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The Wellow brook at Stoney Littleton |
Yesterday I went for a talk at the Folklore Centre, it was about Antiquarian Psychogeography the application of the mind, also emotional response, as to what you see around you. Not quite an 'ology' but near. As an aside I have done two 'ologies' - sociology and archaeology. So in theory I can group people socially into their class or background or in the case of archaeology, address the history of man through the layered pancake we call history. So be it.
But I always question words as you well know if you read my blog at all. And rather than the pretentious word 'psycho' joined on to geography I prefer to use the term 'sense of place'. It is the way when out walking in an urban setting or out in the open country I feel the world around me. You will see below that I have tackled my responses to my environment, the phenomenology of things which somehow seems nearer to what sense of place means.
Funnily enough it was Andrew the other day, someone who strides ahead purposefully on his walk without taking a blind bit of notice where he is walking through (yes I nag him to see), said out of nowhere, yes since I have got that app 'Merlin' I listen to the birds and now need to name them. ;)
Two words have trickled into my mind as I think - Anima Mundi, the World's Soul is perhaps the doctrine that sits behind all this, the everlasting strain of the human minds that seeks to explain the world and our thinking in it.
John Billingsley the lecturer had to turn skillfully on his subject because psychogeography is related to urban understanding and only recently to landscape depiction, so we would find psychography + megalithic as an outlier.
So one of the 'intellectual' (excuse my sarcastic italics) Will Self did it in his London walkabouts. And a very much more genuine person in the form of 'The Wandering Turnip' did it in his analysis of towns and the breakdown of the closure of shops in the High street.
I of course read my sense of space through the medium of the prehistoric stones and Neolithic long barrows I have visited, Wayland Smithy's barrow lying in peace in the middle of the countryside, or Stoney Littleton Barrow, time and time again. Places visited by those who are enthusiastic over the old stones and the sense of times gone by. And maybe, somewhat sort of magic that radiates from the stone, maybe of course it is just radon!
North Stoke: Phenomenology
North Stoke: Tuesday and retrospective words
North Stoke: This and that