The unfolding leaves of an aquilegia

Watching a queen bee in the damson blossom, brushing the petals to the ground is a reminder that summer is on its way....

The Bee -Orchis

I saw a bee, I saw a flower,

I looked again and said, For sure

Never was flower, never was bee

Locked in such immobility.

The loud bees lurched about the hill,

But this flower-buried bee was still;

I said O Love, has love the power

To change a bee into a flower.

Andrew Young

This is a little orange tailed bee in a cranesbill, the ultra violet of the veins draws it to the centre of the flower.

Peter Gabriel and music

sometimes music and words seem to have a far more powerful poetical edge.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww9JS8dJ9fY

Peter Gabriel and Here Comes the Flood.

The Lansdown Battles

Wood anemones found on the way

Today I took Moss for a walk across the Langridge (long ridge), this time to the other part of the ridge where one of the battles of the Civil War were fought. The battle line must have ranged over a good mile, and this particular part was on Hanging Hill looking out over to Bristol and the Severn Channel, with the Welsh hills in the distance. The following photo will give some idea of the position and what happened...

Self explanatory

The top of the hill, with 'dugouts', these though may have come from exercises in the first world war

The slope of the hill

Looking out to Wick with Bristol in the distance in the middle foreground are the stones of Wick Burial Chamber

A view looking towards the Bath side

This is the other part where the battle took place

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lansdowne

Braythwaite.

Three not very exciting images, the shaft, which I think is a Norman cross shaft, was exposed yesterday in some hardcore the contractors were putting down on the racecourse.
It looks as if it has come from the medieval pilgrim chapel (St.Lawrence) at Chapel farm in Braythwaite, just across the road. The carvings are very worn but are probably acanthus leaf, there was more of the shaft under the soil. Four sided, with decoration on all sides, it would be interesting to see if there was an earlier foundation under Chapel farm, as it faces two bronze age burial mounds on the other side of the road.....









Although I have mentioned the chapel as a stopping place for pilgrims, there is another reason why there maybe an earlier connection. Just a field or so down from the chapel is St.Alphege Well, the following explains why there would have been an earlier hermitage or cell somewhere.... Alphege was martyred in London by the Vikings in a pretty brutal manner, hammered to death with oxbones by the drunken men, though there leader Thorkell tried to stop it, Alphege was put out of his misery by a newly converted christianised Viking called Thrum, who administered the fatal blow.

Alphege, or Elphege, (written as Aelfheath in Anglo-Saxon times but pronounced as it is today) was reputedly born in 954 of a noble family in the village of Weston, now a parish in the west of Bath, Somerset. While still young he renounced the world and entered the monastery at Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, apparently against the wishes of his widowed mother. The ancient church at Deerhurst still contains features from that time and a mediaeval stained glass window depicting the saint. Alphege served as monk, and later as Abbot, at Deerhurst, but he found the life there too lax for his taste. After 8 years, seeking a life of greater seclusion and austerity, he moved back to Weston in 980 and set up a small cell on the slopes of Lansdown Hill above the village. Ordnance Survey maps mark a spot there as St Alphege’s Well.

This sunday walk, the first day of the new summer time, did in fact herald two interesting things, the first was my buzzard, sat high on his telegraph pole, scanning the fields for mice. And sure enough Moss on his way back started digging in the field for mice, who must have come out of hibernation from the winter, needless to say Moss arrived home covered in soil and needed a thorough wash on the terrace. The soil on the Lansdown is a rich red/brown colour and stains his colours, but there must have been continuous cultivation and settlement on this upland land. Though the racecourse bought the land many years ago, it covers a about a hundred acres, they must have got rid of the hedges of the farm, but there are still concrete slab gate posts in the grass showing how the whole area was covered in small fields. The area where the buzzard and Moss hunt for mice must have been pasture land (harebells can still be seen in their time), but further up towards the bronze age barrow cemetery, wide rig and furrow lines show medieval ploughing.

Yellow

Picking up a pot of yellow dye today for my silk yarn, which is slightly useless because it is a 'resist' dye and needs to be painted on, set me wondering about the colour yellow and its exuberant explosion of colour at the beginning of spring.

Daffodils by the million deck the roadside, gardens and the flower shop. Pale fragile primroses nestle amongst the grass, there is a favourite tulip of mine, yellow with a green streak through its outer petals in the front garden flowering happily. From my window I can see the pale yellow catkins of the pussy willow in the next garden, and bushes of forsythia everywhere.
There was the bed of calendula I grow each year, the bed this morning has been dug over by Moss and in his usual manner has covered the terrace with dirt, why he does it heaven knows.

Welsh poppy - a pretty sort of weed in the garden

evening primrose - again a wild flower that grows intermittently in the garden. Go out in the evening and watch the lovely unfolding of its petals to welcome the moths with its scent.

Yellow Iris much later but look at its clear colour

I can never name this plant!

The tulips that started it all

Calendula

Not sure what to make of this video, which I picked up on my weaving group, is it cruel to the sheep? very clever border collies though, and completely original, who'd have thought a bunch of Welsh farmers could be so ingenious..

