If you saw the selfie I posted not too long ago, you’ll have noticed I was out walking earlier. I regularly walk along the same road to the next town over, 40 minutes out, 40 minutes back, regardless of weather.
When I walk, I let my mind wander, too. I mostly think about the landscape, and the language and symbology connected to it. I thought I could share some of that today. I apologise in advance for the quality of the photos, it was steadily raining and the sun was going down. But perhaps that’s the best time for the subject matter I’m about to share.
This string of thought was brought to you by a little egret I spotted today, a strikingly white bird which contrasted sharply with the overcast grey landscape. It was standing in a body of water perhaps not unique to these environs, but certainly ubiquitous;
In Dutch, a stagnant body of water like this, essentially a drainage ditch, is called “sloot” (consider it rhyming with moat, and keep that tidbit in mind).
Now, lots of man-made bodies of stagnant water get colloquially referred to as “sloot”, although there are a number of other words more specific for a certain nuber of those, like the body of water pictured below, technically is a “watergang” (lit. water(hall)way).
That word ties in nicely with some prehistoric ideas surrounding water, watery places, and things like bogs; that is to say, they are like boundaries between worlds, roads to the underworld, specifically. Many offerings are found by archaeologists in what were watery spaces at some point in history. Bodies were deposited into bogs in pre-Christian times. We still deposit coins into wells and fountains.
Anyway, “sloot”. It’s not just a drainage ditch, or a symbolic boundary between worlds, it’s also a physical boundary in the landscape. Etymologically speaking, the word “sloot” is related to the word “slotgracht” (moat. Aha, see, I told you to keep that rhyme in mind!). Since as long as people have been settling in the landscape and shaping it to their liking, they’ve been digging ditches for a number of reasons.
Drainage ditches are almost as old as human settlement, as are defensive dicthes (look up Iron Age hill forts, try finding shots that show you exactly how deep their dicthes and tall their banks are, and consider that these were dug by hand). Ditches were also dug around ritual spaces, like burial mounds, and even Stonehenge, as both physical and symbolical boundaries between the mundane landscape and the ritual landscape.
One of my favourite roads to walk on, is the one pictured below:
If you’ve been following me for a while now, you might have seen this road before during different seasons. I don’t know how often I’ve actually shared pictures of it, but I do know I’ve taken quite a number of this stretch of manky tarmac.
The thing about this road is that it’s a raised road. If you want your infrastructure to withstand being in a flat, low-lying lanscape, you’ve got to raise it above the surrounding land. Many of these roads around here are lined with hedges, to keep the wanderer on the road from being buffeted by the wind, which has free reign in the fields around the road.
With the quality if the silence on this road, the slight cocooning of the hedges, the wildlife which is present in those same hedges, etc., it’s a mildly magical experience to walk down it.
Now, if you’ve a brain like mine, and have been following along with the above text, depicting my train of thought as I went along this road, you might get a little kick out of the realisation that this road has a sloot on either side of it.
It’s literally a road between two boundaries that are both physical and symbological.
I love it. I hope you enjoyed learning about it.
There’s an image and a phrase that can fit into a fantasy story with no effort whasoever…
The Downs have changed a lot over the past few decades. It was one of the first things I noticed when I looked at the old gardens.
Gone were the ornamentally created front lawns with their hedges and potted flowers in large, decorative basins. Gone were the flowering trees and willows, gone were the streams and the fountains and the sound of chimes in the wind like crystal and bell. The air was dead of all things but the sighing trees and even that seemed more memory than present whisper.
The creatures that still lived in the high-walled kitchen gardens were not much better off. Even if those in the Great House had moved on, or disappeared, or passed, they still lived among the holes in the hedgerows, or stole the dusty, questionable hospitality of the gardener’s quarters.
I found myself rearranging the bricks beneath the dirt. Exposing the worn-down stones to the air after gods only knows how long beneath the earth; scraping back the loam and rotting leaves and the good black thickness beneath my digging, searching fingers that, in a moment’s glance, looked more molelike than human.
When the dirt and debris had been cleared away; all by hand, for all the tools’ handles seemed rotted and splintered in the sun; I fell to re-arranging the bricks. They were supposed to form raised beds, once upon a time. Silver-grey and red sandstone in the most beautiful patterns. All I found were the grey and blackened, as if fire had come or the long years spent apart had desecrated all my childhood heart held sacred.
Hours in the dappled shade and silent, twisting breeze exposed the foundations. The patterns I had laid in laughter and a summer’s joy. Before the heat had settled in my bones and made every move a misery when the index climbed too high. Back when the sun’s caress left freckles only in its wake and dancing-bright eyes; not reddened skin and desperate, drained exhaustion.
When I was finished, the bed was raised again, and the path between it and the gardener’s cottage had been squared and straightened again as well. It was a little frightening, really, how the mounded black earth looked more a grave than garden, but there was nothing left in my shoulders but ache and I had not the tools to enact further change. The vines that climbed the cottage walls concerned, for the way they insinuated themselves between the bricks and seemed to cover more than a third of the roof. They, too, would have to be removed; and yet… and yet I did not reach for them, wary as I was that they might now indeed be holding the building together even as they ripped it apart.
The glass windows in their casements were still perfect and uncracked. The little diamond panes bright, if dusty, where they stood reflecting the sun. I knew the drapes inside would crumble if I touched them, the sink was full of half-done dishes and a thick layer of dust. Spiders spun webs in the corners and the furniture… taken from the Great House on the abbey grounds, when the new things had been acquired in some long-ago year, looked as though perhaps, with a new upholstered cushion and perhaps, perhaps, some polish….
But I did not throw open the door. Did not shove my shoulder to it and command it yield to me. Did not even reach for the knob to check that it were locked… I was, yet again, on the outside. Couldn’t even remember finding the door in the bank beneath the tree roots… didn’t remember the dry streambed and the sunny, dappled shade that shifted in every rustling breeze and the call of distant hawks-
But I had put one small corner of the garden to rights, and in time perhaps the denizens of the hedge and heathrows would repopulate it. I sank back down on my knees and brushed the path clear of dirt and leaves, plucked the grass from the verge and discarded it beneath some hedge or other. The birds might use it, perhaps, if it struck their fancy.
When I rose there was black dirt clinging to my hands, a testament to its time gone fallow with nothing but the changing seasons dropping leaves to turn to mulch and only the rummaging about of the wind to till it. It should not be so ill-used, the grounds I had loved so much, ran wild on, should not be so silent.
No sheep bells calling across the moor. No distant barking of the hunting hounds. No choirs in the abbey, no whistling in the fields. No laughter from the club at the end of the lane, no sighing, crying notes from Fox’s violin or Badger’s low baritone-bass. No high clear ringing from Mouse’s pipes-
And so the dreaming fell to pieces much as the first in a decade had, with potential peeking from under leaves and behind the sturdy trunks of ancient oak and apple trees. When I looked over my shoulder, shadows were moving and there was a smile on my face. Perhaps not so dead and forgotten as all that…
House Of Crows 