Sacred Places

a novel by
Stephen Page

Chapter 1: A Sacred Place Called Home

She was heavy, close to death. The weight of

life, though lessening, was more than made
up for by the dead weight of her physical
form. The spirit, thought the elder male,
becomes heavy in the struggle to leave the
body. Such a thought would cross the mind
of most of his descendants, as they
approached or were confronted with death.
Evolution would not prepare any of them for
the inevitable end. All journeys come to
an end, and duration, the elder male knew,
was no measure of significance.

The long journey had taken them across the

great forests toward the sacred waters where
the sun met the sky. It was many days trek
from their usual hunting grounds. It was a
special journey, only undertaken at a time of
need and this usually meant death or
sickness. The trees were beginning to
wither, the light was leaving the world and at
this time of the cycle the girl would not
survive to see the new Sun. There was little
hope; the elder male had seen too many
times the way in which the little ones had
become sick, weakened and then died. The
best course was to travel toward the lair of
the sun, to chance that proximity to the
Goddess might return life to her cold body.

It was a ritual that would echo through the

ages, whenever there was an untimely
death. In the elder male’s gene pool, there
would be many more that would not survive,
more than would grow to maturity. To
continue the line. He would be proud if he
could see the ever extending line of DNA,
evolving and changing but unbroken across
ten thousand years. Proud and humbled
perhaps, to know that he was loved by the
gods, charmed even. His desires had not
been wasted. It would have been a heavy
burden to have foreknowledge of those that
would die, as one major difference to evolve
in time would be the changing emphasis
from death to life. Death was the elder
male’s constant companion, from birth to
maturity and in his twenty or so Winters lay
the knowledge that death would give
comfort, especially when it was a good death
on sacred ground. For three days now, they
had seen the signs, keenly observed the
stars, watched for the confirmation of their
expected arrival, observed the rituals and
the rites. At one point they had seen a hind
cross their path, a prized trophy on their
hunting grounds, but here just as valuable as
a symbol of their coming; and though they
were forbidden to hunt in the sacred
grounds, still they were fed on the
knowledge that their arrival would be
welcomed.

If the half-wolf came back with small game,

in the sacred grounds this was a cause for
ritual feasting, once the sun was shrouded in
night. The Goddess would always provide.
The half-wolf must have come directly from
the Goddess, it was the reason they were
alive to make this journey; it could sense
danger where the group saw nothing, and it
was never far from their side. It was a
hunter and a protector, a talisman and the
group’s most valuable, and mysterious,
member.

The last trek day was marked by special

moments, when the group gathered and
gave their most heartfelt attention to the
sacred rites of their coming. There were
seven of them, three young men, the elder
male, and three females. The child’s mother
had not survived her birth, and was already
interred in the sacred ground, brought here
many cycles before. There was a
recognition, in the females particularly, of
the land that they knew only from these brief
moments of return; and it was not long
before they came to the place which they
sought.

It was a solitary location, stripped of trees,

but recognisable by the cairn of stones and a
circle made from the upended roots of great
oaks. The waters nearby were still and quiet,
as the river widened in a great bend around
the water meadows, land fertile through the
action of the river in its cycle. The elder
male knew what he must do, as he rested
the child from her long journey, lowered from
his strong back to the ground. Her breath
had grown slow, almost ended, but she had
reached the sacred ground and would
therefore sleep undisturbed.

Reaching into his carry pouch, he asked the

oldest female which of the objects he held
would be appropriate. She listened to her
heart, then pointed at a stone tool, that
would enable the earth to be broken in the
way that was passed down. The males
helped him, scraped away the soil as he
broke the ground, while the young females
ululated and gave voice to their deepest
fears, watching all the time for a sign that
their journey would end with renewal rather
than death.

The soil became red as the cut into the earth

deepened. The females gathered branches
of dry leaves, sage and wild hops, which
made a soft resting place for the girl. These
were special herbs, when they grewin the
sacred ground. At first it was a shallow
resting place, just deep enough for the girl to
be in the embrace of the Goddess. The elder
male went to his place at the water, to ask
the goddess to take back what she had
given, and to give again. This was for him a
moment of great privilege, and a time when
his rank within the group was most in
evidence. For he knew the rituals, handed
on through the females and would pass them
down to one of the younger males when it
was time.

When he returned from his vigil at the waters

edge, the girl had indeed passed through
from this world. He was glad that they had
arrived in time for her death to be close to
the goddess. In the rite of burial, he placed a
bead necklace on her wrist to mark the
maturity she had not lived to see. It had
been her mother’s, would have marked her
reaching maturity and there were no other
eligible females that would have need of the
amulet. She would take it with her to the
other world, and would show the spirits that
she was of an age to bring renewal and this
would bring good things to the group after
the cold had passed.
 ***

In another time, the same rituals would be

honoured by a different people, that came to
this land when it was no longer sacred, but
was held in common on the edge of a small
market town. It was a stretch of land that
flooded in the Spring, and though fertile was
only good as grazing for cattle. Although the
land had lost its old ritual significance, it had
not lost its draw for people from the town, as
a place to escape the dreariness of harsh
lives lived without certainty that the Goddess
could and would provide. Some of these folk
carried in their genes the line that went back
to the burials by the bend in the water, with
the ochre soil and the offerings of a bead
necklace or a stone tool. They would have
been amazed, to know they had been here
before, in another time and with other
memories. But some of them knew, secretly,
that they were in the right place and the
right rituals would bring comfort in death.

Like the woman Maggie, who scattered her

husband’s ashes from the spur of land, just a
few feet over the grave of the little girl,
whose beaded necklace would be found by
her son Tom when he was digging on the
Common. For Maggie, it was the most
natural thing in the world to bury her
wedding ring at the root of a living oak, for it
was life, not death, that she was drawn to.

When she talked of her husband Ned to her

son Tom, as they walked together on the
Common, it was as if she were passing on
the knowledge of the departed elder to a
younger male, chosen that he would pass on
the knowledge down his own line. His
memories were becoming displaced by what
he had heard, he had been so small when his
father died. Tom came to feel he knew the
man that was his father from these walks
with their dog, Jig, on the Common. Ned’s
dog Jig, whose ashes had one day joined
Ned’s when he too passed through into the
arms of the Goddess.

In the scattered gene pool of the ancient

elder, there were many scions, and many
lines that ended without fruit. But there
were some that had never wandered far from
the Eastern forests, though the forest had
mostly disappeared in the intervening time.
There were those whose tracks across the
common followed other marks made before
them and whose feet would fit most perfectly
the shapes made by more ancient steps.

There was a moment when these worlds

connected, came face to face and the gulf
between shrank to nothing. In that Summer,
Tom and his friends uncovered the ancient
girl’s burial, along with three other graves
and the unusual ritual burial of a dog. They
had found a small human skull while making
a ramp for their bicycles. Scared at first,
they found the small bead necklace, and
suddenly they faced the dilemma about what
they should do next. Tom quickly became a
natural leader, recognizing at once the
importance of the bracelet from the books he
had read in his father's library, which fed
Tom's thirst for knowledge. And his thirst for
a glimpse of his father.

Right from the beginning Tom felt like he was

a detective, and everything he knew came
into play, so they were careful not to
contaminate what they called the crime
scene. One of them was courageous enough
to wait while the others took the bracelet to
the small town museum, as proof that they
weren’t just telling boy’s tales. Things were
never quite the same. Tom’s mum, Maggie,
became proud of her son’s maturity, the way
he dealt with the press interest, with local
civic interest and especially the interest Tom
himself showed in the work of the
archaeologists who descended on the town.

In the beginning it was a news story, local at

first but briefly reaching a tiny slot on the
National 6 o'clock news. Press interest was
followed by academic interest from across
the world and in no time Tom was e-mailing
interested specialists and amateurs alike.
Maggie encouraged him to be serious in his
approach to his new interest, and reminded
him sometimes of how like his father he
seemed, and how proud she was.

