Tumuli in the neighbourhood
I found out a few weeks ago, greatly to my delight, that the woods near our house are basically full of Bronze Age and Gallo-Roman tumuli. Today being a bank holiday and a fine day, we went out in search of the two nearest (numbered 2 and 3 on the linked map), and found them fairly easily.
Tumuli in a forest don't photograph well. You need to be on the ground to appreciate why the sudden swell of the land looks obviously and convincingly like a human addition to the land's natural contours. Presumably this mound, rising barely a metre over the surrounding soil, would have been much more impressive when originally constructed.
And here, the pattern of sunshine and leaves (living and dead) is what catches the eye (quite apart from the lovely human being in the foreground), This one actually had traces of a ditch surrounding it, but I really couldn't see a way of photographing it.
We walk over our ancestors; these mounds are remnants from the Bronze Age, maybe five thousand years ago. They are a message from two hundred generations before our time: look, we were here too, and some part of us remains.
Tumuli in a forest don't photograph well. You need to be on the ground to appreciate why the sudden swell of the land looks obviously and convincingly like a human addition to the land's natural contours. Presumably this mound, rising barely a metre over the surrounding soil, would have been much more impressive when originally constructed.
And here, the pattern of sunshine and leaves (living and dead) is what catches the eye (quite apart from the lovely human being in the foreground), This one actually had traces of a ditch surrounding it, but I really couldn't see a way of photographing it.
We walk over our ancestors; these mounds are remnants from the Bronze Age, maybe five thousand years ago. They are a message from two hundred generations before our time: look, we were here too, and some part of us remains.