Lost forest wonders

(Nimue)

This tree is some 4.500 years old. It was preserved by a peat bog, then covered over with sand. Back in 2014, storms stripped the sand away, revealing it again. As a consequence, the beach at Borth has the remnants of an ancient forest, and peat bog, where seaweed grows on the tree stumps. It’s something I’ve wanted to see for years, and I was finally able to encounter at the weekend.

This isn’t a petrified forest in the usual sense of the term- those are far older. I don’t know what the proper technical term is for something peatified in this way. To walk amongst these trees is to be in two different landscapes and times. The present moment of the beach and the frozen historical time of the trees overlap in a way that it is very strange to encounter. It was a remarkable experience.

Every landscape is full of history. Often it isn’t self announcing in this way. Seeing it brought to mind just how much history is under our feet, all the time. The unseen presence of the past informs the present, and that influence acts on us even when we aren’t conscious of it. This is one of the things I think about when the idea of ‘spirits seen and unseen’ goes past in a Druidic context. History exists in the soil. What is long gone is also still with is. The echoes of things that happened hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago are still here. Time is intrinsic to landscapes.

What makes this even more fascinating is the local folklore about a lost city – a kind of Welsh Atlantis beneath the waves. When the forest was revealed, it had a walkway in it – I think we saw part of it. People lived in this lost forest. Whether the story is a folk memory of that, or the result of the trees being exposed before, or of something else entirely, isn’t clear.

(Photograph by Keith Errington)

History in the landscape

(Nimue)

The hills around my home are made of Jurassic limestone. It’s hard to think about the scales of time this involves. When I walk I often find fossils. Bits of sealife from the ancient past, held in rock, and from which these hills have grown. The enormity of time involved in going from that Jurassic shore to the modern Cotswold edge defies my ability to think about time. I could dig the numbers out, but I don’t think humans have it in us to comprehend millions of years as anything more than abstract ideas.

Every landscape is the product of time. Human activity is often present at the surface. For humans, things humans have done in a place in the last few thousand years are impactful. In geological terms, this is barely the blink of an eye. We forget how small and fleeting we are. It’s good to put ourselves in perspective. 

Housing estates often hold the shapes of old fields, or the road names and place names may carry some sense of what was there before. The past can be surprisingly present when you start looking for it. This is the sort of thing you can do when the opportunity arises. It gives a lot without having to make a big or sustained time commitment. If you’re looking for human history in the landscape, maps can be really helpful. I use ordnance survey a lot because those show ancient sites. Online maps are good if you can access them on a phone to find out what you are seeing.

Wherever you find yourself, it’s worth taking a few moments to look for signs of history. Landscape history is a fascinating thing to get into, and if you have local landscape historians that can be so rewarding to explore. The internet is great for finding information about history in the landscape, and you may find local resources available to you.

Having a sense of your geological history is good, too. There’s a lot to be gained from just knowing what kind of terrain you are on and how it formed. Again you can pick up a lot without having to make a huge time investment. 

These are effective ways of deepening your relationships with the land, and with ancestors of place. It can form a good basis for excursions, meditations, photography and other creative responses. It’s a good thing to take on as a lay Druid because it gives a lot of relationship for relatively small time investments, and you can pick it up and put it down as you need to – it doesn’t need high levels of commitment or any real continuity of practice, you can just explore things when it suits you to do so.

The difficult ancestors

(Nimue)

If you’ve thought about honouring the ancestors for a few minutes it has probably crossed your mind that they weren’t all good. It would be fair to assume that our ancestors represent the full range of human capability both for good and for evil. That recognition is easy. Deciding what to do with it is a good deal more complicated.

Most humans are a mix of things, and whether they seem good or terrible may come down to your relationship with them, or your perspective. The warrior who fights for your people is a hero, the warrior who fights against your people is a monster. How we might judge the actions of our ancestors will not be how they judged themselves, or each other. 

Mostly for this post I want to think about ancestors in the more distant and unknown sense. I should mention though that if you have personal distress involving recent ancestors you absolutely do not have to include them in your Druidry, forgive what they did or anything like that. You can just ignore them and focus on the breadth and depth of your ancestry in a less personal way.

When it comes to those more distant ancestors, I think acceptance is a good place to start. Recognising their flawed and complicated humanity is a compassionate thing to be able to do. It also counts as compassion towards ourselves. We all have ancestors who did terrible things – even if we don’t know them by name. That legacy is in each of us, but we also have the power to respond to that with kindness and to do better. Where the legacy of harm is known to us, we have the power to break ancestral patterns, break family stories, change legacies of trauma and heal our family lines.

