Field-Mouse…

*

Field-Mouse was out gathering wild-beans for winter when Buffalo came down to the meadow to graze.

‘He will mow down the long-grass with his prickly tongue and there will be no where left to hide,’ thought Field-Mouse, ‘I will offer him battle, like a man would do.’

“Ho, Buffalo!” squeaked Field-Mouse, “I challenge you to a fight.”

Buffalo went on grazing.

Field-Mouse repeated his challenge but still Buffalo went on grazing.

With his third challenge, Field-Mouse laughed contemptuously at Buffalo’s inaction.

“You had better keep still, little one,” said Buffalo, still grazing, “or I will come over there and step on you.”

“You can’t do it!” squeaked Field-Mouse in defiance.

“If you don’t be quiet I will certainly put an end to you,” said Buffalo, quietly.

“I dare you!” said Field-Mouse.

Before Field-Mouse had quite finished, Buffalo charged at him…

*

The Hooded Stone…

“It has to be the Stone on Gardom’s Edge…”

“What does?” says Wen.

“My Robin Hood Stone… I mean it didn’t look much like the stone on Gardom’s Edge but that could have been the angle.”

I study the sketch in our guide book.

“A lot of these stones look different from each and every angle you know.” …

…“Let’s go find the Hud Stone,” say I.

“Is the Hud Stone the same as the Robin Hood Stone?”

“Well of course it is!”

“The same stone that we are not totally sure exists at all?”

“Well it most surely does exist if it is what Mr Harris is calling the Gardom Stone.”

“All these names are apt to become a tad confusing don’t you think?”

“Not at all, it’s just one more way of marking time.”…

…A short walk later and we are approaching what are undoubtedly the outer precincts of a prehistoric enclosure.

Just then I catch sight of the Gardom Stone from some distance.

There is always a thrill when seeing a site or stone for the first time, but in this case the thrill is tempered somewhat by the simultaneous realisation that, even from this distance, it is obvious that the Gardom Stone is not the Hud Stone.

“It’s there,” I say, “but it is not the Hud Stone.”

“It’s been called, ‘The Devil Stone’ before now.”

“I can see that too, but let’s face it, we’ve had more than enough truck with that particular personage these last few months.” …

…“Is it significant,” interrupts Wen.

“Is what significant?”

“The fact that a lot of these stones look different from every angle… I mean it starts to look like another involution.”

“It’s spatially significant for your ubiquitous theory but how so otherwise?”

“Well, take your traditional temple of the elements.”

“Which few people ever do…”

…“Of what does it consist?” says Wen, ignoring me.

“It consists of a uniform central point and the distinct cardinals.”

“Eloquently put, O Something Feral, eloquently put,” she smiles.

“Oh I see, the distinct cardinals have been collapsed into a central point…”

“Collapsed and reversed, which is something of an involution is it not?”

“It is indeed, Little Grub, and if that is what they were doing…”

“It is genius.”

“Genius, yes, but to what end?”

Scions of Albion

The Lost Stone of Chat…

“There is a stone which would be worth visiting. It is in Baslow which is on our way to the Symposium so we could stop off there, grab some lunch, check out the stone and then head off to our meeting.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“If I can remember where it is.”

“I thought you knew where it was; why else tell me about it otherwise.”

“I do, sort of, only we will be coming at it the other way, the last time I visited I came down off the moor but we won’t have time to do it that way.”

“How long ago was this?” says Wen becoming somewhat suspicious.

“About ten years. It’s a huge stone. You can’t miss it and I know the general direction of its whereabouts.”

“How big is the stone?”

“It’s massive. It’s the largest free-standing monolith I’ve ever come across and we found it quite by accident.”

“Bigger than the stones at Avebury?”

“Not bigger, but taller than the stones at Avebury.”

“By accident you say?”

