a not-the-Guardian country diary piece

            Four Winds, Dartmoor, midsummer

On the moor, the beeches on the high granite walls are hazily opaque, not yet substantial, and the little leat muted. Beyond, Merrivale’s two Bronze Age double stone rows are just coming clear of early mist, the central burial kist in one of them barely a divot in the ground. Further again, I can’t make out the monolith or the closer little stone circle, and so far the view to Bodmin Moor and the sea is a milky wash.

The sun is rising at its most northeasterly point, apparently at a standstill for the three days of the solstice (‘solstitium’, ‘sun-standing’). Who knows what rituals might have been enacted here once, perhaps at the old Celtic midsummer of May 1st, Beltane, or perhaps nearer to our midsummer, celebrating the solar god at his zenith? It’s possible that the double rows here, like the processional avenues at Avebury which, some allege, can be seen to alternate longer thin stones with ‘lozenge’ stones, have carried over millennia their representation of a coming-together of man and woman, god and goddess, in ceremony, processing towards the obvious symbolism of the circle and the menhir behind it.

Now the mist has burnt off and another clear day reaches us. This year’s pony foals race in small gangs, knobble-kneed, through gorse and bog cotton, short tails held out stiffly as bottle-brushes. Above us all a skylark holds its place, spilling notes towards us through the clearing air as its ancestors have done, presumably, for century on century.

Driving up this morning, the Dart was empty of the many bright white-water kayaks that crowd it in its seasonal torrents, slaloming wildly through the boulders and over the short bursts of rapids. The grey wagtails are tranquilly flicking their tails on the rocks, alongside the dippers (old name water ouzel), that symbol of the Devon Wildlife Trust, that can walk and feed on the riverbed, using its wings to swim.

I come down through birch, ash, rowan and oak, blackbirds’ songs clear against the evening. Devastatingly, some of the ash trees are losing leaves from their crown branches – ash dieback. In the fields on the moorland edges they’re baling hay, rather than plastic-wrapping silage, and the scent of that and honeysuckle displaces thought.

Now, earth is drifting away from full day to lit night, lemon-white air hosting an absence of swallows this year. Home, the young blackbirds being reared in a hole in the slate-quarry wall behind a rosette of bracken are insisting on their hunger, as they will have been all day. Opposite one of the local barn owls is hunting, an otherworldly presence gliding across the scrubby hillside. Venus is rising. The sky dims slightly, but doesn’t go out.

© image & words Roselle Angwin 2018

poem for the summer solstice

Summer solstice 2018

Today is the day of the oak-king
horned god of the greenwood at the peak
of his solar powers, at this moment
of maximum light bound to none –

(how many years ago now did we
process to the stones at sunrise?) –
sun on his longest journey northeast
to northwest in the sky (we crowned

each other then, king and queen of
midsummer) and nowhere to hide –
no shadows – yet already the year
slides back to the moon-queen’s time

(that journey you took that midwinter)
at the nadir where the holly king
guards the doorway and wrestles the old year
down (you with your crown of antlers

and how you too succumbed). And yet
nothing dies; simply lies fallow. Burdened
with the gift of our brief bright lives we could
remember this – nothing dies; everything will return.



© Roselle Angwin

the land's wild magic (again)

It has been hard for me to imagine that any writing retreat I lead could be up there with Islands of the Heart on the Isle of Iona, which I've been leading since 2001.

So I'm still digesting the fact that last week's holistic writing and walking course brought as much depth, richness, delight and sheer magic as the Iona week does, albeit differently. Oh, and a lot of moving and inspiring writing.

Of course, it helped that we were back in my homeland of the far west of Cornwall, like Iona right at the rim of the world, but the southwestern rim (where, yes indeed, Poldark is both set and mostly filmed).

It helped, symbolically, that Cape Cornwall is where two seas merge to become the Atlantic Ocean (the Bristol Channel/Irish sea and the English Channel), and that the next stop west is America. (Of course, you could say that the great Atlantic splits to flow in two directions here. Either way, it's a place of transition, a threshold place.)

