Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

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.

At this stage, I realise I’m using this blog in a very different way from how I approached my previous one for Festial. The thing is, it’s helping me to make a start, even though all I’m doing is getting initial thoughts pinned down here rather than in a notebook. This may not make for very entertaining reading, I fear, but I quite like the idea of the project growing in a truly organic fashion this time. For some reason I feel oddly confident that something will emerge, blinking and stretching, if I give it the space to do so.

Yesterday, I started to look closely at Jeremy Harte’s article Hollow Hills, which I quote here more or less verbatim. He stresses that just because a site is referred to as a beorh in an Old English text does not mean that it was a grave mound. We should not even jump to the conclusion that it was the sort of hump or hillock that looks like a gravemound. King Alfred, after all, refers to the Alps as beorgas and he must have had some idea that they were not artificial. The ‘mountains round about Jerusalem’ of Psalm 125 were turned into muntbeorgas in translation. The word comes from Indo-European (IE) *bhergh, ‘height’, and its original sense of ‘high place’ persists in later languages.

Old English (OE) beorh was obsolete in written English by 1500. But the word left four dialect descendants – in the North barf, ‘a low ridge or hill’; in Sussex berry, ‘a hillock’; in Anglo-Cornish burrow, ‘a heap or hillock’ (often of mining waste); and in Wessex barrow, ‘a gravemound’. Ancient tumuli, rather than topography or tin-mining, were a proper object of study for gentlemen; besides, Salisbury Plain was rich in archaeological features that were the subject of fieldwork research by Aubrey; so the Wiltshire word won the day against its competitors.

It might look as if this can’t possibly be leading towards an engaging art project, but I’m liking the sense of shifting meanings and near misses.

OK – why hills? Why did I call this project Howe? How am I going to structure the time and what am I going to make? Will there be any tangible ‘art works’ or will the outcomes consist of reportage of performance/installation/intervention? I do need to think about these things and get something down on paper – or, at least, in this blog. This may take a few days of posting but feels like a very necessary first step.

I’ve just read a very relevant article by Jeremy Harte; Hollow Hills, in the magazine At The Edge . It addresses some of the things about hills that fascinate me, and I think I’ll be plundering it shamelessly for quotes (very much in the way that grave robbers plundered so many Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, leaving a telltale hole in the top).

I’ve been reading about Barrow Hills on the Chertsey-Egham border. Here, three mounds had appeared as threm burghen in a charter of 672-4, and so they were duly scheduled in the County list as ‘Chertsey nos.1-3’. But ironically, inspection later on showed them to be natural hillocks…

On the other hand, when is a hill not a hill? When it’s a barrow. But in Norfolk (and elsewhere, I’m sure), many places named ‘hill’ (one example is Kettle Hill) turn out to be, not natural features at all, but burial mounds. There doesn’t seem to have been any real separation in the minds of whoever named them.

Who did name them? I guess that the names of hills may sometimes have taken shape organically, through a chinese whispers process, so that an Old English name became something quite different and quite strange in modern English. Some of them may have got their names through folkloric associations. I like the fact that we can’t know this, but, for example, a name like Ladies Hill sets the imagination into overdrive – perhaps there were tales of fairies dancing there, or sightings of ghostly ancestors, or the hill was perceived to have a feminine shape had therefore been thought sacred from time immemorial. What resonates for me is the knowledge that someone, or groups of people over time, named these places.

Crow Hill. Snow Hill. I love the way these hills have been named so simply and evocatively. Of course, as above, these names may not be all that they seem, if they are names that have evolved over time from older words or the languages of those from over the sea who brought their own names and customs.

So, to keep count, that’s really two separate things to focus on. Number one: the ambiguity of whether a hill is actually human-made as a burial mound (with its associations with the dead, with treasure, with the halls of the fairy folk) or a natural feature, which may also be linked with supernatural occurrences and have a human history as a place of ritual, or as a meeting place of any kind – including a gallows site. Number two: the actual names of the hills and what they evoke; their fascination for me stemming from the fact that they would not have names at all if it were not for the people who lived here before. And for me, the relevance of that is overwhelming.

To be continued …

Today I’m continuing to reflect on what led me to the foot of the hill. There’s no doubt that the seed was sown during Festial. One of the positive things about that project’s structure was the need to make spontaneous new work after each of the festivals, in order to fill a thematically-linked 16-page magazine in strange and surprising ways. Through this, I (re)discovered the joys of collage, especially real, physical collage (admittedly partly from necessity – I don’t know how to do many technical tricks but I can cut up prints, stick them together and scan them as well as the next person). For the Michaelmas issue of Kalender I made a text ‘hill’ out of the names of hills from the vicinity of Wood Dalling. For a previous issue of Kalender I had made a slogan from cut-out newspaper letters and loved doing it – very Sex Pistols, I thought. It was in Latin but translated to ‘in the beginning was the word’. I just found that very pleasing on so many counts … I think I’m a text-piece junkie.

So, this is how my vision of a newspaper hill was born … and was realised as a prototype for Four Friends at the Forge. But I knew there were so many more names out there – so many more clues, so many more expressions of belief, humour, fear, plain creepy horror (there are several Gallows Hills and Deadman’s Hills) … all I needed were larger-scale maps, and more of them. I dreamed of filling a whole shop window with a hill; the letters for each word pre-cut by me and indexed, maybe even alphabetically (she said, salivating), but pasted up ‘live’ during the course of a single day, as a performance. I need to investigate how this can happen.

So far, I am just thinking about the background to where I am now. But I know I need to look outside that as soon as I understand my starting point. Now I’m blogging again I’m beginning to look closely at other people’s blogs again, and to reflect on the diversity of art practice and the validity of my place within it. It’s early days in that area; I’d closed myself off from thinking of myself as an artist, despite the fact that Fine Art is what my BA (first class hons) and MA are in. I don’t need to do art, I’ve been telling myself, it only leads to hours of frantic application-making, followed by disappointment. There’s so much else calling out for attention. And that’s all true – except, if I’m honest, the art is a part of what I need to do, like it or not.