Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

Towards the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero makes his way to the appointed tryst at the Green Chapel, and can find no such place:

‘but a little way off on the level there was a kind of low,
A smooth barrow on a bank sloping down to the brook . . .
It had a hole at the end and one to either side,
And grass grew over it all in great clumps;
Inside it was hollow and only an old cave’.

The use of words derived from beorh and hlaew has disposed commentators to see this site as a tumulus – presumably some kind of chamber tomb with side passages. But barrow and low are simply synonyms for ‘hill’ – indeed the site is ‘that hyghe hil’ a few lines later. The Green Chapel may be pure imagination, but local historians have found a cave-pitted knoll called Thurshole or Fiend’s House, near Wetton, that fits the bill very well.

Here again, there’s that sense of uncertainty as to whether the words ‘barrow’ and ‘low’ can really be taken as evidence that the place in question is a burial mound. It’s coming up time and time again, and I know I need to capitalise on the way it piques my curiosity. Also I find myself excited by the names given to the ‘cave-pitted knoll’ (which I take to be a natural hill) – Thurshole or Fiend’s House. Well, given my primary aim of exploring the extent to which Germanic and Scandinavian sensibilities might be caught and anchored in such places, it’s really not surprising. Thurshole can be nothing other than the cave of Thor (or Thunor, in Anglo-Saxon) and naturally enough it would attract the name Fiend’s House by the early Christians who would be doing their utmost to badmouth the deities of the Old Religion.

I’m drawing to the end of Hollow Hills now – just one more blog entry will do it, I think – which means that the time of reckoning is also approaching. Attempting to deconstruct a piece of writing as closely focused as this one is has, I know, been really useful in helping to get my ideas together. But I’m not underestimating how difficult it might be to translate the specific reasons that I feel drawn to create a project called Howe, into a body of work that will be truly engaging. Given that the Arts Council have given me some money to develop this work, I can’t gloss over this aspect of the project. Nonetheless, maybe the most authentic approach to my work is just to do it, without any thought of a future audience? That’s probably how I worked during the Festial year, come to think of it. And I know that it was a really worthwhile thing to do, even though it hasn’t directly done much for my progression in the art world (whatever that means).

The motif of ‘barrow as fairy dwelling’, is common in recent folklore. Unfortunately the prevalence of sites which are not gravemounds tends to diminish the significance of those which are, and this eclecticism becomes even more apparent when we include others which are not prehistoric at all into the reckoning. The Fairy Hill at Bishopston was due to be levelled, when the pick and shovel men heard a voice from within say, ‘Is all well?’. ‘Yes’, they stammered. ‘Then keep well when you are well’, bellowed the voice, ‘and leave the Fairy Hill alone’. Thanks to this intervention it still stands, making it possible for field investigators to identify it as a twelfth-century castle motte. In fact many of the most celebrated fairy mounds are not archaeological at all.

Any attempt to connect fairy hills with haunted gravemounds must meet the objection that, in historic times at least, people did not know that barrows were gravemounds; the process of association must therefore be a very early one. If this were so one would expect barrows to predominate in the earliest literature, hills in the later stories. The reverse is true. Although barrows are common in recent oral tradition, seven out of the eight accounts gathered from the witchcraft era relate to hills; and when, in the same generation, Aubrey has a tale of entry into Faerie, it involves a cave such as that at Borough hill in Frensham, or a natural rise such as Hackpen Hill at Avebury.

A cluster of stories from twelfth-century chroniclers tell of people who enter a mysterious Otherworld: they adventure through, respectively, a cave, a tunnel, a cave, a barrow and a hill. The story of the barrow is told by William of Newborough, about Willy Howe, a massive Neolithic mound within the ‘Great Wolds sacred landscape’. Here a rustic was wobbling his way back home from a party c.1150 when he heard the sound of singing and dancing coming from within. ‘Perceiving in the side of the hill an open door, he approached, and, looking in, he beheld the house, spacious and lighted up, filled with men and women, who were seated, as it were, at a solemn banquet’. One of the attendants brought him a cup which he stole.

There are Scandinavian versions in which the sacramental implications of the cup are developed for the story is one about the transference of magical power, not food and drink. But as far as locale is concerned, hollow barrows occur as only one among many entries to the world of Faerie.

Here, then (slightly abridged) is more evidence that the ‘supernatural’ properties of hills and barrows are in many ways interchangeable. And within the article are some snatches of story, some themes, that I may be able to incorporate into my own explorations, which is why I’ve retained them. In particular, I’m interested in the transference of magical power through the stealing of an otherworldly vessel or other artefact.

The conclusion that natural hills and barrows are equally likely to be ‘hollow’ and to have stories attached to them, is very welcome, as it really opens up the possibilities in Norfolk! Unlike other parts of the UK there is no building stone here and therefore no stone circles or other prehistoric monuments. Instead, we have barrows, many of them flattened and known only through cropmarks, discovered via aerial photography. This in itself may be something to think about. Is a hill still ‘hollow’ when it has been entirely flattened through ploughing? Its location still exists and there may be burials within the ‘magic circle’ of the ring-ditch.

While thinking about entry ‘into’ hills, I mustn’t forget the properties of hill tops. I think I am tending to muddle the two, but then perhaps what I’ve been reading shows that there is no clear division. If a hill is special because it can be seen from a distance, or because you can see a long way from the top of it, or even because it’s invisible until you are almost on top of it, how that hill is experienced from the outside must be significant too.

