Photo of the comedian Norman Maclean taken from The Urban Clansman, the blog of the Galgael Trust

From the Guardian -

Its freshly oiled pine hull is as fragrant as a wet winter woodland. Modelled on a thousand-year-old prototype, this hulking birlinn – a Gaelic longboat – will soon be ready to sail out along the Clyde and up the west coast in homage to the time when water was Scotland’s main thoroughfare. It is taking form in an old iron foundry in Glasgow’s Govan, home to a uniquely imaginative community project called the GalGael Trust.

Here, local volunteers teach carpentry, saw-milling and metalwork, as well as boat-building and sailing – the skills so valued in the once thriving shipyards that secured for this area its reputation as the workshop of the empire. It was the inexorable decline in demand for such skills that gifted Govan the reality it contends with today: paralysing levels of unemployment, chronic alcohol and drug addiction, and habitual violence on the streets. The fractured life stories of the men who come here to learn bear witness to all this.

The GalGael philosophy addresses what many an academic study has theorised: that deprivation has psychic as well as economic consequences; that social exclusion is ameliorated as much by a sense of place and heritage as it is by targeted benefits and instrumental interventions; and that hope flourishes in the most unlikely soil. Crucially, given Govan’s history, it recognises that the future is informed by the past.

Perched on a high-backed chair as expertly rendered as anything you’d find in Heal’s, Jinksy tells of 10 lost years sitting in the house, “becoming a vegetable”, after he was laid off as a council roadsweeper. Then a pal told him about the GalGael. “I’d lost trust in people, but there’s a family feeling here. I’ve always been an outside person and this brings you back to the land. It gives you an idea of place.” Over the years, the GalGael has helped hundreds like him to regain confidence in their working abilities, relationships and community.

Gehan, who set up the trust in the mid-90s with her late partner, explains how the act of building and sailing a boat in the same way that one’s ancestors did offers an immediate connectedness that is different from academically acquired history. The fact is that many city-dwelling Scots are only three or four generations removed from rural living, and connection to the land looms large in the national psyche. Many descendants of the half-million Highlanders driven off their crofts to make way for sheep-farming now live in poverty in Glasgow. While the Scottish land reform movement has scored recent successes with community buyouts like those on the isles of Eigg and Gigha, the GalGael is restoring an area of derelict farmland in Argyll.

It is thus entirely appropriate that some of the men working here have recently enjoyed a foray into acting, as extras in a television series on Scottish history. The History of Scotland, which concluded last Sunday on BBC Scotland, proved controversial, with many senior academics lamenting its broad strokes and glaring omissions. This reaction was perhaps inevitable, given the startling lack of popular treatment of Scottish history, as well as the legacy of poor and piecemeal teaching of the national heritage in schools. For many Scots, knowledge of their history begins and ends with William Wallace – and Mel Gibson’sBraveheart version of the man at that.

The 10-part series, fronted by the archaeologist Neil Oliver, was a watchable introduction, and avoided the usual shortbread-and-saltires mythologising, even tackling the country’s role in the slave trade. But it remains to be seen if this will serve to kick-start public examination of Scotland’s political, social and cultural past, or be seen as the history box ticked for another decade. It’s worth noting that on the same network Andrew Marr has been offering an examination of just the first few decades of British 20th-century history with the same amount of airtime that Oliver had.

Homecoming, a year-long festival celebrating the Scottish diaspora that concluded on St Andrew’s Day, prompted further examination of the national self-image with the news that the centrepiece Clan Gatheringevent in Edinburgh, which attracted claymore obsessives from across the globe, had made a £600,000 loss. Those clan chiefs, so beloved of our ancestry-minded American and Canadian cousins, continue to draw resentment over their collusion in the Highland clearances.

An organisation like the GalGael is local by intention, a bespoke vision that is constantly retuned and refreshed by its participants, rather than a one-size-fits-all template imposed from Holyrood or a charitable behemoth in London. To recognise its worth is not to submit to David Cameron’s big society rhetoric, but to see how small-scale originals like this one can only succeed alongside centrally governed support structures.

If it can teach us something nationally it is that, in understanding our past, we must face the faultlines of Highland or lowland, Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or unionist that have come to define the nation, though not always the people within it. And particularly at a moment when independence is once again top of the political agenda.

Moreover, if a sense of history is about a grasp of narrative and one’s place in it, this can only assist us in imagining the future. Last year theGlasgow 2020 project, funded by Demos, found that inhabitants of some of the most deprived areas continued to tell stories of optimism for the future of their families, friends and neighbourhoods. The true legacy of history can be hope.

From YouTube -

From the Galgael website -

Folk without an enriched sense of their culture are like trees with shallow roots… To our minds, this analogy describes the loss of identity and sense of meaningless that creates vulnerability to the vagaries of the worst excesses of modern life. A situation steadily worsened by the consistent undermining of the bonds of community.

Agencies picking up the pieces and the tab for tackling the symptoms of this rootlessness are essential. But beyond this – what is called for is nothing less than to reconvene a sense of ‘peoplehood’; deep roots for an identity that builds resilience, embodies shared values, and in the same breath, transcends narrow forms of nationalism.

The very name GalGael is our way of re-rooting these notions of identity in nourishing ground and recognises that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all. In history, Gal Gaidheal were a 9thC people; the Gal – the ‘strange or foreign’ Norse, embraced by the Gael – the ‘heartland people’.

As a modern day people, GalGael folk have been re-visioning inclusive forms of community that build on our interdependence rather than slip into dependency culture, and that explore our collective responsibilities, not just our rights. From this stand point, we are reweaving the fabric of our families and communities, experimenting with notions of clanship, extended family and kinship.

‘by the people, for the people’ by kayodek

From the BBC -

The anger in the air is palpable. The ordinary people hold the political class in contempt.

The government is failing, as war and economic catastrophe are dealt with in increasingly unconvincing fashion by second-rate public servants. There is, for the first time in a generation, a sense of revolution brewing.

This is not today’s Britain. It is England in 1381, the year that witnessed one of the greatest popular risings in our history: the Peasants’ Revolt.

Between May and November that year, England was seized by spasms of popular rebellion, provoked by poll taxes and a disastrous war, and underpinned by the common belief that the government was a pack of scoundrels.

Towns and villages from Somerset to Scarborough rose against their rulers, beating and sometimes killing MPs, lawyers, landowners and politicians, tearing down their homes and vandalising their land.

Bloody revenge

At the heart of the rising was a march on London on Corpus Christi weekend (Thursday 13 to Saturday 15 June).

Traditionally this was a time of mystery plays and festive processions. In 1381, the main procession consisted of villagers from the Thames estuary marching along the pilgrim road between Canterbury and London, burning houses and taking political prisoners as they protested against their venal, incompetent masters.

The peasant’s revolt ransacked London before it was put down

When the protestors, led by their general Wat Tyler and the maverick preacher John Ball, reached London, they found they had significant common cause with the townsmen.

The London populace bore long-held grudges towards their own ruling elites – which included the oligarchic, super-rich merchant traders in the City as well as the hapless courtiers who governed in the name of 14-year old King Richard.

Common fury with the state of lordship bound rural and urban rebels in a compact to clean up government.

So the town mice opened their gates to the country mice, and together they all set about the cats.

At first there were organised protests, attacks on specific, symbolic landmarks: the Savoy Palace, home of the powerful and unpopular duke of Lancaster, was burned to the ground; the Temple, home of the legal profession, was sacked. Prisons were broken open and the Tower of London, where the government had holed up, was besieged.

Demonstrations became riots. A chopping block was set up at Cheapside, where the street ran sticky with the blood of the condemned.

Kind Richard II was only 14 years old when faced with the rebellion

The Archbishop of Canterbury had his head hacked off on Tower Hill. The Treasurer was murdered, as – in Suffolk – was a Chief Justice.

Some 140 Flemish merchants and their families were butchered on the banks of the Thames, in a shocking xenophobic massacre.

But for the luck of the young king, Richard II, and the fortitude of a few good men around him led by Mayor of London, William Walworth, the City would have been burned to the ground.

Tyler and his mob were eventually defeated at Smithfield, but it took nearly six months to calm the rest of the country.

Political revolt

The summer of discontent left a profound mark on the English political consciousness.

A few lines written, prior to the rebellion, by the Kentish poet John Gower, were suddenly recognised as an important tenet of government.

“There are three things of such a sort that they produce merciless destruction when they get the upper hand,” he wrote.

“One is a flood of water, another is a raging fire and the third is the lesser people, the common multitude; for they will not be stopped by either reason or by discipline.”

I have thought many times during the past months that our politicians would benefit from revisiting the events of the Peasants’ Revolt.

In many ways it is a tale of mutual misunderstanding: the ordinary folk thought the worst of their politicians, and politicians saw their people as an economic resource, to be taxed and tormented as the necessities of government demanded.

The Black Death was a major factor in fermenting anti-government feeling

This government, like the government in 1381, has been caught out by a global crisis of unprecedented severity.

In the fourteenth century it was the Black Death, which killed 40% of Europe’s population.

The government’s reaction – to impose labour laws that stifled economic recovery but preserved the social hierarchy, was vastly unpopular, for it prevented ordinary people from improving their lives.

Now, it is the collapse in global credit which has brought a different sort of misery to millions.

No doubt there are many differences between 1381 and 2009. They were medieval, we are modern. And history never repeats itself as exactly as historians sometimes wish.

But if I were an MP today, I would make it my business to learn the course and the lessons of 1381 by heart. Then I would give thanks that there are no longer any chopping blocks at Cheapside.

Dan Jones is the author of Summer of Blood.

All photographs and text from the Guardian.

A male great bustard makes a courtship display. Great bustards disappeared from the UK in 1832 after game shooters made it extinct. This emblem of Wiltshire and the heaviest flying bird in the world (it can weigh up to 20kg) was reintroduced to Salisbury Plain in 2004, with eggs rescued from farmland in Russia. Great bustards need open grassland and arable fields where they feed on grasshoppers and cereal seeds; Photograph: Erich Kuchling/Rex Features

A beaver swimming in a Scottish river. Beavers were hunted to extinction in the UK by the end of the 16th century for their fur, glands for medicine and because their building of dams interfered with other land uses. Proposals to reintroduce this famous wetland engineer to Knapdale Forest in Scotland began in 1994. This was turned down in 2002 and again in 2005. A licence was granted in 2007 and the first beavers to return to Scotland for 400 years will be released this spring. Other proposals for reintroduction in England and Wales are being considered. The first beavers arrive in Scotland for the reintroduction programme that has started at a secret location. The beavers have all been electronically tagged; Photograph: A.Good/Rex Features

It’s been over 400 years since a wild beaver roamed an English river, but freedom will probably be short-lived for the lone male still at large after escaping – along with two rapidly recaptured females – a few weeks ago from an enclosure in Devon.

Unlike some parts of Europe, where beavers have been reintroduced by being chucked out of the back of a van, the return of once-extinct wild animals to the British countryside is treated with Byzantine feasibility studies, public consultations, legal wrangling, interminable arguments and meticulous planning. For example, it has taken since 1994 to reach acceptance on beaver reintroduction to Knapdale Forest, in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, with the first releases due this spring.

Ecologist and beaver reintroduction specialist Derek Gow, from whose enclosure the three beavers escaped, says: “It has been a long and tortuous process, and the success of reintroductions of beavers will be because of the ability to manage the species and habitats. We are involved in a feasibility study with South West Water. Beavers could help water filtration, removing pollutants and conserving water supply to reservoirs. They are ideal for ecosystem engineering, and they bring real environmental benefits.

“That’s how you sell the idea of reintroduction and persuade landowners. It’s all very well talking about conservation in cosy meeting rooms, but any landowners think conservationists are a devious lot. If we can’t engage with landowners and show them the benefits, reintroduction will be dead in the water. Nature conservationists have to get gritty and realistic.”

Also preaching realism is Tim Coulton, professor of population biology at Imperial College London, although he’s talking about probably the least realistic of the reintroduction targets: the wolf. “The reason for our report [a joint UK and Norway report on wolf reintroduction in Scotland for the Royal Society in 2007] was to look at the effect of wolves on the deer population of Scotland by simulating what had happened elsewhere. The debate on wolf reintroduction had been driven by anecdote and we wanted to inject some science to provide a more informed debate.”