Extreme Sheep LED Art


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw&feature=channel_page

39 Saintly Bundles and hungry jackdaws

Each morning I go through the archaeological news for Heritage Action, mostly its boring, though what has come out over the past weeks is that museums are feeling the pinch, and many jobs may go, today it is the Bristol Museums that are in the news;
http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Bristol-museum-job-cuts-insult/article-838374-detail/article.html
But one item caught my eye, the British Museum having dragged out, from one of its vaults presumably, a portable altar which had been donated in 1902 and not opened. Well they opened it this year and found the relics of 39 saints, wrapped up in separate cloth bags - see here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/24/british-museum-relics-discovery

The jackdaws, well whilst reading the news on the computer, happened to look up at the big laurel bush outside the window, and there was a jackdaw on the branch 'fixing' me with his beady eyes "where's the bread" is what I read in them. So I went and fetched their morning breakfast, goodness knows what they do when I'm not here, and as I threw it down several more appeared from nowhere. My jackdaws are a part of the garden scene, and having been instrumental in saving a few of the young, they seem to acknowledge my presence as a person who should provide for them...

A Bath garden

Bath at this time of year springs into life literally, blossom is to be seen in Victoria Park, and the yellow of forsythia cascades through everyone's garden. Daffodils dance down Lansdown Lane, and in the Archery Field where I occasionally walk the dog, or at least throw his ball interminably, the yellow of celandine can be seen lining both sides of the ditch of one of the streams that cascade down from the Lansdown itself. On the slopes if you look up, you may spot deer, a muntjac shot out the other day five yards in front of a group of dogwalkers much to the surprise of the dogs.
But in the garden, spring can be seen as getting underway. Butterflies, the yellow of the brimstone, and brown ones dance around each other, great queen bumble bees buzz slowly past looking for a new home in the bank or lawn. Frogs have been and gone around the pond, and the hawthorns I planted years ago, are breaking into that green foliage one can nibble on. At the bottom of the garden is a bank, which I have always allowed to be wild, it holds its history in the plants it produces, it was once part of the garden of the old Victorian house behind.




There is an old holly tree from the 19th century, the great trunk of a dead Japanese cherry tree, double petalled in its day, that we hung a swing on years ago. Japanese knotweed makes an appearance on this bank, as does Iris foetidissmus, at the moment there is the blue flowers of brunnera, earlier on a pale mauve crocus would sprinkle the grass, again a relic from the Victorian garden. Yellow primroses carpet this end of the garden now, a couple coloured pink where they have managed to hybridise with the later coloured primulas perhaps. The lovely fresh leaves of the cow parsely, to flower later in April, scenting the air faintly with a honey smell.. Rushes are everywhere, this is due to the stream that once meandered through the land.



Ponds have been dug in the garden, the larger one destroyed by an over-enthusiatic young dog called Moss in his heyday, the reeds produce long spires of golden brown seedheads which scatter their fine seed all over the garden, and it is an annual chore to pull these young plantlets out.

Miscellaneous

Portico of Celtic temple of Rocquerpertuse, 3rd or 4th century BC. The three pillars have niches for skulls, and the lintel has carved horse heads on it, with a goose presiding over the whole.


Slightly odd juxtaposition of photos but the question is did trilithons have any meaning in themselves. Thinking about this Stonehenge is a stone monument made with carpenter skills. Someone or some people, had gathered round in a tribal meeting, looked at the great wooden henges, and the stone circles and said why can't we make a stone circle in imitation of a wood henge.
What they did shows great skill, but it also showed up that its much easier to carve in wood than stone, unless of course you have some soft easily carveable stone around. Stonehenge is therefore an imitation of something else, though of course it is unique in this aspect.
So why put the two together, it was the question, what lies behind the shape of a trilithon; for instance it is immediately a doorway/portal to somewhere else, but we know that Stonehenge is a circle, and that in the case of a roundhouse the space between the wooden posts would have been filled with wattle hurdling, so therefore the trilithons at Stonehenge are not doorways, its entrance coming from the Avenue side.
But the portico, the act of entering into another world, has of course been taken up by later religions in the Celtic world. A facade/doorway into the 'place for ancestors' for instance can be found on the Cotswold longbarrows 5000 years ago - West Kennet and Wayland Smithy come to mind. A doorway/entrance delineates the difference between the outside world and an inner sanctum, even though that may only be a humble domestic interior. Perhaps we should look to the materials used, a pole tent, in which skin or cloth is used, relies on a triangular network of poles to keep it upright. At Wayland Smithy the original timber mortuary house had such a ridge effect, there was even two stones balanced against each other. All this shows of course is technology being concieved, ideas going forward through time. The trilithon developed in a logical fashion, balancing a third horizontal pole on two vertical - neat and simple, joining them of course was the next stage in carpentry, a mortise and tenon, as seen on Stonehenge, is the method.
Of course there are other types of arches, gates and porticos, one at the Roman fort of Caerleon, this time a tetrapylon - a four pillared open-sided archway, which according to the literature survived into the 13th century, see below. It was here at Caerleon, in Wales that the Romans overcame the Silures, and gained a foothold in Wales. Also of course the saints Julius and Aaron were put to death here by the romans in 304 AD, perhaps they would have been marched through the archway to their martyrs death.

"Excavations in Caerleon, the headquarters of the Second Augustan Legion, have demonstrated the existence of a tetrapylon at the centre of the Roman fortress. Evidence indicates that the structure survived into the medieval period when it was undermined and demolished. A recent review of ceramic finds associated with the demolition horizon suggests that the tetrapylon was razed in the thirteenth century. While stone-robbing for reconstruction of the medieval castle in Caerleon may provide a partial explanation for the destruction, political circumstances at the time provided additional incentives."

Urnes Church - Norway

Lately I have been reading "The Real Middle Earth - Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages" by Brian Bates. Tolkien is of course one of my favourites, so the combination of dwarves, elfs and trees taken from the Anglo-Saxon and Norse myths is a must, found in the book was one of the following similar photos....

one thing that has been nagging at my mind after our visit to Greensted Church, was the oldest stave church in Norway at Urnes with its beautiful World Tree carving - The Yggdrasil Tree.. and a bit of finger tapping bought up two beautiful photos by Gari-baldi on Flickr, and he had kindly licensed them under Creative Commons.....