It helped that on the first day we spotted a pod of five dolphins leaping and playing their way around the Cape.

It helped that the participants formed a diverse, interesting and creative group of ten women, one courageous man (plus me), and that trust and intimacy arrived so swiftly.

It helped that Thelma at Boswedden provides plentiful vegetarian food, and home-made cakes.

It helped, too, that I instigated silent walking. I love this, walking together and apart simultaneously. 

We walked round the coast and came up from Porth Nanven, 'my' family beach (Angwin being cognate with Nanven) through the lush and beautiful Cot Valley so beloved of painters like Kurt Jackson in St Just. Here's one of Cot Valley's gunnera:

As always, we visited a number of holy wells, this year adding a 5th to our walks: St Levan's Well above Porthchapel Beach. What joy to peer in and see families of newts. What joy to find the few stone remains of the little oratory that was built in the 4th or 5th century CE, within close earshot of the sea, tucked back into a cliff by a waterfall, hidden away from the worst of the weather on these wild and dangerous coasts. What joy, too, to visit the current church 'proper' with its huge riven fertility rock dating back and sacred to pagan times (and countered by an ancient stone cross), to visit the walkers' chapel in the church, and to see the very old carved pew ends:

It was also a delight to see two of our number skinnydipping in Porthchapel Cove with its turquoise waters (sorry – their photo is censored):

Once more, we visited Zennor's mermaid, whose story, as always, I told; Caer Bran, ditto, having climbed up and up through meadows and over the idiosyncratic Cornish stone stiles; and Carn Euny Iron Age village with its fogou, specific to West Cornwall, and detailed in previous June blogs. This year, I caught a photo of the wonderful phosphorescence that illuminates the little circular chamber off to one side:

And we added another stone circle; like most of them in West Cornwall another one of 19 stones (perhaps marking a full metonic cycle of the moon through its 235 synodic months). This has been associated, as the early Bronze Age circles themselves have been, with the lunar Goddess of our ancestors. As far as we can tell, the druidic training was also 19 years – no coincidence.

Boskednan stone circle is up high on wild moorland overlooking the sea at Zennor, beyond Mên an Tol, the holed fertility stone, and Mên Scryfa, the inscribed stone supposedly marking the place where an important tribal leader fell and was buried after a battle with 'the invaders from the east' in around the 6th century CE, though the stone itself is a prehistoric menhir. Off to the east here is Ding Dong mine, one of the most significant of the Cornish tin mines; to the west, Carn Galva or Galver; and behind us a rather beautiful if ruined tumulus.

But maybe the highlight of the week was the final morning's visit to the most beautiful and secluded circle deep in the West Penwith countryside, site of ancient and current gorsedds,  bardic and druidic ceremonial gatherings.

Apparently, this one was one of the three major stone circles in the British Isles, cited in the Welsh Triads (some of the content of which dates back to the 9th century and earlier, maybe 6th or 7th centuries CE), though I haven't yet tracked down the other two. Avebury, I would guess, would have to be one. As for the others: a circle on Anglesey, Ynys Môn, Isle of Druids? Callanish on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides? The very beautiful Castlerigg, in Cumbria (a personal favourite)? Stonehenge? (So obvious as almost not to need citing.)

Anyway, 12 writers were utterly silent for nearly two hours, writing and writing, in this circle.

And my final treat was a bowl of rock samphire, gathered from the cove on the morning we left, and wilted with lemon and olive oil.

Next year's THE LAND'S WILD MAGIC will happen again in June.

~~~

It's been a long time since I led a 'writing from life' retreat, though I used to lead them regularly. As a good excuse to go back to Cape Cornwall, I'm offering a short course there in just that in early September this year (3 days, 4 nights). An added extra is writing from nature, in the style of the 'new' nature writing. You can read more about 'IN HARVEST TIME' here, and there's an earlybird discount.