Coulton appreciates that the motivations of many who support animal reintroductions may be aesthetic or romantic, and he does not believe that, even with economic subsidies, there will be strong enough support from sheep farmers for the reintroduction of wolves. However, he does see reintroductions as an important means to an end. “We have to decide what we want from our open spaces – large fields or diverse ecosystems, tourism, water quality,” he says. “Reintroductions can be a tool to achieve these ends. I suspect science rarely drives reintroductions, but it’s the role of science to provide data for a debate and raise warnings, not to decide. That requires a wider public platform.”

Steve Carver, senior lecturer in geography at Leeds University and a coordinator of the Wildlands Network, agrees. “Reintroductions must have grassroots support and cannot work as an authoritarian, top-down process,” he argues. “The reintroduction of the white-tailed eagle on Mull [in Scotland] has developed an industry around wildlife watching. People need to see the benefits of re-wilded landscapes.” He says different landscapes need different policies, with subsidies for restoring habitats.

The current reintroductions, and many of the candidates for a future return, do not require landscape-scale ecological restoration for their success. For example, the red kite has the highest population for 200 years in the UK. White-tailed eagles too can float over the existing landscape without its modification, while wild boar have introduced themselves to the English countryside very successfully, and great bustards like Ministry of Defence grassland and arable fields on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

The most iconic candidate for reintroduction, the lynx, could also arrive without any landscape restoration. This big cat seems happy to live in broadleaved woodland or conifer plantations, and it is estimated that the Scottish Highlands could support a population of 400 lynx. Its selling point is that it would keep down roe deer numbers, as well as foxes, the notorious predators of ground-nesting birds.

Carver says: “The reintroduction of lynx will depend on the success of the beaver, so I’m hopeful that, within 10-15 years, they may be reintroduced. Personally, I’d be happy going to my grave knowing they were back.”

Behind the reintroduction and the re-wilding agenda there is an important shift going on in the conservation world. “Traditional conservation has potentially seen its day,” Carver claims. “The old guard was focused on sites and species, and managed reserves for one species, not the whole landscape. There’s a reason for rarity. If we lose a few species, does it really matter if they’re common in other locations? The new paradigm in conservation is about habitats, landscapes and whole ecosystems.”

Facing a list of 1,149 priority wildlife species and 65 priority habitats that need concerted action to save them, the government’s chances of fulfilling its commitment to stop the loss of biodiversity before 2010 is hopeless. A new target of 2020 is being proposed, but that is likely to be just as hopeless. As traditional conservation becomes more difficult, with less money available and less public support in the current financial climate, the reintroduction of charismatic fauna offers conservation bodies a chance to engage with the public in ways that obscure species of plants and invertebrates in isolated nature reserves unfortunately don’t.

Defining moment

As well as this utilitarian approach to the value of animal reintroductions as economic tools, and the enhanced products and services of ecosystems, Andy Evans, head of the RSPB’s terrestrial research section, says: “There is a moral imperative to correct anthropogenic harm and a moral obligation to maintain habitats, and to improve them from damage caused by, for example, agriculture. Conservation, which has always been scale-dependent, is facing a defining moment.”

Ecologist and author Peter Taylor says: “The reintroduction of charismatic species is also a way of re-wilding the human mind, engaging people with nature on a deeper psychological level. But these reintroductions won’t happen unless all the community is involved, including hunting, shooting, fishing and farming interests.

“This kind of conservation is not helped by the dead hand of computer simulations, government consultations and accounts of the lynx being good for eco-tourism. In early natural history, there was a spiritual connection with nature. As a scientist, I think we need to reclaim something lost from scientific conservation. The lynx, the beaver and wild boar have become iconic emblems for that.”

Comeback contenders

Lynx
The Eurasian lynx, a secretive, powerful cat, is the most likely mammal predator to be reintroduced to the UK – although many say it is already here.

A Eurasian lynx mother sits in the grass while her two pups play in their outdoor enclosure in Germany. This secretive, powerful cat with tufted ears and a short tail weighing 25kg survived in Britain until 180AD. The Eurasian lynx is the most likely mammal predator candidate for reintroduction, although many say it is already established in some areas. It is estimated that the Scottish highlands could support a population of 400 lynx, where they would control roe deer and foxes; Photograph: Ronald Wittek/Corbis

Beaver
Hunted to extinction here by the end of the 16th century. A proposal launched in 1994 to reintroduce it to Knapdale Forest, Scotland, was turned down in 2002 and again in 2005. A licence was granted in 2007 and the first beavers to return to Scotland will be released this spring.

White-tailed eagle
By 1916, this huge bird, sometimes called the sea eagle, became extinct here through persecution. It was reintroduced to Scotland from Scandinavia in 1975 and there are now 42 breeding territories there. A study is being carried out on proposals to reintroduce it to East Anglia.

A white-tailed eagle seen in Scotland. In 1700 there were 200 pairs but by 1916 this huge bird, sometimes called the sea eagle, became extinct after persecution in the UK. It was reintroduced to Scotland from Scandinavia in 1975 and there are now 42 breeding territories there. A feasibility study is being carried out on proposals to reintroduce it to East Anglia;Photograph: /RSPB

Great bustard
Last year saw the first egg laid by a great bustard – the heaviest flying bird in the world – in the UK for 175 years. It was reintroduced to Salisbury Plain in a project that began in 2004 with eggs rescued from farmland in Russia.

Pictured here is the first female great bustard to lay eggs in Britain in 175 years; Photograph: HO/AFP

Wild boar
After an absence of 400 years, they have reintroduced themselves by escaping from boar farms damaged in the 1987 storm. Now well-established in south-east England and the Forest of Dean.

After an absence of 400 years, wild boar have reintroduced themselves by escaping from boar farms damaged by the 1987 storm. There are now populations in south-east England and the Forest of Dean; Photograph: Solent News/Rex Features

Grey wolf
The last wolf in the UK was killed in Scotland in the 17th century. Experience in other countries shows that reintroduction would help to regenerate vegetation and woodland.

The last wolf in the UK was killed in Scotland in the 17th century. According to recent population modelling if wolves were reintroduced to Scotland, their population would stabilise at 25 wolves per 1,000 square kilometres. Although wolf populations would have an impact on the high red deer population, experience in other countries shows the wider effect would be to regenerate vegetation and woodland, benefiting wildlife and helping to restore ecosystems; Photograph: Robert Pickett/Pickett

Large Blue butterfly
One of the most vulnerable butterflies in the world, it became extinct in the UK in 1975, but was reintroduced to Dartmoor in 2000 from Sweden.

The large blue butterfly became extinct in the UK in 1975 but was reintroduced to Dartmoor in 2000 from Sweden. This is one of the most vulnerable butterflies in the world. It lays its eggs on wild thyme, then the caterpillars are adopted by red ants who take them into their nests, where the butterfly caterpillars become predators of ant grubs before pupating and emerging as spectacularly bright blue adults; Photograph: Emma Daniel/PA

From Showcaves.com -

Goat’s Hole Cave, better known under the name Paviland Cave, has its important entry in science history. It is the place where for the very first time the discovery of fossil human remains is recorded. Rev. William Buckland discovered in 1823 a skeleton, and he was the first who recognized that is was a remain of a former time, and wrote about it. Subsequently the new sciene archeology developed, so this is the birth place of a new science.

However, each birth is connected with pain, and the discovery of William Buckland is connected with complete error: he misjudged both its age and its sex. [...] Buckland believed the skeleton was from Roman times. And as it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry, he thought it was a woman. The person was covered by red ochre, so soon it was commonly known as Red Lady of Paviland.

Modern archaeology identified the Red Lady of Paviland as a man, no older than 21, who lived 29,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth’s skull, which has since been lost. The formal burial ceremony, the number and kind of items, suggest he was a tribal chieftain. This is the oldest known burial in the UK and western Europe.

When the man was buried, the cave was about 120km from the sea. The cave was overlooking a plain similar to present day Siberia with tundra vegetation. The ice sheet of the Devensian Glaciation, the last ice age, advanced towards the site, and the weather was cold, 10°C in summer, -20° in winter.

From British Archaeology (published Oct 2001) -

Goat’s Hole cave, Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, has long been renowned as the site of one of the best-known prehistoric burials in Britain – the notoriously misnamed ‘Red Lady of Paviland’ which was discovered in 1823. Yet it has taken archaeologists nearly two centuries to unravel the mysteries of this remarkable site, with the definitive report published only last year.

The story begins not in 1823 but during the previous year, when Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies, respectively surgeon and curate at Port Eynon on the south coast of Gower, explored the cave and found animal bones, including the tusk of a mammoth. The Talbot family of Penrice Castle was informed and Miss Mary Theresa Talbot, then the oldest unmarried daughter, joined an expedition to the site and found ‘bones of elephants’ on 27 December 1822.

William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University and a correspondent of that well-connected family, was contacted. He arrived on 18 January 1823 and spent a week at Goat’s Hole – a week in which his famous discovery took place. He later wrote:

[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle . . . which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12mm] around the surface of the bones . . . Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods . . . [also] . . . some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods . . . Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones. (Buckland, Reliquiae Diluvianae, 1823)

In the field, Buckland had identified the skeleton as male, suggesting that the bones were those of a Customs Officer murdered by smugglers. By the time of publication later that year, however, the gender had changed with a new and better story.

The ochre-stained skeleton had become a ‘painted lady’ who serviced the needs of the Roman soldiers garrisoned in the camp on the hill above the cave. It was a good story. But by the early years of the 20th century, it could be seen not to add up: the burial was male, the mammoth ivories were Palaeolithic and not modern products made from fossil ivory as Buckland had claimed, and the camp was an Iron Age promontory fort.

Buckland had found a burial, representing a single event in the human history of the site, but found no more than a few flints, even though the site has since yielded thousands. Indeed, in subsequent excavations the site was to produce diagnostic or dated material – flint, ivory and bone artefacts, and the burial itself – spanning more than half a dozen Palaeolithic events over at least the period 35,000-11,000 BP (before present). Buckland did not know this. What he did know, as Dean of Westminster and Curate at Christchurch – or strictly speaking what he believed – was that the bones of such animals as mammoth and woolly rhino found in the cave could not be contemporary with the burial since such species, he thought, had not made it onto the Ark and so had been drowned in Noah’s, or an earlier, flood. His belief in such a deluge is shown by the title of his book, Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Evidence of the Flood’).

He therefore regarded the ‘Red Lady’ as intrusive, a reasonable inference given the intellectual context of his day and the undeveloped nature of archaeological excavation as a technique. But did he really miss the flints because of his mindset? The answer may be yes, but Buckland’s elevation drawing of the site suggests that the burial may have lain at the lowest level then exposed. The many thousands of lithics, now interpreted as earlier than the burial, were not found until 85 years later through the excavations of William Sollas, also holder of Oxford’s Chair of Geology.

The ‘Red Lady’ would now be interpreted as a ceremonial interment of the Gravettian period of the Palaeolithic (c 28-21,000 BP), such as are now known across Europe from Paviland to Moscow and south to Portugal. But at the time when the ‘Red Lady’ was unearthed she – or rather he – was not only the first such burial to be found but also the first human fossil ever to have been recovered anywhere in the world.

The radiocarbon dating technique was not invented until the late 1940s, so neither Buckland nor Sollas could have known the true age of the interment. Sollas did, however, work on the assumption that the burial was Palaeolithic. He confirmed the burial site by finding a spread of ochre associated with ivory rods parallel to the cave wall, and added to our understanding of how the body – which was incomplete at the time of discovery probably because of marine erosion – had been interred.

The bones were deeply stained with red ochre, and the grave goods – ivory rod and bracelet fragments, and perforated periwinkle shells – were all similarly stained. In addition, small limestone blocks may have been placed at the head and feet. Perhaps, too, the skull of a mammoth found nearby may have been part of the grave furniture – this was the interpretation of the Abbé Breuil who had joined the Sollas expedition in the role of lithics analyst. Sollas correctly identified the body as that of a man.

Sollas’s fieldwork at Paviland in 1912 had been prompted by a visit to Oxford of the French scholar Emile Cartailhac, then preparing his magnum opus on the caves of Grimaldi in Liguria. Cartailhac dated these burials as Upper Palaeolithic and suggested that the mode of burial at Paviland was comparable. It was not until the 1960s, however, that an attempt was made to date the burial scientifically, when Kenneth Oakley published a radiocarbon determination made on the actual bones of the ‘Red Lady’.

The result of 18,460 ± 340 BP coincided with the peak of the last Ice Age when the edge of the ice lay only an hour’s walk north of Goat’s Hole. The date conjured up a picture of great charm and power, with a later suggestion that the body could have been transported from somewhere further south to a distant, venerated site at the edge of the ice for a summer burial when temperatures rose.