This is part of the wood sculpture on the north wall of the 11th century church at Urnes, in Sogn, Norway. The carving is exquisite, the deer under the tree is browsing on the foliage, and those lovely curving lines.

The oldest Stave church in Norway at Urnes

Brian Bates sees the Yggdrasil Tree as representing Sleipnir, the spirit horse of Odin, a great eight legged creature that takes him down to the otherworld. Bates works his way from the word Yggdrasil, Ygg being a nickname for Odin and drasil a word for horse. Odin of course famously hung from the tree for 9 days but it was during this time, a time of spiritual quest and dreaming that the tree transformed into Sleipnir. And Bates points out that the gallows in Anglo-Saxon times were also known as "a 'horse' upon which its victim rode to death".

Sleipnir carries Odin on his ride round the nine sacred cosmos of knowledge, Sleipnirs eight legs representing eight of the worlds, with Odin representing the ninth. Of course, Tolkien also had a great horse in the Lord of The Rings, this was Shadowfax, and there is a dramatic moment in the film, when the great army of Gandalf stands high on a steep hill, Shadowfax, gleaming white to the fore, and then they sweep down this impossibly steep hill to destroy the myriad trolls and terrible creatures on the plain below that are harassing the fort. Tolkien describes Shadowfax "as being foaled in the morning of the world". The tale of Odin's descent into the Lowerworld is for another day, it was a place that contained wisdom, but of course it also contained the dead spirits, which at that liminal time of the year allhalloween, would seep gently into our world, curling and spinning round the houses ;)

Detail from the Greensted Church

Detail from the Greensted church

A Jeremy Hooker poem

I have neglected my blog for some time, but on checking back through my sitemeter, I often find a blog called 'Matrix' has been visited quite a lot. Don't know why I called it Matrix perhaps it is the name of the poem I forgot to record. But the poem by Jeremy Hooker is a firm favourite of mine, catching within its words the slow dying of history caught for evermore in the dust and 'petrified creatures' of chalk.


A memorial of its origins, chalk in barns and churches
moulders in rain and damp;petrified creatures swim
in its depths.

It is domestic, with the homeliness of an ancient
hearth exposed to the weather,pale with the ash of
countless primeval fires.Here the plough grates on an
urnfield, the green plover stands with crest erect on
a royal mound.

Chalk is the moon's stone; the skeleton is native to its
soil. It looks anaemic, but has submerged the type-sites
of successive cultures. Stone,bronze, iron; all are assimilated to
its nature;
and the hill-forts follow its curves.

These, surely, are the works of giants; temples
re-dedicated to the sky-god, spires fashioned for the
lords of bowmen;

Spoils of the worn idol, squat Venus of the mines.

Druids leave their shops in the midsummer solstice;
neophytes tread an antic measure to the antlered god.
Men who tresspass are soon absorbed, horns laid beside
them in the ground. The burnt-out tank waits beside
the barrow.

The god is a graffito carved on the belly of the chalk,
his savage gesture subdued by the stuff of his creation.
He is taken up like a gaunt white doll by the round hills,
wrapped around by the long pale hair of the fields.

Greensted Church, Essex

The church is one of the oldest stave churches in Europe, and before I go into the detail, the atmosphere of the place is a must.

A quiet country lane just outside Ongar, leads you to the church, it lies just in front of a large house and is surrounded by about three other oldish houses, one a pretty little church lodge.

The church has dormer windows which is unusual for a start, it is quaint and very pretty, the white wooden tower gives a modern look to the little brick and wooden church behind it.

Peace pervades the small churchyard, crocuses in front of the doorway, and those marvellous timber staves are extraordinary. Dark black, and so finely fissured vertically that it is almost like a comb, but there the similarity stops, for there are elegant waving shapes as the lines move round old knots, or branches that were sawn off all those centuries ago. This is where the marvel comes in, you are touching wood grown in the Saxon age; the wood is hard, almost like stone, it has weathered the centuries and now stands rock hard against the elements.

But I said it was a pretty little church, and so it is, open the door and go inside, the first thing to strike is the darkness of the place, your eyes must grow accustomed to the wealth of detail inside.

The staves inner faces are inside, and everywhere there is wood, the high timbered and cross roof beams are ornamented with carved pictures in the triangulated intersections. The pews are closed and you must unlatch a small gate to sit on a seat; the stained glass is mediocre, but there are certain windows that have a lightness of touch in their execution.

For sale, and here the parishioners have been very generous in their bounty, there are pots of jam, marmalade, lemon curds and that new fangled delight red onion marmalade. Priced at about £2 a jar, they are quite reasonable and all have the name of the church on them.

Outside wandering round the bank and you will see the little triangle opening that appears in the stave, apparently this was the door, but I have'nt quite worked out its relationship to the rest of the church.

Outside towards the east, and the land slopes away from the church, and looking over the wall that bounds this side, are open fields with a public footpath going through. There is a pond to the right, which would probably have been the water source in Saxon times. Walk along the footpath, and the land to the left is landscaped for the large house with another pond for ducks, and there is a great cluster of snowdrops scattered under the trees with artless natural ease.

If you have muddy shoes, a great bag of plastic carrier bags, is at the church entrance for putting over your shoes, rather spoiling the inital impression. But the day was beautiful, sunny and the Essex countryside a quiet mix of brown ploughed fields, and the green of pasture land. Woods there were aplenty, marching right up to the fields they curved in graceful lines, there soft browns and silvers etched in the sun, with a rich mush of golden brown litter underneath.

