draw your attention to our own battle royal. As you may have read elsewhere, Ireland’s most venerated ancient site, Tara, seat of the pagan High Kings, is threatened by the construction of the M3 motorway, powered by Euro- grant millions.
Tara represents, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, ‘an ideal of the spirit’. But the secular state is without ideals. Heedless of tradition, it will thrust a spear into our spiritual heart and fill the hole with money.
Several like this. She kept on scrolling down, looking for a specific reference to the Dinedor Serpent. Although there seemed to be a direct parallel here, if on a far smaller scale, to what was happening at the hill of Tara, the various Irish protesters didn’t seem to have been aware of the Serpent.
A hard copy of Jane’s petition had already gone to Herefordshire Council, although Merrily guessed that some of the messages accompanying the names and addresses of supporters had been edited out first.
From Helios, Chichester:
This is to confirm that my Order has now placed a suspended curse upon The Herefordshire Council. If a single modern brick should ever be laid upon Coleman’s Meadow, it will come into effect and you will — be assured — have local by-elections within the year.
Bright blessings to you, Jane!
Merrily found several like this, also, some of them far more local and even more weird.
One, from a man in Malvern, said:
Dear Jane Watkins,
I thought I should write to you as I have visited Coleman’s Meadow on a number of occasions in the past few months and wondered if anyone else had had similar experiences to me.
I should point out that I am an experienced pendulum dowser and also, I suppose, a sensitive, in that when I visit neolithic sites I can usually sense something of their origins and the purposes for which they were created.
The essence of it is, at Coleman’s Meadow I believe you have a very active site-guardian.
(I presume you know what I mean by this term. In the unlikely eventuality that you do not, I append a list of relevant websites — I trust, Miss Watkins, that I do not insult you.)
Most site guardians are, as Shakespeare has it, ‘all sound and fury signifying nothing’.
Please post this message on your website so that this information is available to anyone who may wish to comment or even to use it, in the defence of this site against negative intentions.
Yours sincerely.
Charles Miller
Inst. of Chartered Surveyors
Member, British Society of Dowsers.
Merrily closed the database, switched off the computer. Sometimes logging on to the Net was like turning over an old log in the woods, a whole unexpected ecosystem under there.
Yes. Most of them.
23
The Hill, the River and the Moon
‘It’s not
His name was Harri Tomlin, from the South Wales Valleys, now based in Worcester with the team in charge of the Dinedor/Rotherwas excavation. Young guy. Blond curls fringing his orange hard hat. Bliss had been given one too, before he’d been allowed on the site. Health and Safety. At least it kept the rain out.
‘When I say
They were standing on a bulldozed mound of clay. Caterpillar tracks below it had filled up with cloudy water. A bunch of trees had been sawn down, their trunks lying around like dead soldiers on a battlefield. Behind the site was the sprawl of the Rotherwas Industrial Estate and the civic waste tip — on the edge of that, unexpectedly, the Rotherwas Chapel, medieval and Tudor, an historical gem.
Mass of contradictions, this part of town. Directly ahead was Dinedor Hill, wooded and misted, towards which the Serpent apparently coiled.
‘So let me get this right,’ Bliss said wearily to Harri Tomlin. ‘You’re saying it definitely wasn’t an ancient road.’
‘We very quickly ruled out an actual road, Mr Bliss, because it doesn’t have any substructure, see. It’s also built on undulating ground, rather than having the ground flattened as you’d do for a road. So it has this kind of
He’d talked about fire-cracked stones, sourced nearby. The Bronze Age guys would heat up big stones, then drop them into cold water which would break them up into the kind of small pieces they could use.
‘And it contains a lot of quartz?’ Bliss said.
‘Fair amount.’
‘And it was exposed for a while after you found it.’
‘For too long. Even after a few weeks, there was some erosion. We were actually glad to get it covered over again.’
‘Weeks,’ Bliss said. ‘So in that time anybody could’ve nipped up here, under the fence, and pinched a handful.’
‘Or a bucketful. That’s what worried us. Sightseers often like to go home with a souvenir.’
‘So people
‘It’s ten metres wide. How could we tell? Why do you want to know if some were missing, Mr Bliss? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘How long is it?’ Bliss said.
‘How long’s a piece of string? We cleared sixty metres, but that might be just a small segment. May go all the way up the hill, to the Iron Age camp on the top, behind those trees. The Serpent is
‘I’m not really getting an image, Harri.’
Bliss was cold and his hands were going numb and whatever the Serpent had been they’d reburied it, so the council could put their road across it. Just another construction site now.
‘Ever seen the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, Mr Bliss?’
Bliss shook his head. Didn’t recall ever being in Berkshire. He did remember a white horse in Wiltshire, in the context of a miserable camping holiday with Kirsty before they were married. Kirsty whingeing the whole week.
‘May have seen one on the Wiltshire Downs. Chalk?’
‘That’ll do. Now, forget the chalk and instead of a horse think of a snake. Or, if you like, think of a river. Think of the Wye. Could our structure have been designed to replicate the actual course of the Wye, winding from the top of the hill to the banks of the river itself?’