Sometimes people do terrible things by accident. Sometimes they do terrible things with really good intentions – war is full of that kind of tragedy. We all make bad choices, or act on the wrong information. We hurt each other when we don’t mean to. Honouring the ancestors calls for recognising all of this and acknowledging it.

We are here because of them. Our lives are shaped and informed by their lives. However, it’s not a simple progress narrative. I like to honour the ancestors who did not bring us to where we are today – ancestors of radical politics who strived for fairness and equality that we still don’t have. Ancestors who resisted the industrial revolution, objected to war, fought slavery, demanded the vote – many of whom never saw their work make changes in their own lives. We’re still a long way from getting much of this right.

When you visit an ancient monument you do not know that the people who raised it were good. Even while you love the site, are inspired by it and feel connected to the ancestors who created it, you don’t know them. I’m not someone who feels you can separate the art from the artists, but what do we do when we can only know the artist through their art? As with cave paintings. We get to see what is good, and enduring, and meaningful. We can honour that.

I think that working with our ancestors, in all their complexity, has a lot to teach us about how we deal with each other here and now. What we choose to focus on. What we need. What we refuse to accept. There are many ways of approaching this, what matters is the integrity and the care that you bring to the issue.

(This post was prompted by Babs in the comments, I’m always open to suggestions about topics to tackle).

Ancient ancestors of place

(Nimue)

I live on Jurassic limestone, so my non-human ancestors of place include a great deal of sealife. They’re unthinkably old. I can’t really process the time in a meaningful way. The land here is made of ancient life, and the hills are full of it. As the limestone also gets into the water I tend to feel that these ancient creatures are also in my bones, and part of me.

I’ve always been interested in fossils. Walking as a child involved a lot of scrutiny of the ground. I grew up in an area with a lot of seashells, ammonites and belemnites. Around Stroud I’ve also found seaweed, sea urchins and crabs. I get particularly excited about sea urchins.

Stroud has been many things in the distant past. It was at the edge of the ice sheet during the last Ice Age, which is a notion I find powerful and compelling.

Ancestors of place don’t have to be human. If there’s something present in the land that speaks to you, then it speaks. The past forms our landscapes physically, our topsoil is laid down in layers of history, our trees grow their rings year by year. Human ancestors impact on the land, but not so much as other forces and presences will have done over time. 

Thinking about ancestors of place is a wonderful opportunity to open up beyond a human-centric perception and see our place in the world as one that has been shaped by many different kinds of influences.

Seeking ancestors of place

(Nimue)

One of the best tools you can get for working with ancestors of place (certainly in the UK) is an ordnance survey map. Failing that, any online map that shows a lot of details can help you with this, and there are all sorts of things that the more technologically minded folk can use on phones to help identify what’s around.

I’ve always been fond of maps, and I get a lot out of siting down with physical ones to look at what’s in the land. Ordnance survey maps are good for showing historical and prehistoric sites in the landscape. This is a great place to start if you want to get out and make physical connections with whatever is around you.

Maps are also an excellent source of place names, and place names can reveal a lot about the history of a site. ‘Cester’ at the end of a UK place name indicates a former Roman settlement. ‘Bury’ goes with hillforts. The language a place name derives from can tell you a lot about who was there in the past. Places may be named after activities that occurred in them. You can’t always determine a lot from just the place name, but it can be an excellent jumping off point for finding out more of the history of a place.

What remains to us of history is only ever a tiny percentage of what was there in the past. Places are more likely to be named after famous white men who went there once, than after one of the workers who lived and died in the same place. (We have a King Street in Stroud). Conquerors erase the history of those who went before them, changing names and languages as they go. Famous events can dominate our sense of a place while we lose sight of the great mass of smaller events that may have been more important to people who actually lived in the landscape. I think this is especially true around historic battles, where the death of a prominent figure dominates our sense of a landscape, and we lose sight of all the quiet, ordinary lives lived out over hundreds of years.

We won’t know the stories of most of the people who are our ancestors of place. It’s good to take the time to think about them, to acknowledge them and to remember that they existed. History as a process erases more than it records. We can honour the unknown ancestors who have shaped the landscape, lived in it, died in it and whose influences we still feel even if we cannot know much of them as individuals.

