Between 1981 and 1984, I attended a three-year extra-mural course in Field Archaeology based at the Department of Adult and Continuing Education in Glasgow.

That's when I learned there was more to archaeology than churches, mounds and castles.
We visited chambered tombs, stone circles, round cairns, cairnfields, burial cists, cup and ring marked rocks, ring-ditch houses, unenclosed platform settlements, enclosed platform settlements, vitrified forts, enclosed cremation cemeteries, early Christian cemeteries, shell middens, burnt mounds, ring groove houses, post hole houses, scooped settlements, Roman forts, signalling platforms, watch towers, mottes, duns and the astronomical alignments at Ballochroy and Kintraw.
Brochs, wheelhouses, crannogs, and Viking houses, were about the only sites we missed because of the distances involved, but to round out our education, most of us visited them in our own time.

It was a marvellous mind-expanding learning experience of lectures, field trips, surveys and discussions that gave me a far greater understanding of the prehistoric mind than I would ever have gained otherwise.

Unlike my colleagues, however, I had come to archaeology for a specific reason - I wanted to find out how the alignments I had surveyed in my cross-country travels got there. Why did some of them keep crossing and re-crossing the same points on the landscape - who had designed all this? This subject was not on the curriculum, but during the course I learned a simple five-step process that for me changed an inexact science into something that could be analysed.
Observation, Classification, Hypothesis, Prediction, Test. . . five steps to clearer thinking. After the course I applied it to my own research, vowing that in future I would do everything 'by the book'.

Naturally I refrained from mentioning my publishing activities to my colleagues, but as readers of Billy Bunter's Schooldays might recall, the Cad of the School is always lurking out there waiting to play some thoughtless jape on the unsuspecting scholar . . . in the final week of the course I found this cartoon tucked into my reference books.

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The Straight Road with No Path

One of the strongest objections to my alignment maps in the early 80's was that there had never been any reference to alignments or anything of that nature in the early Scottish chronicles.
Everyone seemed quite certain of this, but had anyone ever looked?
All I had to go on was an account of the origins of Glasgow Cathedral.
St. Mungo (aka Kentigern) is said to have led a burial procession down through the Campsie Fells to bury Fergus the holy man in a cemetery that now lies beneath the flagstones of the Cathedral crypt. I was curious about the route the bullock cart took to the cemetery so my next step was to search for the earliest written account of St. Mungo's journey to Glasgow. Perhaps in the record of this journey there would be a clue about the nature of early roads or tracks in the Glasgow area.

Many a tedious old volume I had to read through before I learned that when Bishop Jocelyn was rebuilding Glasgow Cathedral in the 12th Century, he had commissioned a hagiographer from Furness Abbey to revise St. Mungo's biography. Two copies of this book survive, one in the British Museum, the other in Dublin. To my delight, however, I unearthed a translated and edited version in the Glasgow Room of the Mitchell Library. In this book, The Life of S. Kentigern, I finally found what I was looking for - the earliest known reference to a road or track in the Glasgow area. It appears in the following extract from chapter nine, in the very first sentence in any historical record ever to mention Glasgow:

'And in truth, the bulls, in no way being restive, or in anything disobeying the voice of Kentigern, without any tripping or fall, came by a straight road, along where there was no path, as far as Cathures, which is now called Glasgu ...'

' I was ecstatic ... In a quiet corner of the reading room, I whispered the words over and over again to myself like a mantra, 'they came by a straight road along where there was no path'.

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