The Ghost Lake, page 4
It is July, a breezy, warm but overcast morning. I have come to Seamer Beacon to be close to the burial complex. Although I’m familiar with Seamer Beacon as a landmark, I have never visited the site up close. Now I want to see the burial mounds, climb the beacon, explore the liminal place where manmade structure becomes landscape, where the dead lake people meet me, a living lake person with my own dead, my own rituals and rites.
When I think about my experience of loss, I sometimes wonder whether the way that I reacted to grief, my daughter’s death especially, was a case of me being ‘too sensitive’. ‘Too sensitive’ was one of the labels given to me in childhood that I have attached a great deal of shame to. To be ‘too sensitive’ is to be too much, to be uncontrollably, animalistically, monstrously far away from ‘normal’. To fit in, one must crush down the fear and hope and sadness and pain and not be the explosive thing that you are.
I grieved hard for my daughter, for years. There were people around me who could not understand that grief. After all, my daughter was pre-term, premature, might not have survived anyway, even if she had lived through the trauma of her birth. It is so easy to squash another person’s experience like this. To discard her death as if she was a defective factory part sliding into a bin at the end of a conveyor line, rather than an actual person, my person. Later, after my dad died, I began to think about who will remember me after I have died. Although I have a niece and a nephew, with no children I have no one to maintain a grave, no one to carry my stories on down a chain, no one to recall my achievements, or my failures.
According to Historic England, Bronze Age barrows, and later barrows, are often placed near monument sites that have been used by earlier, Neolithic people. In fact, at the Seamer Beacon site, there is evidence of Neolithic occupation beneath the barrows. These burial mounds are not simply cemeteries, but monuments to the dead, they are made to be noticed, to be seen. I imagine that the Bronze Age cemetery was built around the prominent mound of Seamer Beacon because it was meant to be seen. The dead in the burial mounds were meant to be remembered by the people below in the village. Seamer Beacon would be a symbol and a tool of remembrance, the physical message in the landscape that told generation after generation that this was the place of their people, that even when the stories of the people buried there were long lost, the sense of belonging was not. I did this with my daughter, in a way, I placed a headstone over her grave with her name on it, and our names, and made a point of telling anyone passing that she was loved, that she was missed and remembered. When I am gone and can no longer carry her memory in me, can no longer write books about her or tell people about her, her headstone will still be there. My name too, will be on it. Perhaps that’s enough.
I wish to acknowledge the effect the burial mounds have had on me, both as a sign of home, and as a reminder that grief has always been present, always happening to us, and that I am not alone. This will be my first pilgrimage to a place that I have no immediate connections to, a place that I have seen but never been in close contact with. This feels like the beginning of a journey. I will make my way up and above the cemetery where my daughter is buried and climb to the place where the Bronze Age community of lake people remembered their dead. I will make a deliberate, physical act of remembering them. I will travel to see the burial mounds, these memorials. I want to acknowledge their time spent here as significant, in the way that I want to mark the time my daughter spent with me as significant. I want to make sure these people are not just important in a historical sense, as a device for learning about ourselves and our own past, but as people living their lives, being ordinary, being important because they existed as human beings. I want to connect and acknowledge myself, my grief, and to forgive myself for being sensitive, for over-grieving. I hope that by seeing the monuments these people left, I can understand the sheer strength of grief. After all, grief is only the counterweight of love, and to love a child created in and born of your body is also to love yourself, to bury a part of yourself. There is nothing insignificant about that. There is nothing oversensitive about being in a state of grief that lasted many years, until we came to accept a life without her, without any children. Where is the sensitivity baseline over which one must never pass? Who sets the limits?
I want this pilgrimage to be spiritual. I am holding onto the idea of a pilgrimage as a devotional practice. I have been looking at the tonsure-like tumuli on my Ordnance Survey map, have walked my fingers over them obsessively, as if there is a puzzle to be solved between the contours and the dotted lines of bridleways and railway tracks.
I arrive at Throxenby Mere, just a couple of miles north of Scarborough, aiming to take the long route up the steep slope and through the ancient woods, a sort of diagonal approach to the top of the hill, where I can walk above Woodlands Cemetery, above my daughter’s grave, and onwards to Seamer Beacon.
It’s been thirteen years since I lost my daughter, and I find that I myself feel lost, even now, never wholly in one place or truly belonging. Walking in nature has always been a means of reconnecting with myself and my place in the world, and my walks are usually along the farm tracks around the village where I live, or occasionally on the high chalk paths of the Wolds. It’s been a long while since I walked in a forest and immersed myself in the wild.
Today I want to make a pilgrimage through this ancient woodland to the Bronze Age burial site. I want to make a conscious effort to slow down, re-tune myself to the landscape, stop looking at it as merely the ground I traverse to get to where I am going and start seeing it as something other, something more meaningful. I want to feel meaningful.
There is a Japanese method of reconnecting to nature called shinrin-yoku, or ‘forest bathing’. It’s a superb name for what happens when one steps off the path and in among the trees. According to research by the German forester and scientist Peter Wohlleben, trees have their own communication systems and are aware of our presence, passing information through the fungal networks around their roots, alerting each other to the presence, or threat, of people. I am conscious of myself as an intruder among the trees and perhaps this is why I step so quietly, as if entering a church.
