‘The true yield of the land’- British fairies in their landscape

As some readers of this blog may already be aware, I also write the British fairies blog on WordPress.  This latest posting sits somewhere between my two sites, but as it takes a more pragmatic and non-folklore perspective, I put it here.

If you’re determined to find a rationalising and ‘psychological’ explanation for the belief in fairies, a fruitful approach may be to view them from the perspective of the British landscape.  It’s arguable that they are a medium for representing aspects of the land and climate.  One way of explaining the fairy faith is to see it as a way of articulating what’s sometimes called the genius loci- the spirit of place- that people have sensed over the centuries in particular places.

Paul Nash, Earth home, or The fortress

Spirits of place

Many British writers and artists have responded in mystic fashion to the British landscape.  The landscape visions of William Blake and Samuel Palmer were shared by later artists, especially by Paul Nash. His writings disclose a strong sense of the unique character of places and the power of those with links to antiquity.  Of Wittenham Clumps, which he painted repeatedly, he said:

“I felt their importance long before I knew their history…  [The landscape was] full of strange enchantment, on every hand it seemed a beautiful, legendary country, haunted by old gods long forgotten.”

Later in his life, Nash encountered the stones of Avebury.  Writing in Country Life in May 1937, on The Life of the Inanimate Object, he explained that “it is not a question of a particular stone being the house of the spirit- the stone itself has its spirit, it is alive.” This idea of animating inanimate objects was very old indeed, “a commonplace in fairy tale and and occurs quite naturally also in most mythologies.”  Sketching at Silbury Hill near Avebury, he recalled that-

“I felt that I had divined the secret of that paradoxical pyramid.  Such things do happen in England, quite naturally, but they are not recognised for what they are- the true yield of the land, indeed, but also works of art; identical with the intimate spirit inhabiting these gentle fields, yet not the work of chance or the elements, but directed by an intelligent purpose ruled by an authentic vision.”

For Nash there was magic in ancient and significant places that was still real and tangible, even in the mid-twentieth century.  His art tried to express and to contact those deep forces of the English landscape.

Paul Nash, Silbury Hill

In traditional folklore, some fairies have been inextricably linked to specific locations.  The brownies are the best example, being tied to an individual farm or dwelling, but spirits might also be associated with particular natural features- caves, pools, groves or fords, for instance.  Morgan Daimler in her recent book Fairies called these ‘land spirits.’

The intimate associations with certain landscape features has encouraged writers to speculate upon the nature and role of these beings.  In her book Faerycraft Emily Carding describes fairies as nature spirits of place who are “the inhabitants and guardians of the inner landscape of our world, just as we are of the outer landscape.”  They are “the spiritual life force within the land.”  In Sirona Knight’s conception, “the strength of fairies comes directly from the power of the land.  The generations buried in the land give it tremendous sacred power.  This sacred power is the power of the fairies.” (Faery magick, c.1)  Other writers have linked the fays to ley lines; they are ancient spirits magically tied to certain places of the earth.

David Inshaw, Silbury by night.

‘These gentle fields‘- the personality of the land

Fairies may equally be a means of expressing the particular landscape character of different parts of the country.  I have discussed these manifestations in detail on the British fairies blog, but the various fairy forms may be reflections of:

• the unique conditions (and perils) of certain English rivers and ponds, which are personified as lake maidens and river spirits, many of whom are perilous to humans.  Examples are Peg Powler on the upper Tees and the widespread Jenny Green Teeth;
• the harsher conditions of the Highlands, the less forgiving nature of the mountains and lochs, might perhaps have been animated through the monstrous water beasts that are such a feature of Scottish folklore.  The kelpies, shellycoats and other man-eating beasts of the far north are born of tougher climes.

I always hesitate to be too reductionist and determinist about such matters, but it is undoubtedly the natural tendency of people to imbue the world around them with personality; the tiddy men of the Fens may be another good example, but many of the ‘tribes’ of British fairies (pixies, spriggans, hyter sprites and the like) are quite parochial in their occurrence and might, as such, symbolise or portray particular features or traits of that locality.

Even if we reject such close ties between fairy character and the territories they inhabit, I think we can still see the fays as a response of the British people to the British environment.  Even if they are not characterisations of specific landscape features, the still reflect a particular spirit of place.  From a common core of elvish traits, over the medieval centuries the British have elaborated their many fairy tribes, each unique to its region.

