Symbolic Forest

I mentioned in Saturday’s post that I’ve recently been pulling data off a hard disk I haven’t touched for more years than I care to think about, and saving the things that are worth saving. The original text of my degree dissertation, for example, which I thought I’d lost, and more than one terrible short story. Photos that are even older, that I’d had scanned in for one reason and another. I thought it might be worth sharing a few bits and pieces here.

First off, this post from May 2006 about local politics was picked to be quoted in The Guardian, for some reason. So, naturally, I saved an image of the clipping.

More people probably skimmed that quote than anything else I’ve ever written on here, at least to date, but I recall it didn’t lead to any noticeable spike in traffic, showing that people just don’t bother to type in URIs they read in newspapers.

Then, among the black and white photos, these pictures of an empty croft on the edge of the village of Calanais, in the Outer Hebrides. It stood in the middle of a tongue of land sticking out into Loch Róg, with nothing but grassland all around it, so you could almost imagine you were in that famous Andrew Wyeth painting. From the fragments of newspapers we found, it had last been lived in some time in the mid-1970s.

When I was in the Outer Hebrides, doing archaeological things, it was standard practice to carry two cameras: one loaded with black and white film, for print, and one loaded with colour slide film, so you could lecture people. These photos are from the same trip as the empty house. The first I think shows the Ullapool ferry approaching Stornoway somewhere on the east coast of Lewis; the others are another random evening around Calanais, probably with a large supply of stubby bottles of beer. I think the croft you can see in the middle picture is the same one as in the set above.

Some of the colour photos on that trip have never been scanned in and I think I’ve hardly even looked at them; these ones were scanned by someone I was briefly seeing, years ago, who had access to a film scanner, and scanned as many as would fit onto one CD. You never know, maybe I’ll dig the others out one day. There will probably be a few more of these posts to come, too.

Keyword noise: The Guardian, photography, Outer Hebrides, Callanish, Calanais, urbexing, derelict, abandoned, archaeology, standing stones, stone circle.

Sunday: a trip out to Stanton Drew stone circles. They are a mysterious and imposing group, relatively little-investigated and therefore with little certainty about them. The Great Circle, second in size only to Avebury, appears to be the remains of a complex henge monument containing multiple concentric circles of wooden posts and an avenue down to the nearby river: rather like Woodhenge, if you know it. The precise date or sequencing, though, is very unclear; it is almost certainly at least four thousand years old, possibly five thousand or more, a range of timescales which in the modern day would easily encompass both a medieval cathedral and the latest office blocks with a huge amount of room to spare.

We have no real way of knowing what sort of rituals were held here, just that some sort of ritual presumably was, and that over time it will have changed radically. To the last prehistoric people to carry out a religious act here, it might have said to have been immeasurably old, here before the start of the universe; or it might have said to have been built just beyond the touch of living memory, in their fathers’ mothers’ fathers’ time. What we do know is that in reality it may well have been in continuous use for fifty generations or more. In that time there may have been considerable change in language, belief and ritual, or it may have been relatively static. Modern reconstructions of the site, which you can see on the English Heritage website, show an almost-alien forest of posts, completely foreign when compared to any modern-day religious rituals or structures.

Of course, people still carry out religious rituals at Stanton Drew today. They have no real relationship with the religion the site was originally built for, but they do have a deep spiritual and emotional connection to the site itself, as we today see it: to the land, the landscape, and the goddesses and gods that the people of today call upon.

Walking around and exploring the site, we looped around two-thirds of the Great Circle and wandered over to the North-East Circle, much smaller and on a much more human scale. It, too, had its avenue down to the river, and may have had some sort of four-post structure in its centre. Today, at its centre, we found a dead crow. Wrapped in black silk and placed there carefully face-down.

We had no way to tell if it had been sacrificed deliberately, or had died a natural death. We had no way to tell who had placed it there, or why, other than that they clearly cared, that it clearly meant something, to place it directly in the centre of the smallest circle, its head facing north. “Insects will eat it and turn it into a skeleton,” said The Child Who Likes Animals, and, indeed, we could see small flies on its soft feathers already getting to work and returning it to the soil. We stood back respectfully and let it go on its way, just as the brambles still ripening in the hedge at the corner of the field will in a few weeks time wither up probably still on the plant.

And then, as it was barely even lunchtime, we headed off to the fish and chip restaurant at Chew Valley Lake to dine in style from cardboard boxes and with wooden forks.

Hurrah, even if the peas are a bit too fancy to be proper mushy peas.

Keyword noise: archaeology, Stanton Drew, Ancient Britain, neolithic, stone circle, paganism, religion, sacrifice, fish and chips.

Over on the bookshelves – but not the bookshelf I talked about the othe day – is an interesting little local book by an artist called Cleo Broda. It’s called Symes Avenue: Building On The Past, and it’s about the rebuilding of the centre of Hartcliffe, and the ways in which public art was involved in the rebuilding; particularly, community art which celebrates the area’s history.^*

Hartcliffe doesn’t have a particularly long history as a residential centre in its own right: it was built from scratch in the 1950s and in many ways was and is a typical 1950s council housing estate. Shiny and sparkling for the first few years, the first decade even, it decayed. By the time the term “social exclusion” came along, Hartcliffe was a prime example; so the 2000s plan to knock down the old, mostly boarded up shopping street and replace it with a new supermarket and community centre was definitely a Good Thing. The book concentrates on efforts to preserve memories of the estate, record oral histories of its origins, and generally recapture the optimism felt when it was first founded.

Quotes from the oral histories collected during the project fill the cover of the book. Reading through them, I noticed one in particular:

The stone circles at Stanton Drew are three miles from here as the crow flies

I’d heard of Stanton Drew, at some point in my education. And I knew that Hartcliffe was right out at the edge of the countryside. So – look, I’m finally getting to the point – one day, we went out there. To take photos of the stones.

Keyword noise: archaeology, Bristol, Bronze Age, Cleo Broda, countryside, Hartcliffe, history, megalithic, neolithic, oral history, photography, redevelopment, rural, Somerset, standing stone, Stanton Drew, stone circle, Symes Avenue.