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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White violets and clashing kings: the Odda side of Deerhurst

The presence of two Saxon churches in close formation is one obvious reason to revere the parish of Deerhurst in Gloucestershire as a unique historic treasure, but it also lays claim to some other important Anglo-Saxon shenanigans.

Fourteen months of bitter violent fighting, repeated clashes and ravagings across England from Northumberland to Somerset, betrayals, defections, double crossings and fickle loyalties, amazingly came to a peaceful and unbloodied end in a meadow by the Severn.

These battles were the long struggle of the English Saxons, under the Kings Æthelred the Unready and his son Edmund Ironside, to fend off the invading forces of the Danish King Cnut (sometimes spelled Canute to avoid the risk of accidental anagrams), who came in 200 shining longships tipped with silver and gold, "the men of metal, menacing with golden face", terrorising and overwhelming every part of the country. After a vicious battle in Essex, King Edmund fled west, possibly hoping to find some support across the Welsh border, but Cnut caught up with him at the River Severn. And so it was at Deerhurst that the two kings met, in October 1016, and signed a truce. Cnut was to have all of England north of the Thames, but Edmund Ironside was to keep southern England, including London, for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, the rest of his life turned out to be only six weeks. His death at the end of November 1016 forfeited the rest of the English lands to Cnut. The circumstances of the young king's demise are lost to history, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes no mention of any suspicion of foul deeds, so presumably the cause was natural. Cnut consolidated his position by marrying King Æthelred's widow Emma the following year, while keeping his first wife Ælfgifu as a spare, and went on to help himself to Norway and a few bits of Sweden. He is most famous, of course, for getting his boots wet on a beach in Southampton.

Edmund Ironside (left) and Cnut the Dane, from a 13th century manuscript: Chronica Maiora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi, 26, f. 160.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the truce between Edmund and Cnut took place on an eyot, or small river island near Deerhurst, called Ola's Island – Olney or Alney. (Confusingly, there is an Alney island a few miles downstream, but that almost certainly isn't it.) To this safe and secluded spot both kings were conveyed by fishing-boat. In his book Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, published over a century ago, Henri Massé cites the site as the place known locally as the Naight – and many other sources agree. The name is a clue, because the word "eyot" (pronounced the same as "eight") readily morphs into "naight". There is no obvious trace of this island at Deerhurst today. But it can still be found.

Follow me from the place where the road ends, by the gate of Odda's Chapel. A footpath leads over a tiny stream and across a flat plain, lightly moated on both sides, a short way to the bank of the River Severn. The first landmark you see in this featureless plain is not the steely Severn, but this magnificent holey oak tree (with the Malverns lined up behind).

This vast and ancient tree is hollow: if you're relatively small and supple you could get inside it and climb right through. It has survived countless floods, and its cavity is banked up with densely packed river silt. During a flood the river flows straight through the trunk. The tree is a marker of the ways, and has been so for centuries. It stands at the point where the moated path from the village joins another passing track which runs along the cusp of the river (innovatively named the Severn Way). Turn left along this path and through the gate, which leads alongside a patch of scrub and shortly to another gate. This opens out into a meadow with a stand of oak trees in the middle, on what is otherwise a flat expanse of floodplain. The outline of an earthwork, of uncertain date, can be faintly seen running alongside the riverbank, and a corresponding one cuts diagonally across the meadow, marking out a long sliver of land. This is the Naight – it was almost certainly on this sliver of meadow, in 1016, that the Saxon and Danish kings met.

It doesn't look much like an island today, but 1000 years ago this chunk of land was entirely surrounded by water and could only be accessed by boat. The Severn may now pass cleanly within straightish banks (aside from its tendency to erupt in flood) but in the past it was bigger and more sprawling. During the Saxon period it was wide enough to encompass much of what is now riverside meadow. Thus a miniature island was formed in what must have been a very large and formidable river. As the Severn shrunk away over time the eyot was left dry, although its outline was still cut out from the meadow by a little stream known as the Naight Brook. No longer requiring a boat, the brook was small enough to cross with a simple footbridge. In more recent years, the Naight Brook has dried up almost completely – and the delineation of the island is only faintly traced in the contours of the meadow.

I was initially drawn to the spot by its magnetism. Three great oak trees. One fallen, its whorled and grained trunk now barkless and hollow. Within its cavern the cellular pockets of wild bees,  harbingers of faery in old myth. The middle tree shattered black down its core, lightning split, headless, but spiking fresh wands all around. The other tree immaculate, stately. The wind began to blow when I put my hand on the trunk of the middle tree, shaking its branches. The ground is different here – it stands slightly proud of the field, and the lusher plant life gives away the presence of water, which wells up around your feet as you pass. If the ground is spongy underfoot you've found the Naight Brook.

