Jane Satterfield

The Crooked Track

He who will not take advice will take the crooked track.

 --Gaelic maxim

In the photograph that falls to the floor from an old notebook, the recumbent stones of Arbor Low are a shattered circle on a windswept grey-green field, a clock face spun out of time. Just back from six weeks in a small town in Italy’s Marche Region, I spent sun-drenched hours in a sheltered mountain town off the Via Flaminia where time is marked by the ancient sound of tolling bells from thirteen separate churches, I’m dragging my feet on domestic chores. I find it far too easy to put off dry mopping my dusty floors to stop and gaze at this shard of a former life. Caught for a moment as I walked the perimeter of the high circular bank of the neolithic henge in care of English Heritage, arms stretched out from my sides for balance, I am a speck on the horizon, a figure reduced by distance.

To look back now is to see a shadow—ridiculously thin, in need of a moderating spirit. My previous visits to England had never brought me this far north, so far from the cultivated gardens where nature remains at an arm’s length, domesticated. It was August, summer was dying. The English moorlands were frighteningly empty, the air preternaturally cool as I walked under low scrolls of threatening clouds. For the length of one long afternoon, I’d driven around and through England’s Peak District in a second-hand Metro whose engine threw water, threatening to boil over. My then husband and I drove and drove, consulted, conferred, retraced our steps, returned to where we’d started. Were we hopelessly lost? Using last year’s road guide? The map on my knee was, I thought, clearly marked: motorway, A-road, B-road. My recent affection for maps--ordnance surveys, the Highway Code, pocket A-Z’s of each and every town I’d visit--was a love of wresting order from chaos, of translating uncertainty into traversable routes, something I congratulated myself on inheriting from my mother’s emigrant Irish forebears who’d lost the very ground beneath their feet.

At thirty, with no real academic berth to show the world for eight years of adjunct teaching and no book to show that the hours I spent revising poems by long-hand and typing them into Word Perfect 2.0 were justified, I especially loved that the old roads are named for destinations--the Windsor Road or the London Road--follow it and you know where you’ll arrive. But if you don’t know where you’re going? In that case, as George Harrison sang on his farewell album—"any road will take you there." It’s an accurate description as any of my psychic state at the time.

I’m a latecomer among the so-called "quiet Beatle's" fans, although his own music, I’ve come to realize, was part of the soundtrack of my youth, the tuneful music of "Blow Away" floating from a lifeguard’s transistor as my friends and I sat pool-side, tracing spiral whorls with our toes, waiting out the adult swim. Writing on November 18, 2002 about Harrison’s posthumously released farewell album for the BBC News, Chris Heard put his finger on Harrison’s unique contribution to popular music, observing that no one but Harrison could include "the most profound meditations on eternity and the quest for inner peace without it seeming contrived." Like many critics, Heard categorizes much of Harrison’s solo work as veering from "unremarkable and workmanlike to inspired." Although Brainwashed revisits familiar ground--listeners will recognize Harrison’s characteristically witty reflections on the bittersweet nature of life in the material world--it’s undeniably enjoyable and skillful, a melodiously rich memorial to Harrison’s musical legacy and humanitarian worldview. Among the album’s virtues: Harrison’s jangly ukelele in the old standard, "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," (in his hands an apt metaphor for his own bittersweet relation with the material world); the gorgeous chorus in "Pisces Fish"; the careful use of natural imagery in songs like "Stuck Inside a Cloud" and "Rising Sun"--a song whose "classic structure, strings, slide guitar and minor chords" is, Heard observes, a "masterclass" in kind of tune Noel Gallagher (likely the world’s biggest working-class Beatles’ fan whose punk attitude and guitar-driven hits once won my attention) "spent two albums trying to hone." Describing the title track where Harrison’s bitter critique of consumer culture swells into an impassioned plea for deliverance from "the places of concrete," Heard rightfully suggests this album’s closer is a "fitting swan-song, suggesting the listener beat a different path to the one society decrees is right." Like most things worth doing, it’s easier said than done. And Harrison’s reminder that cultivating the spirit is a lifetime’s work was a message I wasn’t able to hear.