Things were beginning to hot up, however, for John Campbell’s 1977 study of the Goat’s Hole lithic assemblage showed convincingly that it belonged to the later part of the Aurignacian period of the Palaeolithic (c 40-28,000 BP) and was perhaps 30,000 years old. He suggested, however, that the burial might be younger, specifically Gravettian, on the basis of the dating of comparable European ivory bracelets.

At much the same time, hitherto little known material from Belgium was being studied by Marcel Otte and became widely known through his publication of a synthesis on the earlier Belgian Upper Palaeolithic. This was complemented, in 1980, by Roger Jacobi’s ground-breaking study of the British Upper Palaeolithic. Jacobi undertook a rigorous analysis of both the ‘Red Lady’ burial and human presence at Goat’s Hole and concluded that parallels could be found within the Belgian Aurignacian for the ivory artefacts associated with the interment and that the ‘Red Lady’ was therefore likely to be of that age.

He dismissed the 18,460 bp date on the grounds that human presence was simply lacking from north-western Europe at this time. Jacobi pointed also to continental parallels to artefacts termed ‘leaf points’ that should be contemporary with or, even, predate the Aurignacian and reaffirmed the presence there of a flint ‘Font Robert’ Gravettian spearpoint and of Late Upper Palaeolithic artefacts that related to the recolonisation of the British peninsula after the peak of the last Ice Age sometime after 13,000 bp.

In other words, it was quite clear by 1980 that Goat’s Hole had been the scene of a number of apparently discrete phases of human presence spread over 20,000 or more years of the Palaeolithic. But all this knowledge depended largely upon typological parallels and on one very suspect radiocarbon date.

The stage was clearly set for a scientific re-evaluation of Paviland. In 1989, a new and far more plausible result of 26,350 ± 550 BP was produced by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator on bone powder residual from the original Oakley sample. Because contamination of ancient samples normally results in ages that are too young, it was reasonable to assume that the ‘Red Lady’ died around 26,000 years ago in radiocarbon years (calendar years are possibly several thousand years older than radiocarbon years at this date). Even so, this dating was at least a couple of millennia too young for the Aurignacian.

Could he be yet older? A visit that I made myself to the site in 1989, following a massive storm that had exposed apparently in situ deposits, convinced me that further work would be useful. There the matter rested, however, until 1995 when I received an unexpected letter from Erik Trinkaus revealing that he had made a comprehensive study of the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton some years previously. Since then, Erik had been sidetracked into Neanderthal studies to the great benefit of palaeoanthropology. But now he was once more involved with the study of anatomically modern humans and the ‘Red Lady’ paper was just awaiting a publication outlet. This was the final spur to action.

The new study began with a radiocarbon dating programme and resulted in the dating of some 40 radiocarbon samples of fauna, artefacts and the bones of the ‘Red Lady’ himself. The skeleton was re-dated to 25,840 ± 280 BP and an age of the order of 26,000 years confirmed. None of the ivory or shells associated with the ‘Red Lady’ was dated because of problems of potential contamination by preservatives, but charred bone dates are earlier and centre on 28,750, and so are plausibly Aurignacian.

Of the ivory pieces, 75 per cent are ornaments, virtually all associated with the burial of the ‘Red Lady’, although the well known perforated ivory pendant made from a growth in a mammoth’s tusk is later at 24,000 BP. Bone artefacts include three bone spatulae dated to 23,000 BP. The latest phase of human presence with a firm radiocarbon date is represented by ivory-working of 21,000 BP.

At the time when the young man was ritually interred, there is no substantive evidence in this remote part of Europe for a human presence that was other than episodic. Indeed, faunal compositions and densities probably oscillated over time and space. Human presence in the British early Upper Palaeolithic may plausibly be linked to a ‘biomass expansion’, an overall increase in the availability of animals and other forms of food, centred on the 29th millennium. The coincidence of the dating of burnt bones to this period, combined with the presence of burnt Aurignacian artefacts, supports this as the most likely time for Aurignacian presence at Paviland. Radiocarbon dating of an Aurignacian bone spearpoint to around 28,000 bp at nearby Uphill lends additional weight to this interpretation.

Gravettian visitation is attested by a scatter of large tanged points occurring across southern Britain, including Paviland. Such points are generally dated to 28-27,000 BP, although their use may possibly extend down to the time of the ‘Red Lady’ burial.

As part of the radiocarbon dating process, the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen within the bone sample were measured. These values provide important information about ancient diets and show that the ‘Red Lady’ had a penchant for seafood – either collected when living on the coast then 100 kilometres distant, or in the form of salmon fished out of the palaeo-Severn, which bears from Paviland are also known (from stable isotope values) to have eaten.

The ‘Red Lady’, when alive, was a healthy young adult male – aged 25-30, about 5′ 8″ (1.74 metres) in height, and possibly weighing about 11 stone (73 kg) – but less robust than might be expected for this period. Whilst the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe were characterised by tropically-adapted body proportions, arising from their African ancestry, this is not reflected in the skeleton of the ‘Red Lady’, probably because the Paviland individual was a product of perhaps 10,000 years of evolution of modern humans within Europe.

Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes has shown that the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton has a DNA sequence corresponding to the commonest extant lineage in Europe. As such, the Paviland evidence lends support to the argument that the roots of modern Europeans lie not with Neolithic farmers but with the ingress into Europe of human populations who were to replace the Neanderthals.

Restudy of the Goat’s Hole lithic collections has confirmed material ranging from about 40,000 BP to about 13,000 BP (including Mousterian, leaf point, late Aurignacian, early Gravettian, Creswellian, and Final Upper Palaeolithic phases), although the earliest and latest phases are not dated by radiocarbon. Aurignacian finds form the dominant element. These artefacts were made from a range of imported and local raw materials. It is interesting that analysis of the ochres is consistent with a local origin, probably within Gower.

Clearly, the people responsible for the interment possessed considerable local as well as more far-flung knowledge. Preferential use of imported flint for ‘busqué burins’, a specialist kind of engraving tool, and blade blanks, suggests the import to the site of curated items. A type of Aurignacian inversely retouched scraper is special to the site and may reflect the long term isolation of a social group.

The ceremonial burial of the ‘Red Lady’ involved the interplay of art and consciousness which combine in an act that is simultaneously creative and symbolic. The rite possesses features replicated, in regionally changing modes, across Europe in other ceremonial Gravettian burials. These include an extended burial position, positioning of the corpse along the cave wall, the presence by the grave of large herbivore remains, the placing of stone slabs at head and feet, the use of ochre, the deposition of personal ornaments, and the possibility that the body may have been headless when interred. No head was found at Paviland, and other headless Gravettian burials are known.

In chronological terms, Paviland is early in the European series of burials and is actually the earliest with a firm radiocarbon date measured directly on human bone. These burials are resonant of a complex early European society in which status may have been inherited rather than acquired by merit – as evidenced by several very rich child burials elsewhere.

In the ancient world, the sacred and profane were inextricably intertwined. Paviland cave was occupied by the hunters of the Gravettian mammoth steppe as a functional shelter; but there may also have been an aura of sanctity attached to the place, explaining the burial here of the ‘Red Lady’. We may wonder whether one reason for visits to Paviland, as the climatic downturn accelerated and the British peninsula was increasingly abandoned, may have lain in its status as a special place.

From wikipedia -

The Red Lady of Paviland is a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ochre, discovered in 1823 by Rev. William Buckland in one of the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower peninsula in south Wales, dating from c29,000 BP.^[1]

When Buckland first discovered the skeleton, he misjudged both its age and its sex. As a creationist,^[2] Buckland believed no human remains could have been older than the Biblical Great Flood, and thus wildly underestimated its true age, believing the remains to date back to the Roman era. Buckland believed the skeleton was female in large part because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry. These decorative items combined with the skeleton’s red dye caused Buckland to mistakenly speculate that the remains belonged to a Roman prostitute or witch.

Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae (Evidence of the Flood), Buckland stated:

“[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle … which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12 mm] around the surface of the bones … Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods [also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods … Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones.”

The “lady” has since been identified as a man, probably no older than 21. His are the oldest anatomically modern human remains found in the United Kingdom, as well as the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth‘s skull, which has since been lost. Scholars now believe he may have been a tribal chieftain. Tests made in the 20th century suggested he lived about 26,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period: however, a more recent examination of the remains by Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University and Dr Roger Jacobi of the British Museum suggests they may be 4000 years older. ^[3]. Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain. When the remains were dated to some 26,000 years ago it was thought the Red Lady lived at a time when an ice sheet of the most recent glacial period, in the British Isles called the Devensian Glaciation, would have been advancing towards the site, and that consequently the weather would have been more like that of present day Siberia, with maximum temperatures of perhaps 10°C in summer, -20° in winter, and a tundra vegetation. The new dating however indicates he lived at a warmer period. Bone protein analysis indicates that the “lady” lived on a diet that consisted of between 15% and 20% fish, which, together with the distance from the sea, suggests that the people may have been semi-nomadic, or that the tribe transported the body from a coastal region for burial. Other food probably included mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and reindeer.

When the skeleton was first found, Wales had no museum in which to keep it; instead, it was housed at Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. In December 2007 it was loaned for a year to the National Museum Cardiff. Subsequent excavations of the area in which the skeleton was found have yielded more than 4,000 flints, teeth and bones, and needles and bracelets, which are on exhibit at Swansea Museum and the National Museum in Cardiff.

From the BBC (published Oct 2006) -

The cave skeleton was found by clergyman William Buckland

A world famous archaeological find – a 26,000-year-old skeleton discovered in the Paviland cave on Gower – is set to return to Wales.

The skeleton, known as the Red Lady of Paviland, was discovered in the 1820s and taken to Oxford University.

The National Museum of Wales said a deal had been struck in principle with the university to borrow the remains.

It said the skeleton would be on display for a year as part of its centenary celebrations in 2007.

Last month, druid Chris Warwick spent a weekend in the cave where it was found to campaign for the return of the bones.

The Dead to Rights group, set up by Mr Warwick, said the removal of the skeleton was a “desecration” of a sacred site, and has previously called for the bones to be reburied in the cave.

The remains have been on display at Oxford University

The skeleton was discovered by the Reverend William Buckland, also a palaeontologist, who removed the bones.

As the skeleton was stained with red ochre and elaborately buried with artefacts, Buckland misinterpreted the find as a young female prostitute from Roman times.

But the body turned out to be that of a young man, who was many thousands of years older, and had been buried with great dignity and ritual.

The skeleton is set to feature in a new archaeology gallery at the museum called Origins: In Search of Early Wales

The museum’s director general Michael Houlihan said: “The national museum is delighted with this decision as it will provide an excellent focus for the opening of this exciting new gallery.”

However, Mr Warwick still insists he wants the bones returned to the cave saying something is “amiss” with the cave since the bones and artefacts were removed.

From About.com, by K. Kris Hurst -

The early Mesolithic archaeological site of Star Carr is probably one of the best known sites in England, occupied intermittently for about 300 years, beginning about 10,700 years ago. The site lies within the Vale of Pickering in east Yorkshire in what would have been at the time a swamp fringing a lake. Star Carr was an engineering marvel for its hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the settlement built atop a man-made platform of brush wood, stones and clay, set to stabilize the surface.

Artifacts recovered at Star Carr included over 200 barbed spearpoints, elk antler mattocks, bone scrapers, and masks or headdresses made from red deer antlers. Animals represented in the faunal collections included red deer, roe deer, wild oxen, elk, wild pig, and waterfowl, but a curious lack of fish or molluscan remains, given its location.

From the Times Higher Education (published 2000) -

One of the seats of Stone-Age civilisation in the British Isles has just become even older. Experts have been able to date the settlement of Star Carr, where the first evidence of wood-working and possible animal husbandry has been discovered, with unprecedented precision.

It emerges that the inhabitants of Star Carr, in the Vale of Pickering, Yorkshire, lived in a lakeside settlement dating back 10,970 years, just 600 years after the ice sheets retreated following the abrupt end of the last Ice Age.

Petra Dark, an archaeologist at Reading University, said: “It is even older than we thought and for the first time for any Mesolithic site, we now know the exact length of the interval between the occupation and climate warming.”

In a forthcoming paper in the journal Antiquity, Dr Dark said that a new assessment of tree-ring data in Germany had added 200 years to the age of the site.

