Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Christmas Reading
My feelings towards the book are mixed, I know his writing from Secret of My Heart and Life in the fields, the former book being an emotionally intense desire to reach the very essence of his soul, the latter a joyous hymn to the intricate wonders of nature.
But what of Wild England, following his mind for me is easy, so here he is constructing a fabled barbaric England from his own beloved landscape, the hero, or perhaps anti-hero, Felix is probably himself. The setting is an Iron age depiction of small territories dominated by overlords, this is not Wm Morris's utopian vision of News From Nowhere, in Jefferies book wild men haunt the forests and woods, slaves serve the illiterate noblemen, there are several castes of people. The shepherds in the hills, the gypsies, the barbaric men in the woods, and lastly small despotic kingdoms carefully guarding the remains of old iron tools, pieces of glass, fragments of manuscripts.
This is the fall of civilisation as seen from a nineteenth century viewpoint, It is a fall of the new industrial Victorian rise to power and domination. He centres this fall on London, for it is here that the worst has happened. Nature has taken over England, impenetrable forests, a great lake sits at its heart, stretching down from the City (which was once Oxford) though now it has a different name, right through the heart of the West country down to London. The lake is a beautiful place with forests down to its sweet waters but when it approaches the great city of London terrible things have happened.
A great sulphorous yellow mist hangs for miles across this last stretch of the Lake, to enter it is to court death. No animal or bird life lives, the waters are black and oily, vegetation rank and dying, great bubbles of noxious gas escape the waters every now and then. London has descended into an evil marsh land, sinking into the depths of its own sewers and basements. Felix enters this terrible landscape at one point and Jefferies eloquently describes how Felix walks across a ground black with a sooty deposit, the remains of long dead people. He touches buildings that crumble to dust, and a great sense of lassitude that is brought on by the foul air, makes him stumble and walk with his back bent.
But perhaps I should go back to the beginning of the story, I have described Felix as an anti-hero, he is the eldest son of a nobleman in Aquila, but he is no brave knight, he would rather read the few precious manuscripts that still exist, or draw his ideas for new fangled inventions. He is often bad tempered and because he is poor, miserable with his lot in life. He loves Aurora who lives in the kingdom of Thyma but he is not seen as a suitable suitor. At the beginning of the book he manages to construct a boat, for he wants to sail round the Lake, which is of course unmapped and discover its length and breadth.
The whole environment of the landscape is painted as hostile, wild dogs, there are three different types that have evolved that now haunt the woods, are liable to attack. Wild pigs and boars are also prolific in the woods and forests, and then there are the human dangers, the Bush men, who, happen to use poison on the tips of their weapons, his material for his fiction writing can be found in the books that he has read.
The Lake must centre on his beloved Coate, and its waters, and sailing on a boat there in his childhood. Here in the book he has changed Coate Waters to an uncharted large inland lake, fed by rivers, dotted with small islands and ringed with cliffs and beaches, in which he, our intrepid hero would sail around and explore. He has adventures on the way, meets with humiliations, but in the end he triumphs.
His braveness in sailing into the terrible territory of London earns him respect and leadership amongst the shepherds that live in the hills. He becomes their overlord, and can muster 8000 men to his service, but he refuses to be their leader, only asking of the tribal elders that he should be their leader in war should it happen. In the final chapter we see him heading back to Thyma to Aurora, for he has found a territory to settle in and build a tower, and the last words are of him setting out through the forest to bring her back.
My mixed feeling for the book comes from that which is brilliant in his description of the landscape and the different world he has conjured up, to perhaps some of the things that he draws upon which are rather imitations of other books. But overall the story is captivating and warrants a full reading from beginning to end to uncover a mind that rebelled against the society he lived within. A mind that constructed another world, not necessarily better, but a different world in which our hero could change some of the injustices and cruelty that abided there.