Ghosts in the landscape

(Nimue)

Sometimes I look at a landscape and have a sudden sense of what it would have been like at a previous time. Recently in Shropshire having an intense sense of a landscape carved out by glaciers brought this to the forefront of my mind. While sometimes it happens for me in an unconsidered woo-woo sort of way, it is also territory worth exploring deliberately.

I try to see the shape of the land under the human constructions. I particularly try to see how roads have changed and distorted the landscape. I try to see where the water should have been, and in low areas, where there should have been marshes.

Sometimes place names give clues as to what was there before. The ‘ley’ ending of a place name indicates a clearing in a wood, and all too often is all that remains of the wood. Mere indicates marsh. Names with ‘cran’ in them indicate that once there were a lot of cranes in the area. Street names often reference the habitats that were destroyed to build them.

Knowing the history of a landscape makes it easier to look at it and see what has changed over time. It’s a good way of connecting with a place.

History is easier to read when there are human expressions of it. Buildings have their eras, and once you know what you’re looking at, buildings can tell you a lot about the past of a place. The one that always makes me wince is finding in villages houses with such names as ‘The Old Bakery’ and ‘The Old Forge.’ Where once there was a way of life and a community, now there are only houses for the affluent.

In the woo-woo moments I see what was there before. I see skies that had a lot more birds in them. I see the loss far more than I see anything that suggests progress to me. I don’t know whether I’m seeing something that has a reality to it, or whether my brain is just plugging in what I know about history in landscapes. I’ve not seen anything wildly dramatic, and that encourages me to think the experiences are genuine and that some landscapes contain ghosts of their former selves. 

Living History

(Nimue)

I did not expect them. Hooves thundering – a heavy horse, white and otherworldly racing across the field. A man in armour, glinting in the sunlight. I wept, and I did not know why I was weeping.

We tell good stories about knights in armour who come to the rescue. Aurthurian tales of chivalry, the wild fantasies of those early romance stories. Knights who go mad and tilt at windmills, chase questing beasts and search for the holy grail. Riders out of fairy with uncanny beauty who might lead you into all kinds of peril. Knights who will rescue you, or fight to defend your honour. The tales of knights are full of magic and wonders.

What my heart responded to when the knight rode out into the field, was those stories, and a longing for chivalry and magic.

My head went somewhere else fairly quickly. My head said this is a symbol of patriarchal oppression and feudalism. This is money, power and control, claiming might is right. What you have here is a capable killing machine able to force its intentions onto others. This is conquest and colonialism, and throwing lives away so that a small number of men can give each other titles. 

What I learned about the battle of Tewkesbury at the weekend agreed with my head response far more than with my heart feeling. A battle caused by a desire to rule, fuelled by the ambitions of others. Professor Ronald Hutton provided some enlightening context, and insightful commentary. We sat in the landscape where the battle had taken place. No one knows how many of the dead are still in that field, uncounted, unnamed, unrecovered. I was moved during the minute’s silence where we were invited to think of them. It turned what might have been just a theatrical show into something poignant. 

My heart still longs for the knights who are not driven by greed and the desire for power.

Ancestors in the landscape

Ancestors can seem like a distant, abstract sort of concept. Once you look further back than the ones you can name, there are a lot of them. There’s a lot to be said for being able to make more substantial connections with them. One good way of doing this is seeking ancestors in the landscape.

For Druids, there are three kinds of ancestors to consider – those of blood, those of place and those of tradition. No matter where you are, there will be something of ancestry of place to explore. Something as simple as a footpath represents a connection with people of the past. Old buildings, the shapes of fields, the history of hedges and woodland can all be worth finding out about. 

Ordinance survey maps are a great source of information about historical features. Going to visit a site is a great way of making a physical connections with your ancestors in the landscape. There’s nothing like standing in a place and knowing something about what it meant to people in the past – and any place where you know something of the history can give you this.

I see prehistoric ancestors as ancestors of both place and tradition. I don’t claim any direct link with the practices of ancient people, but at the same time this is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from. 

In the photo, I’m standing at the Nympsfield barrow. It’s been opened up and excavated, it isn’t what it was but that also means there’s a connection with early archaeologists. I remember first going to this barrow as a very small child, and not really understanding what I was seeing beyond the feeling that it was important. 

This is a place I’d like to spend some serious time sitting out and contemplating, which for various reasons I have not so far managed to do. I’ve spent more time inside the next barrow along the hill line, which is complete and sometimes accessible. I’ve also spent a lot of time at the next barrow in the other direction, sitting out. I find it meaningful just to put my body in these spaces and be present. It is enough for me to share space with my ancestors of place, and to know them a little through what they’ve left behind.

