The Stones of Britain at Lammastide

The song of Lammas sounds a note of melancholy as summer wanes. The faint coolness on the breeze, the shortening days, the thirsty fields – it seems the height of summer, it IS the height of summer, but the bass note of summer is loss. It is the first cross-quarter day in the season of harvest. The image of the scythe, and the reaper who wields it, accompanies this time of year.

Harvest is not necessarily easy. It is time to cut back something we have worked hard to grow, time to count and measure it, prepare it to go to market. The scales appear, and with them the goddess of justice with her sword. The harvest may be scant. You reap what you sow. But in the old ways, in the agricultural year that the turning wheel honors and marks, gathering in the harvest is made easier with the help of others. Our connection is our sustenance.

The summer wanes and I wax nostalgic about my time in the English countryside a year ago during July of 2023. It is the stones that are speaking to me still. Stones standing in circles, stones tilting in parish graveyards, stones collected in the path of a woodland walk, stones full of stories we can only imagine but which inform the landscape throughout Britain with antiquity and mystery.

After my heady week in Oxford, its dreaming spires and medieval colleges built from many kinds of local stone, I took myself to the English countryside. Here I sought and found a much-needed grounding after my immersion in the exclusive and sanctified halls of book learning. I wrote about that experience in “The Ivory Towers of Oxford.” Plenty of stone in those historic buildings, but speaking a more domesticated dialect than I heard from the stones in the countryside.

I arrived by rail in the city of Birmingham, where a dear friend I’d hitherto only known in the ethers met me on the platform. My friendship with Patricia Hayward deepened during the next week, as she and her husband, Tony Hayward, generously hosted and squired me all over the countryside, taking me to see wonder after wonder. From our home base in the West Midlands, we ventured out to Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, through Warwickshire, and further south to Somerset and Wiltshire, and doubtless to and fro through many other shires. It was an incredible gift to visit these places in the company of soul friends.These two regularly explore interesting places around England and Wales, so they were the perfect guides to take this Yank around to see the sights.

This part of my journey was a true pilgrimage, giving me images to take home in my heart, my hands, my bones. All places are holy but some places have a resonance that comes from long communion with other pilgrims who leave a little of their devotion behind when they leave. Such places are made sacred by our tending, by our feet treading the ground and our hearts stirring with the connections we feel there.

The Rollright Stones were profoundly sweet for several reasons. When I last came to England in 1997, I couldn’t visit them, but wished keenly that I could, even after seeing Stonehenge and Avebury. I couldn’t account for my attraction to this particular stone circle, but I had to wait twenty-six years to get there and understand why.

The timing was right to have waited until I had the interest and resources to uncover my genealogical link in Oxfordshire. Patricia is again to thank for urging me to look again at my family tree before planning my trip any further. With only an hour’s search I found the lineage of my father’s mother’s folk in a small Cotswold village not far from the Rollrights.

Being with the Rollright Stones was as magical and intimate as I dreamed it would be. Their size was human-scaled, companionable. The stones welcomed me. I wondered if my long ago great grands ever walked among them. They were as much my kin as the great grandparents I would seek later in the day in the village churchyard. These Neolithic-era stones, dating from 2500 to 2000 BCE, are of weathered oolitic limestone, textured with time and love to be friendly.

Through miles of winding roads in green and gold Cotswold countryside, Tony and Patricia brought me to my newly discovered ancestral village of Shutford, late in the afternoon of our visit to the Rollrights. They had come to visit the week before so they knew the way to everything I wanted to see.

The beautiful stone church, St. Martin’s, dating to Anglo-Saxon times, had plenty of weathered gravestones in the churchyard, bearing a marked resemblance to the Rollright stones.

The baptismal font in St. Martin’s is clearly made of the golden Cotswold stone used in so many of the buildings throughout this part of the countryside. My great grands were baptized in it. Alone in the church, I eventually sat in one of the box pews and introduced myself and my line to the listening walls. Then it was time to go on.

Down the shaded country lane we went, into a sweet green meadow, filled with curious sheep, on our way to see the other sights bearing the names of my ancestors.

At the further side of the meadow we came to something breathtakingly brilliant. The public footpaths that cross many a privately owned field often provide something to help the walker, in this case a stile to offer a safe place for a foot on either side of the fence and a thoughtful rail to grasp.

We climbed over the stile into First Maid Field, following the footpath cracked with summer drought, the golden wheat heads seeding in the breeze, ready for harvest. From here we came to Jester’s Barn, at the foot of Jester’s Hill, with views of blue borage fields, more green meadows and amber waves of grain. I gathered a few stalks for my hearth altar, and a few golden-colored stones from the footpath.