If beorh had always meant a hill rather than a grave, it is easy to see how the passage of a thousand years might obliterate the memory that certain hills had once been raised over the dead. The notions of country people about barrows show little memory of their purpose: the tumuli on Bincombe Down, to which the disgruntled commissioners of 1621 trudged after wrecking Upwey, were known principally for the fairy music which could be heard from inside if you put your ear to the top at noon. Something similar was proposed by James Walsh, the cunning man of Netherbury, when hauled up before the authorities at Exeter in 1566 and asked how he was able to commune with the fairies. ‘He speaketh with them upon hyls, where as there is great heapes of earth, as namely in Dorsetshire. And betwene the houres of xii and one at noone, or at midnight he vseth them’.

Earlier, in the fifteenth century, a recipe for summoning a fairy involves burying hazel wands ‘under some hill whereas you suppose fayries haunt’. In the 1670s a Yorkshire healer did his business ‘with a white powder which, he said, he received from the Fairies, and that going to a Hill he knocked three times, and the Hill opened, and he had access to, and converse with a visible people’. He was acquitted, though not without the threat of a whipping.

It seems that fairy hills, like the Tardis, are larger inside than out. Isobel Gowdie ‘went in to the Downie hills: the hill opened, and we came to a fair and large braw room in the day time. Another woman accused of witchcraft, to the far north in Orkney, confessed to seeing a fairy people rise out of the hill called Greinfall as they made their way to feast at the expense of mortals during Yule. In 1613 Isobel Halfdane of Perth was carried out of her bed and into a fairy hill, where she stayed for three days learning secret knowledge.

Among the arts of the seventeeth-century ‘walker between the worlds’, then, was a knowledge of fairy hills. Some of these were what we would call hills, some were what we would call barrows: fairies and magicians, like the Anglo-Saxons, saw no difference between them.

Today’s chunk of Hidden Hills deals with hills or barrows (I note again that no difference between them seems to have been made) which have traditionally been seen as a habitation of the fairy folk. From the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlers in Norfolk, these supernatural hill-dwellers would presumably be equally likely to be seen as elves, wights, trolls, giants and dragons. There is also a line of thought that the Iron Age Eceni tribe looked to Scandinavia for their stories (Eceni coins seem to show Northern myths, cosmology and even a version of Woden) – and who knows how far back before them? Norfolk is right out there, sticking out into the North Sea and may have had more in common with tribes from the North Sea basin than with those in other parts of Britain.

Now I realise I need to start thinking again about how these notions (which excite me, at least!) might actually inform an art project. One question is how far it should be ‘local’ to Norfolk. I think it has to be, in that I am here and it’s the layers in the landscape under my feet (and all around, in every conceivable medium) that I want to draw attention to. Starting out with my first ideas, I thought that the ‘hills in Norfolk’ thing might be a reaction to all those who – and believe me, this is sooooo common – when confronted with the words ‘hill’ and ‘Norfolk’ will assure you that the county is completely flat, usually by quoting Noel Coward. The dozens of hill names I know I can find on large scale maps of Norfolk will surprise those people. I’m looking forward to that as part of the project, but beyond that I need to seek – if it’s not a contradiction in terms – depth.

Back from a weekend away. Purely by coincidence, the friends we visited live within a stone’s throw of Harrow on the Hill, which made an impressive silhouette against Saturday’s sunset.

But back to business, such as it is. I’m going to allow myself until the end of the week to finish deconstructing Hollow Hills, after which the plan is that I’ll be in a position to structure the project(!?). Yes, that is the plan. And I do feel that this period of analysis is helping me to see where the potential ‘art’ lies after such a long period of uncertainty.

Also, I realise I’ve never set down here the reason for the project’s title. If you know that a howe is a barrow, then it becomes obvious. I think it’s a local name here – certainly, there’s both a Howe Hill and a How Hill. Not to mention a village named Howe. Surely it also relates to hlaew and lowe. I’d find all this stuff interesting enough if a barrow always meant a grave mound, pure and simple. But knowing that the fact that something is a natural hill is no bar to it being called a barrow, and that a grave mound can be called a hill, just seems amazingly intriguing. I need to continue to think about the implications of this, and how to translate my own intrigued-ness into something that might intrigue others. Anyway, back to Jeremy Harte’s article:

The early antiquaries, when trying to describe gravemounds to each other, were often at a loss which word to choose. Sir Thomas Browne speaks of ‘artificial hills, mounts, or barrows’ in correspondence with Dugdale, who had consulted two other scholars on the subject, none of them being certain what the monuments really were. Lambarde, in 1576, calls them ‘Barowes . . . which signifieth Sepulchres’. Leland refers to gravemounds west of Exmoor by the local word tors, adding that they ‘be round hillockes of yerth cast up of auncient tym for markes and limites’, with never a mention of sepulchres. As a rule, writers until the 1690s communicated the connection of barrows with burials as a fresh discovery. From the Isle of Wight, Sir John Oglander noted triumphantly that ‘buries’ were ‘hills whose name in ye Danische tounge signifieth theyre nature . . . Dig and you shall find theyre bones’. In 1621 two speculators turned up ‘to dig in a hill at Upway . . . for some treasure that lies hidden underground’, but three days’ labour turned up ‘nothing but a few bones’.

Here again we have that fluidity as to the names and natures of hills. Also we now have the search for treasure – or bones – or treasure that turns out to be bones. Also we have the first appearance of the ‘Danische’ – i.e. the Vikings, as the likely inhabitants of such hills.

What constitiutes treasure, anyway?

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.