Finca Banega

Today John Simmons and Stuart Delves are in Spain with the Dark Angels advanced group and I’m preparing to leave for Hyderabad in the morning. It has been a strange day, knowing they’re there in that beautiful place, basking in warm autumn sunshine. Much of the time I’ve been wishing heartily I was with them. But I have a different journey to make, and there’s much to look forward to in India.

Right now though, on a grey afternoon in Perthshire, I’m feeling in limbo, caught between those two worlds – or should I say continents. Perhaps because I’ve been to Spain more recently, my thoughts are pulled to southern Europe, and in particular to the private finca that a small group of students will visit tomorrow morning. It’s a beautiful stretch of wild, rolling countryside, mantled with small oak trees, and populated by lazy cattle and black Iberian pigs. A good five miles down a dirt track stands the cortijo, an elegant whitewashed house with a terracotta roof and a large central courtyard. It was built sixty or seventy years ago entirely from materials found on the estate, not just the stone and timber, but even the clay from which the floor tiles were fired.

The land at Finca Banega has been generous with its resources for a long time. Up the hill from the house is a Roman quarry where you can still see the shapes of the millstones that were hewn from the granite, two thousand years ago. The first time we went there, six years ago, and climbed the hill, I was transported back at once. Later, I imagined this scene that might have played itself out there:

We woke at first light

Gracchus and I

Shivered in the Iberian dawn

Unfurled our cloaks

Rose yawning from the bony ground

And broke our fast with sweet, ripe figs

Plucked from the tree

Still cool with dew

Mist hung like bull’s breath

Among the holm oaks

As we hefted satchels on our backs

And climbed the rock-strewn path

Scattering sleepy piglets at our step

Sun rose, shadows melted

Light trickled down the hill

Warming the dust-dry earth

And on the scrawny plain below

Goat bells broke the silence

With their gurgling song

Ahead, a pocked loaf of granite

Reared into the deepening blue

In its shadow lesser boulders

Crouched like pagan worshippers

We downed our satchels, lit a fire

And cooked our porridge

In a haze of aromatic smoke

A small brown scorpion

Scuttled from a crevice

And watched us as we ate

Gracchus crushed it with his sandal

We spat on hands and set to work

All that long hot morning

We bored stone

Wrestling augers

Till our muscles cracked

The air grew thick with dust

And sweat ran down our backs

Our necks and thighs

When the holes were deep enough

I took the twenty-seven oaken pegs

And hammered hard

Driving them one by one

Into their beds of stone

Gracchus lugged the leather bucket

To the spring

Filling it with sweet cool water

That would swell the oak

And split the rock

And conjure rough-hewn millstones

To grind our daily bread

At last we rested in the shade

Dreaming of wives and home

We waited as the sun beat down

And nature’s forces took their course

While far from this forgotten place

Amid the seven hills of Rome

More skilful hands than ours

Made gods of men

And carved their likenesses

In marble from Liguria