Hawkwood

When William Capel inherited a fine historic Jacobean manor house on the wooded rolling slopes of the Stroud Valley in 1842, he did what any rich, assertive young Victorian squire would have done. He demolished it and had it rebuilt in a fashionable neo-Gothic style.

He was an extremely wealthy landowner and landlord of many houses and cottages all around the Painswick and Stroud area. He was a powerful Tory and a County Magistrate, one time High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, and he built the imposing and dominant house not just as his residence but as a fitting emblem of his status. What he didn't know, as he sat in his luxurious living room quaffing his port and peering through the mullioned windows at the expanse of his copious estate, was that the door-frames and skirting boards all around him were filled with secret messages.

It's impossible to know exactly how the site, now run as Hawkwood College, would have looked through the ages. At the time William Capel inherited it – just one of a family line who lived in the house for centuries – it was known as The Grove and occupied its beautiful position as part of a substantial estate. During the 17th century the house was owned by a family called Mayo, and when their surviving heir was a girl, Hester, who married one Samuel Capel in 1700 and bought out her sisters' shares in the estate, the family name changed but the genetic line continued. It's unclear who built the Jacobean manor house but traces of medieval stonework have turned up which indicate an earlier origin for the site. I'd always understood that there was a monastery (or more likely, a small religious cell) there at one time, but so far no evidence has been found to support this. Other than the occasional psychic impressions of visitors, who have been known to 'see' cowled figures mooching about the grounds, even when they didn't have any previous knowledge of the monastery story.

I'd go a step further and say that the Hawkwood College site has the feel of having been a sacred place throughout time. It has the most extraordinary atmosphere, and is quite unlike any other place I've known. It has a focused and contained kind of energy, as if its sanctity is insulated from the outside world, and when you're inside it you feel as though anything is possible.

The building, which feels as magically charged as the land it sits on, is perched on a ledge in the landscape underneath a slope covered by woodland. It has a magnificent view to the south over the meadows to the town of Stroud and beyond (the clod-hopping white bulk of the new SGS College campus notwithstanding – how did they get planning permission for that?) and the adjacent Cotswold scarp, and if you go and stand on the top of the Toots long barrow on Selsley Common you can clearly see Hawkwood across the valley with its distinctive Gothic gables. On the lawn beside the house there rises a spring, whose cool bright chalybeate loveliness flows steadily throughout the year (when I was younger I used to take it home in bottles and make wine with it – it's wonderful stuff – makes a lovely cup of tea too).

Immediately beside the spring is a mammoth, venerable sycamore tree. This tree has its own spring welling up underneath it, and the thick roots of the sycamore form a basin in which a little pool of water stands, lightly strewn with leaves. It's a scene straight from the legend of Gereint and Enid in the Mabinogion, where a sycamore stands beside a spring in an enchanted garden. I wouldn't like to speculate how old the tree is (at least 300 years, I'm told, and probably older, which is unusual for a sycamore), or whether the spring was ever considered a holy well, but standing beside it the whirly churning feeling in your stomach tells you that this is a very special place indeed. The Hawkwood double spring has a very special active-passive energy, one spring gushing out over the land and the other gently enclosed by a naturally formed well.

William Capel is shown in the 1841 census in his early 30s and living with his mum in what must then have been the Jacobean manor house. He was still unmarried at the time and in fact didn't marry until later life. He's described in the following census as a Magistrate and Proprietor of Land, Farming 500 Acres. Among his domestic staff, in 1871, can be found a young man called William Gurney, who lived in the house as a domestic servant. He came from Maisemore and was in fact Ivor Gurney's uncle!

Presumably it was when William Capel's mum passed away that he decided to knock down the ancestral home. A few bits of stonework from the older house still survive, but the rebuilding was substantial, and he also had some new cellars added. The Gothic design of the building is very much the style of the classic Cotswold manor house and built from beautiful honey-coloured local ashlar. There are some beautiful decorative details, like this foliate head – which may be a green man but probably more likely a lion or similar beastie.

Among the skilled craftsmen employed to work on the rebuilding of the house was a carpenter and joiner named William Clifton. He was born in Chipping Norton on or around 24th January 1816, and after serving an apprenticeship in Witney, spent the rest of his life in Tetbury, where he married the daughter of another carpenter. In 1843, at the age of 27, he was working at The Grove (Hawkwood) where he was responsible for much of the decorative woodwork around door frames and skirting boards. We know this because he signed and dated many of the fixtures before fitting them in place.

A number of intriguing pieces of wood with pencil scribbles on the back have been coming to light over the last 40 years or so in the course of repairs and alterations. But the extent and detail of it only became clear a couple of years ago, when a burst mains water pipe in the upper part of the house caused a devastating flood in the downstairs sitting room. In the course of clearing up the damage, the skirting boards were taken off and revealed the prevalence of William Clifton's literary endeavours – and his political views.

"Down with Kings and Queens and the Aristocracy and all Tyrants". One of William Clifton's secret messages, written on the back of a chunk of wood which lay hidden within the house for 168 years.

 This piece is signed "Wm Clifton Chipping Norton" (his birthplace, although he lived in Tetbury) and is dated 1843. The two slogans read "Down with Kings and Queens" and "Universal Suffrage for ever".

Like many working class people in the 1840s, William Clifton was a Chartist. Some of his slogans include direct references to the Chartist movement, others refer more generally to its principles. One of them was signed "He who has no voice in the making of Laws by which he is governed is a Slave. William Clifton".  I don't know how he felt about his employer William Capel and whether he had him in mind when he condemned the ruling classes – Capel was a respected man in society, but what kind of person he was and how he treated his staff is much harder to know – but Clifton was performing a powerful act of talismanic magic in hiding such fiery sentiments under the boards of a country squire's house.

And in its way, his magic worked, even if it took its time. The last of the Capel dynasty died in 1932, and the house and its somewhat diminished estate was sold to a bloke called Colonel Murray. Murray was a bit of a military history fanatic, and it was he who rechristened the house Hawkwood – named after his hero, the 14th century mercenary Sir John Hawkwood. A few years later it was sold to Roland and Lily Whincop, who founded an adult education college there based around the principles of Rudolf Steiner.

