Dark Skies

by Tiffany Francis-Baker

  The Woodbury is based on a real roundhouse discovered near Salisbury in 1919. Before its excavation, the site was first noted as a crop mark on aerial photographs, but its significance wasn’t fully realised until the German archaeologist Gerhard Bersu started excavating in 1938 after he was forced out of his profession by Nazis and emigrated to Britain. Bersu’s work disproved the theory that Iron Age people lived in holes in the ground (what we now know to be storage pits), and the Little Woodbury was one of the first roundhouse excavations to shed light on how they truly lived. The building measures approximately 15 metres across and 9 metres high, with a thatched roof, wattle and daub walls, and a chalk floor lined with deerskins for fireside comfort.

  I was running an event late one evening when a few of us decided to stay over at the farm rather than deal with the hassle of locking up in the dark. We would be sleeping in the Little Woodbury with a fire to keep us warm and tightly bound hay bales for beds. Before heading in, I offered to walk a loop of the site to check for escaped sheep or lingering visitors and wandered off to the car park alone. The sky was completely clear, the path lit by stars, and the moon almost full, a milky-white orb suspended above me like a big French brie. I walked to the car park where there was nothing to see even in daylight, but beyond that, the farm boundary blurred into the edge of the landowners’ hillside forest next door. Dark conifers stood militantly along the land, and as the slope climbed to the top of the peak, fleets of elder trees and other deciduous species were entwined between them; by June the hillside would be a whispering mob of sweet pines and elderflowers frothing in the sunlight. One spring I even heard a cuckoo.

  Pesticides and rodenticides are not part of ancient farm maintenance, and the abundance of small mammals, voles, mice and rats had resulted in a healthy population of tawny owls and barn owls as well as buzzards, red kites, kestrels and the occasional hobby. Nearby farmers put up owl boxes on their land, which – combined with the natural materials, gaps and sheltered warmth of our houses – meant that the site was alive at night with shouting owls calling out to the dark countryside. Our Saxon longhouse had been popular with the resident barn owl, who dropped in on winter nights to digest and regurgitate its prey. In the morning we would find shining black pellets full of jaw bones and tiny teeth. I spent many weeks trying to capture it on my trail camera, climbing onto the roof rafters to strap it onto the oak beams, adjusting it every few days to target different perches the owl might favour. At last, I caught one 10-second shot of her sitting roundly on the timber, shimmying her head like a baby snake before the clip ended and she was gone.

  The owls weren’t calling tonight, but as I walked back towards the farm, I heard rustling in the trees – perhaps an owl preparing to leap out or a pigeon in a restless shuffle. I continued my slow loop around the site. Past the turfed roof of the Neolithic house decorated with burgundy wall paintings that swayed and shimmered in the light of the fire (copies from an excavation somewhere towards Turkey). Past the Roman villa with its cool, white walls and its herb garden blossoming outside. Past the goats who, I discovered after they accidentally misaligned the trail camera onto their paddock one evening, don’t go to sleep but continue to roam about all night, wandering intermittently across the camera with white eyes glowing.

  For the first time, I saw the farm as an alien landscape; the buildings and pathways that seemed so familiar to me in the day were transformed, and I was thrown into a new world, anchored only by that intoxicating aroma of woodsmoke permanently infused in the air. The farm was cloaked in shadow, concealing the fences and landmarks that defined it, and it was a different place, strange and inscrutable. With one last glance at the moon, I retreated to the roundhouse and pushed the doors closed behind me, shutting out the darkness until sunrise.

  Inside, the fire was dancing, and sparks drifted up towards the roof, extinguished by the lack of oxygen. Archaeological experiments completed here in the past included one to see whether a roundhouse roof was built with a hole in the middle to let out smoke. It wasn’t, which the team realised fairly quickly before calling the fire engine. With a hole in the top, the smoke and flames were caught in an updraft, and the roof caught fire. They have since proved that smoke filters out through small holes in the thatch, not only clearing the air inside but also keeping insects at bay and deterring birds from pecking the straw. It does not, however, prevent them from nesting in the roof, particularly one as high as this, and a pair of barn swallows arrives from Africa every year and builds a nest in the centre of the roof, directly over the fire. In spring they collect mud and fibrous grasses to make their nest and brood a clutch of chicks, which fledge successfully in time for a second attempt later in the summer. If you sit quietly on a warm afternoon, the adults swoop back and forth through the hole at the top of the door, bringing food to their young in a slow silence broken only by the sweep of air against wing and the seep of a hungry chick.