A look at some old maps, such as the Ordnance Survey of 1884, shows a line of trees running along the bank of the Naight Brook for its entire length. Although the positions of trees on Victorian maps can't always be taken too literally, it does seem likely that the two surviving and one deceased oaks are the sole remainders of this tree avenue, with the great holey oak two fields away also being part of the same line. They are doing better than the Naight Brook, which is basically nonexistent. It was still being shown on maps up to the 1970s, but the patches of damp grass are the only hint that it was ever there. Plus perhaps one other clue.

What is this stone wall doing here? Well I don't know, is the honest answer. But it has an arched channel running underneath it which tunnels through the earth for several feet and emerges half way down the river bank (photo below). It's largely blocked up with earth now and completely dry, but it appears to have been designed for water to flow through. Again, study of old maps shows that its site coincides with the outflow of the Naight Brook into the River Severn, so it's probably fair to assume that it was built to contain the outflow. The maps also indicate that there was a footbridge over the brook here, or very near by. So my best guess is that this chunk of strangely isolated stonework is the last remaining portion of the bridge.

The disused and partially obscured conduit where the Naight Brook once discharged into the Severn.

A map of the Naight (more or less to scale).

The proximity of Deerhurst to the River Severn is a mixed blessing. Everyone in North Gloucestershire will remember forever the floods of July 2007 but the residents of Deerhurst went through a horrendous ordeal – which can be seen in pictures on their Floodblog. Their neighbourly spirit and stoic humour is a credit to them. There was also a devastating flood in 1947, and no doubt on many previous occasions in past centuries. The Severn is not a friendly river, and occasionally it becomes a monster.

It's perhaps something of a liability, then, that right on the edge of the vulnerable low-lying floodplain stands one of England's precious Saxon architectural relics: Odda's Chapel.

Forty years after the signing of the English-Danish treaty on the Naight, a local ealdorman, Earl Odda, built a modest chapel on his lands at Deerhurst within view of the priory (see my previous article for more details about the Saxon priory). Cnut's 20 year reign had ended in the depositing of another English king on the throne: Edward the Confessor. Odda's timing might be seen as a little unfortunate, because by the time he built his chapel, in 1056, there were only another ten years to go before the Norman Conquest and the ending of Saxon rule forever. Not that Odda himself lived to see it: he died only four months after completing his chapel. After 1066, the invading Normans became obsessive-compulsive church builders and were all too keen to replace the older English structures with their own edifices. It wasn't very long before Odda's humble little chapel disappeared.

Many centuries later, in 1675, an intriguing engraved stone was turned up in the orchard of Abbot's Court, a medieval house in Deerhurst.

A replica of the dedication stone found in the orchard (the original is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The inscription translates as: "Duke Odda ordered this royal hall to be built and dedicated to the honour of the Holy Trinity for the soul of his brother Ælfric which was taken up from this place. Bishop Ealdred it was who dedicated the same on the 12th April in the 14th year of the reign of Edward, King of the English". A second (mutilated) stone is set above.

Written in Latin, in generous roman-uncial letters, it appeared to be the dedication stone for a chapel of the Holy Trinity which Odda had built for the soul of his deceased brother Ælfric; it was dated April 1056.

The stone was taken by some as evidence that a chapel had once stood somewhere near the spot, as there is some mention of one in the shambolic Tewkesbury Chronicle of the post-1066 period. It was more widely assumed though that the stone belonged to one of the chapels of the priory church, which was only a short distance away and did undergo some extension in the 11th century. If there had ever been any other chapel building, it was thought, it must have been destroyed long ago.

However, Odda's Chapel wasn't destroyed. It was subsumed.

The truth finally came out in 1885. The timber-framed medieval house whose orchard had yielded the consecration stone turned out to have entirely encased the Saxon chapel: swallowed it whole. A portion of half-timbered house had been built at one end, and then extended to swallow up the entirety of the little church. Its small chancel at the east end had been divided into two floors, with leaded-light windows installed; the upper storey fitted with a fireplace and chimney and used as a bedroom. The somewhat larger nave had been pressed into service as a kitchen. The whole structure was plastered over on the outside so that, to all external appearances, it was just a common or garden medieval farmhouse.

Once this discovery had been made, a process of reclaiming the chapel got underway, and what emerged was a 46ft long two-part building with a typically Saxon horseshoe arch in the middle. Confirmation of its provenance came in the form of a second engraved stone, found within the chimney stack. Unfortunately this stone had been re-used as a window head, and a big slice chiselled out of it which makes the inscription undecipherable, but there is enough left of it to confirm the building's status as a chapel. In its transmutation into a domestic dwelling some damage had been done to the structure of the chapel: a wall missing and a doorway lost. And the scars can still be seen in the west wall where a very large kitchen fireplace had been punched through. But all things considered, the building is remarkably intact.