A poem by Jeremy Hooker - Landscape of the Daylight Moon
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=6418
Jeremy Hooker is a great admirer of Richard Jefferies and has compiled some of his essays into a book which can be found at Green Books.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Christmas Eve
Two more days than it will all be over - thank goodness, everyone will rush out to the sales and life will return to normal. The year has turned the corner, and the days will slowly become light again. Flowers will return, emerging from under the dark soggy leaves. I cannot wait for the return of flowers, the last winter rose hangs forlornly on the trellis but soon there will primroses, ice cold snowdrops, the mauve crocuses with yellow hearts that have been spreading slowly over the years. Dark tips of tulips push up from the earth, hanging catkins from the hazel tree.
This last weekend has been cold, but with marvellous skies in the morning. Dawn, that spiritual time between dark and light is extraodinarily beautiful at this time of year. The great wide skies viewed from the Downs, is a slowly changing painting of colour and shape. The full moon on Saturday, illuminated by the rising sun, had a soft rose pink hue, so different from its cold white colour, it was almost a pale sister of the the sun. Both sun and moon figure together during the winter months, the sun never quite managing to push the moon out of the sky.
Twice over the weekend I have seen the golden plovers leaving their night nesting ground, they rise as one, perfect timing makes their flight an aerobatic wonder, the sound of their wings as they fly overhead is a soft swoosh but you can just hear the sound of an individual wingbeat and the sweet solitary call of - who knows - perhaps their leader.
Propped on my window is a print of "The Uffington Parade" and I am reminded of hares and Wayland Smith and the White Horse that gallops across the hills away from his Manger. She might belong to the goddess Epona, a swift sure footed creature, symbol of power and freedom, the wild exhultation of the wind and the sweetly flowered pastures that she gallops over, summer in full riot, in the print the sun merges with the moon as does the night and day sky and stars float haphazardly over Silbury, the long linking Ridgeway melding the wondrous act of nature with long dead people who over the centuries have created this small piece of the Earth.
Bluebells in the hedgerow
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Dean Merewether's diary.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Nineteen century Poetry on Barrows
Ashen Hill Barrows 'excavated' by Skinner
Hath boundless power to slay,
With hunger, sword, or sad remorse,
Whate'er returns to clay.
But still all Nature pleads in strains,
Which touch the tender heart,
Oh! Spurn not, spurn not the remains,
Of those who've felt the dart!
A grave the Patriarchs demand,
As strangers for their race,
The pyramids in Egypt's land,
Proclaim a resting place.
A lofty mound of earth declares
And who shall disregard their pains
Or funeral rites impair.
for sacred are those spots of ground,
Which to the dead we give,
At the last day the trump shall sound,
And their dry bones shall live.
Stonehenge barrows
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Reverend John Skinner
Friday, December 14, 2007
Winter Poems
The Words of Finn
----
-----
gáeth ard úar,
ro-rúad rath,
ro-gab úacht
It is interesting to see the original Irish and the english translation,, which is a 'near' translation not an equivalent. Language is first and foremost a spoken medium, a storytelling occasion filled with the drama of the words, celtic and saxon bards would use the darkened halls lit only by firelight and candles to convey the strong impressionistic flavour of winter and its rawness.
Belling is descriptive of the noise of the animal, and it occurs in a Celtic tale told of a giant of a man with one eye and only one foot. He is probably a local god modelled on Cernunnos, the stag-headed god.
The story goes that Cynos approaches this giant of a man and asks him "what power he had over the animals". The giant replies 'I will show you little man' upon which he strikes a stag a mighty blow till it gave out a might belling, and in answer to its belling wild animals came till they were as numerous as the stars, a rather beautiful analogy as the animals gathered around.
The giant tells the animals not to graze and and then they 'bowed down their heads and did him obeisance, even as humble servants would do to their lord' These stories were already being interwoven with the christian stories, the myths stranding together.
The Peaked Red One or The Man in the Tree;
There is one more celtic story to tell, this again features Finn, who was walking through a wood one day and happened to spy a man sitting at the top of a tree. A blackbird on his right shoulder, and in his left hand a bronze vessel filled with water, in which swam a skittish trout, and a stag at the bottom of the tree. The man would crack a nut, half of which he ate himself the other half he gave to the blackbird. Then he would take an apple out of the bronze vessel, half of which he ate himself the other half he threw to the stag below. Then he would take a sip of the water in the vessel, as did the stag and the blackbird - they would all drink together.