Back on the long and winding road through the Peaks, a hairpin turn took me by surprise. Within seconds, I caught sight of a battered sign, directing us onto a minor road. The site could be accessed via a private farm boasting a tiny car-park where a tin waited for visitors to place their 50-pence courtesy admission fee. Stepping out of the car, I was instantly uneasy. Surprising, really, since I’d become a veteran visitor to stone circles, henges and long barrows during my last visit to England. Unlike New Age adherents who seek to commune with the stones and channel the energy inherent, I wasn’t drawn because they were cathedrals of "inner space" which technology and organized religion had exiled. Of course, I appreciated that sites like Oxfordshire’s Rollright Stones or Stanton Moor’s Nine Ladies Circle were well-removed from the tourist track and that the landscape surrounding them had a certain integrity: no guard rails keeping you back from the stones, no gift shops, no milling crowds, factors which eviscerate Stonehenge of its monumental splendor and its visitors of awe. But because of a superstitious nature, my interest in visiting other archaeological sites was more atmospheric than occult, gleaned purely from literary sources—Tess’ night on the saracen stone, the adulteress exhumed from a bog and memorialized in Seamus Heaney’s poetic sequence, North (inspired in part by P.V. Glob’s photograph collection, The Bog People). Gothic imagination aside, I was attracted to the sheer impenetrability of these neolithic archaeological mysteries. Stone circles are perfect monuments to intellectual hubris. Aside from ashes, flints, pottery shards, bone bits, the occasional skeleton with a broken skull, the ground promises more than it delivers, gives up little. The stones at Arbor Low are said to have been the victim of religious zealotry, toppled by early Christians seeking to abolish traditional customs they considered "pagan rites." In the absence of evidence--no socket holes have been found to establish that the stones had ever been in an upright position--fanciful notions of fallen giants or supernatural spells are equally appealing explanations. As far as the eye can see in my glossy photograph, the sole sign of human habitation is an extensive system of dry stonewalls demarking old pasture lines.

The very air at Arbor Low, I remember, was charged enough to make your hair stand on end. The weathered limestone blocks created an ominous, sacrificial circle; an internal ‘cove’ formed by four stones added to this impression. In time I learned I wasn’t alone in apprehending disquieting sensations. Casual visitors and serious students of archaeology alike attest to the varying moods of megalithic sites whose original functions remain an entire realm of speculation among both scholars and laymen. While the low-rolling hills of Wiltshire lend West Kennet Long Barrow a pastoral, commemorative air (a mid-century excavation led experts to believe it served as an ancestral mausoleum), the wind-scoured pastureland of the Peaks is nothing but bleak, an area redolent of darker moods and seasons, one where the wind is likely, any moment, to violently shift, bringing a deluge of rain. Other visitors have spoken of mystical vibrations emitted by the stones; members of the Society of Ley Hunters also reported an uncanny experience of their own during fieldwork.

In the early 1920’s Alfred Watkins advanced the idea that "ley lines" or "old straight tracks" existed in a dense network across the British Isles. Used primarily by traders, these tracks would have included notable markers such as hilltops, groves, standing-stones and churches recognizable to the traveler as orientation points. Since much open countryside has become heavily trafficked, mapping leys is a complicated matter. It requires an intimate knowledge of a given landscape, including its history, folklore, geological and topological features. A steely reading, of multiple, in other words, superimposed texts. Contemporary ley hunters tend to ascribe these lines a more mystical interpretation, visualizing them as ways "of spirit and light," direct routes to greater spiritual consciousness. Ordinary amblers, however, also seek them out, enjoying the sheer pleasure of walking in landscapes that appear "natural" and are relatively free of the familiar signage of globalization.