“Look, there’s nothing mysterious about it, I’d taken Al and Sal to see the Park-Gate stone circle and then we walked back over the moor, which is another necropolis by the way, to Baslow and lunch. There was some sort of monument giving a rather splendid view of the area and just after that we came down off the moor and found the stone.”

“A necropolis you say? It is not marked on the map,” says Wen with some conviction.

“Well, not all of them are.”

“The big ones though, they usually are, surely?”

“I didn’t imagine it. We even took a photograph. Al and I were laughing because of the, shall we say, somewhat rude reputation of such stones, so we got Sal to stand next to it and Al took a photograph on his phone.”

“Okay, if it’s as big as you say we should be able to find it again quite easily.”…

The Aetheling Thing

***

Amazon UK and Amazon.com for Book One of the Doomsday Triad:

Doomsday:

The Ætheling Thing

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

“Who was this Arviragus bloke anyway?”

Don studies the light as it plays through his beer, casting prisms on the table. How is it possible to hide such a story… the hidden history of Christianity in Britain? Oh, there are legends of course… old tales… Yet what if there was truth in them? What was it that gave these blessed isles such a special place in the minds of our forefathers? There are some things you are not taught in Sunday School. From the stone circles of the north to the Isle of Avalon, Don and Wen follow the breadcrumbs of history and forgotten lore to uncover a secret veiled in plain sight.

***

Wen is checking something in the Dictionary, “Get this… ‘ætheling from O.E. .Æpling, ‘son of a king, man of royal blood, nobleman, chief, prince, king, Christ, God-Man, Hero, Saint…’
“Wait a minute… wait a minute… give me that last bit again.”
“…Christ, God-Man, Hero, Saint…”
“Didn’t we call our Arthur, Aeth in, ‘The Heart of Albion’?”
“We did.”
“And didn’t we set his story in Mercia?”
“We did.”
“And didn’t Mercia grow to become the largest and most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Albion at one point in its history?”
“It did indeed.”
“Well that’s it then…The Anglo Saxon kings were claiming divine descent.”
“…Along with most other European kings at that time no doubt.”
“That’s true, but the Anglo-Saxon kings’ descent wasn’t from God it was from Christ.”
“And how did they get there?”
“They got there from their very own High One who also hung from a tree with a spear in his side… screaming.”
“Odin!”
“They evidently regarded Christ as an avatar of Odin.”
“Blimey, you’ll not read that in any history book!”
“Just as well we’re not writing a history then isn’t it?”

Full colour illustrated

Also available in Paperback.

 

Free Day III …

… Our-Father, Lady, Countess-Grae passed light and demure across the softly shifting shades of a turquoise beach.

Formless as beauty likened to the morning mist, her presence cleansed and refreshed the air as she danced; flitting capriciously between the stark but numerous clumps of white seaweed which lay sprawled like bleached and dying spiders: upturned and struggling in the yet cool but rapidly warming, morn-time sun.

They straddled the beach like shredded robes with their puckered strands wafting playful death throes in the sea breeze and as robes which had been wrenched, torn and wildly flung to lie forgotten upon the rising mounds of the blue dunes they appeared to have been discarded and scattered amid the sea’s insatiable passion for the sand.

And in her innocence, in her uncertain, whimsical passing Our-Father, Lady, Countess-Grae’s ruby feet caressed that same dry and now sullied sand: with all its succulence spent and with its surface baked-dry in the aftermath of the sea’s relief.

Yet cajoled and enticed by the arch of her feet and the spring in her step as she ran, the sand was compressed and spilled forth a deeper moistness; the dark clammy grains of which clumped and clung in a rich blue pulp and which squashed and squelched between the niches of her toes; cold, and invigorating as the new day which dawned all around.

A girl again, her laughter bubbled between short gasps, gurgled, giddy and pure as she moved; her reckless spirit sprightly and unabashed, flowing swifter and swifter, until, exhausted from running but still in playful mood she succumbed, collapsing onto the blue-green terrain beside a large vermilion boulder which squatted upon the lip of a small rock pool: its shade only vaguely unsettling her as she fell, splaying out her pale, slender limbs in limp, abject surrender to her surroundings.