Maggie liked James, the young chief

archaeologist who showed a genuine interest
in this enthusiastic 11 year-old. He showed
Tom what was happening to the finds as the
investigations progressed and answered his
questions properly and without dismissing
his naive imaginings. When Tom asked
whether he was related to the group, James
credited Tom with planting the idea of
genetic tests. James didn't seem like other
adults he encountered. He seemed to know
so much about his subject, and took a delight
in answering Tom's questions.

As the dig progressed Tom spent more and

more time reading the books in his father's
library, realising there was enormous overlap
between the dig, and his father's long-held
interests. Maggie allowed him to read some
of his father's diaries, which in themselves
formed part of a larger detective story. At
the center of it lay not a murder or a sinister
plot, but a journey undertaken 25 years
before, when his father had followed his
instincts and traveled across a thousand
years of history from Wales to East Anglia.
The story became his mother's story, his own
story. The man at the heart of it had not
lived to see his son grow to the edge of
manhood, and before Tom's discovery on the
Common he did not appreciate the extent to
which his father still lived on in the hearts of
his family. Tom's sisters, the Twins
Madeleine and Frances, remembered the
man that Tom could only see in books and
come to life through his mother's stories.

When they came back for Christmas from

university, they remarked to Maggie how
much he had grown since they had been
away, and when they walked on the Common
they did not need a dog to conjour a sense of
their father back to them all. The site of the
dig was still roped off whilst it was prepared
to be buried forever, something Tom's dad
would have approved of, Tom thought, when
he reflected on his father's sense of the
sacred. There was a short ceremony planned
for Christmas Eve, when many of the
townsfolk came out of curiosity to see for the
last time the graves which had become
famous throughout the modern world. Few
of those present fully appreciated, like Tom,
what these first inhabitants of the river valley
had revealed about their life. It was not a
religious ceremony, but something written by
the archaeologists themselves, and James
used the opportunity of almost everybody in
one place together to reveal something he
had not expected.

James did not think to find any kind of link

between the townsfolk and the graves on the
Common, but he was amazed when there
wasn’t just one match, but a whole harvest
of them. Matches to the MDNA, the
mitochondrial DNA carried through the
female line, identified in the girl, and found
to be present in at least six of the towns
current inhabitants; including Maggie. He
explained this at the culmination of his
speech, which had been written before he
got the confirmed results. He read a short
poem which he said spoke more profoundly
than he could about the people uncovered by
Tom on the Common. Tom noticed James
looked at Maggie when he read the last lines
of the Poem, with a tenderness Tom sensed
his father would have approved of. Tom did.
He hoped James would still come to visit long
after the archaeologists and the press had
gone. Maggie just smiled, and gripped her
son’s hand ever so tightly.

Maggie’s family had always lived in the town,

and now Tom knew for sure what she meant
by ‘home’. Though Ned his father had
walked from out of the West to find his love
match, contributing his own gene pool to the
local mix, Tom began to feel that he really
belonged in the sacred place they called
home.

Chapter 2: Inheritance

I am now the same age as my father when

he began his journey from the West to the
East, his walk towards the Sun. Where at
journey's end he found my mother, his great
love, and his destiny. I did not know my
father then; I was just three when he died.
Although he lives on in my blood, in my
heart, and in my thoughts, there is little
consolation in this. My mother has just
explained to me his wishes for me when I
reached this age, and what my father
required of me if I was to follow in his
footsteps. She spoke to me in his library, a
room that had changed little since he had
left it for the last time. It was at the back of
the house, leading to the garden through
French doors, and was always bathed in light
and warmth with the slightest sun.

"Tom, you've known for many years that this

was to be your inheritance, this room and
these books. Your father's all too brief life-
time of study, his library and his notebooks.
He made me promise I would do this just as
we are doing it, as close to your 21st
birthday as possible, but only when you had
finished the first phase of your studies. That
moment has come."

She stood up and walked over to the large

cupboard, and I noticed that for the first time
the key was in the lock. It was a room full of
books from floor to ceiling, but this was the
only covered bookcase and I had never seen
inside it. Even as a curious child the location
of the key was a secret I had never
discovered, the reason plainly obvious to me
now because I could see the chain which my
mother had always worn like a charm around
her neck, the silver chain I had always
assumed ended with a locket was in fact the
place closest to her heart - and furthest away
from my childish fingers. If my father had
intended the sensation of theatricality, then
it was a masterpiece.

"The key is now yours, and yours alone. Your

father wished it so, but when you were ready
and not before. He wanted you to understand
him only when you were old enough to
appreciate what he had been seeking for so
many years. Even I do not know the whole
significance of the contents of this cupboard,
beyond the fact it contains his papers. And
his most precious volumes, many of which
are rare and irreplaceable. For me, it has
been enough that I was entrusted with this
task, the culmination of your upbringing, it
has symbolised his life and kept for me his
memory present in the House. I'll never leave
this place, because I still feel his presence in
every room, filled with memories of our time
together and the precious love we held for
each other. It's not a shrine, but something
living inside of me."

She stepped back a pace, as if to symbolise

the passing to me of the key. I placed my
hand against the dark wood of the cabinet,
caressed it as if it were my father's cheek.
Something told me this was not the time to
open it, and when I caught my mother's
glance, I could see there were tears close to
the surface. Instead of turning the key, I
crossed the room and embraced her. She
held me tight, with a sob that was half a sigh,
and we remained like that for many minutes.

"Let's have a drink." she pushed her hair

away from her face, and as if to break the
spell she opened the door to the hall where
the dog lay patiently beneath a large
engraving that almost filled our view.

"Come on, I've bought something special for

the occasion."
It was the first time I had drunk champagne
alone with my mum,, and somehow that in
itself seemed to make me feel older. We
stood in the kitchen and toasted my father, a
third person in the room. Maggie had already
put something in the Rayburn to cook slowly,
and delicious smells filled the House. As we
chinked our glasses, it was as if she suddenly
felt naked, and before we took a drink she
insisted I should fetch the key, that up until a
few moments before had been around her
neck.

"You mustn't ever lose this," she said,"you

must keep it like I have, never leave it
unattended, even now."

It was like a talisman, and I marvelled at the

fact I had never known the significance of
that slender chain. She took it from me one
last time, and placed it over my head, the
cold metal against my skin as she tucked it
inside my shirt. I didn't flinch at such a
motherly act, which somehow signified a
change in our relationship. I no longer
seemed the child she had fussed over all
those years, and as the bottle slowly
emptied, we talked of the man I had never
known except through the memories of my
mother and sisters.
"Ned would be proud of you. I suspect he
always wanted to study in the way you have
been able, although when he was your age,
he was already on the road. When we met,
all those years ago."

I could see them in my imagination, I already

knew much of what she was telling me, but I
let her speak and just listened as she
recalled first meeting the man whose
children she was to bear. I had already asked
all of the questions there were to ask, when
as a child I would insist she told me again of
all the wonders to be seen at those
gatherings in a field beside the church at
Barsham. It was said to be an ancient
gathering place, and the Romany horses
were still traded then as they had been for
perhaps thousands of years.

Maggie never tired when speaking of those

days, when it seemed that the whole world
arrived in this out-of-the-way place. Ned was
a musician, and like many others at the time,
he sensed the need to find his way to the
extraordinary spectacle that was the Bungay
Horse Fair. To say it was a hippie gathering
was not to do it justice, it was more like a
pilgrimage to which like-minded people
found themselves drawn. Music was a central
part of the fair, as was so much more besides
- people still talked about the one-legged
London banker who spent the whole three
days wearing nothing but a loincloth, his only
possession his begging bowl. It was a
medieval fair in an authentic sense, many of
the people may have been stoned out of
their minds, but for three days the world
stopped at the entrance to the field. There
was never any violence and naked children
with their parents' names and location
scrawled in felt tip on their back, just in case
they got lost, roamed like wild things. It was
a wild but extraordinarily peaceful time, long
before Glastonbury became a rite of passage
for the young.