The followers of Finn asked who this disguised hooded man was. Ann Ross speculates that this 'nurturer of animals' could be attributed to Cernunnos again or the romano-celtic god Vosegus, who has some of the attributes of the man in the tree.
and Grigson's own words on winter...
Two Verses from Thomas Hardy - To the Moon
Monday walk
Early morning
As I have a slightly different routine on monday for walking the dog, I walk nearer home up the slopes of the Lansdown. My walk takes me through several fields to Primrose Hill Wood, a newly established 25 acre wood situated midway between Beckford Tower and Weston.
On saturday I had driven to Braythwaite in freezing weather, a hawk had been sitting hunched and cold on a wire, normally he can be seen hovering with that perfect precision in the wind holding a perfect balance between earth and sky. Half a minute later two great buzzards swooped over the car, the feathered tips of their wings marking their great wingspan. I felt their hunger in the cold morning as they scouted for food. But Monday's weather was misty as we set up the hill.
View towards Kelston Round Hill
Moss in a renactment of last week when he lost a ball down a drain at the end of a track, managed to do it once more to his absolute astonishment, he gazed somewhat disbelievingly into the drain that now holds two of his unretrievable balls.A stick though will be found and his walk will bounce along in its normal way. The path through the fields is well used by walkers and MOD people who work at the old Foxhill outpost along the top of the Lansdown.
Coming up to Primrose Wood you are met by a steel gate fitted into the deer fence that surrounds the wood, there are many deer that live up on the slopes of the Lansdown, the land is not heavily farmed and they range quite freely.
The trees in the wood are now 10 to 12 foot high, and are growing strongly. There has been a 'suburban' hand in the choice and planting of shrubs and trees, a formality that jars one's expectation of a proper wood.
Moss by cotoneaster bush in Primrose Hill Wood
The trust has hung up notices asking for wild plants for insect life such as butterflies. Hemp agrimony I have in the garden and also Dames Violet, or Hesperis Matronalis to give it a more stately name, so next spring I will leave some there. The leaves are off the trees, except for the bright golden yellow of the larch firs, it is just a tracery of branches everywhere with the strong red wands of dogwood shrubs lining the path.
Primrose Wood is part of the linking corridor of woods that are part of the national reforesting scheme, Shiner's Wood under Kelston Hill is another newly planted wood, it will take many years before they achieve maturity and then decline with decaying grace as the old woods do that cling to steep escarpments.
On the way back I meet a dogwalking friend, and as we go through an old iron post gate on the path, he points out deer hair. Apparently last week a frightened deer had tried to force its ways through the 6 inch bars and had of course got jammed. The RSPCA came and hooded the little creature and then with a car jack forced the iron bars wide releasing the trapped animal.
Monday, December 10, 2007
sightlines
The West Kennet longbarrow sightline of Silbury has to be viewed from the far end of the barrow.....
Walking down from East Kennet longbarrow, and according to my photo the sightline just touches the ledge.
Overton bronze age barrow; the top of Silbury glimpsed through the trees
Silbury seen from The Sanctuary, again a sightline can be discerned.
Silbury from Avebury Truesloe - a beautiful sightline - but was it meant?
Saturday, December 8, 2007
A Game of Henge - Stonehenge
A game of Henge, my masters?
Do you see Hangman? Or
It's your move. You're in the ring
You want out? Good - that's
And whichever world you stumble into
Stonehenge Today
Collecting theories
Thumbing through my Flick'r account looking at photos last week, I came across the following comment which had been posted a few days ago. The photo is of a ridge with rocks protruding that reminded me of teeth, and absentmindly I had tagged it that it reminded me of Denke G. His theory of Stonehenge, or at least his dentist ancestor theories of the 17th century is another of those speculations that is worth collecting.I question his statement that ring ouzels and snow buntings are common migrants to Wales, but there again his Stonehenge theory is also very questionable.