Excavations at Star Carr over the past two decades have revealed evidence that nearby reedbeds were annually burned, implying a deliberate management policy that may have been intended to entice animals to the lakeside where they could be easily hunted.

Evidence of a plank-built jetty was found, representing perhaps the first use of such sophisticated woodwork in the British Isles.

From Wikipedia -

Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, England. It is around five miles south of Scarborough (grid reference TA02798100).^[1]

It belongs to the early Mesolithic Maglemosian culture, evidence for which is present across the lowlands of Northern Europe, and is a Maglemosian type site.^[1] It was occupied from around 8770 BC until about 8460 BC, possibly with a period of abandonment between 8680 BC and 8580 BC.^[2] It was discovered in 1947 during the clearing of a field drain.

Star Carr’s main feature is a birch brushwood platform which stood on the edge of former Lake Pickering.^[3] The platform would have been laid down to consolidate the boggy water’s edge.

Hearths found further away from the water indicate temporary settlement. It was visited seasonally by Mesolithic hunters chasing red and roe deer, elk, aurochs and wild boar.^[2] The original analysis of the animal bones led to the suggestion that the site was occupied during the winter season. New work has proved this to be wrong, and has shown that hunters visited the site in early summer, to take immature deer that had lost maternal care. A few visits may have been made later in the summer^[4].

The mud of the lake has preserved items dropped into it and the hunter’s tools such as flint scrapers used to clean animal skins and worked bone and antler have been found. The most striking examples are 21 perforated part skull and antlers of red deer.

A fragment of a wooden oar implies that the people who occupied the site also built boats, probably coracles or simple canoes used to travel or fish. Beads made from stone and amber suggest personal adornment. Remains of a dog are indication of the animal’s domestication during this period.

The flint came from the Yorkshire Wolds further south. A type of axe, new to Britain, was made from it at Star Carr. It was sharpened during its life by simple transverse blows which made it more adaptable.

The most famous find is the top part of a stag skull, complete with antlers. The skull had two holes perforated in it and it has been suggested that it was used as a hunting disguise, or in some form of ritual or story-telling..

Excavations at Star Carr are currently being undertaken by a team from the University of Manchester, led by leading expert Dr. Chantal Conneller. During August 2008 extensive excavations will be undertaken, extending the trenches dug by Grahame Clark, who remains an authority on the site.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} “Star Carr“. Pastscape.org.uk. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
2. ^ ^{a b} Scarre (2005), p. 397.
3. ^ Scarre (2005), p. 396.
4. ^ Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988

Bibliography

• Scarre, Chris (ed) (2005). The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28531-4.
• Legge, Anthony J.; Peter Rowley-Conwy (1988). Star Carr Revisited; a Re-analysis of the Large Mammals, Birkbeck College. ISBN 0-7187-0876-8.

From British Archaeology -

Fading Star

Star Carr is one of the truly great sites of ancient Britain. It has been revisited by archaeologists (the then young editor among them) more than any other excavation. So how is it that in five years it may be gone? Nicky Milner – deep in her own revisitation – explains.

Star Carr, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire has captured the imaginations of archaeologists since the first significant excavations in 1949–51. In the 1940s the British mesolithic (then thought to have lasted 3,000 years, now dated to 10–4,000BC) barely registered in prehistoric narratives. Grahame Clark, however, realised the importance of hunter-gatherers in European prehistory. He hoped the promise of organic remains likely to be preserved in the wet peat at Star Carr would add a new dimension to an era represented by little more than a few enigmatic flint artefacts.

It did. In fact the range and quantity of finds, including red deer skull frontlets turned into headdresses, and antler points made for spears or harpoons along with manufacturing blanks and raw antlers, remain outstanding in Europe. Star Carr has been described as a “type site”. It never fails to appear in text book accounts of the mesolithic. It has had a huge number of research articles written about it, it is constantly being reinterpreted and further excavations were undertaken in the 1980s by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust.

So, why carry out more excavations there?! Well, despite all these years of research there are still many important unanswered questions about Star Carr. And now we have discovered that the site is under serious threat and may soon be lost forever.

Over the last 20 years or so the Vale of Pickering Trust has been working hard to picture the ancient landscape. Today the area is farmland, but some 11–12,000 years ago Star Carr would have been on the edge of a lake. The lake turned to peat through prehistory, but augering and measuring the peat’s depth have revealed the mesolithic land surface and lake edges. Test pits dug around much of the lake edge have also discovered a number of other early mesolithic sites.

What this work has shown is that Star Carr is not a “type site” within this landscape: it is unique. None of the other early mesolithic sites has the same kind of artefact assemblage. At Star Carr 192 barbed antler and bone points have been found (which is over 97% of the total number found in Britain!). Only one other broken barbed point has been found on the lake, at No Name Hill. The antler mattocks, stone axes and beads made of shale, animal teeth and amber found at Star Carr have also not been found on the other sites around the lake. As if that was not enough, Clark’s antler headdresses find parallels on only three sites on the continent, each with one example. Star Carr has 21.

This work around the lake has allowed new interpretations to be put forward. For instance, Richard Chatterton, Joshua Pollard, Chantal Conneller and Tim Schadla-Hall have all considered the unusual range and quantity of material culture at Star Carr, and have suggested that these objects may have been the focus of ritual deposition into the open water. They also identify the social significance mesolithic people attributed to animals, particularly in this context red deer, as the motivation behind the unusual depositionary practices. Yet technological analysis highlights the range of activities at Star Carr and the network of connections with other sites in the area. These authors have not tried to replace the other functional interpretations, such as butchery site or hunting base camp, with “ritual site”.

New questions

The original excavations and the monograph have been heralded as being of a high standard for their time, but there are certain questions which have been thrown up by the new interpretations which cannot be answered with present data.

Environmental investigations were carried out during the original excavations, but they did not provide detailed information on the archaeological contexts. Through the work in the 1980s it is now thought that much of the area excavated by Clark may have been open water at the time of occupation. This also raises questions about the brushwood, which Clark interpreted as a living platform. It is now believed it lay beneath the artefact layers and was perhaps a natural wood accumulation. The site stratigraphy is far from clear because there are very few section drawings.

Another area of intrigue is the wooden platform found during palaeoenvironmental investigations in the 1980s. This platform, unlike the brushwood one, shows clear evidence of working, and according to ancient wood specialist Maisie Taylor is the earliest evidence for carpentry in Europe. To date we know very little about it, how it relates to the archaeology found in Clark’s trenches, its extent and where it leads to.

Another major question is “how big was Star Carr?”. There seems to be a general impression that Clark’s excavations encompassed most, if not the whole of the site, but it now seems that he uncovered only some of the lake edge deposits. The fieldwork carried out in the 1980s suggested that the site was larger and there was a dry land element.

Another important issue is the timing of activities. From the distribution and typology of barbed points, Clark suggested there were two phases of occupation; he estimated that Star Carr was used over 25 years. Work in the 1980s by Petra Dark on pollen and burning of reed swamp has suggested that the site has a much longer history and that it was probably occupied, intermittently, over about 230 years.

New work

Three years ago, we revisited Star Carr again and fieldwalked it. What was immediately apparent was that the land had been affected by peat drainage. What had in the past appeared as a totally flat field (seen in some of the earlier fieldwork photographs), now rises and falls. What would have been dry land on the lake edge in the mesolithic stands proud of what would have been the lake, and we estimate that the peat has shrunk in some places by several metres.

The fieldwalking provided some interesting data. A peninsula to the east of the original excavations produced large quantities of flint, and some test pitting suggested that plough damage was occurring. The following year we excavated a line of test pits down the peninsula. This revealed substantial concentrations of knapped flint, in some areas up to 139 pieces per square metre. This suggests that the original excavated area constitutes less than 5% of the total occupation!

Fieldwork continued last summer, when we excavated two larger trenches to determine whether the archaeology continued in the lake margins to the east of the earlier excavations. We also wished to elucidate the stratigraphy of the sediments, and observe the effect of drainage and the state of peat.

Trench 21 was fairly shallow, and produced flint but no organic material. Trench 22, however, was much more like both Clark’s trenches and the 1980s excavations. It contained considerable quantities of wood. Maisie Taylor suggests this represents a natural accumulation of brushwood, similar to that discovered by Clark. However she also found several distinctive triangular chips which are a characteristic of mesolithic woodworking. This activity may have been connected with the manufacture of the timber platform discovered in the 1980s, which lies only 12m to the west of this trench.

We also found several pieces of antler, one of which has clearly been worked: a strip has been removed to make a barbed point. What is more, burins and other flint tools were found beside it. These finds show that activities occurred further around the lake edge than had been previously thought; there may be other concentrations of activities elsewhere still to be explored. The antler has now been dated to roughly 8700BC, which falls towards the end of the period of occupation and coincides with Petra Dark’s later phase of reed swamp burning, demonstrating a long tradition of antler working at the site.

What was really shocking, however, was the state of the antler. It had lost almost all of its mineral content and was flattened in section, unlike the solid antler found in Clark’s excavations. Specialists who visited the site and saw this, along with the state of the peat and the wood, suggested that any antler, bone and wood that still survives will probably disappear within the next five to 10 years. Research at York University by Matthew Collins and his team is showing that bone can rapidly decay in a mere couple of years if contained in peat where the water table fluctuates seasonally. It is possible that this may be happening in some areas of the Star Carr site.

The future of Star Carr

The arguments for further work at the site could not be clearer. Less than 5% of the site has been excavated and there is still much to learn:
• What was the nature of the dry land area? Were there structures, hearths and other activities? What does the flint distribution tell us? How far does this occupation area extend? Could this represent large group gatherings?
• What was the nature of the lake edge deposits? What exactly was the context of deposition – were objects being placed in open water or reed swamp? How did the hydrology of the lake work – were some areas seasonally flooded? Where did the timber platform lead and why was it constructed? Why is the accumulation of brushwood there? How far does it stretch? What is the distribution of lake edge activities such as antler working? Why were artefacts being deposited at the lake edge?
• How can we understand the temporality of activities at the site? Did they change over time?
• Why is this site so different to other sites around the lake? Why have other sites like this not been found in Britain? How does this site compare to other sites on the continent?

Our plans are to continue excavating. This year we hope to investigate a larger area of the original dry land to look for evidence of occupation and activities, and to assess the extent of the plough damage. We also intend to excavate nearer to Clark’s trenches at the lake margins, to further investigate the deposition of bone and antler, to monitor the degradation of the peat and the conditions for organic survival, and to examine the stratigraphy and nature of the lake edge deposits and the brushwood accumulation in more detail. We are lucky to be collaborating with a wide range of specialists who are providing support and expertise on subjects that include wood, pollen, sediments, macro-plant remains, insect remains and conservation.

But time is running out. Although Star Carr has been studied for over 50 years, we may have less than five years before much of the waterlogged remains deteriorate completely.

There have been criticisms by some that Star Carr has not just informed, but also prejudiced and biased our understanding of mesolithic Britain, and that perhaps this site has been studied too much already at the expense of other sites.

It is certainly true that Star Carr has dominated our narratives of the period. But these have drawn on a very small area of the site, creating a biased understanding. It is important that we try to understand much more in order to correct previous misapprehensions. It is also important that Star Carr is not seen as a “type site”, but is acknowledged as having a unique character, at least within the Lake Flixton landscape.

We aim within the next five years to rescue much of the remaining archaeology and address many of the new research questions that have been posed. And we hope that the site will continue to stimulate interest and debate for generations of archaeologists to come.

The new excavations are a joint project between the Universities of York, Manchester, UCL and Cambridge supported by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust, the British Academy and the McDonald Institute, Cambridge. See www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/Projects/StarCarrWebsite/index.htm. Nicky Milner directs a new MA in mesolithic studies at the University of York.

Bryan Appleyard, writing on poetry as the essential characteristic of the ‘English Imagination’ – and of Englishness -

HERE are two opening lines:

“Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,”

“Lord, the Roman hycinths are blooming in bowls and”

The first is from Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, the second from T.S. Eliot’s ‘A Song for Simeon’. I quote them here solely because they both send a shiver down my spine. I could try to explain why – that haunting sc-sh-qw sound in the Raleigh, or the odd, unexpected stillness of the Eliot line caused, I think, by ‘in bowls’ and that hanging ‘and’ – but, in truth, my shiver comes from wells deeper than those plumbed by practical criticism. It comes from being and speaking English.

