This piece was written in response to a Therapeutic Writing exercise to find stepping stones or moments in your life which have informed your lifepath …..I thought I would like to share it as it is a while since I have written on this blog and it shows where my love of landscape and sites came from.
It was a time when I
was feeling trapped in further education having returned to teaching
and getting a management job which was very stressful; it was the
summer holidays and I realised I would be working; preparing
timetables, interviewing students, and lesson planning for classes I
had not even met yet made to complete a year’s preparation in
advance which felt ridiculous. I was feeling very trapped as the job
wasn’t what I had thought it would be and I decided to get away on
my own for a holiday to the Outer Hebrides. I had been longing to
return to Scotland having visited Mull and Iona and travelled on the
West Coast railway from Glasgow to Fort William and Oban.
The calling
to do another pilgrimage to The Outer Hebrides a skinny narrow finger
of four islands the joints between them being small waterways one
crossed by passenger ferry was pressing and in particular the idea of
visiting and standing within the stone circle west of Stornoway on
the Isle of Lewis called Callanish. I was fascinated by the ancient
stone circles, archaeological sites and their links to the heavens
and the wheel of the year, their position on lines of energy leys and
their alignment to other sites in the landscape as well as their
being joined by ley lines across the country. Lewis was one of the
farthest places from West Cornwall I could have chosen to visit apart
from Orkney and Shetland which I still reserve for another trip.
I
had begun this fascination as a child following my dad to digs of hut
circles collecting flint arrowheads, scapers and bronze age and
neolithic pottery as well as spindle whorls and clay pipes in our
back garden. Dad had an instinct as deep as the ancients rooted in
his veins and could dream a site which next day he would find
accidentally by jumping a granite wall into a farmer’s field to
retrieve a Roman coin from the reign of Hadrian or being called to
walk up to our local Carn Brea after his day job as an ambulance
driver whereupon he found three flint arrowheads on a granite boulder
just there not hidden as his dream had foretold. This early influence
of my father hit me in my late twenties and thirties when I was
living in West Penwith at Madron with its own Mother Church and
ancient holy well complete with healing spring and clouties upon the
surrounding blackthorn trees. And thence to the ancient sites of West
Penwith and on to, Bodmin moor, Dartmoor, Somerset and Glastonbury,
Avebury, Stonehenge in Wiltshire and Maiden castle and sites
associated with the Goddess Brigid or Bride in Dorset, on to The
Lakes and Peak District with Arbour Lough and Robin Hoods stride as
well as its white and dark peaks and then to Wales and the border
country castles and dissolved abbeys. History had been my love at A
level and during my studies of Literature at university I had always
maintained a lively curiosity for the times in which an author wrote
as well as being taught in the FR Levis tradition which looks at
literature in its context and at the growth of writing from Greek
theatre to the present day. I had also started reading lots of
literature about stones my favourite being Julian Cope aka Teardrop
Explodes with his weighty book of pilgrimage to sites ‘The Modern
Antiquarian’. I followed in his footsteps as he had photographed
and written about every site in the UK and also Europe, including
poetry and personal musings over a decade or more. His quest inspired
my own, especially as I had always enjoyed his music in the early
80’s ‘Reward’ and ‘Treason’ being two of my favourites as a
teenager. Other inspirations were Hamish Miller’s dowsing of ley
lines throughout the UK in his book ‘The Sun and the Serpent’,
Craig Wetherell’s ‘Bolerian’ and ‘Cornovia’ where he
catalogues all the ancient and more modern sites in Cornwall from
cliff castles and ancient settlements to church crosses, and also
Cheryl Straffon’s ‘Pagan Cornwall Land of the Goddess’ where she
shows the influence of the land as female, fecund, fertile and
forever changing from maiden to mother to crone, as well as the
influence of early female deities in the shaping of the landscape and
its sites. Monica Sjoo’s art compliments this and her book ‘The
Great Cosmic Mother’ was a revelation to me in terms of her showing
the beginnings of goddess culture in Africa and thence to Europe and
beyond, showing the links of the sites to the cycles of birth,
fertility and death which parallel the three stages of womanhood from
maiden to mother to crone.
I had also travelled to Malta to stay on
Gozo and see for myself the ancient goddess temples that people these
islands with their link as a trading and resting place between
mainland Africa and Europe. I had also visited numerous sites in
Greece from the Acropolis in Athens to Olympia, Mycenae and the
wonderful healing site and theatre at Epidaurus, as well as Crete
with its Minotaur and ancient Knossos to Skopelos, Skiathos, Corfu
and also Hydra. Then Turkey with the wonderful ancient city ruins of
Ephesus. Yes, I certainly had a fascination for stones and ruins
which began in the simple act of digging in my own back garden with a
little metal child’s red trowel with a wooden handle and a plastic
slide box filled with cotton wool to store my stone found treasures.
