Albion, ancient sites, Art, Books, Don and Wen

Carrot and Coals: Maze…

*

…There is another important thing with these sites which is not always immediately obvious.

It is not a collective thing.

It is not simply a case of visiting each and every site and then resting back with feet raised and head held high basking in the glories of one’s achievement. It is a living thing.

Each subsequent visit reveals more.

A wider scope: a deeper understanding… more questions, inevitably… many of them unanswerable, probably.

It is nice too, and I feel it is appreciated although by what or by whom I do not know, when one elects to take other people there; when one acts as something of a guide… but then again it is also exciting to explore a new site, along with someone else who is new to it…as in the case of Arbor Low…which is a henge and one of the most important sites of Central England which we are now calling Mercia.

Situated at the centre of the high limestone ridges that skirt Middleton Common on a slight northern slope it is over 1200 feet above sea level and grants panoramic views of the horizon which includes Morridge Moor to the West, Taddington Moor to the North as well as both Stanage Edge and White Edge to the east. In a word: stunning, as most if not all of these kinds of site are.

As if by prior arrangement Wen and I walk around opposite ridges of the henge and meet up at the mound which Wen insists on calling a maze because of its positioning and similarity to the maze at Maiden Castle.

There is a mirroring of the horizon hills in the contours of the henge though doubtless this the archaeologists would put down to a combination of weathering and fancy.

Be that as it may such sites as a microcosm to the macrocosm of the wider landscape are too frequent an intimation to be accidental and such intimations lend weight to the inherent magic of this and the other places we have visited.

The magical theory of correspondence could quite easily have be born from considering such structures…

*

5 thoughts on “Carrot and Coals: Maze…”

  1. This is beautiful, and so true too. If something is worth looking at, and few things are ultimately not so, then they seem to bring up more and more questions and they beckon to us to return to perhaps glean the answers. Even if we do not come up with the specific answers for these sites, they lead us on a deeper meaning in our questions. Are we perhaps asking the correct questions, and would the responses to those questions have changed over time as a new generation came forth, or perhaps a whole new people from other lands. Was there a blending of the people from the land and the other lands? What other things happened in their brief stay on this earth? There is so much I wonder if we will ever truly really know. We can all, of course, theorize, but is what we come up with truth? This is great writing. Thank you one and all.

    Liked by 2 people

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