Another conception of fairy nature is to see them as protectors of the land.  This aspect of their nature is particularly emphasised in the modern fairy faith, but it has older roots, at least as far back as the nineteenth century.  In the Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The moon of Gomrath, two novels rooted imbued with the spirit of place of Alderley Edge,  Alan Garner portrayed how the elves might fall ill as Britain is progressively polluted.  From this it is a short step to envisage the fairies of Albion as being dedicated to the preservation of their land- a role I have dramatised myself in The elder queen and in Albion awake!

David Inshaw, Silbury Hill on  starry night

The spirits of Albion

The resonance of these ideas derives from a tight bundle of associations.  Fairies have very often been connected in folklore with standing stones and megalithic burial chambers.  They are thus in some way related to our ancestral dead and, by conceiving of them as spirits of place, we are reaffirming our deep roots in the land, re-establishing connections to racial and national origins and reasserting a sense of belonging to, relating to and respecting the land on which we live and depend.

Fairies and elves may therefore be seen as personifications or embodiments of the spirit of Albion.

David Inshaw, Storm over Silbury Hill

For more discussion of this general subject, see my 2022 book The Spirits of the Land- Faeries and the Soul of Britain (available on Amazon/KDP as a paperback or e-book).

Ritual landscapes- a visit to south-west Scotland.

 

Visiting Sheffield on a wet and cold December afternoon last year, I wandered into Waterstones bookshop looking for warmth and shelter and picked up a copy of British art, Ancient landscapes by Sam Smiles.  Now, as readers of the blog may appreciate, this is my kind of book- a combination of art and megaliths.  I bought it and highly recommend it.

Nesfield, Circle of stones, from the V&A collection

Leafing through the book later with my wife, we came across a painting by (the hitherto unknown to me) William Andrews Nesfield entitled Circle of stones neat Tormore, Isle of Arran, 1828.  We didn’t know the site and we reached for our old and battered copy of Aubrey Burl’s Guide to the stone circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany.  The place in question was Machrie Moor on Arran, an area we had never visited.  A plan began to form…

During the last week in June we visited Arran and Kintyre.  The weather was astonishingly perfect- blue skies unbroken for seven days.  Arran was stunning- both lush coastal woodland and dramatic mountains (although perhaps not quite as spectacular as Nesfield would have had us believe).  On the Sunday morning we visited the Machrie Moor complex, a short drive across the middle of the island from where we were staying in Brodick.

There is a walk of a mile or so from the carpark, but then you wander through a succession of megalithic monuments, spread out over a gently sloping moorland covering another mile or so.  This many stone circles in one place was remarkable enough; for them all to be so impressive was more incredible still.  There are six, plus two cairns.  The standing stones reach as high as five metres.  As ever, you are confronted with bafflement as to their purpose and the motivation that led to such sustained and prolonged effort with limited technology.  it’s suggested that they are all orientated to the midsummer sunrise between the mountain peaks to the east.  We’d arrived a week or so too late to check this…

Next to The Glenartney where we stayed in brodick was the studio of artist Angela Elliott Walker.  Before departing, we purchased a copy of her print of Machrie Moor.  I love her almost Futurist style and the great sense of perspective over the whole ritual landscape that this picture gives.

Angela Elliott Walker, Machrie Moor.

On leaving Arran, we crossed on the ferry from Lochranza and stayed at a Landmark Trust property at Saddell Bay on the east cost of Kintyre, almost directly opposite Machrie Moor on the island’s west coast.  The Saddell estate comprises a castle, a stately home and four cottages, all available as holiday lets.  You get your own beach, too, with seals, otters and gannets.  Pop fact: the video for the (in my personal opinion, execrable) ‘Mull of Kintyre’ by Paul McCartney was filmed on Saddell Beach.  You can see the isolated cottage used for picnics and the castle in the background when the Campbelltown pipe band march manfully along the beach.  You can ‘enjoy’ this on You Tube.

Ballymeanoch standing stones (from Neilston webcam)

Anyway, on our first full day we undertook the long drive north from Saddell to visit the second ritual landscape in the area, at Kilmartin in Argyle.

Temple Wood stone circle (from Tripadvisor)

The Kilmartin monuments are slightly more extended than the Machrie Moor site, so that it’s not possible to comprehend the distribution of circles, cairns and stone rows in their entirety.  It has been very well preserved, although to a degree this was a disadvantage as its accessibility drew coach parties.  I may be selfish, but I prefer having stone circles to myself, just so that there’s time and silence to absorb the sense of place.  That personal gripe aside, the complex is well worth visiting.

