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| (Sugarloaf Hill, Folkestone) |
And
this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons
in stones, and good in everything.
(William
Shakespeare, 'As You Like It')
The Land is hungry
to tell us its stories, for us to take up the threads lost so long
ago. If we can truly come into relationship with the earth by
connecting with our feet and hearts, not just with our heads, then
the Dreaming of the Land may open to us. Like any relationship, it
can take time. It is not always easy falling in love and we can never
consider ourselves truly in love until we see our beloved for all
that they are, dark and light. So it is with the Land.
And so, over the
last two days, I have walked on the hot-baked earth of the North
Downs Way in search of what lies beneath the surface. I walked
knowing that, here, are chalk hills, the remains of ancient shallow
seas. Here is an ancient trackway used by our ancestors as they
followed the migrations of reindeer and wild horses from mainland
Europe long before we became an island. Here is a holy hill, a place
of pilgrimage for thousands of years, and a holy well, a sacred
spring close to which our Bronze Age ancestors chose to place their
community of round houses almost four thousand years ago. Here is
Holywell Coombe, a wooded valley of streams and ponds, Holywell Fen,
land of bog and stream which has never been built on or farmed and
where pollen deposits dating back to the last Ice Age have been
found. Here, is hallowed ground, and here, the land has been
brutalised. Here, if we have the courage and the heart, we are
offered the opportunity to walk the warp and weft within a hair's
breadth of the Wasteland. Sometimes, I return from walking the land
shining and sometimes, just sometimes, I return dusty and
broken-hearted. Both are a blessing.
Two days ago, I set
off in search of Creteway Down, high on top of the hills overloking
the sea and where 6,000 year old Mesolithic pottery has been found. I
don't drive, have little sense of direction, am often nervous when
out in the world, and so many of my journeys are unsure. Finding the
signpost for the North Downs Way was a moment of feeling quietly
proud of myself and my determination to connect with where I live.
I
love all landscapes of chalk, having spent much time as a child in
the South Downs where my grandparents lived, and so I had a sense of
being somewhere familiar. And yet, all of this was new, fresh ground.
It is an unforgiving landscape on a baking hot day. Before setting
out across the Downs I had meandered onto a short section of the
England Coast Path, which was awash with wild thyme and viper's
bugloss, buzzing with bees, the sudden half-seen scurry of lizards,
the screech-soar of gulls. The Downs were parched; a tract of short
grazed grass, thistles, and ragwort with the occasional tenderness of
small scabious, toadflax, knapweed, and agrimony, and very little shade.
As I
walked I thought of the ancestors making their long journeys and how
it must have felt to travel so far, to carry your 'home' with you, to
make and remake the trackways and dreamways of the earth, to walk the
earth alive. I was relieved to reach a lane where the shelter of the
hedgerow offered some ease from the heat of the day. I am sure that
it is my own foolishness, and perhaps a whisper of arrogance, that
made me walk in such an exposed place when the sun was so fierce in
the sky. I am sure that the people who followed the reindeer tracks
would not have made such ill-considered journeys, instead walking in
the early morning and the cool of the evening and resting during the
day. Today, I have learned and am writing and preserving rowan
berries for winter in the cool of the house, rather than forcing
myself out. I hope to become more deeply attuned to the wisdom of
being with the land in this way. Truly she is a great teacher, even
when we didn't know that we were looking for the lessons.
At the end of my
long walk I began to catch sight of the curve of Sugarloaf Hill, one
of five sister hills which enfold this little town by the sea and
several of whom have burial mounds at their summits. They are a
powerful presence, especially this hill which has been a site of
religious significance for more than two thousand years. Even today,
Christian crosses are put up on its summit every Easter, a sure sign
of a much older pre-Christian tradition. I knew that in the small
wooded valley at the base of Sugarloaf Hill there was a holy well and
so, having run out of time to walk further, and knowing from past
experience that it is best to introduce ourselves to the Land slowly,
I decided to return the next day.
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| (Folkestone Holy Well, 1906) |
“All
these elements, native to the downs, endow them together with their
continuity of line, with the status of mountains. Their quality too,
is the spiritual release the mountain gives. But they possess another
virtue rarely granted to the mountain in physical fact. That is their
serenity. Every detail of the unenclosed chalk landscape - the
protuded spur, the fluted hollow, the giant but unstrained buttress,
the flowing lateral ribbing, the sinuous curve, the blunted
promontory, the unbroken passage of the ridge, the dipping and
soaring of the range - bespeak a calm, a remoteness from the tumult
of our mortal days as pregnant with power as are the winds that sheer
their crests. It is this absence of harsh and abrupt conformation
which gives to chalk downs the appearance of perpetual movement, so
that nothing could be more appropriate than the phrase applied to
them by geologists, a ‘frozen sea’”
(H. J. Massingham - English Downland 1936)
Descending into the
cool of Holywell Coombe was bliss indeed on yet another scorching
day. Half way down I rested in yet another patch of the ubiquitous
wild thyme that grows on the Downs and listened to the buzzing of
bees, felt the breeze from a bumblebee's wings on my skin, gazed in
quiet reverie at the round belly of Sugarloaf Hill almost close
enough to touch, knew that I was blessed to live in this land and to
have an opportunity to come to know it.
