Salisbury Plain. Image credit Cowley: circa 1744

Tuppence worth of imagination

I am told that there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the pre-historic footpaths of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druid Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see, or tuppence worth of imagination to understand with.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Stonehenge by John Constable: circa 1836

The Broken Circle

I STOOD On Sarum's treeless plain,
The waste that careless Nature owns;
Lone tenants of her bleak domain,
Loomed huge and gray the Druid stones.

Upheaved in many a billowy mound
The sea-like, naked turf arose,
Where wandering flocks went nibbling round
The mingled graves of friends and foes.

The Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane,
This windy desert roamed in turn;
Unmoved these mighty blocks remain
Whose story none that lives may learn.

Erect, half buried, slant or prone,
These awful listeners, blind and dumb,
Hear the strange tongues of tribes unknown,
As wave on wave they go and come.

"Who are you, giants, whence and why?"
I stand and ask in blank amaze;
My soul accepts their mute reply
"A mystery, as are you that gaze.

"A silent Orpheus wrought the charm
From riven rocks their spoils to bring;
A nameless Titan lent his arm
To range us in our magic ring.

"But Time with still and stealthy stride,
That climbs and treads and levels all,
That bids the loosening keystone slide,
And topples down the crumbling wall,--

"Time, that unbuilds the quarried past,
Leans on these wrecks that press the sod;
They slant, they stoop, they fall at last,
And strew the turf their priests have trod.

"No more our altar's wreath of smoke
Floats up with morning's fragrant dew;
The fires are dead, the ring is broke,
Where stood the many stand the few."

My thoughts had wandered far away,
Borne off on Memory's outspread wing,
To where in deepening twilight lay
The wrecks of friendship's broken ring.

Ah me! of all our goodly train
How few will find our banquet hall!
Yet why with coward lips complain
That this must lean, and that must fall?

Cold is the Druid's altar-stone,
Its vanished flame no more returns;
But ours no chilling damp has known,--
Unchanged, unchanging, still it burns.

So let our broken circle stand
A wreck, a remnant, yet the same,
While one last, loving, faithful hand
Still lives to feed its altar-flame!

O H Holmes (1887)

Silbury Hill beneath the clear dark sky. Image credit Thelma Wilcox

Unchanged it stands

Unchanged it stands: it awes the lands
Beneath the clear dark sky;
But at what time its head sublime
It heavenward reared, and why -
The gods that see all things that be
Can better tell than I.

Rev A C Smith

Liddington Hill. Image credit Jane Muir

How many words

How many words has it taken to describe so briefly the feelings and the thoughts that came to me by the tumulus; thoughts that swept past and were gone, and were succeeded by others while yet the shadow of the mound had not moved from one thyme-flower to another, not the breath of a grass blade... The silk grass sighs as the wind comes carrying the blue butterfly more rapidly than his wings, A large humble-bee burrs round the green dome against which I rest; my hands are scented with thyme. The sweetness of the day, the fullness of the earth, the beauteous earth, how shall I say it?

Richard Jefferies

Silbury Hill time capsule. Inspired by Agostino Ramelli (1531-1600)

No sitting on fences

Our Silbury, chalky old pile
Was concerned with a threat to defile
But no sitting on fences
Brought EH to their senses
Now the hill can sleep on for a while

Slumpystones

Stations in the sacred landscape

Henge, barrow and midsummer hill

Henge, barrow and midsummer hill
Are stations in the sacred landscape.
Here the timeless Goddess enters
The times of her tribes. It was lifetimes back
And what it meant we have almost forgotten,
Almost forgotten.

We killed a child
With great honour and buried her body
Curled like a snail at the heart of the henge
Where earth spirits might rise through her grave,
Follow the curve of the bent bones
And spiral out among villagers dancing
The sunwheel dance that is danced in spring.
A captive ghost, in my meditation,
She takes my hand, but I cannot lead her
Beyond the ring where the magic fixed her.
She will be four years old forever,
And crowned with flowers.

But all the rest of us
Have to be laid in tribal earth
To be remade by the winter Goddess
Before we come back to the world again.
She is the sow that eats her farrow,
Old bones cracking within the barrow,
But to those whom she fails to frighten
A giver of gifts.

