Landscape is an extraordinary and glorious thing to explore and the UK provides plenty of scope. We’ve been in Wiltshire again as the weather has warmed gloriously into summer for a few days. We enjoyed some traditional festival fun at the Green Man festival in Bradford upon Avon which must be one of the largest gatherings of Morris Men (and Women) we have ever seen. But it is good to know that there are people in England connecting with a cultural past and bringing it into the future creatively, and one not overseen by our capitalist and Christian religiously dominated past. There were lots of craft stalls and some beautifully designed and crafted “pagan” items on display and plenty of crystal and crystal jewellery to reflect our attachment and fascination with rocks. although. The music thankfully folk not ubiquitous rock music for a change. For us rock music is something entirely different! It was also good to see other peoples fascination with history and pre-history, whilst letting go of reductive scientific process, to give free reign to good home grown and a mainly voluntary fun event devoid of corporate commercialism.
The Green Man Festival visit was not planned just one of life’s delights that comes your way as a nice surprise. A return visit to Avebury was, however, planned. It has been so interesting and important to visit different stone circles. Originally we had visited Avebury before we started on our landscape work, and definitely before the stone circle work captured our artwork imaginations. The site is a very strange mix of the visible, and largest stone circle, in the UK, and its huge earthworks henge. The roads and small village segment the site and we felt a strange discord between the two. The modern does give rise to a very disjointed experience of the Neolithic past. It seemed to sap our energy a bit and we decided not to go back to Silbury Hill or go on to the West Kennet Barrow this time. But the joy of this site compared to Stonehenge is that you wander freely, in both walking around the stones and henge to get up close and personal, and also ticket free! Getting in early on a Sunday morning avoids the bulk of visitors and we got to connect with what we needed easily and unhindered. We were struck by several things.
The huge hollowed out trenches of the henge are so striking. We sat on the top of the bank looking down contemplating it in the sun. All too often henges have been softened over time as erosion lowers the banks and fills the troughs, but this doesn’t seem to be the case at Avebury. This human-made landscape is every bit as impressive as the stones, and again you cannot help but think why would people spend so much time and effort digging out the chalk rock, probably with antler picks, to create these huge circles, large chunks of which that remain. For sure they may have found some layers of flint, but the bog standard flint used for Neolithic tools was easily found around across the UK, certainly found in quite a few places, or so we believe. These trenches were not purposed for mining that was quite clear. At the Grimes Graves site in East Anglia, flint was mined in deep pits and tunnels, and there they didn’t build a henge. So more wonderful mystery that drives our question “Why do people go to so much effort to build something which seems to have no obvious purpose, like defence, or shelter, self aggrandisement, as per pyramids, or obvious religious worshipping reasons?” The other questions are: “How does the necessary collaboration come about? And what kind of culture provides the base to work together without obvious self advantage?” Unlike slaves or even paid staff building self aggrandisement tombs in Egypt.
The rocks themselves at Avebury are local like the Sarson stones at Stonehenge, the bigger ones there. There was no obvious energy at a distance with the stones, like the outcrops of Bluestone Dolerite in the Preseli Hills, but when you touched them there was definitely a relaxing energy coming from them. As we walked around the site, we found we became more relaxed and even sleepy, almost feeling quite stoned. This was similar at Stonehenge, where you can only enjoy the stones at a distance, and you find as you remain at the site that a stoned energy seems to build. At Preseli, the energy was much stronger and felt like it opened up a more spiritual feeling inside much more quickly.
As with all these stone circles when it come to feelings of energy, or emotional shifts in response to being in the place, you have to wonder if that with the circle alignment, which of course is usually incomplete on these prehistoric sites, rock energy was somehow enhanced very significantly by bringing the stones into a circle.
We know that some of the sound research done on the Stonehenge complete structure in model form does bring sound resonance and we are working on our installation work this year to see what might come out of that line of investigation. At Avebury some sound exploration has been done in relation to the West Kennet Barrow using bull roarers. We are after the Avebury visit now bringing the henge aspect into that installation work to see what that brings in our sound art too. So we come away inspired and thinking about more things to make work.