I tune in to my senses. The air feels damp, loamy. The smell of the reedy mere, the body of water I’ve just passed, is all around me, and the ground is puddled with black water. I am no more than ten feet into the trees when the sound, or lack of it, becomes a close, comforting thing. As I enter the terrarium of trees, the air becomes thicker, the ground becomes softer; I am walking over the life cycle of trees, the rotting leaves, the stuff of trees replacing their own nutrients through their roots. There is no birdsong and, for now, no animal movement among the trees. Time slows. I become slow too. I am bathing in the forest. It is like entering a lake; my surroundings become darker, the light, leafy edges of the woods are blotted out. I am submerged.
This place feels ancient in the way that the glacial valley feels ancient, and mountains feel ancient. There is a presence here. Even thinking such a thought makes me feel slightly embarrassed. I was a scientist in a previous life, before I was a writer, and am trained to see the facts in relation to action and reaction. But perhaps there is more to the world than facts laid out end to end.
In this part of the forest there are many patches of burned ground. There are illegal bonfire sites, the sharp scent of burned wood all around, and empty bottles and cans are strewn about, the detritus of the local teenagers. A man with a dog is moving about the place with a delicate familiarity. He has a bin liner and a waste-collecting grasper and he’s clearing up after the night-revellers. We smile a hello to each other and his dog, a silvery grey marbled sheepdog, comes to greet me, gentle-eyed and soft-muzzled, placing its head trustingly into my hand. I feel a desire to help, a responsibility. I share a kindred concern for this place, for keeping it clean and unstained. But today I must continue on. The man picks steadily away, crab-like, and I climb, digging my toes into the soft ground to steady myself.
I see no one else for a while, though occasionally I hear voices. In this dark part of the forest sound becomes focused on the tread of boot, the steady step after step. It really does feel like these tall, dark trees are watching me weaving between them. And then, quite suddenly, I reach an open chalk and brick road which stretches up the hill. The forest continues on the opposite side, but I turn a hard right, and step onto a steep path which is shored with pieces of broken bricks, cement, cobbles and what looks like rubbish – squashed bottles, bits of old metal, pen lids and other everyday detritus – all crammed and wedged to create a surer footing and, I imagine, drainage – some sort of soakaway for what is still a very boggy path. It seems strange to me that what appears to be landfill rubbish has been used to do this, but I have seen, in the past, farmers do the same thing, using rubble, broken crockery, broken glass, etc., to create better drainage in areas of a field where water pools, places where tractors need to get past. When I see the rubbish from my own youth, I can’t help but feel that here is time becoming thin: the road packed with our disposable waste, and the disposable waste is already becoming history, wedged into the road to aid the passage of future passers-by. I see cans and bottles from twenty years ago, recognize products from my childhood.
As I walk on, the road curves further up, becoming steep enough that I need to stop for breath. I’ve been moving steadily upwards until this point and hadn’t realized that I have travelled sideways. It’s heavy going. I have to keep stepping up onto the banks to avoid the thick mud, but the higher I go, the less groundwater there is, and it is a pleasure to feel my muscles pushing and pulling, to feel the rhythm, the force of grasping the branches of a living tree, using them to swing over puddles and uneven ground.
Everything on this part of the journey is magnified. I am paying attention not to the surroundings, not to the wider scope of the valley, but to where my foot is, where my hand is, how I grasp, how I push forward. The world becomes small enough to notice individual leaves, the roots of trees, the flower heads and insects, because climbing and grasping and forcing my body up through the woods is causing me to be eye level with it, literally, in places. There is something mindful about it, being so present, and I’m reminded of doctors who prescribe outdoor activities to heal trauma.
During my transition from scientist to writer, at a point in my life when I needed not to be reliant on training or specific skills and needed only an ability to walk in nature, I worked as a dog walker. The work was often miserable. I discovered that many, many dogs do not like to walk in the rain, in the heat or with strangers. I learned that people expect an awful lot from you for eight pounds an hour if they think you’re an unskilled worker. But I also learned how to physically slow down. How not to rush. If a dog refuses to walk, you cannot force it, you must stop. I spent a great deal of time standing under trees avoiding heavy showers. In fact, my abiding memory of that part of my own journey is of standing beneath dense foliage in silence, with a dog at my side, both of us motionless, listening to the sound of the rain on the leaves and watching the puddles ripple.
I stop to catch my breath and look up towards the rim of the slope. I am conscious of the round barrows above me, just out of sight, and that the landscape I am traversing hasn’t really changed a great deal since the builders of these mounds were here, possibly walking this route, pulling themselves up through the trees, their voices echoing through the forest.
The barrows are much more complicated than they appear, the structures must have taken some time to create, and must have involved much lugging of materials from around the area. I think about what these workers did when it rained. Did they shelter under the trees of Row Brow Woods, listening to the patter on the leaves? I feel most connected to this area, and the people who came before me, when I think about people doing ordinary things. Not when I think about great and wonderful graves like Sutton Hoo, but these places of respect and remembrance for regular people, the non-elite. That a person might have paused here and placed their hand, like I have, on the smooth bark of a sycamore and stood, leaning into the shelter, waiting for the storm to pass. It creates a sense of connection much deeper than when I gaze at the gold and jewels of ancient peoples, stuff that sits behind glass in London museums.