I was still in awe of the beauty captured in

photographs which remained hidden away in
that special place my mother reserved for
her memories. She still had friends in the
town with whom she shared memories of
those days, though I was sure she had kept
her beauty when others of her generation
had just grown older. I too still had by friends
in the town, and if we happened to be
drinking with their parents, at some point the
conversation would turn back 20 years, and I
would be reminded that nobody forgets a
musician. Not in this small town at least.

My own memories wandered as Maggie

spoke, but they returned suddenly to the
present when she started to speak directly
about Ned, something she rarely did these
days. Perhaps it was the alcohol, perhaps the
sense of a burden relieved. As she prepared
the last of the vegetables for our meal, she
suddenly put down the knife and spoke to
me in a way that was both strange and
familiar. "Promise me just one thing, Tom.
That you will take care when you follow your
father's footsteps, which I know you will
surely do. Don't allow yourself to become
obsessive, as I know your father did. We only
had 10 years together, but that was a
lifetime - how we loved each other. How
much more - "

her voice trailed off as she stopped herself

from daring to contemplate an alternate
history for herself.

She changed the subject deftly, as if the

readiness of the dinner had sounded a gong.

"Did I tell you that James comes back this

weekend?"

I had been so absorbed in myself I had

neglected to ask whether he was going to be
here at tall during my stay.

"He's been working on a dig in

Northumberland, but he's popping back for a
few days at the end of the week. I know he
will want to see you, and to congratulate you
on finishing your degree. You will be here,
won't you you, Tom?"

Of course I would. Nothing would tear me

away from my father's bookcase, and next to
my family James was the most important
person in my life. He shared my mother's
bed, and if not her whole heart then a major
part of it. I was not surprised they had never
lived together, for besides the fact he spent
so much time scraping soil from the ground
on his endless round of digs, they were both
too independent to try settling down again.

They both had children from previous

partners, and although James's wife was still
living it was Maggie he loved. I loved him,
too - almost like a father. My mother always
said It was me that brought them together,
when I had stumbled upon the neolithic
graves on the common. All of our lives had
been changed. It was natural I should study
anthropology after meeting James, as well as
reading the books in my father's library on
the open shelves. I would open the book-
case the following morning, getting up before
my mother was awake and much earlier than
a recently graduated student we be expected
to be about. I was excited, of course, and
when I stepped into my father's library the
sun had barely risen. The key towas smooth
and silent in the lock, and I noted Maggie had
cleared the desk of her papers as if in
recognition that the whole room had become
mine. I turned the key, then without opening
the door, sat in my father's chair to soak up
the atmosphere.

I was quite familiar with the books on the

open shelves, because they had been my
companions my whole life. I began to take
them much more seriously after the
discovery of the graves on the common, and
over the last three years they had become
an essential part of my university life. I had
even added a number of volumes, not only
books for my course but the beginnings of
my own library, reflecting the range of my
own growing interests.

On the open shelves I had become familiar

with the classics of anthropology and
archaeology as well as a great many works
which most people would categorise as new-
age books, some of which covered themes
considered less than academic. There was a
complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary
from the 1950s, long before the great work
would become a CD Rom available in every
branch library. I had found this an invaluable
tool when it came to research, as if the
language I took for granted had a secret
foundation from which it drew deeper
meanings. There was a Complete third
Edition of the Golden Bough, in what I felt
was pride of place, at a focal point in the
room but within reach of the ancient wooden
revolving chair at which I now sat.

My father's ordinary diaries were stacked in

small piles at the ends of shelves acting as
informal bookends. I had read bits of some of
these, searching always for something of the
man behind this room. He had always eluded
me, although sometimes I would come
across a paper bookmark with notes in his
handwriting. Through scraps of paper like
this, and as I learned more about the
subjects they covered, I learned much more.
I even began to interpret their context in the
room, and through the references and
connections they made seemed to gain some
access to his thinking. It was just like a
practical exercise in my chosen discipline,
piecing together from cultural artifacts, layer
analysis, and locational context the one thing
that doesn't survive in the archaeological
record - what a man thinks, and the meaning
he attaches to the world.

After about 20 minutes I felt prepared

enough to actually open the cupboard and
begin to explore its contents.I had
speculated for so long about the contents of
the locked cupboard, I had become almost
certain I would be disappointed when
eventually I came to know what lay within.
Maggie knew something of what I should
expect, but aside from my father's private
papers and some rare antiquarian books, I
really had no idea.

Perhaps this accounted for my hesitation.

Much of what I knew about my father I had
learned from the mouths of others, from
tales retold by members of the family, and
sometimes by people who had known him in
the context of the fairs. My studies had
begun to teach me the value of taking time
in assessing the evidence of the senses,
whether in a field situation, in a museum
store-room, even between the boards of a
book.

Context was everything, and if there was

something important inside the cupboard, I
wanted to be sure I saw it for what it was,
what made it different, and therefore I
wanted to be certain I knew the Room before
I opened the cupboard. There was a half-
familiar scraping at the door, which I
recognised at once. She had slept that night
at the bottom of my bed, as she always had,
but when I had woken early she had simply
half-opened one eye and I thought, went
back to sleep. Two-step was the great-great-
granddaughter of Ned's dog, Jig, and in spite
of the fact I had spent the last three years as
an occasional student visitor, she always
greeted me like I was a Prince returning from
a hunt. I was about to go to the cupboard,
but instead I went to the door and she
slipped quietly in.

"hello, girl." straightaway she made for the

desk, and placed herself quietly on the little
rug which would place her at my feet when I
sat down. She wasn't normally quite so
attentive, but then I supposed she had been
used to Maggie using this room, and I didn't
mind the company. I went straight over to
the cupboard, and with a pair of eyes peering
up at me, I tentatively opened Pandora's box.
A strong smell of camphor greeted my nose,
and the comforting smell of old books. My
first impression was how tidy the cupboard
was, a thought I reprimanded myself for
thinking. Why shouldn't it be tidy? It was also
not as full as I imagined, all of the shelves
had some contents, but it wasn't stuffed full,
which made me wonder immediately if there
were some order to the contents which
required the luxury of space.

On the bottom shelf, singularly separate, was

a small Black metal box which I recognised
as an old-fashioned document box. There
was a small key in the lock, and I
straightaway bent to reach for the box, only
to be surprised at its weight. It was locked,
and the key was attached by a small wire to
the brass handle. Of course, it was a fireproof
document box, and although its weight was
surprising, somehow I knew it was the box
itself and not the contents that accounted for
the weight.

I pushed it back fully on to the shelf, and

examined the rest of the shelves. On the top
shelf, there was nothing but a brown paper
bag containing a brand new paperback. At
least, it would once have been brand new, in
fact the receipt was still in the bag. It had
never been read or even opened. I looked at
the title, The Old Straight Track, a book I
knew already from my studies. It had been
out of print for some time, having been
originally first published in 1925, and had
been the cause of much controversy ever
since.

