The Solstice horn...part 2

Did I say I wasn't getting up for sunrise? The gods put paid to that. I woke of my own accord at 3.30am and thus it was settled.

We went to Nattadon Hill, Meldon's little sister. It proved a good choice as Meldon was soon covered in cloud.

We found only one other person but as he hardly exuded solsticial bonhomie we tactfully left him to his solitude.

The valleys were filled with a skein of bird song. We heard two cuckoos, which, according to the rhyme I learned as a child, should be on their way back to Africa:

The cuckoo comes in April,

Sings a song in May,

Whistles a tune in the middle of June,

And then 'e flies away.

The hawthorn is still in bloom, at midsummer, another warning sign that the climate has been irrevocably sundered. Calendrical rituals allow such checking in. They remind us where we are and where we've got to.

Through intermittent mizzle we watched the sky turn grey. No sign of the sun, though a brief break in the cover revealed high clouds tinged with gold. I welcomed them with a blast on the Solstice horn and as I did so I thought of all my friends keeping watch on other hilltops.

It's a batty English ritual, one that seems daft when the weather is inclement, and yet somehow the doing of it matters, come what may. I'm glad we didn't stay abed, however much I might regret that later.

The Solstice horn

Summer Solstice is upon us and ordinarily I'd be making my way on foot or by bicycle to Avebury, as has become customary. Alas, not this time.

The forecast, it must be said, is dismal and while I've done my fair share of wet solstices I can't say a night out in the pissing rain is all that appealing right now. Having just moved to Dartmoor I feel little compulsion to go anywhere else. I'm still landing. But in truth, I'm staying put because I'm knackered, deep down tired, and I simply don't have the energy for all night shenanigans, music and magic brews. No, it's the acupuncturist's couch for me today and the summoning up of dwindling kidney chi.

But making use of the brief interlude of sunny weather earlier this week, I climbed up Meldon Hill, all four hundred metres of it, and, standing on a granite outcrop, gave the setting sun three blasts on my Solstice Horn. I trust that sufficed.

Cuckoo song

Making use of the long evenings and the fine weather, we went out to Scorhill, our local stone circle. On Dartmoor, where blocks of granite erupt invitingly from every tor and tummock, it seems a bit superfluous to go to the bother of arranging them yourself, but Scorhill has a bleak grandeur all of its own. I get why they did it.

Now, it is the last obvious human touch before the forbidding expanse of the high moor, still snow-bleached despite the spring. When it was built, this would have been forest. Its construction marked the beginning of an unstoppable ecological change, a process of deforestation that bequeathed us the Dartmoor we know today.

While we were there, a cuckoo bugled in the distance until he was hoarse. His song made a descending minor third, rather than than the more usual major, a shift that gave it an extra sinister twist. For, like all his kind, he was a murderer before he even left the nest: savagery amidst the beauty.

Resurrection

According to Plutarch, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius a sailor by the name of Thamus heard a voice on the water proclaiming that 'the Great God Pan is dead!'

News of this seems yet to have reached Oxford, where strange graffiti started to appear during our final days living there.

Perhaps a coven of witches was trying to invoke the ancient Greek god of bees, goats, pastures, caves, wild places, panic and the regenerative forces of nature.

Perhaps some old acid casualty was trying to immanentize the eschaton through a rehash of Operation Mindfuck.

Maybe it was a piece of ontological anarchy or poetic terrorism, designed to shake up what has become a frighteningly self-satisfied neighbourhood.

And maybe it was just some bored teenager out tagging. It's hard to say.

But now we have moved to Dartmoor, a land so fecund, so utterly alive, that ancient gods, horned or otherwise, need no invocation.

Rather, it is they who invoke the Pan-ish parts of us. We find they were not dead after all.