William Clifton didn't live long enough to encounter the work of Steiner; he died in Tetbury in March 1872 at the age of 56. But he would probably have been pleased with what the house has turned into: a socially and environmentally responsible college which anybody can attend for education or spiritual refreshment – with the landed proprietor and the class system of unbalanced social power long gone. He also didn't live to see the introduction of universal suffrage, the cause in which he believed so passionately, although one of the succession of "Reform Acts" in the Victorian era may possibly have granted him a right to vote in 1867 when suffrage was extended to include skilled working class men (prior to that, you had to be an owner of property to have the vote). But universal suffrage didn't find its way into British statute until 1918.

Hawkwood remains an incredibly special place. As well as its education programme it provides a venue for all kinds of creative and spiritual groups, and was the scene of Gareth Knight's legendary ritual workshops during the 1980s. The Gareth Knight Group was founded in its dining room in 1973, and still meets at Hawkwood today. And if you're among those who encounter one of the strange presences that are occasionally seen or heard in the upper rooms and corridors of the house, don't be alarmed, just remember that it's a place where the walls are full of magic.

With special thanks to Dave James, Head of Maintenance at Hawkwood College, who provided much of the historical information and kindly allowed me to photograph his collection of door jambs.

The Chosen Hill church scratchings

At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, a pencilled notice was visible above the south door of St Bartholomew's church on Churchdown Hill. Very possibly it still is, obliterated by layers of scribbles, scratchings and daubings. The notice read: "Non scribe Ecclesiae Muris Quia Deus Dominus Tuus In Ecclesia Habitat". Which translates as "Write not on the walls of the church for the Lord thy God abides within". Given the continued rampant defacement, perhaps something more on the lines of "Don't write on the fucking walls" might have got the message across.

  The south doorway, where pencilled signatures of the early 20th century make an odd accompaniment to carved Norman studded chevrons.

I have to confess though that I love church graffiti. Not that I condone the daubing and etching of sacred buildings, but the historical graffiti is fascinating and it's one of the most direct and personal relics our ancestors have left us. It often shows considerable patience and stone-working skill, and beautifully proportioned letterforms – largely lost skills, which show up the casual wall scratchers of today as rank amateurs with no sense of beauty or proportion.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best historic graffiti is found in places where people could scrape unobserved. Isolated churches, where bored people had to hang out for long periods, are a rich source of them, especially when they're not overlooked by any roads or buildings. Perched as it is on the top of a sacred mound at the corner of an iron-age hillfort, high above the surrounding countryside and quite a steep trek even from its adjacent village, St Bartholomew's on Churchdown Hill (or Chosen Hill as it's called locally) has acquired quite a collection of graphical scrapings from every age of its history. They adorn more or less every part of the church, inside and out.

When it comes to unobserved spots, St Bartholomew's church is pretty impressive in its isolation, perched on top of the ancient ramparts of Chosen Hill.

For sheer flagrant cheek, it's hard to beat the contribution of Thomas Badger, who carved his name in crude capitals deep into the stone of the chancel arch, in a way that cannot fail to have led an incensed vicar straight to the culprit – unless perhaps this part of the wall was covered up by furnishings in his day. His vandalism is currently exposed for all to see.

One of the things that intrigues me most though is a symbol which appears over and over again all over this church, but particularly on the north side, and which I will name the Churchdown Sigil. It comprises a lozenge with an arrow through it – invariably pointing upwards, although it has a few variations such as multiple arrows or multiple lozenges. The best example can be found in the north porch, just to the left of the door, where it appears alongside another intriguing pattern based around a quartered cross.

The Churchdown Sigil (right) and the quartered cross

The guidebooks describe it as a mason's mark, and that certainly seems very reasonable. I've seen masons' marks on other churches which look very like it. But masons are skilled stoneworkers and most of the examples of this symbol are a bit amateurish, as if they were carved by somebody who didn't have the right tools or skills. There's also the sheer number of them – sometimes several times on the same block of stone. An obsessive amateur copier of mason's marks? Or something else? If anybody has seen this symbol on any other churches I'd be interested to know.

Alongside this figure of a bird and someone's initials are more examples of the Churchdown Sigil. A small one and the point of a much larger one, plus an incomplete one (far right).

The north porch (pictured at the top of this post) has some of the best of Churchdown's amateur chisellings as well as the highest concentration of sigils. The porch is an unusual two-storey job with a priest's lodging above it, which was added to the church in the 13th century. Some of the graffiti is probably not far off being contemporary with it, and in fact it's possible that some of the carvings pre-date the porch on stones re-used from elsewhere. A good example of this can be seen on the outer walls of the porch where the base and lid of two Crusader coffins, complete with incised cross, have been used as building blocks. (I have a Joe Orton-style mental image of the masons turfing some poor benighted skeleton out of its coffin so they can nab the decorative lid.)

Here's a rather nice fleuron, bunged in for no apparent reason as if someone was practising and got bored half way through the second one.

Much of the graffiti in the porch is highly enigmatic, and the more you stare at it, the more you see different ways of viewing or interpreting it, especially as it's often hard to distinguish the lines of a carved image from natural marks or chips and scrapes in the stone. I think it's always important to look at these things with an open mind and be prepared to come up with your own thoughts about them, rather than taking anyone's view as established fact – even when it's in a respectable guidebook.

Perhaps one of the most curious to interpret is the figure, now extremely faded, on the door jamb of the porch's outer door. William T. Swift's book Some Account of the History of Churchdown, a valuable local history resource published in 1905, includes a description which Swift most likely got from the Rev. Dr. F. Smithe, who was vicar at the time he was researching the book, and who took a tremendous interest in the church's history. In their view it represents "a gaunt figure, or emblem, of Death – having the long hair and breasts of a woman; the fleshless arms are extended; in one hand an hour-glass is held, to denote the brief span of man's life, and in the other hand, to signify the grave, is an aspergès, which was used when the sprinkling of Holy Water upon the corpse (at the grave-side) was enjoined in the rubrics of the Old Uses or Service Books, such as that of Sarum."