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| (Honeybees on wild thyme) |
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| (My beloved honeysuckle walking staff) |
As I had made the journey
there I had reflected on what I know of the threads that weave their
silver way through the land, singing love songs to mycelia and the
deep roots of trees on their way. In the west, the North Downs Way
connects with the Hog's Back in Guildford, belived by some to form a
reclining goddess figure, and which I believe to be ancient site
sacred to the goddess, Brigid and her serpent temples. It also
entwines with the Old Way, which as the Pilgrim's Way stretches east
to Canterbury and west to the Harrow Way and the prehistoric sites of
Avebury and Stonehenge ~ these shining chalk spines of lowland
England creating a great network of movement and communication across
the landscape. Writer Tom Fort has suggested that the first 'Harrow
Way' was an ancient reindeer track travelled by the herds from the
frozen North of Europe and followed by our ancestors in their
seasonal movement through the landscape. So many feet have walked
this way. As Hilaire Belloc once wrote;
“Of
these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The
Road… it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said,
the greatest and the most original of the spells which we inherit
from the earliest pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative
and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and older
than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals
still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places,
and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have
made.“
(Hilaire
Belloc - The Old Road 1911)
As
I came into the bottom of the valley I entered the restorative cool
of a small glade where the sunlight caught the progress of fluffy
seedheads through the air and made them into faeries. It
was beautiful and
I was enchanted
but, today, I was to be pixie-led, bewildered in a landscape that was
asked
for a deeper knowing before
opening
its mysteries to me. Sometimes the Land helps the veil fall from our
eyes, letting us see what we are inviting in, before weaving us back
into the spell of its poetry. I am a positive person, seeing 'small
beauties' everywhere I go, no matter what the circumstances. Some
have suggested
that I can only do this because nothing bad has ever happened to me.
That is far from the truth but seeing the beauty is my daily
meditation and my practice, and it takes work. That does not mean
that I don't see the coke cans amongst the wildflowers, the plastic
bags hanging like tattered crows from the trees, that
I don't reflect on the scarcity of butterflies even when admiring the
beauty of a Chalkhill
Blue.
I choose to see the deeper beauty beneath that, call
in what remains good as a radical act of belief.
But
sometimes I go to that place too fast, miss things. Today, I was to
be shown what this land, and so many lands, have endured.
I
walked around the base of Sugarloaf Hill, which despite the busy road
closeby, is a place which feels both peaceful and sacred. I hoped to
find the well, although there was nothing other than my own intuition
to tell me which way to go. Eventually I came to Holywell Fen. In
chalky areas marshland is often referred
to as
'fen', becoming bog on more acid rich soils. I have always loved bogs
and marshes, finding great beauty and richness in their, to some,
bleak landscapes and I was excited to have found
one so close to my home. I was possibly even more excited to find
that Romney Marsh, to the east of here, is the foremost breeding site
of wild medicinal leeches in Europe, and a stonghold of the Water
Vole! Holywell Fen has
been a wetland habitat for over 13,000 years and
is rich in orchids and butterflies.
On this day it was dry but I could see where pools had been and in
those places there
was a carpet
of bright yellow
fleabane, a
sprinkling of gold dust in the sunlight.
It was beautiful in the way
that only a marsh can be and yet here began my initiation into the
woundedness of this landscape because thundering
overhead is the
the A20 viaduct. The
fen, so
rich in nature and echoing
with the footsteps of our ancestors, cut
through by
cold concrete.
Even now writing this I have tears in my eyes.
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| (The A20 viaduct cuts through Holywell Fen) |
I
noticed a white van parked there
and felt afraid, the spell of the wild broken, becoming like a
frightened hunted deer. Not wanting to retrace my footsteps, I went
through the kissing gate into the woods on the side of Castle Hill,
on top of which is 'Caesar's Camp', not a Roman site
as its name suggests
but the
earthwork remains of a
Norman castle built following their invasion in the 11th
Century; always this land on the edge of the sea has been invaded in
one way or another. I had no idea where I was going, knew that I had
walked far from the well, and ended up at the junction of the M20
motorway. The heat was almost unbearable, the scar of the motorway
even moreso. I felt broken and a little bit afraid.
