by Hugh Thomson
Others slowly join us for coffee and breakfast. I hand out some fruit and bags of nuts I’ve brought from the small village store in Avebury.
When the full group is assembled, Lyn announces that we need to focus. A blond rasta-haired man called Blue, who has been playing the pan pipes and has a calm, contemplative face, suggests we form ourselves as circles, an inner one facing out, and an outer one facing in, so that we all are partnered and looking in someone’s eyes. The idea is to hold the gaze of the person opposite ‘until you make a connection’.
Under normal circumstances this would be excruciating. In the sunshine that comes through the trees (quieting Lyn’s fear that the wood was no place for a solstice ceremony), with the drums beating and in a hypoxic state after a night half awake, it feels perfectly natural.
We circle around each other, then bend down to touch the ground, still gazing at the other person. If this is paganism, it makes a certain amount of elemental sense – a direct connection with the sun and earth, with no mediating deities or theology.
That said, I find looking directly into someone’s eyes, a stranger’s eyes, problematic. It’s a reminder that the way we establish intimacy – or friendship – is not by a long continual stare (which in the animal world would be mistaken for hostility), but by glancing away and then back at people; real intimacy and connection are made when those glances coincide, when both look back at each other at the same time. I remember that admonition of E M Forster’s to ‘only connect’, and how difficult that is.
Holding someone’s gaze for minutes on end is hard work. I quickly learn the way out: to give a little sigh, or the Indian greeting of Namaste, as if you’ve mentally embraced each other, and then move on. And while I’m not sure I make any real connections, looking frankly and fearlessly in people’s faces is better than the common English practice of avoiding the other’s eyes.
Holding your partner’s gaze becomes more important (or difficult, depending on the partner) as several of the participants slip off all their clothes to be ‘skyclad’. The music builds in intensity. We start dancing free-form, like teenagers at a disco where you are neither quite dancing alone nor with a specific partner. Just about everyone has stripped at least to the waist.
A young woman from Bristol with an alert, enthusiastic face who, if she were not topless, would be a dead ringer for a primary-school teacher, leads us all in a chanting workshop. She divides us up into sopranos, altos and tenors, and coaxes a surprisingly good performance out of her improvised choir. Our voices build, lift and harmonise. The sunshine coming down through the trees is blinding.
*
There is a ghost present for me at this feast and his name is Jeremy Sandford. A leonine, craggy presence, in his coat of uncured goatskin.
I first met Jeremy in the late 1980s, when the tide had been against him for some time and was only just beginning to turn. Jeremy had stayed resolutely committed to the ideals of the 1960s long after they had become unfashionable and even derided: not just free love and plenty of cannabis – although he subscribed to both – but, above all, free housing or at least some easing of the belt on the constraints of a system that allowed thousands of homes to stay empty and neglected while elsewhere landlords charged extortionate rates for crude bed-and-breakfast.
His script for Cathy Come Home, with which he made his name, had done more to raise public consciousness of the housing issue than just about anything else and led to the forming of the charity Shelter. It had been one of the most watched and controversial BBC dramas ever made. But that had been in 1966. Twenty-five years later, in 1991, a decade of Thatcherism had hardened attitudes. Together we made a film sequel, called Cathy Where Are You Now, which revisited those same problems of housing and showed that the situation for many people had if anything got worse, not better.
It was Jeremy who first told me about the Rainbow Circle camps, and how elusive they were to find. He had known many of the organisers, like Sid Rawle, the so-called ‘king of the hippies’, who had set up ‘Tipi Valley’ in Wales; Jeremy had hosted some of their early gatherings at his home, Hatfield Court, on the Welsh borders.