Information from the Church handbook; - The church is one of the oldest wooden churches in the world, and the oldest wooden building standing in Europe. The two earlier wooden buildings dating from the late 6th or 7th century, people have worshipped continuously here for 1300 years.

First church at Greensted; It was St.Cedd who probably inspired this little church, he began his work in 654 A.D. and probably the first church at Greensted (probably a clearing or space in the vast forest of which Hainault and Epping are the only remains). An archaeological dig in 1960 revealed the impression of two simple wooden buildings under the present chancel floor, these would have been the 6th or 7th century buildings. The logs had been held upright by simply dropping them into a trench, and it goes on to say that people would have gathered outside to listen to the celtic missionaries and priest. The dedication to St.Andrew suggests a Celtic Foundation.

The nave was added in about 1060 A.D. but the timbers seem to go back to 845 A.D. and since then there have been many more additions, stretching from the Norman piscina, to a Tudor window, the church tower could probably have been built in the 17th century and then of course the Victorian restoration which includes the dormer windows and porch.

St.Cedd's Church of 654;

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2008/10/stpeter-on-wall-chapel.html

Notes; It is interesting to see from the handbook that there is a great deal of interest in this 'stave' church from archaelogists and historians, and English Heritage is to fund some work on the church. The mind always falls back to the Norwegian staved churches and to one in particular with the beautiful carved doorway, but the Greensted church predates these, and is truly a Saxon building that has survived.
It is an 'original' very much like Stonehenge in its class, that wood and the shape of the old building with its building techniques is still there after a thousand years is a bit of a miracle.
To imagine this small wooden building, very cosy, for it is a great deal warmer inside a wooden church than our old stone churches, filled with people maybe, or originally perhaps a visiting monk or priest evangelising to the Saxons, who have only just recently settled in the area, the solitary monk living within the confines of the earliest building.

The thatched roof rustling with mice, the great forest stretched for miles around and the people working quietly in the clearing to build a life in this wilderness. So these heathen Saxon people would have heard the sound of the bell (or bangu) of the wandering monk, he would come through the trees, food would be offered, and then the great discussion about whose god would prevail, we know the inevitable truth about which god did win out in the end but this first 'church' would have been very unlike the churches we see today.

Photos courtesey of Littlestone.

More photographs here 

Essex musings

Ugley Green. Yesterday we went looking for a puddingstone, something very particular to Essex - at least I think so. Eventually we tracked it down, to a small hamlet, thatched cottages around a green. The stone itself was placed at the junction of three lanes, next to a green pump. Stones, crossroads and water of course all have a symbolic meaning, and in the middle ages people were hung at crossroads and buried on the spot, apparently, I have been reliably informed so that their wicked spirits would not know which track to take.

After the stone we went hunting for Ugley Green church, strangely about a mile away next to a large house. To access it you drove down a long track, and you are greeted by the brick church tower, at the end of a short row of pollarded trees. The bricks are 16th century though the church itself is 13th century, and the bulk of the church is flint and mortar. Surprisingly it is rather large, and fortunately someone arrived who opened the churchfor us. She had brought a great armful of forsythia for decoration, the branches forced indoors to flower. The church itself had been restored in the 19th century, but its east window was rather beautiful.

There were four small panels of christian stories either done by William Morris or Burn-Jones, though presumably the workshop is the place of attribution. The church could only afford these four small panels, so the rest of the window was filled in with a lovely traceried pattern of Morris's 'wallpaper' flowers in a sort of trellised effect in the glass.

Which reminds me that there was a very large tapestry by the Pre-raphelite workshop that appeared in the papers a couple of weeks ago . It was in the Yves St.Laurent collection, but I think the tapestry was withdrawn and will stay with the Musee D'Orsay due to export licence complications...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5613792.ece

One of the things about Essex is its glorious house building tradition, cottages with thatched roofs, some so tiny that they are one-up, one-down. Tudor timber and plaster, and exquisite pargetering, think that is the term for the decoration you find on the plaster.

Audley House was the next place on the list, a very large splendiferous house in the Jacobean style, though it looked very Elizabethan to me it had been a Benedictine monastery but dear old Henry had got his grubby little paws on it in 1538...
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.960

The gardens were put together in the 'Capability Brown' style, again you cannot beat a large expanse of land with sculptured waters, fountains, bridges and tastefully arranged trees around some of our larger estates but the 'pattern' book these 18th century gardens came out of are strikingly very similar. I still love an untidy garden of flowers, a bit William Morris or Elizabethan, herbs, flowers, fruit trees nudging each other for space, a useful garden is so much prettier than a functional view.... No photos till I get back to my own computer but a couple from earlier on.

Thaxted, the view up to the church, and on the left somewhere Dick Turpin's cottage

Payecocke House Coggeshall

Elizabethan House at Terling

Belderg

'They just keep turning up
And were thought of as foreign'-
One-eyed and benign,
They lie about his house,
Quernstones out of a bog.

To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries

Fell open like a glib;
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.

A landscape fossilized,
Its stone wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go

He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How stubbed and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth rings
Of iron, flint and bronze.
So I talked of Mossbawn,

A bogland name 'but Moss'?,
He crossed my old home's music
With older strains of Norse.
I'd told how its foundation
Was mutable as sound

And how I could derive
A forked root from that ground,
Make bawn an English fort,
A planter's walled-in mound.

Or else find sanctuary
And think of it as Irish,
Persistent if outworn.
'But the Norse ring on your tree?'
I passed through the eye of the quern,

Grist to an ancient mill,
And in my mind's eye saw,
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piles like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.

