Against the Bone Grey Sky
a snaking path between the barrow mounds
Samhain on Salthouse Heath, Norfolk.
An ox skull glowers / from a pole / alder and elm wear masks / of the dead
brushwood burns / round the sacred copse / our wooden gods watch
The witchman holds a ram’s head / horned / against the bone grey sky
two sparrows / on the flatted stone / stomach of deer / a stoat’s torn foot
A lapwing stirs
the witchman sips / the blood of dawn
he sprinkles water on the neck / of the boy / draped in a bullock skin
Around the stone / our elders stare
men stand / without shield or spear
To the cold sun
the sword is raised
its blade dull
in the trees’ half light
Victor Tapner, ‘Altar’ from Flatlands
Hello my lovely friends.
I don’t know about you, but now that it’s October my thoughts have turned towards the deepening of autumn into Hallowtide. I think of it as a Tide, because rather than being a single evening - All Hallows’ Eve - I always feel that this segment of the Wheel casts a broad sweep across the last days of this month and into the next.
Last year at this time I was immersed in preparing to wrap and post out Earth Chant, the seasonal candle edition I had been working on inspired by this Tide. One huge benefit of the two-year project from the point of view of my own writing life, was that I got to uncover and tell many stories. Each candle was given its own setting in the landscape, and I found that the haunts of the ancestors were the natural habitat of this one, whether prehistoric burial mound or the ruins of once-proud medieval church.
As the stories flowed, I set them down in my Instagram feed and shared them to Facebook. At that time IG was the main outlet for my writing, but it has one serious limitation. The maximum number of characters (not words) in a caption is something like 2,250, which is not only hard to judge but doesn’t allow for much story development. To be fair that’s not what Instagram was designed for. And on the plus side this constraint does force some serious editing, often down to the last comma, which certainly serves to sharpen things up. But still, I’ve often had to run a piece of writing into the comments section or serialise it over a few days.
The story that follows was shared in four parts between 4th and 8th October 2022. I’ve scooped up the pieces, glued them together and edited lightly to make something that I hope will evoke this most liminal of times.
So let’s jump in and make our way together along the winding footpath between the bracken, birch, fly agaric and deer tracks to where a smiling pumpkin lantern shines a light through the gathering dusk.