Nave of Odda's Chapel, now restored to its original form after a long and humble career as a kitchen.

Details of the life of Odda are few, not surprisingly for someone who lived so long ago. He was probably born some time around 990, and may have been a kinsman of Edward the Confessor. He was awarded much of the land confiscated from the disgraced Earl Godwin, only to be made to give it back when Godwin came back into favour. He is known to have been an extremely generous benefactor of Pershore Abbey, helping to re-establish it after it had been destroyed by fire and abandoned by its monks. If the chronicler John of Worcester is to be believed, he was also a kindly benefactor to the community and a generous champion for the poor and oppressed. He took holy orders towards the end of his life and when he died on 31st August 1056 he was buried in Pershore Abbey.

If Odda was related to Edward the Confessor then that would also make him a kinsman of Edmund Ironside. In her book The World Before Domesday, Ann Williams suggests the possibility that Odda may already have been in possession of Deerhurst in 1016, which would put him right at the heart of the Edmund-Cnut negotiations. This can only be speculated, but it's an intriguing thought.

I associate Earl Odda with white violets. Why? Because the ground outside his chapel is packed with them. Viola odorata, sweet violets. If you have a look at the closely mown lawn on the south side in early spring they are a beautiful sight – and scent, if you feel like grovelling about on your hands and knees to snuffle at them. White sweet violets are not uncommon in the English countryside but it intrigues me that they are so abundant at Odda's Chapel when the Priory churchyard just a few yards away is blooming with the more conventional purple Dog violet.

Sweet violets (Viola odorata) in the grounds of Odda's Chapel.

Odda's Chapel was consecrated by Bishop Ealdread of Worcester on 12th April 1056. Such a precise dating for an Anglo-Saxon monument is rare, but the survival of the consecration stone gives us this information. The feel of the chapel is quite beautiful, especially in the nave, where I always find my stomach doing a loop-the-loop as soon as I walk through the door. It's small and humble but has a deep aura of sanctity.

Although the chancel is now well lit, there's no trace of any window from the Saxon period, so if there was one it was probably very small. Maybe Odda preferred the sense of mystery created by candlelight. The nave is also dimly lit, having only two small windows, high in the wall.

The photo above shows the alterations to the chancel. The ceiling timbers, leaded windows, and upstairs chimney breast and fireplace are all interlopers, part of the transformation into a domestic dwelling. Not all of it dates from the medieval conversion: the leaded windows are Tudor, and you can also see a small stone bracket in the corner of the downstairs wall which dates from the 13th century (suggesting, perhaps, that the chapel was still in use at that time). The upstairs bit was used as a bedroom from the medieval period onwards, and you can only wonder what strange dreams its occupants may have had. Henri Massé (writing in 1900) makes mention of a ladder allowing access to the upstairs section, but this is long gone, and it's no longer possible to go up there.

Sources:

Gilbert, Edward, A Guide to the Priory Church and Saxon Chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (privately printed, 1956, revised 1977).

Massé, H.J.L.J., The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury, with Some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (London, Bell & Sons, 1900).

Swanton, Michael (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Routledge, 1998).

Williams, Ann, The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy, 900-1066 (London, Continuum, 2008).

Deorhurst: grove of glorious beasts

River Severn at Deerhurst.

An isolated flood-prone plateau between the sluggard River Severn and the eternal old track now baptised the A38. A long straight lane ending in a curl before it glances the river bank. A menagerie of wild beasts in stone and legend, and the oaken tracks of Kings. A place of orchard cottage dreams, of roses and lawns and white violets, demurely hosting two Saxon churches barely 100 yards apart.

Deerhurst crouches off the modern beaten track, a secret spot about equidistant between Tewkesbury and Cheltenham. It gets minimal through-traffic because its roads, so close to the unbridged River Severn, don't really go anywhere. It's mostly open meadows and flood plains these days, but its older name, Deorhurst, reveals a "grove of wild beasts".

This is the first of two articles about Deerhurst, as there's far too much interesting stuff in this village to cover in one go. Here we have a dander round the older of the two churches.

From this angle you can clearly see that the Priory Church of St Mary is a bit of a bolt-together job from different time periods. It's immediately obvious that the aisles on either side of the tower have been added later, the smooth ashlar making no attempt to blend in with the rougher rubblestone. If you look carefully you can see that the top part of the tower is also an add-on, although still very ancient. The lower part of the tower is the oldest bit. One of the giveaways is the use of stones stacked diagonally within the masonry, and with little attempt to arrange any of it in level courses – a building style that particularly characterises the Saxon period. Two sticky-outy carvings of dark age provenance are unfortunately too weathered and damaged to decipher.