Far be it from me to question the judgement of Dr Smithe or W.T. Swift, but to me it looks patently obvious that this is a mermaid. As faded as she is, she clearly has a scaly fish's tail, and underneath her is a symbol which looks very much like an anchor. Whether that could be an hourglass in her hand I couldn't say, but the other thing, an aspergès?! I'm not sure where these gentlemen are coming from in their "female Death" interpretation, but I think they might have got a bit tangled in a Biblical mindset. Last time I saw a priest asperging, he was using what appeared to be a pastry brush.

Given that she seems to be a mermaid, it may be fair to assume that the objects she's holding are a comb and mirror, since the majority of English pre-Reformation mermaids are depicted with them –  though admittedly the comb looks more like a television aerial. 

Another very striking image is what appears to be a face of Christ, with radiating aureole, chiselled into a lump of blue lias. Swift/Smithe reckon this to be pre-Reformation, and may well be right. And yes, all around this Christ-head you can see crude but distinctive Churchdown Sigils, some with multiple arrows.

Not all of St Bartholomew's wall chisellings are illicit; this official one (below) is rather nice too. The original Norman tower of the church fell into a dilapidated condition and was rebuilt in 1601. The rebuilding is commemorated by an engraved stone tablet at the back of the nave, incised with big bold letters and prahper Glahhsterrsh're spelling.

"This Belhows was buyldede in the yeere of our Lode God 1601". Plus additions.

The outside of the church has loads of carved grafitti – some of it quite brazen, other examples more subtle so that you spot different things every time you look. The oldest dated piece of graffiti I've found so far on the outside walls was apparently done in 1624.

Names and initials on the west wall of the tower dating back to 1624, not long after the tower was built. The Badger family have been at it again.

The church guidebook (an exceptionally good one, by the way) mentions a scratch dial on the outside north wall of the chancel, but this is very faded indeed and you need sharp eyes to spot it – all that's really visible is the hole for its long-lost gnomon. Another little enigma of this extraordinary church is why anybody would carve a scratch dial on the north wall, where it would have been as much use as a chocolate teapot. Most likely it was originally on the south wall and the stone block got moved during a past rebuilding: there are numerous re-used carved stones all over the fabric of this church, which point to the likelihood of an earlier building on the site whose stone was recycled. The fact that it's so weathered backs up the idea that it could be very old. Either that or it was etched by somebody with no sense of direction and a very poor grasp of physics.

 The northerly scratch dial. (NB This photo has been tarted up in Photoshop to enhance the outlines, otherwise, honestly, you wouldn't be able to see a damned thing.)

I feel like I've barely started extolling all the delights of St Bartholomew's Church so there will definitely be more to come. It always seems to be omitted from any books about interesting historic churches, but it seems to me to be a very special place and much underrated. Not to mention its position on a pre-Christian sacred hill where the powers still flow, and its magnificent views over the Severn Valley.

Sources:
Swift, William T., Some Account of the History of Churchdown (1905).
Waters, Gwen, A History and Guide to the Churches of St Bartholomew and St Andrew, Churchdown (church pamphlet, 1989, 2004).

Selsley Toots

 
The Toots long barrow

The other day I was driving up towards Stroud on the high road across Selsley Common when there was the most extraordinary downpour. I couldn't see where I was going even with the wipers on full pelt, but there was something strangely exhilarating about it too. And it went on and on and on, relentlessly, until the road was running like a stream. I decided to pull off the road on the edge of Selsley Common and wait for it to pass. And once it had eased off a bit I got out of the car with the camera stuffed up my jumper and had a squelch across the common, having intended for some time to visit its subtle but distinctive landmark – a long barrow known as The Toots.

I got completely soaked but I did manage to capture some attractive cloudscapes as the storm passed over.

 Toots on the horizon

Why does a long barrow attract a name like The Toots? It's got nothing to do with either smoking marijuana or farting, though no doubt both those things have been done there at various times over the centuries. Nor is the name a corruption of 'Tits', as is sometimes suggested by those who can't look at a tumulus without thinking of giant goddess boobies. But it's a name you often see associated with burial mounds in high places, and often those with a road or track running close by. Among many examples are barrows called the Fairy Toot and Wimble Toot, both in Somerset, and Toot Hill at Healing in Lincolnshire which has a likely barrow on the top. The name also sometimes occurs in relation to beacon hills and hilltop camps and castles, such as Toot Hill in Macclesfield Forest, Cheshire.

There isn't any definite etymology for the name but it's clear from the sheer number of them that are readily found across the country that 'Toot-hills' meant something significant at one time. Perhaps the most compelling suggestion is that the name comes from the Saxon word "teotan", to look out – a word which evolved into the Middle English "tote", to watch, or to look out. In short, most Toots have a view.

The view west from The Toots long barrow, over the village of King's Stanley, to the sandy silvery expanse of the River Severn and its great horseshoe bend, and the Forest of Dean on the far side.

That's certainly the case with The Toots barrow on Selsley Common. The barrow sits just on the crest of the Cotswold ridge with a magnificent panorama across the west, where the River Severn meanders like a silver serpent through its green valley with the Forest of Dean beyond. You can see the horseshoe bend in the Severn which stands out on every map of the UK, and also the sandy banks to the south west where it turns from a river into a tidal estuary. To the north, green rolling Cotswold tumps delight the eye as far as it can see.

I ought to know a thing or two about Toot-hills, because I was practically born on one. I spent the first years of my life in an old house on the Mythe just north of Tewkesbury, a round hill graced by a tumulus, known as the Mythe Toot. It fulfilled many of the criteria for Toot status: an obvious look-out point, a man-made tump on top of a natural hill with an old road (the A38) running right next to it – and the house was haunted – though not in an unpleasant way. But I have no more idea than anybody else what significance Toot-hills had to our ancestors.

