Harp Of The Trees

pretty birds & dancing stones

The old church kissing gate opens onto a fresh spring morning, Filby, Norfolk, 12 April 2025

Hello friends, and welcome to this New Moon edition of Bracken & Wrack.

The April new moon feels very special when it happens just before May Day, as it does this year. Perhaps that’s because this moment of new beginnings heralds the full blossoming of spring, which will continue to wax in tandem with the swelling moon until both reach their peak around Old May Day.

It seems appropriate, too, that this new moon falls in earthy Taurus. Well, you know what they say about Greenwood Marriages ;-) There’s plenty of documentation both literary and historical (not to mention woven into traditional folk songs - see below) that stepping into the woods in pairs around May’s Eve and coming back covered with bits of bark and moss has been a thing since time immemorial.

Along the lane, the very first clusters of hawthorn buds are beginning to unfurl, sugar-pink stamens just peeping out between bridal petticoats. Each year my very first sniff of their scent is a moment to look forward to. This time, for a change, I wasn’t in Norfolk but parked down a country lane off the A17 for a picnic lunch on the way home from Derbyshire. But by May’s Eve the whitethorn will be decked and the blackthorn bare again, on the cusp of its greening as tiny leaves push their way past those wicked spines.

There is, I reflected while side-stepping down a Derbyshire hill clad in both the black and the white, a liminal moment as the sloe-blossom loses its sovereignty and the may-blossom hasn’t yet come into its power. A time between times, a click of the fingers when the year sits between the horns.

That’s the moment where we find ourselves now. Let the magic begin.

Stitchwort embroidering the woodland floor, Derbyshire, 20 April 2025

In this edition of Bracken & Wrack:

• Druids On Top: the enigmatic stone of St Mary’s, Bungay

• Magic In My Pocket: ‘There was sunshine and May Day in it’

• A Gift For The Ancestors: another story of stones

• Bird In The Bush: a song for May Day

• … and somehow the threads of harps and stones and the joys of the May are drawn together as we skip towards the Greenwood ;-)

DRUIDS ON TOP: THE ENIGMATIC STONE OF ST MARY’S, BUNGAY

One of the very few well-known stones of Suffolk stands in St. Mary's churchyard in Bungay. Of course, on the way back from Halesworth Day of Dance it had to be visited. I’ve usually heard this boulder referred to as the Druid Stone but apparently it’s also known as the Devil’s Stone or Giant’s Grave. Nearly opposite the west door, it’s far older than the medieval church, having probably arrived here during the Ice Age.

Seen from the front it looks eerily like a gravestone. Seen side on, though, it’s clearly three dimensional and in fact it’s an ‘embedded granite glacial erratic’ to use the correct technical term. Interestingly, the official church website for St Mary’s concedes that ‘it may have marked the site of a pagan temple or meeting place before the first church was built on the site.’ In other words it’s likely that, in common with many others, the church was deliberately positioned next to a place sacred to the Old Ways. By claiming such pulse-points for Christianity, the hope was that any lingering atmosphere of what it would see as devil worship would be erased.

Before we get to Old Hornie though, let’s start with the Druid connection since that seems to be the most persistent one. Just outside the graveyard of St Mary’s, an interpretation panel catches the eye with its very cartoonish illustration of ‘comedy Druids’ and highly questionable assertion that the Druids worshipped stones :-) In fact I could pick apart all the ‘information’ contained on the panel but the fundamental thing we have to work on is that the stone does seem to be linked with Druid activity through its most commonly cited name. After all, landscape features are far more often attributed to the Devil or to giants than to Druids, and although all three are present here, its the Druids who seem to have come out on top.

There’s plenty of folklore attached to this stone, which is one of the very few named examples in Suffolk, but I don’t know of any that relates specifically to the Druids. That is, unless it’s druidic wisdom that’s being called upon when young girls place their ears against the stone to hear the answers to their questions or wishes, having danced around it (or knocked upon it) 12 times.

And then the Old One steps in, as another version of this lore has children dancing around the stone seven times ‘on a certain day of the year’ (sadly there’s no information as to which one) and then waiting for the Devil to appear. This is a common theme in churchyard folklore, but the number seven is interesting here as it’s traditionally linked with the Fair Folk so I wonder whether there is also a connection to the appearance of a figure like the Fairy King or Robin Goodfellow?

The Druid Stone in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Bungay, Suffolk, 5 April 2025

Dancing around a standing stone - or stones - of course occurs again and again in folklore, reflected in the names of stone circles or even in place names like Skipping Block Corner on the parish boundaries of Kimberley and Barnham Broom in Norfolk, where long ago another standing stone is said to have been danced or ‘skipped’ around ….

