Round cairn of White Raise

I’ve been roaming this fell for years and thought I knew it well but today I came up specifically in search of this ... hidden in plain sight. How many times I must have passed it ...

It was a relief to strike out as the Veneerings kicked off disturbing my quiet reading this morning, after I’d cut my hair. I headed uphill in the sleety rain and out onto open fell. I was excited and delighted to stumble on it after finding evidence of hut circles, cairns, dip and hollows, of which there are many and various up here, and striding determinedly up to several cunningly disguised gorse bushes. What a place this must have been once upon a time.

Unlike the other sites this is a clearly defined burial chamber and I understand that the human remains of a crouched burial were discovered here. It seemed so recent I found myself hesitant about photographing it thinking I wouldn’t photograph an open contemporary grave. I wondered what they had done with the remains that they found. As I saw the path leading away into the distance, highlighted by the light fall of snow, I was reminded of Richard Long’s, ‘A Line Made by Walking’ and the timelessness of it struck me and it had the feel of Everyperson about it. So many poems I want to post with this that I have been looking at today, Rebecca Elson’s, ‘Explaining Relativity’, Maya Angelou’s, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ (for my neighbours, but it would be lost on them), but it had to be one of the Bog Poems in the end ... of course...

https://www.pastscape.org.uk/hob.aspx?hob_id=11183

THE TOLLUND MAN - Seamus Heaney
I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.


II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.


III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.