If their purpose was as a lookout point though, that would make some sense. There are many other sacred places and landscape 'points' visible from The Toots, including some on the other side of the Severn where there were temples and shrines, not to mention a huge range of potential beacon hills. It's reasonable to assume that you would also be able to see the nearby Nympsfield Long Barrow and Hetty Pegler's Tump if it weren't for the woodlands that have grown up around them in recent centuries. With The Toots itself visible as a bump on the skyline from all around, it could be seen as a sighting point for a ley-line, as per Alfred Watkins' system of "old straight tracks". When I say ley-lines, I mean the straight-line alignments of physical features in the landscape, rather than earth energy lines (which to me usually appear to be spiralled more often than straight).

The Worcestershire antiquarian Jabez Allies, writing in 1852, was also intrigued by Toot-hills: "Although the Anglo-Saxons may have used such hills as 'lookout stations,' still many of them may have been of ancient British origin and derivation; and the fact that all the above-mentioned hills or places in Worcestershire [i.e. toot-hills] are either close to, or near upon the sides of roads, appears to favour the opinion that they were sacred to the Celtic Teutates, who was the guide over the hills and track-ways. Bryant says, Theuth, Thoth, Taut, Taautes, are the same title diversified, and belong to the chief god of Egypt."

I'm not sure I can quite get with the idea, now popular among new age questors, that the names of British sacred sites are derived from those of Egyptian gods, and/or that Egyptian priests came over here to share their secrets with the ancient Britons. I'm not completely closed-minded to the idea, but it always feels to me as if the British landscape and group-soul has a wondrous enough mystery system of its own, if you care to delve into it, without needing to be bolstered with bolt-on theories from more readily accessible traditions. The god name 'Teutates' sounds a bit classical to me and not very Celtic, though if it's derived from a simpler form such as 'Taut', or the Brythonic 'Dú Taith', then fair enough. But I must admit the idea of these hills being named after a specific god doesn't ring true for me either, for reasons I can't put my finger on. The word Toot seems more directly functional somehow.

Toots long barrow, looking north along Selsley Common. The dip visible across the barrow here is, unfortunately, a scar left by meddling Victorian twerps.

What can I tell you about The Toots long barrow then? Er ... not that much. It's never really been excavated, other than having a few gouges taken out of it by amateur antiquarians of a previous era, who neither recorded their activities nor made good the damage afterwards, stupid buggers.

The barrow gets a one-line mention in L.V. Grinsell's The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England: "This is one of the longest examples on the Cotswolds, being about 210 feet long," he says. That's it. It may be one of the longest long barrows, but thanks to the twerps of yore digging a big slice out of the middle, it actually looks more like two shorter barrows joined end to end. It has a nice atmosphere but not an overwhelmingly 'buzzy' one; it's more of a passive giver and taker of subtle forces, slowly breathing them. It doesn't have an obvious entrance either on inner or outer levels, but invites your consciousness to go spiralling in.

It does exert a certain magnetic pull over people wandering on the common. The place is thrumming with dog walkers even in the vilest weather, and at more clement moments it's a popular place for flying kites and other airborne toys. It's very possible that many of the people who feel compelled to go and stand on top of The Toots don't even realise it's a long barrow, as it has no distinguishing features: no visible stones or chambers. But stand on it they do, as if drawn to it by something unconscious. And perhaps that's as much as you need to know about its power and purpose.

Quarry remnants on Selsley Common, echoing distant hills

Sources:
Allies, Jabez, On the Ancient British, Roman and Saxon Antiquities and Folk-lore of Worcestershire,  2nd edition, 1852. (Good info on Toot-hills)
Darvill, Timothy, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Tempus, 2004)
Drayton, Penny, 'Toot Hills', from Mercian Mysteries No.21, November 1994; available online here.
Grinsell, L.V., The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England (Methuen, 1936)

Cleeve Knolls

To the Whispering Beech of Cleeve Hill

Soft shake
sculpts the surge
                          as strung out twists,
the permanent forms of the blast
proud in centrifugal spin
                                        cross the five ways

Gold stater slipped in the Malverns purse
Their bulbous jointed horse
                                            clears the ditch
Triple whip-tailed
                             copper, iron, gold

Cirrus makes
                      slate-sliver
on the beacons, blue extrusion
as sky and valley
spreads its table for the day's crumbs

Lamb lands on a ewe's flat back
solicits no reaction
circular jaw
masticates the springing green

Watcher of the old bowed track
silent pinion on
                          serene scars
the cup and ring grained in the turf

As the wind sings down your
fluting ridge and furrow
you tingle with every voice
that ever cut this breeze

Whispering beacon, destiny cross
copper-crowned queen of knolls

A walk in the sacred landscape: Uley

Hetty Pegler's Tump

It has taken over five thousand years to work the spiritual loom over the land between Uley and Nympsfield, two villages up on the Cotswold scarp between Stroud and Dursley. The area is overflowing with ancient monuments, you can barely move without stubbing your toe on a long barrow. But it seems to me that, with so many meaningful relics in such close proximity, the whole of this area must be a sacred place in its own right. Indeed the name Nympsfield is thought to mean "field near the holy place". So as well as taking in some of the obvious tourist spots, it seems to me it's worth sauntering around and in between them to see what might be here that isn't on the map.

My visit to this site starts with my meeting Western Mysteries author Gordon Strong at Hetty Pegler's Tump, in my capacity as publisher of his forthcoming book. The insides of Neolithic burial chambers are not the conventional place to have publishers' business meetings, but that's the advantage of co-running your own press – you can be as weird as you like. I stop off en route for a flying visit to Nympsfield Long Barrow and its Bronze Age neighbour the "Soldier's Grave", a round barrow hidden in the adjacent woods. Ever the rabid snapper, I have to lie on the ground to get the best camera angle on the Nympsfield stones, but fortunately Gordon knows what I'm like and isn't bothered that I turn up looking dishevelled and smelling of fox wee. Hetty Pegler is welcoming ... she smells a bit damp and wee-like herself.