Seamus Heaney 1975

Druidical Bath

John Wood the Elder - Stanton Drew Circle and Stonehenge;

Bath is famed for its neo-classical architecture but what underpins the thinking of the 18th century architect John Wood when he drew the designs for The Circus is a strange mish-mash of legend and myth, this of course is the age of the new 'druidism' that took hold when such figures as William Stukely called such places as Stonehenge the Druidical Temple. Fertile imaginations played with the ideas of sacrificial wicker constructions filled with victims, and Wood took it much further and in his book - A Description of Bath, he writes a history for Bath that is at once absurd yet full of that energetic imaginings that are still to be found in today's new age books.

To understand why Wood built The Circus as he did one must go back to the myths that formed the literature of the 18th century. Wood, though including neo-classical forms in the building, was not returning to a roman past but a pre-roman past steeped in the myths of a Britannic origin. The myth can be found in the 12th century writings of Geoffrey of Monmouthshire, and according to (R.S.Neal - Bath, A Social History) a 16th century edition written in Paris was very much alive in the oral tradition of Bath.

Putting stone circles and Druids together seems rather strange, but Wood thought that the chief ensign of the Druids was a ring. So as he began to plan his city on paper, he incorporated the pagan elements, but also he was relating the pagan symbol of the circle back to Jewish symbolism, therefore Christian, and then British and Greek, which led quite nicely to the "Divine Architect" who was of course God. This is all creative flummery, a mixing of ideas, so when we look at The Circus we see classical lines, but with little touches of druidism – in the acorns that sit atop the surrounds of the roofs – and the frieze which incorporates specific symbols of Masonic details.

First must come the story of Bladud, the founding father of Bath, an exiled prince because of his leprosy, whilst out herding pigs one day happened to notice that the pigs loved to roll in the hot muds of the spring. Bladud also tried this and was cured, and then went on to found the city of Bath on the spot. Our mythical King Bladud is given a date of 480 BC, and as Wood saw it Bladud created the city about the size of Babylon. Bladud was a descendant of a Trojan prince, a high priest of Apollo and a 'Master of Pythagoras'. Therefore this high priest was a devotee of the heliocentric systems of the planets from which the Pythagorean system was derived.

That the Works of Stantondriu (Stanton Drew) form a perfect model of the Pythagorean system of the planetary world............

At Stanton Drew it must have taken him many hours, with his assistant wandering round taking measurements of the circles, which were probably at this time partly covered in orchards. There was a precedence for this fascination with megalithic stones, Stukeley and Inigo Jones were all entranced by these heathen stones of an earlier age, and the development of myths round druidic religions were already forming and capturing imaginative minds – a bit like today.

Now Stanton Drew was, according to Wood, the university for British Druids, which thereby made Bath the metropolitan city seat of the British Druids.

'And since there is an apparent connection between the ancient works of Akmanchester (Bath) and those of Stantondriu, it see s manifest that the latter constituted the University of the British Druids; that this was the university which King Bladud, according to Merlyn of Caledon planted; that it was at Stantondrui the king feated his four Athenian colloeagues and that they were not only the heads of the British Druids in those early ages, but, under Bladud, the very founder of them'

The Circus is based on a diameter of 318 feet, Wood's rough measurements of the circumference of the stone circle at Stonehenge, the terraced houses form a perfect circle around a 'timber' circle of planted trees in the centre. There is an early drawing by J.R.Cozens which shows hitching stone post for the horses arranged symmetrically round the The Circus which would give the allusion of stones.

Wood also incorporated into his thinking the hills around Bath, giving them various titles such as Sun and Moon Hill, and The Parade is also aligned on Solsbury Hill which had an Iron Age settlement on top. The Royal Crescent built by his son John Wood the Younger, was crescent shaped representing the moon. Where you might ask is the masonic symbolism, well it is only seen from the air, taking The Circus as the round part of the key walk down Gay Street to Queens Square which is square, and you will see the 'key' of Bath.

ref; R.S.Neal - Bath, A Social History.

A Description of Bath - John Wood 1765

Badgers and barrows

A badger entrance on East Kennet Long barrow

A tale; Once many thousands of years ago a great barrow was raised by men over their dead, nature grew its flowers and trees over the barrow, birds came and went, the little bones of their deaths adding to the fertility of the soil. Foxes, badgers and deer sheltered in the shade of its trees and bushes. All around the great downs stretched, softly rounded, giving semblance of the goddess that may once have been worshipped a long time ago.

But we are not concerned with the affairs of man, for they are soon over, it is the barrow, decaying gently over the years, the purple of violets and pale primroses in the spring, that would have grown on this mound under the shade of the trees . In the hot summer months, the scarlet poppies, the pale blue, butterfly blue of the cranesbill, the white ox eyed daisy would be seen in the fields around, and the sweet smells of crushed thyme on the path, the yellow of ladies bedstraw as it laced its way through the wheat, would perfum the air on hot afternoons.

Flowers drifting through the seasons, then their lives spent, seed would fall to the ground, and the cycle would go on. Nature moving through time.

Many years ago, badgers moved into the barrow, this was a slow process, for badgers are territorial and home-loving and take many generations to build their small clans. They must create a great burrow deep in the earth, warm and dry with the roots of the trees hanging from the earthen ceilings. Their bedding would be the soft dry hay of the meadows, arranged in a soft comfortable pad for daytime sleeping. Coming out at night to hunt, they would raid the nearby farms, rustling through the gardens of the sleeping village below the hill on which they lived. Drink from the clear flowing river that wound its way past the church and the manor house.

