It dropped through the post this morning, I had been anticipating the book the last few days - The Waters of the Gap by R.J.Stewart. Coffee stained, costing 1p plus postage, not the most expensive book, last time I had read it was a Bath library copy published by Bath City Council in 1981. The cover says Magic, Mythology and the Celtic Heritage, yet its tales are far more distinguished and erudite than a lot of the nonsense that is written round the gods and goddesses of Celtic realms.
Also shuffled through my books for another book of Irish mythology that I had sent off for recently, I have had to renew several books. It was published in 1970, and I can never spell Irish names, so its cover...
Each tell their tales of mythology, wrapped round the artifacts of the past, little ducks on Iron Age jugs being menaced by creatures, stories wrapped round every day things, and scary altars of 'heads', when ever you hear people argue about the usage of Celtic, just look at the jewellery featured throughout this blog recently and question why such a word cannot be used.....
And then this book caught my eye as I sat on the floor hunting other books,( so much reading to do), and I came across the poet Basil Bunting, who had written a book called Briggflat, set up North...
But what really prompted me was a Youtube video of 'Roman Bath' clever, but it has not even acknowledged Celtic Bath with its typically Roman clad figures in the video forgetting the Romano-British people who also wandered in and out of the portico of the temple, their gods blending, seamlessly? perhaps not, but at least they would have remembered the old pagan gods and goddess Sulis who became the equivalent of the goddess Minerva. So I tidied up my Aqua Sulis blog last week, which has had a couple of thousand visits, for the rich decoration to be found in the excavation of the baths is not all Roman.
Have you ever been to Briggflats Thelma? It is one of the earliest Quaker Meeting Houses in the country and is a mile outside Sedbergh at the other end of Wensleydale from where we live. It is the most interesting and atmospheric building - absolutely magical and always open during daylight hours as the custodian lives next door. Meetings are still held there on Sundays.
ReplyDeleteI love Buntings poem (he is buried in the graveyard at Briggflats). To get to Sedbergh from here we have to cross the river Rawthey. The first four lines of the poem are wonderful:
'Brag sweet tenor bull,
descant to Rawthey's madrigal,
each pebble its part
in the year's late Spring.' (Think this is correct).
When you come to live up here you could come over to see the place.
Sounds a good place to visit Pat, must do some more research on it. The poem is on the net by the way, and of course ties in nicely with the theme of Vikings...
Delete"Copper-wire moustache,
sea-reflecting eyes
and Baltic plainsong speech
declare: By such rocks
men killed Bloodaxe."
Tempting books Thelma, and there's me trying to cut back! I am being SO good too. Tam saw the Gundestrop cauldron (as on the jacket of the Celtic Mythology book) for real when she was in Copenhagen recently and was very impressed by it. I'd love to step back in time and find out how they really felt about its purpose and the iconography of it.
ReplyDeleteI suspect when you get past the iconography of the panels, it was seen as a welcoming drink in the halls, these 'cauldrons' are immense, though not the Gundestrop one. As for books, it is surprising what you can find on the net these days, also they range in cost from absolutely pennies to hundreds of pounds. Expect the 'scoundrels' of the antique world still exist in cyberspace..
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