Night Journey

Whoever hasn’t

is still waiting
- Niyi Osundare, Waiting Laughters

I don’t live near enough any standing stones or barrows to have tried this yet. But I’d like to feel something of the awe and dread the worshippers at ancient religious sites may have felt as they approached them under undomesticated skies. So this is an exercise of imagination – perhaps a prehistoric Gothic. In any case, as the philosopher David Hume would have agreed, it is no more than a synthesis of other experiences.

*

It’s night. Late, late, late. Coming out through the door, I feel the wind chill from my eyebrows to my toes entombed in slab-like boots. The worst is around my lungs and kidneys, and shudders its way through my shoulders. I have to spread my tongue between my teeth to stop them chattering. I know that walking makes warmth, but it’s slow to come. The tips of my fingers feel like chunks of stone in my gloves.

At first the cold makes it impossible to take in anything but the barest sketch of my surroundings. The torch beam swings across the white chalk track, beside which grey strands mark the fringes of grass. The hills either side remain stubbornly dark. The sky is too, but for a band of colour between the slopes and the prickles of stars – the glow from Oxfordshire’s towns and villages.

In the valley, where my feet roll around on loose stones, the light picks up white mist, through which darkness pokes as through a sagging jumper.

The sound of the world is gone. My feet clunk on the broad path as though I stomped with steel boots through a library. I stop, to try to catch the rustle of voles and foxes in the fields, but there’s only breathing, which binds huff and puff with the chill in my sinuses, with the drift of vapour into the ill-defined shapes on the edge of my torchlight.

But this is the Ridgeway, and soon the old chalk road starts to climb another ridge. I feel the damp cold across my shoulders like a white bar, but otherwise I’m warm now, taking off my hat, and shining the torch left and right across the spiny stems growing between the path and the fields’ wire fences.

There’s no one else here. No one wants to stumble on loose stones, slosh their boots in unexpected puddles. In Uffington and surrounding villages lights are going out and beds are settled into. But the dark starts to suggest companions moving with me through the chill.

Ice crystals are sprinkling on my cheeks – out of the fog, into the frost. But the wind’s still down and there’s nothing moving in the fields either side. My unbodied companions don’t speak, just seem to be, their movements inaudible except by the streak of nerves down my spine.

By now the climb has made me sweat, and I strip off my gloves and scarf, the cold meeting the flush of my blood. Uneasy in the cluster of shadows at the rim of the torch beam, I’m looking out for the deeper darkness that means a stand of trees against the star-packed field of the sky.

I know there’s one, then another, the one I’m looking for. My calves feel like cracking, and I slow my pace, vapour floating from my nostrils like a dragon’s breath. My companions close in, almost at the heel of my boots, or catching in the wet, bare limbs of the pines. Of course, there’s only me here.

Now the path I want appears on my right, a muddy gap between fence posts and brambles. My torch leads through gates and under the angular shadows of the lime trees. Then the beam falls on stone that shines in streaks of moisture that flow around tufts of dark moss. The long bulk of the barrow extends behind them. This is Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic tomb bearing the name of a Saxon god.

I stop of the edge of the enclosure, breathing white wreaths out into the faint mist under the trees. My feet fizz after the work of climbing the slope, and the cold gathers around my face.

There’s a faint crackling as I stand looking at the barrow. Tiny drops of water are hitting the leaves that colour the bare ground between me and the upright stones. It’s not like the sound of footsteps, but it populates my surroundings.

The torchlight moves along the stones, then down the flanks of the mound behind them. The green of the grass flares around shadows, everything sheened with moisture from the air. I approach the ancient entrance across what’s thought to be the ritual space in front of where the ancestors lay.

The barrow has been reconstructed to an idea of its original appearance, and this reconstruction has been overwritten by the war of visitors, exposing the earth and scratching at the fabric of the tomb. But as I crouch and look up at the stones’ pitted faces against the void of the sky, their weight, their impassivity insists a possession of this night space.

I flash the torch light into the gaps between the stones. A small area brightens – more stone, runnels of earth. The rest remains unlit. The tomb has long been emptied of burials, but for many years people came here to draw on the powers imbued in the bones of their ancestors. I don’t believe that anyone else is here with me, but I feel again that sense of companions, fellow travellers, whose unpredictable moods will determine the rest of the night.

The cold breaks through my carapace of exercise-warmth, and shudders down my back and legs. The air tastes cold, and it feels as though it’s drowning my eyes with its moisture. I stand up and rest my hand on one of the stones, feeling the ridges of its weathered terrain.

I don’t want to leave but I have to move to fight the cold, so set off through boot-dragging grass around the structure. A couple of tawny owls begin duetting their calls as I do so. This circumnavigation feels important. Historically speaking, I suppose I’m walking away from the main ritual site, but someone did dig out the rest of the barrow, the gently sloping mound of heaped earth. Even at the far end, where in this darkness it’s subsumed under grass stems, it was consciously, humanly made.

And the ring of trees has its down presence. Their trunks and branches are only fragmentarily visible in the torchlight, brushed with the varnish of rain during the day. I can hear them moving soporifically, their remaining leaves rustling each other like bracelets along an arm. Their roots, much younger than the monument, grip and mould the earth; fungi and invertebrates make homes in and around them.

At the end of my circuit, I step a little away from the barrow, shine the torch against its stones and along its length. I no longer feel any sense of something accompanying me through the dark, but the structure itself seems infused with – what? Life? Not quite.

But there’s a sense in which my gaze, picking out the joints of the stone, the flanks immobile under their grassy hide, is addressing the barrow and what it represents. It exists, misted, unknowable, as when addressed by all who came here before me. Is there any sense in which it changes when I turn the torch away, turn my back and leave it in the dark and trees?

I carry away an afterglow of its image in my eyes, of the play of light, sound and cold around it. I’ve a feeling that my aim is fulfilled as I journey back to life along the chalk roadway. Tiredness accompanies me now, back down into the fog.

When I close the door behind me, the snap of the light switch and the touch of domestic warmth on my skin push my walk through memory, almost to the status of a dream.