This invisible world I choose to live in
I went to see a stone circle on Sunday.
Cue pics.
This is Arbor Low, on the road from Ashbourne to Buxton, on the southern edge of the Peak District. It is neolithic, worked using the most primitive of tools (shovels made from animal shoulderblades, and the like). There is a Bronze Age mound built over one corner of it.
(Bonus points for anyone who guess that I was rather pleased at getting my shadow to fall right between the central stones.)
Who knows how the people who built this thought of the world? We'll never know. Never truly be able to imagine what it felt like to be one of them. But I walked through the entranceway and up to the central stones and tried to anyway.
Four and a half thousand years ago.
Wow.
But it's the same hillside. I stood where they stood. I took photos of the stones they quarried and carried. Those are their stones, not mine, but I can walk around them, in a world they could never have envisaged.
Four stones stacked atop one another will outlast all your dreams... or words to that effect. My book is on extended leave in Manchester and Google has failed me.
posted by skittledog @ 11:22 pm
11 comments
11 Comments:
Perhaps they were thinking of Permancy.
Rian should have like to live them. All things were Miraculous.
*eyes Rian askance*
Have you been sniffing the Flagstone Fresh again?
Miraculous? I don't know. I suspect more wet and cold and muddy and...scary. Ignorance can be beautiful, but not when you rely for your life on things you cannot understand or predict.
No, I'm not sure I would like to have lived then. I would love to be able to talk to one of them though.
So that's what happened to the Flagstone Fresh!
Rian's obviously putting a dash of it in her chai.
Wet, cold, muddy. And no chocolate. Or coffee. Or, indeed, Flagstone Fresh to keep the stones looking bright and shiny and free of bloodstains.
Skits ... i'm sad cos when i click on your littly pix, i don't get linked to bigger pix.
i would have loved to see bigger pix too.
Sigh.
I'm too fond of flushing toilets to want to live in that age.
I really want to go on a hiking holiday up in the lakes now.
It's the tufty grass. Tufty wild grass is something I miss.
Anyway Myo...getting blogger to load full-size pics is not something I have managed as yet. But because you sounded so woebegone...
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y63/skittledog/DSCF0091.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y63/skittledog/DSCF0090.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y63/skittledog/DSCF0093.jpg
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
*deletes comment with typos galore and tries again*
Thanks skits.
You have begonned my woe.
It's odd that you can't link to full size pix ... it just happens automatically for me.
Rian has been using FF to deice the cats.
Things would have been frightening, yes, but AH the mysteries. And the Possible Futures.
Just because things aren't nice doesn't mean they're not miraculous. Or words to that effect. I can't be bothered going to check. Isn't everything always miraculous?
Sometimes I wish this place was older. I'll have to go to Europe one day, just so I can get that feeling. But you can go anywhere, and think of all the people who've stood in that spot before you, and wonder who they were and what they were thinking, and what happened to them. That sense of history. It always makes me feel a bit lightheaded.
I love the well-worn step that students have trodden on for 500 years as they enter my former college. There are older steps in Cambridge I guess but this I trod upon every day and felt the curve of it against the sole of my shoe.
Our chapel is incidentally the oldest chapel in the "city" so I guess the step that leads into that, also worn down, is more meaningful but of course I only entered the chapel a handful of times.
Post a Comment
<< Home