Lettergorman South. Image credit Gordon Kingston

The Way Stones

I passed here often when young, tired and bored
after another long day at the strand
and never looked past the gate, or did and
saw only cattle rubbing against a post.
It would be thirty years before I knew,
of the cobwebs spun in the morning dew.

Gordon Kingston

See also http://heritageaction.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/archaeoastronomy-and-staring-at-the-sun/

Belderg

'They just keep turning up
And were thought of as foreign'-
One-eyed and benign,
They lie about his house,
Quernstones out of a bog.

To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries

Fell open like a glib;
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.

A landscape fossilized,
Its stone wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go

He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How stubbed and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth rings
Of iron, flint and bronze.
So I talked of Mossbawn,

A bogland name 'but Moss'?,
He crossed my old home's music
With older strains of Norse.
I'd told how its foundation
Was mutable as sound

And how I could derive
A forked root from that ground,
Make bawn an English fort,
A planter's walled-in mound.

Or else find sanctuary
And think of it as Irish,
Persistent if outworn.
'But the Norse ring on your tree?'
I passed through the eye of the quern,

Grist to an ancient mill,
And in my mind's eye saw,
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piles like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.

Seamus Heaney 1975

The ghost of Sorley

The carving on this post is from the interior of a replica Iron Age roundhouse at Barbury Castle. Sadly the roundhouse was totally destroyed last year in a fire started by vandals.

More here - http://www.heritageaction.org/?page=theheritagejournal&id=214

Sorley's Weather

Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill,
For though the winds come frorely
I'm away to the rain-blown hill
And the ghost of Sorley.

Charles Hamilton Sorley 1895-1915

Let no hand of man

And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.

Exodus 20:25

Our curious cromlechs! Let no hand of man
Destroy these stony prophets which the Lord
Has placed upon the tarns and sounding downs
With tones for distant ages.

John Harris (1820-1884)

Old Sarum

Searching for a picture of the past

Cathedral, bank and ditch.
Four thousand years at least
of our hands upon the land.

And should a little gold glimmer in the ground
be picked and paraded and brought all about
to this and that or something other
gladly glimpsed and remembered of what went before
for more good gold in fleeting hands
clicking...
while both rewarding and offending.

The wakeful dreamer searching for a picture of the past
lays down his glossy pages
and considers the lost now discovered
and wonders at the wonder of it all...

LS

Index of poems, poets, pictures and places

Megalithic Poems now has its own (internal) search engine (right of page under Links). New poems are usually first posted on The Modern Antiquarian website and then moved here with an image to accompany them. So, while nearly every poem on TMA is also here, it may be slightly easier to locate a specific poem, poet, picture (or even a place with a poem written about it) using Meg Poem's own search engine.

Once you've keyed in a search word the relevant info will appear under the Gideon Fidler Stonehenge image above.

From Cromlech's summit grey. Image credit William Stukeley

Beth Pennard or The British Chieftain's Grave

The feet beneath the verdant glade
by Bards a narrow cist is made
yet ample to contain
Those listless limbs, in speed and force
Which rival'd once the fleetest horse,
Light bounding o'er the plain.
Now filled the hallowed cup of clay
Withdrew from Cromlech's summit grey
Last night procured in locks of wool,
Filled it with care and filled it full,
Such beverage suits etherial sprite
Ere it ascends to realms of light.
Place it contiguous to the head
And o'er its mouth a covering spread...
To a kind chief, who will revere
A chieftains relics buried here
One who with us delights to ken
The ancient works of Celtic man;
Who makes their labours by his own
Survive, when falls each magic stone,
or roaring midst the hills and groves,
View scenes which every Druid loves
The cup our benefactors hand...

John Skinner (1772 – 1839)