It’s not surprising that Bungay’s special stone also known as Giant’s Grave. After all, legend often attributes the erection of prehistoric monoliths, dolmens and stone circles to an early race of giants, and who’s to say differently? Although I’ve not heard any story explaining the giantish connection, folktales often explain the presence of megalithic sites or extreme natural landscape features as having been cast or dropped there by giants.

W A Dutt, a local writer of the 1930s whose work included the very interesting Markstones of East Anglia, makes the point that the familiar stories of how early saints voyaged to and fro between Brittany and Britain on slabs of stone, or in stone boats, also say much about the magical qualities with which the sacred stones of prehistory were credited.

Dutt mentions in an almost throwaway line that ‘some consider it to be a Ley or Direction Stone’ and goes on to write fascinatingly about the way that such stones in the landscape can be shown to form straight alignments with other especially remarkable features such as natural outcrops, river crossings, church towers and lakes. It’s of its time, but well worth a read.

I, for one, am convinced by his belief that these alignments cannot be random. The evidence does seem to suggest that somehow, natural features like stone outcrops and human-erected monuments like stone circles or churches both gravitate to the same threads of energy criss-crossing the land. When you try to work out how it’s logically possible you soon scratch your head, but still the conviction persists, borne out by such practices as dowsing or even something as simple as laying a ruler across an ordnance survey map.

I haven’t tried lining this one up with any other notable landscape feature (yet) but there’s actually another glacial erratic boulder very near our cottage. In fact, it’s close enough that at one time I was in the habit of taking an early morning run as far as St Margaret’s, Witton, and walking around the church to get my breath back before starting back along the high-banked lanes. Walking widdershins, as it happens, although who’s to say whether there’s any significance in that? ;-)

About two metres away from the north side of the church lies a large, half-buried boulder measuring, so Edwin Rose tells us in The Archaeology of Witton, near North Walsham (East Anglian Archaeology Report No.18) 103cm x 81cm, with 17cm visible above ground. Rose half-heartedly speculates that the stone ‘perhaps once had some local significance’ while the church guide itself rather surprisingly suggests that the building may have been located in this place precisely because of the presence of the stone.

The fact that it’s on the dark, or ‘Devil’s’ side of the church may not be a coincidence if there was a Christian bid to put it in its place. And if that theory is true, I wonder whether it attracted practices that the medieval church would have found unacceptable?

Just above the stone, in the north wall, two deep-splayed round windows look to be Saxon. Clearly, the church site is ancient. We know that in Anglo-Saxon times there were still many edicts against such traditions as making offerings at crossroads and burial mounds, or feasting with the ancestors.

Or perhaps, I like to think, making merry with the Fair Folk on their dancing-stone.

The Witton Stone on the north side of St Margaret’s church, Norfolk

MAGIC IN MY POCKET: ‘There was sunshine and May Day in it’

He let the wind blow into it, and the nightingale sing into it. He let the brook murmur by it, and the trees rustle there. Then he brought it back to the house.

‘Play one more tune before we go to bed,’ begged the little pigs.

‘All right. Now listen,’ said Brock. He turned the handle and most lovely music came out, far sweeter and clearer than ever before. Nothing cracked or false was left. The Badger had put the music of the woods into the old hurdy-gurdy. There was a nightingale singing in the background, and a blackbird fluting to a song. There was sunshine and May Day in it. There was the harp of the trees, and the murmur of the wind and water all mingled with the original airs of the little organ.

‘What have you done?’ asked Sam. ‘It’s quite different. It’s beautiful now.’

‘I’ve mended it,’ said Brock. ‘If I can mend broken whistles and broken hearts, I can surely mend a broken hurdy-gurdy.’

Alison Uttley, ‘Sam Pig and the Hurdy-Gurdy Man’ (extract), Magic In My Pocket

This time, Bracken & Wrack’s recommendation is a book that I remember from my childhood and which has stayed with me, informing my world ever since. I know it’s harder to tap into that sense of wonder when you first encounter a children’s book as an adult rather than when you’re six years old. Still, I’m pretty sure that if you pick up this collection of short stories by Alison Uttley you’ll find yourself enchanted by them.

The introduction to Magic In My Pocket explains that the twenty-three tales have been selected from seventeen of Alison Uttley’s books, which goes to show how much more there is to discover if you feel like delving further. And the very titles of those books leave a sweet taste in the mouth. How about The Spice-woman’s Basket, Cuckoo Cherry-Tree and Nine Starlight Tales?

