Stone Head Again

I realised today that moving the stone 'Celtic' head from Michael's fields next door to our garden has made me look again at the siting of the garden in this river valley. The land starts to rise at this point, and in the thirty feet of garden from north to south the land rises by about three feet, and continues to rise up Wapley Hill. Michael's theory is that these eighteenth-century cottages were built on the worst land in the estate, the land that was no good for agriculture or forestry. That is why the toll road and the modern road are here as well. The head - should it have a name? A gender, certainly; she is a she - has made me look at the orientation of the land east-west as well, looking up the valley towards Radnor and down - although we have no windows that way - towards England. I have looked at England all my life.

I like the idea that this river-spirit stone head has made me reassess this landscape, the position of this house. It is in all probability not a Celtic river-spirit, carved two thousand years ago to guard or represent a long-vanished spring; but I also like the idea that it could be. She has fired my imagination to see this as an ancient and sacred landscape, a buried-in-plain-view landscape of old hills, carved stones, mistletoe in trees and vanished springs. Every night I see the stars over the steep hill and think of the huge Iron Age hillfort that is up there beyond the trees in the darkness and the ancient silence.