Callanish predated Stonehenge by 500 years and aligns with the cycles of the sun and moon, particularly
at the winter and midsummer solstice. The stones resemble grey
striated fingers narrower and much more elegant and tall compared to
our squat granite Cornish circles.. here was what seemed a temple of
great significance positioned as it was on peat bog to the Northwest
of Scotland and yet near to Norway and the Arctic circle far far
north in a magical cold climate and landscape of wide skies and stark
hills. They are made of Lewisan gneiss a striated grey and white
stone and form a cruciform with an avenue of stones leading toward
it. They resemble tall bards overseeing the land, guardians of loch
and moor; here in this spacious landscape of ever changing wild skies
with running clouds and waving seas there is a dramatic interface of
light and shadow. At the time I was single, and yearning for space
meaning and time to be free and wild, to be rooted and in touch with
the earth and the goddess of the land and also to try a small
adventure independent and able to map my own route and travel at my
own pace without the distraction of having to take on the
responsibility of someone else’s needs and agenda. I think all too
often when single, I felt I needed a companion to somehow justify my
own being rather than being able to travel independently and have
faith in my self and my own instincts. Independence is a luxury which
I have fostered since these early forays and now have the yearning to
follow again.
I remember booking into a stone croft hostel and having
it all to myself for three days in the North of the island of Lewis,
hiring a bike and peddling out for a Sunday visit to a black house
only to discover that the locals were all Presbyterian and that it
was a sin to drink and do anything really, but go to church on a
Sunday. It was a strange dark land of abandoned crofts, houses and
black houses from the clearances and just pure poverty being so far
away from civilization; inland lochs buzzing with midges and peat bog
cut for turfs for fuel. The local road signs were often in Gaelic as
this was the main language. There were four main islands Lewis,
Harris, North and South Uist and Barra to the far south with its
sandy landing strip for aeroplanes and its castle in the centre of
Castle Bay, as well as its Kirk and Indian restaurant on the quayside
which was a welcome sign of diversity and some alternative food. The
Machair was everywhere; fertile plains and dunes lined the coast and
kept the ocean at bay adorned in purple and yellow flowers, as well as
the rare purple Scottish orchid; it is a rich source of wildlife as
well as being grazed by wandering herds of highland cattle and sheep
who also pastured on the white sand beaches leaving their dung behind
them. I remember the wide, empty, white curving shorelines and the
sense of beauty; a wild, magical beauty of isolation and primitive
longing. I felt a sense of deep belonging here, even to the extent
where I looked keenly in estate agent’s windows for properties to
let for a year and maybe a job as a teacher there. Remote, far out, isolated and ancient full of their own singing soul; a Gaelic tongue
still spoken, sung and promoted in the crafts of the islanders who
had led a harsh close knitted life suspicious of incomers still.
Barra and Uist were fiercely Catholic compared to the Presbyterian
Northern Islands and were not touched by the Reformation in the rest
of the country. Compton Mackenzie set ‘Whisky Galore’ here, I
remember visiting his grave in a lonely grey churchyard on Barra and
also trekking in the hills and stumbling across cottages abandoned in
the clearances. I felt brave and miles away listening to the waves on
the shore and talking to my family on the phone; there was a signal near the rocks where I walked in the evening with
only the call of birds and hoarse cries of seals for company. I made
my way by bus through the islands, catching ferries between and rail
and aeroplane to and from. I was alone, but enjoying it, not feeling
lonely and meeting the odd person and chatting as I travelled,
including a nice young American couple in the hostel in Barra who I
walked out with on a Sunday and shared a night out at the pub along
with a Ceilidh eve with the locals.
I can see that I craved soulfulness and
meaning and that the space and ancient connection of the Outer
Hebrides was exactly what I needed. I needed that sense of homecoming, rootedness,
freedom, wildness and the adventure was my own; not timetabled or
scheduled. I could roam and follow my own rhythm and motion which was
really important as well as getting healthy and not needing a car or
a daily routine. I was also fulfilling a dream of going to a place I
had often visualised. I can see here just how much I gained from the
stepping stone and that I stepped from one time frame into something
completely different a natural 'me' time and an ancient time, where the
clock was the change of the sun, moon, skies and tides and I was outdoors, not trapped behind four walls. I am also aware that this is how I feel now, happy
at home but longing to escape the imposed time schedule of my job so I need to consider my next step, visualise an
adventure and a quest for meaning and motion once more to find growth
and more about myself because this trip taught me I can be
independent, there are other worlds where I feel at home and other
places to be alive and free. I need the outdoors, open space, nature,
travel, history, learning and to discover new vistas and follow my
interests and passions as here is where the true creative flow lies.