As I move between the trees and the path, searching for the surest footing, I realize that I am by far the noisiest animal in the woods. It pleases me that I am, at least, certainly an animal now, no longer the padded stuffed armchair of the human state. I can feel myself opening, becoming watchful. My ears have tuned in to every cracked twig and moving leaf. I feel, as I always do when out in the landscape, that I am living rather than just existing. The ground around the trees is much greener here, with ferns and bracken and so many wild foxgloves and honeysuckles I begin to think that there may have been some guerrilla gardening going on. There are bees and flies and midges and finches, everything is alive with movement and colour, and as I turn to walk along a ridgeline, I can look down where swathes of trees have been felled for farmland. I can see that I have almost reached Woodlands Cemetery, am almost rising above it, can almost see my daughter’s grave, but not quite. Then the road rises again, and I am climbing away, and now the wide track narrows to a single track, a true hollow way, with curved sides and foot-polished rocks, edged in sandy soil. The roots of trees drape onto the path, the canopy above me forms a tunnel, leading me onwards.
There is a piece of rock poking out of the soil, and when I prise it out I see that there is a fossil in it. I can’t tell what kind – maybe a coral or a fern, maybe an eroded ammonite. It feels like a sign. It reminds me of the Gryphaea I found in the field where I walk my dog, the field from which I can see Seamer Beacon, the hill I am journeying towards today. That day I was looking for a sign, anything that would give me reason to believe the IVF – our one and only NHS go at IVF – would work. The anxiety was eating at me, and I was searching for meaning in magpies and signs in the ground. And there it was, a huge curl of a thing, a ‘devil’s toenail’, which fitted perfectly into my palm like an enormous sleeping woodlouse. It was the biggest, most perfect specimen I’d ever found. It has sat on my desk ever since. When I look at it, I can still see myself holding it up, on the day I found it, examining it in the sunlight, just like I am holding this fossil up to the light now. Both times I have been facing the beacon and the burial mounds, only this time I am so much closer, and my daughter is below me and time has sluiced through the middle of it all.
I duck under a fallen tree, an archway between the woods and the farmland beyond, a mossy portal through which I must pass to reach the summit and then, like a cork popping out of a bottle, I am out and at the top of the hill, suddenly above the valley and beneath a wide blue sky. The air around me is full of birdsong and the sound of the breeze in the fields. In my path are several enormous mobile phone towers; their steel buzz is unnerving, and the generator shed behind is surrounded by padlocked fences, razor wire and signs threatening death by electrocution. It’s a shock to wash up next to something so manmade, so deadly.
Almost immediately there is a barrow to my right, but it is behind a barbed wire fence, with no admittance. It’s the first one I’ve seen up close and, in my excitement, I mistake it for Hagworm Hill, the wonderfully evocative name of one of the barrows I’ve seen on my OS map, ‘hagworm’ being a colloquial name for the adder, a reasonably common snake round these parts.
Later I will find out that Hagworm Hill was excavated and deconstructed years ago, on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, to enable easier ploughing for the farmer. It is still a registered monument, but that monument is unseen, a ring of kerb stones, a crop mark that can only be observed from the air.
Something about this first barrow says manmade, but I’m not sure why. The barrow is an island raised above the meadow. It has a shape that suggests constriction, as if a band has been placed around its middle and squeezed tight, forcing the earth to spill up over the rim. There are rowan trees and a small oak on its top.
The breeze blows at my back as I cross the ploughed field, sticking to the thick ruff of grass and thistles on the verge. I see a gate with a public footpath sign, and a warning of escaped cows if the gate isn’t shut, and as I turn the corner, there it is, the journey marker I’ve been searching for: Seamer Beacon.
It is unbelievably peaceful, the field thick with finches, sparrows, blackbirds, even a woodpecker somewhere, and not at all as I expected. I thought it would have the sombre feel of a graveyard, but it doesn’t at all. It is a soundscape, a scent-scape, a place where I can imagine bringing a book and sitting for the day. Someone has been here before me; a trail of footprints leads through the dew-wet grasses to the base of the hill. They must have been here very early, and now there is no one else here but me.
The land that the burial complex and Seamer Beacon sit on was once owned by Albert Denison Conyngham (1805–1860), also known as Lord Albert Conyngham and Baron Londesborough. Albert Denison was president of the British Archaeological Association. He was a keen amateur archaeologist but, like many gentlemen antiquarians of the time, his scattergun approach may have caused more damage and confusion, rather than the expansion of knowledge for those following in his footsteps. It certainly made it difficult for me, a non-archaeologist, to work out where the barrows were and who had excavated them. I want to know the story of this manmade landscape – what is original, what is ploughed out, what still perseveres thousands of years since it was created – so it is important to me to work out the timeline of the place and who had a hand in its reshaping.