Ancestors in the landscape

I’ve been spending time at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland and it’s been a great opportunity to encounter ancestors of place. The Romans are very present here – in place names, the wall itself, the roads that follow their routes, and the areas of land they drained. Their presence forms the basis of a long distance walk, with walkers resulting in tourist infrastructure.

Much of the wall isn’t in the wall itself, but has been co-opted to build other walls and buildings. There’s a marker stone in the wall of the farm across the road from where I’m staying. Much of the farm is built from the wall, and apparently you can’t dig far without hitting stone. The Romans are very present in this landscape, and people who live here are very much living with them.

I’ve done a bit of walking along the route of the wall. It’s a dramatic landscape, and must be cold and bleak in the winter. In summer, being stationed here might be quite a pleasant gig, but much less so in cold weather. It must have been a bit of a system shock coming here – enough so that Romans stationed here used to wear socks under their sandals, and might even go so far as to don something resembling trousers.

I’ve had the opportunity to learn something about Roman military life. I’ve been surprised by the degree to which it was actually about building things – the wall and the roads – rather than about fighting. I hadn’t previously been aware of who it was in the Roman empire who did the building, so that’s been a significant thing to learn. I’m not especially drawn to the Romans, but I am always interested in ancestors of land, and right now, they are the dominant ancestors in the landscape I’m visiting.

As a young man, my father walked Hadrian’s wall. It’s interesting being in a place where I know he walked. We’ve done very little walking together since I was a child, so there are all kinds of interesting aspects to this for me.

It’s been a great experience for developing the Pagan Pilgrimage book I’m currently writing. It’s also been exciting having time in a landscape unfamiliar to me – not something I’ve been able to do for some years. It’s rekindled in me the desire for adventure, and to walk in places unfamiliar to me. I’ve been sorely limited over the last three years especially. However, life is opening up at the moment and I think there will be more adventures in unfamiliar places.

Albatross stories

An albatross takes up a lot of space. Being the biggest seabird has implications for size. You can’t appreciate an albatross without actively liking how big the bird is. You do not want an albatross if you keep wishing the albatross was smaller and did not weigh so much.

If there is an albatross hanging around your neck, do not blame the albatross for being there, or for being heavy or for drawing attention. If your choices have led you to a place where there is an albatross around your neck, do not blame the albatross, it is not in their nature to hang there. They only ever wanted to fly and live.

If you have killed the albatross who is now hanging from your neck, you cannot also blame the albatross. Really, you can’t, there’s no justice in it, and you are only fooling yourself by thinking this way. You’re denying yourself the opportunity to think about how you got here in the first place.The shame is in having shot the albatross, not in being the albatross.

We need to talk about the weight, about the sense of a burden hanging there. This is the weight of your own choices and if you feel it only as a burden placed unfairly upon you, then you’ve missed the point. You’ve missed the bit in the story where opening your heart to love makes the weight of the albatross fall away.

The right answer was to love the albatross. To love the flight of it and its connection to the weather. See it as a blessing, as a wild and lovely thing that simply existed and certainly meant no harm. And if, for some strange reason you end up with an albatross in your arms, count yourself uniquely blessed to have the chance to do some good. 

* * *

I’m having a bit of a wrangle with my ancestors at the moment. I have a story to take apart. I’ve carried this albatross a long way, too. Not resenting it for being an albatross, but fearing my own albatross self. Fearing the weight and burden of my own existence and the harm I might cause simply by taking up space. Unable to ask for help for fear of being the albatross. It’s haunted me, this wonderful bird, and fear of playing that role has been a conscious, explicit sort of thing for me for many years.

I went back and re-read The Ancient Mariner, the source of this image of a person with a dead albatross hanging from their neck. I read it, and I understood what a fundamental misreading it was that had filled my mind. An ancestral understanding of the poem that had been handed down to me in the most damaging way, as ancestral wounding often is. I’ve written about the albatross as part of how I’m changing my relationship with this story, and I’ve no doubt got more work to do.

I found the albatross having done some very intense journey work where I let myself fall, and found that I had fallen from a cliff and broken myself entirely – as I had intended. Crabs, gulls and starfish came to eat me, and then the albatross appeared, entirely unexpected and with things to tell me about the story I had been carrying. Sometimes you have to break radically in order to change things.

There is no shame in need, there is nothing to fear in needing help sometimes. Albatrosses are glorious, and the story about how to overcome guilt is not a story about blaming the victim.