Denizens of the night we may call them, these black and white creatures, low-bellied they scuffle along in the dark intent on hunting for food, in the damp rainy season it would be worms pulled from the ground. When the earth was hard baked from the summer sun, then they would raid the farmers barn, perhaps taking a chicken or two, or if they were quick enough a baby rabbit from the burrows on the hill.

As the generations of badgers grew in the mound, they would expand the tunnels deeper into the barrow, going down beneath the soft dark earth, through the layers of white chalk till eventually they came to stone. Now badgers are strong creatures, and if you look outside their entrances you will see the small stones dragged out of their setts. But for our badgers in the mound these stones were enormous, like the walls of the houses in the village below.

They would eventually dig round the stones, finding themselves in a small stone cave, unvisited for thousands of years, a sepulchral space, bones would be scattered on the floor. Luckily for the badgers they would be indifferent to such a find, bones are just bones, the last remnant of a living creature. We humans on the other hand, would be given to excited speculation, a reverence for our past ancestors that would make an animal look with complete astonishment at such foolishness.

But stop are'nt we more intelligent than the dumb brain of our black and white friends, we have a right surely to know everything that there is about the world. Inquisitive and curious we pry and turn over any new find that passes our way, and so we acquire learning, though where it gets us goodness knows. I could make up a story about the humans that once raised this great mound, their hunting and growing of crops. Children born and dying in a time when illness was little understood, look over the hill there are more mounds and settlements around. The soft murmur of voices, the lowing of cattle, a tree is being cut down and the sound of its snap on the air travels down time. The sun is up in the sky and all is well in the world, but these people are gone and all that remains are the spirits of the mind.

The wind can be cold up on the downs, past spirits can haunt the air, rustling grass bending softly beneath an unseen footstep, the wind through the trees plays a different seasonal music as it bends the leaves to and fro. Just for a moment though, imagine the great entrance of stones to the mound, the forecourt on which the people will be gathered to perform some ceremony, an animal slaughtered maybe, the human dead picked clean of its flesh by the black carrion crows that wheel in the sky, now the bones must be laid solemnly in the dark cave with reverence. This will be the duty of the shaman, he will be attired in some form of dress (you must imagine this yourself) a decorated stone mace raised to the sky he will chant in a strange language. The smell of the woodsmoke, embers crackling and spitting on the fire, and up in the sky a great moon shine down illuminating the scene - the barrow's function is suddenly understood........

The great bulk of East kennet long barrow hidden beneath trees

Note; There are many different burial practices in other parts of the world, and one is the Tibetan Sky burial. Now this is far to gruesome to write about but in the Buddhist faith, when a person dies his body becomes an empty shell. Tibet is a high country mountainous with great plateaus, well above the tree line so that timber is scarce. Soil is also scant on top of this mountainous region, so that burial of the dead is difficult. So the monks take the body to a high sacred ledge or ground near a chorten and get rid of the corpse through a ceremony called Jhator - 'which means giving alms to the birds'..

Why I mention this is because there is a certain similarity between the Tibetan method and excarnation which is believed what happened in prehistoric Britain, the empty husk or shell of the body no longer housing the soul is disposed of. Which of course brings one round as to how the neolithic people may have thought of the 'inner being', was it represented in the bones of the dead, or was there another layer to their beliefs.

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~pamlogan/skybury.htm

Stories

Reading Roger Deakin's The Wildwood and I come up with any number of delightful stories be it the interior walnut veneer of a Jaguar car (always wanted an XKl140) or Japanese wooden prayer shoes. But firstly a Japanese tale...

This is to do with driftwood, that rather lovely material of wood that has ended up in the sea and is given back to the land in various beautiful convuluted shapes. Well the story is more human than that for it takes in the concept of being cast out on the sea and left to live or die on the will of the currents.

There is an initiation custom by certain monks on an island in Japan in which a novice monk is launched in a wooden box on the tides, the currents could take him out to sea and he could never be seen again. Or the boat may take him on a circular trip back to shore, so the box can either be a coffin or a boat, the novice has consented to be human driftwood.

Perhaps we are all human driftwood, the vagaries of life pushing us here and there like a tumbling piece of wood on the crest of a wave, reminding us that though there may high crests there is also deep troughs of dark water as well.

Deakins has on his desk a wooden pine prayer shoe of a monk that has been washed up by the sea, and he wonders on the fate of its owner. Another fascinating thing I read is about the waves around the Islands of Japan, there is a painting somewhere of great crested waves meeting together, it always fascinated me, apparently this is a 'truth' (I will explain later) the sea does work in this different way quite different to the seas of our shores, that lap gently back and forth with the tides.

Now why I bracket the 'truth', for years I have loved the Chinese paintings of tall vertical sided mountains, these rocky crags with stunted fir trees make an eloquent magical landscape with their tiny bridges over rivers, but I never believed such landscapes could exist. That is until I saw a television programme a few months ago and saw the exact shape of the mountains somewhere in China.
Another story Deakin tells is about David Nash, an artist who sculpts in wood, often with a chainsaw, his works can be seen all round the world. Now I' m not quite sure I like the way he has with wood, he tends to 'torture' living trees to adopt certain shapes, but one story is fascinating. He lives and works in Wales at Blaenau Ffestiniog, and this tale is about a wooden ball carved and then set free on a river. David Nash followed the journey of the wooden boulder over the years, for it took a great many years for the boulder to dislodge itself from the rocks of the river and move gradually downstream till at last it reached the estuary. Here Nash would hire a boat and follow its progress as it washed back and forth on the tides over the months and lodged on different beaches. One day of course it disappeared and is now presumably out on the wide sea floating who knows where, another piece of flotsam that may appear years later on a foreign beach...... The Wooden Boulder can be found in this rather long article here....
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag01/dec01/nash/nash.shtml

