So this Solstice I went walking with some friends, joined the Ridgeway on the Thames past scores of women in fancy hats in Reading station, knowing that staying at home wasn’t an option even though the weather forecast did little to encourage thoughts of camping. We missioned fifteen miles that afternoon, slept in an oversized hedge, a random late night friend of a friend turning up unexpected to me with a bottle of mead and everything looked like it had started to look up. So past White Horse Hill the next day and an existential-conversationed stop at Wayland’s Smithy with one of us departing from bad boots and a blister the size of a cherry tomato. Later, we trudged down an A-road and then a green lane that for the first few miles did a good impression of being anything but a green lane. Past Liddington fort and nearing the end of the day, we finally wound up in a copse beneath the ridge in various states of pain and exhaustion and wonder.
Somehow the blisters did not come for me but for others it was like walking on nails and bubble wrap at once to the point where as we stopped just shy of the motorway crossing, a friend knelt with his head to the kerb and every bit of his body language spoke of pain and composure at once, of wanting to go on and being severely put to the test. A few of us went up the hillfort that night, came across a gang of wannabe-gangster and moped-ed teenagers who may or may not have been responsible for the burning of the roundhouse there that I helped build five years ago now. Two gateposts still stood, charred a bit but still with the original carvings of twin snakes. Liddington sat between the two on the horizon, reminding me of the four-post-wide gap that had once been there that opened up the view from a darkened interior to all the hills beyond.
The area has always held some kind of almost inexplicable magic for me. I don’t know if it was from the first time I’d walked up this way, fuelled by mini popadoms from a skip in Devizes after a trip down the canal on a boat, together with a bag of hash and no real gear besides my german army boots, a modern, summer sleeping bag and an old sports holdall which just about did a good impression of a rucksack. Dry then the summer and me walking down the Lambourne road after a night at the Smithy, and dust on my face and a welcome from a man who’d been at Snelsmore before anyone else and kittens in the bender on the camp from the semi-feral black cat who had only just returned since the eviction.
It might have the mission a few of us made, travelling up in some last minute enterprise and camping in a copse on a track halfway up the hill itself. It was a strange arrival, some huge looming mass in the dark as we approached; a cow we thought but then it turned out to be some kind of standing stone and when my friend began to read staccato phrases from the instant flint flash of his lighter I thought he was making it up. But there they were, quite real the words when I looked, memorials to the Victorian naturalist Richard Jeffries and a close associate, moved from the top of the hill thanks to the kind of Swindon-induced carnage that had made the torching of the roundhouse almost inevitable.
But the place has an appeal from far more than any individual associations and this was of course why we were there – walking as a pilgrimage to the central stones of the upland, heartland inner landscape of Wiltshire, as so many had surely done before, converging from all corners of the country, walking up or down the ridges that span out in every direction – South Downs, North Downs, Chilterns, Cotswolds, Mendips; fingers from Salisbury Plain’s palm.
Finally arriving and stood on a barrow, a man I’d met at Barbury pointed out the line of distant dots of vehicles stretching up the opposite hill of the Sanctuary – a gathering that seemed almost incredible as a reminder of an age no further distant than the eighties, however many echoes it held of our more seriously ancient past. Down the avenue that stretches out from Avebury towards the southwest and the Sanctuary itself, a line of yellow bollards had been placed in an unconscious echo of the stones to either side, one to ward off travellers, the other to welcome them in.
So this perhaps was an old narrative, one mentality settled but far from sedentary, the other one more easy going but peopled by people who were living a life much like anyone else, settled like so Romanies on the estates, a few holding out in trucks and other sites but sure of one thing, that it is right to come to ancient places at these times and mark the turning of the seasons, to be there as more than mere tourists, to recognize these places were built for such a purpose, are somehow intertwined with our own fates and destinies as sure as stone is stone and that grass is still green when there’s rain.
So we partied and danced and played tunes and stayed up to see in the dawn and somehow there was something here that felt right; our being on the land again, however briefly, even in our small symbolic walking to the spot. It was a reminder, brief but deep and pertinent, a moment like an acupuncturist’s needle that spoke of how life can be when we live it together in something approaching some kind of natural order.
I felt different leaving the stones, something that had more to it than simply the minimal food of the last few days or the sleep deprivation or the mead. It felt like everything that must be done was somehow now more possible. The land and the sky seemed more alive, animated and lit up by showers and sunlight and even faith in humanity had somehow been restored thanks to the excellent company. And all these days and decades of cultural clash seemed to be somehow transparent or melting away in the knowledge that we’d made it once again, that it felt good to be here, that suddenly the world appeared to be turning on some kind of better axis.
And that was the point of it all when all the arguments of antiquarians, all the neo-pagan highs and lows of mashedness and the utterly sublime, all the crazy face paint, all the slightly strange and well intentioned throwback cloaks; when all of this had been and gone or had been showed to matter hardly at all in the face of the spirit behind it: that was why we were here, to honour something both ancient and totally immanent, to help create a little more harmony in the world that needs as much love and devotion as we can show in large or small acts or the simple pictures of our observations, creating new memories from the experiences that life is always trying to show us, when we remember to step off the wheel of work or busy mindedness or every groove of our casual ruts and simply see how rich we all are just to be here in the first place.
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