Inside the 5,000-year-old tump (above) there is plenty of space to sit comfortably and chat about the powers and origins of barrows, the electric torch redundant as the sun pelts against the east-facing tunnel entrance and illuminates the passageway just enough to create a pleasant twilight. I sit with my back to a pitch dark side chamber and Gordon asks me my views on the purpose of barrows, so I talk about ancestors and the disarticulated burials, how the barrow people moved and mixed the bones. Like most Cotswold barrows, Hetty Pegler's Tump contained at least 20 skeletons, all jumbled. I'm just waffling on about how lovely and peaceful barrows are, and that even though they are burial chambers they never feel like graves, more of a comforting, nurturing sanctuary where you hang out with the ancestors and never feel frightened. At that moment there is a strange scratching noise in the darkness behind me. "What the fuck is that?" I strain to identify it. Maybe it's a rodent burrowing in the earth on top of the barrow? No, it's definitely something moving about in the chamber behind me. A gnawing, scratching, fluttering noise that gets more intense the longer I sit there. Bugger. Am I going to get a rat running across my leg or a bat whistling past my head? Fortunately neither transpires. I still don't know what it was. I gave the chamber a once-over with the torch on the way out and couldn't see anything.

Looking outwards

Hetty Pegler's is one of the most atmospheric long barrows I've ever visited, and here's a curious thing: this tump has been ravaged and savaged multiple times and what "survives" today is largely a reconstruction, and yet it remains imbued with a tingling sense of potency. Whereas poor old Nympsfield Long Barrow, its mound scalped and its stone chambers standing open to the sky, has almost no atmosphere left at all that I can discern. Putting aside the obvious psychological factor that a dark passageway underground is always going to be more evocative than an open ruin, I sense that the power of a long barrow is connected to enclosure, darkness at its core. When light floods into its hollows and the sun warms the stones, ephemeral ancestral threads dissolve away. The opened barrow is disengaged, its dynamo unhitched.

 Nympsfield long barrow: nice orthostats, shame about the vibes

An hour later Gordon has gone on his way and I saunter on up to Uley Bury, a fairly enormous Iron Age hillfort perched above the village. The middle bit is fenced off and accessible only to cows, but you can walk around the perimeter, between the ramparts. It's more than a mile all round, and the sun is starting to blaze, but emboldened by a tasty half of Pig's Ear ale from the local Uley Brewery, I set off. Within minutes I'm down on my hands and knees inspecting the wild blossoms. What caught my eye was this rather beautiful vetch blossom. Vetch is very common; I suppose that's why it's called Common Vetch. But I was struck by the intense and velvety purple of this particular patch growing on the ramparts – far more vivid in colour than the stuff I usually see.

Vetch, in beautiful magenta-purple, alongside some speedwell and a plantain "sparkler". To me, no domestic flower garden is as beautiful as this.

Uley Bury holds a memory of the Dobunni people; their golden horse emblems have turned up here on the odd coin find. Some parts of the fort are more atmospheric than others, and it seems to be focused in hotspots. On more than one occasion I am drawn towards a tree on the ramparts which seems to be blazing with inner life, only to find when I approach it that the ground yields beneath the grass and I'm standing over a not-quite-breaking-the-surface spring. The most striking of these trees is a mature elder close to the southern gateway, which stands as a green beacon, flaming on the inner levels. A stream of umbelliferous blossoms courses by at the root.

The outer plane view is pretty stunning too, especially to the south and west. A smoothly exquisite tump, Downham Hill, rises from the perfect greenness of fields. It's naturally formed, a natural outsider, a bubble that spurted from the contiguous heave of the Cotswolds, but with its glorious contours and soft sculpted shape and the little flutter of trees on the top, it looks like a giant long barrow.

Downham Hill, as seen from Uley Bury

During my walk around Uley Bury, I spot a translucent rainbow on the ground. Digging it out I find a small shard of glass, old bottle-glass weathered smooth, aqua-green with iridescent curves which the sun brings out in all colours as I turn it different ways in the light. I get a sense I may need it for something so I slip it in my pocket.

Scorched, dehydrated and knackered, I get back to the car to find that the lock has seized up and I have to climb in the passenger side. (Plus ça change – I once had a Ford Capri whose driver's door fell off completely, so let's be grateful for small mercies.) By this time I feel like calling it a day, but there is another sacred landscape at Uley which needs homage paid to it. This is one you won't find on the maps; it is hidden. Or to be more precise, it is so open you can't pin it down to any focused location. The whole hillside is implicated.

Uley Bury

The surface story goes like this. Between Uley Bury and Hetty Pegler's Tump is an east-facing slope called West Hill. A Romano-Celtic Temple of Mercury once stood on the top of this slope, the remains of which came to light during 1970s drainage pipe manoeuvres, close to the road and within view of Hetty Pegler. A subsequent excavation recovered its decapitated statue, now in the British Museum. It also turned up a substantial scatter of cursing tablets. These tablets, similar to the ones famously found in the Temple of Sulis in Bath, solicit the help of the Roman god in kicking the arse, literally or metaphorically, of an assortment of petty thieves and snotty neighbours. "I ask you that you drive them to the greatest death," one bloke petitions as a fate for three named individuals "who have brought evil harm on my beast". A chap called Biccus, a victim of theft, requests that the thief "may not urinate nor defecate nor speak nor sleep nor stay awake nor [have] well-being or health, unless he bring (the stolen item) in the temple of Mercury". The indictment was scratched into the surface of a small sheet of flattened lead, then folded up and tossed into a sacred well; the temple at Uley is thought to have had a pool in the middle for this purpose. Nearly all the curses here relate to thefts: of livestock, clothing, or household items, and in an age when there was no police force or criminal justice system, a good old zap from the Punitive Ray was probably the most realistic chance of getting redress.

I'm not a fan of cursing (despite my involvement in quasi-witchery I don't believe there is ever, under any circumstances, any justification for it) and neither am I a huge fan of the Romans, whose culture and remains give me no great spiritual connection. But what draws me to this site is that its sanctity goes so far back in time, the ranting Romans are actually little more than a flash of noonday sun on this sacred hillside. There was a temple here thousands of years before Mercury ever shook his curly locks and wiggly staff on these shores.

