Joys of Portugal - View from a Hill

The jay was showing me the way through the oak forest, swooping down from high branches and scolding if I dawdled. Jays don't do dawdling. Jays are busy birds and need to get you on your way quickly so they can go back to their secret ways, unobserved.

In the spring, these woods will be filled with the sound of cuckoos and hoopoes and even in the glare of summer, they exude a sense that time, if not exactly standing still, feels pliable or elastic, where centuries become seconds and minutes last forever, both at the same time. The sites of Neolithic settlements further up the hill only add to the impression of dislocated time.

Earth track

Beyond the oak woods is a broad beaten earth track which leads to the summit above Perraço. On its way, it passes half a dozen tumuli, colloquially known as mamoas. In the late Neolithic period, it was the custom to bury the bodies of those deemed worthy in giant mounds erected close to main thoroughfares, so the track I was walking upon had been trodden by other feet for at least five thousand years, probably much longer. It is hard not to marvel at suddenly finding yourself a fellow traveller with your ancestors. Time travel never felt so easy.

Trying the discover the uncared for tumuli, on the other hand, was something else in this hilly and densely wooded country. The maps showed the approximate location of half a dozen funeral mounds but the actual finding was a hiding to nothing, unless torn trousers and thorn-scratched hands count as something. In a way, though, perhaps it didn’t matter at all and the act of searching was what was important. There were sudden sun-filled clearances – dappled glades, no less – weird patches of madly coloured lichen, half-buried stones that might or might not have been lintels, steep hummocks smothered in vegetation, strange depressions in the ground.

What was the urge to actually find a mamoa? Probably the same fascination I used to get as a child in the historic town in which I was brought up where, from time to time, I would muse over a stone carving dating from the Renaissance. I'd run my finger along the delicate chisel work of some craftsman who had stood in the exact same spot to work nearly half a millennia before and try to make a link. Was I successful, back then as a child or, more recently, on the Portuguese hill? Who knows?

Rocky heights

On the rocky heights of Monte Galego there is nothing of the ancient settlement to be seen by the untrained eye but the evidence is there all the same – arrowheads, pottery shards, remains of firepits - all inside a natural circle of great rocks. Many hills in the immediate area were home to people in the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic. No doubt they were easy to defend, the rich arable soil of the valleys and the abundance of water strong attractions. Monte Galego is on a watershed between two river systems, where streams to the south flow down to the Tâmega river and on to the Douro, while to the north they feed the Rio Ave, which finds the sea at Vila do Conde.

I wasn't expecting to meet any wild animals, but I carry a stick just in case. Wild pigs can still be a menace in these parts but feral dogs are more likely, like a shadow of the wolves that roamed here within recent memory. No jays were chivvying me on the hill, but an Iberian woodpecker had a lot to say for herself. As I walked down into the valley, I reflected that it was very likely that many of the residents of neighbouring hamlets and villages were directly descended from those who once lived in the settlement on the hill and who buried their worthies in great earthen funeral chambers. With that in mind, it was hard not to give a second glance at the old man clearing deadwood in a field. I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t speak to him so it was easier for me to place on his shoulders the whole history of human settlement in this valley. What I was certain of was that he was one of a generation who are completely in tune with the land they work.

My late father-in-law was like that: a man filled with knowledge about his natural surroundings but unencumbered by any sentimental or romantic notion of any of it; a source of practical wisdom and deep-rooted skills. Like light pollution blotting out our intimacy with the rest of the cosmos, our machine-led lives suffocate our relationship with the natural world and make our knowledge of it shallower. A sadness of the age is the ineffable feeling that much of this wisdom will soon be lost. I suspect the elderly unknown farmer clearing his field with a rake has more in common with the ancients who once lived on the hill than he has with most of his younger contemporaries.

Fitch is a retired teacher trainer and academic writer who has lived in northern Portugal for over 30 years. Author of 'Rice & Chips', irreverent glimpses into Portugal, and other books.

Fitch O'Connell