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.

Fabula

Rooted, the stolid bulb nestles in the causeless
As obsidian shadows dance across the damask
Where all is rain in the furthest pinions of the sky
As a circular stone collects silver ion whispers

She is crepuscular, waif-shrouds among forest fingers
A dancer’s gate that dare not crack the venal clay
Sends alabaster petals along the last simoom
That breathes incarnadine the volleys of love

Woven in lights to the histones in my bones
Where blizzards of desire spend their downy fury
The labyrinthine foci of enveloping chambers
Blasts a single flower upon the green

Daniel Staniforth (from his poetry collection Weaver in the Sluices, Skylight Press 2010).

Wyche Cutting

Topical weathervane on the bus shelter at the Wyche Cutting, Malvern.

The Wyche is a notch or cleft on the crown of the Malvern Hills, straddling the border between Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It can be seen from miles away as a cleft in the long line of undulations and it marks an important crossing point. It's one of only two places where you can drive over the top of the Malverns rather than having to go all the way round the perimeter, although it is steep and bendy and something of a white knuckle ride in an ancient 1.0 litre VW Polo.

The pass over the hills as it appears today owes a fair bit to the Victorian road-improvers, and some of the tumps and bumps are the remains of spoil heaps from their digging endeavours. But the Wyche pass is ancient – known to have been in use in prehistoric times and to have formed part of a neolithic trade route, used amongst other things for the transportation of salt from Droitwich to South Wales. A small village occupies the high ground on either side of the hill, and a village green bounded by the intriguingly named Fossil Bank.

A special feature of the Malvern hills is the proliferation of roadside springs, spouts and wells – some drinkable, some dry – some sacred, some rancid. The Wyche Cutting has several, bringing together the symbolism of a cleft in the hills with a water-bearing cleft in the earth. They come in a variety of forms but are often at their most interesting on 1st May, when they are "dressed" with flowers and flags as part of a revival tradition.

The Wyche Spring (below) bears the distinction, apparently, of being the highest well on the Malvern ridge – a moot point really, as the flow has been shut off for some twenty years, possibly amid concerns of pollution. The spout is totally dry and in this Beltane well-dressing a twist of blue cellophane has been used to recreate the tumbling waters. The spring that feeds (or used to feed) this roadside water spout rises beside a cottage at the edge of the Wyche Cutting and reaches it through a pipe under the road. Unlike most of the springs and wells on the Malverns, which consist of rainwater squeezed through geological faults, the Wyche Spring is from a true underground watercourse, an Archaean spring.

Here be the Willow Spring (below), only a few yards down the road on the other side, with its May Day dressing. The well doesn't look very much but it's one of the genuinely ancient Malvern springs. The water originally poured straight out of a cleft in the rock beside a willow tree, a proper sacred spring of the kind that opens into the underworld, for those that know how to look. The water was once fast-flowing, so much so that it was something of a hazard in winter, when the gushing abundance flowed over the road and froze into a sheet of solid ice – which is no joke on this stretch of road with its steep slope. An engraving of 1855 shows a very rustic scene with a willow tree growing out over the road at an angle and the waters pouring from the top of a boulder at the roadside. Although still rural, the scene is quite different today. For one thing, the flow is reduced to a piddly little dribble, enough to cultivate a small crop of moss but not much use for anything else.

This is because the spring was damaged during WW2 by a bomb which landed close to it, and has not flowed properly since. Malvern springs are extremely sensitive to disturbance and it's not unusual for them to stop flowing properly if the ground around them is interfered with. The waters pass through layers of impervious pre-Cambrian rock whose alignments are very precise. The springs consist of rainwater which soaks into the hills and is filtered through minutely fine fissures in the rock, so tightly pressed together that even minerals and bacteria are unable to pass through the gaps, resulting in a water which is incredibly pure and essentially has nothing in it. It's a very delicate balance and if the rocks take a thumping the fissures can become so tight the waters can't get through them any more.

The Willow Spring was reconstructed in 1946 following the bomb damage, and set into a little stone enclosure. Its pootling trickle falls into a stone basin and into the earth through a simple soakaway under the ground. Because of this lack of proper drainage, it was decided during recent restoration not to undertake further work to improve the flow of the spring, for fear of causing icy overflow on the winter road. And so a dribble it remains. The willow tree is gone. So is the magic. Whether it's because of the bomb damage or whether it's just me, I can't sense any of the inner dynamics I would normally expect to find at a sacred well of such provenance.

