by Rod Mengham
Grimspound
AND
Inhabiting Art
ROD MENGHAM
Contents
Title Page
GRIMSPOUND
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
A Note on Grimspound
INHABITING ART
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Grimspound
1
I FIRST CAME TO GRIMSPOUND in winter, in ignorance. Having parked the car, I stepped away from it and listened. There was the sound of a distant jet engine, slowly fading and gradually converting into the sound of Grimslake, the stream that runs through one quarter of Grimspound in its descent to the valley floor. The water was plunging and pouring down into a small pebble-knocking gulf; a sound falling into itself over and over again. The stream in winter is torrential, constantly undercutting its own flow, rocking all the stones on its bed, while beneath each successive fall of water, shoals of air bubbles form and re-form, like clouds under a ridge. The volume and velocity of the current creates a transparent scalloping over the broad convexities of the larger shelves of granite on the stream bed. Small channels pulse backwards and forwards across the path that climbs alongside, and in the wettest winters other areas of grass on the hillside are flattened and combed out whenever extra storm vents are needed.
Dry conditions are rare in this season, and I have experienced them only once, in November 2003, when Grimslake had shrunk to a valiant trickle, barely audible and nursing a smoothly terraced effect in the sluicing of water over stone. Here and there, the depleted flow would turn into a stutter, as if intercepted by a valve. After a long dry spell, the sudden rain when it comes loosens and booby-traps the earth, gashing it everywhere with the skid-marks of headlong sheep. When the temperature plunges, the bracken is frayed and ghostly, there are white husks of heather bloom and trails of spiderweb over the densely fossiliferous rock. The small pools of Grimslake have palisades of ice pendants, and the gelid water slides under a frozen cowl, over mossed stones. The wind carries hints of vanilla and tobacco, while tiny flecks of celestial blue minerals appear on the path, small circles of copper-blue lichen. Three mysterious clots of whitish jelly are strewn on the grass.
By Easter-time, the dead bracken is as crisp as straw, and the stream has broken free, it is making a chute near the road. I try to pick out the fretting passage of a small runnel off to one side of the main channel, the beginning of a great shift in the balance. Walking here in spring involves a series of acoustic alterations, a piloting between rising and falling levels of water splash and wind pressure, between the racket of exposed places and the detailed quiet in the lee of a boulder. Crouching down in the shadows, you can see how the exposed water weed has survived under a sheet of gel, trapping the moisture and stopping the green cells from drying out.
By early summer, the rusted tips of the ferns are uncurling, and there are bracken shoots in the middle of the path bearing their standards while others prepare to arch their necks. The first sound of Grimslake is in competition with the wind and the gargling sheep, but each pool in the stream’s descent is now deep enough for the water to make a plunging sound. There are tiny yellow quatrefoils dotted along the banks, while the growth of moss on rocky platforms in the stream produces a complex pattern of accelerating and decelerating pulses.
With the lowering of water supply in high summer, there are three distinct notes and volumes in the sound of water falling at separate points. The yellow quatrefoils are flourishing alongside miniature soap bush. Airborne sounds are carried from far and near: a bird unlocking a snail, then a dog barking, seconds before the hurtling fighter jet is heard. By each pool in the stream, reeds grow through overhanging festoons of heather while midget water boatmen scull round each other in a display of aquatic dodgems.
By late summer, there are multiple arches of pale bracken in the path, and no sound of water. Grimslake is silent, the stream-bed dry. In only one place is there a faint throttle and slippage under dense bunches of heather. On the water left in each pool are yellow petals that stay in place, like buoys within a bay. All the vivid green moss has been flattened into dark brown mats of rubber. The insects make hay. It is the season of feathery-headed grasses and drying thistle heads.
On the edge of autumn, Grimslake is completely hushed, with only the sound of moving grasses and washed gravel deposits of tumbled stones to speak of its other life. Gorse flowers are sheltering among the bracken, and adjacent clumps of heather show different shades of green as well as different tones of purple; the same bush might include four distinct purples. The dry earth has loosened stones of red granite thickly veined with mica. Below them are the terraces of vanished waterfalls, now spanned by gleaming spiders’ webs beaded with tiny globes of light.