Denke says;
Composed of hard Ordovician shale and mudstone compressed into slates with scattered fragments of rhyolite and dolerite - the famous bluestone that forms the inner ring of German dentist, historian and antiquarian Dr. Garry W. Denke's (1622-1699) great white shark teeth of Stonehenge - the Preseli Hills are the highest hills in Pembroke.The crag of Carn Menyn is the source of the Stonehenge pillars and nearby Bedd Arthur is the Preseli's own, rather unusual, eye-shaped stone circle.
There's a memorial to Welsh language poet Waldo Williams at Mynachlogddu. If you're lucky to get clear weather, you'll be able to see north to the Lleyn peninsula and west to the hills of Co. Wicklow in Ireland.
Keep your eyes peeled on the hill though as the bird life, particularly in the winter months, can be remarkable with living clouds of starlings congregating to roost there.Also look out for hunting buzzards and sparrowhawks. In the spring ring ouzel and snow bunting are common migrants.
Much of the upland is boggy and, as a result, very acidic so you can find rare acid tolerant plants like fir clubmoss, liverwort, ferns and orchids with insects like the marsh fritillary butterfly and the southern damselfly. Heather carpets the drier heathland in late summer look out for buzzards, kestrels, curlews, ravens and skylarks.
A very nice photo, thank you much.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Richard Jefferies - Life in the Fields
A hymn to summer days
as I walked over the weekend in driving rain and wind, I remembered reading in Jefferies essays about the "harp of the earth" the natural sounds of the world around. Listening to the wind through the different branches of trees is something we should all do, even as it whistles in a storm and the rain beats down....
All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk arises, the pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush past, and the resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them along. About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm; and the fern-owls at dusk,and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce their legions while they last. Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which is theirs! Heavy moths burring at the edge of the copse; green, and red, and gold flies: gnats, like smoke, around the tree-tops; midges so thick over the brook, as if you could haul a netful; tiny leaping creatures in the grass; bronze beetles across the path; blue dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of water-plantain. Blue jays flitting, a magpie drooping across from elm to elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot blundering up into the branches; missel thrushes leading their fledglings, already strong on the wing, from field to field. An egg here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red ladybird creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond.Finches undulating through the air, shooting themselves with closed wings, and linnets happy with their young.
Golden dandelion discs--gold and orange--of a hue more beautiful, I think, than the higher and more visible buttercup. A blackbird, gleaming,so black is he, splashing in the runlet of water across the gateway. A ruddy kingfisher swiftly drawing himself as you might draw a stroke witha pencil, over the surface of the yellow buttercups, and away above the hedge. Hart's-tongue fern, thick with green, so green as to be thick with its colour, deep in the ditch under the shady hazel boughs. White meadow-sweet lifting its tiny florets, and black-flowered sedges. You must push through the reed grass to find the sword-flags; the stout willow-herbs will not be trampled down, but resist the foot like underwood. Pink lychnis flowers behind the withy stoles, and little black moorhens swim away, as you gather it, after their mother, who has dived under the water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of the duckweed.Yellow loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey stands at the very edge; the sandpipers run where the shore is free from bushes. Back by the underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will presently present us with fruit.For the squirrels the nuts are forming, green beech mast is there--green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns. Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As Iwrite them, so these things come--not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass.
Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet lady's-bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-bush. The broad repetition of the yellow clover is not to be written; acre upon acre, and not one spot of green, as if all the green had been planed away, leaving only the flowers to which the bees come by the thousand from far and near. But one white campion stands in the midst of the lake of yellow. The field is scented as though a hundred hives of honey had been emptied on it. Along the mound by it the bluebells are seeding, the hedge has been cut and the ground is strewn with twigs. Among those seeding bluebells and dry twigs and mosses I think a titlark has his nest, as he stays all day there and in the oak over. The pale clear yellow of charlock, sharp and clear, promises the finches bushels of seed for their young. Under the scarlet of the poppies the larks run, and then for change of colour soar into the blue. Creamy honeysuckle on the hedge around the cornfield, buds of wild rose everywhere, but no sweet petal yet. Yonder, where the wheat can climb no higher up the slope, are the purple heath-bells, thyme and flitting stonechats.