  The fire cast a papaya glow over our faces, and I felt strands of fur between my fingers, dusty remains of the old deerskin that separated me from the floor. To us, a tribe of modern people, it was a luxury, a novelty to escape the twenty-first century and retreat to this ancient world, surrounded for one night by the calm of the countryside. I imagined the lives of our ancestors, without modern medicine, electricity or dominion over the earth, but instead nurturing a connection with the landscape, observing the cycles and rhythms of nature and living out their place in the ecosystem. For thousands of years we were prey and predator, surviving as best we could within our ecological corner. I wondered at what point we rose up and started to carve away the land for profit, exploiting other humans and animals to create systems and empires that would lead us further and further away from a natural existence.

  I imagined the original Woodbury roundhouse, how it would have stood around 2,000 years ago, built by a community of people who could twist plant fibres into rope, weave wattle fences from hazel, mix together the soil, straw and dung needed to daub the walls together, and thatch a golden roof in the sunlight. The fire would have always been ablaze; the continuous presence of smoke in their lungs may have affected their health, but living an active life in the open air would’ve tipped back the balance. At night, just as we slept around the firepit, they would have eaten hot venison stew, wrapped in furs and woven cloth dyed with the plants growing outside. Bundled up inside this warm and sheltered space, stories would have unfurled across the flames, passed down through generations from grandmother to father to daughter. Before Christianity spread through Britain, these stories would have been full of natural symbols, tales of the forests and mountains, sun gods and mythological creatures. Historians might now call them pagan, but they weren’t boxed in by religious labels; they respected the natural world and wove its power into their lives.

  We keep some stories alive in our seasonal celebrations, but most have been lost in the threads of time. Only swallows could remember how these people existed, the birds sweeping over their fireside days and nights for thousands of years, raising their own broods, their own tribes in a roundhouse roof. Would the swallows still be nesting in 1,000 years’ time?

  In June I came at dusk to Butser Hill to listen to the skylarks just across the dual carriageway from the farm. It’s a chalkland habitat and nature reserve, home to many rare butterflies including the Duke of Burgundy, chalkhill blue and silver-spotted skipper, as well as lichens, wild orchids and meadow pipits. During the breeding season, skylarks sing from early dawn until late evening to attract a mate. The energy required for this is enormous, but by singing his best song, a male can indicate his physical fitness and sexual availability to his suitors. All summer they sang under the bright evening sky, and I lay in the grass to listen as the sun dipped below the horizon.

  It was now autumn, and the roundhouse visitor centre was closed until spring. It sat in silence beside the car park, pointed roof silhouetted against the sky like a witch’s hat. It was not yet six o’clock in the evening, but already
the air was closing in, and darkness was settling, the birds quiet, asleep. I left my car by the gate to avoid being locked in later and headed down along the pathway that cuts into the side of the hill. Despite the glow of Portsmouth to the west, there was true darkness here. Conscious of the steep slope to my left that tumbled down to the shadowed abyss known locally as Grandfather’s Bottom, I stepped carefully along the track to avoid the brambles sprawling out like serpents. The slopes of Butser are perilous, but come winter they would be filled with families on plastic sledges, whizzing down the hill on a layer of snow as the sheep watched, alarmed, from afar.

  At the summit of the hill, a large aerial mast stood next to the trig point we once walked to to induce my sister’s overdue baby (now Meredith). This mast, while undeniably ugly, is the unofficial marker by which the locals determine where they are. It can be seen from almost anywhere in the surrounding area, and we rotate around it like a galvanised sundial. That night I used the mast to navigate the hillside, its great barred form outlined against the sky.

