Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

I think of Rievaulx Abbey west of Boulby, where in a fertile river valley Cistercian monks founded and built a space in which to hold Mass. Out of ironstone they made an airy structure of soaring buttresses and vaulted ceilings. Their abbey was one among a network of such sites spread around the world, in which prayers were offered to a presence disinclined to disclose itself to the usual beseechings. On the hillsides above the abbey geological forms known as ‘slip-rifts’ slowly open and close in the rock, emitting warm air from deep within the earth, such that on cold days the hillside itself appears to be breathing – as if the land itself were alive. Thousands of years before the Cistercians arrived in those valleys, Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples entered the darkness of the slip-rifts to carry out rituals that may have been sacrificial and were surely devotional, interring body parts amid the stones of the rifts; another kind of annihilation product.