The extract I’ve chosen here is perfect to welcome the May but there are stories for all seasons, from ‘The Easter Egg’ (one of my childhood favourites) to ‘Sledging’. Those two stories are memoir, but most of the others are what the introduction calls tales of imagination, most of them owing much to those keenly observant years when the ways of country things were so deeply absorbed and indelibly recorded. For this author everything has life; the wind calls, the animals talk, the trees tell their secrets. She can truly say, ‘There is magic in my pocket’

Perhaps from this, you will see why Magic In My Pocket is such a treasured book on my shelf. Of course today we can see the rural settings as idealised and nostalgic but, you know, magic is everywhere. It’s certainly not gone away ;-)

A GIFT FOR THE ANCESTORS: another story of stones

A tussocky hollow among the rocks of Robin Hood’s Stride. Yes, this was the place. Steaming water poured over a couple of teabags, buns and blondies brought out from the rucksacks and we were ready to share a simple lunch with the spirits of bracken, moss and lichen.

Initially I perched on a patch of soft grass that seemed to sprout, improbably, from one of the rocks. When the damp began to seep through my adventure trousers I moved down to the dry springy bracken at its foot.

Taking out pencils, watercolours and square black-bound drawing books we both recorded the scene laid out before us in our own ways. I struggle with literal renditions of landscape. Starting always with the intention of having a go anyway, a minute or two later everything is in the ‘wrong’ place and I find myself just mixing colours and sloshing them onto the page. And not even the ones I can see in front of me, but shades that emerge under my brush in the tiny palette and fill my heart with inexplicable joy.

Truth to tell, those colours never look the same on the page and I end up pouring the remnants over the whole lot so that they trickle together into a glorious cacophony. Glorious, that is, until I get home and open the book again. Then I find they’ve all seeped together into one muddy turquoise, pink and brown blur that bleeds onto the pages on either side.

This time it was different. Perhaps it was Robin Hood himself who helped me to find a renewed excitement in simple pencil drawing, without worrying about scale, realism, proportion, colour or anything else really. My scribbled lines and marks only needed to carry a sense of having been there at that time, witnessing that irreplaceable moment.

Robin Hood’s Stride, Derbyshire, 28 February 2025

Packing up our things (in your own drawing book you had laid down a beautifully observed landscape, subtly washed with watercolour) we stretched our limbs and looked down. The stones were so close that they were easy to spot and we assumed that this was the Nine Stones Close we had noticed marked on the map. Why ‘Close’? I don’t know for sure but, well, I did just say that the circle was ‘close' to the commanding viewpoint on which we were standing :-)

Then again, why ‘Nine’ stones when it’s clear that there are only four, and that they form a rough square? Even at a distance I could see that they were distinct from each other: massive, perhaps taller than us, and differing in their personalities. It may well be that five further stones once joined hands with them, but in a strange way the spacing looked complete in itself.

Of course, there are plenty of examples where the mystical numbers 3, 7 and 9 are attached to clusters of objects without any literal reason. The Pleiades are known as the Seven Sisters but the constellation is actually made up of over 1,000 stars, of which only six are readily visible to the naked eye. There are far more than seven barrows in the group of Bronze Age burial mounds known as Lambourn Seven Barrows. And if you count the stones in the Nine Ladies stone circle you’ll find there are ten of them.

The four great presences remained in sight as we approached over the grassland, and as we neared the last gap in the hedge I noticed a figure in black moving among them. It was a man in what looked to be black jeans and an outdoor jacket. Standing in the centre of the circle, he was holding something aloft. A staff, maybe? Was he invoking the spirits of the place?

This felt unusual. In our combined experience over many encounters with the sacred sites of our ancestors, visitors tend either to walk through, or around, such monuments. Perhaps they pause to photograph the scene, or each other, or pose for a selfie. Then they move on, either having ticked another site off the list or in continuation of a walk of which this feature formed a landmark or stage. If they have longer to linger, it’s a place to crack open the flask and sandwiches and drink in the atmosphere. And then, away.

Nine Stones Close, Derbyshire, 28 February 2025

This man was different. I’d originally guessed that by the time we got there he would have moved on, whether to continue along the trail or because he had accomplished what he had come to the circle to do. Either that, or our arrival would be a signal to him that his time alone there was ended and he would actually prefer to melt away.

But he stayed. And, trying not to look as if we wished him away, we stayed.

