Grounding and walking

(Nimue)

Walking has always been intrinsic to my Druidry. That made the years when I was often too ill to go out really difficult. Having an immediate relationship with the land I live on is really important to me, and moving about in my landscape helps me connect.

In this last year, there’s been a car in the mix, which is a less familiar experience for me. It’s made it possible for me to walk in places I otherwise couldn’t get to. The hills of Stroud are challenging, and I still can’t manage the longer walks. I’m really glad of being able to reconnect with the wider landscape.

It’s also brought home to me how much I value the immediacy of walking from my own front door. I don’t feel anything like as connected if there’s even a short car trip involved. I’d suspected that was the case, but there was always the thought in the back of my head that I might be making a virtue out of necessity. I wasn’t. Walking without having a car in the mix is more grounding and connecting.

I also find significant value in repetition. There is always joy in novelty and the delight of exploring a new landscape. However, there’s more depth of understanding when you repeatedly walk in the same places. Seeing the turning of the year as it plays out in specific plants and other natural things, is profound. Of course a person can have both, and there’s a lot to be said for revisiting the familiar alongside seeking the new.

My experience is only of walking, but my feeling is moving slowly is the important thing here, not how you do it. Wheels that go at human speeds are likely (I reckon) to result in much the same experiences. However, not having moved through landscapes on wheels, I’m not qualified to speak much on this. My most habitual walk is along a cycle path, and is a very accessible space, which has helped me keep getting out when  I’ve been more challenged.

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)

Watery winter landscapes

(Nimue)

Landscapes can change dramatically through the year – something I talked about a bit last week. Here’s another example. In summer, these are regular fields and may have a few birds on them. Winter rain transforms this landscape into wetland, attracting huge numbers of waterbirds. There were some 3000 golden plovers out there, I was reliably informed.

It isn’t as easy to spend time in landscapes when the conditions are more challenging. What kit you can afford, how much extra laundry you can handle and how your body deals with cold, damp or slippery conditions will inform what you can do in the dark half of the year. 

However, there’s a lot to be said for knowing how landscapes change through the seasons, and what happens there. Some places are dramatically transformed. 

Wetlands are wonderful, liminal places that shift and change a lot. If you only saw this field in summer, you would not know that about it. The liminality itself becomes invisible. The field is most alive in winter when waterlogged and teaming with birdlife. Some places locally are prone to more invasive flooding. The relationship between land and water in the UK has a long history. We’ve drained a lot of wetland to use it for farming and building, but we need those wetlands to handle heavy rain. They also lock in carbon at least as much – and potentially more – than trees do.

Landscapes that seem very ordinary and seem devoid of life at some times of year can become very different places in the right conditions. It takes time to know a landscape and learn its ways. I think we can have much more meaningful relationships with places if we encounter them at different times and see how different conditions change them.

(Photo by Keith Errington)

Temperate rainforest

(Nimue)

There are temperate rainforests in the UK, in Scotland, Wales, Cumbria and the south west. These are places where the rainfall is high and the temperature is more even than normal. As a consequence you get a lot of moss and lichen. One of the signs that you’ve got a temperate rainforest is the presence of stuff growing on trees. The photos in this post show moss and ferns growing on trees.

These photos were taken in The Golden Valley – one of Stroud’s valleys. The canal runs through this one. The bottom is sheltered by the hills and it’s clearly a damp place with good conditions for moss. There were a lot of trees that had a lot growing on them.

This was a saunter that underlined the importance of getting to know places at different times in the year. It’s something I’ve talked about repeatedly around working with landscapes and seeking spirits of place. Most of the locations I visit I’ve encountered at different points in the year. For various reasons I’ve only previously been on this stretch of canal in the summer. Seeing it in winter made things obvious that I hadn’t recognised before. 

In summer this whole area is green and leafy, so the moss isn’t so self announcing. With the leaves down the area looks very different, and while the bare branches weren’t a surprise, the intensity of the moss was unexpected. It’s more visible for having more direct light on it and stands out more for not being surrounded by other greenery. Seeing this place at a time of year I hadn’t previously encountered it has changed my sense of it.

(Photos courtesy of Keith Errington).

Enchanted by the landscape

(Nimue)

I first went to Brimham Rocks, in Yorkshire when I was in my early twenties, and was blessed with the opportunity for a return visit last week. This is a stunning area of landscape, with massive stones. Some have been placed on top of each other in strange and unlikely ways – due to ancient glaciers. All have been carved by the elements over unthinkable amounts of time. 

On seeing it, you might well imagine that these are the eroded remains of some ancient temple, it has that kind of look in some parts, and certainly that kind of feeling. Many of the rock formations have names based on what they remind people of.

