Arrow of Silver Water

Below her now, an aqueduct, arrow of silver water, leads her to a bustling Roman town.  The hot air smells strongly of vinegar, honey and cured fish, mingled with smoke and the faintly sweet smell from a funeral fire.  It is late May in the first century AD.

The Hill at Hissarlik

"Ah well, as I said my dear, I'm off to Troy and the hill at Hissarlik.  I had an idea, you see, that as Troy was such an important trading city, it might also have been an observatory.  You see there's a mention in The Iliad of Helen running like a mad woman to the observatory tower when she heard the Trojans were losing the battle."

Solstice Observatory

Went to The Knoll yesterday evening with Rupert.  Looked at a Victorian folly about four miles from Bodiam that turned out to not have started life as a folly after all.  Noticed a lot of mistletoe, viscum album, growing on the oak trees there.  Today is the first real winter's day we have had: white frost in the morning and a sea fog later on.  Folly turned out to be a solstice observatory.  Very old.  Possibly pre-Celt.  Rupert thought Grooved Ware People - five thousand five hundred years ago.  A school of astronomy in Kent, long before the great pyramid of Kufu in Egypt and some two thousand years before the time of Moses.

The Grey Goose of Winter

The grey goose of winter and a country gardener

Rode out to a green moon of spun glass.

In the white wood of watchers

Time stood with tick fingered

Knowing all angels' first secrets

All cheats' endless lies.

Go gently now Walter,

Fold her in your arms,

Give her moonsparks and gay fairgrounds,

Love's true promise and goodbye.

Si Texen

Roger the Cat

"Roger the cat. It's his name, not an instruction."

Nature Witch

"Does the night sky look different in autumn?"
"It does.  What do you sweep the night sky with?"
"I don't know.  A broomstick?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a telescope."

The Long Man on the Hill

Again she watched the dog fox cross the ploughed field below the chalk figure, heading for the vicarage garden.  He stopped, one front paw raised, to watch a rook digging in the furrows.  Then (did he shrug?) he went on his way.  The fox lives at the vicarage.  And the Long Man on the hill.  She sipped her coffee.  That wasn't a man's walk.  The angle of the leg to the hip: that was a woman.  Walking away over the hill.  Where to?  And why?  And for how long had she been on the hill?  Had she been there, like Rupert's observatory, over five thousand years?  Like a henge monument?  Like Stone Henge, maybe?  What was she marking?  A direction perhaps.  South?  Again, why?  Surely, if these people studied the orbits of the stars and were capable of creating this figure on the curve of the Down, they must have been able to write?  But if so, on what?  Not on stone, or clay tablets, or they would still be with us.  So something less durable, less long lasting.  Like paper, perhaps....An advanced culture over a thousand years before the pyramids of Egypt.  How tempting was that then?