You only have to get just inside the door to find the first of Deerhurst's wild beasts.

Is it a dog? Is it a dragon? From the front it even looks like a cow, but I wouldn't want to meet a cow with a set of fangs like that. Its nose certainly suggests it's a dog - reminiscent of the style of hunting dogs seen in Celtic artwork. It stands on guard by the door, along with its asymmetrically matching companion, as a label-stop inside the west porch of Deerhurst church. No ordinary church, you understand, but a proud, mutated but miraculously surviving edifice of a vital Anglo-Saxon monastic site. The doggy is of eye-watering antiquity – probably chiselled into being some time in the early 9th century.

At the opposite end of the church is another pair of beastie label-stops on a chancel arch. These look more dragon-like but also, it has to be said, like a cartoon hippopotamus (George from Rainbow?) They have tusks though, so perhaps they're supposed to depict wild boar. The church also has an interesting image of a domestic animal; the tomb brass of Sir John Cassey and his wife Alice (dated 1400) also depicts her pet dog, Terri. It's very unusual to find animals' names mentioned on old brasses.

Anglo-Saxon remains in Britain are rare. There are plenty of Norman parish churches around, but for something as old as Deerhurst priory to have survived is remarkable fortune. It hasn't got through history unscathed of course; the original church was smaller and simpler in shape. During the turbulent medieval years (when its wares were repeatedly plundered by greed-crazed monarchs) it got its chancel whipped off, its tower strangely bolted onto, its outer walls knocked through for an aisle extension and a monastic building shunted up its kisser. But with a bit of imagination and a floor plan you can still see the tall thin lines of the original Saxon building, and some of the ramshackle lopsided herringbone stonework which shows off its dark age credentials.

Plans reproduced from H. Massé's Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, published 1900.

Even within the Saxon period the church was undergoing changes. The earliest church was a simple rectangular job and may have been built in the seventh or eighth century, or possibly even earlier. During the next few centuries a west porch was added and the two side chapels appeared; and then in around 1000 AD the church was extended at both ends with a further souped-up porch in the west, which was built up to make a tower, and a semi-circular chancel added at the east end (now ruined).

However there were some more drastic changes in the 12th and 13th centuries which have altered the character and shape of the church, and some of the Saxon features were lost. Much of the original nave was knocked through to make way for a row of decorated arches.

The domestic building which adjoins the church is also a rude interloper in historical terms, but it is a gorgeous building. Built around the late 14th or early 15th century and much poked and prodded in the fashions of later eras, it's now a private farmhouse but the quadrangle it forms alongside the church was once a monastic cloister. The blocked doorway which once gave access between church and cloister also has beastie-heads as label-stops, but these face into the priory garden and are not accessible to the public.

The Priory farmhouse, joined onto the church at one end, is a surviving monastic relic. What is now a domestic garden was once the cloister (see plan above) still with an original Saxon door.

It isn't possible to put a date on the original foundation of this church. The first definite recorded reference to it is in 804 AD, when it was part of a monastery or abbey and received a gift of land from a bloke called Æthelric. It's highly likely that it was already well established by then, but nobody really knows for how long. It was at one time the principle monastery of Hwicce, the Saxon kingdom of the lower Severn. The churches of Hwicce originally adopted Celtic Christianity rather than the missionary Roman version.

It must have been an important place and it predates its close neighbour monastery, Tewkesbury Abbey, by some centuries. Information about the Deerhurst monastery is scarce but it seems at some late date to have become a Benedictine priory. One of its luminaries was St Alphege, or Ælfheah to give him his Saxon name, who began his monastic life at Deerhurst before going on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and later a martyr to marauding Danes at Greenwich and thus into a giddy spiral to canonisation. St Alphege is commemorated in a 15th century stained glass window at Deerhurst, and as it happens 2012 is his millennial year, having met his sainted demise in 1012.

Another slightly less high-flying martyr saint is associated with Deerhurst, but still important in his own way: St Werstan. He was a monk at Deerhurst at a time when it was ransacked by Danes. He escaped and fled up to the Malvern hills, where he founded a cell close to the site of St Ann's Well. The misery of Viking-harassment was far from over though, and the unfortunate Werstan was murdered in his own chapel. Legend has it that this atrocity was the reason for the founding of Great Malvern Priory; whether true or not, St Werstan is well commemorated in the windows of Great Malvern Priory church.

West doors. The inner one, though probably restored, is a beautiful example of a rounded Saxon arch. The outer one is an original Saxon doorway (from the church's later development, around 1000 AD) with a later medieval pointed doorway inserted into it.

Despite medieval alterations, Saxon features abound. The round-headed arches, the small triangular recess beside the blocked doorway half way up the wall (suggesting there was formerly a second floor in the church at this level, or at least a gallery) and most notably the twin triangular-headed windows at the top, which are exquisitely carved – all are surviving features of the earliest pre-Conquest church.