Nether Largie cairns (from Undiscovered Scotland)

These sites are both called ‘ritual landscapes’ by the professionals and it’s appropriate to end with a few thoughts on that.  We have next to nothing in the modern, certainly Western, world, to equal these planned and co-ordinated Neolithic and Bronze Age constructions.  Other than, perhaps, the Vatican City and a couple of other places of Christian pilgrimage, the last millennium has largely produced single, albeit very impressive, structures.  At both Kilmartin and Machrie Moor we find a half dozen or more interrelated constructions.  Furthermore, we can barely begin to match their usage.  The carbon dates suggest that Machrie Moor was in use over a period of 800 years.  The sites at Kilmartin attracted worshippers and new building over a period of 2500 years.  Very little from the Christian era can match that kind of deep significance and veneration.

Kilmartin standing stones (from Tripadvisor)

 

Scorhill Stone Circle- tranquil beauty

For me, the north-east quadrant of Dartmoor is the best part of the whole moor.  To the south deep wooded valleys cut into the plateau around Holne and Dartmeet, whilst the western side seems generally higher and bleaker.  In the area of the moor north of Chagford, there is an ideal combination of features: there is natural woodland fading into expanses of moorland, there are deep winding lanes, lush valleys and small sheltered farms and settlements.  Access is by a network of minor roads, barely navigable without local knowledge or a good map, and this tends to keep away too much traffic.  On top of that, there are several excellent megalithic sites.

The Nine Stones stone circle above Belstone is well worth a visit, and is an easy walk up a broad track from the centre of the pleasant village with its very handily placed pub, The Tors Inn.  The entire fringe of the moor running south-east from here, through South Zeal and Throwleigh, is very attractive.

The Belstone Nine Stones- image from ‘megalithic portal.’

The primary purpose of this post is to eulogise Scorhill stone circle, but it has other neighbours in the vicinity worthy of a visitor’s attention whilst in the area.  If you walk due south of the site itself, skirting the plantation you can see, you will come to the stone rows at Batworthy and Thornworthy.  Some distance further to the south, at the end of a lengthy and frankly tedious trudge through conifer forest, is the twin stone circle at Greywethers.  It’s an impressive site which rewards the fairly miserable approach and is unmatched elsewhere in the British Isles, except perhaps by The Hurlers on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.

The Greywethers

Scorhill itself is best directly approached by driving on the by-roads either from Chagford or south from Throwleigh.  Eventually, the road runs out in a small parking area.  A gate lets straight onto the moor, a lush pasture at first with a clear stream running through what may be old mine workings.  A walk of a quarter of a mile takes you to the crest of a ridge, from which you look straight down at the circle standing towards the bottom of a wide valley.  It’s clearly visible, only another quarter of a mile away, with a clear track leading to it.

It’s a compact circle, quite complete, but with some marked gaps or low/ prostrate stones. What recommends it is its relative accessibility (no bogs, no barbed wire and no wandering aimlessly amidst tussock grass), its fine position and its tranquillity.  On this latter quality I lie slightly- on my last visit the Army was in occupation on its firing range to the west of Belstone and was cheerily blasting away with its artillery.  The war, nonetheless, was going on the other side of the hills you can see in the photos and was muffled enough to be dismissed as distant thunder.

Scorhill is always worth a visit.  It’s not a demanding site to reach yet the rewards of the monument and its location are considerable.

More on megaliths?

I’ve discussed a number of other sites, such as the stone circle at Boscawen Un in West Penwith (twice), other sites on Dartmoor,  Bevis Thumb long barrow in Sussex, and Bosiliack cairn in West Cornwall.

On wider megalithic themes, see my musings on Neolithic language, on chalk white horses and on long barrows.  For even broader contemplations of Britishness, see my postings on the mystical vision of Albion, on the romance of the landscape.

The mystical vision of England

Avebury, by Penny Morrison

My starting point for this posting is, once again, Peter Ackroyd’s Albion.  In chapter twenty three, The mysterious voice, he discusses the mystical tradition of medieval England and its contribution to the overall theme of his book- ‘The origins of the English imagination.’

Ackroyd writes that:

“The mystical tradition on England is of mysterious origin.  It must be in some way associated with those early intimations of the supernatural in the land of mist and ghosts [he refers here to Anglo-Saxon poetry which he covers earlier in the book]; English is the language of vision.”