The drama of the stream, its ebbing and flowing, with its stage-set dismantled and reconstructed every year, offers a seasonal equivalent to the much larger rhythms of this series of reflections, and is collateral to its inventions. The drama intensifies, before even the Bronze Age compound has been reached, in the story of a tree and its nest. This ancient, lowly thorn tree, with many fractured limbs now dressed with great plasters of moss, leans over the stream. At the base of the channel where it is bowed, granite boulders are packed round with smaller, less rounded, stones of terracotta colour, and it must be the percolation system these provide which puts life into half the available boughs. Less than eight feet off the ground, the boughs support a great nest swung to and fro in the wind. The nest seems as old as the tree, and indeed the branches in their growth have twisted round and round and round each other, as if in imitation of its structure. In winter, both carry government-issue camouflage of russet and green moss, while in summer there is a flourish of olive pale leaves, advanced on by reconnoitring slugs. Even in the driest spells, the gnarled roots of the thorn are able to detect the faintest rill of fresh water, where the small birds drink. After four years of visiting, I returned to the site one winter to find the nest still there, but showing no sign of refurbishment. Despite this neglect, it was a shock to me, the following year, the shock of disbelief, to have to accept that the nest was finally undone, carried away by winter storms. Without my realising, it had been a sheet-anchor, now no more than a speculative probe, a sign of habitation deleted without trace, the landscape re-forming quickly and irretrievably to forget it. Two years on, and a replacement had been built, with heather roots lined with earth and copper-coloured lichen. I was excited, but this rhythm of uncertainty is now one of the reasons I cannot go back – in itself a strange hesitancy to arise from this compulsion I have to stand among ruins.
I never hesitate over my entry point into the citadel. I use that word because the thought of Mycenae arrived, unbidden, with my first sight of the great, cyclopean stones of the eastern entrance to Grimspound. But I do not use the original gate, steering instead through a gap in the wall-rubble that gives onto an area set aside for a stockpen. There is a second, much more feral, stock pen in the south-west corner of the site, but that has little power over me. Here, along the main wall of the compound, flat stones have been placed to the interior, giving the impression of having been dressed, and there are always strands of wool clinging to the largest of the level blocks, showing me that sheep still use the pen, out of long habit. Better still, after heavy rain, there are sumps of clear water filling hoofshapes in the mud, to record the fact that horses also use the area.
Within the compound, the first sound in summer is often that of sheep teeth tearing at the mixed diet of grass and stunted bush. Denuded heather stems lift like timber off a beach. There is the head
y thermal smell of bracken roots in peaty soil, an abundant harvest of cuckoo spit on the heather, and sometimes the clean white bone of a sheep. The longer grasses are dried out and wispy: stiff tassels shaking in the wind. The turf is deeply cushioned with tiny infills of moss and small orange mushrooms bleached on top, their colour most intense on the fringe.
Animals are now the only inhabitants, helping to preserve the character of the site, but also knocking it about. I once surprised five horses and two foals gathered around hut circle number three. Their hooves buffering on the turf could be heard clearly from three hundred yards away. This drumming often disturbs the forensic memory of the stones, waiting to reveal the angle of their fall to the absent archaeologist. In the south-west of the compound, between the gate and the stock-pen, in one of the larger hut circles, eight paces across, one of the wall stones has been pushed out of place recently, uncovering a hollow inside the wall, a space closed up for three and a half thousand years, now empty but crossed by brown roots. Sheep and horses have evidently made a breach in the main wall nearby.
Much of the site is now feral. Bundles of reeds are thriving within many hut circles, perhaps descended from spores dropped from shaken-out bedding. Roughly a quarter of the reeds sport mossy outgrowths halfway down the stem. There are several dimensions of growth here. Many of the heather domes are flattened and snapped in parts, the middle stopped up with moss, while mimic heathers, of a softer fabric and a brighter green, colonise the surface of larger bushes. Wherever there is shelter, flourishing wedges of mace-head moss are inserted in every plausible crevice. If you bend down to ground level, you find yourself among tiny Portuguese man-of-war toadstools.
