Bartlow Hills Roman Burial Site, Cambridgeshire
Avebury Stone Circle, Wiltshire
Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
The Sanctuary stone circle, Wiltshire
West Kennt Long Barrow, Wiltshire
Sutton Hoo Burial Site, Suffolk
'In burial, the human body becomes a component of the farther, returned as dust to dust - inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites on the Earth's surface. The burial chamber, the gravestone, the hillside on which ashes have been scattered, the cairn: these are places to which the living can return and where loss might be laid to rest'. - Robert Macfarlane.
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Visiting these sites over the past year has been such a restorative process. There's something deeply evocative about being in the presence of something or somewhere truly historic, or indeed, prehistoric. It's the unknown that surrounds sites like these that is so intriguing. The fact they are often partly obscured, eroded or visible only adds to this - and we get a sense of how important they must have been at a time when our communities were evolving from hunter gatherers to farmers and settlers.
March 2024: Bartlow Hills Roman Burial Site
A site not far from me and one I'd never heard about...
Visually intriguing to see these forms rising out of the ground in this way. When I think of burial grounds (or the ones I've been looking at anyway) I think of the burial being sub soil. At this site, the artefacts were buried within these mounds. I can visualise what this might look like, if you could look straight through the grass and soil - a collection of Roman objects almost suspended within the ground, neither above it or below it.
Walking, circling...
How I might use this site visually isn't really know now, although it seems a fitting coincidence that a small experiment I did last week (and prior to this visit) featured two mound forms in it:
Lines meandering down, down into the ground. What do they reach? What do they find? Touch, seeking those hidden, reaching out, wondering and wandering.
April 2024: A mini pilgrimage to Avebury
This time visiting Avebury, we expanded our walk and connected up to the other ancient sites in the area. It was absolutely amazing to experience this as a sort of sequence, especially entering a burial chamber at the top of a hill, in gale force winds, at night!
I love the line of the stone here, set against the sky and grass. it creates an intersection between these natural elements. I'm thinking about using this line in drawing.
Also, the marks and deposits on the surface of the stone itself, could almost map a journey in itself.
Entering the burial chamber at night when no one else was visiting was amazing!
Silbury Hill. This was built by hand!
Walking along the avenue. The time at which we visit here is significant as I've just turned 40. I said to my husband all I want for my birthday is to walk. I want to walk the South West coast path - obviously not in one go, but in sections. As we walk this Avenue in Avebury, with friends, I feel a strong sense of life and living and at the same time - a sense of life passing.
Sutton Hoo
" In June 1939, archaeologists painstakingly brushed away layers of sandy soil to reveal the shape of a ship beneath a mound. In the centre of the ship, they found a burial chamber full of the most extraordinary treasures. It turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon royal burial of incomparable richness, and would revolutionise the understanding of early England'. - https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/suffolk/sutton-hoo
A great place to take kids as it's so clearly visible how large and significant this burial site is.
The geography of the site means that there is quite a long walk to get to it and around it. Not completely stress free with kids, but the high watch tower was a huge draw as you can climb it and really get a sense of the site's scale.
Thinking of layers, different shades and tones as time passes, the colours of the seasons - how does this change our experience of a place? How being there with young people captures something for us that we may have lost.
