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moss

2897 posts

Edited Apr 01, 2012, 11:19

Sense of Place

Apr 01, 2012, 09:57

Well this quotation sparked off a thought today!

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
John Muir

Sense of place, I could have used power of place but I just don't like the word power and the images it contains. Sense of place can of course be caught in a photo, Brian Kerr, Sian Williams and Gladman amongst many on this forum. But it was Gladman's photos of high places that caught the eye, the deserted bleakness of high mountain tops with their steep slopes and screes of rocks. Jan Morris once wrote, that you only need to take a metre square of Wales to understand its history, underneath that thin film of grass is rock, often beautifully coloured and magnificent but hardly conducive to farming.

So what do I mean by sense of place in relation to the prehistoric stones that are visited and debated over. Sometimes I think the human involvement in erecting stones is not important, we are creatures of creativity and invention it would follow that we would develop our world with the materials to hand. No it is the natural world that invokes the sense of awe and wonderment, the perfection of the wing of a bird, the colour of a flower or the massivity of a great mountain and perhaps their interconnectivity to everything around them as expressed by John Muir above. This always strikes me as I touch the stones at Pentre Ifan, the millions of years the stone was so long ago created, if you walk along parts of the coast of West Wales, you will see the great vertical folding of the rocks after some upheaval of the Earth - geological history writ large. Stoney Littleton has the symbolic image of an ammonite at its doorway, and beautifully shaped stones in the tomb itself. But for me Stoney Littleton represents the little Wellow river with trailing water plants floating in the current and a rich wild planting of flowers lining its banks in summer, also the stoniness of the field you walk through as you approach the long barrow, probably evidence of its' creation.

Many of our prehistoric stones, barrows, etc remain in the wild places of the moors and high mountains, the last remaining bits of 'wildness' in this small country, perhaps that is what draws people to seek prehistory out.

Replies:
Re: Sense of Place (tjj)
Re: Sense of Place (GLADMAN)
Re: Sense of Place (tjj)
Re: Sense of Place (ryaner)
Re: Sense of Place (BuckyE)
Re: Sense of Place (The Eternal)
Re: Sense of Place (Littlestone)
Re: Sense of Place/Wildness (Sanctuary)
Re: Sense of Place (tjj)

Topic Outline:

Sense of Place – moss, Apr 01, 2012, 09:57


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