Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having written about Pictish stones and their claim upon aspects of ancient Scottish landscapes, it’s impossible to resist following the same theme into Spain… which will come as no great surprise. In expressions of dreams, mysteries and imaginative whimsy, Spain is where I usually end up.

There are two enormous stone carvings on display at the Museo Archeológico Nacional in Madrid. At a glance, these objects look blunt and ambiguous – just strangely shaped blobs of granite which bridge a rubbly arch from front to back. On closer inspection, they’re clearly creatures with heads and legs. One has the plunging, downswept shape of horns on his neck – the other has a halter or a harness around its head, but it’s noticeably pig-like in bearing and expression.

These statues are verracos – just two of several hundred which have been unearthed around the western regions of Spain. They can be dated to between the 4th and 1st Centuries before Christ, meaning that they belong to the period before the Roman conquest – a time of Iberian or “Celtiberian” culture in Spain and Portugal. It follows that some of these verracos are almost a thousand years older than the Pictish symbols which have been exciting me in Sutherland and Morayshire over the past few months.

There’s no specific definition of what verracos meant to ancient Spanish people. Almost all of these statues depict domesticated livestock, with a particular focus on bulls and boars – animals which were important agricultural commodities in their own right. Some archaeologists believe that they marked places of special reverence for livestock, where offerings could be made to ensure good fortune in harvests to come. Others wonder if they served as waymarkers for roaming herds and flocks, designating specific directions or locations as the property of certain individuals or deities. The puzzle is part of the fun, but it’s also clear that later cultures have appropriated or changed the purpose of verracos to suit their own taste and beliefs.

Some verracos have been moved several times over the centuries, and others have engraved with individual names in roman writing, suggesting that they were used as gravestones or memorial-markers for the dead. Several verracos have had entire towns built around them during the course of their existence – perhaps they were established in open pasture or woodland and now find themselves washed up in busy, crowded plazas.

A particularly famous set of bull-shaped verracos at Guisando is mentioned in poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca, who often serves as my access-point to Spain and Spanish culture. He describes them bellowing with the weight of their centuries, and that’s where my encounter with those verracos in the Museo Archeológico suddenly falls desperately short – because if these objects can still bear any sense of meaning in the world, they have to be seen in their original setting – in the knowledge that the same sun has cast the same shadows across their heavy backs for two and a half thousand years. It’s fun to see them up close in a tidy museum, but it’s a very different experience to finding one “in the wild”.

Next time I’m free to explore Spain, I’ll be looking for these objects wherever I can find them – in fields, woods and roadsides – urgently trying to unpick their original significance in an ancient world of farming, livestock and seasonal change.