In Search of High Ground

By Ian S. Grosz:

The car climbed steeply up the narrow roads of Cleeve Hill, at just over a thousand feet the highest point in both the Cotswolds and Gloucestershire as a whole. The hill forms the high point of Cleeve Common, a site of Special Scientific Interest due to the bird, insect and plant species found there. Most famously it is the home of three wonderfully named, rare orchid varieties. Known as the bee, frog and musk orchids, they thrive in the unique soil found on the common; a product of thousands of years of grazing and the spoil and scree from centuries of limestone quarrying.

But rather than hunt for rare orchids, I have come to find the trace of our earliest presence in this landscape: the descendants of the people who first cleared the land of its forest and began farming here more than 6000 years ago. Belas Knap – its name possibly derived from the Old English words bel, meaning beacon, or the Latin word bellus, meaning beautiful, and cnaepp, meaning the top, or crest, of a hill – is one of the best examples of a Neolithic Long Barrow found in the River Severn-Cotswolds landscape. A barrow is the genus name for a type of stone and earthwork burial chamber in use in the early Neolithic. As a group of structures – found across Atlantic Europe from SE Spain right up to NW Sweden – they represent the oldest surviving buildings with a recognisable common form in widespread use. This particular long barrow is found on the slope of Cleeve Hill itself, above the village of Winchcombe with its Medieval Anglo-Saxon castle, Sudeley, and is part of a group of structures known as the Cotswolds-Severn Group, being made distinctive by their regional distribution and common building material.  

I parked at a layby on the road, the village and the wide expanse of the Severn Valley stretched out below me like a pale watercolour in the diffuse light, distant scattered settlements appearing as though islands in a mythic sea amongst recently flooded fields, confusing the usual geography. The weak February sunlight glistened invitingly in the floodwaters around Tewksbury, the worst affected town in a Severn River landscape that was shifting and changing almost before everyone’s eyes. Worcester cathedral in the far distance was just visible against an anaemic sky. I recalled the recent news footage: the water that almost surrounded the cathedral, the pipes coming out of local resident basements pumping out the mud and silt, the racecourse a lake. It reminded me how closely tied our lives are to rivers, to once sacred courses of water worshipped as deities, and how precarious our existence can be. The world seemed to be giving us a taste of things to come. I wondered why the early people of this region buried their dead so far from the banks of the Severn, up on the high ground above the valley, whether they had known similar flooding.  

Across Britain, these tomb-come-shrines built to house the bones of the ancestors are typically located on high ground: prominent hills or slopes overlooking the wider local landscape. The use of locally harvested limestone, collected and piled into distinctive structures, would have been in stark contrast to the surrounding cleared land. It is thought that, along with the confluences of rivers and other prominent features in the landscape, these ancestral resting places marked so clearly may have helped to form territory boundaries. This is our place, they tell us.

Seeking out the high ground may have been a way to get the message out there without any ambiguity, but others have argued that they mark seasonal pastoral grounds, or the inherited sacred sites of the earlier, mostly nomadic Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In a landscape covered by forest, any high point would become a natural place to gather and remember, overlooking the hunting grounds and the sacred rivers that forged their way through them. I wondered if the importance of high ground had been retained in folk memory after the rise in sea level associated with the end of the last great Ice Age, when the low ground and ice-free valleys, coastal caves and estuaries, would have all become flooded: whether the high places would be revered as a safe place not only for the living, but also for the dead. To reach and toil upward feels a natural human impulse and, following the path of the Cotswolds Way, my footsteps trod a well-worn route through both time and place, away from the floodwaters below. 

I made my way up a steep and muddy track through still winter-bare woodland toward the more open slope of the hill. Emerging breathless from the trees, a swift, dark arrow above caught my eye: a small bird of prey in silhouette against the sky. It remained with me, calling now and then across the open hillside, its dark shape patrolling the edge of the treeline. Likely a merlin, it is Britain’s smallest bird of prey and widespread in the winter months, feeding on small birds and larger insects. It led me on, out from under the trees and across a steep, grassy slope along the edge of a dry-stone wall, upward toward where the long barrow was hidden beyond more trees further on. I crossed through another short section of woodland and emerging briefly into a clearing, the merlin flashed again above me. Following the arc of its flight, my eyes found the low mound of the barrow surrounded by a stone wall on the next rise. With its long lozenge-like shape and its mysterious entrances, it seemed other-worldly to me: a man in the twenty-first century. To the people of the Neolithic it must have had a profound impact: a portal to another realm, another, hidden layer of existence. It is aligned almost exactly north-south, hinting at an already important relationship with the sun and the seasons that would be evident in the later practice of building stone circles.

How would the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have explained the great floods following the last ice age? Perhaps then, seeking out the high ground, they first looked to the heavens and began to speculate, began to observe the stars and other celestial bodies more closely, formed the beginnings of a cosmology as they gathered at these high places to bury their dead and tell their life-stories: not only as individuals within a group, but as people within a much greater, grander story that encompassed the cosmos. 

To find the high ground – that shift in perspective that it offers us, lifting us above the narrow confines of our daily lives, expanding our view, our horizons – is something we have always found compelling. With the threat posed by climate change and habitat loss, I wondered what new stories we might begin to tell of our place in the world. I took a last look along the low, curving spine of the barrow, this ancient house of the dead, and made my way back toward the floodwaters below. 

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Ian S. Grosz holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Aberdeen. With a deep interest in landscape and place, he is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. Most recently, his work has been accepted by The Writer’s Cafe magazine, published in Causeway Magazine and The Lighthouse Journal. In 2019 he worked on a collaborative Deep Mapping project focusing on the rivers of SW Australia and NE Scotland, currently being taken to publication by the editors.