Holloway

In the Spring I tried to find a Bronze Age religious site at the eastern end of the valley, a spring I found given a sideways mention in something else. I found two possible sites, one on the rising floor of the valley in a field - cut into the bank, surrounded by guardian thorn trees - and one high up on the hillside, a deep pool again with thorn trees. Coming down from the pool I found what I thought was an ancient holloway, an old road following the hillsides.

Having read more about holloways in The Wild Places I decided to go back and try and walk it. The holloway starts about 300 yards from the modern road, as the cultivated lands starts to rise steeply in two drections, west and south, on a rough corner of hillside. I walked along a modern farm track from the road past a potato field - mustard yellows, browns and blacks and old greens, tartan colours - and followed it along an old hedge of elder and hawthorn or blackthorn. The track is deeply rutted. It swings past a small line of old oaks and sweeps up the hill into the fields. But just by the line of old oaks is the entrance to the holloway. It is choked with dumped, rusting farm machinery - some 50 years old at a guess - and coils of barbed wire, all thickly overgrown with nettles. As I turned in to the undergrowth I heard ravens and buzzards in the pine woods on the far hillside; I thought of totem birds, spirits of place. The totem plant is the nettle. The holloway at this point is about 25 feet deep, i.e. it is a trench whose deepest point is 25 feet below the surrounding fields.

The holloway has not been used as a track for - at a guess - at least 50 or 60 years, as this was a conservative estimate on the age of some trees in the middle of the track. The whole track was choked with thorns and nettles and had some spectacularly big ash, oak and beech trees in it, especially along the banks. I managed to walk and crawl about 300 yards through the holloway, before I reached thick thornbushes and a fence; the rest had been grubbed up (or was not below ground level). The ground was soft and crumbly, and there was lots of evidence of rabbits, foxes and perhaps badgers.

At the very least this holloway is a very old road which once led up the hill from the lower fields. But it is possible that it connected the lower valley with the sacred spring on the top, and could therefore be several thousand years old. I think it might have approached the spring in a circular way, a processional way, perhaps with reverence, leading over the lower slopes to join other semi-natural valleys and make an approach road to the sacred spring.