The north-west quadrant now appears clear of hut circles, as if the Bronze Age inhabitants had plans for future development. But there are a few mounds covering stones, and at least one likely construction rising in the centre of this area. The ground in the whole of the north-west quarter is inflated with cold water in winter, the long, exposed heather roots smooth and shiny like seaweed, and it may be that any settlement here would be abandoned after two or three seasons.
Building a hut circle would have required little effort compared to the immense, collective project of the main compound wall. Just south of the course of Grimslake, the rubble spread from this is fifteen or sixteen feet across. The biggest stones remain upright. Several have a rocker shape, tying in with each other. The three largest blocks by the north entrance are long and tapering, as if shaped originally to be standing stones. In the western wall, there is a massive upright showing clearly how it was engineered into place. Behind it, at the bottom of small empty chambers in the foundations, water slips by at regular intervals, every seven seconds. Chambers among the wall-stones are more frequent on this side of the site, where Grimslake has scoured them out. Those to the north, much drier, make lairs for spiders. To the east, they have linings of bracken and dried grass.
The Great Stone of the West is slightly concave, making an obvious back rest, now as then. On my last visit, it was guarding an empty champagne bottle adorned with purple bird droppings. There are blue stains, vertical and horizontal smears, nearly everywhere on the tumbled wall stones. But their colour is insignificant compared to that of the wall itself. The grey skin now covering everything has been left by generations of lichen. A scrape with a pen-knife blade will reveal a glow of pink granite underneath. The original wall must have been a great roseate screen in the morning sun, an astonishing sight. All this is now hidden. On the southern wall there are lime-green bulbs of moss, and many of the horizontal slabs are half covered with up to four inches of peat and gnarled growths of heather, the stems as broad as my thumb. Everything here might be covered, dried out and blown away, hundreds of times. Only the more sulphurous-looking lichens stay the course through thick and thin, on angled stones that have tipped to forty-five degrees.
The wind is almost sonorous in the belt of reeds along the western wall. It is layered with the sound of Grimslake flowing through flutes in the rock. The water rattles the stones underground in unexpected places all around the great western upright. The stones of the wall here are acoustic traps, throwing the sound of chutes in the stream, ventriloquial tricks of the trade. In spring, the reed-beds are abundant, and cresses and mosses are piled over one another at the very edge of the stream. The new growth of reed is almost as high as the dead stems it uses for support. Flow-patterns in the water are serene and orderly, but the vents from the underground passage carrying the stream right into the compound are at their most rowdy. Where the water actually enters the compound it shoots through, and in one place the roof of the underground aqueduct has collapsed, revealing clean pale stones on the bed of the channel. In the larger pools being formed, the entering water creates small plateaux with transparent contour lines refracting the light.
In summer, Grimslake is often reduced to a trickle, and even north-west of the compound, right upstream, nearly all the water has gone, and what is left is filled with larvae. In the winter, this area becomes a great mossy sump, and Grimslake is forced to find many new channels west of the compound. In the pools here, great sacs of bubbles rise like spawn. If you follow Grimslake upstream in winter, it soon becomes a delta, then a marsh, then a quag, and there is no way to trace it back to source. Wherever the flow is faster and deeper, there is more visual distortion, like the flow of time. All along the bank there are flecks of wool going through an endless rinse cycle.