Finding
no other way to go, and feeling trapped, I doubled
back,
found the mud-churned tracks of offroad vehicles in the woods, felt
in my heart and my bones how 'hemmed in' this hallowed ground on the
edge of the sea has become. As I walked back to the fen I passed by a
gap in the trees where I could see Round Hill and the Channel Tunnel
entrance that has cut a gash through her centre. There
are references to a priest blessing the tunnels once a year because
'dark forces' were disturbed
during construction.
Truly
this land has been brutalised beyond endurance, and yet the sacred
remains and it matters that we continue to look for it, call it back
from the coke cans and the plastic bags, from the thundering of
traffic, and the four
by fours. Those
things are real but, for me, they are not as real as the things that
lie beneath them, the
things that have always been there.
In her important book, 'If Women Rose Rooted', Sharon Blackie tells
the story of 'The Loss of the Voices of the Wells'..
“In
the old days the kingdom of Logres was rich and beautiful, and the
land offered nourishment for all, for it was properly tended and
cared for. It's a contract you see, people and land. You care for it,
and it cares for you. The source of the kingdom's
life, the life-giving blood which surged in its veins, was the sacred
waters of the wells, which flowed out of the deep potent waters of
the Otherworld. The wells were tended by maidens, and these maidens
were the Voices of the Wells”
In
the story, the king fails to respect the old ways or the contract
with the land, the maidens of the wells are raped, just as the land
is so often raped, and..
“the
maidens no longer came out of the wells, and withdrew from the land
altogether. And so it was that the people of Logres lost of the
Voices of the Wells..This is how the land was laid waste. The leaves
on the trees shrivelled and died, plants withered, fields and meadows
turned brown, and the earth lay barren and scorched.”
And
so I was, quite gently compared to what some have seen, shown the
sacred land laid waste. This land where once the ancestors walked
following the tracks of reindeer and wild horses, where they formed
communities of roundhouses around sacred springs, where,
later, a small fishing village formed with a nearby religious
community of women, the
first in England, and
pilgrims walked on their way to Canterbury, stopping to drink at the
holy well and perhaps becoming entranced by the orchids and gold-dust
fleabane of the fen. It would be easy to say that all that has gone
and grieve for what is lost but my experience of grief is that it
also brings courage; the courage to see through what is real to what
is even more real beneath. As Sharon Blackie says, we must once more
become the 'Voices of the Wells'. We
must call
back the wild from the Wasteland, speak to, and for, the sacred
places of soil and soul. It matters and it is our work.
And
so, what of the hidden well? I eventually found my way onto a modern
housing estate, relieved in some ways to have escaped into normality.
This estate is called 'Holywell Avenue', the road that I emerged
onto, 'Pilgrim Spring'.
The echoes of the well are still here,
beneath the concrete and the plastic flowers, and it
was here
that
I found a crabapple tree. She drew me, this small and shining tree,
just as crabapples always draw me for the wilder way of being that
they represent. I began my journey with the Wilding Tree close to
home and now here was another apple tree soothing my heartsickness.
I climbed the bank that she was growing on, leaned against her bark
to
remind myself of what truly matters, and found to my delight that
tiny tinkling silver bells had been tied into her branches. Perhaps
another traveller had come this way seeking the well and left this
offering at the only Pilgrim Spring they could find?
I had a homemade
oatcake with me, which I had planned to leave at the well as an
offering to the ancestors. I left it there for
them
in the branches of the crabapple tree by the gently swaying silver
bells. I will be back and I will search again, perhaps
not soon but when I have filled and healed myself with the familiar
hedgerows and the sea closer to home. These things take time. It matters that what lies beneath is unearthed, what is lost and
hidden is revealed. I
think of the bees who travel their own pollen pathways, dreaming the
land alive with every flight. I think of the reindeer and wild horses
who brought the
trackways to life with their hoofbeats, drumming the wild web of the
land into being. And I pray that we be in co-creation with them.That we can witness the wounds of the Land,
search out its stories, take up the threads of our ancestors, and
heal the Wasteland, in the Land and inside ourselves. It
matters to be
hedgerow-tongued
and to
sing with the silver threads of mycelia. It matters to
be a Voice of the Wells.
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| (Folkestone Holy Well, 1909) |
Other Views of Folkestone
'Rubbish Destroying Top Wildlife Site', Kent Online, 17th April 2008
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/folkestone/news/rubbish-destroying-top-wildlife--a37124/