The lone barn shut off by acres of barley is noisy with sparrows. It is their city, and there is a nest in every crevice, almost under every tile. Sometimes the partridges run between the ricks, and when the bats come out of the roof, leverets play in the waggon-track. At even a fern-owl beats by, passing close to the eaves whence the moths issue. On the narrow waggon-track which descends along a coombe and is worn in chalk, the heat pours down by day as if an invisible lens in the atmosphere focussed the sun's rays. Strong woody knapweed endures it, so does toadflax and pale blue scabious, and wild mignonette. The very sun of Spain burns and burns and ripens the wheat on the edge of the coombe,and will only let the spring moisten a yard or two around it; but there a few rushes have sprung, and in the water itself brooklime with blue flowers grows so thickly that nothing but a bird could find space to drink. So down again from this sun of Spain to woody coverts where the wild hops are blocking every avenue, and green-flowered bryony would fain climb to the trees; where grey-flecked ivy winds spirally about the red rugged bark of pines, where burdocks fight for the footpath, and teazle-heads look over the low hedges. Brake-fern rises five feet high; in some way woodpeckers are associated with brake, and there seem more of them where it flourishes. Ifyou count the depth and strength of its roots in the loamy sand, add the thickness of its flattened stem, and the width of its branching fronds, you may say that it comes near to be a little tree. Beneath where the ponds are bushy mare's-tails grow, and on the moist banks jointed pewterwort;
....
Ladies bedstraw on Stoney Littleton
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Silbury Hill
The link below will take you to William Long's article on Abury, and Silbury. The fascinating thing about these nineteen century articles, is that they mirror the same interest in old stones that we have today. And it is a sobering thought that though we may laugh at their Victorian findings based on the knowledge of that century, it is as well to remember the same may happen to us from the 22nd century, our knowledge is just as scant.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ADYGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA338&lpg=PA338&dq=beisgawen&source=web&ots=SLxlifITB3&sig=O6U_m-DtsDXs2iwP5Y8ud_--f7U#PPA337,M1
Two points are of interest, the first is that Merewether mentioned that there were stones around the monument of Silbury. Long refutes this, saying that he was mistaken, and that had Merewether lived he would have amended this. On reading Dean Merewether's diary, what he actually said was that he had heard from others that there had been stones round Silbury, hearsay in other words. Given the extensive roman settlement round Silbury, the stones (if any) would probably have been removed.
The second point is the recent finds in Silbury of small sarsens, though one did in actual fact need two men to lift it. Our barrow-robbing Dean Merewether in his diary has words on this as well, his diary is both informative and a record of what he saw of the excavation and he says this of the primary mound when it was reached by the earlier tunnel...
"I therefore directed that a chamber be cut at right angles with the tunnel on the right hand, following the dip of the primary heap. In this many sarsen stones were discovered, some of them placed with their concave surface downwards, favouring the line of the heap, as is seen frequently in small barrows; and casing, as it were the mound. On the top of some of these were observed fragments of bones, and small sticks, as of bushes, and I am strongly disposed to think of mistletoe and two or three pieces of the ribs either of the ox or red deer, in a sound and unusually compact state, and also the tine of an antler in good state.......
This having been worked as far as seemed necessary, another cutting was commenced on the opposite side, and following the curve of the heaping up of the central cone. In all of these the sarsen stones were similarly disposed
Similar 'edging or kerbing stones' are found elsewhere, Charmy Down barrows excavated in the 1960s show similar kerbing.
