Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Valerie Nieman writes about Upon the Corner of the Moon from Regal House.
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For Love of Small Museums
A chance discovery that the historical Macbeths were not as depicted by Shakespeare sent me on a long quest to find and write their stories, culminating in the release of Upon the Corner of the Moon in March. That meant a great deal of research, as my background was in journalism rather than history. Good thing I like digging around in fusty books!
This all began so long ago that it was not the internet but interlibrary loan where I got my information. I bought and borrowed and read my way toward an understanding of the early medieval period in northern Europe. I had the fabric of the historical record, threadbare as it was, but lacked the fictional embroidery of setting and culture on which to build character and plot.
The phrase “if you know you know” should be “if you don’t know that you don’t know, then you’ll never know.” And I knew how little I knew, so it was time to shoulder that backpack and head to Scotland.
During the course of two month-long wanders, I visited many of the great museums – the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, Kelvingrove Museum. My first day in the country, in 2014, I went to the Hunterian Museum where I strolled among the paintings and saw an exhibit on Scottish gold, quite a bit of which was found as nuggets and placer deposits and turned into torcs and other finery. These museums were awe-inspiring, as expected. I took photos and typed up notes. But on my two hiking expeditions the length and breadth of Scotland, I found myself enchanted by small, quirky, local museums.
I began with a hike of the Great Glen Way. That coast-to-coast path connected me with the Highlands, gathering scenery and the anecdotes of people met along the way. I saw the thick moss-draped forests of the west, was restored by ginger tea and biscuits when what seemed like a miraculous teahouse appeared deep in the Abriachan woods, ate local venison, drank water that leaped from the top of the mountains.
After 77 miles in five days, it was time for a respite in Inverness before I took the train north. At Thurso, an exhibit of Pictish stones allowed me to see them up close and personal. Ferries took me on to Orkney. Skara Brae unfolded Neolithic history, with intricately carved stone balls that seem like artifacts of an advanced civilization and the complicated tale of Pictish and Norse settlement and the Christianizing efforts of monks whose presence left the name “Papa” on three Orkney islands. I saw an ancient breed of sheep that live off seaweed and picked my way up stony beaches to brochs still standing watch over the brooding seas.
I returned to the Macbeth homeland in northeastern Scotland, and was enchanted by the unique collection at the Elgin Museum, Scotland’s oldest. This “Cabinet of Curiosities” was not some prince’s collection, but the fruit of a desire by local people for “the collection of preservation of objects of Science and Virtue.” An admiral, banker, bookseller, and other men met in 1836 and oversaw construction of the Italianate building, expanded repeatedly since its opening in 1843. The building, today a Category A listed property, was paid off by the efforts of Elgin women running a bazaar!
While I wasn’t interested in the Peruvian mummy nor the shrunken head, I was fascinated by the Iron Age and Pictish materials, including bones in a cist burial, St. Ninian’s hoard, sculpted stones, and elaborate Pictish jewelry. I was allowed to take photographs, once I’d signed an agreement not to publish them without permission. There and elsewhere, volunteer docents guided and instructed, adding local detail to the printed material. Their efforts are not nearly as honored as they should be.
That first trip also included the ruins of the fort at Burghead, home of the awe-inspiring relief carvings known collectively as the Burghead bulls, now dispersed to major museums across the country. On the other side of the country, I visited the site of Dunollie, a stronghold of the Dál Riatan invaders who would burst upon the Pictish kingdom and shape a new realm called Alba. Among the archeological finds from that site was a stone with the imprint of a foot, upon which the king once stood to be “married” to the land. On Mull, the candy-hued village of Tobermory had a tiny museum, tucked among tourist shops, with lots of information on geology, archeology, and local maritime history.
Finally, Iona. Much remains, the St. Martin and St. John crosses, the vallum that demarcated the monastery boundaries, the mound where St. Columba built his writing hut — now a grassy hill on which children shout and people pose for photographs. Columba’s well still exists, a baptismal site that may have been a pagan shrine before. Grave slabs and cross slabs have mostly been moved inside the museum. Most evocative was the burial ground of kings, the Reilig Òdrain, named for the saint’s companion who had himself buried alive to ensure the chapel’s foundations would stand. Here was Macbeth’s final resting place, among the bones of dozens of rightful Scot, Pict, and Norse kings.
I went home to write, and read, and write. My research library burst its banks and settled in piles on the floor. The book was in yet another revision, as it still hadn’t found a home.
I returned to Scotland in 2023, devoted several days to the National Library and the National Museum in Edinburgh, but also making my way to sites connected with the times and places of the Macbeth story.
At Abernethy, the small museum illuminated traditional farming methods, the growing and processing of flax, and weaving techniques. Periods from the Roman to the present were represented. I was given the heavy iron key to open the door to an 11th century round tower, which Macbeth himself perhaps might have seen, and make my way up the narrow stairs to the roof and a view of the farmlands around.
St. Andrews is a holy site for golfers, but I made the pilgrimage to see the rock-cordoned promontory where an ancient cathedral had stood before being replaced by another, itself now ruined. This place of ecclesiastical and secular power once called Kilrymont appears several times in Upon the Corner of the Moon and The Last Highland King, which will complete the story when it’s published in 2027. In the cathedral museum, St. Andrew’s Sarcophagus was as haunting as I expected, a Pictish monument with relief sculptures of lions and wolves and hunters wielding swords and spears. The sarcophagus never held the remains of St. Andrew (though his relics were brought there and remain at the cathedral) but might have been the tomb of the 8th century King Onuist.
The history of the Kingdom of Strathclyde is recorded in stone at Govan Old Church on the River Clyde in Glasgow. Carved slabs and burial chambers, removed from the graveyard to preserve them, include Constantine’s Sarcophagus with its hunting scene and a number of “hogback” sarcophagi, their shape perhaps meant to emulate overturned boats. Carved as early as the 9th century, these stones record the violent period when the British Kingdom of Strathclyde struggled with Viking invaders before becoming part of Alba, or Scotland.
Many other sites from Arran to Cromarty bulked up my notebooks and photo files, but I’ll mention only Groam House, an independent museum in the seaside hamlet of Rosemarkie on the Black Isle north of Inverness. Its collection centers on the spectacular Rosemarkie Stone, nine feet of red sandstone intricately carved with Pictish symbols, geometric motifs, and Christian crosses. The museum also has excellent explanations and illustrations of Pictish culture at this major early Christian site.
My research journey was woven from many threads: traditional research, site visits, encounters with the land and landscape. But there’s another collection that the historical fiction scholar should access, and that’s the information held in the community itself, in its history and legends and folkways. Here you’ll find St. Aethan’s well … that’s where they carry the burning clavie through town on Old New Year’s … that rock they call Fingal’s Dogstone, where he tied his hunting dog … the green stones you find on Iona’s beach are Columba’s tears, that can save you from drowning … so many bits of lore, artifacts that I collected as assiduously as any Victorian enthusiast to display in the pages of my books.
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Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater won the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award and was a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist. Her critically acclaimed work includes To the Bones, Blood Clay (Eric Hoffer Award), and collections of poetry and short fiction. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she is professor emerita at NC A&T State University.