planned to cycle up to Uig on the very north west tip of Skye the next morning and catch the 9am ferry to Harris in the Outer Hebrides. But that ferry was only every second day, so I took all the packs off my bike and rode a 55 mile loop around the north west of the island. It was wet and mizzly and colder than predicted but it was lovely to see more of the island.

Day three

The road up the north east corner of Skye from Portree to Duntulm and then switching back to Uig is a piece of single track heaven. The view of The Old Man of Hoy, a stack of rock like a chimney reaching skywards from the flank of a mountain, is stunning, and looks better the further away you are. Actually when you’re right there it’s hard to pick out the stack. As you ride away it appears again.

I was lucky to get the boat from Uig – after a long period of interrupted service for pier maintenance it had been off in the days before I arrived because the engine had caught fire. I knew nothing of all this and sauntered on without a care in the world.

When you’re on a bike packed with clothes and recording equipment and can only realistically do about 50-60 miles in a day the kind of detour that happens when a ferry is cancelled in the islands is trip-ruining. Had I been sent on a 90-100 mile detour, which cars would have managed just fine, it would have scuppered the whole Calanais recording trip.

This was to be a big day – 33 hilly miles to Uig, then a windy further 38 to Lewis’s big town, Stornoway.

I wheezed my way up the big climb out of Tarbert on Harris and soon left its craggy horizon behind for the low flatlands of Lewis. Lewis and Harris are on a single landmass but are talked of as separate islands. It’s no wonder – Harris belongs firmly in the craggy, granitey, spiky west highlands, whereas the flat, bleak, barren peatlands of Lewis are more like the very far north of Scotland where the big hills peter out. There is a point in the road where a road sign announces the change and it is as if someone had just glued two separate islands together, that’s how sudden the change is.

Day four

It’s recording day! I’m not meeting the expert for Calanais Ian McHardy till the afternoon so explore Stornoway in the morning and cross the island in heavy wind to conduct an amazing interview, where Ian describes discovering how a rock acts as a sundial, casting a shadow around which the entire Stones of Calanais site may have been arranged.

It’s a quick blast back to my hostel before dark and early bed for the 7am ferry.

Day five

It turns out Scotland’s ferry operator Caledonia MacBrayne expect cyclists to arrive something more than 20 minutes ahead of departure on the biggest boat in their fleet, the modern, monstrously large ship that will take me to Ullapool on the mainland.

It’s a smooth, luxurious two and a half hours and I roll out of Ullapool for about 15 miles of relentless uphill on a traffic-heavy main road, my least favourite stretch of the whole trip. Even when I reach 10 miles of descent a headwind means it’s hard going.

Isotonic drink recovery at Clachnaharry Inn

I got off the main road and picked my way through the little villages of the Cromarty Firth and stopped for a beer in a dark and welcoming pub three miles from my destination, Inverness. I can’t recommend Clachnaharry Inn enough if you’re tired and thirsty.

The train ride home would take your breath away if you hadn’t been on the West Highland line four days ago. Through the Cairngorms and rich, lush Perthshire it winds, bringing me home to Glasgow late at night after what felt like quite the ordeal.

It was an incredible experience. I relished such a stretch of time on my own, with just enough worry about logistics and plans to keep me on my toes.

Would I want to ride for five days for every interview I did? I don’t think so, but this was a special route and it was no hardship in the end.

The Stones of Calanais programme in my Stone Me series will go live on 28 June.  

What’s so special about the neolithic period?

Scotland is full of fascinating history: why did I choose the oldest?

I used to think I liked the Vikings, then I read about the Picts. I used to think I liked the Picts, then I went to Orkney and saw neolithic stuff.

I’ve always liked the oldest history I could find, even when studying it at school and university. I had studied Viking Orkney a little and a few years ago finally convinced my family to come on holiday there after some years of fruitless persuasion. 

I had always loved standing stones and stone circles - come on, who doesn’t? - but paid little attention to them. They were unavoidable on Orkney, and my head was soon turned by tales of these much more ancient people.

The Stones of Stenness in Orkney - possibly the first stone circle ever built

I had never appreciated how much further back their period was than anything else I’d ever read about. Vikings were 1,000 years ago, Picts 1,500. What do you mean the stone circles were built 5,000 years ago?

I’m sorry to say I was beguiled by the glamour of grand old age and spent my days on Orkney mainland and on Papa Westray furiously visiting everything I could find. It was like a neolithic fairground - Maeshowe here, Ring of Brodgar there, here a Barnhouse, there a Skara Brae. 

