On April 17-18, the project held a highly successful workshop at Buckfast Abbey Devon. We are tremendously grateful to all who attended, gave papers, and joined in a series of lively discussions. The full programme is available here.

The workshop concluded with a roundtable discussion led by Anne-Lise Francois (UC Berkeley), Nick Groom (Exeter), and Stephen Mileson (Oxford). We’re grateful to Anne-Lise for permission to reproduce her closing remarks here, with other contributions to follow soon.

ANNE-LISE FRANCOIS

In his “Introduction” to Pig Earth, John Berger describes cultures of progress as orienting themselves toward the future as toward an ever-widening, ever-expanding horizon, presumably because they are relieved by technologies of storage and reproduction from the never-ending task of reproducing past knowledge for the next generation. A “culture of survival,” by contrast, “envisages the future as a sequence of repeated acts of survival. Each act pushes a thread through the eye of a needle and the thread is tradition. No overall increase is envisaged” (xix). For Berger a culture of survival wants nothing for the future but the by no means automatic or guaranteed transmission of past practice. Lacking permanent or mechanically reproducible works of art and depending instead on the near but not always accessible past—borrowing from it only so much as to keep going, and getting only so far as to borrow again—such cultures are never relieved of the “obligation to remember,” as we are “once we’ve assigned monumental form to memory,” according to Lewis Mumford’s formulation that Ceri Price cited in her paper earlier this afternoon.

The past in its place. I have been thinking about Berger’s distinction in the course of these two days, all the while turning over the workshop’s title and its different senses— remembering through it Thoreau’s rather beautiful if ghastly image of the unburied dead being tucked into bed by the turning tide:

It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up, —a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them.  The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them.

Thoreau, Cape Cod

Of these different senses then, there is first the use of place to contain the past, to store and sequester it, keep it in reserve and maintain access to it, but also to limit and control its impact on the present. Perhaps such exercises in containment have always been illusory but never more so now with the problem of nuclear waste, plastic garbage patches in the ocean, and the long afterlife of other toxic materials that will be with us for what is in some sense the rest of imaginable time, continuing to permeate the atmosphere for generations, if not millennia, after their fleeing use. In her talk yesterday Lucy Donkin touched on the illusory solidity of land into which we think of the dead as being deposited and laid to rest. Listening to her on the miracle of a substance conceived simultaneously as permeable enough to be impressionable—and solid enough to hold the image, I was reminded of Rachel Carson’s comments on groundwater as what is ceaselessly circulating under our feet:

Seldom if ever does Nature operate in closed and separate compartments. . Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys. This groundwater is always on the move, sometimes at a place so slow that it travels no more than 50 feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of a mile in a day. It travels by unseen waterways until here and there it comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps it is tapped to feed a well. But mostly it contributes to streams and so to rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface runoff, all the running water of the earth’s surface was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the groundwater is pollution of water everywhere.

Silent Spring

Many of the papers have rightly focused on the difficult and precarious task of remembering—of carrying the past forward into the present. But what if what is also at risk is the ability to forget and leave behind, or put down in one place? To erase our tracks, to let them fade and be washed away by the tides? One instance of deliberate and protective erasure occurs in George Ewart Evans’ oral history of Suffolk farming Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay, where he describes how shepherds would sometimes double as smugglers at night, using their sheep to cover up the tracks of the wagon carrying contraband:

Old Liney’s chief task on the night when a cargo was being run was to keep his eyes open and to turn his flock of sheep from the fold and quickly cover up the tracks of the wagon when it returned full—particularly did he do this near the spot, either barn or cottage—where the contraband was being hidden.

In another chapter Ewart Evans describes the onerous task of stone picking that was once set to children, despite the fact that “the yield from the land that had been left untouched was greater than that of the patch that had been cleared of its stones.”

With these two contradictory figures of path-clearing in mind, I’d like to whisk you at galloping pace through several memory-spots or what the Japanese call “poetic pillows.”  Listening to Lucy’s talk yesterday on Christ’s footprints, I couldn’t help but think of the “Stone for Rubbing Shinobu Figures” (Shinobu-moji-zuri-no-ishi) that Japan’s most celebrated poet Bashō goes looking for in the course of his travels recorded in Narrow Road to the Deep North. According to the editor Hiroaki Sato,

Shinobu, is a place name that also means ‘hare’s-foot fern’ and ‘think of (someone, the past).’ The stone was associated with the belief that you could make letters appears on it by rubbing a cloth placed over the stone with the sap of green leaves, as well as the belief that you could see the face of your lover by rubbing the stone with the sap of wheat.

Bashō tells us that:

In a foothills village far away, the stone lay half buried in the ground. A boy from the village came by and told us: “Long ago, this stone was on top of the mountain, but passersby would trample upon the wheat going to test the stone. People here hate it and pushed the stone down into this valley. So it lies here, face down.” A likely story, or was it?

