We've just slithered down from a late, late lunch with our neighbours. The time is 9.00pm. That's how late lunch was. But that's what they call lunch and after such good food and company who am I to argue?
All around us is silvery bright - everything seems in such sharp focus. Monochrome. Silent. The big full moon is hanging in the north east - over Stapely Common I think, where the stone circle - Mitchell's Fold - is. This is day come to night. If I think this is strong mysterious magic what did my predecessors think?
A little over two kilometres to the north of Mitchells's Fold is another stone circle, 'Hoarstone,' which barely rises above the height of unmown hay. Indeed in the summer months it is the patch the mower avoids - we do not see stones, only grass. I learn that it might also be called Black Marsh Circle and recall from my trawls though the archives that my lead mining ancestors lived here. Very close to here. Now it is something of a desolate place, unkempt, on the fringe of neat agricultural practice. Perhaps this was always the case.
But here they were. Big teeming families living, I imagine, in some cobbled shanty, blessed with a little land, fresh air and a miner's wage. And sharing sometimes a moonlit landscape such as mine.
I hope on a night like this they too saw trees silhouetted and skeletal; and reflections and the moon on water and the vast foreverness of the sky, felt the comfort and love of now and wondered, just for a moment, about 'them' - 'Them' that moved stones into a circle and for whom this was a scared place. And why? And did they see this moon too? And did they too wonder: why?
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