Digging Up Giants

---11.19.1999---

I was able to find more information on some of the island’s old burial sites in another one of the books that Ellen loaned me, Observations of the Ancient and Present State of the Isles of Scilly by William Borlase. These “barrows” as they are called, are fairly large. A common myth held that ancient giants had been buried within them. Borlase, as part of his research, decided to see for himself. On Wednesday, the third of June, 1752, he and his men proceeded to pry a few open.

In the first we found no bones, nor urns, but some strong unctuous earth that smelt cadaverous...

They found nothing. But that wasn’t the end of it. That evening, and on through the night, was brought upon the islands one of the worst storms that anyone there had ever known. It wiped out all of the crops, bedraggled a number of animals, and erased many people’s chances of paying rents and feeding themselves for the season. A few pages on, Borlase has a conversation with the woman who runs the inn in which he is staying.

Then [she] asked me whether we had not been digging up the Giant’s graves the day before, and smiling with great good humor, as if she forgave our curiosity though she had suffered for it, asked, whether I did not think that we had disturbed the Giants; and said that many good people of the Islands were of the opinion that the Giants had been offended, and had really raised that storm.

Call me superstitious but I felt like Nature was watching me the other night. Perhaps She was watching then too and wasn’t happy. Or someone wasn’t.

I thought about it the other day as well. What if kings were still buried there? I am of the mind—and this is a recent shift—that once a people decide to inter one of their own into the land (which is a living body in its own right), they are performing a sacred union. The people that live here now, like the ones that lived here then, inherit the land fused with its ancient remains. Trying to excavate a sacred piece, cannot be done, it seems, without causing another death: a death of place.