On BELAS KNAP I sat down...

An old one, but a recent visit prompted me to post it here:

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Belas Knap (GLO1) lies on a gentle hill-slope overlooking a steep-sided river valley. The name is derived from the Old English words bel meaning a beacon and cnaepp meaning a hilltop. It displays many of the classic features of Cotswold-Severn long barrows and is often seen as a type-site for examples with lateral chambers.  The wedge-shaped mound is over 50m long and stands nearly 4m high; it is orientated north-south. At the north end is a deep forecourt between two rounded horns, and in the back of the forecourt is an H-shaped setting of stones, perhaps the remains of a portal dolmen. The ditch that seems to define the sides of the mound is a product of reconstruction work during the 1930s; the bank of soil and stones outside the ditch is in fact material that has weathered off the top of the mound.

Timothy Darvill. Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (2004:262) 

On Belas Knap I sat down

For I felt in need of some sacred ground

And I had no strength in my ragged soul

And for me the nonetide bell had ceased to toll

And so to Belas Knap by the withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

For I’d lost my way in Bethlehem

And I’d bartered my name to Rome

And the body of god was a dry wafer crisp

And my soul felt as cold as stone

And the book in my hand had lost is voice

And the altar candles their flame

And the blood had turned to cheap red wine

And the world had lost your name.

Then I heard it in the earth

And I felt it in the air

And the crowing of the birds above

An older voice laid bare.

The spilling of a wilder blood

The beat of shaman drum

The smell of earth and woody moss

The cycles of the sun.

And its…

1 for the man who counts our bones

2 for the woman who carries our souls

3 for the man who reads the stones

4 for the woman who flies with the crows

5 for the man who rides the moon

6 for the man who catches the dream  

And the primal drum beat pulses

Through the veins of every leaf

As before the Christ and devil danced

To the frozen music of our creeds

The Alpha and Omega busts out of Palestine

No longer held by cultures

No longer bound by time.

And so to Belas Knap I came

And kindled there a dying flame

And as I sat on ancient ground

It was an older God I found

As in the shade of a withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

THEOLOGIA

I have never sought a transcendent God,

nor one that sat on sovereign heights above angel wings

on sceptred thrones or in hallowed vaults

that echoed with eternal hymns.

For I have sought

only one,

who

would come and sit with me
and drink tea from a china cup

one velvet, late-summer's afternoon

when shadows stretch across evening lawns.

And who, smiling, would balance

a bumblebee on the tip of his finger

and clap his hands at a stranger's joke.

Music written and performed by Helen  Ingram

What is THAT whispered on the WIND...

... by the stone rings of Avebury?


Deep echoes like the oceans' storm-bells tolling, chiming soft against the flesh of my soul.


Strange music that plays along the wide sweep of downland ridge and makes my heart beat faster. Perhaps our paths are really guided by songways; ancient music, as gold as the dawn mist, that sing to our hearts and call us back to our first roots in this rolling landscape of flint and chalk and wide skies.



Is that what takes us out of the town and out from the urbanity of life; out of the valleys and on to the downs? This way of song that threads its path through the wildness of wind and sheep and histories that are no longer told. Is that what brings me back to this place of deep echoes of the soul?

So what is that whispered on the wind by the stone rings of Avebury?


Where, Tibetan-like, coloured ribbons fly upon ancient branches and prayers swim upon the air. At owl-time when the badger prowls, does God, with steaming breath and earth-stained hands, stand beneath this tree and let these prayers run through his fingers? Perhaps, he too is touched by their hope. That we may follow the laughter on wilder winds.

An audio version of this post

The SCENT of God

I went down to that damp green place of churned earth and nettle beside the cow pasture and the rectory; the bleached wood of the little kissing gate glistening and greasy to the touch. I had not seen for a long time such a profusion of watery green in that shoulder-high, wild, profligate, tangle of undergrowth; as prodigally abandoned and as sensual as a lifted skirt. 

The rain fell as it had for so long and still its joy was undiminished. To stand there, in the midst of this writhing, dank fecundity was a joy too... 

... to feel the rain on my hands and wrists, leaching up round my cuffs, as I brushed the delicate parasols of the cow parsley, covering my fingers with those little black specks and tiny insects and pollen

... to draw dripping fingers across the scimitar blades of weeping grass and to slide them up the firm plantain stems and over their glistening heads 

... to feel the thrill of the first hot kiss of nettle as I swept my hands through the green depths of their feathery enchantment and traced, with my finger, the snaking lace-work of silvery trails of slug and diffident snail.   

Perhaps it was the proximity of the rectory... Perhaps it was the sweet scent of cows' breath and soil on the air... Perhaps it was just because I was alive and human, but I found myself thinking... 'if God has a scent what would it be?'

I have lived long enough to know that for some it is the cloud of incense and candle wax that anoints the altar. For others it is of brimstone and the refiner's fire...

I thought I smelled it once, in a small welsh chapel, washed with winter sunlight, with wooden floors and the scent of old hymnals and dust. 

But standing there in that riotous wilderness of life, I realised all those were too dry. The scent of God must be vibrant and living and wet; like the scent of sex; like the scent of birth; ... like .... like ... the scent of rain cascading from nettle to dock leaf and of fungus growing on decaying wood...

... and I set out, once more, to follow that rill of laughter across these friendly hills.