While this easily reads as an allegory for the conflict between a touristic or contemplative relationship to the land, as the bearer of buried images, and a working relation to it, as the bearer of future harvests, the haiku with which Bashō completes the journal entry, begins to undo this binary:

Sanae toru temoto ya mukashi Shinobu-zuri

The hands taking seedlings recall the ancient rubbing

But a few pages later comes a reference to a tanka on ‘Love Compared to a Stone’ by Nijōin Sanuki:

My sleeves are like the stone in the offing, invisible with the tides out; unknown to anyone but no time to dry.

It helps to remember here that to wet one’s sleeves is a familiar euphemism for crying in classical Japanese poetry. I can’t help but think these two rocks—the one now lying face down so that it can never again render the faces of imaginary lovers, and the one offshore, not even visible when the tides are out—are connected. I also can’t help but think in this context of the story Sarah Orne Jewett tells in The Country of the Pointed Firs of an old sailor-fisherman turned farmer who rather than remove the stones from his field marked them with flags as if they were buoys. Jewett’s narrator tells us:

In the narrow field I noticed some stout stakes, apparently planted at random in the grass and among the hills of potatoes, but carefully pained yellow and white to match the house. . .

[Tilley explains]:

“Folks laughed at me when I first bought this place an’ come here to live,” he explained. “They said ’t wa’n’t no kind of a field privilege at all; no place to raise anything, all full o’ stones. I was aware ’t was good land, an’ I worked some on it—odd times when I didn’t have nothin’ else on hand—till I cleared them loose stones all out. You never see a prettier piece than ’ is now; now did ye? Well, as for them painted marks, them’s my buoys. I struck on to some heavy rocks that didn’t show none, but a plow’d be liable to ground on ’em, an’ so I ketched holt an’ buoyed ‘em same’s you see. They don’t trouble me no more ’n if they wa’n’ there.”

“You haven’t been to sea for nothing,” I said laughing.

“One trade helps another,” said Elijah with an amiable smile.

Jewett’s Elijah shows us one way to split the difference between clearing the ground and removing traces of previous deposits, and sequestering these traces, which may also be boundary markers and means of orientation, as relics to worship at a safe distance. I offer this thinly woven together tapestry of quotations by way of netting the theme interspersed through many of the papers this weekend—that of having to intuit what is missing and to infer the half- if not fully submerged or buried placeholders of the past, markers that promise to serve as guides into the future as much as stumbling blocks to its passage.

[In March 2015, the PASTPLACE team paid a visit to Castle-an-Dinas, Cornwall. Paul Bryant-Quinn reflects on a chilly but illuminating excursion.]

“Another PastPlace field trip, another cold” I grumbled to myself as, channelling my inner Victor Meldrew, I plodded on reluctantly after the now-distant (and much fitter) members of the project. To say that the wind was fresh would be something of an understatement, and rueful lines from an equally disgruntled early medieval Welsh poet came to mind:

Llym awel llum brin

Anhaut caffael clid …

[Piercing wind, bare hill

It is hard to find shelter …]

It was worth it, though. Castle-an-Dinas, ancient hill fort and now scheduled monument of national significance, is one of the most impressive oppida in Cornwall. Its strategic importance is immediately evident, occupying as it does a position of exceptional strength on the high ground of Castle Downs between Goss Moor and St Columb Major. Standing some 700ft above sea level, to the north you look towards St Breock Downs; the south and east offer views across the Hensbarrow Downs, and away to the west are Newquay and the Gannel estuary.

Three (perhaps four) stone and earth banks would originally have enclosed a central area of about 20 acres, and finds at Castle-an-Dinas have dated its occupation from the 4^th to the 1^st centuries BCE. The archaeology does not offer any evidence of long-term settlement, however, and the fort may have served various functions: military and defensive, almost certainly, but trade and shelter also, as the need arose. But they who came here in the 4^th century were not the first. The hill is also the location of two burial mounds which predate the iron-age fortifications and may date back to the 3^rd millennium BCE. Interestingly, the later occupants seem to have left these barrows undisturbed. Whether that instinct was born out of respect or fear, Castle-an-Dinas reminds us that the past had a past of its own which it sought to understand and come to terms with. Did the newcomers weave tales about the people who built those mounds and were buried there, just as later ages would in turn mythologise them?

And Castle-an-Dinas certainly was ― or became ― the stuff of legend: William of Worcester (c.1415– c.1482) came here in 1478 and recorded the story that this was where Cador ‘duke of Cornwall’ met his untimely end. A similar connection emerges in the early 16^th–century Beunans Meriasek, where the ‘duke of Cornwall’ (who is strongly reminiscent of Arthur) challenges the tyrant ‘Teudar’: echoes of the An Gof rebellion of 1497 come to mind. In Meriasek, the duke states that Castle-an-Dinas is his dwelling, but that Tintagel is also his residence; the Galfridian background to this strand of the story is not hard to detect. Strategically, Castle-an-Dinas looks towards Tintagel; and Alan Kent has suggested that it may have been a seasonal or battle dwelling, with Tintagel itself providing longer-term residence. Interestingly, as Oliver Padel has noted, the Tristan legends position Tintagel itself as a defensive response to pressure from Irish raiders; and although there is no corroborating Cornish documentation for this, the presence of Dark-Age ogham inscriptions in the area do attest to an Irish presence. Does the Tristan story preserve folk memories of actual events?