Originating in the Derbyshire High Peak and ending up at St. Bertram’s Well in Ilam, Staffordshire (a post-Norman structure that’s spring-fed and shadowed by a maple tree once venerated as "St. Bertram’s Ash"), the Arbor Low Ley passes through the South-Southeast entrance of the henge. At the moment ley hunters attempting to "fix" a sight line drove a stake into the ground, "the heavens opened in one of the fiercest cloudbursts" the team had ever experienced. The sheer weight of rain water had ripped the maps from their hands; their compasses could not be used.

I place the photo in the notebook, the notebook on a shelf. Still jetlagged and accustomed to observing Italian pausa where commercial activity ceases during the span of the afternoon, I felt myself relax as a tape looped over. The Rare, Neglected, and Out-of-Print Harrison—not a souvenir bought off a shelf but a gift—a tape made by hand, just for me. In time, I think, I’ve developed a better appreciation for Harrison’s often overlooked song-writing skill and for his willingness to look sentimental and even foolish in his pursuit of individual vision. In Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation, journalist Philip Norton described Harrison’s attraction to Indian mysticism as an enthusiasm offering an escape route from the past, from the fug-like heat of the Cavern Club to the stage-life of a Beatle, "wearing a suit and singing Yeah, yeah, yeah" (275). Studio life, too, had its frustrations: Lennon and McCartney’s "stifling partnership" allowed Harrison one song per album--"if he was lucky." In 1966, after two months studying sitar with Ravi Shankar (whose spiritual teacher introduced this world-weary Lilipudlian to the Law of Karma), Harrison returned to England, "filled with India’s infinite wisdom and mystery, having perceived nothing of its equally infinite mundaneness" (275). Harrison’s initial attempts with the sitar may have been clumsy--moving from a more "tentative" sound on Rubber Soul to become "one of the prime elements, and praised as such, on Revolver" (274)--but eventually allowed him to make a distinctive contribution in the group’s musical evolution. While it’s easy to be dismissive of Harrison’s quest for transcendence, in the long-run his adoption of Indian mysticism served him well, becoming a kind of internal compass, directing him toward an invaluable measure of professional independence and personal peace.

With my film supply exhausted, I got back into the car, resuming my work with the map. Instead of relying on embodied knowledge "used since time immemorial by the people of the land," to navigate the world, moderns have no choice but to rely on a map. In ancient times this was otherwise: place-names enshrined geomythic tales about a locale's significance. Those who know their own country have direct experience of the land and no need for maps which reduce the spirit of any given place to coordinates on a grid. As we drove on, attempting to re-trace our steps, the road suddenly dead-ended.

Celtic folkore is replete with tales of magical tracts of land—fairy tracks that may cure or curse, pestilential places where one must never go willingly. In Ireland, for instance, the fear gortach ("hungry grass" or "violent hunger") is said to grow at the spot where an uncoffined corpse was laid on the ground on it way to burial. To step on such a spot guarantees instant doom for the unfortunate trespasser who will, henceforth, "suffer insatiable hunger." Even more widely reported is foidin seachrain ("the stray sod"). An unsuspecting traveler who steps on this piece of ground will become disoriented. A classic example of this the so-called "gateless field" where a traveler steps over a stile and into a field lined with a thorned hedge. Although the traveler knows his destination, he is inexplicably waylaid. The way out of the field cannot be found, nor can the entrance: the traveler spends the night sleeping on the ground, in the open, waking to find he or she has slept next to it.

No picture exists of that peculiar moment, but I remember it as if it, too, were something I’d fixed on film--how we stalled before backing up the car and attempting to retrace our way. The eeriness of it all: the road behind us a white dash into nowhere, a stitch undone, a vacancy; autumn beginning its ordinary ruin.

Sources for this essay include:
BBC News Online
The Society of Ley Hunters
Peak District Information Website
Norman, Philip. SHOUT! The Beatles in Their Generation. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).
Pennick, Nigel. Celtic Sacred Landscapes. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000)

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