The Rainbow Circle traced their lineage back to the Windsor Free Festival of 1972, the first illegal parties at Stonehenge and the sixties counter-culture that, by the time I met Jeremy, had been as superseded as the Druids they revered. To a soundtrack of Hawkwind, Motorhead and the Incredible String Band, the last of the hippies lived on in exile around the Welsh borders or Glastonbury, searching for magic mushrooms and an alternative society. They were harassed by police who at one point, the infamous ‘battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985, intercepted a convoy on its way to a Stonehenge Free Festival and set about the travellers’ families with batons in a way that was universally condemned.
For years Jeremy had taken up the cudgels in their defence and we discussed the predicament of travellers in the film we were trying to make. Not that working with Jeremy was easy. He was of the sixties persuasion that any decision was ‘closure’ and so should not be taken until after the last possible moment. At one point I asked him, in desperation, if he would ever finish the script before filming began. It was already months overdue. ‘Don’t worry, Hugh,’ he told me, puffing on a joint like a Zeppelin: ‘I’m working on it in my dream-life.’
He brought an agreeable amount of anarchy to the staid corridors of the BBC, down which he trailed the whiff of that uncured goatskin coat. To the consternation of my fastidious executive producer, Jeremy used his BBC desk as a recycling point for any timber or plastic he found lying in the streets of Bristol. We went in search of the travelling communities who were squatting in lay-bys and under the A4 flyover by the docks. He opened my eyes to the hardships they endured.
Jeremy could also be mischievous and funny, as befitted a man who had once roamed Mexico looking for magic mushrooms. It was he who first told me about the bitter rivalry between Rainbow Circle and the larger, more established group they had seceded from, Dragon Order.
Dragon Order was a more settled organisation, with regular publicised camps and set fees to join. At some point around 1987, a group of rebels had decided this was all too organised and split off to form Rainbow Circle, with a more happy-go-lucky, anarchic ethos. I discovered that Lyn Lovell, the woman who had been trying to arrange the solstice celebration in the wood, had been one of the original founders of ‘The Rainbow’.
According to Jeremy – who like any dramatist loved a good conflict – Dragon Order regarded Rainbow Circle as irresponsible hooligans just out to party, with too much Special Brew and constant techno. Meanwhile Rainbow Circle thought that Dragon Order were middle-class weekenders, not really ‘living the life’ or hard-core enough; one had complained to Jeremy, in disgust, that ‘at Dragon Order camps they have washing-up rotas!’
Now Jeremy was dead. At his funeral near Leominster, travellers had descended from all over the country to play at his wake. He would have been in his element here.
In a way, the endless splits and visions of the counter-culture world still mirrored the original problems at the heart of the sixties dream: on the one hand, the idealism of a spiritual community closer to the earth, with home schooling and a self-sufficient lifestyle; on the other, the reality of trying to make this work, of decision-making ‘closure’ in an occasionally hostile world.
Just over the few days I spent with the Rainbow Circle camp, which always last a lunar month from full moon to full moon, some of the highs and lows of the sixties could be seen. The very free-form nature of the camp caused problems – people came and went in an easygoing way, but that also meant no one knew who everyone was. I noticed Neptune continually forgetting names; he told me that it was a bit like an ashram – you had moments of intense highs and then days of more domestic mediocrity, sorting tents, washing and food. The danger was that the longer you stayed, the more the ratio inclined to the dull day-to-day.
From the intensity of first moments like the solstice celebration in
the woods, I wound down later to a more measured Circle gathering that was held beside the fire. A ‘vision-stick’ was passed around from participant to participant. Whoever held it voiced their concerns.
The gentle blond rasta-headed Blue, who had led the solstice dancing, took the vision stick and spoke of his fear that the gatherings might attract those who wanted more to ‘party with ganja’ than use it as an occasional release. The rubric given to newcomers attending the Rainbow Circle was careful about this, perhaps mindful of the old criticisms that Dragon Order had made about them:
Come and experience a truly healthy and happy way of being. Switch off the computer now, and come and meet your family, a family of living light. Remember the essentials – cup, bowl and spoon and adequate clothing, bedding and shelter. Please do not bring alcohol, synthetic drugs, electric items or dogs.
