At Home - Bill Bryson [15]
In most other respects, however, and allowing for a little aging and the introduction of some electrical wires and a television aerial, it remains largely unchanged from 1851. It is now, as it was then, manifestly a house. It looks the way a house should look. It has a homely air.
So it is perhaps slightly surprising to reflect that nothing about this house, or any house, is inevitable. Everything had to be thought of—doors, windows, chimneys, stairs—and a good deal of that, as we are about to see, took far more time and experimentation than you might ever have thought.
Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it. This aura of homeliness is, it turns out, extremely ancient, and the first hint of that remarkable fact was uncovered by chance just at the time the Old Rectory was being built, in the winter of 1850, when a mighty storm blew into Britain.
It was one of the worst storms in decades and it caused widespread devastation. At the Goodwin Sands, off the Kent coast, five ships were dashed to pieces with the loss of all hands. Off Worthing, in Sussex, eleven men going to the aid of a distressed ship drowned when their lifeboat was upended by a giant wave. At a place called Kilkee, an Irish sailing ship named Edmund, bound for America, lost its steering, and passengers and crew watched helplessly as the ship drifted onto rocks and was smashed to splinters. Ninety-six people drowned, though a few managed to struggle ashore, including one elderly lady clinging to the back of the brave captain, whose name was Wilson and who was, the Illustrated London News noted with grim satisfaction, English. Altogether more than two hundred people lost their lives in waters around the British Isles that night.
In London at the half-built Crystal Palace rising in Hyde Park, newly installed glass panes lifted and banged but stayed in place, and the building itself withstood the battering winds with barely a groan, much to the relief of Joseph Paxton, who had promised that it was stormproof but appreciated the confirmation.
Seven hundred miles to the north, on the Orkney Islands of Scotland, the storm raged for two days. At a place called the Bay o’ Skaill the gale stripped the grassy covering off a large irregular knoll, of a type known locally as a howie, which had stood as a landmark for as long as anyone had known it. When at last the storm cleared and the islanders came upon their newly reconfigured beach, they were astounded to find that where the howie had stood were now revealed the remains of a compact, ancient stone village, roofless but otherwise marvelously intact. Consisting of nine houses, all still holding many of their original contents, the village dates from five thousand years ago. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, older than all but a handful of built structures on Earth. It is immensely rare and important. It is known as Skara Brae.
Thanks to its completeness and preservation, Skara Brae offers a scene of intimate, almost eerie domesticity. Nowhere is it possible to get a more potent sense of household life in the Stone Age. As everyone remarks, it is as if the inhabitants have only just left. What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were