I was mesmerised and vowed to come back and learn more. 

I started reading the poetic, philosophically informed works of Richard Bradley, an archaeologist bravely concerned with the questions archaeology can never fully answer: what did people believe? Why did they suddenly start building monuments in stone and wood on such a scale? How was society structured? What is the relationship between farming, settlement and monument building?

This is such a weird looking society in many ways. They burned some of their monuments down - both stone and wood - but let others stand for thousands of years. They lived what must have been a pretty tough subsistence life in the earliest days of farming yet diverted massive amounts of labour to building structures with no practical purpose.

As soon as I started seeing pictures of the rock art at Kilmartin or the remnants of paint on pottery or the walls of buildings at Ness of Brodgar I was astounded at the sophistication of the art, the obvious complexity of the inner lives of the people who made it. These were not primitive people scrabbling a meagre living and concerned only with base survival, these were status-anxious, modern-seeming powerful, wealthy people with a stratified and specialised society and an inventive culture producing objects of abiding beauty. 

And - sorry to go on about it, but - this was 5,000 years ago. I’m old enough that the early medieval period was still called the dark ages when I was growing up. I had always thought that before the Roman occupation we were just cloth-wearing savages mucking around the glens in grime and misery. 

That visit to Orkney was a complete revelation and every new thing I learn about these people makes me want to find out something else. 

So, with apologies to the Vikings and the Picts, I’m sticking with the neolithic people for now. 

What even is ‘neolithic’?

It’s simpler than you think

There are a lot of ‘-lithics’ when you start looking at old stones. It can seem confusing, but the one that’s really easy to get your head around is the neolithic, as I found when researching my podcast about neolithic sites in Scotland, Stone Me.

This period (4000BC to 2000BC[ish] in Scotland) is an important and fascinating moment in our history, it is the moment we stopped being hunter-gatherers and became farmers, staying in one place for the first time. It’s hard to think of a more significant change in our lives, in what it means to be human, than that change from nomad to farmer. 

Before this we led a nomadic life, probably cycling between fairly established seasonal haunts but living in temporary buildings and moving to look for food and shelter.

Then we decided to stop moving and pick one place to live. Buildings, made of wood and mud and in some rare cases stone, became bigger, more permanent. And, crucially, we started farming, cultivating plants and animals to become plentiful and substantial enough to meet our needs all year round. 

Barnhouse in Orkney, a neolithic settlement that I won’t be featuring at all in Stone Me!

This changed so much – it meant labour had to be organised, which probably led to some stratification of society: somebody has to make decisions and somebody has to dig lots of rough ground into ploughable soil, and they probably weren’t the same person. 

But it also created surpluses: of materials and of time. Material surpluses meant that some people could be fed and housed who weren’t working full time on the land. Surplus of time meant that they could create culture. 

And the neolithic period gave us a huge explosion of culture – ever more elaborate items have miraculously survived for 5,000 years to show us how sophisticated and complex these people could be. 

Grooved ware pottery was probably invented in Orkney and spread as a style throughout Britain and Ireland. Stone carvings in elaborate, elliptical, abstract styles decorated passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in Ireland and the bare rockface of Argyll in Scotland. 

Different times, different places

The neolithic happened at different times in different places – it was earlier in Europe and travelled westwards over time as people settled further west and ideas came with them. 

It’s a weird notion to us now, but of course we can think of plenty of ideas and culture that are commonplace in one part of the world and are only adopted later in other countries or regions. 

The end of the stone age

The neolithic period is the end of the stone age, and it came to a close once people discovered and started using metal. A brief copper age (chalcolithic – I told you about the -lithics) gave way to the bronze age and then the iron age as those metals took over from stone and bone as the basis of tools. 

The culture changed and some of the ancient sites we will look at in Stone Me were abandoned, such as the Ring of Brodgar, while others were broken up and re-used, such as like Cairnpapple Hill.

Why do archaeologists obsess about grooved ware pottery?

Hang around archaeologists in Britain and Ireland long enough and you’ll soon hear about grooved ware. So what is it?

Grooved ware is pottery that’s had a certain kind of design pressed or carved into it. It’s important because, like beakers and beaker people, it marks out and defines a whole civilisation, as discussed in the first programme in my podcast Stone Me.  

