Still trying to get to grips with where ‘hills’ as a stilll-woolly concept might interface with an art project that I will feel passionately involved with for six months – and beyond. And further, of course, be engaging and thought-provoking for an audience, too. But in my experience at least, art which clearly springs from an obsessive passion will have an elusive quality I respond to, even if the basic subject matter isn’t something that I’ve ever been drawn to, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much.
Back to the Hollow Hills:
Camden in 1607 says ‘they are called Lawes: the people round about say they were raised as memorials to the slain’. [This was in Derbyshire where the sites were known as ‘lows’.] The word derives from OE hlaew which, like beorh, can in certain contexts describe a grave mound. But that is not its primary meaning, for hlaew comes from IE *klei, ‘to slope’, and belongs to another group of words for hills. Some of the most imposing hills in the North are designated law.
In southern England, a barrow was equally likely to be a hill. Creech Barrow in Purbeck is a steep-sided, volcanic-looking hill, visible from a great distance. So is Colmers Hill, after which the village of Symondsbury is named. Barrow Hill in Loders and Bugbarrow in Bere Regis are isolated small round hills.
Often, the ‘broken barrow’ is not a hero’s grave pillaged for treasure, but a hill defaced by quarrying. But the apparent vagueness of beorh and hlaew is only a product of our own cultural preoccupations. We think that the Alps are different from the Three Barrows because we grade landscape features by size, from hillock to mountain, a practice introduced quite deliberately in the 1640s to assist with the familiarity with proportions required by landscape art. Our ancestors, however, had a topographical language based on experience, not measurement. In the case of beorh, we are being told that the hill is one which can be seen from far off, or that you can stand on it and look into the far distance. It may be large or small; it may be natural or artificial; these are secondary considerations.
So what am I getting from today’s instalment? Again, that delicious misty veil wherein a hill can be a barrow and a barrow a hill, and they can all be slopes or indeed, some other hill-designating word altogether.
Having read that lows or laws are also barrows, I was ridiculously elated when I noticed on a map of our ‘own’ Bronze Age barrow cemetery that close by is not only a Lowes Farm but also Lowes Pond and a woodland area simply called The Lowes. As the word comes from the Anglo-Saxon Hlaew we are starting to see those Germanic echoes and perhaps take a step closer to the elves and giants.
Note to self: I’m not just interested in hill names that clearly reflect the impact of Anglians and then Vikings. Some will originate in the deep past, maybe even before the time of the Eceni, and have been passed on, in ever-evolving form, by word of mouth. Others, like Potato Hill a few miles from the barrow cemetery, have obviously been named far more recently. But there is still the ambiguity of whether the hill was so named because its soil was particularly suitable for root crops, or whether ‘potato’ is a crude rendering of a far more ancient word; perhaps, indeed, a Scandinavian one. Food for thought.
Something else I find interesting is the idea of grading landscape features by size, and that this concept was developed deliberately in the 1640s because of the familiarity with proportions required for landscape art. That connection with art might be something I come back to. Even more interesting to me is the idea of topographical language based on experience rather than measurement, and the probability that beorh denoted a hill that could be seen from far away, or that you can stand on and see into the far distance. Whether or not it was a gravemound wasn’t the point.