I left the book in the bag on the shelf, and

examined the shelf beneath. If I had any idea
what to expect, this was more like it, and a
neat row of leather-bound books, all slightly
different sizes, included works by Tacitus and
Herodotus and other ancient histories. Mostly
Victorian, some contained paper bookmarks
which I took care not to disturb. One or two
were in the original Latin or Greek, mostly
they were reputable translations.
On the next shelf, once more there was a
single volume on its side, but this time it was
much larger and far from being new or
unread. It was in remarkably good condition
for its age, marked at the bottom of the
typically wordy title page, the Latin numerals
translating quickly to 1676. This was a book I
had been aware of but had never studied,
because it was famously dismissed as the
least accurate history of Britain ever written,
Brittannia Antiqua Illustrata. Its full sub-title
was the History of the Britons from the
Phoenetians to the present day, and its
principal interest to historians lay in the
remarkable engravings rather than the text,
for which its author, Aylett Sammes, was
regarded as a plagiarist at best, and a
charlatan at worst. It contained some very
interesting genealogies of the Saxon Kings,
most of them tracing their lineage back to
Noah. It's too easy to be critical of a time
when it was believed that the age of the
Earth (according to the Bishop of Usher)
could be identified by careful biblical reading
to around 4004 BC.

In spite of its inaccuracy, or perhaps because

of it, I knew this to be a rare and valuable
book which many universities would be
proud to own. It famously contained the first
imaginative rendering of what the Druids
looked like, the first of its 20 or so
engravings. Of course, this was entirely
speculative, but later writers had been
influenced by the depiction and description
of Druids by the author, including reputable
scholars like Stukeley, the first person to
catalogue the stone circle at Avebury, which
of course was attributed at the time like
Stonehenge to the Druids. I turned to the
engraving, stunning in the quality of its
workmanship, and thought how like Gandalf
the Grey it seemed. Perhaps I shouldn't have
been surprised that Hollywood [or was it
Auckland?] would have done its research,
however inaccurate.

There was a sealed letter tucked into the

front of the volume. It was typewritten, but
the signature was in ink. I read it with
trembling hands.

Dear Tom,

If you are reading this, then you have come

of age, and you are about to inherit my
papers. All things being equal, as my wife
and executor, your mother Maggie will have
placed this letter where you have found it,
although she does not know its contents.
There were other letters she could have
placed here, but because I had time to plan
for my end, I also had the time to consider
numerous options. We had time to consider
them together. The other letters will have
already been destroyed.

I insisted to Maggie that you should only

receive this letter, and the associated
papers, if she felt certain that you were fit
and ready to receive them. Other
arrangements had been made in the event
you would not be up to the task I shall
outline for you, because there are others in
the world that hold the same interests as I
did, some of whom you may well meet in due
course. I do not pretend that your inheritance
is of any significant material value, although
its importance will be for you and others not
yet born to decide. Do not accept at face
value what you see before you, but allow
time and personal experience to weigh it in
the balance.

The purpose of this letter is firstly to express

my love for you above all things, which I am
unable to tell you in person for reasons which
you will be painfully aware. There is nothing I
can say that will recompense for what we
have both missed, and I do not have any
illusions that this letter can make amends. In
some respects, what I leave to you is not so
much a legacy, but a responsibility which you
are perfectly entitled to refuse to accept.
My request to you is that you complete the
work I started, and which only a son could
complete in the way his father would have
wished. I believe it to be true that the blood
tie between father and son is in itself sacred,
similarly between mother and daughter.
Although we have been born in different
times, and into a rapidly changing world, we
are linked through our common blood, and
this gives me the hope that you will accept
my charge with some sense of purpose
because you are my son and I was your
father.

Read the notebooks in the box carefully, in

the order you find them, before you make
any judgments. It is my hope you will follow
some of my own journey, because it is
important you are yourself equipped to
complete what I was unable to finish. Maggie
will give you as much support as she can, but
remember the task is yours, and you should
not - you must not - burden her with details,
particularly where they will cause pain. You
must decide, and the choices you make will
never be straightforward. A small amount of
money was invested at my death with the
plan that you could be free for a short time of
the financial concerns that I always had, so
you can undertake what you will have to do.
Use this wisely, but do not think that this is a
test. My guidance is limited, and although
important, you are completely free of
constraints, except those you impose on
yourself.

It is with much pride that I sign this letter

from your loving father

Ned

I read and re-read my father's letter over and

over. I don't think I had expected to have
such contact, and it was a little
overwhelming. On the one hand, this was
someone I knew intimately, but always
filtered through the medium of others. Here
he was addressing me directly, and this was
the first time.

It underlined as well, if I needed it, the extent

to which my father had in mind a purpose for
me, planned when I was just a child, and my
mother must have been very much part of
his planning. I did not feel I had been
forcefully guided by my mother's hand over
the years, and whilst she had clearly known
something of my father's plans, there were
things she had not been told - or perhaps
was not to be told. I found this both
intriguing and slightly disturbing, because I
had always believed they knew everything
about each other, but my mind kept going
back to the instruction in my father's letter
that there would be things I would have to
decide whether my mother should be told.

I had never consciously kept anything from

Maggie, and I did not relish the prospect of
keeping things from her now. In truth, I did
not understand what my father meant by his
instruction. I hoped it would become clear
from the rest of the papers. In the document
box,there were a dozen or so modern A5
notebooks all similarly bound in brown
leather. They were plain except for an
embossed symbol of a circle with an
spreadeagled figure, similar to Leonardo da
Vinci's vitruvian man. It may just have been
a decoration enabling the owner to recognise
which way up be book should be opened, and
I was familiar enough with da Vinci's image
to see it was not a straightforward
reproduction of this. Each volume had a wire
clasp keeping it shut, and each volume had
been sealed with wax. The impression from
a seal ring marked each one, no-one, not
even Maggie, would have seen the contents
of these notebooks since my father's death.

On the shelf immediately above the

document box, there were several cardboard
tubes such as you would store larger papers
you did not wish to fold, and sure enough
when I popped open one of the tubes, it
contained small scale Ordnance Survey
maps, 4 inches to 1 mile. The first one I
looked at was annotated in a fine pen using
red ink in contrast to the plain black and
white of the Map. I had expected something
like this, because Maggie had always talked
about the journey my father undertook which
led him to find her. She had always expected
I would follow in his footsteps, and now I
looked back and wondered the extent to
which she understood the contents of the
bookcase, which clearly she had access to.
Had she examined the contents In detail, and
how much did she know about my task?

I realised how effective the wax seals on the

notebooks were once I had set about the
task of opening the first one. With a box of
matches from the kitchen I lit a candle and
held the wax-coated wire close to the flame.
It wasn't difficult to melt the wax, and soon
there were red sealing wax droplets across
the desk. I found some newspaper to cover
the desk, and eventually enough of the wax
had been removed to enable me to see the
way in which what seemed like picture wire
had been wound between two small rivets,
the heads of which protruded just enough
above the boards for the covers of the
notebook to be tightly held together. I
contemplated snipping the wire, but
dismissed this as a form of vandalism, and
after burning my fingers several times I
managed to untwist the wire and remove it. I
noted that in spite of my care I had left clear
traces of blackened candle soot on the
pristine paper edges of the notebook.

As a security measure, this would not have

protected the contents from a ruthless hand,
but it certainly meant no one could have
read the contents without Maggie's
knowledge. The pages had been unlined
quality cream paper, and as I turned the first
pages, I recognised from my father's
ordinary diaries his regular neat hand. The
ink was black, and I recognised at once the
neatness of the letters. I began to read.
Chapter 3 A Father's Tale

When I was 18 years of age, I received from

my adoptive parents the proceeds of a small
Endowment which had been designed to
mature when I became a young adult. My
parents had always been frank with me
about the fact of my adoption, and what it
meant to them, and they were supportive in
obtaining for me the best education that
suited my character. From a very early age I
was more interested in music rather than
academic study, and my parents had the
good sense to encourage this interest.

