Summer
solstice stirred the old pagan soul and drove me from sleep at 4 a.m. to the
beach to see the sunrise.
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The Knowe |
There is a
mound at the south end that noses into the North Sea.
I know it is a fluvio-glacial deposit pushed
up by ancient snows and melt-water when the world was a lot younger but it does
have a symmetry that suggests the hand of man.
It is at the end of a winding right-of-way that starts at the site of
our 14th century priory, itself built on earlier religious
foundations.
The priory site was
probably a pagan sacred place standing, as it does, on the high ground between
two streams.
In post-Roman Britain,
the legendary king., Lucius was reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the
Christian chronicler, to have deliberately converted all the old temples to
churches. This is supported as historical fact by the discussion
in the famous letter from Pope Gregory to Augustine preaching among the Anglo-Saxons
,advising him not to destroy the pagan sites but to convert them to Christian
churches.
There are Anglo-Saxon graves near the Priory.
The Angles of Northumbria probably took over the site from their Brythonic predecessors and they from earlier peoples.
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The sunrise |
The processional way from the
old shrine to the beach and the knowe is still there.
Not proof
but I like to think so.
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The brightening sky |
Today was a
bit disappointing as it was for the hordes that descended on Stonehenge. The skies were overcast and no sun could be
seen at the eastern horizon. Still the
beach was deserted apart from the cries of the terns fishing and the chorus of
birdsong. The fluting of the whaups* and
the piping of the sea pyats* gave an eerie cadence to the air, an atmosphere
that wouldn’t have been found in the bustle around the stones at the world
heritage site.
I left to
return home wondering if I was right and folk had once processed down to the
hill to see the sunrise. If not then it
should have happened.
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Daybreak |
Back in the
prosaic, everyday world of the Lowland Scot, the thoughts will be typically
downbeat… “ Aye, the nights’ll be drawing in now”.
As P.G.
Wodehouse put it … It’s never hard to distinguish a Scotsman from a ray of
sunshine.
* A whaup is a curlew and a sea-pyat is an
oystercatcher.
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