• The Guardian Sat urday 30 Apr il 2022

8 Obituaries

I

n the 1990s, when Julian

Cope, the musician and

antiquary , met Margaret

Curtis on the Isle of Lewis ,

he was impressed. Curtis,

who has died aged 80,

was a “living legend”

and a “psychic queen”,

said Cope, who fi lled him with

“a real sense of awe”. He devoted

a chapter in his bestselling 1998

book The Modern Antiquarian

to her and to Calanais, one of

the most extraordinary ancient

monuments in Europe.

Near the Atlantic coast in the

remote Outer Hebrides , Calanais

(pronounced as in the anglicised

spelling, Callanish) is a stone circle

at the centre of fi ve rows dating

from around 3000BC. The tallest

of nearly 50 megaliths is over fi ve

metres high, and all are made of

Margaret Curtis

Megalith enthusiast and

unoffi cial archaeologist

of the stone circles

on the Isle of Lewis

when a road near her house was

straightened led to the discovery of

a bronze age burial cairn.

Archaeologists did not support

all her ideas, but embraced her

notion of a sacred landscape. At

the centre of this, she argued, was a

dramatic moonset that occurs

every 18 years and seven months.

At that moment (next up in 2025) the

midsummer full moon rises behind

a hill – shaped like a sleeping

woman, she said, representing

an ancient goddess – skims the

horizon and sets, before briefl y

reappearing behind the Calanais

circle. “She had a keen sense of the

theatrical,” said Alison Sheridan, a

former principal curator at National

Museums Scotland.

Margaret was the adopted

daughter of Doris (n ee Cattermole)

and Charles Woolford, who lived

in Edgbaston, Birmingham.

Charles was a railway engineer, and

Doris a teacher before her marriage.

Late in life Margaret found and

visited her birth mother, who lived

near Edinburgh.

After school in Edgbaston,

Margaret qualifi ed as a teacher at

Maria Grey College, Twickenham.

She met Gerald Ponting, then

training to teach in Southampton,

when they were students at a

conservation camp in Anglesey.

They married in 1967 and took up

jobs in Suff olk, where they lived in

Kesgrave, near Ipswich, Margaret

teaching at a primary school.

They were both interested in local

a distinctive streaked gneiss that

glows against stormy skies. Curtis

did much to further understanding

of this and other overlooked sites

on Lewis, becoming the island’s

unoffi cial archaeologist and

sharing her enthusiasms with an

appreciative visiting public.

She found many more stones

under the peat as she walked the

moorland, probing with a metal

bar. One , at Calanais itself, was

re-erected in 1982, and she spotted

the broken tip of another in a wall.

Archaeologists sometimes

followed up her suggestions.

Patrick Ashmore , who led

excavations at Calanais in the

1980s for what is now Historic

Scotland, praised the fi eldwork

and record-keeping of Curtis and

each of her two husbands. On one

occasion, quartz pieces she found

history, and after they had moved

to Scotland they self-published a

book about Kesgrave.

They spent their summer

holidays travelling, fi rst with a tent

and later a Bedford campervan,

at locations ranging from Iceland

to Turkey, and often on the west

coast of Britain. In 1973 Gerald

successfully applied for a job in

Stornoway, the capital of Lewis

and Harris, teaching biology and

science at a secondary school,

and they moved there the

following year, Margaret driving

the old van from Suff olk with their

two young children.

In Lewis she became a

peripatetic primary school music

teacher in villages strung out

along a 35-mile road. She was

keen to escape what she saw as

the urbanisation of the English

countryside, and the family

embraced a crofting lifestyle with

a large vegetable garden, chickens,

goats and sheep, making hay and

cutting peat.

They had previously taken a

casual interest in archaeology – the

year before the move Margaret

had volunteered on an excavation

in Suff olk – and they had seen

Calanais on summer holidays.

However, their house was close to

the megaliths, and as a birthday

present for Margaret, Gerald found

a book about standing stones.

Antiquarian curiosity soon became

all-consuming.

The book was Megalithic Sites

The stones

at Calanais,

left, which

Curtis, above,

believed were

aligned with

the midsummer

full moonset

MURDO MACLEOD/

THE GUARDIAN;

STEVE MARSHALL

It’s like

doing a

jigsaw,

every

little bit

gives you

another

insight

into

what was

going on