It is not, however, the duke whose stories are interwoven with this landscape and whose name echoes out of legend, but Arthur. Medieval Welsh tales and poetry locate several of Arthur’s courts in Cornwall, and his association with this part of the world is central to the pre-Galfridian literature, such as Culhwch ac Olwen, the Triads, and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy. In the 11^th/12^th–century ‘Dialogue of Arthur and the Eagle’ (Ymddiddan Arthur a’r Eryr), a text which is independent of the tales invented or reworked in the Historia Regum Britanniae, Arthur is the pagan “chief of the battalions of Cornwall”, and the eagle is the reincarnation of his dead nephew Eliwlad, who offers him Christian enlightenment:

Arthur of surpassing far-flung fame,

bear of the host, joy of shelter

the eagle has seen you before.

Here too we find ‘Arthur’s Hall’, on Bodmin moor; Treryn Dinas, one of his ‘castles’; and ‘Arthur’s Hunting Lodge’ (or ‘Seat’): this, by tradition, was Castle-an-Dinas itself. Oliver Padel has suggested that if the Thomas de Kellewik who was murdered at Gulval in 1302 came from these parts, then it is feasible that the toponym Celli-wig, noted in medieval Welsh tales of Arthur as his principle Cornish residence, may be associated with Castle-an-Dinas, although this identification is tentative.

We have to bear in mind, however, that for all the attacks on the Arthurian legends, until well into the 18^th century their various strands were accepted not only as factual, but as defining elements both in regard to the history of these islands and the right of the English crown to still wider dominions. The Welsh themselves long considered these legendary accounts as validating their supposed descent from the nobility of Troy; Owain Glyndŵr and Henry Tudor alike propagandised their bids for power by appeal to Welsh vaticinal poetry (it was not by chance that Henry named his son and presumed heir ‘Arthur’); Henry VIII appealed to historical authority of these same legends, as did John Dee in his Brytanici Imperii Limites of 1578, his most important construction of the basis for territorial claims on behalf of the English monarchy in furtherance of its imperial ambitions.

Polydore Vergil’s scepticism in regard to the Galfridian tales was met with stubborn resistance, and for a surprisingly long time: Leland excoriated Vergil and, in doing so, preserved stories and traditions about Arthur which would otherwise have been lost. Sir John Prise wrote his Historiae Britannicae Defensio (1553) in similar vein, and the chorographer and historian Humphry Llwyd too was a staunch defender of the essential historical basis of the accounts, as were recusant authors in the 16^th–and 17th centuries. As late as 1716, Theophilus Evans of Carmarthenshire could appeal to this ‘history’ as the cornerstone of his people’s dignity. Here we see the sustaining myth at work: as the 15^th–century Welsh poet Siôn Cent reminded his listeners, ‘For all our travails and humiliations, we are not as they [the English are] are: we are the descendants of a noble race, and we hope for that which is to come’. In 1575, Morys Clynnog, custos of the English and Welsh Pilgrim Hospice in Rome, made a paraphrase of this same poem for Pope Gregory XIII as he highlighted the plight of his people under Elizabethan rule. With all of them, their point was that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fables were not the only source of the surviving Arthurian references. From what came to be called the ‘Old North’ through Wales to Cornwall, some of the Arthurian associations have affinities with much older material: for example, the stone now associated with St Columb, said to bear the imprints of Arthur’s horse, is curiously reminiscent of a similar legend recorded in the 9^th–century Historia Brittonum. Who would not look at a site like Castle-an-Dinas and see in it the fortress of some mighty king of the past, as its very name suggests; and of them all, who greater than Arthur?

In any event, place-lore is both consistent and central to the early Arthurian legends; and as Padel says,

What interests us, and is so impressive, is not the antiquity of any individual name, but the vitality and consistency of the tradition in the various Brittonic areas … The folklore may in some cases have been boosted by the literary developments … [but] it remained largely unaffected by the literary Arthurian cycle, and retained its character throughout the period.

Castle-an-Dinas drew the attention of later writers too: Richard Carew (1555-1620) of East Antony in Cornwall comments on it in 1602, as does John Norden (c.1547-1625), the cartographer and antiquary, in his Survey of Cornwall of 1610. Even in the 19^th century, there was a curious legend that the John Trevisa, who translated Higden’s Polychronicon, also wrote an account of King Arthur and a book of his acts. Perhaps he did.

The ‘bare hill’ of Castle-an-Dinas reminds us that the past in its place is never just “the past”, and it is not only our place. From the people who built the ancient barrows to those who constructed the iron-age ramparts, and from the weavers of myths to the partial interpretations we create and believe to be true, here we find an interplay of many pasts and many understandings. Quondam et futurus: we are only the latest to pass this way.

In 1987, Castle-an-Dinas was acquired by the Cornwall heritage Trust from the Duchy of Cornwall for £4,000. Even on a day of biting cold and winds, it seems like money well spent.

Paul Bryant-Quinn