In many respects I was just a child of my

time, growing into a world where the
traditional boundaries between classes were
eroding, and the aspirations of the young
were no longer to be moulded by their
elders. I left school at the age of 15 with
nothing by way of qualifications, but a great
deal more knowledge than many of my
classmates. I had a thirst for knowledge, but
would not easily bend to a system which
failed to recognise difference and cultivate it.
In effect I was an autodidact, a sponge
soaking up what interested me, and because
of my musicality I was able to earn a living
easily within the network of folk clubs which
prospered in London in the early Sixties. I
had been taught to play the violin, which I
soon learned to call the fiddle, and taught
myself guitar because this was the
instrument of the day for the young.

The small endowment was a surprise to me,

and I suspected was connected to my birth.
My adoptive parents were very poor, the
respectable poor of the East End, and
although I was never hungry, any spare
money for me was spent on music lessons.
When I questioned them about the sudden
good fortune in the form of cash, they could
tell me nothing beyond the fact that the
paperwork for the endowment had been
forwarded from the adoption agency about a
year after my adoption. They had been told
very little about the circumstances of my
mother, although a photograph of me had
been requested and sent about the same
time. When they informed me about the
endowment, they also gave me the
photograph they had received with the
endowment paperwork, which was not to of
my mother but of my grandmother.
This was all I would ever know of my blood
relations, the photograph had been taken
when she was a young woman, and in a short
note on the reverse [in I don't know whose
hand] that she looked very much like my
mother. that was the reason for its being
given. I asked my adoptive mother about
this, why not a photograph of my own
mother? She knew nothing. I was soon able
to draw my own conclusions. The
photograph looked like it had been taken just
before a ball, the woman was exceedingly
well dressed, and you sensed there was
confidence in the eyes. A young beauty that
was accepted and understood. I guessed
that something had changed significantly
between the generations, mother to
daughter. If this was my grandmother, it was
as if the message my mother wanted to
communicate was one of comfort, status,
importance. I could only guess at the
calamity that had led to my own situation,

I wondered for some time about finding my

mother, but at the time there was no means
or right of locating birth parents, and
besides, beyond curiosity about my origins
engendered by this photograph, I had no
need to find parents because I already had
them. I gave some money to my mother,
which she tried to refuse, and quickly
formulated a plan to travel to complete my
education. I had no desire to travel abroad,
and besides had no facility for languages at
the time, and so like so many people of the
period hit the hippy trail which led to Wales,
and in no time (or so it seemed) I began to
meet like-minded seekers on the roads and
byways of that ancient kingdom.

I learned so much during the first few weeks

of my journey to adulthood. Because I was a
good musician, I quickly learnt this was a
passport to lodgings and invitations to party.
My years of apprenticeship in the London folk
clubs had taught me to pace myself when it
came to alcohol and drugs, besides, if a
musician wants to play he'll stay sober. Truth
was, I became fascinated by the people I met
on the road, and by their dreams of a new
world. I listened to their drug-fuelled
fantasises about the dawning of a new age,
and having set off in the summer of 1967, by
the time the days had shortened towards
autumn, I found myself happy to accept an
invitation to join a small community
squattting in an isolated disused farmhouse
close to Machynlleth. It was a good place to
spend the winter, and they were serious
enough to have already developed a well-
tended vegetable garden.

It was a green valley protected from the

world and the weather by hills which grew
quickly to mountains at the Northern horizon.
Snowdon was almost visible on a clear day,
although we were closer to Cadr Idris, and
just as attractive to me was the folk-lore in
which the area was steeped. The Victorians
had mined Gold from the mountains, but
minerals had been mined in the area for
thousands of years.

Perhaps it was no coincidence this small

community had been founded in this
particular place, with such a tangible sense
of the spiritual. In 1657 George Fox, the
founder of the Society of Friends, travelled
throughout Wales, arriving at Dolgellau from
Machynlleth. His preaching made a great
impression on some of the local families,
such as the Owen family of Dolserau and
Humphrey family of Llwyn Du. Fox was
profoundly influenced by the mountains
themselves, and this seemed to have
engendered in the local people a religious
sensibility which he recognised immediately
was well suited to his preaching, radical at
the time and soon to be persecuted, that the
local people needed no intermediary by way
of a priest to access a sense of the divine.
The local population was mainly Welsh-
speaking and non-conformist, and some
meetings that took place in the foothills of
the mountain had numbered in their
thousands.
It was impossible to spend time in these
mountains without feeling the power of the
place. Fox came here with a local Welsh
speaker called John ap John soon after the
English Civil War. There were many converts,
many of whom later emigrated to
Pennsylvania to avoid persecution, which
after the Restoration of Charles II led to the
imprisonment of hundreds of Quakers.

This was the first time I made the connection

between religious experience and the natural
world.

I began to read the literature that contained

the folklore and poetic mythology of Wales.
and Ibecame enthralled by the bardic
tradition. I read the Mabinogian, the book of
Taliesyn, and was soon fascinated by stories
of how the Druidic tradition lay behind much
of the local folklore and mythology. When the
Spring came, I was on the road again,
Northwards this time to Anglesey, where I
begAn to search for traces of that elusive
elite that were the Druids.

I stood on the beach and gazed over the

narrow stretch of water, the Menai Straights,
and read in Tacitus his eyewitness account
from the first century AD of the last stand of
the Druids. For 30 years, the Romans had
been fighting their way from Gaul into Wales,
hot in pursuit of the Celtic Priests. I soon
came to recognise the sense of fear the Celts
had created in the Romans. There was no
other people the Romans had been so
aggressive with. Their rule of the known
world was founded on a sound principle,
which even the British Empire had adopted in
some form. Conquered peoples would still
rule themselves as long as they paid tribute
to Rome. The Romans were famously
tolerant of other people's religions, but for
some reason the Celtic people of the West
were not tolerated. A form of ethnic
cleansing took place, which according to
Tacitus had its conclusion in 101 AD with the
Druids on Anglesey thumbing their noses at
the terrified Roman soldiers on the mainland.

The conscript legions which had fought for

many seasons in this difficult terrain had
much to fear. The Celts had a reputation for
fearlessness in the face of death, and they
would give their lives at great cost. Tacitus
records that a suitably nasty German Legion
of horse were sent across the narrow Straits,
where the last of the Druids were
slaughtered, their sacred groves burned. It
was suggested they practised human
sacrifice in these groves, but nothing
remains to answer for truth.
Medieval literature began to manufacture
story-book versions of who the Druids were
and what they believed, This became
interwoven with inaccurate accounts of
Arthurian legend. By the 17th century,
antiquarian studies had become fashionable
among Gentlemen, with varying degrees of
scholarship applied to the subject. Perhaps it
was because the English Church no longer
followed Rome, that stories about this
mysterious people abounded. Rome would
have suppressed such dangerous romance.

Like so many people, I became fascinated by

what motivated the Romans to behave in
such extremis. There was a lack of historical
record, and with only passing references by
the Roman historians. The Druids themselves
seemed to have left nothing by way of
artifacts, or more likely their culture and
traditions were oral, and required nothing
above nature to enable the practice of their
religion.

It was easy for me to imagine that the bardic

tradition in Wales represented a tantalising
glimpse at these people, because there was
always a sense of timelessness within which
stories from the red and white books of
Taliesyn portrayed an ordered and civilised
world in which rank and honour played an
important part. Rank seems to have been
based upon bloodlines and birth, but most
importantly upon bravery in battle. Their
fierceness was legendary, and to modern
eyes appears to be primitive savagery. It was
said they would often decapitate their
vanquished foes, and that heads played
some part in ritual worship. This had been
one of the charges behind the organised
destruction of the Knights Templar in the
13th century, and the archaeological record
gave evidence of bear skulls being arranged
in some ritual fashion dating back to
antiquity.

I suspected the Roman fear of these people

arose from their failure to behave in ways
which the Romans took for granted as a
mark of civilisation. It was just not possible at
the time to understand how a social order
could be imposed without the trappings the
Romans took for granted, and the
significance in their own culture of the
written word as the source of authority as
well as the myths and legends that were
Rome, made these Celtic people seem to be
a greater threat to the order they were busy
imposing on the known world.

