Delivering The Seeds…..Barclodiad Y Gawres…...Listen & Read….. From ‘Emergence’ Magazine…..
by Bernie Bell - 10:38 on 25 September 2024
Delivering the Seeds….
I’ve previously written of my vision for the ‘Garden of Brodgar’…
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16200
And then there was my ‘Equinox Seeds’ poem…
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=17021
On Monday I collected the last lot of seeds from our meadow to give to Nick Card, potentially to be scattered on the Ness of Brodgar site. In fact, I walked the spiral in the meadow and picked the last of the seeds from there. ‘Nuff said.
A perfect Scottish Thistle seed-head went into the mix - I like it so much I took a photo as I parcelled up the 6 jars of seeds…
…..and we went to Loch View to deliver them. I should point out that Nick had said to do so – Loch View isn’t open to the public – it’s Ness HQ for on-going work there.
We handed over the seeds to Nick, who said it was OK for me to take photos of the site now that it’s been filled in - which was weird to see – just, plain, weird after all these years…
The ‘Digger’s Rest‘ is still there, for now…
I took the opportunity to take the view down from Loch View….
As I did back in 2018….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2018/07/24/we-went-to-the-ness/
And also of the Standing Stones in Loch View’s front garden….
I’m pleased to have collected the seeds and to have handed them over, and the thought that they might be scattered on the site pleases me greatly. But…..I felt decidedly ‘ruffled’ for the rest of the day.
Then I put this together, and felt ruffled again. I’ll probably continue to feel ruffled for some time, when I think of The Ness.
Things change – when they need to.
PS
More info.on the back-filling...
https://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/backfilling-trp/
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Barclodiad Y Gawres….
I saw this item by Peadar O’Neill on the ’Stone Botherers’ FB page…
“Bothering the stones inside Barclodiad burial mound, Anglesey. Not normally open, but special access today through the “open premises” scheme. The decorations are thought to be some of the oldest artwork in Europe. Fantastic guide who provided a really informative talk.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=500356019298157&set=pcb.2513796112148840
And my response was….
“I wrote this to friend Euan MacKie…. https://theorkneynews.scot/.../a-personal-tribute-to-dr.../ in 2012….
There's a cairn on Anglesey called Barclodiad Y Gawres. That's a very hurt, sad place. We visited there some years ago and I found it very disturbing.
We went to visit the cairn and, as you'll know, it's encased in concrete - it's light has gone out As far as I was concerned, it was 'dead' - or almost. It's a terribly un-happy place and it shouldn't be - that's not what it was raised for. It was dreadful to be there.
We went up on the top of it and I tried to channel light back into the place - pictured light flowing down, through me, into the cairn. Mike did something similar - I don't know what Ben-The-Dog made of it all - he seemed to be quite un-interested!
We met a lass there who I thought was practising Reiki on herself - it turned out she was doing Reflexology. I told her of how I felt about the place and she said that was why she went there, to sit and try to produce good feeling. I won't witter at you about this, Euan, as I don't think it's your 'thing'. I'm mentioning it as what can happen when folk totally mis-understand what a place should be, and treat it that way.
All these places are to do with light. With life, and death, but light, lines to follow, to 'catch' the light. Light. Barclodiad y Gawres, has been mis-used by the Department of Works, or whoever it is.
When we returned to Suffolk, I was telling my friend about it. She said she had a friend on Anglesey who is a Druid, and she'd ask him to go there and try to bring some light and life back to the place and give it some love.
These places used to get a lot of reciprocal love – now, mostly, they don't. They had years of neglect, or even abuse, and now, often, folk go to them looking for something - it's too often not reciprocal - which I feel is how it used to be.
Some places have lost their light - some are really, badly hurt - same as people. Help can be given, though.
It's so wrong when such a place becomes like that. When you mention that there is a carving there, albeit a "crude" one, which may be connected with the ancient folk finding their sight-lines for observatories connected with the passage of light, that makes it even worse.
Barclodiad y Gawres stays in my mind as a sad, dark, gloomy, clammy place, compared to Bryn Celli Ddu, which is............how/what it should be.”
Looking at your pictures, Peadar, I see similarities with carvings in Four Knocks and other sites in the Bru Na Boinne. The Irish Connection again!..... https://theorkneynews.scot/.../the-irish-connection.../ “
‘Nuff said.
Listen & Read…
https://archaeologyorkney.com/2024/09/25/talking-stone-circles/
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From ‘Emergence’ Magazine…..
“Taste of the Land
Directed by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
“I could see and feel with my own eyes how it feels to live with the land and somehow that reawakened those memories again. The memories of our ancestors. And now I feel it. I feel it in my bones. I feel it in my blood. I feel it circling through my body.”
The truth that we are of the Earth remains present, even when it becomes buried under the humancentricity of modern life; even if we don’t recognize it. The land, so completely entwined with who we are, is both home and ancestor to us; nourishment and spirit. It is the root of the self, and the memory of this sacred relationship can be awoken through story, whether by passing down stories over generations of a glacier’s changing face, or by bearing witness to stories of deep kinship between people, forests, and rivers in one’s homeland. This week, we premiere Taste of the Land, the fourth and final film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary series, in which award-winning Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam journeys into an ancestral remembrance of the land as inextricable from who she is.
Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a genocide which devastated an entire culture and displaced millions of people from their homes, Kalyanee has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film follows her to the landscapes of her homeland—changing through deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and development—where she has spent years tenderly documenting the disappearing, relational ways of life held within them. As she comes to know these places not only through the lens of her camera, but through the intimate relationships she forms with the landscapes and people whose stories she shares, Kalyanee finds her way back into an embodied, spiritual relationship with the land.
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Shifting Landscapes Film Series
Directed by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Alongside Taste of the Land, the first three films in our new Shifting Landscapes documentary series are screening exclusively on Emergence, sharing stories of what it means to reawaken and hold love for the living world as the places we call home are changed by ecological destruction and irreversible loss. In The Nightingale’s Song, British folk singer Sam Lee joins the nightingale in song as development threatens it with extinction in the UK. Aloha ‘Āina explores a love for and of the land embodied by Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Osorio as she fights to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. And The Last Ice Age journeys with Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason to the melting Vatnajökull glacier as he searches for the myths large enough to hold the vastness of the climate crisis.”
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