It's speculated that the Danes may have made an occasional raid on Deerhurst Abbey during the late Saxon period, and they were known to have a particular fondness for ransacking monastic establishments. The eventual fall of the Saxon royal dynasty was enshrined at Deerhurst, where King Edmund Ironside was obliged in 1016 to sign over most of England to the Danish King Cnut in a meadow by the Severn. The decline of Deerhurst as an abbey probably came about a few years later during the reign of Edward the Confessor, who handed it over to the French Abbey of St. Denis. It was downgraded to a priory, and then the notoriously exploitative King John came along and trousered all its revenues. Subsequent Norman dukes and monarchs helped themselves to whatever was left.

Detail of the triangular windows and their curious fluted decoration. There is an "upper room" hidden on the other side and the window is carved on that side too.

Another of Deerhurst's Saxon treasures is its font, decorated with beautiful panels of spiral scrolls in a style that shows a certain Celtic influence. It's made from local Cotswold stone (oolitic limestone) and like the other carvings in the church it dates from before the Norman Conquest. At some point in the subsequent centuries though it became detached from its home and ended up being used as a washtub in a local farmyard.

In 1844 it was rescued from this ignominious fate by the Dean of Westminster, who bought it for the nearby parish church of Longdon. There it remained for 25 years, until its lower portion apparently turned up in Deerhurst:

"A lady in the neighbourhood (Miss Strickland, of Apperley Court) found in a garden close to the river, in 1870, an upright carved stone. It occurred to this lady that the stone was in reality the stem or lower part of the font then in Longdon church, in Worcestershire, as the ornament seemed to be similar. The vicar of Longdon was then asked to give up the bowl portion which had been conveyed in 1845 from a Deerhurst farmyard to Longdon church. The request was graciously entertained, and Longdon church received in exchange a new font. The two portions – probably long separated – were then replaced as they are now to be seen in Deerhurst, and the font previously in use there was given to Castle Morton church." (Massé, Tewkesbury and Deerhurst, p.114)

And so it remains today, but more recent expert opinion is that the stem and bowl don't actually belong to each other at all. You can't blame Miss Strickland for her assumption though – the pattern really does match very closely, and they must be connected in some way or other.

Fittingly for a village named after a grove of wild beasts, Deerhurst has its own dragon legend. The legend was first recorded in 1719, but the best description comes from a guidebook by Samuel Rudder in 1799:

"In the parish of Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury, a serpent of a prodigious bigness was a great grievance to all the country, by poisoning the inhabitants, and killing their cattle. The inhabitants petitioned the king and a proclamation was issued out, that whosoever should kill the serpent should enjoy an estate in the parish, which then belonged to the crown. One John Smith, a labourer, engaged in the enterprise. He put a quantity of milk in a place to which the serpent resorted, who gorged the whole, agreeable to expectation, and lay down to sleep in the sun, with his scales ruffled up. Seeing him in that situation, Smith advanced, and striking between the scales with his axe, took off his head."

There are many theories for the serpent/dragon/worm legends that abound all over England. One possibility is an allegorical origin, with the Danish invaders being a good contender for the role of "serpent of a prodigious bigness". The pagan associations with serpent energy (tying in nicely with the spiral-patterned font) are a nice symbolic connection. Whether there ever was any actual physical manifestation of a marauding mythical beast, well, who knows.

There are a few more mythical beasts on the outside of the church in gargoyle formation. These are much later than the Saxon carvings and belong to the medieval period alterations, and they seem (although very weathered) to depict a more conventional kind of mythical beast, probably gryphons. The beasts are not themselves gargoyles; they appear either side of a large human or semi-human head with a startled facial expression (which is fair enough really) holding its gob open. Very curious.

Gargoyle at SW corner

Gargoyle at NW corner

The church is so full of exciting Saxon features that it's easy to overlook a slightly more recent historic treat which Deerhurst is exceptionally rich in. The churchyard is full of old gravestones dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of these are exquisitely beautiful in their carving and typography. I will only include one sample picture but really you could make an article just about these, as they are so diverse and intriguing. They have done well to survive the all-too-frequent flooding from the nearby River Severn, most recently in 2007 when the whole churchyard was submerged.

 Grave of Thomas Cox, who died on the 19th of April 1696. One of many lapidary gems.

The churchyard is a wonderful place in its own right – quiet and secluded as far as humans go but alive with noise and activity from the crows who live in the tall trees on the north side. They are the custodians of the grove of wild beasts and the place positively reverberates with the skraaaaaa of their derisive laughter.

The magic of Deerhurst will be continued in part two ...