The third point, this time made by William Long, is a brief reference to what seems to be a 'druid's barrow' on the opposite side of the road to Silbury, this could in actual fact be Silbaby,
as seen as a small double circle underneath the Roman road just to the east of Silbury on the following plate;
http://www.avebury-web.co.uk/plates/plate6.html
Reading Stukeley's words on this, and to be quite honest there is some confusion as to which druid's barrow he meant, or at least at what point a barrow was subsequently 'run over' by a roman road, but it seems that the roman road from Beckhampton to Devizes is the one he meant, where the 'crown' of a barrow is excavated into.
It does'nt really answer whether Silbaby was or is a barrow but it gives credence to the fact that the romans were quite capable of digging into a barrow should it be in the way.
Chapter 6 William Stukeley - Abury;
Beckhampton/Devizes Road; For this road is not finished though mentioned in Anton.It. only chalked out as we may properly say. Moreover the workmen for readiness have par'd off above of a sepulchral barrow on the right hand, of a very finely turne'd bell-like form, to make use of the earth....
...I could well enough discern from which point the roman workmen carry'd this way, by observing the discontinuity of their little pits, on account of the m,aterials they took from the large barrow viz Cunetio, Marlborough, to Verlucio Hedington and so to Bath....
Merewether's tunnel, though in reality it was others that dug and supervised it; the following is his account in his diary of the first digging of the tunnel;
The first 75 feet were cut through the natural and compact bed of chalk - the structure of the original hill; but at that distance the upper line of the tunnel cut into the surface of the original hill, which was clearly marked by the vegetable mould, and upon that by a layer of bluish clay about 2 inches thick, very soft and tenacious, which represented evidently the decayed and compressed turf and grass of the former surface of the hill; above this was the brownish earthy, chalky rubble, the artificial component of the mound differing from that nearer to the centre.....
http://tinyurl.com/3cmmyp
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Travelling to Whitby
Listening on the radio early this morning to a programme about Whitby and its Gothic image reminded me that I had been at the gothic festival there last year. My daughter migrated to Whitby several years ago after having fallen in love with the place, and she now lives with her family in a tall terraced house overlooking the harbour and Whitby Abbey.
Occasionally I take the long train journey down there, an adventure in itself, starting at Bath Spa station. Next cold Bristol platform waiting for the Newcastle train which will take about five hours to reach York. It plods slowly through the countryside, the welsh hills are soon left behind, Cheltenham a quick stop, past the Malverns and then into the black hole of Birmingham station. It looks like a hell on earth, dark, concreted, with people moving bleakly around. Here the train gets full, they squeeze past with vast amounts of luggage that will not fit in the central areas. Should a reserved seat already have an intruder in it, there will be the comedy of the reclamation of said seat, and a lot of shuffling around as people try to find other seats. Business people will sit, laptop placed on the little table, doing important things, mobile phones will ring and other peoples lives will be enacted publicly.
But now we are all settled; out of the suburbs of Birmingham and heading through the Midland plain, here the fields still show the rig and furrow of the medieval period and the scenery is on the whole boring... Now we are in the gritstone country of Derbyshire, the train has followed the rivers up from Birmingham, and in winter the fields are often flooded through the Midlands, the rivers themselves are murky brown flecked white with foam, rubbish caught up in trailing branches. Sheffield, Doncaster and then over the Vale of York to arrive in York station.
Here, my journey may take the route of a two hour bus ride over the Yorkshire Moors.
This is a Postman Pat's Yorkshire, up and down dale, over tiny bridges with becks tumbling down over the rocks. We visit each and every village, picking up people with shopping, sometimes with dogs, sometimes with children. Past the brooding menace of the 'watching eye on the world' at Fylingthorpe, its square tapered monolithic shape reminds one of a great pyramid stuck in the centre of the moors.
Fylingsdale
There is no brightly coloured protestors bus in the layby, they seem to have departed these bleak brown moors.
Tumulus can be seen dotted around amongst the heather, rocks lace their way through, water leaks from the earth through the soft velvet patches of green grass, nibbled short by the sheep that nonchalantly hang about the tiny roads. But there is one place I would visit on these moors if I had my faithful companion with me, and that would be Holcrum Hole, a vast ampitheatre hollowed out of the moor as if some gigantic meterorite had landed from outer space.. It entices you to walk down into this other world, the experience of standing in a giant cup surruounded by hills.