One extraordinary account exists of a Roman

witnessing a Celtic ritual which the Romans
found particularly offensive. It involved a
Celtic Warrior seeming to have sexual union
with a horse, at the climax of which the horse
was slaughtered by the warrior, who then
literally bathed in the creature's blood. I
found this story very revealing of a
connection we still make today, linking sex
and death. From the ancient world, a shadow
survives of the way in which life and death
were merely reflections of each other. The
French still refer to the moment of orgasm as
' the Little Death', and such moments of
ecstasy even in the Christian mystics are
thought to be a glimpsing of the face of God.

Over time, I became fascinated by the notion

that what science tells us does not survive in
the archaeological record, can be found
beneath the surface of our conscious culture
if we know where to look. The way in which
the human brain works has not substantially
changed for thousands of years, even though
it contains different information, I suppose I
began to explore the concept that Jung
developed in the 19th century, that there are
some things which are hard-wired into our
brains. This is still a mysterious area of
study, neurologists to not claim to
understand the deepest secrets of this organ
which is given the prize for having enabled
us to become a tool using animal, our
capacity for thought, and the reason for our
survival.
In the summer of 1968, I left the small
community in which I had spent the winter. I
found myself heading south towards
Glastonbury, a focal point for those that
believed we were on the cusp of a new age.
It was on that relatively short journey that I
bought my pipes, from a penniless young
Northerner is a small encampment on the
road to Bristol. I fell in love with the sound, it
seemed to me to have a quality of
transporting the listener through time. I
found the fingering easy to pick up, although
the co-ordination between your limbs and
breath took some practice. The chap I bought
them from was happy to teach me the
rudiments in return for enough money to
return to Durham, where he could lick his
wounds after having been fleeced by some
drug-crazed hippies in Cardiff. It wasn't all
peace and light when you were alone on the
road. I gave him my guitar in part exchange,
but kept my fiddle. I was travelling light, and
I was relieved to unburden myself from an
instrument that was bulky and actually not
very good quality. There was usually
someone around in those days with a guitar,
and I immediately warmed to the guttural,
distinctive sound of the Northumbrian pipes.

My journey to Glastonbury was not so much

a disappointment as a surpise. the town
resembled the worst kind of tourist
attraction. There was an almost permanent
temporary encampment as close to the
spiritual focus of Glastonbury Tor as the
authorities would tolerate, and the Church
authorities seemed to be torn between
welcoming a new breed of spiritual
adventurers whilst keeping one eye on the
Church silver and the other on evangelising.

We arrived by car, when it was already dark,

and found myself in a bizarre world that
looked back to history and forward to a new
age. In those early days, few people seemed
genuinely interested in properly
understanding the place and its context, but
I soon fell in with some local residents that
had more than a passing interest in the
place. We forget that the so-called summer
of love was driven even then as much by the
forces of capitalism as youth culture is today.
In the local pubs just off the beaten track,
someone really interested in the place could
do well to listen and learn from people who
had been drawn here years before, as if by
something deep within themselves. Of
course there were plenty of charlatans and
spaced out hippies who wouldn't have seen
enlightenment if it accosted them in the
street.

But there were scholarly types who sensed

that deeper spiritual forces were at work
even among the ragbag of itinerant youth
that descended upon a place of ancient
pilgrimage. Once again, the fact I was a
musician gained me access much more
easily within this serious component of the
Glastonbury community.

randolph....

It was here I first heard about the work of

Alfred Watkins on rediscovering the ancient
trackways linking sacred sites. His book, The
Old Straight Track, had been published in
1925 and remained a little known scholarly
work for some years. The West Country has
always been well-known for its
concentration of surviving ancient
monuments, not least of all Stonehenge and
Avebury. Watkins's work was based less on
spiritual ideology and more on simple close
observation. In the early twenties, he
produced a short pamphlet about his
findings, and then quickly followed this up
with a more detailed study to counter the
prevailing disdain of the establishment. This
had taken against the idea that ancient man
had been capable of astonishing feats of
alignment in the form of trackways across
the countryside. and Watkins proposed that
there was evidence of an astonishing
correlation between settlements sites, grave
markers and standing stones and suggested
this was a means of travelling long distances
without getting lost, as well as indicating the
location of key resources within the
landscape such as minerals. Salt was an
example of something essential and valuable
that was not available in every community,
but there were many other commodities such
as livestock and traded goods which found
their way across the country. The genius of
Watkins' study lay in the painstaking
fieldwork he had undertaken, a seminal work
of landscape archaeology. Most exciting was
the discovery, well understood in some
circles, that most sites of worship such as
churches had been placed precisely in
alignment with the these leys

For several weeks, I did much walking in the

countryside around Glastonbury, and was
shown by more experienced eyes the
evidence of skilled surveying dating back
several thousand years. I was struck by my
own prejudices, disbelieving at first what I
soon came to see for myself as the subtle
shadow of a practical culture about which
archaeologists pondered little and knew less.

One of my guides was Randolph, an elderly

gentleman who could remember meeting
Alfred Watkins when as a young man he had
strolled around the parish in which he had
been born. He had paid little attention to this
very particular stranger, but when his
pamphlet first became available, he obtained
a copy and read it with interest as much
because he recognised the terrain Watkins
described, as well as the fact he had met the
man, and was curious what he was really up
to.

He was in his mid-Seventies when I met him,

and yet was still able to put me to shame
with his stamina and his extraordinary vital
energy. He had himself explored the
trackways and paths over many years, in
latter years with a pair of divining rods held
loosely in his time-worn hands. He said he
had only discovered he had the capacity for
dowsing as an old man, he had suddenly
become aware of subtle shifts in patterns of
energy as if the ends of his fingers were
tingling.

He said that he had also realised that his dog

responded to aspects of the countryside that
were invisible at first glance, but which on
closer examination, and particularly with the
aid of two copper divining rods, could be
shown to be crossing points between leys. It
was from him that I obtained my first dog,
one of a litter born to his own bitch. She too
was a bitch, and she heralded the
commencement of my own deep attachment
to these magical creatures.

The question kept formulating in my mind,

why the continuous re-use of sacred sites?
This could be answered in part by reference
to the fact that ancient man was far less
wasteful than we are, and the re-use of
buildings could be understood as an example
of parsimony. Closer examination, however,
made it clear that there was no easy
equivalence between re-use: for example,
why should an ancient sacred shaft dating
from pre-Roman Times then be chosen as
the place for a parish church?

It wasn't sufficient simply to consider one set

of religious beliefs to have become
superseded by another. There had to be
something more important in this ancient
system of Leys and alignments which seems
to have been preserved at all costs,
regardless of extreme differences between
different practices. On one hand, the English
Church expressed an extreme antipathy
towards the pagan religion it superseded, but
on the other hand it appeared to have
grafted itself almost entirely onto the root-
stock of its predecessor.

No-where in the text books could I find an

adequate explanation for this, even though
the fact of continuous use by different
cultures was often recognised. Still less
seemed to have been asked of the reason
behind this.

When I spoke about this to the priests and

churchwardens that I met on my travels, I
quickly learned to cloak my questions within
the guise of other matters for fear of the
people I spoke writing me off as some new
age tourist. It wasn't long before I began to
use the ruse of musicological investigation,
asking questions related to the music used in
the context of church rituals. This gave me
access to the interested and enthusiastic
priest's view of the church or shrine in
question. Often the history of the place
would come tumbling from the vicar's lips,
and you'll find much by way of notation in
the note books regarding snatches of musical
Material which in itself could form a study
worthy of pursuit.