It is unfashionable to speak of national characteristics. Queasy types think it is akin to racism. But the truth is that nations are definably different. Most importantly, they differ in what they do best. No nation has produced better essayists than France, none has produced better composers that the Germans, better painters than the Italians, nor better novelists than the Russians. America invented jazz and still masters the form and, though some may dissent, her record in film is unsurpassed. And the English? The English do poetry.

Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words “We defy augury”. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.

Why this should be is open to infinite speculation. It is often said that Protestantism turned us away from the image to the word, but that was late in the day. Some talk of the landscape or the weather, but other nations have those. More significant may be the legacy of Roman occupation which left the English with a unique sense of home as land, a poetic idea that runs through Clare and Wordsworth to Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’. But the truth, I suspect, is that it is the English language itself which made us poets. This is, of course, unprovable, not least because of the chicken and egg question – did the language make the English poets or did the English make the language poetic? But, if only subjectively, I think some kind of case can be made.

First, I have to acknowledge one unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American. In addition, there was Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery – all giants – as well as a whole host of other figures, like Frank O’Hara, who may yet come to be seen as equally gigantic. This needs to be said partly because this article argues the necessity for a resurrection of our national art, but also because the idea that it is our language that makes our poetry must necessarily encompass the Americans.

If Hamlet can be seen as one big poem, then so, in a sense, can all of English poetry. It is a conversation with itself. Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ – indeed, perhaps the whole of his work – is another way of articulating the spirit of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’. Robert Browning’s dramatic meditations are refined and internalised by Ezra Pound; the Gothic arches of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ becoming the broken psychic concrete of the Cantos. John Clare’s open-eyed, innocent, wondering, exact gaze is also that of Ashbery. And – slightly quirky one this – Clare’s line “I am the self consumer of my woes” could, to my ears and mind, prefigure Bob Dylan.

Eliot understood this better than anybody. ‘The Waste Land’ opens with a line – “April is the cruellest month” – that sardonically inverts the mood of the first line of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (“Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote”), as if to remark that all poetry is one, and that in the end is the beginning. Less explicitly, Auden had only to set pen to paper for the whole history of English poetry to come flooding onto the page in his infinity of rhythms and nuances. His great but neglected short poem ‘Like a Vocation’ expresses this eerie feeling of looking around to see where the voices are coming from:

But somewhere always, nowhere particularly unusual,
Almost anywhere in the landscape of water and houses,

The voices are, of course, those which Peter Ackroyd has called English Music.

But this homogeneity, this great conversation, could only happen if there was something in the language that made it possible. This is a much more elusive matter. Of course, one could come up with very broad generalisations; for example, two geniuses – Chaucer and Shakespeare – moulded the language decisively into poetry: they made English poetic. Or one could point to the unique flexibility of English that makes it equally suited to the epic, dramatic or lyric moods. Both observations are demonstrably true.

Yet there are further things that may be said about the themes that run through poetic English which cut deep into our sense of who we are. Here is just one, a famous lyric from the 16th Century.

O WESTERN wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

This is the clearest expression of the disjunction between the world and the soul that is sometimes defined as ‘pathetic fallacy’. The contingency of the weather is heartbreaking – it springs the lines open to expose a whole inner landscape of pain and longing. This heartbreak is an effect of the failed metaphor, for the weather does not reflect our feelings; the sun does not shine because you are happy – it does so because, as Samuel Beckett pointed out, it has “no alternative”.

The failed metaphor arises from poetry itself. It is this link that connects Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens, both poets attempting to unite the poem and the world and, necessarily, failing. But the failed metaphor is also a crucial aspect of the English character. We are – or used to be – ironic, stoical, gloomy but always funny. We revel in defeat and adversity. Jack Dee, Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper are all about failed metaphors. They are made by and of poetry.

There are countless other examples of poetic themes that are also English character traits – our tradition of radical dissent from received narratives is manifest in William Blake; our penchant for fantasy was made by Shakespeare, Edward Lear and Lord Tennyson; our sense of the comedy of the banal runs from Chaucer through Pope to The Royle Family and The Office; and the lively irony of our death was hammered into us by Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Keats and Hardy. And what about these lovely, silvery lines from Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ as an expression of the Englishman coming to terms with his fate in a deck chair in the late summer sun? Notice how the word ‘still’ seems to make the words pirouette away from banality.

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.

This correlation between who we are and what we have written is, I believe, unique in the world. “Poetry”, wrote Auden, “makes nothing happen” – but, he added, “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth”. Poetry is England’s way of happening.

And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.

Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: “The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days” (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.

Those following the political news from London recently will have been aware of the arrest of Damian Green, the Conservative MP, in relation to a police investigation into the leaks of sensitive information from the Home Office. The following article, ‘Golden Thread, National Myth‘ by Tom Holland, is published in the New Statesman -

The makers of The Devil’s Whore, Channel 4’s recently screened extravaganza set against the backdrop of the English Civil War, must have been especially excited by the arrest of Damian Green. Certainly, it is hard to know what more the Metropolitan Police could have done, short of donning floppy lace collars and pursuing parliamentarians across Marston Moor, to highlight the topicality of the drama’s themes. The centrepiece of the first episode was the notorious attempt by Charles I to seize five troublesome members from the very Parliament House itself.

“All my birds have flown,” intoned the actor Peter Capaldi, looking resplendent in a flowing Cavalier wig – for Charles, who was always a stickler for good manners, no matter what his other faults, had naturally made sure to enter the chamber without a hat. The police who arrested Damian Green seem not to have been quite so sensitive to protocol. No wonder that leading Conservatives, scarcely able to believe their luck, should have hurried to anoint their immigration spokesman a martyr for liberty, a hero in the grand tradition of John Lilburne and John Pym. “This,” warned Michael Howard portentously, “is the sort of thing that led to the start of the Civil War.”

A bit rich, it might have been thought, coming from a man whose tenure as home secretary had suggested that he would rather have relished the reintroduction of the pillory. And yet, instead of laughing at Howard’s analogy, commentators gave it so much airtime that now, several weeks on, it has become a virtual given. MPs in particular have shown themselves to be hugely keen on it – and on the left as well as the right. Perhaps this is not wholly surprising. Principle is invariably the stronger when fused with self-regard. That parliament is the guarantor of British liberties, and that an assault upon its privileges is an assault upon all the British people: here are presumptions fit to energise any member, Labour no less than Tory. A respect for history does not have to be the mark of a Conservative, after all – a truth so self-evident that already, well before the fingering of the Ashford One, it was serving to generate improbable alliances across the party divide.

Prior to Green’s arrest, the single most bizarre political event of the year was surely David Davis’s forcing of a by- election in his own constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, in protest against what he saw as the government’s infringement of civil liberties – a démarche enthusiastically backed by none other than that old leveller, Tony Benn. Both men, attempting to explain what appeared to many a thoroughly quixotic venture, made great play with abstract nouns – “freedoms”, “rights”, and so on – and yet it was evident that their truest inspiration derived not from political theory, but from their understanding of Britain’s past.

Just as the revolutionaries during the Civil Wars, even as they set about turning the world upside down, had claimed to be fighting in defence of their country’s ancient laws, so too did Davis and Benn. “This Sunday,” Davis announced in his resignation speech, “is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus.” Parliament, by tamely kowtowing to the 42-day detention plan, had shown itself to be not the defender of British liberty, but rather its jailer. As Benn, shaking his head more in sorrow than in anger, put it: “I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed.”

In January 2006, in a speech to the Fabian Society, Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, had spelled out in language no less emotive than Benn’s what he saw as the essence of the country he would soon be leading. There was, he argued, “a golden thread which runs through British history” – and where did the thread begin, if not “that long ago day in Runnymede”? And who better to continue weaving it – by implication – than the Honourable Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath? Two years on, even as civil liberties campaigners continue to cast him as King John redivivus, the Prime Minister surely retains the invincible conviction that if anyone is the true defender of Magna Carta, it is himself.

All of which might seem to suggest, with both supporters and opponents of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation busy laying claim to the legacy of Runnymede, that one side must have it badly wrong. But this is not necessarily so – it is well to remember that Magna Carta has always been hedged by ambiguity. Indeed, that seems to have been precisely what enabled it to be sealed in the first place: the ability of both the king and his enemies to find in it what they pleased. “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined,” declared its most famous chapter, “. . . except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” A teasingly Delphic statement: does the second clause serve to buttress or to qualify the first? It is not entirely clear. Either it is freedom from the oppression of unjust legislation that is being prescribed, or else it is freedom under the law, a subtly different thing, because laws may always be changed. The tension between these two interpretations has persisted ever since the tents were first packed away at Runnymede – nor, evidently, has it been settled now. The “golden thread” of British liberty remains what it has always been: a thing of glittering and tantalising ambivalence.

All of which, to many, has long been a source of frustration. What value the mystique of Magna Carta and its centuries-old inheritance, when it is capable of being interpreted in such mutually opposed ways? Yet it is possible to argue that what it may lack in clarity it more than makes up for as a myth. If it is true, as the political historian Benedict Anderson argued, that a nation is an “imagined community”, then what gives shape to a nation’s collective imaginings is inevitably what most effectively reflects the widest possible spectrum of its people’s principles and beliefs.

That is why the most potent national myths of all have invariably been those most susceptible to multiple readings – and most capable of evolving in response to change. For that, the surest evidence this year lay not in Britain, but across the Atlantic, in another democracy with an enduring taste for self-mythologisation: the United States of America.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” So spoke President-elect Barack Obama in his victory speech. A politician of the centre left, the son of a Kenyan goat farmer, an African American, he signalled, with his very opening sentence, that he was subscribing to the time-honoured narrative which had always served to burnish his country’s elevated sense of itself. Unsurprisingly, among those hostile to the very notion of the nation state, and to the United States in particular, this served to raise the odd eyebrow. Writing in the New Statesman in November, John Pilger complained that Obama’s oratory was nothing more than the honeyed expression of the “brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the world”. Even blunter was Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command. The president-elect, he sneered, was like a “house slave”. Rather than labouring in the cause of a universal caliphate, as his Muslim heritage might have inspired him to do, Obama had instead bought into the pernicious ideology of those slave-owning hypocrites, the Founding Fathers. Black he might be – but he was no less the white man’s stooge for that.

A bleak and bitter assessment. No doubt, as Obama himself has wryly acknowledged, he is indeed doomed to disappoint. And yet one can acknowledge as much while still recognising in his invocation of the venerable archetypes of American patriotism something nobler than a betrayal of the colour of his skin. After all, far from casting a veil over slavery, he opted, in his very first speech as president-elect, to make it the climax of his address.

The historical narrative Obama delivered that night, rich with allusions to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Gettysburg Address, could hardly be reckoned to have redounded un ambiguously to his country’s credit: for the achievements that it chronicled would never have been necessary without America’s original sin. Yet the speech, far from subverting the founding myths of American democracy, served ultimately to buttress them: for a myth is hardly diminished, and may even be enhanced, by being framed as a tragedy. “That’s the true genius of America, that America can change. Our union can be perfected.” Here were convictions as old as the Republic itself, and yet, coming from Obama, they hinted at darkness as well as light: of how America, having originally betrayed her own noblest ideals, must continue with her quest for expiation.

It goes without saying that there are many Americans – white, patriotic, moose-hunting Americans – who viscerally disagree with this reworking of their nation’s founding story. That, however, is precisely the measure of the narrative’s astounding potency: that it can serve to stir the souls of both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, Republican and Democrat, evangelical and liberal. Even beyond the limits of the party system, on the radical fringes of which both Pilger, and possibly even Ayman al-Zawahiri, would presumably approve, the paradigms of American history have maintained something of their implacable grip. When Gil Scott-Heron, that bard of black militancy, eviscerated American mythology in his classic song “Winter in America”, his anger was all the more savage for being blended with such evident disappointment. The constitution, in Scott-Heron’s reading of American history, has never amounted to anything – and yet it remains, for all that, “a noble piece of paper”. Winter in America it might be – and yet always there is the ghost of the summer that should have been.

The role given to Britain in this American master-narrative has usually been an inglorious one. What King John was to Magna Carta, George III was to the constitution of the United States. Yet it is telling that Scott-Heron, in the very opening line of his great song, should have chosen to name-check the Pilgrim Fathers. If it was colonists from Britain who brought both land-hunger and slavery to the New World, then so, too, did they bring what would end up as the ideals of the infant Republic. An interpretation of Magna Carta which saw it as “such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign” served as no less of an inspiration to the Thirteen Colonies than it would to rebels against absolutism during the British Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution. What should lie embedded within the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution, that “noble piece of paper”, is the most celebrated of Magna Carta’s chapters: a guarantee that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law”. Woven into the very fabric of American history, then, is that very same “golden thread” which Gordon Brown, in his speech to the Fabian Society, had identified as British: the “golden thread” of liberty.

