Halangy Down iron age village.
Arminghall Henge
Just a few minutes walk from where we live, on the south side of the river, is the site of Arminghall Henge, a neolithic timber monument that has been dated to around 2500 BC, although it may be even older. There isn't a lot to see there these days, save for a few dips in the landscape where banks and ditches used to be, but aerial photography clearly shows just how impressive the whole complex was.
Cropmarks in the soil indicate eight giant post holes, almost a metre in diameter, arranged in a horse-shoe shaped pattern, seemingly aligned to the setting of the sun at the midwinter solstice. Subsequent excavations revealed the posts to have been oak, and sunk more than two metres into the ground - which means that they could have easily stood to a height of six or seven metres.
Obviously, nobody really knows why the monument was built, or indeed, who built it. It dates from a time when man was coming to grips with agriculture, and to some extent, trying to tame nature - not always successfully - so perhaps it had some ceremonial or ritual significance connected to the seasonal cycle. Perhaps it was a political statement of an affiliation of local clans who wanted to impress and intimidate trading partners and rivals (County Hall is only a short distance away).
Or maybe it was a neolithic job-creation scheme.
I'd like to think it was something of all of these - religious, political, cultural - and by being positioned in the landscape as it was, facing the setting sun on the shortest day of the year, the idea was to harness the fading power and in some way store it for the future.
It seems somehow apt that in the same field where the henge once stood there is now an electric power station, and rows of pylons in attendance.
Bant's Carn Tomb
We were staying in the Isles of Scilly for a few days, on St. Mary's. One afternoon, we walked up to Bant's Carn Tomb, and had a notion that it would be a good idea to record the sounds of the sunrise from there. So, a couple of days later, we found ourselves getting up early, and leaving our holiday cottage just after three o'clock in the morning. In the darkness we stumbled over the rocky path up to the Halangy headland, before our torch ran out of battery and we were forced to navigate by the weak light of a mobile phone. It took us nearly three quarters of an hour to walk the mile or so to the grave, and we congratulated ourselves on getting lost just once, and taking a wrong turning which brought us out at Telegraph Tower.
We finally found the grave, squatting near the top of the slope, its entrance facing towards the faint streak of light that was starting to appear on the horizon. We ducked inside. It was just starting to get light enough to make out the shapes of the rocks in the chamber, and my wife was able to set up her recording gear without too much trouble, attaching a couple of microphones to an old wire coat-hanger, and hanging it from a fissure in a rock just under one of the roof lintels.
Satisfied that everything was working properly, she went off to explore the headland, while I stayed in the chamber to keep an eye on the equipment - you never know who's abroad at this hour - and to watch the gradually lightening sky.
I made myself comfortable, and sat and listened to the dawn, and the hypnotic white noise of the Atlantic waves crashing into Halangy Point and Little Creeb. After a while, I realised there was a slight humming sound, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. Or was it like a small swarm of bees? What was it? It didn't seem to be the wind blowing in through the gaps of the tomb...perhaps it was the radio transmitter a few hundred yards away to the east? Sometimes the hum was there, sometimes it wasn't. Perhaps it was just in my head.
My wife returned. At first she said she couldn't hear anything, and the recordings hadn't seemed to have picked anything up - but then, there it was, an intermittent low hum.
A bee flew into the chamber. No, it wasn't that. A different kind of hum.
Eventually it stopped. The sounds of the morning became louder. A twin-engine plane flew overhead, a motorised boat headed out towards St. Martin's, and a car drove down Telegraph Road.
The day had begun.
Swinside Stone Circle
Probably the most picturesque stone circle you're ever likely to come across, and without the distractions of a visitor centre or car park, the Swinside circle is worth the uphill trudge of over a mile to see it. It stands in an open field just down from Swinside Farm, five miles north of the town of Millom, in the south-western corner of the Lake District.
Happisburgh
Ancient footprints have been found preserved in mud on the beach at Happisburgh (pronounced Hazeboro), a run-down north-east Norfolk coastal town that is gradually falling into the sea. They had been made by nearly-humans almost a million years ago, and are the oldest hominin tracks outside of Africa.
Who were these people? What did they look like? What were they thinking as they squelched through the sand and mud? Were they happy?
Although we'll never know for certain, we can surmise that the prints appear to have been made by a family unit - perhaps two adults, and three or four children. The adults don't appear to be very large - around five feet six inches in height - if length of stride and size of footprint is anything to go by. And although it seems likely that they would have been scavenging for food, the random nature of the prints indicate the possibility that they could have been larking about as well. Maybe they had some kind of pre-historic beach ball that they entertained themselves with.
It seems almost miraculous to us that something so transient as a footprint should last so long, and that the only thing that remained of those people was the empty space beneath their feet, which we homo sapiens were able to measure, photograph and record, all these hundreds of thousands of years later.
And when the tide rolled in a few days afterwards and washed the prints away, it seemed fitting that the same elements which had preserved them for so long in the first place would be the ones to finally destroy them.
White Horse, Uffington
White Horse, Uffington (watercolour on paper 70cm x 50cm)
(pen sketch 15cm x 15cm)
A view from the horse's eye, overlooking a strange landscape. Below us, Dragon Hill, a chalk hillock with an artificially flattened summit, where St.George slew the dragon, and the Manger, a geographical feature carved out by the retreating ice at the end of the last Ice Age. The figure of the horse itself is a wonderful piece of artwork, carved into the hillside and filled with chalk. Nobody knows why it was created - a tribal boundary sign perhaps? - and recent evidence indicates it dating from the the late Bronze Age.
Ramsdale Standing Stones
Ramsdale standing stones (oil sketch on canvas 25cm x 20cm)
An evening ramble on Fylingdales Moor; paths and tracks peter out, and the ground is boggy underfoot. We see a fox skulking around a farmyard, un-noticed by the geese he's eyeing up for food, while a barn owl glides ghost-like in the fading light. It's almost ten o'clock, still light enough to read the OS map, and to realise that we're not where we thought we were. We're looking for standing stones and they should be round here somewhere. Finally we catch sight of them, on top of an area of raised ground, only a couple of minutes walk away at most. Ten minutes later, we're still walking, and when we finally reach them we find the monument isn't very large; the stones themselves are only about a metre in height. It's not so much a stone circle, more of a stone scalene triangle, but the location is impressive, with a view eastwards towards Robin Hood's Bay. I face west, take some photographs, and start sketching. My wife walks over to the stone nearest the sunset, then calls me over. Look at this. Sheep bones scattered around the standing stone, picked clean by carrion. There's probably a perfectly rational explanation for this, but somehow it seems too symbolic, too ritualistic, too un-natural.
It's getting dark.
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