Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain
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Take a journey into our ancient past. Explore a long-lost landscape and gradually discover the minds, beliefs and cultural practices of those souls who lived on these lands thousands of years before you.Travelling the length and breadth of Britain, James Canton pursues his obsession with the physical traces of the ancient world: stone circles, flint arrowheads, sacred stones, gold, and a lost Roman road. He ponders the features of the natural world that occupied ancient minds: the night sky, shooting stars, the rising and setting sun. Wandering to the furthest reaches of the islands, he finds an undeciphered standing stone north of Aberdeen and follows the first footsteps on the edge of a long-lost Ice Age land in the North Sea.As Canton walks the modern terrain, slowly understanding the ancient signs that lie within and beneath it, he weaves a gentle tale of discovery, showing how, beyond the superficial differences of life-style and culture, the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles were much closer to the present-day one than we might imagine.
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TO MY MOTHER
rare an object of wonder, a marvel: OE
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I wandered on towards the Elphinstone estate. Two oystercatchers stood upon red-tinged clods. A yellowhammer called from a phone wire. Down a hawthorn-lined lane in the estate lands, a miasma of St Mark’s flies filled the air such that I was forced to walk along through a cloud of long, shiny, black bodies, each one dangling dark legs that hung as though paralysed from the fly’s torso. The religiosity in naming these creatures after St Mark supposedly comes from their emergence close to the saint’s day of 25 April, and yet the manner in which each fly flew with wings wide and pendulous legs dangling reminded of a shrunken dark cross, a crucifix. I pictured St Mark being dragged about the streets of Alexandria, a rope tied about his neck, his black-robes hanging dirty about his lifeless form, and wondered if this image wasn’t the inspiration for the beatification of these flies by Carl Linnaeus when he had named them Bibio marci in his tenth edition of the Systema Naturae back in 1758.
The flies vanished. I stepped back into woodland where the bare pine carpet was littered with tiny, bright green posies that were bunches of new growth snipped from the higher branches of the pines by the flocks of finches and that now lay like votive offerings – minute nosegays or scattered sea anemones lost in the woods. Each was perfectly soft to the touch, the young needles in gentle clumps, the severed attachment turning brown in the air. I picked several from the floor, some truly no bigger than an agate stone, smelt each one, and put them into my shirt pocket. When I found them later that day they had already lost their soft lustre.
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