No wonder the soon-to-be prime minister showed himself to be not a little jealous of Yankee grandstanding. “Even before America made it its own,” he protested plaintively in the same Fabian Society speech, “I think Britain can lay claim to the idea of liberty.” The speech itself, with its tortured analysis of “Britishness” and its proposal for a national “British Day”, was almost universally derided as a floundering expedient, a desperate ploy to stop Brown’s fellow Scots from leaving the United Kingdom, and radical Islamists from blowing themselves up on Tube trains. Yet, in truth, there was a sadness about it, and a sense of loneliness which marked it out as the very opposite of cynical. Brown’s tone was that of a man labouring to jerry-build a Skoda, who suddenly realises he has had a Rolls-Royce sitting mothballed in his garage all along.

For almost a decade, the government in which he was such a dominant figure had been promoting a vision of Britain as a blissed-out, baggage-free place, one far too hip to bother with anything so terminally un-Cool Britannia as the past. If that attitude presented new Labour with some fairly obvious targets – fox-hunting, Black Rod, and the like – it also obliged them to trash the Labour Party’s own heritage. It was not only Clause Four that had been cheerfully junked. So, too, was the venerable narrative that had enabled an old romantic such as Tony Benn to believe himself the heir of Wat Tyler, the Diggers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Heroes of the common people such figures may have been, but they were dead, they were white, they were European, and they were mostly male. Certainly, to the Young Turks of new Labour, it appeared hard to imagine anything less expressive of cosmopolitanism or diversity than Our Island Story. Only Gordon Brown seems to have paused, to have had second thoughts, to have wondered, in his customarily earnest way, whether there was not possibly the risk of losing something important along the way.

And he was right to wonder – as the campaign against his own anti-terror legislation, ironically enough, has served to suggest. After all, despite the best efforts of Davis and Benn, the person who has most tirelessly invoked Magna Carta over the past few years is decidedly not an Anglo-Saxon male. It is pushing things, perhaps, to cast Shami Chakrabarti as the British Barack Obama; and yet there is no question that, just like Obama, she is invoking themes and narratives that have hitherto tended to be seen as hideously white. It was the failure of our history to reflect today’s multicultural reality that originally persuaded the government to brand Britain as a “young country” – as though the thousand years and more that have passed since its constituent kingdoms were first established could simply be magicked away. Chakrabarti’s term of office at Liberty has served to emphasise just how otiose the whole manoeuvre was. By praising the “golden thread” of the nation’s inheritance in terms that would embarrass many a white liberal, she and her fellow campaigners for civil liberties have disinterred a venerable historical narrative, one that sees the flow of our traditions much as Wordsworth did, as “the Flood of British freedom”. In doing so, they are illustrating once again what has always been the key to understanding radicalism in this country: that it looks for inspiration not in the future, but in the past. As another poet, even greater than Wordsworth, once put it: “I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs/By the known rules of antient libertie.”

Evidently, we live in a sceptical, deconstructive age. The identification of Britain’s evolution with the march of enlightenment – what Herbert Butterfield, back in 1931, termed “the Whig interpretation of history” – has long fallen from academic favour. Meanwhile, in universities and secondary schools, the teaching of history is becoming ever more modular and fragmented, while in primary schools, if the government’s senior education adviser Sir Jim Rose has his way, the subject will soon cease to be a distinctive field of study at all. And yet, against the odds, 2008 should be remembered as the year in which Our Island Story made a spectacular comeback: not as a fantasy of the heritage industry, but rather as a storm-centre of political life; not as a triumphalist narrative, but as one shaded by disappointment no less than achievement; not as a thing uncontested, but as the very stuff of urgent, furious debate. A story, in short, that might well merit a measure of reconstruction.

Come the New Year, the government will announce its decision on whether to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport. If, as expected, expansion is given the green light, a whole village will need to be obliterated: not only houses, but pubs, a school and a church dating back to the Domesday Book. Such is progress, perhaps; and yet not even the most rabid enthusiast for air travel would argue that the whole of Britain be concreted over, that the entire country be transformed into a mere transit hub with shops. Yet that is what we may well end up inhabiting, should we forget the history that has shaped us, the narratives, the themes and, yes, the myths as well.

We live in an age when the issues that have shaped the grand sweep of Britain’s past – issues of security and personal freedom, of identity and dissidence – are coming back into ever more pressing focus, of no less interest to the terrorist suspect banged up in Belmarsh than to the Eurosceptic brandishing a Union Jack.

To let the memories of Our Island Story fade is not to give a vote of confidence to a progressive and multicultural future, but to diminish it. To paraphrase 1066 and All That – it risks seeing more than History come to a.

The news that Georgina Downs won her landmark High Court battle against the UK Government, regarding its assessment of risk in exposure to agricultural pesticide spraying, gives hope to those trying to improve the ecological impacts of today’s farming.

Here’s the news article from the Guardian -

An environmental campaigner yesterday won a landmark victory against the government in a long-running legal battle over the use of pesticides. The high court ruled that Georgina Downs, who runs the UK Pesticides Campaign, had produced “solid evidence” that people exposed to chemicals used to spray crops had suffered harm.

The court said the government had failed to comply with a European directive designed to protect rural communities from exposure to the toxins. It said the environment department, Defra, must reassess its policy and investigate the risks to people who are exposed. Defra had argued that its approach to the regulation and control of pesticides was “reasonable, logical and lawful”.

Downs, who lives on the edge of farmland near Chichester, West Sussex, launched her campaign in 2001. The judge described how she was first exposed to pesticide spraying at the age of 11 “and began to suffer from ill health, in particular flu-like symptoms, a sore throat, blistering and other problems”.

Downs said the government had failed to address the concerns of people living in the countryside “who are repeatedly exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals throughout every year, and in many cases, like mine, for decades”. People were not given prior notification about what was to be sprayed near their homes and gardens, she said.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Collins highlighted that the 1986 Control of Pesticides Regulations states that beekeepers must be given 48 hours notice if pesticides harmful to bees are to be used. The judge said: “It is difficult to see why residents should be in a worse position.”

Speaking after the ruling, Downs said her seven-year battle was over “one of the biggest public health scandals of our time”. She called on Gordon Brown to block any Defra appeal. “The government “should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health and citizens of this country”.

The case centred on the way the government assesses the risk posed by pesticides. The current method is based on occasional, short-term exposure to a “bystander” and assumes that individuals would be exposed to an individual pesticide during a single pass.

Downs said: “The judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed.” The model does not account for rural residents exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals “throughout every year and, in many cases like my own, for decades”.

She said: “The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risk to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide-sprayed fields is an absolute scandal, considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years.”

Downs’ campaign has collected evidence from other residents who report health problems including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, ME and asthma, which they claim could be linked to crop-spraying.

The judge said “defects” in Defra’s approach to pesticide safety contravened a 1991 EC directive. He said Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, “must think again and consider what needs to be done”.

A Defra spokesman said: “The protection of human health is paramount. Pesticides used in this country are rigorously assessed to the same standards as the rest of the EU and use is only ever authorised after internationally approved tests … We will look at this judgment in detail to see whether there are ways in which we can strengthen our system further and also to consider whether it could put us out of step with the rest of Europe and have implications for other member states.”

The European parliament’s environment committee last week approved new ways of assessing the risk of potentially hazardous sprays to protect crops and plants. The new criteria are part of an attempt to halve the use of toxic products in European farming by 2013. A final vote on the proposals is due next month or in January.

Backstory

Georgina Downs was first exposed to pesticide spray in the garden of her parents’ house near Chichester, West Sussex, in 1984 when she was 11. She suffered several years of ill health, and after years of study into the possible causes, she founded the UK Pesticide Campaign in 2001. A hard-hitting video of a mannequin picnic in her garden, regularly drenched in pesticide spray, helped make her case. She has won many plaudits and awards, and was joint winner of the Andrew Lees Memorial Award at the 2006 British Environment and Media Awards.

Here is the statement Georgina Downs gave outside the High Court after her victory, published on her UK Pesticdes Campaign website -

I would like to start by confirming that I have won my High Court action against the Government. Therefore I am obviously very pleased with today’s result, and have been fully vindicated, as this case was based on a set of core arguments that I identified and have been presenting to the Government over the last 7 years.

The Judgment from Mr. Justice Collins is very clear in that the Government has been acting unlawfully in its policy and approach in relation to the use of pesticides in crop spraying, and that public health, in particular rural residents and communities exposed to pesticides from living in the locality to regularly sprayed fields, is not being protected (and this applies to both acute effects and chronic long term adverse health effects).

This is obviously a very significant and landmark ruling for the potentially millions of residents throughout the country who, like myself, live in the locality to pesticide sprayed fields.

The Government’s method of assessing the risks to public health from crop-spraying is based on the model of a ‘bystander’, in which it assumes that there will only be occasional, short-term exposure to the spray cloud at the time of the application only, from a single pass of a sprayer and to only one individual pesticide at any time.

The Judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed from various exposure factors and routes to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals, throughout every year, and in many cases, like my own situation, for decades. Obviously those living near pesticide sprayed fields will include vulnerable groups, such as babies, children, pregnant women, the elderly, people who are already ill and who may be taking medication, amongst other vulnerable groups where the health risks are increased.

The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risks to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide sprayed fields is an absolute scandal considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years. Under EU and UK law the absence of any risk assessment means that pesticides should never have been approved for use in the first place for spraying near homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas.

Reports of adverse health effects in rural areas have gone on for decades. In 2003, I produced a DVD that I presented to the Government, its regulators, (the Pesticides Safety Directorate) and main advisors, (the Advisory Committee on Pesticides) that featured individuals and families from all over the country reporting acute and chronic long-term illnesses and diseases in rural communities surrounded by sprayed fields.

It is important to note that the acute effects reported by people on the DVD are the same acute effects recorded in the Government’s very own monitoring system, such as rashes, itching, sore throats, burning eyes, nose, blistering, headaches, nausea, stomach pains, burnt vocal chords, amongst other effects. Government officials and advisors have therefore been fully aware for years of the adverse effects that are being confirmed by its own monitoring system, but the Government has continued to accept such effects as not being serious. Today’s Judgment again recognizes that it is unlawful for the Government to have added in a qualification to the standard of the European Directive which requires that pesticides are not approved for use until it has been established that there will be “no harmful effect” at all on human health.
Also by the Government allowing acute effects to be considered acceptable it is then also allowing the risk of chronic illnesses and diseases, because the risk of chronic effects developing can increase when acute effects repeatedly occur as a result of long-term cumulative exposures. This has been recognised previously by the European Commission that acknowledged that “Long term exposure to pesticides can lead to serious disturbances to the immune system, sexual disorders, cancers, sterility, birth defects, damage to the nervous system and genetic damage.”

The most common chronic long-term illnesses and diseases reported to me by rural residents include various cancers, leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, ME, asthma and many other medical conditions.

The Judge has concluded that the DVD contained solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health, particularly in relation to acute effects, and that a different approach should have been adopted and accordingly there has been a failure to have regard to material considerations and a failure to apply the European Directive properly.

The crucial evidence I produced for my case in 3 very detailed Witness Statements, shows quite clearly that the Government has knowingly failed to act, has continued to shift the goalposts, cherry picked the science to suit the desired outcome, and has continued to issue grossly inaccurate information and mislead residents and the wider public by continuing to assert that the current regulatory controls in the UK are robust and fully protective and that pesticide spraying is safe. The Government’s response to this issue has been of the utmost complacency, is completely irresponsible and is definitely not “evidence-based policy-making,” and has now been ruled by a High Court Judge to be in breach of European (and UK equivalent) legislation. As I have always maintained from the outset of my campaign this is definitely one of biggest public health scandals of our time. In fact the UK Government’s relentless and extraordinary attempts to protect the industry as opposed to people’s health has been one of the most outrageous things to behold in the last 7 years of my fight. This is especially apparent at the moment as not content with not protecting its own citizens the UK Government has been trying to scupper new European pesticide proposals from having the primary focus on health protection of citizens across Europe, to one of primarily protecting the industry.