On my last night a posse of drummers and guitarists arrived: one had an unusual ‘travelling guitar’, like a balalaika. I went to sleep in my tent among the trees with the sound of drums and massed guitars in my ears.
Next morning I slipped away quietly with a few goodbyes to the last men and women standing. Many were asleep on the bare earth: Mark was muttering a little incoherently about a girl who had sung so beautifully the night before that he had fallen in love with her: ‘She’s absolutely gorgeous. But troubled – look at her there, she’s sleeping on the ground.’
As I left, I passed a dark, intense-looking man who was observing the proceedings and smoking a thin gold-tipped cigarette. I asked him who he was. ‘I am Ilim, the Lithuanian,’ he said. ‘I lived here for years. And I cleared the place. I always hoped that something like this would happen – that people would join me here, in the wood that I found.’
In dreams begin responsibilities.
*
They stand in a clear line along the Wiltshire Downs facing north: facing an enemy we do not know. The remarkable hill-forts of the Downs that I now start to come to – first Barbury, then Liddington, and Uffington in the distance with its white horse – may have been begun in the Bronze Age, but it was in the Iron Age of the first millennium BC that they reached their apogee.
Their purpose seems clear, defensively sited as they are on the northern slopes of the Downs, the better to aim their slingshots at any approaching enemy, and with such a large space inside them that an entire community could shelter for protection. Their great ditches and double ramparts are still impressive. Yet these days they are visited more by sheep than people – even forts like Barbury, which can lay claim to being one of the most historic sites in Britain. And it is far from clear that they were primarily military: some, just as at Maiden Castle earlier, are too large and may also have been places of congregation and prestige.
Long after its use or not as a prehistoric fort, Barbury crops up as the location of one of the most significant and forgotten battles in British history. In AD 556 Cynric, the leader of the West Saxons, fought a decisive engagement with the Britons at and below Barbury Castle. The Britons were defeated. The Saxons went on to create Wessex; many of the remaining Britons became slaves.
It is almost too cinematic to be true, given that the hill-fort had probably been built a good thousand years before the battle took place – as if a climactic episode of the Second World War had taken place at Agincourt, or there had been a pitched machine-gun battle inside the Colosseum in Rome.
I arrive on a beautiful but crisp spring morning. The trackway from Avebury has been lined with cranesbill and elderflower, and curls around the escarpment of the Marlborough Downs. There is a wind in the trees. I feel invigorated by my time with the Rainbow Circle; not because I share their views, but because it has been time spent in a different mindset from my own.
No one else visits the fort when I’m there. Just walking round the earthworks takes a while – they enclose some thirteen acres. I remember a comment made by a naturalist, Anthony Bulfield, who once came this way: that if you walk around the ramparts of Barbury Castle, you have walked around England. The line of the Downs turns here from the north towards the east and in doing so opens up views in every direction; Barbury Castle is on the precise point of the turn.
I become conscious of the incessant calling of the rooks from the stand of trees beside the castle. Iron Age man was obsessed with these birds. At the hill-forts and later Romano-British settlements like Dorchester, rooks and also ravens, the largest of the corvids, were often buried alongside humans.
What is it about ravens and rooks that made them so fascinating? To the casual passer-by they can be sinister – their harsh cawing coming from high stands on bare trees. A rookery is an austere place leading to madness. Tennyson’s heroes deliver their neurotic and mad monologues to the sound of rooks screeching in the Lincolnshire background.
The raven has always been a creature of myth, for its intelligence, longevity (at twenty-five to forty years, Tennyson’s ‘many-winter’d crow’ had at least the life expectancy of an Iron Age man) and capacity to mimic or follow human behaviour. But not necessarily for its loyalty. A raven is not like a dog. Corvids are cunning with their intelligence, able to steal from an Iron Age camp.