  I reached a small copse of hawthorn and elder trees where I knew a hidden path tunnelled through to the top of the hill, but the gloaming had crushed all the light from inside, and I realised it would be a blind ascent through the trees. With caution, I climbed through the dark until, emerging from the copse, the track undulated through the grass in loping waves bordered by heaps of cow dung. The trees surrounding the car park and paths began to ebb back to the edges of the hill as I climbed, until I was alone, exposed beneath the stars, a wasp on a yoga ball. There were no clouds, just a pale glow from the distant city and a spread of constellations and satellites glittering across the sky.

  I followed a path across the hill, so the dual carriageway and city lights disappeared behind me. It was almost dark now, and I made a note to keep in sight of the pylon for my return journey. Down slightly, and over to the mounds and tumuli on the northern edge. The grass was soft underfoot here, stretched over the milky chalkland, their rich soils bringing so much biodiversity to the South Downs. Eventually, I came to the spot I was searching for: a polo-shaped mound on the slope I had discovered in daylight a few weeks before, facing away from the sea and towards the rural landscape of Hampshire and Sussex. I climbed into the mound and lay down with my back propped against the soil, dirt and dock leaves pressed against the palms of my hands.

  These mounds were remnants of Bronze Age barrows and Iron Age ditches, echoes of ancient life when the trees were first chopped down to make room for wattle houses and sheep grazing. The sheep still belonged to the landscape, but the houses moved down over the centuries until they settled in the towns and villages which now lay below me in a sea of sparkling lights. Electricity is a captivating force, but it is nothing compared to a glance at the sky when the coercive lights of modern life make way for the real thing: a shimmering assembly of stars, burning through the night like a thousand gilded rambutans.

  They were burning on Butser that night, raw and frozen in the infinite space above us that always makes me feel so reassuringly irrelevant. There is something satisfying about the idea that, while we fritter away the days worrying about office politics and calorie counts and luggage allowances, the natural world is wholly disinterested. The sun will rise, and the moon will wane, and we have no power over it whatsoever. Snuggled up in my ski jacket and gloves, I could feel the cold permeating my cheeks and nose, but I was happy. The galaxy was performing just for me tonight. Squashed into my polo-shaped tumulus, disrespecting some ancient soul buried beneath me, I could see constellations in every direction, each telling a tale on the midnight stage.

  The night sky starts with Orion with his belt of three bright stars: Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, which sounds like a spicy dip. On winter nights he’s found in the northern hemisphere, although his reputation as the Hunter changes between cultures. In medieval Arabic astronomy he is called al-jabbar or the Giant, and in Afrikaans, the belt stars are the Drie Susters or Three Sisters. For the Ojibwa Native Americans, he is known as Kabibona’kan, the Winter Maker, while in Greek mythology he is the son of the ocean god Poseidon. One day he travelled to Crete to hunt with the goddess Artemis and her mother Leto, but after threatening to slay every beast on earth, Mother Nature sent a giant scorpion to kill him instead. The Greek goddesses begged Zeus to commemorate Orion’s death by placing him in the heavens among the stars, together with the scorpion that destroyed him.

  My star sign is Capricorn, although I haven’t paid attention to it since I stopped reading Top of the Pops magazine in 2002. Capricorn is a water goat who lives in the unspoiled wilderness known as Arcadia. He earned his place in the heavens by helping Zeus to fight the Titans, but to escape one of the monsters he was forced to jump into the Nile, transforming half his body into a fish. Today the constellation Capricornus is found in the aquatic end of the night sky with Pisces, Cetus and Aquarius, looking like a squashed slice of pizza.