Down below the road on the steep slope of the hillside is a place where the real magic flows. You won't find it named or signposted, but you might find it if you follow the sound of chuckling water.

Nature's well-dressing: Beltane flowers deck an abandoned spring.

A small stream emerges from a mossy spout in the side of the hill and splashes into the pebble-gulley it's traced out for itself. The spout is most likely the outflow from the abandoned spring which formerly served the Royal Malvern Well Spa, long vanished, crumbled under ivy, its presence deleted. The flow from this spring is much greater than that of the two roadside wells round the corner, but its opening is hidden. It lies to the side of a footpath below the road and in its lushness it can only be found by listening to the tumbling of its water through the stones and weeds. Nobody "dresses" this spring at Beltane, but it dresses itself in the colours of the wild weeds and garden escapes. A radiant sky-blue trickles down its far side from a clump of forget-me-nots, a domestic cultivar gone feral and rejoicing in the marshy soil, fronded with fern and eyes of herb robert, green nettles and dusky watermint, tangles of buttercups and golden saxifrage. In the wooded shade of the footpath another garden escape, tissue-fine Iceland poppies, catch the shafts of the sun in translucent crêpe, a flaming orange.

As the spring makes its way down the hill so the footpath follows in parallel, down a dappled corridor to a wooden stile where the bluebell woods meet an open green, giving way to a break in the trees where blue takes over. In the wood shade it's the royal earth blue, the saturated colour of pendular bells, and in the sunlit grass it's an astral faery light, radiant blue on a green wave.

And so the path opens out into a meadow, where a solitary oak tree roots into the ancestral pitch and ancient memories flame the grass.

 The Wyche oak, hub of the meadow.

Sources:
Aquae Malvernensis: The Springs and Fountains of the Malvern Hills by Cora Weaver and Bruce Osborne (private publication, 1994)
The website of the Malvern Spa Association

The Braintree sarcens

Sarcen stones in Essex? Well they're not common, but they do exist. Sarcens are boulders of very hard sandstone which originally formed in a rocky crust, broken up and redistributed by the last ice age. A modest deposit of sarcens have ended up in the gravel layer underneath the Essex clay, sometimes found during gravel extraction or exposed in the beds of rivers which run sufficiently deep, but they aren't very abundant. They were much appreciated by our ancestors, as their durability made them ideal for foundations, wayside markers and protective barriers at roadsides. They were also often taken for ceremonial use, the classic examples being the very large sarcen stones at Avebury and other sacred sites around Wiltshire. In Essex they are much less common, the soil being mostly clay and having no natural local stone other than the ever-abundant small flints. Consequently there are no significant megalithic sites in Essex at all.

So I'm very curious about the presence of a sarcen embedded against the wall of St Michael's church in Braintree. I first noticed it around 1984 and it's been intriguing me ever since.

St Michael's dates in part to the 12th century, although much of it was rebuilt from 1349 onwards, and ravaged in the 1860s by Victorian "restoration" zealots. One of the surviving 12th century components is the tower (above), which is largely constructed of brick, flint pebbles and bits of puddingstone and recycled Roman brick. There's quite a lot of Roman debris in the older parts of the church, which was probably fairly abundant at the time in readily available waste material, whilst the parts of the church which were added in later centuries are built from just flint and brick. There are some limestone blocks serving as quoins and window edges, but it has been used very sparingly. Many, if not most, old churches in Essex are built from similar flint, brick and rubble mixtures in the absence of any local stone.

It's therefore quite interesting that there is a sarcen, or what appears to be a sarcen, wedged against the western end of the church just below the tower. It's hard to tell how big it is because it's embedded in the ground and has been tarmacked all around. Recently some gravel boards have gone up around it which make it look slightly smaller than it is. But roughly speaking, the visible part of it is about two feet wide and the top is fairly flat, though whether from deliberate shaping or natural weathering I'm not sure. It's not a huge stone and it's not very exciting looking, but it's pretty unusual as far as North Essex is concerned.

I've already mentioned that sarcen stones were used in times past for foundations of buildings, so that might account for its presence here. But this one is not part of the church's foundations – it actually sits right next to the foundations without being a part of them, which seems a bit odd. It looks more as if the church has been built around it. If that's the case then it must have been there for at least 850 years.