In the ancient European world, from Greece to Celtic Britain, raven calls were thought to be messages sent from the underworld to the living. One can see how. That ‘caw’ has the rasp of death to it. And prophecy. Apollo is said to have listened to the utterances of a raven. The Celtic raven-god, Lugh, the god of war, was told by his fellow ravens when enemies approached. In Celtic mythology, ravens were one of the animals thought to be used by shape-shifters, themselves often old women dressed in black rags, the Mor Regan or witch-harridans.
Some ravens may have been domesticated by their Druid handlers, like the tame ravens at the Tower of London today. It would make for an arresting image – the priest with a large raven perched on his shoulder, for they are large birds, bigger than buzzards; and such an image has been found, at Moux in France, as a Gallo-Roman stone relief.
The Celts practised what modern Parsees call ‘sky burials’ and archaeologists more ponderously ‘excarnation’: the exposure of a corpse on a platform or hill so that the bones can be picked clean by scavenging birds, of which the raven would be the largest and most predominant. Only then would the bones be buried, sometimes together with some of the birds. There has been academic speculation that at the time of death the Druids may even have summoned the ravens to come with a special call, much as vultures are summoned by Parsee priests to similar modern sky burials in India.
The practice of burying ravens with humans continued well past the Celtic Iron Age and into the Romano-British period. But then it stopped. Not a single Anglo-Saxon grave has been found with corvid remains. It is just one more reminder that life in Britain changed more with the Anglo-Saxons than with the Romans.
There was a small country lane that led up to Barbury from the plain below and some friends had kindly used it to bring my mountain bike. Much as I enjoyed the walking, I wanted to do this next section at speed – and the descent along the broad green swathes of turf into the village of Ogbourne St George below was fabulous.
As my children liked to point out, mine was not an up-to-date mountain bike. Made twenty-five years ago, when they were still a novelty, it had no suspension and what they used to call a ‘tight frame’, so that the rider felt every last jolt on the track. Going across a furrowed field was like using a pneumatic drill.
But on the turf, and with the wind and sun behind me, I felt I was flying down the slope. The cries of the rooks died off and I started to hear the wood pigeons in the wooded valleys below. If the rooks and crows were emblematic of the Iron Age hill-forts, then surely the wood pigeon was the bird of the Saxon villages that replaced them.
At the bottom of the hill lay Ogbourne St George (‘Ogbourne’ comes from Anglo-Saxon and means ‘the source of the River Og’ – the ‘bourn’ suffix often referring to places where rivers flow off the chalk, like Eastbourne below the Sussex D
owns). By an accident of land management, it had retained the nucleus of the late Anglo-Saxon village intact: a manor house right next to the church, surrounded by fields. The rest of the village had grown up a little distance away.
As I thundered down the slope I could feel the ground underneath the wheels changing from the high chalk and grazing land of the Downs to the arable clay of the river valley below. Fields of green, early wheat were coming up to meet me.
In one short ride I was dropping down out of history by a millennium, from the Celtic world of hill-forts and high cattle grazing to the Saxon world of villages and farms. This was a generalisation – of course there were some Celtic farmers and Saxon shepherds. But it was broadly true. And when you’re travelling at speed down a grassy slope, it’s not the moment for finesse or the slightest wobble, or you’ll come off your bike.
The village had daffodils growing by one of the small ponds the River Og leaves in its wake as it flows through: at first I noticed them because of the King Alfred daffodils – almost too obvious a symbol of the village’s Saxon provenance. But in among the plain yellow of the King Alfreds, someone had carefully planted the far rarer (and more expensive) cyclamineus daffodils with their flared-back wings, like startled horses. Good as the mountain bike had been, it made me wish that I’d galloped down that fabulous green swathe of turf into the village.
*
I don’t like keeping to paths. The original Icknield Way was anyhow hardly route-mapped in the modern style with signposts. It diverged in many places. Better to think of it as a route with tendrils. Those travelling with large numbers of cattle or horses would have needed different routes from those travelling on foot alone, just as happens today in the Andes or any developing part of the world.