Stone Head

The watermen flooding through the valley awoke ancient river stones and old pathways lost in the woods, and left mud-scars, hacked white timbers, fresh tarmac stitches across the roads. Their mud trails are full of confused rocks, calcereous mudstone, we call them river stones; eggs and half-eggs of stone, grey-mud-stone, muddied brown-grey; a subtle colour, indistinct, vague; they crack into three-dimensional jigsaws, crumble in your hands, unused to air and light after five hundred million years underground, this floor of an impossibly ancient sea. Not a fine stone but layered, shale-depths, inch-thick, two-inch-thick layers; raised as walls and turn-edged as cattle-floors, fireplaces, where with heat it polishes softly to a steel grey.

But the rumblings of the watermen also touched stranger things, and brought an ancient boulder to the surface, a smooth stone the shape and size of a small human head. I thought instantly of river-gods, Celtic heads at the heads of rivers, spring-goddesses; she rose in Michael's stone-fields (builders' rubble from two centuries of DIY) and surfaced gently, bobbing in long grass and drying soil. Three buzzards appeared as I righted her, washed the mud from her sightless eyes, turned her north towards the distant river; guardian-birds. It seemed right that she reappeared at the foot of the hill and the edge of the fields, the hinterland between slope and marsh, a place of springs and uncertainty. The soft bubbling of springs, grass waters, underwater stones, smooth water slipping down to the widening river. I righted her on St Valentine's Day, a pagan fertility festival in late winter, a celebration of the distant hope of spring. She sat for a day or so among the modern garden ornaments, where the Roman god eyed her warily; but any garden is too tame for her; she has memories of blood-lust firelight ceremonies, mushroom feasts, wild dancers. I moved her to the wilder corners, higher up her old slope, where she could realign the garden with the valley landscape, and her eyes and beaky face can see the untamed flood-marsh and the distant river.