He notes the evolution of the term ‘mystical’ from its original sense, which is properly employed in respect of such religious writers as Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle and William Hilton.  In this context the word describes a personal, ecstatic spiritual experience; as such, it “is not directly related to the visionary imagination.” From the seventeenth century onwards, though, the word is acquired its sense of “ancient or occult wisdom.”  In this sense we have used it of later writers and artists and their responses to the English landscape.

Nonetheless, in the works of the solitary and meditative writers like Rolle, Ackroyd traces the origins of native individualism, of a visionary strand in English art and of the “unheard melody” of their prose, full of singing and sweetness.  Even in its origins, there is a suggestion of mystical meanings in landscape and nature.  For example, Julian of Norwich describes a submarine vision or revelation:

“I was led in imagination down to the sea-bed and there I saw green hills and valleys looking as though they were moss-covered, with seaweed and sand.”

The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing shapes that most British of features, the enveloping grey cloud, into a symbol of mystic significance:

“Ween not, for I call it a darkness or a cloud, that it is any cloud congealed of the humours that flee in the air, nor yet any darkness such as is in the house on night when the candle is out.  For such a darkness and such a cloud mayest thou imagine with curiosity of wit, for to bear before thine eyes in the lightest day of summer and also contrariwise in the darkest night of winter.”

Behind these homely and familiar images, there lies a more mysterious meaning.

Hidden meaning in the British landscape  has, of course, been a theme of many of my previous posts and has run through the work of many artists and writers about whom I have written, William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Paul Nash to name only a few.  Today, I’ll cite novelist and poet John Cowper Powys, of whom Philip Pulman has said that:

“Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity.  Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.”

Powys himself described the “psychic chemistry of religious sites older than Christianity” and the sense that the land around Glastonbury “reeked with the honey lotus of all the superstitions of the world.”  His general position was set out in the Meaning of culture (1929, p.178):

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”

This connection was felt by fellow Cymru-phile David Jones and by Gwent born author Arthur Machen, a sense encapsulated in his novel The hill of dreams.  We”ll have more to say about this theme; in the meantime, go out and make contact with the profound among the hills and valleys of Albion!  For fuller details of my fiction and nonfiction writings on British folklore, see my website.

Bant’s Carn, St Mary’s, Ian Cooke

More on the matter of Britain?

See my postings on the nations of Albion, the people of Britain and on the various ancient sites across the British landscape, such as white hill horses and long barrows.  For more discussion of this general subject, see my 2022 book The Spirits of the Land- Faeries and the Soul of Britain (available on Amazon/KDP as a paperback or e-book).

“The ghostly language of the ancient earth”- finding (and founding) Albion

John Piper, ‘Wiltshire archaeology’

Albion– an old word for an old place.  But I feel we need to use it in a new way, to express an old emotion free of some of the associations that have attached themselves to other names.

Love for your home country is an inborn sensation, just as a sense of national identity seems to be.  But what is that identity formed from?  We are all just stories we tell to ourselves and nationality is just one element in those stories.  It’s woven from many things: from memories of home, of holidays, of history lessons at school and from books we have read; it crystallises out of pictures we have seen and views enjoyed from trains and cars.  It is the product of a set of accidents and is shaped as much by choice as by circumstance.   With Yorkshire roots but with antecedents also from Sunderland, Manchester, Cornwall, Ireland and Germany, what are my origins, what are my roots? Does ‘home’ change with time, so that a couple of decades resident in London now make me more attached to the capital and to Essex than to my birthplace?  Is belonging just a matter of imagination and volition?

 

John Piper, ‘Cartoon for the stained glass window at Wiltshire museum.’

And yet, there is no denying a sense of attachment to certain places and certain landscapes, and to the ideas and that they evoke- to my own particular formulation and conception of ‘national pride.’  I might have said Englishness, which would have been accurate enough, except whilst chalk figures, downland, hill-forts, fields and pastures, woods and castles are all configurations of natural and built environment that can be uniquely English, I hesitate about the labels:

• English describes a country from the south coast to the Border at Hadrian’s Wall, but it carries with it other meanings- wars with France, invasions of neighbouring lands, drunken football fans on the rampage, a particular ethnic pride waving the St George flag;
• British evokes an island and the rich diversities of landscape and culture from Cornwall to Caithness, but there are too memories of the British Empire and those other connotations of ‘Great’ Britain, outdated but persistent as they are; and,
• United Kingdom is a purely political identity; I may more readily say that I am English or British but few can identify with the UK as a real place, not least now that it faces dissolution though devolution and since UKIP gave it a particular separatist and isolationist meaning and further narrowed and politicised it.