The ancient peoples that we all too often label as ‘cavemen’ mostly didn’t live in caves. What did feature a lot in prehistory, was rock shelters. Caves aren’t that common, and were also attractive to large mammals. Any decent bit of rock that offers shelter from the prevailing wind direction is a good foundation for a shelter. Looking at Brimham Rocks, it was obvious to me that there were a lot of places that would make good shelters. I couldn’t imagine prehistoric people not being in that space.

From there of course all is speculation. There is no way of knowing what people in the past thought, felt or often even what they did in response to the landscape. Even when we have written accounts, we only have the view of the people who did the writing and it’s never the whole story. Brimham Rocks feels like a magical place to me, it seems full of spirit, and the rocks speak. It’s all too easy to project my response onto distant historical people and imagine that they felt something similar. On the other hand, it might not be irrational to do so. 

There are things about being human that show up across time and cultures. We like cheery celebrations in the dark part of the year. We get excited about big rocks, whether we’ve stood them up or not. The urge to climb them, look at them, draw them, draw on them, crops up all over the place. We get excited about landscape features that suggest stories to us. It might be fair to suspect that ancient Pagan peoples looked at this landscape and had feelings, too.

Spending time amongst the rocks is spending time exposed to history. The creating of this phenomenal landscape took a lot of time. Unthinkable enormities of time, so encountering that is an affecting thing in its own right. Whether it was all in my head or not… I felt a sense of human presence, veneration and significance. I wanted to respond as though to a temple, and I find myself wondering how much human temples might arise from a desire to recreate or mimic some of the majesty occurring naturally in the world.

(Photos by Keith Errington)

Tiny Druid, massive landscape

(Nimue)

In this photo I’m stood on the side of Haresfield Beacon, Gloucestershire. It’s a hillfort. Keith was further up on the ramparts when he took this photo. Behind me is the edge of the Cotswolds. What you can’t see from this image is the great expanse of the Severn flood plain and beyond that, the majesty of the Malvern hills. 

Very small Druid, very large landscape.

I find this good in all kinds of ways. Human stories tend to put humans centre stage, and within that we are all prone to seeing ourselves as the most important feature of our own stories. Being in a big landscape encourages us to shift that focus and see how small we are in the grand scheme of things. The enormity of a landscape puts life into perspective. Our hopes and dreams, fears and troubles all seem small when pitched against anything so manifestly larger than ourselves.

One of the things I greatly appreciate about being out on the land, and under the open sky is this sense of smallness. It’s also an invitation to think expansively. Being a small thing in a big space invites you to think beyond your own experiences and see a story that is far bigger than your own narrative.

Here there is room for wonder and awe. It’s liberating, and good for the soul. 

Genius Loci

(David)

Our family companion and my familiar, Blaze, left this life three weeks ago. We are still hurting, each in our own way. I remain hopeful that he will visit me, wherever he is now in the Otherworld.

On his final day with us, I spent the early morning sleeping and dreaming with him, sitting beside him on the sofa from 6 until 8. I held him and spoke soothingly to him from time to time, but mainly we slept and dreamed, and for a time we flew together over lands and sea and a vast forest, at the edge of which we landed and entered its cool green beauty.

I feel that forest will be where he will start his life in the Otherworld. It’s where I will look for him after he’s passed, in the first instance anyway. If I don’t find him there, it will at least be a beautiful place I can remember sharing with him on our flight together that day.

My grief has had the not unexpected effect of opening my mind and heart even more than normal to the spiritual world. Exploring an entirely new-to-me practice of possible devotion to the spirit of this valley rather than simply talking with her and asking for protection each day when I’m getting in and out of the shower. I’m not a deity worshipper, but without searching for the practice I formed this gentle intention of offering devotion to her.

I hoped to learn her name. I’d told her like that, if she was willing to tell me. My instinct is that she was here for prehistoric people, before the valley was named by Anglo Saxons. So that’s a name I was hoping to learn, from prehistoric times.

Things remained quiet here, both in our home collectively and in my mind. The heat wave over Britain had a heavy effect on me, pressing me down and sapping my mental energy to nearly nil. I couldn’t find any energy to write anything at all, including for Druid Life. I was grieving and letting the grief work through me.

Until then, I accepted that this exhaustion is like any and every other symptom of ME that I’ve experienced over these 30-odd years, and I need to manage it the same way.

Oh!!! Then one morning I was visited by twenty or thirty sparrows having a party in the broad, shallow, clean birdbath outside my study window. In those moments I felt strongly that the spirit of this place was answering my question through them as they flew back and forth for the high wall to the bath, back and forth, fluttering and splashing and I felt laughing with glee. Five minutes of them performing, then my friend Gentlebreast the wood pigeon landed to paddle and drink while the sparrows darted in and out of the apple trees up in my grove. The visit filled me with peace.