Ebbor Gorge

Ebbor Gorge; Photos from 2007 show, a lovely green wooded stone gorge, fallen branches, ferns and wildflowers growing in its hidden depths. It is approached from Priddy village, there is a car park at the beginning of the walk. Its quite a difficult walk for Somerset, for you have to go a long way down and then through the gorge and up again, a good hour or two is needed, but it is worth the effort climbing the natural limestone steps through the gorge. From the first rock shelters that were occupied 10,000 years ago, like all the landscapes of Britain it has been occupied through Bronze age, middle age etc, it is a hidden place that allows you to look into the wild heart of our countryside......

verdant green

the slope through the gorge

                                                            Nettle leaf bell flower

                                         this is the path through the narrowest part

                                                The narrowest part of the gorge

Sacred Groves

I have just been reading Roger Deakin's Wildwood, and one chapter immediately catches my interest. It is called the Sacred Groves of Devon, and he gives a list of village names all with Nemet/Nimet in their names. Celtic mythology, or at least here be our Romans naming an old celtic site and calling it sacred grove., so the villages are called Nymet Tracey, Broadnymet, Nichols Nimet, Nymet Roland, Nymet Wood and Nymphays. All named probably after the River Yeo(also after Nimet/Nymet) who's source is at Nymph. He also mentions that Beer, Bear or Beere are versions of the old english bearu, again the meaning is close to Celtic nemeton.

The Roman fort of Nemetotacio, the romans built a mile or two away on the banks of the River Taw, is obviously the place where it stems from Nemetotacio meaning "The Road Station of the Sacred Grove".

What visions this conjures up, history falling through time in its etymology, Deakins speculates that the Dumnonii people of the area refused to surrender their sacred woods and holy rivers of Nimet and Nemet to the Romans, for there are other forts in the area as well, and they put up a stout resistance.

Also about 20 years ago a wood henge at Bow was discovered by Frances Griffiths by aerial photography, information here on the Megalithic Portal ........ http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=17581,

Now Deakin goes on to say that the name Bow has contracted over the last seven years from Nymetbowe (the bend in the sacred river) and Nymetboghe, its root in the old english boga, a curve describing the wide curve in the River Yeo nearby. In fact very similar to the relationship of Durrington Walls and the River Avon. Frances Griffiths also discovered a large cluster of barrows and ring ditches surrounding Bow, and feels that this area was a major focus of ceremonial activity.

The flow of history is incredibly beautiful, Bronze age barrow cemeteries round the wooden henge, the river acting as a focus, and the names remembered through the Celts, the Romans and the small village settlements.

Terminology; Here I will break off to stand by my use of Celts/Celtic, there is so much contempt for the usuage of these words that perhaps we should use the term indigenous British people, but to be quite honest I like the term Celts, it has a far more romantic ring....

And what about the sacred curve of the river, does it not call to mind Silbury also surrounded by the curve of the Winterbourne, with the Swallowhead marking the rising of the River Kennet.

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2008/01/roman-temple-of-nettleton-scrubb-to-be.html

Longbarrows

Beckhampton Longbarrow

But the masons leave

for the lime-pits of time, with flowers, chaff, ashes,

Their plans are spattered with blood, lost,

And the golden plumb-line of sun says; the world is leaning,

Bedded in a base where the fingers

Of ancient waters touch the foundation.

But feel the walls; the glow stays on your hands.

From the House of the Dead - Part one; taken from Richard Bradley's book The Significance of Monuments. The actual poem is from Ivan Lalic, 1996 'Of the Builders'

These late neolithic long mounds can be very complex, yes they may have burials in them but sometimes they do not - such as South Street and Beckhampton, both having a similar design pattern - Paul Ashbee in his book The Earthen Long Barrow highlights the different types to be found. Some can be extraordinarily long, and are often described as bank barrows, such as the one found in Maiden Castle.

It is the practical mode of construction that is so intriguing, archaeology is good at highlighting the methods used, sometimes we drift into an abstract notion of ritual and sacred landscape, our minds wallowing in some far away land of our own making; physical evidence, although scant, gives us a reality check.

South Street and Beckhampton when excavated, showed a framework of hurdles, set on an axial line with further offset hurdles creating bays. At the eastern end the hurdling was used to form a spurred convex or facade.

Ashbee says of South Street, that because of Stukeley's drawing it was thought to be stone built, the only stones found though were, small boulders (thought to form a core) in two of the bays, whilst at the end there was a cluster of large sarsen stones which did not form any pattern. A large capping of chalk rubble may have been added, remains of such were found.

The two barrows may have been tribal monuments, a 'clan' system is often postulated, perhaps delineating territory, West Kennet and East Kennet longbarrows both seem to have the same function in the landscape as does the one on Windmill Hill.

Its fascinating to think that the later Silbury also has some of these building properties captured in its make-up. Dean Mereweather mentions 'strings' radiating from the central primary mound, he also mentions stones round this mound, and in the latest foray into the heart of Silbury small sarsen boulders were found.

The other interesting thing to be found in some longbarrows are of course mortuary 'houses'; Wayland's Smithy had one, Ashbee says of this mortuary house that at....

..."the proximal end, two considerable flat-sectioned sarsen stones had been pitched together, an arrangement that was apparently continued by timbers set against a ridge supported at each end by the trunks, which seem to have projected above the barrow."

and Ashbee quotes Atkinson's account of his excavation in 1965...