Inside the compound, the water flows through the underground aqueduct, and in winter also over the grass, to meet at a basin with flat stones whose surface lies just above, or just below, the water level, depending on the season. The stones have clearly been placed there for washing clothes, precisely where the stream enters from under the turf, bringing with it distant profound gurglings. Tiny green sashes of weed and slime, bacterial in structure, flail in the current. In winter, the area above the opening becomes a miniature flood-plain, a maze of cross-currents. But when the flow relents, the long tunnel to the washing stones has enough air along its fifty-foot length to carry the echoes of distant rushing and cornering, like a remote cistern always refilling. When the water level is low down in the basin, the great washing stones are exposed to the open air. However, one deep pool is always there, edged with ghostly weed and trails of spawn. One of the largest, flattest stones, when dried out round the base, wobbles under pressure, and this movement releases an inky cloud. One summer, I came across a new black and yellow pencil dropped beside this platform, its leaden point dipped in the main flow.
By far the most spectacular elements of Grimspound life are the mosses and lichens. They are perpetually at war under long slithering streaks of cloud. On the north wall, the seasonal growth in the larger moss colonies is exactly two inches. Later colonies of moss prefer bedding down in their predecessors, showing layers of habitation like the Bronze Age city of Troy, all the way down to the granite bedrock. By contrast, the circles of lichen look like blueprints for a ring cairn. Every return to the site means a different configuration of moss. The discovery of drifts of white coral moss peppering a fallen block outside the north entrance indicates a major shift in migration patterns. While a microscopic spider climbs the trumpet lichen, and several tiny jet beads with legs traverse the moon rock of ossified plant life, entire planets of moss encircle and avoid the prows and nuggets of quartz in the wall stones. Green globular pads of moss slowly put out antennae.
Lichen overcrowding is so acute in the north-west corner, it resorts to limescale methods on any plant that does not resist. Much of the lichen is blackened but silky to the touch. In the south, and facing south, there are many more stones coated with the dry grey scales of old growth. The oldest patches have been calcified into marble entombing the record of their change. Among the more recently established grids are clearings in the lichen forest where an expeditionary force has blasted. In winter, the lichens are damp and spongy. New arrivals are a vivid yellow and as soft to the touch as
mustard powder. Among the colonies of old grey matted lichen are streaks of pink ruin where the spores react to a vein of minerals in the rock. The yellow-green varieties have vertical plates, like food traps on a coral reef. The spongier varieties with complex tendrils seem to be travelling the site like tumbleweed. At the base of one small orthostat is a chalk-pale green specimen with ship’s funnels. In the west, there is a small patch blooming into midget wild strawberry heads. And controversy still rages but the soft whitish coral lichen appears to be symbiotic with a bright green starred moss.
The giant blocks of the great gate are covered almost entirely in lichens and moss. Sheltering by the gate during a winter storm, with my shoulder up against studs of quartz in the granite, I contemplate the rich silage underfoot and a few new fragments of red, grey and black stone broken off by the winter weather. The low sun brings out a cross shape carved on the northern flank of the gate and highlights the knobbly outgrowths of tiny succulents bedded down in Lilliputian moss and lichen on the shelf above. The entrance proper under my feet is heavily paved but ends in steps, since there was no use for any wheels anywhere here, only feet and hooves. There are sheep droppings everywhere, most surprisingly on the very top of the gate, where there is absolutely no vegetation, and no shelter, nothing but a good view, the ovine sublime.
Birds are the most frequent visitors. At all points of the compass, kestrels stoop. Sky-diving through wind, they open their wings for a split-second only, each time they stabilise. My eye is caught by the swooping flight of a stonechat, before I hear the tiny rattle of its alarm call, a series of warning clicks. In the spring, a cuckoo-welcome fades up the hill on approach to the site, replaced by the gravelly riff of a bunting with deep pink throat and black crest. In the summer heat, there is often quiet, broken by the clear piping call of the curlew, the chirr of now untroubled stonechats, the urging of a distant cuckoo and, high above all, the pealing cry of the falcon. Into the quiet, one, two, three, four larks speed away from the bed of the stream and dive down into crevices with the velocity of swallows, or miniature gannets. In winter, I am decoyed all the way up Hamel Down by six fieldfares, taking it in turns to lead the way. On coming back down, I try stalking a wren along the south-east wall to find its nest, but the number of boltholes is too confusing, there is increasing soil erosion here, more and more collapse.