Collecting Words on Megaliths

This is one of my favourite stones, I call it the 'Lion Stone,' for its face of course, to be found in the  large circle at Stanton Drew Stone Circles.  credit; LS photo

The following I have taken from a book review of a book that seems no longer available, Megalith; Eleven Journeys to the Stone.  Jan Morris, who lives in Wales wrote the following in the introduction.  Just like the way she has crafted her description. I should actually title this 'Looking forward to Going to Solva', images of Wales have flashed through my mind this morning as I peruse lists for books on West Pembrokeshire!  This is what Jan Morris wrote.........

“In their lichened,

faceted faces we see our lineaments; in their

solitariness, our loneliness, or our need to be

alone; in their gregariousness, our

congregational temper; in their alignment,

our deviousness; in their poised mass, our

fragility; in their rootedness, our

deracination; in their age, our ephemerality;

and in their naked outfacing of time and the

elements, a valuable lesson in patient dissent”

Pentre Ifan

Gillian Clarke writing on why she wrote the poem to be found at the end of this blog.


What set me on this stony path was working on a commission to write about a megalith which I’ve known all my life, since early childhood days spent in Pembrokeshire with my grandmother on the farm. The megalith is a massive but elegant cromlech known as Pentre Ifan, in the hills above the Irish Sea. The huge weight of the capstone seems scarcely to touch the orthostats. Within sight of the sea, under the granite outcrop of Carn Meini - source of the bluestones of Stonehenge - Pentre Ifan is a pictogram from the alphabet of stone. I read its silhouette as the very word for cromlech. Carn Meini is formed from igneous granite, as old and as hard as any rock on the planet, an outburst of molten dolerite and rhyolite from the Earth’s mantle. Under Carn Meini the fields slip downhill to the sea, the underlying sedimentary rock blown away in the wind, aeon by aeon, from Carn Meini’s bony shoulders.

And the poem by Gillian Clarke...

Stone

Near the cromlech
lies my favourite.
It’s fallen out with the others,
left out of the circle,
ditched in a damp hollow
like a huge toad
keeping its head down.


Megalith, giant stone.
Nobody knows it’s there,
hidden in long grass
cooling its bluestone bones,
asleep under the sun,
under the stars
for four thousand years.


So when I stroke it,
I’m sure it’s the first time
anyone gave it a friendly scratch
for at least four millennia.
I’m sure its stone heart
is beating under my thumb.
I’m sure it’s breathing.

Gillian Clarke