Down off the moors the bus goes, the sea is in the distance, we fold down through a stream of villages and then arrive in Whitby.
Whitby is a fishing town, but to my nose it smells of chips, full too bursting point in summer with tourists winding their way through narrow streets. It is a northern holiday resort, a vast confectionery of northern people, children and dogs. Shops have enough tat on offer to last you a lifetime, fish shops let out a pungent smell, candyfloss and amusement arcades, chips to be skewered on plastic forks whilst sat out on the esplanade. It is a rollicking english scene, and if you go in November the added drama of the Goths. They parade their splendour up and down the streets, dark nights- Halloween, ghosts, black dogs, 199 steps and of course Dracula, to take that sip from a white throat - here we have good old pagan England gathering in a historic setting to have a festival.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Stars in the bluestones
Constable - Stonehenge
http://www.archaeology.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=26
Stars captured in the bluestones at Stonehenge, that is what Timothy Darvill speculates upon in the above article in Current Archaeology.
"the Carn Menyn summit is especially striking, forming an envelope of gateways, places of transition around the summit, whose fingers of shattered dolorite form a dramatic skyline to the peak, resembling the natural stone portals to some kind of peak sanctuary. In lectures Tim teases his audience with possible explanations, asking ‘is this perhaps the abode of the gods, or the birthplace of the ancestors?’".
In this paragraph he sees the jagged rocks of Carn Menyn as a place of 'transition' moving through space into another world, ancestral maybe, the rocks reflecting the bones of the dead to be carried afar and then 'renewed'.
Here is an outcrop of rock on Carn Meyn, covered in lichens that had grown over the centuries, protruding from this rock was white fledspar, a good candidate for stars in the sky. Could the blue of the stone reflect such crystals, turning them into a starry night, somehow this seems a somewhat romanticised view, is'nt it enough for the gleaming white crystals to have held their own magic.
the effect probably only comes from newly quarried stone, when the stone
is a soft dark blue, "a rockbound equivalent of the stars of the night sky, a Milky Way trapped in stone?" its a nice image, it blows away the cobwebs of ones mind caught up in countless strands of speculation, and focuses an image of starry bound stones. If this be so, a great deal of blood and sweat must have gone in transporting them down to the plains of Wiltshire, but as ever there could be a modicum of truth there, for to look at the horseshoe shape of Bedd Arthur,
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/45/images/bedd_arthur.html
is to be reminded of the horseshoe of the inner settings at Stonehenge.
Moss brooding with great insight on the scenery around him, for once he sat for a long time without wanting to move on, there again given a dogs brain he could just have been tired out, at least he got to drink from one of the 'magical' springs.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Windmill Hill
I must have walked up to it in February of this year, from Avebury, past the church, over the bridge at Avebury Truesloe and then down the lane past the expensive cottages. Up the track with Moss, meeting a rider leading a horse, and then through the gate into this site. Its unprepossessing appearance is a first response, the barrows in the centre mark it out, but it ditches and banks are small. Looking at the recent book that has come out, and I note that Keiller who excavated some of the bank and ditches, restored them after the excavation was finished. In one photograph there are great piles of snowy white chalk spoil heaped in the background, and it is well to remember that what you see, may not necessarily be as it was. The same can be said of the barrows, one is supposed to have had a windmill on it, hence the name, they to have been much degraded, probably by farming.
Yet forgetting these petty criticisms, the photos that he took of the bones, mostly animal, at the bottom of the ditches, are a sharp reminder of past lives. There is a skeleton of a man lying casually on the original ground level beneath the bank. Another of a childs skeleton. Dog bones, oxen, some pig and sheep/goat are also to be found......