John Piper, ‘Salisbury plain.’

Which brings us to Albion, a name unfreighted with the burdens of the past.  It’s a name from literature and history that more readily suggests the unique combination of land and culture, of geography and  history, of art and imagination, memory and inspiration that inspires and motivates me.  Albion has emotional meaning- and not just for me: witness Peter Ackroyd’s 2002 cultural history entitled Albion.  He quotes Ford Madox Ford (The spirit of the people, 1912) to the effect that “It is not- the whole of Anglo-Saxondom- a matter of race, but one quite simply of place- of place and of spirit, the spirit of being born of the environment.”  Ackroyd also shares with John Cowper Powys a sense that “the spirit of the earth called out to him from the green shoots beneath his feet so that he was filled with the genius loci and sustained by it.”  In his earlier novel First light he described in the Dorset landscape an “almost human presence,” as if the foregoing generations had left an echo.  With Wordsworth (Prelude, Book 2, School tree) Ackroyd hears “the ghostly language of the ancient earth,” and himself concludes (p.448) that his subject is “the landscape and the dreamscape.  It encourages a sense of longing and belonging.  It is Albion.”

Perhaps the time is right to rediscover and reestablish Albion.  For fuller details of my fiction and nonfiction writings on British folklore, see my website.

John Piper, ‘Avebury restored’

More on the matter of Britain?

See my postings on the vision of Albion, the nations of Britain and on the various ancient sites across the British landscape, such as white hill horses and long barrows.

Bosiliack- a gem of Neolithic Penwith

I’ve just returned from a few days in Cornwall, staying in Penzance.  This gave us a chance to visit a few of the ancient sites in the Land’s End peninsula, some familiar and some new to us.  Despite my many holidays spent in Penwith, I was impressed to find that there were still megalithic monuments I had not previously seen.  The burial chamber at Bosiliack was one of these.  It isn’t especially easy t find.  I know the moorland around Ding Dong mine reasonably well- many is the time I have walked the circuit from Lanyon farm to Men an Tol and then on to Boskednan stone circle on the height of the moor, but I had never seen the burial chamber.  A visit in mid-September made matters worse, for the bracken and brambles were at their tallest, of course.

Some aimless wandering amidst bog and briar followed.  Some enterprising soul had driven a hatchback car all the way up to the abandoned mine building before setting fire to it.  In a perverse way the conflagration must have been spectacular and satisfying.  It was a clear bright day and the views down to Mounts Bay and across to the Lizard were rewarding in themselves.

Eventually, all other unlikely looking tracks through the thickets having been exhausted, we found the burial chamber.  it was worth the effort.  It is a little gem; the stones are still very much intact and the passage in which bodies might be laid was distinct.  It reminded me of the far larger and remarkable construction at Ballowall near St Just and also of the more complete chambered tombs on St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly- Innisidgen and Porth Hellick.  These have retained their earthen coverings and crawling inside to the experience the eery, damped stillness is always memorable and impressive.  Bosiliack may be bare of its covering, but it is attractive in its neatness- almost as if we were coming upon just as the stonework had been completed and before the soil was piled upon it.  It is evocative: you can sit in the passage and gaze south east towards the rising sun.  You can enjoy the solitude of the spot and try to imagine how it was so many thousand years ago.  You can endeavour to connect with those people who constructed it, and reconstruct the landscape they would have seen- crowded with monuments even then and redolent of family and tribal associations, presumably.

I have spoken in previous posts about the significance to me of tumuli and similar burial monuments.  They are tangible links to a seemingly impenetrably ancient past; they are a part of our present; they are a source of magic and mystery in our lives.  This last may be to romanticise these sites, but to this accusation in plead actively guilty.  In both my ‘adult’ fairy stories, The Elder Queen and Albion awake!  I have made prehistoric tombs the focus of supernatural activity.  It is a tradition of British folklore and a natural human response to the eerie and unknown.

More on megaliths?

I’ve discussed a number of other sites, such as the stone circle at Boscawen Un in West Penwith (twice), the Scorhill stone circle and other sites on Dartmoor, and Bevis Thumb long barrow in Sussex.

