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Sense of Place
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Sanctuary
Sanctuary
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Re: Sense of Place/Wildness
May 07, 2012, 21:15
thesweetcheat wrote:
BuckyE wrote:
thesweetcheat wrote:
BUT. Whatever the motivation behind a particular monument at a particular time, its positioning still appears likely to have been significant. And that implies an awareness and inspiration created by the landforms around. Even if the significance differed from monument to monument.


Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. With the caveat that we are now down to speaking of the "landforms." Not the "landscape," which to my limited and literal mind also implies the ecology: particular congeries of plants, animals, etc. And therefore kind of leaves out the interconnectedness to all things motif as a primary motivating consideration.

Unless I'm misunderstanding!


No, you're not :-)

The switch was deliberate, as the landforms are largely the same today as they were when the monuments were built, the landscape is anything but.

So if a stone circle is sited near a particularly prominent rock outcrop, or water source, there is at least an even change that this is significant in the placing of the monument. Whereas a monument may have been placed somewhere because there was a grove of trees that had particular "sacred" (for want of a better word) associations, or it was a place that was remembered through folk-memory as somewhere a fine herd of horses had been encountered thousands of years earlier. But we can't ever know those things, because the evidence has gone.


There is so much we don't understand, or maybe we make more of it than we should. They weren't magicians but normal people who survived, it would seem, under often difficult conditions! There must have been a practical side to them, there had to be, but was there a 'mystical' side to them and something we no longer understand because we no longer require that particular 'knowledge'. Were they at one with animals and did they understand what animals felt in nature? I'm thinking now of the 40 or so horses that used to gather on a circular patch of New Forest grassland near to Lyndhurst. Why? It was out in the middle of open land with no shelter or water yet they gathered there every night and stayed within the confines of the worn out circular area like it was a safe haven. Maybe it was but what did they know and did man once have that knowledge?
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