Therefore today’s judgment is extremely damaging to the Government, all the Government departments, officials and scientific advisors, responsible for pesticides, as it clearly confirms what I have always said from the outset of presenting my arguments in 2001, that the Government has fundamentally failed to protect people in the countryside from pesticides and has also knowingly allowed residents to continue to suffer from adverse health effects without taking any action to prevent the exposure, risks and adverse impacts occurring.

Of course whilst it is right that the Government as a whole is held responsible and accountable for its unlawful policy and approach, there is no doubt that there are a number of people within Government who have a very key responsibility for presiding over this fundamental failure in duty to protect the public from pesticides and those people should now be sacked with immediate effect. I would like to name just a few of these people. First of all David Milliband who previously held the position as the Secretary of State for DEFRA and who did not see it as necessary to meet with me to even hear the case and arguments presented in relation to residents exposure to pesticides and reported ill-health and neither did Hilary Benn the current DEFRA Secretary of State. Paul Hamey who has been in charge of the exposure assessment at the Pesticides Safey Directorate, since 2001 and has had direct responsibility for the exposure model that has been ruled unlawful in the Judgement today. Kerr Wilson Chief Executive of the PSD, Sue Popple the former director of policy at PSD, and now an official working within DEFRA, Richard Davis, Director of Approvals at PSD and Jon Battershill, the secretariat for the Government’s Committee on Toxicity. And last but by no means least Professor David Coggon who featured heavily in this case as he was the Chairman of the Government’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides between 2000 and 2005 and is now a chairman of another advisory committee, the Committee on Toxicity. Professor Coggon was responsible for introducing the adjective serious to describe the standard of the legislation which has been found to be an error in law in today’s Judgement. He also previously informed me that he only saw 15 minutes out of my 2 hour DVD (the one that the Judge has called solid evidence, and that should have led to the ACP adopting a different approach), as Prof Coggon said it was not good use of his time to watch any more. He has continued to maintain that this is merely a social issue, when the reality is that this is obviously a very serious public health issue.

I would now suggest that the Prime Minister himself sees the evidence I have presented in my case first hand without being told by his advisors that there is nothing wrong as that has been shown today to not be the case and I would urge the Prime Minister to step in and stop his Government from appealing this decision, as the Government should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health of the citizens in this country.

The most important action that must be taken, based on the evidence that adverse effects are occurring, is to prevent exposure for residents and communities by banning crop-spraying around homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas. Considering studies have shown that pesticides can travel in the air for miles then the distance of the no-spray area would need to be substantial.

I hope this Judgment now puts to rest any attempts by various parties to criticize me for what I am doing. I have worked to the highest professional standard in the campaign I have run and have been meticulous with accuracy and attention to detail. With all the unarguable scientific evidence I have amassed over the last 7 years, I would be acting completely irresponsibly if I didn’t do what I do. I should not have had to have spent the last 7 years of my life fighting to get the Government to do something on this when the evidence and arguments I identified were very clear from the outset and the Government should have acted when I first started to present the case in 2001.

Finally, I would like to thank my legal representatives, Michael Fordham QC, Emma Dixon, Derek Sutton and others at Blackstone Chambers, as well as all those at Foresters Solicitors, especially Joe Mensah and Robbie Manson, for all the work and support in this case and for agreeing to work in my very unique way, as I have been directly and fully involved in all preparations relating to this case and its overall management.

I would also like to thank all those who have supported the campaign over the last 7 years, all that support has been invaluable and is what has kept me going in this battle on behalf of all those who have had their health and lives destroyed due to the government’s very own policy.

Some might say that this event presents ‘a new hope’ -

Rev. Dr William Stukely’s image of the serpentine Avebury Complex, published in 1743

From pages of the website, Avebury – A Present from the Past -

Situated in southern England in the county of Wiltshire the village of Avebury is close to two small streams….the Winterbourne and the Sambourne which unite to form the source of the River Kennet. After being re-inforced by a number of springs this beautiful English river rapidly gains in stature as it passes through the North Wessex Downs on its way to Reading where it eventually flows into the River Thames of which it has become the main tributary. The waters of the Kennet therefore pass through London before reaching their ultimate destination in the North Sea.

Around 4,500 years ago, when the site of England’s capital was a thinly inhabited marshland, the area around Avebury almost certainly formed the Neolithic equivalent of a city. By coincidence this waterway has become a link between the two largest cultural centres of their day to have ever existed in the British Isles. As London now contains most of England’s largest buildings Avebury is the location of the mightiest megalithic complex to have ever been constructed in Britain. This henge with its enormous ditch, bank, stones and avenues survives in a much depleted state but the nearby Silbury Hill which is the largest man-made mound in pre-industrial Europe still dominates the surrounding landscape. The two largest surviving British long barrows of West Kennet and East Kennet are also prominent a short distance away and in recent years the remains of two massive palisaded enclosures have also been found. The quote that antiquarian John Aubrey made of Avebury……”it does as much exceed in greatness the so renowned Stonehenge as a Cathedral doeth a parish church” recognises the true importance of what has now been largely absorbed into the modern landscape of Wiltshire. If we could return to the time when the Romans occupied the British Isles it is a sobering thought that we would have to go back as far again to find an Avebury that was already several centuries old.

The history of the modern village is inevitably linked to the prehistoric monuments that surround it. Abandoned for several thousand years the land around the stones became occupied oncemore when people of the Saxon period began to settle in the area. Their arrival and subsequent development of the present village was to have a dramatic effect on the history of the stones. The relationship between the local inhabitants and the monuments has now added an unfortunate dimension to the Avebury story that helps make it one of the most fascinating historical sites to be found in the British Isles if not the world.

It remains a magical place as so many who have been there will agree. A visit to Avebury is a very personal event. It still seems to retain, somehow, the spirits of all those who laboured in its creation or whatever it was that led them to create it. If you have never been there a visit will not be an empty experience. You will come away with a head full of questions and probably a realisation that somewhere over the years modern society has lost something important.

[...]

Trying to successfully solve the riddle of Avebury’s purpose is much of what attracts us to it in the first place. I wonder if it would appeal to us in quite the same way if we knew, beyond doubt, the solution to the riddle. Throughout Europe are many magnificent cathedrals which are equally as awesome in conception, construction and demanding of manpower as anything our Neolithic forefathers have left us. However we know what cathedrals are, how they were built and the motive for building them, but apart from being some of the most wonderful examples of what religious belief can drive us to achieve they contain no mysteries. Avebury, though, in common with all of the many megaliths of the Neolithic period, is something that lies outside of our experience, its purpose still demanding an explanation by our modern, scientific minds. These days my personal attitude towards it is merely one of delight that it exists. I’m certain that the people who built it had a perception of life and sensitivity to nature that is now quite alien to us. I like to imagine that they were also very altruistic, a trait that the love of money has largely eradicated from our modern world. Considering these points I now accept that the 4,500 years of history since has probably rendered us incapable of finding a path that would lead us to the correct explanation of Avebury’s many enigmas. Our minds are now, in a sense, corrupted with such a mass of knowledge that seeing the world through the eyes of the Neolithic people exceeds even our imaginations……We can go a short way but I think their motivation will always remain beyond our comprehension.

It seems amazing to me that we now consider ourselves to be living in the space-age yet we show a total disregard for the awesome beauty of the night sky by first filling the atmosphere with the by-products created by our insatiable desire for power and transport and then floodlighting the resulting pollution with an, often as not, waste of that same power we didn’t need in the first place! We now need to travel to the remote areas of the world to obtain a sense of what our ancestors once took for granted and perhaps appreciate the huge influence the ever-changing and complex sky must have had on their lives. It therefore seems natural to assume that Avebury’s builders would have been motivated to somehow encode all manner of astronomical alignments into their creations and almost impossible to believe that they wouldn’t. In reality, though, any evidence that celestial events were the primary influence on the construction of the megaliths remains elusive. However such evidence isn’t totally absent as rudimentary alignments exist at the coves which are orientated towards the solstices. There can be no great surprise in this for at a time when clocks and calendars didn’t exist the extreme positions of the sun would have been the events that marked out each year for our ancestors. Some researchers claim significant alignments in the inner circles and evidence that lunar cycles have a strong influence on the monuments but with so much missing it is difficult to advance things beyond theories. The trouble with lines is that they all point to something and the number of permutations that can be derived from the positions of celestial objects and the stones at Avebury allow many options for imaginative research!

Despite our assumption that we are something apart from the animal world the ever increasing contamination of the internet is unfortunate evidence that procreation and its attendant activity remains the fundamental force that drives us all. The part it played in the lives of Avebury’s builders must have been no less influential so it would be surprising if there wasn’t a sexual component evident in the enigma they have left behind. Indeed this is an aspect of the monuments that is obviously represented and must be considered as one of the primary motives for their construction.

It has been suggested that Silbury Hill is a representation of the huge pregnant belly belonging to a massive Earth Goddess figure….an idea that seems to fit the general ethos of the monuments.  Quite how the megalith builders perceived death still seems vague….Even including the long barrows its signature on Avebury’s Neolithic monuments remains ill-defined and difficult to interpret.

From the website, retrobhikku

When theorising about Avebury it is very easy to ignore the huge timespan over which the monuments were built and developed. Six hundred years cover the period from the initial building of the Cove in the Northern Inner Circle to the the final form of the henge when the avenues were added. At a time when the average lifespan barely exceeded 40 years it would seem far more likely that Avebury’s construction was a process of evolution rather than the result of some “grand plan” the result of which would never be seen by its conceivers. It can’t be discounted that the henge and avenues may have been “operative” in some rudimentary form ( ie.wooden posts) before being consolidated later by the erection of the stones, but any evidence that this was the case has yet to be found.

Many researchers become consumed by the positions of stones but ignore trying to explain the purpose of the immense ditch and bank which must originally have been truly awesome. It is also easy to ignore the existence of the hundreds of other megalithic structures that were constructed throughout the British Isles during the same period and to view Avebury in isolation. So much of what existed in the Neolithic period has now disappeared but each year pieces of the jigsaw are being rediscovered. Despite its importance amazingly little of the henge has ever been investigated and the surrounding fields must still hold many secrets. There is always the chance that something relating to the monuments might yet be found that dramatically alters ideas about them.

The quest for the “Holy Grail” of solving the Avebury mystery will no doubt continue far into the future as it seems a part of human nature to believe only what we want to believe and no matter how seemingly perfect a solution there will always be those who will remain convinced that it was something else. Each “solution”, convincing or not, though, adds something to our knowledge of Avebury and it will be a sad day if we stop searching for the truth about this wonderful place……. Perhaps the only truth now is that it is what each of us wants it to be and therein will always lie the power it has to capture our minds.

[...]

Whereas Stonehenge has long been one of Britain’s most famous pre-historic sites, Avebury was to remain relatively unknown until recent times. This is easy to understand when one realises that much of the monument we see today had disappeared until Alexander Keiller resurrected it from the obscurity into which time and human behaviour had driven it. Stonehenge has stood upon Salisbury Plain always obvious to the eye and defiant of the weather but Avebury’s magnificence lay hidden, vandalised and ignored. Keiller’s achievement has allowed it to oncemore assume its rightful role as one of the most important ancient sites in the British Isles.

The Ringstone by Moonlight

Whatever drove our ancestors to such stupendous efforts in creating the Avebury monuments is perhaps beyond the understanding of our space-age minds but those of us who are captured by the incredible legacy they have left can share one thing with its creators – it fulfils a need. In a world that forces us along at a pace few of us want to go it provides an escape from the modern madness we have created for ourselves. It reminds us that there was a time, before money was invented and the destruction of the planet began, that we could achieve great things by mutual consent.  We can indulge ourselves in a great variety of theories to explain its mysteries and as such it has become many things to many people, but no matter how diverse our ideas it remains one thing to us all……..a place to dream.

An excerpt from the book, The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor, copied from the website, Son Eagle Metaphysical -

Avebury, on the Wiltshire Downs in the south of England, was the sacred center of megalithic culture in Britain. Avebury’s stone circle is the largest yet found in England. It dwarfs Stonehenge. (There are seventy-seven other stone circles, or henges, dating from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.) Avebury was built by pre-Celtic people, living in a farming community circa 2600 B.C.

For thousands of years before its construction, the entire landscape of the surrounding area, stretching for about 37 miles, had been seen as the outline of the body of the Goddess. Every hill, mound, stone, and long barrow was believed to form part of her maternal body. The three stone circles at the causewayed camp at Windmill Hill nearby predated Aye- bury by more than six hundred years.