Given that there is now no visible trace of the temple on West Hill, it remains for the imagination to visualise the scale of it. There was a large complex here by the first century AD – lots of buildings, including accommodation, shops and bogs. But the archaeologists found traces of a Neolithic enclosure around the temple site, dating the shrine back a further two thousand years. A previously unknown round barrow was discovered (ploughed flat and now invisible) by the roadside. They also did a magnetometer survey over an area some way beyond the excavation site and found extensive and varied soil disturbance, too jumbled to interpret, which suggested an active presence in this place over a wide area and long timescale (Woodward & Leach, 1993).

My purpose today is not to find the physical location of the temple, but to attune to the landscape that held it. I want to know why the Neolithic people, the barrow-builders who made Hetty Pegler's Tump, chose this place as their shrine. I want to know what native deity or genius loci presided over this place and what traces it has scratched through the ethers.

The starting point for this is selected: a footpath down through Toney Wood. I just want to follow my instincts and not plan out this walk. Climbing by necessity out of the wrong side of the car, I take a left fork through the woods and soon find myself squelching through the mud of not-quite-evident springs.

It's really hard to describe the ambience of Toney Wood. It's Otherworldly to the point of feeling unreal – almost hallucinatory in its strangeness. It's not at all like the usual Gloucestershire faery woods, and is altogether more awesome – in the true sense of inspiring awe. Mildly unsettling too, but more because of its raw power than any focus of malevolence. It's a very old, mature wood and the trees are tall, which wipes out a lot of the light. The sun's orb dazzles the upper canopies but the pathway is dim. All around there are sounds of movement: branches sway, twigs crack. I'm most definitely not alone here.

This wood has a feel of being simultaneously immutable and in a constant state of change. The pathway cuts alongside a steep bank whose earth face is draped with old ivy and yet freshly crumbling away its layers, ever revealing. Looking at the fresh tumbles of red earth and pale stone I have a sense that if I so much as touch this surface it will fall away and expose the bones of the long dead, or other traces of old things hidden inside. I try to align my senses with the underlying layers, the resonance of a native spirit of place.

The logical assumption is that the pre-Roman deity must have had similar attributes to Mercury, since that's who replaced him (or her). But not necessarily. Stephen Yeates in his book A Dreaming for the Witches notes that the temple on West Hill was aligned so that the rising sun would stream through the entrance and illuminate the statue of Mercury on certain days in late April and early May, almost corresponding to the feast of Mercury on May 15th. From this he suggests that Mercury was chosen as the replacement god not because he had similar attributes to the local deity, but because he occupied an equivalent feast day (which may have been on or near Beltane). This rings fairly true to me, seeing as how Christianity subsequently superimposed itself on the native faith by subsuming its feast-days. I also read somewhere that the pre-Roman Uley shrine had been connected with the stag-god Cernunnos. Can I detect any feel of Cernunnos-vibes here, I wonder, as I descend through the sloping woods? At that moment there is a loud crackle of breaking twigs to my left and a swish of movement, and I turn to see a large deer pelting away through the trees.

The path presents me with choices. I try to follow intuitions, and one time when I take a path based on rational sense rather than instinct, a voice in my head says "wrong way! go back!" Following this imposed course I venture into the adjacent copse, Ring Wood. Heading towards sunlight and the green of a field glimpsed through the trees, I find the place I have been meant to discover. A thick mossy drystone wall holds back the forest, and on its other side is a low drop into a semicircular enclosure. From this circle of tree-ringed ground a stream emerges and chuckles away down the hillside. An old iron-barred stile, almost hidden, allows entry.

The alder tree above the spring. One well-head rises under the roots of this tree, the other can be seen emerging from the ground top right.

This is indeed a sacred spot. Admittedly it doesn't look that exciting, and its main use in these secular times is for cattle, as a drinking hole and occasional toilet. The enclosure is a squelching mire of their footprints, in deceptively deep mud. Tree roots weave the surface, which is spread with stone tumble, flat limestone bricks. A few bits of plastic litter and an old car tyre add a touch of modern decor. But on inner levels we have something special here. It is a double spring, a two-headed source. These are polarised, active and passive. One spring ripples straight out of the open ground, its current pulsing against the palm of my hand. The other emerges from a crease in the ground under the roots of an alder tree, and although it produces water at a similar rate, appears placid and completely motionless. In fact it took me a while to realise it was a spring because at its source it appears not to be flowing at all. A few yards from the twin springs the waters blend together and make a little stream, polarised unity.

Was this double-spring ever revered as a sacred place? Who knows. It's quite some distance from the temple complex, but then this whole area was in a sense a part of the temple, and there's no knowing which of the many springs on this hillside, if any, were singled out for special attention. I can't even be sure whether this double-headed flow existed in ancient time: some springs dry up over time, while others newly reveal themselves. But in recognition of this being a special place now, solitary, penannular and cowtrodden, I offer my piece of rainbow-sheened glass among the stones of its bed.

The "active" spring emerges from the earth.

If the atmosphere in Toney Wood was a little bit unsettling, I have to say there is a similar tension about this place. The polar spring itself is naturally buoyant, but there's something overlaid on the top, a thinly netted veil laid on the field. A little of its exuberance is stifled by this dusky web. Perhaps this negative tension is only to be expected in a place where people have pinned their curses, even if this isn't the cursing well itself. The Romans went in for cursing in a big way, but whether the practice of cursing has an older lineage in Uley, who knows. As far as I know there's no evidence that earlier peoples practised it, which is not to say that they didn't. It is, of course, perfectly possible that they did so without the relative permanence of inscribed lead. Perhaps a veneer of negativity on this place is inevitable.

I move on, down the slope into the sunlight, following the course of the young stream. The Ordnance Survey shows a footpath here, but there is none: a little used public right of way which leaves no track. The terrain is difficult as the cows' feet have left treacherous hollows under the grass; I have to reroute myself a little way into the field to avoid a twisted ankle.

