Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

Child Rowland, setting out from Carlisle towards Elfland, comes to a round green hill terraced from top to bottom, walks round it three times widdershins and calls for the door to open. It leads to a long passage, studded like a rough grotto with gems. At the end he finds himself in a vast hall. From the arched vault hung a carbuncle which by magic illuminated the room, and by its light Child Rowland saw his lost sister, and the king of Elfland, whom he slew. The fairy hill in Child Rowland might be a distant memory of chambered tombs such as Maes Howe.

In later years Maes Howe was haunted by something called a hogboy, the Norn version of Norse haugbui, ‘barrow-wight’. Gravemounds in Scandinavia are haunted by these creatures, and rocks or crags by the bergbui; we also hear of alfar who, like the Scots elves and English fairies, could be consulted on magical errands. In Kormaks Saga the witch ordis sends a man in need of healing to ‘a hillock not far from here, in which dwell elves; take the bull which Kormakr slew, and redden the outside of the hill with bull’s blood, and make the elves a feast with the flesh; and you will be healed’. The similarities with British rituals are clear, but the difference lies in the fact that the Norse haugr would contain, and be known to contain, an ancestral burial; there are in fact a great many stories about the hero descending into some howe in search of treasure, and there grappling with the dead man within. Such an animated corpse, or draugr, is a figure of horror and not to be compared with the peaceful and benevolent dead, usually ancestral kings, who responded with good luck and fertility to the living when people venerated their mounds.

Olaf of Geirstad received offerings made on his gravemound, and for that reason was known as an alf – which very much suggests that the dead man was seen as approximating to the world of natural spirits, and that the spirits were not simply an extended group of dead men. In Christian Norway it was forbidden to believe (and therefore evidently was believed) that the landvaettir lived in groves, waterfalls and haugar. The early Icelandic settlers, shortly after landing, made compacts with certain Otherworldly beings living under stones and hills. This cannot have been a cult of the ancestors, for there were as yet no ancestors to cultivate.

It is curious is that the Norse colonists of Orkney and Shetland had been accustomed to bury their dead in gravemounds right up until the introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century, while the Gaelic settlers in the Hebrides came from regions where barrow burial had been virtually unknown for two thousand years. Yet you could not discern any such difference in their fictions, or insights, about haunted mounds. It is enough to persuade me that the folklore of barrows does not derive from memories of their historic role or prehistoric origin, but from something else entirely.

And there ends Hollow Hills. For my earlier project Festial, I did make reference to the Childe Roland story, by walking around the church widdershins three times, holding a video camera on a long pole (yes, really). And I have never used that footage. It was part of the work I did in response to medieval Palm Sunday. That was over two and a half years ago now, and I’m uncertain about how valid it would be to develop at this point, such a long time later. But perhaps it has relevance again now?

The Childe Roland story might be interesting to revisit for Howe, especially as it feels quite Northern with its reference to the King of Elfland. I also like the idea of elves, or ‘barrow-wights’ residing in hills – which, if I understand Jeremy Harte’s argument correctly, might in this country be any hill-like feature in the landscape. A final point to remember is that the magic of hills may equally lie in the experience of them now rather than purely as a sort of repository of ancestral memory.

The persistent legends of secret passages into hollow hills invite links with the megalithic legacy of chambered tombs, because these are . . . well, secret passages into hollow hills. But would medieval, or Roman, or Iron Age people have shared that experience? Even today, after archaeological restoration has done its best, there are not many sites in England and Wales where a tunnel leads into the hill. Nine times out of ten the fate of a chambered tomb was to have its mound robbed and the capstones of the passage and side chambers slid away for building purposes. The original entrances had been covered not long after the disuse of the sites by earth slipping from the mound, so that it is fair to say that between 2500 BC and AD 1800 no-one in southern Britain had access to these ‘secret passages’.

This is not to suggest that the great mounds of the Neolithic were not venerated for long ages after their construction. It is just that none of the later worshippers had any idea what was inside them. At Newgrange a golden hoard of Roman workmanship was buried, and coins were offered, by strangers from outside the Irish world – presumably local people were also making gifts, but of more perishable things. All these offerings were made, however, around the standing stones before the tomb, while its decorated kerbstones and entrance passage remained hidden under earth until the mound was cleared in 1699.

There is a paradox here. As a physical object, Newgrange was, until 1699, a rather ragged looking hill with some stones at the foot of it, and to all appearances was no more hollow than Ben Bulben. But as an Otherworldly place, the Bru na Boinne, it was not only hollow inside but positively capacious, containing inter alia the Dagda, his son Oengus ind Oc, three fruit trees which were always in fruit, an inexhaustible cauldron, and three times fifty sons of kings. Moreover it contained these things as a hill, not as a tomb or gravemound. When dispossessed by the sons of Mil, the Tuatha De Danann went into the hills, or sidhe, becoming the People of the Hills, the Aes Sidhe. They did not die but transformed themselves into a invisible people.

Jeremy Harte seems to be re-stating his opinion that people in the past had no idea of the significance of ‘hollow’ hills as grave mounds – it was the hill in itself that was the subject of respect or worship. Of course, people may have known something of the significance of ‘hills’ such as Newgrange; even if only as a hazy folk-memory. So I’m not sure whether the continuation of this line of reasoning is adding anything new to my ideas.

What is worth thinking about, though, is the persistent idea that ‘special’ hills are larger on the inside than on the outside. The example given is Irish, which makes me a little wary as I don’t feel much connection with the West – indeed, my project is partly about the Northern/Germanic influences that (may) re-echo here. But the ‘capacious hill’ motif can be found in Scandinavian folktales like The Elfin Hill by Hans Christian Anderson, and it’s something I definitely want to explore in my own work.

I can see that Howe has to be rooted here in Norfolk – I can’t help that; it’s what draws me to wanting to do the project at all. Does that matter; does it sound too ‘local’ and narrow? If I’d been commissioned to make work based on a particular area or landscape feature, I wouldn’t have that anxiety. Hopefully, something about the work will resonate with others. But can I plan that in, or will it happen by itself, if it’s going to happen at all? I’m not sure, but at the same time I don’t think I have it in me to ‘get it right’ before I even begin…

It’s just going to be a case of seeing what happens, but I need some definite structures in place, and mustn’t let myself obsessively cut hill names from newspapers without having other areas of the work planned and hopefully started.

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.