Circles

A warm Saturday morning in September dawned, I felt the urge to celebrate the full moon, the Harvest moon. I knew I needed to be walking through fields, the romantic image of a lone figure in the landscape. I walk, therefore I am. The bus was noisy with a chattering flock of teenage girls who alighted at Cabot Circus, our glass-roofed city centre shopping mall, eager for retail opportunities and bubble tea. The green-liveried smoothly whining electric bus lumbered on, and after much meandering, came to the place where the houses thinned, the edge of the city. I had chosen a route from Whitchurch, once a village in North Somerset, now part of Bristol’s suburban sprawl, and Stanton Drew, home to a Neolithic stone circle. It’s about five or six miles, mostly following the ‘Three Peaks Way’ footpath.

Pre-pandemic, when I was working three or four days a week in an office, I used to do this more. Pack up my rucksack and an OS map, lace up my boots and take a bus into Somerset, walk for a few hours then organise my return so that I would be home in time for the school run. Now that I have reshaped my working life, I spend more time out of doors, and perhaps that’s why I’ve fallen out of the habit of long hikes, my contact with nature batteries are recharged regularly. I tried for some long walks in Cornwall in the summer, but my body was treacherous. I ignored a niggling pain in my calf, gritted my teeth and pushed on. To my daughter’s alarm the niggle grew into a massive cramp, and I was forced to hobble the last mile back to our accommodation. Sometimes pushing on is the right thing, sometimes it turns out, it’s not. On Saturday I ignored my usual tendency to stride out, to push, and instead perfected my amble, enjoying the regular cadence of my steps, noticing what was around me.

As I climbed steadily up East Dundry Lane, away from the streets and towards the hills and fields, I was depressed to see that the first thing I noticed was flytipping. I’ve walked this route several times, and each time found rubbish, a later search of the local Facebook pages reveals it’s a constant problem. This time it looked like the remains of someone’s home improvement project, a sagging leatherette sofa, an old bath, plasterboard, empty tins of paint. Humans can be revolting sometimes, such lack of care, such arrogance. There is always more for the taking, anything you don’t want, just throw it away. Except there is no ‘away’, there is only somewhere else. But that’s the thing about paying attention, you realise that nature walks aren’t just all squirrels on treestumps, you’re exposed to all of it. I pushed on up the hill and found the turning in the hedge for the footpath to Maes Knoll, wanting to make myself feel better by the simple method of climbing to the tallest point in the landscape and letting out a self-satisfied sigh at the top. Maes Knoll is the remains of an iron age fort, thought to have been constructed about 250 BCE, I walked this way last year and wrote a poem about it.

After climbing carefully down again, I walked on, enjoying the familiar route and well-marked footpaths, less need to consult the map, more chance to just enjoy the way. I passed family groups and couples, dog walkers, and on passing we all completed the socially accepted nod and muttered greeting, sometimes daringly stretching this to remarking that it was a lovely day. Late butterflies sometimes careened across my path, looking for the last of the flowers. It felt like a summer’s day, but the way you would like summer to feel rather than the scorched heat that we experienced this year. In places the path beneath my feet was a tessellated mass of mud mosaic, still hard from the summer drought. The recent rains may have regreened the pastures, but it’s a fairly superficial refreshment, more rain is needed to restore the balance.

Refreshments for me were easier to find, and I stopped at the Druid’s Rest pub for a ham roll and pint of lemonade before making my pilgrimage to the stones. Hunger doesn’t go well with spirituality in my case. The beer garden was full, we were eyed by a flock of crows circling the nearby churchyard, a Rowan tree stood bright thick with berries, perhaps providing protection from witches. Amongst my fellow customers there was a proportionately higher than average number of men with big bushy beards, I wondered if any were descendants of druids. After lunch I walked over to the stone circle, these massive lumps gnarled and knobbled, covered in colourful lichens. A little girl and her parents played hide and seek, a party of German tourists consulted Wikipedia and their words drifted over to me “date of construction is unknown, but thought to have been between 3,000 and 2,000  BCE”. Someone has placed a single red rose on several of the stones, the one nearest me nestles a shiny conker. We are all still feeling the pull of the stones, a sense that we’re following in the footsteps of others, the need to make an offering.

During the week at work I met a little boy who has currently has a fascination with circles. He runs in circles, whirls his hands in a bucket of water, spins wheels on trucks, and is captivated by bubbles. The academic language for this is a ‘rotating schema’, it’s part of a child's way of understanding the world. As I pause in the stone circle in the sunshine before moving on, I think of all the circles I am part of, the little bubbles of connection. Later in the evening, tired from my walk, I join a friend for a full moon firepit, we sit around the fire in the dark and watch the moon chase in and out of a filigree of clouds, marvelling in her beauty. Another circle, another cycle.

Photo shows the view from Maes Knoll in Somerset. You can read more about Stanton Drew stone circle here. I have been making a concerted effort to avoid doomscrolling this week, turning to real paper books instead when I feel the urge. I've have been spurred on in this by reading The New Dark Ages by James Marriott, which his publisher describes as "an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word". I have also read The Future, a novel by Naomi Alderman, which tackles tech billionaires and their apocalypse bunkers, and another non fiction, Good Girls by Hadley Freeman. All in their way exploring what makes life worth living.