As she gradually began to recover and her breath grew more even, her fingers scratched and gently scraped at the purple moss that spread like speculative boredom in dark, sporadic patches across the rock’s hunched and brooding form.

But she remained unmindful of the delicate intricacies and patterns which she so idly created for she was lost in the emerald-green sky and there she bathed her resting soul in the lushness of its translucence…

Earl Grae slumbered sardonically in his shell.

“…Still on your mind then?”

“Is what still on my mind?”

“Samuel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The ‘he’ look, behind you.”

The etchings which she had scratched in the moss spelled Samuel.
“I still don’t understand.”
“The ‘He’, that is his name.

That is what he is ‘called’. That is what he is ‘known as’ or ‘goes by’.

That is his title; ‘hearkened unto’, or ‘requested by, the Lords’.

“Oh!” She read the name pronouncing each letter “… Who decided?”

“You did.”

“I did?”

“Just then…”

“Oh!”

“…When you were bathing…”

“Sa-M-U-El… mmm, I like that.”

“I like it too. A commendable choice…”

“Why, thank you, it was nothing… but, does Sam-U-El struggle, does Samu- El hurt?”

“Yes, of course he does but he loves it to death.”

“Oh death, Samuel has touched death then?”

“Grasped dear, grasped.”

“Sorry, grasped. How do you know?”

“I read it somewhere…

Here, tell me what you think.”…

The Aetheling Thing

Only to build with…

*

“It doesn’t work quite so well with stone.”

“So it woud seem, but it might have once

before we became so ‘stone-blind’.”

“I can think of a lot of things to call our culture

but ‘stone-blind’ would not necessarily be top of the list.

We still use stone you know.”

“I know, but we only use it to build with.”

 

 

Amnesiac…

*

Spontaneous Internal Combustion.

You may have heard of the phenomenon?

It can now be regarded as the final death-knell for the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

It is hardly likely that any ‘new species’ would simultaneously errupt on the face of the planet like so many hot flushes.

Yet, once a memory is framed, and accepted, it can be true at all times and all places without ‘compunction’.

It also means, that we are born into a past that never happened,

and pass-on into a future that is real.

 

Of Truth and Legend…

*

‘The Silver Well: Legend says that St Augustine once visited Dorset. While there he met some shepherds grazing their flocks and asked them whether they would prefer beer or water to drink. The temperate shepherds replied ‘water’ whereupon St. Augustine struck the ground with his staff, crying, ‘Cerno El’ as the water gushed out. The words were supposedly a pun on Cernel, the old name of the village and meant ‘I perceive God.’

It is thought that the above legend was invented by the Benedictine monks of Cerne Abbey to serve as an attraction to pilgrims.
Closer to the truth perhaps is the story of St. Edwold, a member of the Mercian Royal Family who one day had a vision of a silver well. He went wandering through the countryside and when he came to Cerne he gave some silver pennies to a shepherd in return for bread and water. The shepherd then showed him a well where he could drink and St Edwold recognised it as the well of his vision. He built a small hermitage by the spring and lived there until his death in 871…’

Information Plaque, Cerne Abbas

*

‘Are the monks responsible for the Legend of Silver Well such villains if they tweak the truth in order to entice pilgrims to their shrine?

People who have embarked on a Pilgrimage always get something, even if that something isn not quite what they bargained for.

And how true is the earlier story of St Edwold for that matter?

There was doubtless a hermit and a hermitage at one time.

How he actually came to be there is quite another thing altogether.’

Excerpt from, The Heart of Albion by Stuart France and Sue Vincent

 

 

Rather, a Neanderthal?…

*

If it were true

that we had evolved

and progressed

and were still continuing to do so…

then a thousand times, yes, to modern man.

*

Unfortunately, it is not…

and we have not, and are not.