On wider megalithic themes, see my musings on Neolithic language, on chalk white horses and on long barrows.  For even broader contemplations of Britishness, see my postings on the mystical vision of Albion, on the romance of the landscape.

White Horses in the English landscape

The Vale of the White Horse c.1939 Eric Ravilious 1903-1942 Purchased 1940 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05164

“Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.

For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse; Part One- The vision of the king

Patrick Cannon- Sunrise at White Horse Hill

I have just finished reading Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones- Engraver, soldier, painter, poet (published April 2017).  London born and bred, Jones throughout his life felt a great affinity for Wales, the land of his father’s birth.  This made me reflect upon nationality and belonging.  Speaking for my myself, brought up in Yorkshire but with a mixed Yorkshire, Irish, Cornish, German family, it is worth considering what family roots actually are?  Is any sentiment just an imagined affiliation?  Is there any real ‘racial/ national’ inheritance?  When I feel a stirring of identification with Cornwall, with the northern counties  (or, indeed, with England or Britain), is that any more than romantic delusion? Are these links merely a story I tell myself?  Are they not just transitory illusions, dependent upon mood and situation: at times, I may feel more of a Yorkshireman, at others more tied to my ‘celtic’ roots- but are they not all self deception, mere wishful thinking?

Jane Tomlinson, Long grass at White Horse Hill

When travelling by train to Wales, I always watch out for the Uffington White Horse and feel reassured by its presence. Likewise when I travel to Birmingham: the castle at Berkhamstead is a reaffirmation of some ancient continuities.  Is this the consolidated learning from books expressing itself or some genuine organic attachment to place?

These ancient monuments, I believe, tie us to the land and give us that sense of belonging to a place and a nation.  For their makers they represented a territorial claim but also, I suspect, a hallowing of the land.  The tribe that asserted its rights to resources may no longer exist, but that sacring and that sense of identity persist, I believe.  The hill figures represent continuity as well as a connection; they supply a sensation of stability, of a depth of time and the foundation of generations.  Unlike Chesterton, seeing the white horse in the distance does not make me feel like one of a strange and stranded people, but instead just the most recent member of a community. Those barrows of the dead I have mentioned before represent an identical continuation- the same family still occupying the same land.  The sites we build and the stories we tell all serve to situate us in our environment and to re-envigorate that tradition so that it continues to flow and have meaning.  A feeling of magic is a feeling of love and of attachment, a rebinding of bonds.

For fuller details of my fiction and nonfiction writings on British folklore, see my website.

Simone Dawood, Uffington White Horse

More on prehistoric Britain?

I’ve discussed a number of ancient sites, such as the stone circle at Boscawen Un in West Penwith (twice), Scorhill stone circle and other sites on Dartmoor,  Bevis Thumb long barrow in Sussex, and Bosiliack cairn in West Cornwall.

On wider megalithic themes, see my musings on Neolithic language and on long barrows.  For even broader contemplations of Britishness, see my postings on the mystical vision of Albion, on the romance of the landscape.

“Like long barrow sleepers”

Eric Ravilious, ‘The Long man of Wilmington.’

I return to the issue of myth, inspiration and the British landscape.  On the recent E17 Art Trail in Walthamstow, London, I visited an exhibition by local artist Henriette Monteiro. Her pencil drawings and water colours were imaginative illustrations of ancient sites around England, such as Avebury, Kit’s Coty House in Kent, Belas Knapp long barrow on the Cotswolds and Cymbeline’s Castle in Buckinghamshire.  She complemented the art with poetry, and I was thereby introduced to the work of Andrew Young (1885-1971), whom I had not previously encountered.

Here’s his poem A prehistoric camp, which has been used by TfL as a ‘Poem on the Underground’:

A Prehistoric Camp

“It was the time of year
Pale lambs leap with thick leggings on
Over small hills that are not there,
That I climbed Eggardon.

The hedgerows still were bare,
None ever knew so late a year;
Birds built their nests in the open air,
Love conquering their fear.

But there on the hill-crest,
Where only larks or stars look down,
Earthworks exposed a vaster nest,
Its race of men long flown.”