Monday, November 12, 2007
Edward Thomas - Spirit of Place - Cornwall
The following are short extracts from The South Country written by Edward Thomas when he travelled in Cornwall. His prose has the magical touch of Jefferies, and Thomas did indeed write a biography of Jefferies. Strangely when I was looking for a piece of writing for today, Rememberance Sunday, I was looking for Siegfried Sassoon's bleak poetry on war, but listening to some evocative music on the radio by Butterworth "The Banks of Green Willow" it struck me that what so many soldiers died for in the Great War was this marvellous expression of love and empathy for a countryside full of summer flowers and a history that stretched back in time.Thomas writes about the bronze age barrows that are strung along the cliff tops looking outward to sea, his prehistory is somewhat muddled, Beowulf is alluded to, and a lovely extract on a stone circle evokes druids the inscription upon the chair of the Bards of Beisgawen was 'Nothing is that is not for ever and ever'. Poetical licence must be granted in lieu of the truth, the factual accounting of today which drags the mind away from lilting prose should be set aside...
On the barrows themselves, which are either isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle and gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. In their sight the great headland run out to sea and sinking seem to rise again a few miles out in a sheer island, so that they resemble couchant beasts with backs under water but heads and haunches upreared .......
....and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened as by a harrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-covered isles; donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks rise and fall and curlews go by; a cuckoo sings amongst the deserted mines. But the barrows are most noble on the high heather and grass. The lonely turf is full of lilace scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the solid mounds of gorse. The brown-green-grey of the dry summer grass reveals myriads of the flowers of the thyme, of stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright, of golden lady's fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest and earthest of all fragrances
On every hand lies cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten years. They are confused and and mingled with the natural litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, a senseless cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk as animals must do when they see those valleys full of skeleton where their kind are said to go punctually to die. There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the living, and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the typpanum with ambigous fatal voices. At the end of this many barrowed moor, yet not in it, there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where the cry of the past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the moor itself, but more intense. Nineteen tall, grey stones stand round a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst long grass and bracken and furze. A track passes close by, but does not enter the circle; the grass is unbent except by the wieght of its bloom. It bears a name that connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards of Britain. Here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon the stones, tall fair men of peace, but half warriors, whose songs could change ploughshares into sword. Here they met, and the growth of the grass, the perfection of the stones(except that one stoops as with age), and the silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, in robe of blue or white or green - the colours of sky and cloud and grass upon this fair day - the circle has been unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade any but a bard to enter it........And the inscription on the chair of the bards of Beisgawen was "nothing is that is not for ever and ever" - these things and the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of the sun, and the green bough and grass, hallowed the ancient stones, and clearer than any vision of tall bards in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of being thus ' teased out of time' in the presence of this ancientness,....
The Stone circle of Beisgawen is in actual fact Boscawen -Un
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/229/boskawenun.html
The Banks of Green Willows.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q9dz1kse8
Thursday, November 8, 2007
A Dark Afternoon.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
A brown ringed snail
When out walking on the Lansdown, I often come across groups of these little snails clinging to stalks or blades of grass. They cluster in the early morning sun, high above the wet turf. There is something vulnerable about them, light enough to cling to grass stalks, they seem a reminder of an ancient past.
I had spied such snails around the Kennet at Silbury. The river was in full flood, and wading through the water on the path I had noticed snails clinging to the blades of grass. At the time I thought it was because they were trying to escape the flood water, and I remembered all the snail shells that had been trapped inside Silbury, generations of them stretching right back to when it had been built.
These small innocous creatures, would also have been round in prehistory to delight the children with the pattern of the shells; perhaps they made necklaces out of them, or chalked on the stone their weird round shapes.
It is a humbling experience when reading all the daft theories that people come up with regarding prehistory, to remember these little shells and their quiet constant presence in the cyclical nature of time.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Natural Sacred Places
-------------------------------------------------
The drama of stones at Avebury;
One of the great stones left on Fyfield Down
The fallen 'Fisher' Stone by the track from the Ridgeway
The enigmatic Cove Stones - the female stone is calculated at over 100 tons
Ghostly stones dancing in front of the church