  Draco the serpent dragon lies close to Ursa Minor and the North Star, associated with the dragon Ladon from Greek mythology. Tasked with guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides, Ladon was killed by Heracles who stole the apples as one of his 12 labours. In Arabic astronomy, however, the head of Draco is not a dragon at all, but the Mother Camels. Two hyenas – the stars Eta Draconis and Zeta Draconis – are attacking a baby camel that is protected by four female camels owned by a group of nomads camping nearby. Not as dramatic as a dragon, but the changing stories behind our constellations are a way to explore how different cultures have understood their place in the world. I like to imagine two people looking at the stars from two different points on the globe, projecting their own rich histories onto the night sky. Of course, an essential piece of dragon-based folklore comes from the 1996 film Dragonheart, an icon of modern cinema that critic Roger Ebert claimed ‘no reasonable person over the age of 12 would ever be able to take seriously’. Here we learn that both the Greek and Arabic cultures were wrong, and the constellation Draco is actually dragon heaven where all dragons go once they have upheld their ancient oath to protect mankind. It’s what the silver screen was made for.

  For an hour I sat by the edge of the hill and watched the stars until I could no longer feel my fingers. Then, with no choice but to head home, I stood up and left the northern edge of the hill to walk back towards the car park. The problem was that the horizon was no longer glazed with the dying rays of the sun, and the pylon’s silhouette had vanished into the shadows while I’d been walking. I had no idea which direction to take.

  ‘Hmm.’

  For a second I glanced back at the stars to see if I could use them for navigation, before remembering I’m not a fifteenth-century sailor but a helpless twenty-something dependent on Google for everything. I had no option but to wander off in the vague direction I appeared from and to carefully pick my way across the landscape in search of something familiar.

  I walked back to the summit and headed towards Orion’s fateful acquaintance Scorpio, not knowing if this was useful but enjoying the view nonetheless. After a while I heard something move to my right; the stars were just bright enough to illuminate the ground, but now what was walking beside me? It sounded like a mammal, but it scampered off with an enviously sharp sense of direction before I could find my phone to use as a torch. Perhaps a fox or a deer; maybe a descendant of the badger whose skull I had discovered in the elder trees nearby when I was younger.

  It’s a strange thing to be part of my generation and to have returned home, to the place where I spent my entire childhood and teenage years, by the age of 22. Four years later, most of my friends were still living in London, Australia, Thailand, Europe, spending their days exploring and pursuing careers that couldn’t really be attempted in a pretty market town boasting of its history in the wool trade. For those of us who went to university – who couldn’t wait to escape at 18, live in shared accommodation and eat toast for every meal – only four years away felt too little. I’ve found inspiration in the lives of my friends li
ving around the world, but I love being at home: watching how a familiar landscape has changed in the short time I’ve been alive, remembering the highs and lows of each season as they passed, the way the lake froze every few winters, and how tall the chestnut tree grows on Sheet village green while we drank cider in the pub garden.

  As I continued my walk along the hill, I realised the pylon had loomed out of the darkness beside me. There she was, the Aluminium Lady, come to pull me out of my dark puzzle. From here, I could align her with the glow of Portsmouth on the horizon and use the fizzing, orange serpent of the A3 like a compass to guide me back to the car. I was never very good at orienteering; when my turn came to navigate our Duke of Edinburgh group across the Isle of Wight, we ended up lost in the rain. This evening, I wondered if my ancestors would be ashamed by my use of a metal tower and dual carriageway to lead me home rather than the natural maps of the landscape.

  But the road did guide me, and in the cold night, I climbed wearily into my car to drive back to the warm nest of home and a mint tea.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ghost Stories

  As children we are taught the night is a time for rest, not for play. We have a bedtime to adhere to, a nightlight to ward off our fear of the dark. I couldn’t sleep without the clunk of a cassette tape, the soothing voice of Stephen Fry reciting the latest Harry Potter book. We are told stories of ghosts and goblins, of werewolves and creatures that lurk in the darkness so that even if we don’t fear the night, from a young age, we are taught to be wary of everything about it. Many of the stories we have told ourselves over the years reflect this: they are attempts to know the unknown or to understand our place in the universe. When we’re unable to make sense of something we cannot control, we engage our most powerful asset instead: the human imagination. To examine the literature we have produced as a species is to gain insight into our hopes and fears and into the way we have connected with unknown landscapes and ideas as our societies have changed.