Eggardon Hill, which is east of Bridport, Dorset, is an Iron Age hill fort, but there is evidence of much earlier use in the form of several tumuli or long barrows on its summit.  The presence of barrows within the defences is what interests me here: it is quite a common feature, as for example at Hambledon Hill further east in the same county.  The barrow within the ramparts at Hambledon provided scenes for my one of my ‘fairy tales;’ the conjunction of ancient sites and supernatural mysteries makes intuitive story telling sense.

Also by Young is the poem ‘Wiltshire downs’ from which I quote here the final stanza.

“And one tree-crowned long barrow
Stretched like a sow that has brought forth her farrow
Hides a king’s bones
Lying like broken sticks among the stones.”

I like the verse, but I’d take issue with his depiction of the bones like broken sticks. Young has connected to a key feature of our landscape and folk lore, but he does not take advantage of the full mystery associated with these features.  Welsh poet and artist David Jones in his extended prose-poem concerning the first world war, In parenthesis (1931), described slumbering British troops in Flanders dugouts as being “like  long-barrow sleepers, their dark arms at reach.” He returned to this theme decades later in The Anathemata.  In the poem Sherthursday and Venus day Jones mentioned “the hidden lords in the West-tumulus.”  In the same poem he also recognised the intriguing mystery of hill-forts as well as barrows, imagining a climb “up by the parched concentric bends over the carious demarcations between the tawny ramps and the gone-fallow lynchets, into the vision lands.”

“Into the vision lands…” Jones intimately knew and worked with the legend and myth of the British Isles. Rudyard Kipling also drew on the deep wells of folklore and in his poem ‘Song of the men’s side’ from the book Rewards and fairies advised:

“Tell it to the Barrows of the Dead—run ahead!
Shout it so the Women’s Side can hear!
This is the Buyer of the Blade—be afraid!
This is the great God Tyr!”

In Kipling’s story The knife and naked chalk Puck introduces Dan and Una to a neolithic herder who tells a tale of “a Priestess walking to the Barrows of the Dead.”  He sees a girl he knows at a tribal ceremony- “I looked for my Maiden among the Priestesses. She looked at me, but she did not smile. She made the sign to me that our Priestesses must make when they sacrifice to the Old Dead in the Barrows. I would have spoken, but my Mother’s brother made himself my Mouth, as though I had been one of the Old Dead in the Barrows for whom our Priests speak to the people on Midsummer Mornings.”  The ancestors lie beneath the tumuli and their purpose is to advise and help their living descendants.  Perhaps that function is not yet exhausted…

A vital element of British folk stories (the so-called ‘Matter of Britain’) is the concept of the sleeping hero.  King Arthur, most commonly, is not dead and buried in Avalon but lies hidden beneath some ancient feature- a hill fort or cave, perhaps- awaiting the time when he is summoned to save the island and its people.  On the ancient heights of those tribal fortifications, warriors lie in wrapped in the dreams of centuries, patiently biding their time until the call is sounded and their slumbers are ended.

In another of his poems, Rite and fore-time in the collection Anathemata, David Jones equated tumuli with altars, regarding both as places of worship and of burial of holy relics.  His analogy is perceptive and powerful.  The sleepers in the barrows are our ancestors, our predecessors on the land, and doubtless one element in their interment and the rites associated with their monuments was a reassertion of community links not only with those who had gone before but also with the landscape over which their remains now watched.  They had become both features in the landscape and guardians of that landscape.

Today campaigners declare ‘The Land is Ours.’  The barrows and stones carry the same message.  The land is a common inheritance and a common resource.  The long-barrow sleepers repeat and protect that message.  This is where we dwelt and where we dwell.

To return to Andrew Young, I must again demur from his description of Eggardon hillfort- “its race of men long flown.”    They, we, are still here.  They still speak, albeit faintly and only if you are attuned.  What’s more, in times of trouble, they may perhaps:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many – they are few.”

For fuller details of my fiction and nonfiction writings on British folklore, see my website.

More on prehistoric Britain?

I’ve discussed a number of ancient sites, such as the stone circle at Boscawen Un in West Penwith (twice), the Scorhill stone circle and other sites on Dartmoor,  Bevis Thumb long barrow in Sussex, and Bosiliack cairn in West Cornwall.

On wider megalithic themes, see my musings on Neolithic language, and on chalk white horses.  For even broader contemplations of Britishness, see my postings on the mystical vision of Albion, on the romance of the landscape.

For more discussion of this general subject, see my 2022 book The Spirits of the Land- Faeries and the Soul of Britain (available on Amazon/KDP as a paperback or e-book).