Summer Solstice, Deep England

Summer Solstice, Deep England

Celebrating Summer Solstice at Sinodun Hills, watching the red kites flex their fantails to stay on the currents, listening to the invisible skylarks higher than the kites, and gazing at the outline of Lowbury Hill on the Berkshire Downs.

This is a place to come and reconnect with Deep England.

Niall Gooch’s blog shows how the essence of Deep England is deep within the work of artist Eric Ravilious. Ravilious worked in many forms, often as illustrator, giving us the viewers his interpretation of an ordinary rural scene, the light on cliffs, an aircraft in flight.

Paul Nash is another 20^th century artist who communicated the spirit of Deep England through everyday life and ancient countryside in his work, especially in both World Wars. In later life he returned to his childhood landscape of the Sinodun Hills, seeing them not only from a house on Boar’s Hill a few miles away, but also through the prism of his profound wartime experiences.

Landscape of the Summer Solstice is one of a series of visionary Equinox and Solstice paintings by Paul Nash. 

Paul Nash. Landscape of the summer solstice (1943) in the collection National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1952.

This evening people are bringing picnics to Wittenham Clumps, named after the local village of Little Wittenham. Thousands of people are drawn here maybe because, like Nash, we feel the ancient landscape of Deep England beneath our feet.

Earlier this year, along with many others, I visited Dig Ventures archaeological digs in the fields on the lower slopes of the hills, where the Earth Trust will be developing an Earth Lab.

Thanks to careful searching and scraping by the archaeologists it was easy to see physical remains of the people who lived and died here in Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman times. Post holes and trenches delineated roundhouses and a large Roman hall or barn. There were shards of pottery, a key, a spoon, skeletons, middens and a kiln to dry corn.  Watch the dig here.

This really is Deep England!

Castle Hill, one of the Clumps, is circled by steep ramparts carved by hand, using tools like the shoulder-blades of ox and deer, probably over hundreds of years by people who lived nearby.

It’s an Iron Age Fort, which has been studied by Time Team and other archaeologists. How difficult it must have been for Iron Age families to dig into the chalk beneath the soil. The chalk is so hard that the river coming out of the north (top left corner of the image below) has to bend sharp left to go around the Sinodun Hills.

This LIDAR image above tweeted by Ed Peveler (@edpev7) Landscape Heritage Officer working on the Beacons of the Past project studying hillforts of the Chilterns, clearly shows the ramparts on the Sinodun Hills.  They are an outlier from the massive chalk escarpment of the Berkshire Downs and Chiltern Hills.

‘The landscapes of Deep England are beautiful and sometimes wild, but never overwhelming,’ writes Niall Gooch. Artists like Ravilious and Paul Nash give us their interpretations of the spirits of ancient and powerful landscapes – where we return today to reconnect ourselves with nature and history.

Round Hill from the ramparts of Castle Hill, 20 June. Photo: Wendy Tobitt

Castle Hill from Round Hill, with happy picnickers, 20 June. Photo: Wendy Tobitt