The cattle are clustering. They move en masse to a scrape of bare earth in an adjacent field – another spring. I decide not to explore this one as it's on private property. But the terrain of many wells is clear.

And then I hear the sound of rapid sploshing water close by. Another circle of earth, hollowed and muddied and shaded by a ring of trees, but while the double-spring was presided over by alder, this one has a guardian of thorn. White may-blossom nods in the shade. Energies are feminine, and waters splurge. I can't get close to the spring itself but I can see it. Waters pouring from a gap, not in the flatness of the earth like the previous springs, but in a small vertical bank, straight from the tangled rootball of a hawthorn. The stream from the double-spring meanders in a reverent circle around it before meeting with its waters lower down. If there is a sacred well in this field, then this is surely it. Its powers flow forth, a gushing spark undiminished by nettles, barbed wire and the smell of biodegrading dung.

A small bridge takes me over the stream and into a sunny field, where my path is immediately sliced off by an electric fence right across the footpath. A short tube of hosepipe hangs on the wire, presumably to discourage hapless ramblers from blundering into the fence without seeing it. And perhaps to provide a zap-free passing place. I contemplate this obstacle. Under or over? Not ideal either way. On balance I decide to go for the undignified shimmy, and find myself for the second time today slithering along the grass on my front.

From here it's not easy. The electric fence scores an artificial ring within the meadow, and I can't get back to the woods. The only obvious footpath leads to the farm in the valley, in completely the wrong direction. I choose to forge my own path around the field edges, back up the hill towards the wood, hoping for an opening when I get there. Knee high grass and buttercups. English meadow magic. Marred by a distant warning as a tractor two fields away begins to creep towards me. Having strayed from the authorised track I now fear a bollocking.

Hogging the headlands I struggle up the hill. Grass becomes waist-high, buzzing with pollen, surging through umbelliferous blossoms and the squish of underfoot springs. That this hillside is a whorl of springs I already knew; the satellite image on Google Streetview shows the hidden watercourses as cropmarks, a tangle of meandering serpent outlines scotched in the grass. I reach the edge of the wood, but there is no way in. Threefold barbed wire lines the boundary. The electric fence, the farmer's curse, strings through the tall grasses.

And then a merciful stile appears, and I'm into the cool of the woods. Too knackered now to get back up the slope. Light-headed and struggling to breathe, but the strangeness of Toney Wood offers little respite. I sense the antiquity of the track, hauling me into its time loop. So I sit down on its bank to catch my breath, and watch the shining ones dance in their hall among the trees. Their floor level is below the ground of the present forest. I'm an outside observer acknowledging their music and colour. And then I move on, because if I rest here too long I probably won't be able to get up again.

I am, as it happens, just a few yards from the Romano-Celtic temple, invisible though it is beneath the ploughsoil. But the temple site is just a hub. Out from its core spins the weaving of a sacred landscape, where every twig carries the tremors of its weft.


Sources:
Bord, Janet, Cursing not Curing: The Darker Side of Holy Wells (article available online)
Woodward, Ann, and Leach, Peter, The Uley Shrines: Excavation of a ritual complex on West Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire 1977-9 (English Heritage, 1993).
Yeates, Stephen, A Dreaming for the Witches: A Recreation of the Dobunni Primal Myth (Oxbow, 2009).
Several pages about Uley on Curse Tablets from Roman Britain website.

A long barrow's tale: Notgrove

Most people visiting Notgrove long barrow these days have one overriding reaction: disappointment. "A lumpy mess" is one reasonable response. "Fucked" is another. But I would suggest that your appreciation of this barrow might depend on whether you believe in faeries. Or how much you appreciate wildflower biodiversity. Either of those perspectives will allow you to see something beyond the sorry sagging remains of this once impressive site.

I remember being "disappointed" when I first saw Notgrove long barrow in the late 1980s. To all outward appearances, it's an undulating wobble of indeterminate lumps and bumps, bereft of distinguishing features. Graceless and scraggy, it isn't even obvious which way round it is - nor where the barrow ends and the natural lumpiness of the landscape begins. Its position on the elevated plateau of the Cotswolds is quite spectacular, but unflattered by being crammed into a tightly cropped corner of a field, enclosed by trees and severely sliced round on all edges by fencing, so you can't stand far enough away from it to view it in its entirety. Being right next to the A436, access is easy enough with plentiful parking in a large, dirty, pothole-pocked layby, but you have to watch you don't get your arse knocked off while walking the few yards along the grass verge to the barrow, such is the speed of the cars tanking through this rural idyll.

I'd like to be able to say that this indentation is the horned forecourt, but no – it's the other end. Merely a scar from the bad old days of invasive and irresponsible archaeology.

So much for the outer impressions, but Notgrove barrow still has a very nice atmosphere. As a site which was once made sacred, it retains its gravitas. As a place where a seeker of ancient resonances can connect with the ancestral magnetism within the mound, it retains its power. There are many archaeological perspectives on this barrow which can be found across the internet, but I'm more concerned with attuning to what the barrow offers on an inner level which might not be apparent in physical dimensions.

Long barrows of the Cotswolds and elsewhere have a long association with Faery, there being a deeply embedded tradition that hollow mounds are where the faeries hang out. In this region it seems to apply whether the mound be a man-made barrow or a natural conical hill of some kind. Most hills and mounds across Gloucestershire have some kind of faery legend associated with them, even if it's only the tales collected by Victorian mythographers from local farmworkers who encountered mysterious music or lights while wobbling home from the pub on a dark night. The tradition has its roots in Celtic legends of the Sidhe, who lived in the "hollow hills" and were often associated with burial mounds; these early portrayals of the "shining ones" are much closer to the root and spark of Faery than the more modern gauzy-winged notions. I'd say Notgrove barrow makes a pretty decent faery mound even today, and if you can find an entrance on the inner (there are many, find one which opens for you), it's a warm and friendly one too.

