Tuesday and memories

There are emails, cards and letters, praising Paul.  The doctor on the phone yesterday brought me to tears as he offered help.  I have thought I should not talk about his untimely death, but then it is so much part of my life I need to gaze unwavering at the person who I have l loved and lost.  People catch up on memories, 'do you remember' is an American friend who wrote yesterday, and yes I remember......

We are in a pub in Wiltshire before we head out to Wales next morning. Keith, Paul's brother is there, Bucky and Loie our American friends, we are waiting for Mark and Ephraim to arrive, they are late but eventually turn up. It is a part family, part friends meet-up, a gathering place just outside Avebury.  A place where Paul and I came together, its large stones standing like sentinels in the landscape.  Enigmatic stones, hauled with great labour from the surrounding downs to a religion long gone and dead.  Archaeologists play guess this history but they truly cannot for prehistory is lost in the mists of time.  Yes there are 'finds' remnants of lives once lived.  I walked over those downs for several years, trailing the barrows, and the Great Ridgeway which passed through this area, everywhere there is a story to be told.  Pages to be turned in the green of the land.  Crop circles appearing like magic in the wheat fields, it is very easy to make a crop circle but it was mathematicians that crafted some of the more spectacular ones.  Pagans as well drift down to the Swallowhead Spring, garlanding the old willow there with offerings.  Do you know why the Swallowhead, which is part of the River Kennet, is so magical is because it is a river that dries out during the year then magically reappears. And if you have never read a single book on the subject of  pagan history, go find Michael Dames on the subject and feast in the imaginary world of  gods, celts and paganism.

I have written in the past many blogs about Avebury and Silbury, even become involved in campaigns to protect these places.  Watched as 'Druidical' elders have proclaimed from the top of Silbury Hill their faith.  A man made mound by the way, the largest in Europe.  Yet there are traces of two other mounds in the area, one at Marlborough, that O so dinky middle class old country town with its posh school.  William Morris went there and paddled around in the water meadows round Silbury Hill.  But right in the heart of this Marlborough School slightly knocked around by later additions there is also a great mound by the River Kennet.