Sources:

Massé, H.J.L.J., The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury, with Some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (London, Bell & Sons, 1900).

Gilbert, Edward, A Guide to the Priory Church and Saxon Chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (privately printed, 1956, revised 1977)

Laing, Lloyd and Jennifer, A guide to the Dark Age Remains in Britain (London, Constable, 1979).

Friends of Deerhurst Church

The Deerhurst Dragon: www.twistedtree.org.uk

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Crickley Level, Crippets Tump

Larches are most fitting small red hills
That rise like swollen antheaps likeably
And modest before big things like near Malvern
Or Cotswold's farther early Italian 

Blue arrangement; unassuming as the 

Cowslips, celandines, buglewort and daisies 

That trinket out the green swerves like a child's game 

O never so careless or lavish as here, 

I thought, You beauty! I must rise soon one dawn time 

And ride to see the first beam strike on you 

Of gold or ruddy recognisance over 

Crickley level or Bredon sloping down. 

I must play tunes like Burns, or sing like David, 

A saying out of what the hill leaves unexprest 

The tale or song that lives in it, and is sole, 

A round red thing, green upright things of flame 

It is May, and the conceited cuckoo toots and whoos his name. 

(Ivor Gurney)

Crickley Hill is one of the most dramatic sites on the Cotswold ridge, overlooking the Severn Valley with a view which takes in the tower of Gloucester cathedral and the Malvern Hills beyond. On clear days you can gaze as far as the Black Mountains of Wales. Much of the Cotswold ridge undulates gracefully and is flat and level on top, hosting wide smooth fields of corn and ribbons of ancient coppiced woods, and Crickley Hill blends so seamlessly with its neighbour Shurdington Hill that you can walk from one to the other without noticing. On its other side however it has a steep, spectacular scarp plunging down into a green valley, and this is what made it so attractive as a site of human settlement, going back into the stone age. 

Along the spine of the hill on its western edge is a long grove of very old beech trees, many over 200 years old and exquisitely gnarled, their ancient roots rummaging the mossy lines of tumbled drystone walls and forming natural hollows and stoups which collect rainwater in deep canopied shade. The thick carpet of leafmould creates silence underfoot but all the noise is overhead in the rushing of the wind through the boughs. The beeches grow in dense dark clusters but some of the open parts of the hilltop are also lined with beech trees along some of the steepest slopes, and these were probably planted in previous centuries to help reduce erosion of the crumbly limestone edge. 

Crickley's most obvious feature is its iron age fort whose ramparts dominate the hillscape, but there are more subtle traces of a fortified village and ritual site from much earlier times. On the western edge, overlooking the beautiful valley, a small neolithic shrine was built which originally took the form of a paved circle. It later acquired a small building, which was approached by a fenced path and was found to have had fires lit outside it. After some 400 years it was replaced by a cairn and a small stone circle, paved with cobblestones on the inside with a slab in the centre, which bore traces of burning. The pattern of trampling around the circle shows that it was circumambulated in a clockwise direction. Finally, in the bronze age, the whole shrine was covered with a long low mound resembling a long barrow. The stone circle is still there, but you might be disappointed if you go looking for it. Having been found by archaeologists investigating the long mound, it was decided to re-bury it for its own good. Although the surface remains may be limited, the deep sanctity of this place is not difficult to appreciate. 

The village of Shurdington and the dark mound of Churchdown Hill, seen from Crickley Hill

You don't have to go far to find an actual long barrow either, or a tump as they are called in Gloucestershire. The sweeping slope across the hilltop to Shurdington Hill is crowned by a large neolithic barrow, 189 feet long and 20 feet high, oriented east-west, and now topped by a cluster of coniferous trees. While the trees may have invaded the ancient remains below the ground, they have at least protected it from ploughing, as evidenced by the fate of a round barrow a short distance away in the same field. The round barrow is almost entirely ploughed out and its site can now be located only with a good map and a keen inner sense. 

The Cotswold area is well known for its proliferation of long barrows and they represent some of the oldest architectural structures in Europe. The Crippets long barrow is around 4000 years old. At the eastern end is a semi-circular indentation which could very easily be mistaken for a horned false-entrance of the type seen on other local barrows such as Belas Knap. Unfortunately it's not; it's the scar left behind by 18th century treasure-seekers, who ripped away a large chunk of the barrow some time around the 1770s. Needless to say the results of this clumsy pillaging were not formally recorded, the only contemporary source reporting that a cromlech was found inside containing a single skeleton (subsequently lost) and a metal helmet which was so rusted that it dissolved to dust on contact with the air. Quite how you manage to lose a human skeleton is not entirely clear; perhaps somebody in one of the old farmhouses in the area will get a surprise one day while clearing out the loft. 