A local legend associated with Notgrove long barrow is that a golden coffin was buried within it (a very common claim which applies to many other barrows too). Not surprisingly, the two recorded excavations in 1881 and 1934 didn't turn up anything of that nature. And although the barrow had been plundered multiple times prior to that, if there ever was a golden coffin it wouldn't have been a physical one. It might be the mortuary receptacle of choice for the likes of King Tut and Jimmy Savile but the Neolithic people didn't really go in for coffins, other than simple stone cists, and certainly didn't make them from precious metals – a gold coffin actually sounds much more like a faery myth. The ubiquity of the legend at different sites suggests a lingering folk memory of an old myth associated with barrows and hollow hills. Common misconceptions about physical treasure in burial mounds were responsible for much of the lamentable destruction of ancient sites, during the 18th century in particular, and the Cotswolds are littered with half-dismembered barrows torn apart by get-rich-quick treasure-hunters and abandoned in disappointment when they failed to yield anything more than a jumble of bones and a few stone beads.

Indeed the idea that digging into a barrow will reveal, Tutankhamun-like, a glittering hoard of bling is quite a strange one as it doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. While some fancy burials with rich grave goods do exist in England, they tend to be from later periods – the Anglo-Saxons being the masters of this in their burial of an entire ship at Sutton Hoo. But whatever the long barrows were used for, there was more to it than a mere disposal of the dead. For the most part they were not built for a single interment of one important person but chaotic multiple burial. Many of the Cotswold barrows – Notgrove included – are found to contain a jumbled assortment of skeletons. While some of this might be put down to earth movement, burrowing animals, careless looters etc, that doesn't account for all of it, and it seems to have been the way these barrow-people did things. Either they let their dead decompose before putting the bones in the barrow, or they went back in and moved them from one chamber to another after they'd been buried for a while. Either way, they seem to have purposely given them a good shuffle. Why?

To understand something of the Neolithic mentality you have to put aside the individualism which dominates modern thinking. People in the past were less focused on themselves as individuals and more conscious of the group or tribe of which they formed a part. Within this collective sense of self could be found a reverence for ancestors as part of the continuing collective whole. Again we have to detach our modern preconceptions which see ancestors in terms of specific lineage and genealogy – a line of individuals. To the barrow-people, ancestors were a much more nebulous and collective group representing "those who had gone before", in a more abstract and archetypal sense. The cycles of death and rebirth were all around them in the tides of nature and this cyclical pattern would have been obvious. Drawing upon the insights and blessings of those who were travelling the realms of the unseen would have been obvious too. And so it's not surprising that several barrows have presented evidence of regular and repeated entry and interaction with the bones of the ancestors over long periods of time, supporting the view that barrows were communal ritual sites and not just graves.

We can't know what rituals or practices the barrow-people followed. But we can see that it included a dynamic relationship with the ancestors, as the living entered the hollow dark spaces of the tomb and spread the bones from one space to another. Perhaps the multiple chambers represent different stages of the ancestors' journey through the afterlife, with the barrow itself a chamber of initiation for living and dead alike.

Notgrove long barrow was built with five internal chambers off a central passage, in common with many other barrows in what is called the Cotswold Severn group. It had a forecourt area at the eastern end and was structured all around with a double kerb of drystone walling. One thing that is quite unusual is that it was built on top of an earlier round barrow. In this instance there was a burial of a single individual: underneath the dome of the round barrow was the crouched skeleton of an old man. The body of a young girl had, at some later date, been placed on the top. The round barrow sits hidden in the centre of the long barrow immediately behind the furthest chamber. The passage and chambers of the long barrow contained disarticulated skeletons representing at least six people, with the jumbled bones of at least two more underneath the horned forecourt. It also had a possible standing stone on its north side.

Plan of Notgrove long barrow – not that you can identify any of these features definitively from what now remains, sadly. Based on a plan in Timothy Darvill's book, itself based on the excavation map of 1934.

Far from yielding any golden coffins, the only treasures were a flint arrowhead and a black shale bead.

In the course of its first excavation in 1881, Notgrove barrow was ripped right open and its passage and chambers exposed to view. The 1934 excavation was also an exercise in regrettable unsubtlety. Photos of it in this exposed condition show it to be quite an impressive sight, but a rather melancholy inversion of what a barrow is supposed to be. Writing in 1931, H.W. Timperley laments that "the stones were meant to remain unseen – we have uncovered them and let the wind swirl in their empty spaces."

It was a fair point – with as much of problem for conservation as for the violation of ancient solitude. By the 1970s the condition of the stones was becoming a serious issue and the barrow was deteriorating rapidly, easy prey to vandalism and the wear and tear of visitors as well as the ravages of the weather. In an ideal world, the barrow would have been carefully reconstructed with its original materials, as was done at the magnificent Belas Knap barrow nearby. However, it being a non-ideal world, Gloucestershire County Council went for the more basic solution of dumping a load of soil over the stones to cover them. Thus we have ended up with the lumpy mangled bollocksation that so disappoints visitors today.

On the plus side, the barrow is managed as a miniature reserve for wild flowers. Limestone grassland in the Cotswolds is now rare and precious, as modern industrial farming has destroyed most of it. In the traditional way, the grass on the barrow is only mown once a year, in August. This means that for much of the summer it appears to be an overgrown mess of long grass, which understandably leads to an impression that it's being neglected. However, if you look more closely it's a beautiful tangle of blossoms: scabious, knapweed, harebells and yellow-wort – while in spring the whole mound is bursting with cowslips.

More words from H.W. Timperley (1931):

"The tomb looks desolate in decay, yet it still holds something of the serene and simple impressiveness which must always have hung about it. There must be more than earth and stones in a form that, destroyed, can fill the mind with the peacefulness of the eternal and make it seem no greater and no less than the living quiescence which keeps the hills stable and puts the wind which sweeps over them into place as a ripple on the surface of time."

Sources:
Notgrove Long Barrow page on The Modern Antiquarian.
Long Barrows of the Cotswolds by Timothy Darvill (Tempus, 2004).
 


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