Which leads on to the question of what was on the site of St Michael's prior to the church being built there. According to Rodwell et al (1977) it is thought to have been the nucleus of an earlier settlement and there is a fair possibility that there was a Roman cemetery on the site. Many Roman fragments have been found in the churchyard, some of which are now in Colchester museum, and a rare Roman silver coin was found in the 1830s. Iron Age relics have been found nearby too. So was the stone placed there as part of the Roman activity or does it go back even further to an Iron Age settlement? I don't know if there's any evidence to suggest a previous ceremonial use for the site, but looking on the more speculative side, it may not be a coincidence that the church is built on the crest of a mound and the dedication to St Michael the Archangel is often associated with sacred sites of pre-Christian provenance. The fiery guardian archangel was thought to be a protective influence against any lingering pagan resonance on the site (although it didn't work very well on Glastonbury Tor). My own psychic radar finds the church to be flat as a pancake spiritually, so maybe Michael has been a bit over-zealous with the cosmic Domestos.

None of this would excite a huge amount of curiosity, except that I don't think this is the only sarcen stone in Braintree. There are, or were, at least a couple of others that I know of.

Other stuff in the churchyard - When I was growing up in Braintree in the 1970s there was a small, upright stone in the south-east part of the churchyard, by the junction of two pathways. It was only a foot or two tall and the top was hollowed out into something resembling a stoup, which was usually filled with rainwater. It disappeared some time in the early 1980s, though it's possible it may have been taken into the church for safekeeping, as I understand they do have a few stone relics in there which include one described as a stoup.

Sandpit Lane/George Yard sarcen - I vividly remember a sarcen stone very, very similar to the St Michael's one, embedded at the roadside in George Yard. The original George Yard was a narrow and ancient lane leading off the east side of Sandpit Lane. It had no pavement on its north side and there was a slight kink in the road as it narrowed towards the far end. The cause of this kink was a large flat sarcen boulder, almost identical in size and shape to the one at St Michael's, sitting at the edge of the road and sticking out into it. Clearly the course of the road had been adjusted to fit, and even the double yellow lines did a slalom around it.

It's not unusual to find sarcen stones in roadside positions like this; in fact it's one of the most common uses for them. It was no doubt placed there to protect the masonry of whatever stood there in former times (I don't think there were any old buildings there during my lifetime, but the 1876 map shows what was probably the perimeter wall of a Methodist chapel ground) to prevent any damage from the wheels of passing carts and carriages. The question in my mind though is whether a fresh sarcen was brought in for this purpose or whether it was an older stone "recycled" from an existing Braintree site, perhaps in the vicinity of St Michael's. Sadly it's not possible to compare the stones any more because the entire lane, sarcen and all, were swept away and destroyed in the George Yard shopping precinct development of the 1980s. Even the original line of the lane (and position of the stone) is impossible to discern any more in this depressingly bland and homogenised retail blight.

Boar's Head sarcen? - In 1985 I had a friend who worked as a general labourer for Braintree District Council. One day he told me that he and a couple of colleagues had been brought in to do some work on a disused well in the car park of the Boar's Head pub in the High Street. The Boar's Head is a very old pub – parts of it date back to the 15th century – just across the road from St Michael's church. Down at the very bottom of this dried out well was a sarcen stone, which appeared at some time to have been thrown down there. I never got a chance to see this stone for myself or even verify its existence, but my friend reckoned it was very similar to the one in the churchyard. Again, one assumes that it had been moved from its original site, wherever that may have been.

Are there other Braintree sarcens? I've no idea. The rate of redevelopment in Braintree is so fast that even during my own lifetime some have been lost ... so there may well have been others which were lost in earlier years, or which still survive in places I haven't seen. I don't have any theory as to what they might have been used for if there were more of them. A stone circle is unlikely, but some other pre-Christian ritual setting is possible. Perhaps they were monuments in the Roman cemetery. Or markers along the Roman road.

As uncommon as sarcen stones or other prehistoric stone monuments are in Essex, there is some similarity here with a scattered group of sarcens in the churchyard at Alphamstone, a village a few miles to the north. There is common ground in that the Alphamstone sarcens appear to pre-date the church, which looks to be built around them, and some have been moved from their original sites, perhaps to use for other purposes.