Next day, I delighted in a new gladiolus that’s suddenly grown and flowered in a different flower bed outside my study window. The second tier up in our deep, high, strong retaining wall of three semi-circular, tiered beds that holds back the hillside from slipping into the back of our house. It’s deep lilac and stunning. We’ve had them in several colours before, including this lilac, but never on this level. It’s ten feet distant on the horizontal and four feet higher than what we’ve had before, so something must have moved a bulb from the existing patch to this new one. My best guess is one of the magpies who visit, and I’m taking it as a lovely encouragement from the spirit of this valley.

On Friday 1^st September, I stood outside our back door looking across the valley and shaped my (winter’s coming) beard square in honour of the spirit. Not ceremoniously, which isn’t my style, but quietly and thoughtfully.

The spirit made herself known to me one day thirty years ago when I was in a dreadful condition, physically paralysed and mentally desperate. She filled my bedroom with her beautiful floral perfume and filled me with peace. Right then, that day, I thought of her as an angel. In the decades since, my knowledge and understanding of such beings having grown way beyond that it was back then, I have come to realise that she is the Genius Loci, or spirit of this place. I have communed with her via trees and plants and creatures here. In these weeks since Blaze passed, I’ve asked if she might reveal herself more openly to me, and there were signs that she might be willing to do that. I awaited her with respect.

Then, at the end of last week, she gave me her name. She is Lady.

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.

In a beechwood

(Nimue)

I had forgotten the particular quality of light through beech leaves and the feel of last year’s beech mast under my boots. I had forgotten how coppery the ground is as last year’s leaves carpet the soil. Beech tree roots are marvelous, complex things especially on uneven ground.

These are without a doubt the kinds of trees I love most. My part of the world is dominated by beech woods. However, the beeches are mostly on the hilltops and my scope to get to them has been greatly reduced during the recent years of considerable illness. I’ve been blessed in recent years with a good friend who has taken me out into the woods and onto the hills about once a month, and that kept me going when I had otherwise lost my connection to the landscape, but I had lost so much.

Being able to get out on the land nourishes my soul. This is tricky though, because I’m so limited now about how far I can get on foot. While I’m considerably more well than I used to be, I can only walk a couple of miles on the flat, and that makes a great many places I could once walk to entirely inaccessible to me without a car. Public transport is of no use for this. I’m not a fan of cars, and painfully aware of the environmental impact. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to deny anyone else access to the landscape on the basis of limited mobility.

My hope is that I can rebuild my health and strength and be better able to once again walk out from my own front door and go significant distances. I have a lot of work to do rebuilding strength and stamina, it’s going to take a while.

In the meantime, I am blessed with the practical support that means I can get into the trees more often. This is a huge privilege. So many people are denied access to the landscape through poverty – poverty of time and of resources. Too many people do not have green spaces near to where they live. Many people are ill and disabled in ways that sorely limit their capacity to get outside.

It was wonderful to be amongst beech trees again in a wood I had not visited for more than a year. Being cut off from my local landscape so much of the time has felt like losing pieces of myself. Reconnecting is a powerful process.

In a haunted valley

(Nimue)

Recently I had the remarkable experience of getting to see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as an outdoor performance at Woodchester Mansion. This is an unfinished gothic building in a valley that has a reputation for being haunted.

As the performance got under way, I thought I heard a loud crowd of people in the woods behind us. As the play continued, it became apparent that there was an echo in the valley. However, sound bounced around in some truly odd ways, so by the time the echo came back it didn’t sound much like the original speech at all.

One thing this suggests is that the way in which the valley distorts and reflects sound might well have caused or contributed to its reputation for being haunted.

However, it is a very unusual thing. There aren’t many naturally occurring places where you can get much of an echo from an unamplified human voice, especially voices that aren’t even shouting. I’ve never heard so much distortion in an echo before and the effect was genuinely eerie. Having been involved with events at this location in the past, I think it required clear voices and no background noise to work, along with people facing the right way. 

I feel this as a human interaction with the spirit of the place. For me, spirit can be about physical realities. Where the shape of the valley is met by human voices, a strange kind of conversation can occur and whether you want to think about that in terms of physics or animism, it is still in essence an exchange between people and place.

Despite all of the rational explanations, I felt the returning sound as something strange. Humans aren’t great at logic and reasoning, we make most of our decisions emotionally and intuitively. What is felt often has a lot more impact than what is reasoned. As I heard those strange, human-ish but not human voices from amongst the trees, I had a sense of otherness and the uncanny.

And of course perhaps it wasn’t a curious effect of physics. Perhaps those voices from the trees came from somewhere else. An uncanny audience gathered unseen, but heard. 

Clearly at some point I need to go back when there aren’t many people about, and try talking or singing to the side of the valley myself.