Count Jack Black

Albion…

*

…And then we come across the church.

Cue mass excitement as we take in all the
Giants, which appear to sprout from every orifice…

The body of the church you see is an education in itself.

You probably already know about consecrated ground and unconsecrated ground.

It is the Inner and the Outer, pure and simple.

And this symbolism is carried into the structure of the building.

The gargoyles, the Sheila-na-Gigs, the Green Men, the Giants, the Dragons and the like, they are all on the outside of the church building.

They do not make it into the ‘ark’.

The inside is for all the saints and angels. Do you see? It is the same symbolism.

The Inner and the Outer.

*

…They do have something of the ‘otherworld’ about them these places.

Not so much Giant Hill itself perhaps although it may have been different had we gone into the Trendle.

It fact I am pretty damn sure it would have been different in the Trendle.

Wen was all for it… even with the helicopter buzzing us overhead. And her logic was very persuasive.

‘No unauthorised person beyond this point,’ said the sign.

‘But we are more authorised than anyone ever could be,’ said Wen.

It is difficult to disagree but then the village of Cerne Abbas is in itself quite otherworldly too.

I got exactly the same feel from it as when I first went to Glastonbury.

It felt like we had left England and gone abroad, perhaps to France…

‘Albion!’ smiles Wen, ‘The whole of these Blessed Isles used to feel like this…’

Excerpt – The Heart of Albion by Stuart France and Sue Vincent

Others like us…

*

… ‘Remind me again, why we are going to Cadbury?’

Part of my reluctance for these, what might be called, impromptu assignations are the inevitable ruptures they make in the overall scheme of things.

Once a pattern has started to form it is somewhat disconcerting to have to unravel it all or even to amend it slightly to accommodate the new strand and even though I know that it is good for the flexibility of the mind and really what we should be doing all of the time it is still an effort and as such is ripe for avoidance if at all possible.

Plus the fact that it is another hill.

On a very hot day!

*

…Still, as we make our way out of the car-park and look up there does not appear to be much of a hill left to climb.

The Silver-Bullet, bless her aerodynamically modified sides, has already taken us up most of the height.

There is, though, a plague of gnats playing along an extended stretch of the tree tunnel which leads up to the hill-top.

Wen and I both turn our back on them which allows us to see the advertisement for the nearby pub which has been strategically placed for those descending the height.

‘Still looking for the castle?’

‘At least that’s lunch taken care of,’ grins Wen.

The thought of lunch and an invisible castle revives me somewhat.

After all what we have here is another Uffington.

Looked at in those terms it is difficult to imagine anything I would rather be doing really, although I still somehow doubt that there will be anything as spectacular as Uffington at the end of this particular tunnel of trees… Interesting how indolence passes from the body to the mind like that.

The best way out of it is to move and to move quickly so I put on something of a spurt to reach the top and leave Wen trailing…

‘It’s the thought of beer and food which does that you know…’

*

…There is something otherworldly about walking up a hill, crossing that threshold between the heat of a summer sun and the cool green of the trees. Glimpses of a landscape that conforms to what we have come to know as sacred are seen through breaks in the gnarled trunks, squirrels scamper busily along the branches and the inevitable sound of birds accompanies each breath.

Beside the track steep banks rise, channelling our footsteps through a narrow passage, guarded by ancient sentinels, rooted in earth. As the trees thin and the shade gets left behind it is almost like pushing through a tangible veil as we emerge into the unprotected sunlight of the summit. Looking back, the tunnel of trees closes in verdant darkness behind us, shutting us off from the world we left some five hundred feet below.

A solitary figure stands upon the far bank… there are always three, it seems, somehow. Although I know he is only another walker…I see the glint of a spear and a cloak flapping in the non-existent breeze…

*

‘…Remind me again why we are going to Cerne Abbas intead of staying at Cadbury?’

Excerpt taken from, The Heart of Albion by Stuart France and Sue Vincent