Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from those travels.
"I have a belief, I guess, in the power of the aggregate human attempt – the best of ourselves. In love and hope and optimism – you know, the magic things that seem inexplicable. Why we are the way we are. I do have a sense of trying to make things better."
Meryl Streep.
The Whispering Knights
I park up Woody and walk through a copse into a field and see the stones for the first time. The field is empty and the stones are beautiful in the softened light. I walk over to the centre of the circle.
My Billingham bag holds all the paraphernalia of a travelling photographer. I’ve set up my device upon a tripod right at the heart of the circle. My finger hovers over my watch which acts as a remote for the camera on my device. With the stones encircling me, I feel as though I’m at the centre of the universe.
Then, just as I’m about to take the shot, people start to team in through the entrance at the opposite end of the field. They each react to the stone circle in a different way. One family starts to count the stones. They walk intently around each stone and shout out the numbers as they pass. One man, dressed in a long white robe, walks over to the bench at the side of the field and sits in contemplation.
"One man, dressed in a long white robe tied at the waist with a rope, walks over to the bench at the side of the field and sits in contemplation."
"They're all behaving a bit oddly", I think. I smirk at the stone-counters and raise an eyebrow at the robe clad man.
Can’t they see what I’m trying to do? Couldn’t they just hold back for a second? I feel frustrated - I want to get my shot - to record the stones.
Of course, it’s a misguided form of entitlement, underpinned by technology that tells me that I’m undeniably at the centre of everything: the me, myself and I - my viewpoint incorruptible.
Unfulfilled, I pick up my device and walk out of the field.
I see a sign for the Whispering Knights. They lie a few hundred yards away in another field. I take the dog-leg path that circumvents the field. The path turns in on the stones, offering a view of them across the valley. As they get closer they rise above the horizon - each stone entangled with the other. Again, the light is soft and welcoming and the stones look magnificent against the backdrop of the valley beneath.
There’s nobody else here, so I pull the camera from my bag and start to take some photographs, until I’m shuttered by an overwhelming feeling to strip back - to remove the paraphernalia of modernity. And it isn’t a completely pleasant feeling - my hackles are raised, I feel uncomfortable.
"I’m shuttered by an overwhelming feeling to strip back..."
So I do it. I take the 360 cam from around my neck, I put the tripod and pocket cam back into my bag. I switch off my iPhone and put it into my pocket, and finally, I take off my watch. I place it all behind a tree next to a bench and walk over to the stones.
For a moment, I disappear: Andy Marshall the frustrated and entitled photographer, the writer, the anxiety ridden camper-van-camino chap - completely disappears.
I walk back over to the stone circle and notice that I’m trying to rub away the indentation marks that my watch has made upon my wrist. At the stone circle, I watch as more people walk into the field. Students, lovers, hikers, academics and tourists. I hear laughing, chanting and chatter. A young man hangs something on a nearby tree. Now there’s a large group of students who are counting the stones. Two young lads with back-packs stand in the corner of the field, wrestling each other to the ground. One of them drops a crisp packet on the floor. In the middle of the circle there lies a couple - prostrate - head to head - with arms outstretched.
Where do I fit into all this - the grumpy photographer?
Then I see it through the blurred movement of people passing in front of me. From where I’m standing, it looks like an orange dot against one of the stones on the other side of the circle. It seems to be blinking.
I walk around the outer edges of the circle (and pick up the crisp packet) - then cut through the centre, past the prostrate couple who are now sitting up and having a smoke. As I move closer the bright orange dot takes shape.
It’s a butterfly. It looks so utterly fresh and present against the ancient oolitic that it grounds me in the here and now.
A new cohort of tourists walk in through the gate. They see the druid on the bench, the couple smoking at the centre of the circle, and a middle-aged man on his knees intently observing a bright orange dot on a stone.
At the heart of it all the stones stand still and silent like an echo of the universe. Their stillness and silence is so polished with time that they have become mirrors. The full gamut of human existence passes through them like the motions of an orrery.
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Become a MemberThe Rollright Stones.
I came to the Rollright stones after visiting the remarkable church at Long Compton (just a couple of miles away).
They consist of three areas of stones: the King's Men stone circle; the Whispering Knights burial chamber and the King Stone.
Legend has it that they are a king and his courtiers petrified by a witch. The story was first mentioned in William Camden's Britannia in 1586.
The King Stone.
The King Stone stands in a field on its own, behind it are extensive views of the Cotswolds. It is the youngest of the stones and is thought to be Bronze Age c. 1500 BC.
The King's Men Stone Circle
Dating from the late Neolithic, c. 2,500 BC. It is said that the stones are impossible to count - that you never come to the same number twice.
I'm struck by their gnarled and weathered appearance, but, even more remarkable, is that the stones have been a habitat for rare lichen - some of the colonies are over 850 years old.
"...even more remarkable, is that the stones have been a habitat for rare lichen - some of the colonies are over 850 years old. "
When the people come and go, most don't realise that there is another life force inhabiting the stones. One that has had a consistency of habitat for thousands of years.
The Whispering Knights
The oldest of the stones on this site. The dolmen or burial chamber is early Neolithic c3800-3500 BC.
From certain angles they do look as though they are in conversation - leaning in on each other.
Once again, on the south aspect, I see a flash of colour - somebody has placed an apple in the well of the stone. I find the combination striking - the transient and mouldering apple (a symbol from the very beginning of mythical time) against the 160 million year old oolitic limestone that has been standing upright for over 5000 years.
I move from the macro to the micro with my camera - from the gnarled surface of the stone to the dented, fleshy skin of the apple.
I'm reminded of the stained glass window at St. Edmund in Falinge near Rochdale in Lancashire: Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and the drama behind a single piece of fruit.
And because places are portals to other thoughts - I'm taken off at a tangent, once again, and remember a snippet of a poem by Betjeman called An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield
The sounds are discreeter
Of shoes upon stone -
The worshippers wending
To welcoming chapel,
Companioned or lone;
And over a pew there
See loveliness lean,
As Eve shows her apple
Through rich bombazine;
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