If the Rollright Stones are as cozy and welcoming as a circle of relatives, the massive standing stones of Avebury, twelve to fourteen feet tall, are so vast in size they beggar belief as to how they might have been placed there millennia ago, and why.

Nowadays there are rituals in these circles, echoing ones performed here long ago. But decades and centuries passed without this hopeful devotion. The stones were vilified by the church at various times. Now Avebury is declared a World Heritage site since 1986, along with Stonehenge.

For myself, I prefer the solace of solitude with them. There is a mystery and narrative to this place that is lost. In the presence of the great stones standing in circles in the landscape, something resounds in us like a hymn but deeper, larger, older.

I called this one Speaking Stone, for its curious openings which seem like cubbyholes in a writing desk. Truly it has a character and will tell you stories if you listen.  You can see some of the village in the background, which grew up amongst the stones, so large is the circle.

Just over the way is Silbury Hill, the tallest man-made hill in Western Europe, pictured at the top with my hosts. The official version is that we don’t know why those crazy Bronze Age people would build such a thing, but a fascinating book called The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames suggests that each of the monuments in this complex – the henge and the sacred enclosure of the Avebury stones, the great chambered cemetery of West Kennet Long Barrow, the two stone avenues of West Kennet and Beckhampton, and Silbury Hill, the tallest mound made by the hands of men in Neolithic times – were made to enact the seasonal worship of the Earth Mother, each representing different aspects of the annual fertility cycle corresponding to the agricultural year. 

Being with the standing stones at Lammastide was poignant. I visited many country churches during that week, but was leaving England just at Lammas so did not have an opportunity to see any rituals of the old ways, no loaves on the church altar as I have heard is the origin of the name Lammas, or Loaf-mass. The resonance at Lunasa, as it is called in Ireland, or Lammas, as it is called in England, between the harvest and the circle of life is an old one. The sun wanes and the year has begun to die, in one way of looking at it. I have felt this stirring in me for a long time, before I had words for the wheel of the year, before I had experienced the kind of loss that changes one at a cellular level. It sounded decades ago when a July 31 surgery meant to save my mother’s life was halted for being too late. It broke me when years later I was undone by another bereavement that I could not resolve, only accept as the reaper’s work.

The standing stones remain a mystery, but if one remains very quiet one might hear the stones speaking.

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Other extraordinary encounters during my week in the English countryside are shown below mainly in photos:

My Revels and Morris dancer friends might like to see some of my photos from Abbots Bromley, the home of the famous horn dance, though I missed the September frolic. I posted a series of photos last September on this public Facebook link. My visit in July to these 900-year-old horns, hanging on the stone walls of the old church, felt like a kind of homecoming, for I traced these exact horns from a photo in 2009 to make my art, The Horn Dance.

At the magnificent Lichfield Cathedral, I was thrilled to discover the eighth century St. Chad’s Gospel on display, showing the exquisite half uncial letters I studied long ago when I was completely enamored of uncial-style lettering.

On the front of Lichfield Cathedral is another kind of speaking stone, this marble carving of Mary Magdalene looking down at us with her knowing gaze, her hair barely covered, holding her alabaster jar for anointing. Carved by Mary Grant in the late 19th century; more about her here.

At the end of the week Patricia brought me to this hidden stone chapel in Glastonbury, St. Margaret’s Chapel and the Magdalene Almshouses. I sang to the Mother and let the oldest and most earthbound spiritual traditions, the religion of sky and water and stone, meet with the religion of my ancestors in this tiny chapel. Replete with my week of pilgrimage and revelation, I emerged with a full heart and a brimming imagination.

Finally it was time to leave the enchanted landscape behind and board a train, taking care not to travel on a day of the train strike, thanks to Patricia’s careful shepherding, and return to Londontown to prepare for my return home to the States.

This post is written so that I may remember some of the highlights of my trip to England, and comes with my deepest thanks to my friends Patricia and Tony Hayward, without whom it would not have been possible to have these experiences. At a time when my ambulation is once again challenged, and at an age when the integrity of our health is not what it once was, the gift of this journey and our ability to be hale and hearty throughout becomes even more blessed and precious in memory.

The Lammas newsletter will have notes of the Resources I used in assembling this post and other ways to follow along with The Wheel of the Year. Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to the Prose and Letters newsletter. I have settled on eight newsletters in a year, following along with each turn of the wheel and gathering in what has transpired between each sabbat, so as not to overtax anyone’s inbox.

I will leave you with a poem that sings in me like an incantation, the last of “Twenty-one Love Poems” written by the poet Adrienne Rich, published in her book, The Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-1977.