Willow-rag tree at Swallowhead Spring, by Graham Harvey

The Avebury monuments, which include Silbury Hill and West Kennet long barrow, form a “condensed sequence of visual sculpted images within the center of the larger and more ancient presence. They express together journeys of cosmic range and the entire yearly agricultural cycle within the space of three fields.”

The monuments are aligned within the “pubic “triangle of two rivers meeting. These rivers were seen as superhuman bloodstreams gushing from the earth womb of the Goddess.

Here, every year anew, the Goddess was born, grew into maiden and lover, became mother, and finally the old hag of death. The temples were her seasonal reality, and the people moved with her from place to place in rhythm with the changing farming year.

Our solar year is divided by solstices and equinoxes, but in the ritual 1 calendar the quarter-days in between were used as the major days and nights of celebration. To the ancients, the lunar and solar manifestations of these days were equally important. The celebration nights fall in early August, November, February, and May on the appropriate lunar phase nearest to the solar quarter-day. These are the witches sabbats of Lammas, Samhain, Imbolc, and Be]tane. At the August (summer) and February (winter) quarter-days/nights the moon and sun rose and set in alignment with the axis joining the two sacred springs at Avebury.

Avebury circle originally had 98 stones, some up to 18 feet high, enclosing an area of 28 acres. Two smaller circles stand within the large outer one. The earthworks surrounding the horseshoe or circular space are bounded by a ditch, with a bank beyond. Using only red-deer-antler picks and shovels made of ox shoulderhlades, the people raised the earth-bank nearly 50 feet above the ditch bottom, stretching almost a mile in circumference.

Two serpentine stone avenues led into the circle. They were 1miles long, 50 feet wide, and were defined by 100 pairs of stones set at intervals of 80 feet. In shape, the stones were broad-hipped and long forms of the Goddess, alive and powerful in her stance.

The Christian church began its long fight against the Avebury stones in 634, smashing them or exorcising them with the sign of the cross. Both inner circles were destroyed sometime after 1700, and many of the other stones were demolished or simply buried. This was at the height of the witch-hunts, and these ritual stones of the Goddess-just like her priestesses, the witches-were actually “tortured”and “exorcized” by Christian priests: the stones were burnt, chipped, mutilated. The institution of private property finally brought about the end of the sacred stones, with the enclosure of common land by private, wealthy farmers. The emergence of the landless proletariat and the modern notion of individual progress at the expense of the community fittingly coincided with the fall of the Great Mother at Avebury.

Of the original stones in West Kennet avenue, 72 were left in 1722; by 1934 only four were still standing, with nine left fallen. In 1937 a Scots industrialist bought up the land, restored the ditch and earthworks (which had been serving as a rubbish dump!), and dug up and reinstalled 43 of the buried megaliths.

The long Avebury avenues represented the bisexual Snake/Dragon Goddess, female and male in one. The West Kennet avenue originated, at the serpent’s tail-end, from the “sanctuary”, once a circular temple-labyrinth of complex timber structures covered with a conical roof. This might have been the puberty temple, where young women of the community were initiated into the mysteries of farming, sexuality, and childbirth in the springtime season of ploughing and preparation of the seed bed. The young women reentered her womb within the sanctuary, which is Silbury Hill at a different season.

Here the Goddess is the hibernating spring-quarter serpent, just reawakening from her long winter death/sleep. On February 1, at lmbolc, the “Feast of Lights” was celebrated, torches carried processionally in the night to help the Goddess return from the underworld and to be reborn again.

At the tail-end of Beckhampton stone avenue, with its more phallic- shaped stones, was the male counterpart to the “sanctuary, doubtless a temple for male initiation.

Avebury circle is where the young women and men met, after dancing and winding their way up the avenues in imitation of the serpent, at midnight of the waxing moon of the May quarter-day. This stone circle forms both an enlarged cunt and a great head, the inner circles forming the lunar and solar eyes. It is also a world island surrounded by the cosmic ocean, and its hidden power and secret is the sacred underground water that seeps into the ditch in the spring. Here the unborn fetuses dwell.

Avebury henge was the Goddess of Love incarnate, the proper place of conception. Here was celebrated the communal yearly May festival- wedding in orgiastic rites, the entire community dancing with upraised arms on the outer banks, in imitation of the horned new moon. This was Beltane.

The maiden becomes a mother, and so the next stage of the cycle was centered at Silbury Hill, the pregnant womb of the Goddess, “the Creation Cone.” Here, as already described, the people gathered on the summit on The Goddess at Avebury in Britain the night of the full moon at Lammas, the August quarter-day/night, to watch the harvest child being born.

With oncoming winter, the Goddess becomes the Lady of the Tombs, the Hag of Death, the Mother of the Dead. Her dwelling is now at West Kennet long barrow, where she retreats into the underworld after Samhain, or Hallowmas. This barrow is 340 feet long and shaped in her gigantic image. The image of the Silbury Mother is repeated within the chambers that represent vagina, birth passage, and uterus-but here is made hollow to receive the dead, who were buried within her in fetal position. The 30 chamber stones of West Kennet might form a lunar monthly count. There is no water associated with this barrow, no spring, no stream; all is dryness and barrenness. There are only rivers of stone.

West Kennet long barrow was built in 3500 B.C. It is a Stone Age horned grave/tomb/womb/temple, and it is older than Avebury and Silbury Hill. The people were buried within it collectively, without distinction of class or hierarchy. It was ritually frequented by the living as well as by the dead.

Megalithic culture is far older than was once supposed. Traces of a megalithic farming community have been found in County Tyrone, Ireland, dating from 4500 B.C. Patriarchal Bronze Age culture was first brought to Britain circa 2000 B.C. by the taller, warlike, and aggressive Beaker people.

In 2600 B.C., the entrance to the West Kennet long barrow was sealed off with huge megaliths (great stones). These stones form the body of an ox. The Goddess was moon and ox, one and bisexual. She is the Ox-Lady. She emerges miraculously out of death through the sacred bull. There was continued veneration of the tomb during late Neolithic culture. On Sam- ham in November-the winter quarter-day-a winter eve ox was sacrificed here on the night of the no-moon. The ox was ridden by the Queen of Death, and this ox is miraculously reborn with the spring.

The Winter Goddess lived on in folk memory as Black Annis. She was remembered as a great mountain builder, and was a gigantic hag. There are also sacred hills in Ireland named for her: the Paps of Annu, or Annu’s Breasts.

Pervading all the earthworks and stoneworks of Avebury was the desire to be close to the earth. The people drew strength from her in birth, in life, and in death. The monuments could clearly not have been built with slave-labor, but were the love-labor of farmers, women and men, who were in tune with great psychic-physical powers. To carry through such a task, they lived a peaceful existence. Perhaps natural magic-energy was released from the earth, and used on an everyday basis by the people.

Ancient myths of the dragon-serpent guarding a mysterious and symbolic treasure perhaps refer to lost secrets of crop fertility-a hidden power running in fertility currents through the countryside. The story goes that anyone who tastes the dragon’s blood becomes at one with nature, and forever understands the songs of birds. Perhaps this is the bloodstream of the Mother gushing from the earth at sacred wells.

The ancients knew that some wells and stones, drunk or touched or embraced in a certain way, and at certain times of the year, could regenerate and revitalize people and animals. Sacred stones seem to contain and emit a force that periodically waxes and wanes. Beneath each “active” standing stone, there appears to be a crossing of underground water streams, The movement of water through a tunnel of earth-particularly through clay soil-creates a small electrical field, for which the stone acts as an amplifier. When this energy/power emerges from the ground, it does so in the form of a spiral ascending in seven coils, the lowest two beneath the ground. This is not a stable phenomenon, but waxes and wanes, changing polarity every month. After waning it dies away for a few days, and then waxes in the opposite direction; it cyclically increases and decreases until the end of the lunar phase.

The study of the moon’s orbit was essential to megalith builders-the people of the moon, the stones, and the Serpent Goddess. The stones might also have functioned as a means of communication over long distances, since the magnetic force that activates the stones also links them in a continuous chain of vibrations. The ley-lines, paths for the force, interlock in a cobweb of stones, circles, mounds, and harrows all over the earth.

But the stone circles would not have been fully activated unless the calendrical events were accompanied by human rituals and dance, sometimes sacrifice, which focused the forces and fixed them in the stones.

Fire, like water, was essential to the workings of the monuments and their hidden power. At May Day/Night was the moment when Beltane fires were lit from hilltop to hilltop, to celebrate the coming of the new moon. On May Day the people drank from the sacred well and circled it nine times.

The May Day sunrise links Avebury in a direct line with Glastonbury Tor some 40 miles away. Glastonbury looks as human made as Silbury Hill, but it was actually shaped by volcanic rock violently thrown into the sky, in an otherwise flat and marshy land. Glastonbury’s spiral path, however, was molded by human hands; it is a three-dimensional labyrinth, rising up the Tor in seven circuits. Nearby is sacred Chalice Well, anciently called “Blood Well” because of its miraculously healing red-stained waters.

Not far from Glastonbury is Wookey Hole, an ancient cave where the rites of the Winter/Death Goddess were probably enacted. According to the myth, in this cave lived a terrible and bloodthirsty “witch” who demanded human sacrifice. She was supposedly finally exorcized by a Christian monk from Glastonbury.

The persistent British myth of the slumbering giant Albion, and the return of King Arthur and the Golden Age, is really the legend of the reemergence of the Goddess and her people, the Great Mother and cosmic harmony we lost with Avebury. Today we live truly in the mythic “wasteland” of patriarchy, awaiting her rebirth and return with the spring of reemerging women cultures.

Brewing storm on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, by Donald Mackinnon

Here is a story told by the Scottish storyteller, David Campbell – courtesy of Christine Stone – that speaks of the childhood places that ground our whole lives:

He was a boy of seven and he lived in his own sweet green glen in the west of Lewis
playing with his companions in the stream
with all his relations about him.

And he thought of the glen as his whole world,
And over and above all was
the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he was only a boy of seven and he didn’t understand when the factor and the sheriff’s officer said that they were to be evicted.

It had no meaning to him, but three weeks later they came back and his parents were taken down and put into a ship, and he himself was taken down and put into the sternsheets of a boat to be rowed to the big ship.

He still didn’t understand.

He thought that surely sometime that evening he would come back to his own green glen
and hear the sound of the surge of the sea.

When they were aboard the ship they were shown their accommodation for the voyage.
It was an area six feet long,
by three feet broad,
by eighteen inches high.

This was for his mother and father, and the same area
Six feet long,
by three feet broad,
by eighteen inches high
for himself and his brother and two sisters.

For six weeks they travelled towards Nova Scotia:
it was a fearful voyage; the sea was rough,
food was scarce.
Many were sick and many died.

But always the boy thought that he would soon be back in his own sweet green glen and hear
the sound of the surge of the sea.

But the ship landed at Nova Scotia and put them ashore.

There was nothing there for them.  They had been told that there would be land there for them to work,
but there was nothing, nothing there for them.

The only offer they had was to work practically as slaves and still the boy thought only of his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

His parents decided to travel onwards into the mainland of Canada, and to walk until they could find a spot where they could build a farm.
And this they did.
They found a spot and built their farm.

And the boy grew up and worked there with them but always while he worked about the farm,
always at the back of his head was the thought of his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

Time passed, time went on and he left the farm and worked at many things,
in the steel mills of America,
on the railways
at anything wherever he went.

But wherever he went and whatever he did,
the dream was there always in his mind that one day he could see again
his own sweet green glen
and hear the sound of the surge of the sea.

But time passed and time passed, and he realised that age was coming upon him.

And still he had not returned to his own sweet green glen
and the sound of the surge of the sea.

At last he gathered what money he could and he made his way after all these years, back to Lewis.

He walked from Stornoway to his own green glen, but when he got there,
everything was changed.

No longer were there companions,
No longer the little black cattle.

The stream still flowed down the hill where as a child he had played.
The glen was still green, but no longer was there laughter of love in the glen.

And he realised that the only thing that he remembered of the glen was the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he realised that all he could do was to make sure that when he died, for now he was an old man, was to make sure that he would be buried there.

He made all the preparations so that he would be buried there in a knoll above his own sweet green glen where he would hear forever the sound of the surge of the sea.

And he sat on the knoll, the little hill above the glen above the sea, before his death and he thought of his childhood and of the time when the ship had taken him
away from his own green glen,
his own island
his own native land.

Hush.  Hush.  Time to be sleeping.