We have so little left of life 5,000 years ago that every object is treasured, sacred and by necessity a bit over-interpreted. Pottery survives pretty well in the ground and seems to have been common for daily use - cooking, storing, serving - and for rituals, ceremonies and displays of wealth. 

This was a time before metal so when it came to displays of wealth, status and power neolithic people in Britain and Ireland used cloth, precious stones - and ceramics. They used buildings and monuments too, but you know plenty about that already from the podcasts. 

A grooved ware wrist guard from Cornwall Credit: The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0

So they put a lot of work, thought and effort into ceramics, and how they decorated their ritual pots became a mark of identity. It indicated not just possibly what you thought about the world and the hereafter, but where you came from, who you belonged to, and where your loyalties lay. 

Designs and styles spread, and so archaeologists are fascinated by what this might mean: does it mean that people moved, or that they were extending political power and the adoption of a new style displayed a practical, political loyalty? Or was it just that people liked the look of some patterns and adopted them?

This is where the fascination with grooved ware comes in. The earliest examples come from Orkney and so the current thinking is that this is where it originated. Of course the discovery of one fragment that’s definitively older at the other end of the country could completely upend this theory, and that’s what’s so exciting about archaeology. 

Fast forward a few hundred years and you find grooved ware all over the place - in Northumberland, Wessex and Stonehenge, right in the south of England. Why is that so important? Because it shows at least the widespread adoption of elements of an Orkney culture, and perhaps some kind of economic, philosophical or political dominance. 

Of course we have no idea what political organisation and relations were like in north Britain 5,000 years ago and should be careful about imposing modern notions on ancient people. But there hasn’t been a period in documented human history when people from one place weren’t hitting people from another place over the head in a bid for influence or control or resources. Neolithic people might have been fundamentally different, but I don’t buy it. 

So the movement patterns of this particular style of pottery are vital in trying to get a grip on social, political and cultural relations between people in different parts of Britain and Ireland in neolithic times. 

But, as always, over-interpretation looms large. People obsess about ceramics because it’s all there is. There’s always the possibility that neolithic people were desperate for the latest trends and might just have wanted nicer plates. 

Why I decided to tour neolithic Scotland by bike

A whim goes too far

I look forward to the moment. I’ve bumped into an acquaintance I haven’t seen in a few months and we exchange pleasantries about what we’ve been up to and I tell them about my new podcast, Stone Me. 

About how I’m cycling (and sailing, and going by train) to the remotest corners of Scotland to interview archaeologists at ancient sites that are sometimes little more than a few holes in the ground. 

It happens: they struggle to put it politely, engage in verbal contortions to try not to be insulting. They try to mask their surprise and ask about ‘the thinking behind the project’ or ‘whether I studied archaeology’, but what they all want to say is: why the hell are you doing that?

And even now, after countless trips through the wind and rain, cancelled ferries and bike mechanical problems, I’m not sure I have a short answer. 

I’ve always loved old history – the older the better. Not for me the perfectly, accurately chronicled second world war or Russian revolution. I gravitated to the period with the fewest documents, the scantest evidence, the biggest gaps where you could begin to tell stories. I love the speculation, the shifting sands, the clash of competing ideas as people try to work out what happened a long, long time ago.

Most of all I love that we’ll never know. 

I wanted to travel, slowly and under my own steam as much as possible, to these wild places where standing stones and cairns and rock art still survived – somehow, miraculously – and see and hear and smell these places for myself. 

These were the most sacred places of our most ancient ancestors and by the miracles of preserving peat bog, accident and modern archaeological science we know an incredible amount about them. 

We know who they were, where they came from, what they ate and some of how they built these towering edifices to themselves, to the land, to the spirits. We know how far and wide their social and economic networks extended and we know how they treated their dead. 

But there is so much we don’t know. What happened in the middle of stone circles? Why did they keep burning their most precious monuments? Why were some abandoned and some used for thousands of years?

These are the mysteries I wanted to pursue. Not because I needed concrete answers, but because of all the incredible things I would learn along the way. Like how they could dig four metre deep ditches into bedrock using antler horns. Or that some monuments were built piecemeal by different groups of people, maybe at different times. Or that a random rocky outcrop, long ignored, might be an ancient sundial by which a huge monument was aligned with the heavens. 

It's not an easy answer to give to someone you’ve bumped into in the street, so people mostly come away probably feeling a little bemused. But that’s OK, I’ve learned so much on this journey about the knowledge gaps that remain that I’m more bemused than I’ve ever been. And that’s how I like it.