Castle Howe, Bassenthwaite

Standing in the remains of a settlement long abandoned always brings its own particular feeling with it.  Do we imagine a resonance or is there really an unexplained and deeply felt link with what has gone before?

This woody glade, so quiet and unvisited, was once the thriving hub of a small iron age hill fort. It’s only a 5 min scramble up a steep deer track from the Peil Wyke carpark so yesterday before swimming I trotted up and was immediately assailed by that strange feeling of being in two times at once.
 In the dominant present, I energetically climb through a wood in winter, emerging at the top to a view of the Lake to the North and with steep slopes down to the roads surrounding the base of the hillock. Underlying this is the past, an awareness of the path twisting through a series of rock cut baffles, low mounds and ditches, overgrown by mosses and filling with dead leaves. The understanding grows, that this is an intrusion where once those who lived here would have cried ‘Halt!’ questioned, kept the gate barred or dropped a rock on the head of a stranger.

The glade itself, colonised by birch trees and soft with hair grass underfoot today, is unnaturally widened and flattened. Once huts would have stood there with a close-knit community looking to this space as home and defining their place in the wider world of friend and foe.
I stand where they stood and for a moment they seem to teeter on the edge of consciousness, ghosts of existences that never quite materialise. Something true and not true, a shared humanity perhaps but only a fiction in the details.

*One detail that is true though and touches me when I read up on it today, is that it was not a rich or technologically advanced site – perhaps iron age in name only. Maybe the hunters had a few iron implements between them, long since rusted, but we know the women heated water and food in the ‘old-fashioned way, by dropping hot-stones into earthen-ware pots. Tricky, time-consuming and quite heavy on pots I should think. Time-travel is never as great as it’s cracked up to be.

*(RC Collingwood c 1920)