Soon I began to formulate the notion that I

must travel further afield so that I could
discover if the same pattern was evident
elsewhere. When I discussed this with my
guide, Randolph. He at once suggested
there was only one direction I could take, a
journey he would have undertaken himself if
he were younger and felt less connected to
his beloved Glastonbury. He said he had
already travelled enough for several
lifetimes, seeking much the same as myself.
I should follow the great line of power that
headed almost due East from Glastonbury
toward the rising Sun. This, he said, drew
him as if it were a magnet. He called it the
Dragon Line, and said he was sure I would
find some kind of answer if I pursued it.

Chapter 4

My first recollection of Glastonbury was

probably much the same as everyone's, a
magical place shrouded in mystery and
romance. Like most boys I had been
fascinated by the stories of King Arthur and
his knights, and it wasn't difficult to imagine
that somewhere under a Hill the King still
waited for the time he would be called upon
to save the nation he was credited with
creating.

Strange then that I should first come upon

the place in the dark of night, asleep in a car,
and with the town suddenly overwhelmed by
a wave of tourism, with hordes of stoned
hippies camped illegally on the tor. My first
temptation was to return to Wales, but the
people who drove me that night through the
narrow medieval streets persuaded me to at
least have a few drinks and clean myself up
before hastily rushing off. We found a small
ancient pub without the usual prescriptive
sign forbidding entry to ne'er do wells, and in
no time my fiddle was out of its case and a
ceaseless row of pint glasses filled with local
Somerset ale encouraged me to reconsider.

It was a fortunate place to arrive at. That

very evening I met a man that was to
become like a grandfather to me, Randolph,
whose copy of Britannia Antiqua Illustrata he
willed it to me and I have willed to you. It
was through his eyes that I first truly saw the
church at Glastonbury, and through our
conversations, which took place over several
years, but which I have conflated for you in a
separate volume, I found the direction I had
been seeking.

The very next morning, as we commenced

our first walk together, my guide talked first
about the significance of the local
geography, IMPRESSED BY MY EXPERIENCES
AT DOLGELLAU. He confirmed the
importance that would have been placed
when siting an important religious building.
He illustrated this by talking about the length
of time taken to build such a place. Time and
labour have always had their reckoning, he
said, and even though social structures
meant much of the labour was in effect
forced, it would have been impossible to
impose the will of a powerful Lord on an
unwilling populace. That was the first time I
began to understand the importance of
meaning in the lives of people. It is said that
faith can move mountains, and what was
meant by such an affront to reality was in
fact a truth still has real and observable
today as it has ever been. The building of
religious structures has always been given
precedence over practical matters of day-to-
day living. Where questions of life and death,
no more keenly understood by the modern
world, came into play there was no end to
the ingenuity and effort applied to a problem.

Take Stonehenge, Randolph had said. Sarsen

stones weighing many tons were transported
hundreds of miles from their source in Wales
to the Plain of Salisbury and erected for
purposes which still elude us 4000 years
later. And Offa's Dyke, an earthwork
embankment separating Wales from England
which extends above the height of a man for
almost a hundred miles. Temporal power is
not enough to explain the existence of such
monuments, and although as humans we
would like to see (no doubt as our forebears
did) some higher agency at work, there can
be no doubt that it is the labour of man that
is responsible. A conception of the divine is
needed, and was provided by such priests as
there have always been appointed among
the races of man.
My Guide insisted we approach the Vale of
Glastonbury in exactly the way travellers had
done for centuries on foot, following feint
trackways often still visible in spite of
Enclosure and intensive aquaculture. We
followed in the footsteps of pilgrims and
cowherds, sheep drovers and all classes of
travellers in the time before metalled roads.
It is easy to forget how recent our own
network of roads really is. As we climbed to
the top of a shallow hill, a spire pierced the
sky dramatically in a fashion that would have
inspired awe in all who saw it. Before the
land was drained for farming, the impression
would have been enhanced by its reflection
Ian a perfect mirror, at a time long before we
were used to seeing a reflection. Any sense
of tiredness disappeared upon such a sight.

The feeling of elation I experienced

continued with me for the next couple of
hours, as our steps brought us gradually
closer to the magisterial towers of the
cathedral. My guide quite consciously
allowed for our journey to continue in silence,
which when we talked afterwards I realised
enabled me to form a kind of bond between
myself and the source of my inspiration.

We began to engage in conversation after a

brief visit to the nave, and we shared some
of the food we had brought with us whilst
lying on the grass with the sun warming our
flesh. He asked me to explain my feelings,
and with gentle probing questions he slowly
drew out my responses. He did this in a way
I only later realised must have resembled
how a Zen master would have tested a pupil.
I learned from my own responses through his
questions, and the experiences remained
vividly with me long afterwards.

Later over a beer in the pub where we

syayed, he explained to me what he had
concluded after many years of gathering
such experiences in many different cultural
contexts. He had been raised from a child to
believe in God, but in that half-hearted
English way where church was attended,
prayers were spoken almost by rote, and in
effect his beliefs were not tested by
discussion. Like for most of us, the death of a
grand mother when he was still relatively
young became the catalyst for a series of
questions to which he found the answers
unsatisfactory.

He had travelled widely and seen much of a

world familiar to me only from history books.
He was old enough to be my grandfather, but
I had never known a man of his generation
who had become so receptive to the spirit of
an age. He had seen misery and suffering
across the world, and I sensed the way in
which he must have visited churches and
shrines in all of the places he had found
himself, looking perhaps for answers to
questions he was not alone in asking.

He had concluded, he said, that people

everywhere in every culture seemed to have
the same capacity for belief. It almost didn't
matter what they believed in, although the
source was often examples from the life of a
man that lived in antiquity. These would be
recorded and elevated in the minds of simple
people (through the intermediary of a class
of priests) so that the personage became
exalted and closer by definition to the divine
spark which had been so illuminated through
his life or work. My guide professed to be an
atheist, although to be honest I felt I had
never met such a spiritual person. He took
great pains to explain this apparent anomaly
to me.

I conflate our conversations here because

the knowledge I wish to impart is not the
product of a moment, but the accumulated
experiences of half a lifetime. We stayed in
Glastonbury itself overnight and then
returned the dozen or so miles to the cottage
where Randolph lived, not quite close
enough to see the spires but close enough
once experienced to sense its presence in
the landscape.

For about a week I was Randolph's pupil,

listening to his stories which he recounted
with extraordinary candour seated in a
comfortable chair in his study, laden with
books from floor to ceiling. There was no
living Room as such, a kitchen and small
bathroom and two tiny bedrooms constituted
his dominion. He lived alone with just an
elderly Hound for company, old enough to
desire little more than to stretch before the
open fire which was the focal point of the
study and of the Cottage itself. He had come
to live here, he said, because of its proximity
to so much worthy of study. This was a
special place, he said, corrected the house at
Glastonbury (he always referred to it as the
House, as if referring to its monastic past) in
this same way that organs of the body,
according to Chinese medicine, are related to
each other. He used the terminology
Meridian when he described how his village
was connected to the great cathedral. It was
a medieval village, laid out according to the
principles by which the original surveyors
would have determined the appropriate
sacred location for the original foundations
that preceded the medieval cathedral by
many centuries, perhaps thousands of years.

