So for this year's Earth Hour we're going to be having a massive firework display, with a laser show and a giant video screen. Young Keith's out there building the tyre-burning generator as we speak.
But Earth Hour brings us to think of all things Earth and Spiritual. And I remember that moment of realisation I had yesterday, standing up on the ridge surrounded by the Rollright landscape and wondering what fool let them build the outskirts of Chipping Norton where you could see them from the Rollrights.
These stones were old before Caesar. The King's Men - the circle - was erected about 4,000 years ago. And when that was built, the place was already hallowed. The Whispering Knights (hidden here behind an ugly railing for no apparent reason) were already old then.
In typically idiosyncratic English style, the King's Stone is the other side of the road. And even more typically English, it's in another county. When the King's Stone went up, the circle was already old.
And when Caesar came, the King's Stone was already old.
It may not seem much, in cosmological or even geological terms. But in the time-scales we normally think in - the Whispering Knights was a tomb before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. About the time that the tomb was as old as Westminster Abbey is today, the circle was built. The time from the building of the circle to Caesar's arrival on our sandy shores, is the same as from Caesar to now. By the time Julius arrived, Rollright and Stonehenge were abandoned already and left to fester - as meaningful to Iron-age life as a Peculiar Baptist Mission Hut is today.
Yet they're still there - not quite as old of the hills, but made out of the same stuff. And the people who were strewing flowers and fruit around the circle a couple of days back really don't have a clue what the original Rollright people did there - it's unlikely they'd have celebrated the Equinox, for starters - but maybe they're drawn by that same Awe that led someone to put that circle there in the first place.
Old from a human perspective yes but not even a million million millionth as old as the light from the stars that they may have been built to point too.
ReplyDeleteSorry I went all Brian Cox there...
I often ponder on the mystery of the Arch Druid's age?
ReplyDeleteWith such a fantastic memory for events, including the erection of the Stones, the later erection of the King's stone and the arrival of Caesar, it just seems that Eileen, couldn't have been 'born yesterday'.
I'm wondering about some mystical order of ancient women, who become Arch Druids, when it was the Day Job, but who somehow survive by constantly re-inventing themselves as a different, modern brand of Arch Druid, in this case, the Beaker Folk.
Sustained through the ages by successive iterations of Oil of Olay, and Anti-Wrinkle cream, they exist to form vaguely mystic communities. I seem to have met some of them at fair grounds, cunningly disguised as Fortune Tellers or Astrologers.
So, could the Arch Druid confirm my suspicions please.