There Is A Mist Hanging In The Air
Climbing out of our tour bus, I invite everyone to ‘walk this way’…..
I navigate my way to a ‘rubble field’ on the moor…. One of many such piles of stones that stretch away into the distance.
I stand between two stones…. A doorway…. And I invite them into my home.
Nine intrepid explorers and myself step back in time as we cross the ancient threshold and into a home that was last lived in four thousand years ago.
I ask everyone to take a seat on one of the stones that make a crude circle amongst the marsh grasses and peat bogs of Dartmoor. We all sit.
There is a mist hanging in the air and a couple of Dartmoor ponies graze peacefully on the tor ( a volcanic plug made of granite), in the distance…..it’s peaceful.
As everyone breaths, our breath turns into steam and is taken away on the soft moorland breeze, that in turn makes us wrap our jackets around our bodies for warmth.
I start to tell everyone about the lives of the folk who once lived in this house…. How they lived, what they ate, what their skills and crafts were. I ask my fellow travellers to imagine walking through a large village, and I then ask them to look around and observe the landscape around us. Explaining what resources were available to these villagers, I then move onto population density….. how many lived here?
As they look over the moors, I can see the lights in their eyes switch on. Realisation has begun to hit them.
We were sitting in one round house, but it was only one of many dozens that were scattered over the hill and moors around us.
I watched as they realised that this ‘rubble field’ had once been a village of thousands.
Strange stone alignments reach away and across the peat bogs…. Who knows why?
A standing stone circle sits amongst the tall grass, as do hidden burial mounts…. small cyst graves cut into the granite and topped with large slabs, then lost under the encroaching peat…. A tall finger like stone sits amidst it all.
We stand next to it…. And we look around. Teaching people to observe their surroundings is a key part of what I teach, and it’s lovely to see that two of my fellow travellers spot another tall stone, off in the distance…. In fact it’s another of several…. Everyone realises that we’re standing in a landscape of archaeology.
People lived at Merrivale for a couple thousand years before the land became untenable and they moved on, but today it stands as a testimony to our forefathers, and it’s as resilient as they are!
Their story does need to be told and I delight in telling it.
Not far away, across this SW peninsula of England, you can find beautiful coastal villages and ports such as Clovelly and Port Isaac, plus a thousand others….. perhaps the residents in them are the descendants of these Bronze Age villagers……yes, perhaps they are!
Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur, is just a few miles to the West of where we stand…. Was he a Bronze Age blacksmith and not just a story created by monks from the 12thC? Perhaps he also worked and lived in a place like this. Did he come from here or was he also a descendant of these people?
The horses certainly belong here……. And those two that were on the hillside are walking down towards us, through the mist.
It’s another good day.