We took photographs and walked around the stones, touching each in turn. It all felt like a waiting game, a treading water until the man left and we could truly engage with the place, leaving a gift for the ancestors and spirits with whispered thanks for their blessing on our journey.

Probably, the man in black felt the same way about us. Surely we were like other visitors he must have come across, and would soon turn our walking boots back onto the footpath over the field. He took more photos. So did we, all of us probably moving the lenses around to find angles without any of the signs of human presence that might place the circle within time.

Still we waited, moving individually from stone to stone, touching them again, leaning against them on the side where the early spring sun warmed them and turned our faces golden. As I’d thought, they were taller than I am. But all the time, I knew I was sinking into them a little less deeply than I would have done had I not been aware of the stranger’s eyes.

Eventually, on the verge of deciding that enough was enough, we stood together by the hedge and chatted softly about other stone circles that we knew lay nearby.

For the first time, the man turned towards us and spoke.

His fingers, I noticed, were full of thick gold and cameo rings that sparkled in the sun and his black jacket gleamed a little too. His colouring was dark; I couldn’t place his accent but I wondered whether he might be Portuguese and, intrigued, asked him whether he had travelled far. From Nottingham, he said, explaining that circles in this part of the Peaks were the closest ones to his home so he spent much time among the stones here, often at sunrise or sunset.

There were, he told us, far more stone circles in the area than were marked on any map. Pointing to the woods just beyond the next field, he said he’d discovered at least three further stone circles among the trees. (Later, we went into the woods to try to find them but were left unsure as to whether we actually had come across them or whether what we stumbled upon were random boulders.)

The mystery of the upraised ‘staff’ was solved when our companion explained that he was in the habit of sending up a drone in the middle of each circle to take photos and video for his YouTube channel. What we’d seen had been the control mechanism. We were amazed to hear that, at several of the circles he’d visited, the drone engine would cut out and the drone itself would fall like a lead weight as it crossed the very mid-point of the circle around which the stones danced.

What did that say about the nature of the energies present within stone circles? Had these powerful anomalies been intuited by our ancestors, who sought to harness them by casting a ring around them, or had they been accrued over time by the activities and rituals that had been enacted in these resonant places in the landscape?

These questions were fascinating enough, but there was more. The drone photography served not only to capture the circles as individual entities but the heights involved revealed their positions in relation to each other. And, the man in black said, the sites align directly with each other, even where the lines cross hill and dale.

Drone photography like this is relatively new, especially in areas which haven’t been mapped for the military. I wonder whether anyone else has made the same observation? In theory, there would have been no way for the Neolithic or Bronze Age circle-builders to line up the sacred places - pulse-points in the land - by eye. Were they following the silvery earth-dragon tracks, sensing the fiery energies beneath their feet? Or the spirit-threads spun by their own ancestors?

You may be wondering which of us turned to leave first, leaving the other party to their quiet communion with the ancestors.

Do you know, I hardly remember.

The four stones of Nine Stones Close, Derbyshire, 28 February 2025

BIRD IN THE BUSH: a song for May Day

Do you remember way up in the introduction where I mentioned that the ancient custom of May-tide frolicking in the greenwoods is well attested in the lyrics of traditional folk songs? Here my friend Julie and her harpist sister Alissa - see how the threads are starting to come together! - offer their beautiful version of the song, though there are many slight variations in the wording and even the title.

Before I set down the words given in Lia Leendertz’ Almanac for 2020, may I just draw your attention to the stone circle pictured in this song’s cover image?

It’s Nine Stones Close. Would you believe it?

Three maidens a milking did go

Three maidens a milking did go

And the wind it did blow high and the wind it did blow low

And it tossed their petticoats to and fro.

.

They met with a young man they did know

They met with a young man they did know

And they boldly asked of him if he had any skill

To catch them a small bird or two.

.

‘Oh yes, I’ve a very fine skill

Oh yes, I’ve a very fine skill,

Won’t you come along with me to the yonder flowering tree

And I’ll catch you a small bird or two.’

.

So off to the green woods went they

So off to the green woods went they

And he tapped at the bush and the bird it did fly in

A little above her lily-white knee.

.

And her sparkling eyes they did turn round

Just as if she was all in a swound

And she cried ‘I have a bird, and a very pretty bird

And he’s pecking away at his own ground.’

.

Here’s a health to the bird in the bush

Here’s a health to the bird in the bush

And we’ll drink up the sun and we’ll drink down the moon

Let the people say little or say much.

Bird in the Bush by the Russell Sisters

Until next time.

With love, Imogen x

PS: Oh, and here is that pencil sketch of the view from Robin Hood’s Stride.