The rusted metal helmet does raise an intriguing question though. The people who built the barrow, in the late stone age, were not in possession of iron or the skills to work it. The metal helmet couldn't have belonged to them. So how did it end up interred within their burial chamber? 

The most likely explanation is that it belonged to a later Anglo-Saxon burial. As strange as it may sound, the Anglo-Saxons often re-used neolithic burial mounds for their own high profile interrments. This seems to have been done for the most respectful of reasons, as an attempt to continue a tradition or to connect with the ancestors – a desire to lay their own illustrious dead in an established sacred place alongside those who had occupied and cherished the same land centuries earlier. 

To the eyes of vision, the Crippets barrow might show itself as a centre of inner activity, for the Cotswold faeries are considered to inhabit all hollow hills, natural or man-made. You might, in vision, stand on the crest of Crickley's undulation under a horned moon and look towards Crippets on the horizon, see the pulse of saturated colour in the faery light of the barrow, orange and purple and carmine streaming into the aura of the night sky. If you're very lucky, you might catch the tumbling shimmers of their music on a passing breeze. 

This article first appeared on the Miles Cross blog.

References: Timothy Darvill, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Tempus Publishing, 2004).

Map Ref for Crickley Hill: SO928161 / Landranger OS map 163 

Map Ref for Crippets Long Barrow: SO934173 / Landranger OS map 163

Midsummer murders

BEFORE: Bluebells on Midsummer Hill

Last April I took some photographs of the magnificent bluebell woods on Midsummer Hill, an iron age hillfort in the southern stretch of the Malvern Hills. These magnificent old woods of mixed native trees are one of the best sites I know for the uniquely English phenomenon of "bluebell carpets", as the mature and unspoilt woods provide a perfect habitat for the flowers to thrive. The magical sensation of these glowing undulations of blue has to be experienced to be believed – to be surrounded by an ocean of azure (and occasionally white) wild blossoms with the spring sun rippling through the new leaves was one of the most moving things I experienced in 2011. Little did I realise at the time that it would be the last time the bluebells would flower in the Midsummer woods.

AFTER: Is this really how you "conserve" a Scheduled Ancient Monument? Tyre-track damage all over the 2,400-year-old ramparts. (Photo by Creda's Hill)

Why anybody would condone such an act of vandalism is difficult to fathom, but there are of course reasons why this devastation is considered appropriate, even "necessary". Midsummer Hill is in the care of the Malvern Hills Conservators, a publicly funded body whose job is to conserve the Malvern Hills (yes, there's a clue in the name). Inevitably there are conflicts of interest in their work. Midsummer Hill is a scheduled ancient monument, the entire top of the hill being occupied by a large iron age hillfort, and it's important that the archaeological integrity of the site be maintained. Parts of the ancient ramparts are wooded to varying degrees, and there are concerns that tree roots may be damaging or disturbing the ground beneath the earthworks. The site is also a designated SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) and so consideration has to be given to the rare birds, butterflies and wildflowers which thrive in the very special Malvern habitat. The Conservators have explained that the work to clear "scrub" from the site has been approved in consultation with various respected bodies such as the National Trust and English Heritage and is considered necessary.

Another reason they want to do this work is to improve visibility of the hillfort and increase the amount of open grassland for the public to enjoy. And the clearance is supposedly limited to scrub. "The most valuable trees for wildlife including beech, hawthorns and field maples are being left."

Well something has gone horribly wrong. Mature trees, including the distinctive twisty "faery" hawthorns and large ash trees of more than three feet diameter have been felled. The bluebell woods have been slashed and burned. The hillside is pocked with scorched patches. The ancient ramparts, in the interests of being protected from "tree-root damage", have been rutted and churned up with tyre-tracks from the heavy equipment used by the contractors.

April 2011

February 2012
(photo by Creda's Hill)

It's hard to know exactly what is happening here. The felling work has been contracted to a commercial firm, who are making a godawful mess. Whether they are doing so within the terms of their contract or whether they are taking shameful liberties is not clear. Either way, the responsibility lies with the Malvern Hills Conservators to ensure that the work is being carried out properly and sensitively.

There also appears to be a discrepancy between what was authorised and what is actually happening. The damage already covers an area substantially beyond the planned limits.

Map of Midsummer Hillfort. The areas outlined in blue show the areas of proposed "scrub clearance". The area marked in orange shows the current extent of the damage. (Map from the Save the Malvern Hills from the 'Conservators' campaign page.)