"As finally revealed, the evidence leaves no doubt that the burials were deposited within a wooden chamber resembling a low ridge-tent, with a massive post at either end, between which a ridge-pole was supported by mortised joints. The combined sides and roof were presumably formed of close-set timbers resting at their inner and upper ends on the ridge-pole, and at their lower and outer ends on the ground immediately outside the lateral banks of sarsen stones, where there is on each side a significant linear gap separating the base if these banks from the basal sarsen cairn."

Wayland's Smithy seen from the back

The ' lateral' stones that may have faced the original timber mortuary house

Here we have another intriguing facet, large 'pits' often termed as ritual, found in longbarrows, could be seen as housing large timber posts, wood before stone, or perhaps another way of looking at it wood and stone, think Stonehenge and Woodhenge, and the flexibility of these two materials in construction and ritual use.

Fussell's Longbarrow contained the remains of a mortuary house, and though I can't show the detail of the isometric drawing in the book I can refer to Ashbee's article in 1998 in BA....

"What did barrows look like when first raised? At Fussell's Lodge long barrow, near Salisbury, the discovery of post-holes in a lengthy, trapezoidal structure showed that initially there had been a structure resembling a Neolithic long house of the type found widely on the Continent. Subsequent long barrow excavations showed that this formula was widely followed. These surrogate long houses contained deposits of human bone that were added to and subtracted from, for more than a millennium, and rites pertaining to ancestors and fertility were no doubt performed. Long barrows, the long houses of the dead, should be regarded as shrines rather than mausolea."

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba32/Ba32feat.html

The idea that longbarrows are the houses of the ancient dead can best be explored through reading Richard Bradley's The Significance of Monuments, in it he puts forward the theory that the longhouses in certain parts of Europe, were left to decay after their inhabitants died, presumably the male, and that these 'dead' houses were left in the settlements alongside the contemporary'living' houses, so giving rise to the conceptual idea of a death house.. As ideas progress, and there is movement away from the original idea because it has become pared down movement of people and ideas through time and space evolve, so we can look at Wessex longbarrows as evolving in a similar fashion.

West Kennet longbarrow

West Kennet longbarrow, the thing that strikes the eye, or indeed the camera lense, is the stone facade, we are overwhelmed by the symbolism of their shapes, as well as the physical effort needed to bring such stones to a particular place. Yet we forget, that we are looking at a 'restored' forecourt, and that behind the stones there are tons of earth, something was 'created' in the eyes of the builders, it may not necessarily be what we have in our minds.

If West Kennet is a 'death' house, than the removal of bones from Windmill hill to the barrow will signify to us that it is indeed the place of the ancestors. An emphasis on certain types of bones is also to be found in some longbarrows. Yet down the hill Beckhampton and South Street show no evidence of human bone, Beckampton of course has three ox skulls placed symbolically in its length, and up on the earlier Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure there are child bone burials with ox bones, one small human burial cradled inside the 'crown' of oxen horns.

The' stalls' of Stoney Littleton longbarrow

Stoney Littleton also has a stone facade, and a stone decorated with an ammonite on the left hand side, which can just be seen in the above photo. As at West Kennet we can imagine a forecourt in front of this longbarrow, a place where the ritual activities would take place.

Further reading has taken me to David Field's Earthen Longbarrows, strangely he doesnt say much about Wayland's Smithy, except to point out that the barrow we see today was built on the wooden mortuary house which is fairly obvious. What he does say is that West Kennet and East Kennet might have been added to, given that EK has a slightly 'waisted' side and that WK's ditches curve at one point at about 35 metres from the facade, and that there maybe in fact two 'contiguous barrows. This could well be so, a couple of miles from where I live there are two round barrows that seemed joined, and in fact several barrows on the Lansdown are paired in such a fashion.

Woods

I have been reading Richard Mabey's Essays on Landscape, his pottering through the lives of William Robinson, Gilbert White and Richard Jefferies, our relationship to the land around us, our 'rootedness' in a place, Gilbert White living all his life in the same village, recording in minute detail the daily lives of the creatures around him - a methodical naturalist.
Over the last few days we had also been wandering around, in woods this time, and one is always struck how a wood, though manmade also carries in its history the story of its growing.. there is its youth, a maturity, then decay. Old trees jostle with impudent young saplings, but sometimes the canopy is too dense, and the young tree reaches towards the sky in an effort to get to the sun, becoming spindly and elongated in its efforts. Sometimes these trees in later life are vunerable to storms and topple over, though often caught in the branches of nearby trees, they never quite make it to the ground.
One wood we walked through, had what looked like to me coppiced stools, but on reflection may have grown from a fallen tree, they circled the top of the hill. Here we come to a cleared space, the harsh reality of the chainsaw, reveals the bright cream of sawn logs, the stump of the tree exposed cruelly, curving annual rings denoting good and bad years, there is the soft epidermis that carries water up its outer skin to feed its leaves. Finished now, in death the tree provides logs for the fire, and we gather a few to carry back to the car.
The wood is damp, small streams trickle through, muddy paths, a thick dense mulching layer of copper leaves keeping the footfall silent. An abandoned shoe, encrusted with bright green moss.




I am reminded of the alder fruit we had gathered a couple of days before for dyeing, steeping them in water they had produced a strong brown dye.

Today we wander through the woods for pleasure, but for many centuries trees were an essential part of the 'used' landscape, wood for the fire, wood for hurdles, pannage for pigs, wood for the great tall ships of war, wood for the curving grace of timbered houses. We laid waste our woods, so that the great giant oaks are no longer with us, we neglected them in the last century allowing the ugly march of the evergreen fir and pine on the mountains of Wales and Scotland.





Mean while the Mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other Seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Andrew Marvell 'The Garden' 1681