When Julian Cope, the musician and antiquary, met Margaret Curtis on the Isle of Lewis within the Nineties, he was impressed. Curtis, who has died aged 80, was a “dwelling legend” and a “psychic queen”, stated Cope, who stuffed him with “an actual sense of awe”. He devoted a chapter in his bestselling 1998 ebook The Fashionable Antiquarian to her and to Calanais, probably the most extraordinary historic monuments in Europe.
Close to the Atlantic coast within the distant Outer Hebrides, Calanais (pronounced as within the anglicised spelling, Callanish) is a stone circle on the centre of 5 rows relationship from round 3000BC. The tallest of practically 50 megaliths is over 5 metres excessive, and all are manufactured from a particular streaked gneiss that glows in opposition to stormy skies. Curtis did a lot to additional understanding of this and different ignored websites on Lewis, turning into the island’s unofficial archaeologist and sharing her enthusiasms with an appreciative visiting public.
She discovered many extra stones below the peat as she walked the moorland, probing with a metallic bar. One, at Calanais itself, was re-erected in 1982, and she or he noticed the damaged tip of one other in a wall.
Archaeologists generally adopted up her strategies. Patrick Ashmore, who led excavations at Calanais for what’s now Historic Scotland within the Eighties, praised the fieldwork and record-keeping of Curtis and every of her two husbands. On one event, quartz items she discovered when a street close to her home was straightened led to the invention of a bronze age burial cairn.
Archaeologists didn’t help all her concepts, however embraced her notion of a fantastic sacred panorama. On the centre of this, she argued, was a dramatic moonset that happens each 18 years and 7 months.
At that second (subsequent up in 2025) the midsummer full moon rises behind a hill – formed like a sleeping girl, she stated, representing an historic goddess – skims the horizon and units, earlier than briefly reappearing behind the Calanais circle. “She had a eager sense of the theatrical,” says Alison Sheridan, a former principal curator at Nationwide Museums Scotland.
Margaret was the adopted daughter of Doris (nee Cattermole) and Charles Woolford, who lived in Edgbaston, Birmingham. Charles was a railway engineer, and Doris a instructor earlier than her marriage. Late in life Margaret discovered and visited her delivery mom, who lived close to Edinburgh.
After faculty in Edgbaston, Margaret certified as a instructor at Maria Gray School, Twickenham. She met Gerald Ponting, then coaching to show in Southampton, after they had been college students at a conservation camp in Anglesey. They married in 1967 and took up jobs in Suffolk, the place they lived in Kesgrave, close to Ipswich, Margaret educating at a main faculty. They had been each desirous about native historical past, and after that they had moved to Scotland they self-published a ebook about Kesgrave.
They spent their summer season holidays travelling, first with a tent and later a Bedford campervan, at areas starting from Iceland to Turkey, and infrequently on the west coast of Britain. In 1973 Gerald efficiently utilized for a job in Stornoway, the capital of Lewis and Harris, educating biology and science at a secondary faculty, and so they moved there the next 12 months, Margaret driving the outdated van from Suffolk with their two younger kids.
In Lewis she grew to become a peripatetic main faculty music instructor in villages strung out alongside a 35-mile street. She was eager to flee what she noticed because the urbanisation of the English countryside, and the household embraced a crofting way of life with a big vegetable backyard, chickens, goats and sheep, making hay and reducing peat.
They’d beforehand taken an informal curiosity in archaeology – the 12 months earlier than the transfer Margaret had volunteered on an excavation in Suffolk – and so they had seen Calanais on summer season holidays. Nonetheless, their home was near the megaliths, and as a birthday current for Margaret, Gerald discovered a ebook about standing stones. Antiquarian curiosity quickly grew to become all-consuming.
The ebook was Megalithic Websites in Britain (1967), by Alexander Thom, a professor of engineering science at Oxford College. Although revealed by a college press, it acquired a cult following, introducing the world to a “megalithic yard” and the concept that stone circles had been laid out with excessive precision, generally aligned on options of the night time sky. Calanais and its surrounding websites had been stated to show “crucial group of alignments in Britain”. Right here, wrote Thom, there isn’t a full survey. The Pontings obtained in contact.
Margaret corresponded often with Thom, a person she discovered extra useful than {many professional} archaeologists, and he launched them to Ronald Curtis, an Edinburgh-based chartered civil engineer who had began his personal surveys at Calanais in 1972. Inside a 12 months Margaret had discovered beforehand unidentified megaliths, and the Pontings quickly joined Ron Curtis in surveying a lot of them.
Their work was highlighted in 1978 when Margaret and Gerald had been finalists within the BBC Chronicle award for native beginner archaeologists. They weren’t winners, however on the ceremony had been offered with a cheque and champagne by Prince Charles as a particular award for initiative.
They self-published a succession of guides to Calanais and different stone circles, promoting them from the storage subsequent to their home, the place Margaret collected her assortment of artefacts and entertained guests from all over the world drawn by guarantees of visionary excursions and eccentric, pleasant firm.
Gerald left Scotland in 1984 after that they had separated, and Margaret continued to work with Curtis. They married in 1989, co-authoring many technical experiences of surveys and discoveries, which included an entire stone circle which Margaret first noticed from a bus. Their experiments in shifting and erecting stones attracted the eye of the mason and author Rob Roy, who gave Margaret one other ebook chapter, in his Stone Circles: A Fashionable Builder’s Information (1999).
In September final 12 months, Peter Vallance, a storyteller on the Findhorn Basis, recorded Margaret speaking by the Calanais stones. “It’s like doing a jigsaw,” she stated, “each little bit offers you one other perception into what was occurring. And I believe I’ve fairly nicely obtained to the tip of all of the insights.”
Ron died in 2008. Margaret is survived by her son, Ben, and daughter, Becky, 4 grandchildren, Eloise, Sasha, Tabitha and Calum, and two great-grandsons.