The Stone Tape

One of the UK’s most successful TV dramas in the 70s was ‘The Stone Tape’, a cliff-hanger based on the idea that building materials can record events by changing their sub-atomic structure. If you know how to trigger the playback function you can watch historical events unfold. If you’re not careful you can get caught up in them...

Now we all have solid-state recording media in our pockets the central idea of ‘The Stone Tape’ seems less extraordinary than it did when we used letter-openers. But I have often wondered if there might be something in it. Why do certain places have an atmosphere which raises the hair on the back of our neck and sends a chill up our spine?

Few people visit Glencoe in Scotland without feeling disturbed, even when they haven’t the faintest idea of what occurred there – a massacre of clansmen and their families trying to climb to safety up the hills and crags which surround the glen. The topography helps: the mountains are dark and forbidding, the clouds always seem to be low and oppressive; there is a feeling of gloom. Is it possible that the glen retains some kind of memory of the terrible things that happened there?

When I was very young I was taken to visit the ruins of Lessness Abbey, a monastery just outside London which had been ransacked and burnt to the ground by agents of Henry VIII. I knew none of this, but as I wandered the neatly landscaped site, with one-metre-high remnants of walls and metal signs explaining what had been where, I felt a thrill which neither then nor now could I put into words. It was as if these old stones gave me a connection with the people who had lived there hundreds of years ago, perhaps intensified by the mayhem which brought their lives to an end.

Some places have the ‘Stone Tape’ effect and others don’t. Isolation is a factor: Pompeii, for instance, should evoke a powerful emotional response, way below the level of consciousness. But for me, at least, it doesn’t. Too many people wandering around, too much evidence of the inhabitants’ comfortable, ordinary life; the drama of the eruption and its effects too graphically portrayed in the plaster casts of contorted victims. It’s subjective. Maybe natural disasters don’t leave the same kind of imprint.

I’ve noticed this kind of variation at World War 1 battlefields. Some of the better-known sites, like the Newfoundland Memorial Park and the Lochnager Crater on the Somme, produce a feeling of awe and sadness at the pointless waste of it all: we are heartbroken by the losses and angry at the incompetents in the rear who squandered all these young lives so eagerly. But it is the smaller settings which incite that mysterious jolt, the feeling that something inexpressible and dreadful happened here: the lonely cemetery of the Devonshires, mown down as they crossed a valley in full view of a machine-gun post, knowing they had no hope of survival; an unmarked gulley, temporary shelter for a group of helpless soldiers until the barrage reached them, still clearly detectable in the clay soil a hundred years later.

In Istria this summer my friend Euan took me to see a concrete fortification hidden in the trees at the base of a hill a hundred metres from the water’s edge. At ground-level we saw a massive, grey structure with walls two metres thick and deeply-recessed embrasures. It was choked with brambles, covered in lichen. The roof had gone. We climbed up to view it from above: we saw a labyrinth of rooms or cells connected by narrow passageways, a maze of enormous concrete slabs. We could not tell who built it, or why, or when. But it told its own story: fear seeped out of the stone and painted a vivid, invisible picture of frightened men hiding from some impending catastrophe.

When I was five I lived on a farm in Kent. The chalk hills surrounding us held the remains of some of Europe’s earliest settlements. One of our regular walks was up a hollow-way which led to the crest of a ridge overlooking a vast expanse of countryside. At the apex was a dolmen, its covering of earth long gone: three huge blocks of stone supporting a ten-metre lintel. It was a grave, 6,000 years old. No-one knew its history. But it was clear to me: the chill I felt whenever I approached it, the sinister feeling of power and dominion which it exuded, told me that this was the mausoleum of a local warlord, surveying in death the lands he had conquered in life. Fanciful, perhaps, but I was too young to have opened a book on prehistory or to have read an archaeological map. It was just an impression.

People often say they are disappointed when they visit Stonehenge. I have never understood. As you crest the rise above Salisbury Plain you see, in the middle distance, two grey stone circles marooned in a sea of green yet somehow commanding the landscape. As you get nearer you realise the true dimensions of these colossal sarsen stones, each weighing 30 tonnes and capped with lintels to make a kind of Neolithic amphitheatre. The horizon is far away and all around are traces of earthworks, embankments, barrows and burials. The sense of mystery is tangible, as is the sense of thousands upon thousands of years witnessed by this enigmatic temple in the middle of the plain.

If any man-made structure complies with the ‘Stone Tape’ idea, Stonehenge must be a good candidate. But it all seems far-fetched; intriguing science-fiction with a semi-plausible theory behind it. And yet... places where tragic or dramatic events have happened do affect us. Whether they are speaking to us or not, they can change our mood, enthrall us, inspire us, scare us, overwhelm us, capture our imagination and give us a fleeting feeling of contact with people whose lives are now nothing more than a memory.