We understand little of the reasoning and

remember almost nothing of the techniques
employed. The location of even temporary
dwellings was a matter of great importance
to our ancestors. Proximity to trash water for
drinking and cooking and washing (such as
there was need for) is an obvious factor, as
would be the question of other resources
such as hunting grounds, timber, and clay for
Building if this was employed. In very ancient
times the whole country would have been
forested, and settlements were little more
and clearings within the woodland, providing
some insight into the manifold reasons for
the development of sacred places in the
woods themselves. The first cathedrals
supported sky itself atop their living trunks.
Those first inhabitants of the Green Wood
would have known every tree and every
watercourse and rise of land in the district,
and whilst settlement encouraged the
planting and harvesting of crops, we would
be wrong to think that these numerous
communities remained isolated from each
other or indeed from the Continent. For
thousands of years trade has taken place
between such settlements as existed, and by
degrees specialisation in the utilisation of
local resources would have enabled trade in
commodities like salt and flint, which would
not readily be available to meat every
community's needs.
The history we have been transfixed by is the
history written by scribes and learned men,
not the everyday history of life as the
struggle for existence carried over from one
season to the next. Our ancestors would not
have missed the way in which the Moon
waxed and waned, and how the women
produced menstrual blood in rhythm with
This dark sister of the Sun. As wisdom
accreted this too became a specialism,
passed from father to son or from mother to
daughter. Women would know which Herbs
could ease the pain of childbirth or stave off
infection in the case of injury or illness. We
think of the stone-age I'll as a primitive time,
but we forget that all of the foundations for
the world we inhabit have been laid down
upon its deepest roots.

When the land bridge with the Continent was

finally breached and Britain became an
island, many thousands of years ago,
perhaps there was a period where change
was less apparent, Until intrepid foragers and
fishermen they could cross a stretch of water
and reach another land. As trade routes
became established, items of importance or
value (not of course extrinsic value) travelled
many thousands of miles routes which
became well established and widely known.

I did not have the advantage of a classical

education, and so when Randolph pulled ,
books from his library shelves which had
been written by Greek and Roman historians
over 2000 years ago, it was a revelation to
me. It had never occurred to me that eye
witness accounts and histories could
authoritatively speak across such a distance
of time.

He read to me an account of the tin trade

with Britain from the 4th century BC, by
which time it had become well established
and was already in effect controlled by
phoenecian traders based from the
Mediterranean port of Marseilles. The Roman
historian Pytheus described a journey he
made in the middle of the 4th century BC as
far as the Baltic with the seasoned sailors
who guarded jealously their knowledge of the
trade routes across the ancient world. He
described the nature of their craft and their
capacity to weather the powerful waters
around Britain by virtue of their simple
flexible construction. More solidly built craft
would have broken up as they approached
the landing places available to them.

The smelting of bronze was quite simple as a

process, explained Randolph, and had been
discovered perhaps 500 years before in the
Far East. I did not realise at first the
significance of these facts, and Randolph
enthusiastically explained that there were
only three accessible sources where Tin
could be found in the entire ancient world.
Bronze was an alloy of copper and tin but the
resulting metal was significantly stronger
than the ingredients. Weapons made from
bronze were sharper and stronger and were
only superseded by the more complicated
smelting of iron ore from about 500 BC. The
existence of such an important mineral made
Britain an important trading partner,
especially since the other sources in northern
Spain and Malaysia were not so productive.
Thecharacteristic 'knuckle-bone' shaped
ingots were still produced to the present day
from Cornish mines, and in ancient times
were transported from Cornwall by what in
effect were coracles to a tidal island six days'
travel from the mines. There was some
uncertainty about the exact location for this
part of the trade, but whilst there were many
candidates, but it seems likely to have been
the island of Thanet on the north Kent coast,
which would have been a convenient staging
post back to Marseilles.

One advantage of this location was that part

of the journey would have been possible
along the chalk highways used by pilgrims
and drovers alike. The Phoenician traders
struck their own currency in silver and coins,
although rare, were sometimes found
throughout Europe and Scandinavia
confirming the existence of developed trade
routes at what to me seemed a remarkably
early date.

At first I missed the significance of

Randolph's analysis. He was patient with me,
and stressed that I would not be alone
among historians and classicists. He said his
was a specialist field requiring broad skills
and knowledge and rarely did the bigger
picture get the chance to resolve. Certainly
in a way that introduced into the analysis the
least visible of historical evidence, much of
which could only be implied from scientific
analysis and archaeological remains. Trying
to understand the psychology involved in
early human history would never be an exact
science, and it was therefore often ridiculed
and open to the criticism that the views of
the academic concerned had become the
substance and content of any such
exploration.

Because Randolph was unconnected with

any academic institution or bothered by
reputation, he was of course free to pursue
his interests wherever they led him, but he
was also thus denied the kind of dialogue
with other like-minded people that resulted
in dissemination and discussion of his
researches. But he did not appear to me as
someone with an axe to grind; his tone was
serious, and his methods, although perhaps
unorthodox, were yet refreshingly obvious
once you followed his train of thought. His
contention was primarily the fact that in the
modern world religious ideas were
considered beyond rigorous discussion by
the very nature of their propositions, and
when the great formalised religions felt
themselves to be challenged by the post
Enlightenment world, the protection of their
interests within the establishment to some
extent removed them from rigorous criticism.
Allied to which in spite of inconsistencies and
contradictions within religious ideas and with
scientific thought, there were still deep
truths which were beyond the reach of
political power.

To be accused of atheism at some points in

history would have led to death, and in the
same way to express the wrong kind of
belief, against prevailing views, might lead at
the least to ostracism and at worst once
again to death. Not only had the human
brain evolved an extensive capacity for
belief, but it seems also at times an extreme
capacity for intolerance. Evangelism was at
times little more than a justification for
conflict.

But the same evolutionary response to

believe, whether in a Flat Earth supported on
the back of four elephants, or the survival of
the soul after death, provided the basis upon
which survival can be achieved in impossible
circumstances. Not perhaps the survival of
an individual, but rather the survival of the
species. The mental strength required to
sacrifice oneself to enable others to carry the
message. An unwritten message in biological
code whose purposes are almost impossible
to identify.

Randolph had made a study out of finding

answers to impossible questions, applying
rational thinking to irrational imperatives.
The mind of every human has formed
existential questions at some point, such as
what is my purpose and what am I for?
Sometimes it seemed to him that thousands
of years of history stood for nothing when it
came to providing answers. This led him to
cease conscious searching - he called it
behaving like a blind man fumbling around in
the dark - and instead he would try to
unravel the biological and psychological
imperatives behind Human Endeavour. He
reasoned, or guessed, that the
'sophisticated' present must obscure any
evidence of meaning to which human action
could respond instinctively. He sensed that it
was the most primitive acts, the discovery of
means of survival in a hostile world, which
might hold a key not to answering these
questions, but to understanding why they
arose in the first place.

And what did all of this have to do with the

smelting of bronze? Randolph's answer to
this astonished me. He had puzzled for
decades over the process of cultural and
social development, and despaired of finding
any sense of meaning to human life. And it
was only when he had concluded that there
was no purpose that he achieved the kind of
visionary insight that suddenly invigorated
his search for something tangible. Not
rational, but something animal and natural.
He reminded me of the experiment
undertaken by Rene Descartes, when he had
himself shut in a cold dark boiler, so that he
could think without distraction. When he
emerged after much cogitation, he finally
closed the door on a world in which
rationalism had been an alien experience. It
was a leap into the dark, revealing nothing
except that the human animal was losing
touch with its primitive urges, and by doing
so using all hope of finding simple meaning
in the struggle for survival. But the survival
of what? If the answer was to be found not in
the survival of the individual, but in the
survival merely of the animal, what was the
animal for? What made this animal any
different from the thousands of creatures
whose parallel struggle for survival ended in
extinction?

He first thought he might have a glimmer of

progress when he read an English translation
and commentary on aspects of Roman
history, which displayed all of the prejudices
of its time when the author talked about the
distinctions and differences between what
were called savages and their civilised
counterpart, meaning the good Christian
missionaries that brought the 'true faith' to
every dark corner of the known world. It was
one sentence, redolent with prejudice, that
caught his attention. That the distinction
between the savage and the civilised man
was the fact that the civilised man could
pray. And through the power of prayer could
achieve what physical might could never
achieve.

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