Enchanted by the landscape
(Nimue)
I first went to Brimham Rocks, in Yorkshire when I was in my early twenties, and was blessed with the opportunity for a return visit last week. This is a stunning area of landscape, with massive stones. Some have been placed on top of each other in strange and unlikely ways – due to ancient glaciers. All have been carved by the elements over unthinkable amounts of time.
On seeing it, you might well imagine that these are the eroded remains of some ancient temple, it has that kind of look in some parts, and certainly that kind of feeling. Many of the rock formations have names based on what they remind people of.
The ancient peoples that we all too often label as ‘cavemen’ mostly didn’t live in caves. What did feature a lot in prehistory, was rock shelters. Caves aren’t that common, and were also attractive to large mammals. Any decent bit of rock that offers shelter from the prevailing wind direction is a good foundation for a shelter. Looking at Brimham Rocks, it was obvious to me that there were a lot of places that would make good shelters. I couldn’t imagine prehistoric people not being in that space.
From there of course all is speculation. There is no way of knowing what people in the past thought, felt or often even what they did in response to the landscape. Even when we have written accounts, we only have the view of the people who did the writing and it’s never the whole story. Brimham Rocks feels like a magical place to me, it seems full of spirit, and the rocks speak. It’s all too easy to project my response onto distant historical people and imagine that they felt something similar. On the other hand, it might not be irrational to do so.
There are things about being human that show up across time and cultures. We like cheery celebrations in the dark part of the year. We get excited about big rocks, whether we’ve stood them up or not. The urge to climb them, look at them, draw them, draw on them, crops up all over the place. We get excited about landscape features that suggest stories to us. It might be fair to suspect that ancient Pagan peoples looked at this landscape and had feelings, too.
Spending time amongst the rocks is spending time exposed to history. The creating of this phenomenal landscape took a lot of time. Unthinkable enormities of time, so encountering that is an affecting thing in its own right. Whether it was all in my head or not… I felt a sense of human presence, veneration and significance. I wanted to respond as though to a temple, and I find myself wondering how much human temples might arise from a desire to recreate or mimic some of the majesty occurring naturally in the world.
(Photos by Keith Errington)
