Susan Brind Morrow January 2026

1. Prehistoric Monuments

Last year in April I went to see an old friend, David Sims, an urban planner who is based in Cairo and works all over the world. David has written books about the failure of development- a question that should be a focus of discussion now with the great waves of migration coming from the parts of the world that David has worked in for decades, working on cities that have attempted to modernize, and yet fail to absorb the populations they were created for.

In the south of Egypt where we used to live the mud-brick villages made of hand mixed brick of mud and straw, plastered and decorated by hand for thousands of years, have in recent years been bulldozed down and replaced by row upon row of identical concrete apartment buildings with wire cables sticking out of the roofs.

David lives part of the year now in France ten miles from Lascaux. I have long been drawn to prehistoric monuments in the naturally occurring formations that people have used over millennia as shrines and houses and the traces people have left in them. You can never know what actually happened in these places- how and why they were created- but it is wonderful just to be in them and feel the mystery that is humanity itself.

I went over to France to visit David and take a look at them. Some of the time we worked weeding the gardens within the high stone walls around his house. But the rest of the time I drove around the Montignac area of the Perigord to visit the caves and overhangs where paintings and works in relief are found.

The river was flooding in Montignac where streets were closed and made the trek of going here and there to see the caves a gamble- as you could suddenly find yourself stuck somewhere as the water erratically rose along the escarpment of grey rock streaked with black, a strange, even supernatural sight.

What stays with me now thinking back on the time is not the chaos of the crowded images of herd animals variously painted in black and white and red at Lascaux, with its weird scene of- evidently- a reading of entrails by a magician with a bird mask and staff collapsing in a trance in a deep hidden shaft of the cave-

But the shockingly naturalistic relief of horses carved in pure white limestone nearby in a hidden cliff overhang, their lips and cheeks and limbs perfectly rendered as though alive, horses layered as though moving forward together- and was it a pack of ravening wolves that approached them from behind?

And the images of woolly rhinos and mastodons tiny and perfectly detailed, carved into the walls of corridors leading down deeper and deeper into another dark cave. I thought of the pictures on walls that magically come to life in The Boy who Drew Cats. These images of living things were closely observed in the light of day and astonishingly executed in the dark with primitive tools and great skill obviously by real professionals- people who knew what they were doing in creating these lifelike images that are unsurpassed today, who knows for what reason. In other words what you see is the sophistication, the skill, of innately talented people working in a learned art. That is undeniable, although the knowledge of what their purpose was is forever lost.

Summer found me in the Burren on the west coast of Ireland, which is one of the most aesthetically pleasing landscapes in the world, and like the Perigord is made of limestone pocked with caves- a bone-white open canyon extending for miles along the sea. The Burren is little known, though it is known as a place where writers, Yeats and Joyce among them, have come to write, looking out on the Aran Islands and the Cliffs of Mohr and Galway Bay.

The hills are spun of a white grey early stage limestone called karst that lies in bare lined circular heaps of rock- thickly embedded with the sea fossils whose shattered bones became the rock itself- and as I dimly remember were the origin of the kaolin clay that became porcelain in the similar karst hills of China.

I lived for a month in a house surrounded by the canyon like walls of the Burren where there are, the government literature says, 700 prehistoric stone monuments- stone circles and tables and tombs.

Outside my window, after the morning fog and rain, rainbows rose straight up from the sea. In the evening, as it stayed light til 11:00 in this northern part of the world, I drove down the narrow coast road along the cliffs of the headland at Blackhead- where you run right beside the sea and every time feel a thrilling sense of freedom with the wind pouring in through the open windows.

There are three hills that rise before you like presences of bare white rock with shadows running over them as you round the dangerous curve of the cliff and could easily fly off into the water below. Delicate Arctic wildflowers grow in the cracks of the rock pavement above- where lies a hidden dolman, the oldest prehistoric monument around. It is something like a giant’s table- three enormous limestone slabs propped together as a communal tomb.

But what strikes you about it, beyond the silence and the light hauntingly familiar fragrance of the pale delicate flowers- is the kind of handmade quality it has, rising from the stone pavement it was made of. This mystery of early engineering has a quality of recognizable simplicity, of the high intelligence and skill- the vulnerable, delicate human sense of beauty, which is like the beauty of nature itself reflected in the symmetry of the circular orange lichen speckling the rock. The mind in the timeless perception and expression of beauty.

Art is the Latin word for the Greek word tekne, skill. The Greeks had a word for human excellence, arete. That excellence is what lies behind the creation of the prehistoric monuments of Europe- creations of the human hand and eye and mind- an excellence that outlasts time, and for which there is no artificial substitute in the world.