No corpses lie
On midsummer hill, but of all the stations
This is the saddest. The sun on high
Burns, burns as midsummer’s Queen
Hands over her whitening world to death-
The fields by severance and the woods
By slow decay. With her hair combed out
In its red gold sheaves she is perfect strength
And perfect beauty about to fade
As from this moment summer does-
And the child will leave its mother and
The long procession wind down the hill.

Tony Grist

Avebury in 1722 by William Stukeley

Dowsing History's Mysteries

To map the magic of the Rollright Ring
To feel the lines of force pulse through the air
To lay its megalithic secrets bare
In the stillness of a summer evening
To walk in wonder through the Avebury Stones
And track earth’s whispering patterns there
Then dowse the rings about the Devil’s Chair
And know the nature of their undertones
To stand in awe within the Stonehenge zone
And check the powers that charge the winter’s air
To probe its dazzling patterns, then dare
To sound the secrets of the Slaughter Stone
To view the world from Silbury’s soaring crest
And sense the power throbbing in its core
In tune with Gaia’s geodetic law
These earthly enigmas I treasure best.
These monuments were raised by men who knew
The patterned secrets in the planet’s crust
Who harnessed Gala’s power with sacred trust
In circle, barrow, hill and avenue.
Their sacred circles now stand vandalised
The sarcens grey and shattered lie around
Razed by religious zealots to the ground
Who saw Satan in the circles they despised.
Yet Silbury Hill still thrusts towards the sun
Like the breast of a giant Amazon
Immune to all, this cryptic paragon
Preceded Mycenae, Crete and Babylon
And like the pyramids win also be
As enduring as Everest, or the sea

Denis Wheatley

Amid the general ruin unsubdued

Silbury Hill

O Thou, to whom in the olden time was raised
Yon ample Mound, not fashion'd to display
An artful structure, but with better skill
Piled massive, to endure through many an age,
How simple, how majestic is thy tomb!
When temples and when palaces shall fall,

And mighty cities moulder into dust,
When to their deep foundations Time shall shake
The strong-based pyramids, shall thine remain
Amid the general ruin unsubdued,
Uninjured as the everlasting hills,
And mock the feeble power of storms and Time.

Rev William Crowe (1745-1829) of Alton Barnes, Wiltshire, England.

The Mound of Hostages. Image credit Ken Williams/ShadowsandStone.com

The Heart of Ireland

Skryne, Faughan, Lismullen, Tara,
Look around these hills of drama,
For if there is a heart to Ireland
It beats here, where we now stand.

Each ditch and mound, earthwork, embankment
Tells its story of burial and settlement,
Worship of ancient Gods, of gatherings
Right back to the time of the old High Kings.

The very folds in the landscape hold our history
And beyond that, our myth and mystery.
This is home to the Goddess Maebh
Honoured here three thousand years.

Once a Royal City filled the whole of Gabhra
And vast timber temples formed the sanctuary of Tara.
Here fought our heroes from the time of the Fianna,
And Kings were crowned by the Tuathá de Danann.

At the mound of Hostages, Duma na nGiall,
First home to the stone of destiny, Lia Fáil,
Perfectly aligned with sunrise Samhain and Imbolc,
And every full moon in honour of Lugh.

So standing here now, let’s contemplate
What will be Ireland’s fate,
If we build a road through the valley of Gabhra
And destroy the sacred sites round Tara?

What will the future say of us,
When we in our turn, are ancestors
If we are responsible for the desecration
Of the most powerful symbol of our nation?

So lost are we to a sense of self,
Intent on destroying our truest wealth,
Only a people who do not understand
Could so wound the heart of Ireland.

Or will we become the generation
Who refused to allow this violation?
Who’ll fight to the end like heroes before
Because we know what it is we’re fighting for.

So our children’s children’s children can stand
As we now stand on this sacred land,
Feel its heartbeat, know its power,
Cos’ we saved Tara in her darkest hour.

Dearbhaile Bradley
Chief Bard of Ynys Witrin 2007

Through the solar field. Image credit Tim Norris

1000 Oceans

well i can't believe that i would keep
keep you from flying
and i would cry 1000 more
if that's what it takes to sail you home
sail you home, sail you home

i'm aware what the rules are
but you know that i will run
you know that i will follow you
over silbury hill through the solar field
you know that i will follow you

Tori Amos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGCRFCokEqI&feature=related