This is my England. I don't expect you to watch this two and a half hours video, it is recorded on my blog for myself. A delicious reminder of what I have lost by getting old, and no I am not sad for I have so many memories to look back on.
This is the chalk downs of Berkshire and Wiltshire, along which runs The Ridgeway track, a white path because it followed the dry chalk ground. Littered with prehistoric barrows, hillforts and megaliths. I know these people that now lovingly and foolishly go to worship in their own pagan ways the solstices at Avebury, they are my tribe.
I am not a pagan by the way, sensibility makes me scorn religion, but I love the involvement that is given to our far away ancestors. If you were to attend the solstice festival at the stones of Avebury, you would find a fire with light flicking dancers, young and old as well for the stones remember us all.
Along this trackway you will meet old grey men convinced that ley lines run through England like veins, read The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins, he started this. Than there is this discipline, the study of the stars, moon and sun, Archeoastronomy the study of ancient sky cultures, Also quite intensively written about, and at the Red Lion* at Avebury, the meeting place of all good megalithic people you will hear discussions about it. It is a difficult subject to grasp;), especially as the Earth seems to have moved a bit and the stars are a bit out of alignment today.
The Ridgeway takes you through beautiful farmed landscapes, little villages all along the way and then you reach Liddington Castle (it is not a castle but an I/A hill fort) and then Swindon town smacks you in the face, reality is crossing motorways.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Viking, and Danes have walked along this trackway, their bones part of the soil as they fought their way into this country. It is a place full of myths and barrows that if you enter, you come to a beautiful place and will be able to wine and dance in meadows. BUT when you are released by the fairies you will find everyone you knew has grown old, though you thought you had only spent a day in this fairy land.
Or stop at Wayland Smithy, the most evocative of long barrows surrounded by the trees and capture the magic. And maybe if you are riding a horse, well tie him up there leave a coin and when you come back next morning Wayland the smithy - a Norse smithy god, will have shod him for you and taken the coin in payment.
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| Wayland Smithy in Autumn |
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A small party distributing the ashes of a friend  Avebury with the Red Lion in the distance * William Morris, when he was a pupil at Marlborough College, would cycle to Avebury to visit 'The Lions'. This in a letter to his mother, a white lie for visiting the Red Lion pub. |
This article in the Guardian asks the question 'What does it mean to be English' The short video covers football, I know some will be interested in that.
That was nicely written, and with nice photos. It's also quite thought provoking. What does it mean to be an Australian? Foreign types will think of sunny beaches and the outback, but that is not the experience of the vast numbers of Australians.
ReplyDeleteIt does mean when looking for history for oneself in a 'new country' but with indigenous people still part of the scene it is difficult, they are not a part of your history. But of course you do have a history in your family and their arrival in Australia. A DNA test can often be quite illuminating as well ;)
DeleteI've never walked the length of The Ridgeway, but what a splendid track it is, open to all.
ReplyDeleteI think it is about 80 miles long approximately, people do it in short lengths and stay at the pubs along the way Janice. I only know parts of it.
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