Anyone who has visited Midsummer Hill will be in no doubt that it's a very special place. The size of the hillfort is enormous, and it's a split-level job, so large you can't really see it all in one go (with or without the trees). The upper part sits on the crest of the Malvern ridge where its rocky backbone pokes through the thin, grassless soil, and the wind blasts unstoppably. If you can manage to stand up in it you can get a spectacular panoramic view across the fields of Worcestershire and the green undulations of Herefordshire, as well as along the rippling spine of the Malverns. The lower section of the hillfort, a short way down the wooded slopes, is a beautiful greensward burgeoning with tiny flowers. It features a curious and unidentified "pillow mound", which looks like a long barrow but probably isn't. The fort in its heyday (about 390 BC) supported a very large community, who lived in wattle and daub houses and had a very self-contained village within the revetted double-ramparts. A spring which still flows through the bluebell woods provided them with a plentiful supply of water.

The lower section of the hillfort. To the right of the walking couple is the mysterious pillow mound.

Today the fort is an important nature reserve where wildflowers, birds and rare butterflies make every walk here an absolute delight at any time of the year.

Native British bluebells, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, growing within the ramparts of Midsummer Hill.

So much for the archaeological and wildlife treasures. Midsummer Hill is also a place where the veil is thin and resonant with ancient spirits. No pagan soul could fail to be enthralled by the dance of Oak and Ash and Thorn through the tappetting woods, and those who are attuned to Faery will find the gates here are wide open.

No doubt within a season or two the damaged land will be green once again and wildflowers (albeit not bluebells) will spring up on the ramparts, providing food plants for butterflies and joy for passing humans. But none of that excuses the horrible devastation of such a precious and dearly loved woodland or the insensitive and clumsy way the work has been carried out. For those of us who consider Midsummer Hill to be a special and sacred place, the loss of the magical woods is an irreparable scar.

Please help local people and other friends of the Malverns to fight back against these ravages, even if only by helping to share and support their Facebook page. It's not too late to stop other parts of the hill from being desecrated.

My thanks to Creda's Hill for making their photographs of the devastation available on a Creative Commons licence.

Old Straight Tracks: Bull's Cross

Bull's Cross is supposed to be a crossroads, but it's K-shaped. It took me a while to work out why, until I looked at it on old maps.

The bendy and undulating road which passes through Bull's Cross hardly fits the description of an old straight track but actually it's probably very ancient indeed, at least in parts. Known to its friends as the B4070, the road runs along the ridge of the Cotswolds between the gloriously named Birdlip and the village of Slad, which is best known for its association with the writer of a certain famous 1950s novel. The road is thought to have been part of an old trade route for the transportation of salt from Droitwich (a distinction it shares with the Wyche Cutting below) and may have already been in use before that, given the number of Iron Age (and earlier) settlements in the area. It crosses over another very old road coming up from Sheepscombe. The priorities of the roads have been switched around over time, so instead of the two tracks crossing over in an X-shape, the parts that pass along the ridgeway have merged to become one continuous road, while the bits which dip steeply into the valley have become side-roads – and remain tiny single-track lanes. Hence the junction being more K-shaped.

Local tradition has it that Bull's Cross is haunted by a place-memory manifestation of a stagecoach following a horrific stagecoach accident on the spot at some unspecified time in the past. Whether the accident can be verified as a historical event I couldn't say, but given the age of the crossroads and its perilous position on the crest of a steep slope, it would be more remarkable if there hadn't been fatal accidents there over the centuries. Even these days, it can be an unpleasant experience driving a car up the single-track lanes in wet or snowy weather and having to give way when you get to the top. What can be more readily verified is that Bull's Cross was formerly the site of a gibbet. Perhaps that's why the atmosphere around the junction is a bit murky.

You can't complain about the view though. On one side is the sumptuously undulating Cotswold ridge, and on the other is the gorgeous Painswick Valley, its slopes positively popping with springs and wells. Painswick itself, a snuggled collection of stone-built honey-coloured historic delight, is enough to make any true-born Englishperson come over all misty eyed.

View across the fields to the town of Painswick from Bull's Cross

Like every self-respecting ancient junction, Bull's Cross has a sturdy old marker stone at the wayside. This delicately shaped boulder is quite a nice example of a rural Gloucestershire milestone, although it isn't very helpful in telling you how far away anything is, because it's blank. It looks like it had a square panel screwed to the front at one time, but somebody's nicked it.

The front of the stone (facing the road) is flat, but the back is gently rounded, and shows off the carving work that went into producing its curious shape – which is reminiscent of an oak-leaf or a bulbous mother-goddess or a fossilised frog, depending how weird your imagination is. The stepped edges could have been made for some more practical purpose though; perhaps for weary travellers to rest their backsides against, or as mounting steps for horsemen. Fans of old straight tracks, armed with a ruler and Ordnance Survey map, might want to look at the alignment of this stone with the churches of Painswick and Brookthorpe. Or, going the other way, through the crest of Down Hill to the Giant's Stone burial chamber (rems of) and Westwood Farm long barrow.