GURNING IN THE URN-FIELD
It is generally supposed by those who have given the matter sufficient attention that the significance of all these markings is religious. Some think that the cups were filled with the blood of human victims, and that it ran in the little gutters or channels from one cup to another, whilst others suppose that they were filled with oil or fat four times during the year, and that the Druidical priests called down fire from heaven, which set the whole thing ablaze at the same time all over the country where this style of ceremony was performed.[1]
In amongst the fliers for the local yoga druids, codex-binders, certifiable sculptors and VHS to DVD technicians, a crumpled pamphlet forced itself upon us, all black caps on fluoro-pink paper A Tour of the Resonant Monuments of West Kilbride County – we had found our guidebook to the occult cartography of the area and it was time to roll up our metaphorical sleeves and trouser leg and enter into the heart of darkness. The route in and out of Haupland Muir would (according to the deranged pink pamphlet) involve the careful navigation of three intersecting spirals – deosil/widdershins/deosil – the psychic equivalent of a housebreaker wiping their prints. If you believed this stuff (did we?) then we were transgressing on debatable land awash with ‘black streams’ and nodes of negative energies that may or may not render our third eyes permanently open and exposed to the Faerie realm.
BEGIN THE OBLATION
(…) the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.[2]
A detour to the Hares Head Inn had been our first mistake. As anyone familiar with the line to A******n will know the reverse energy field at L*********h will suck a phone battery dry within moments as it passes through that accursed station, which meant we were utterly without mobile energy as we pulled into D****. We charged our phones in the aforementioned pub, read the crazy wisdom pamphlet with increasing incredulity, got high on pork scratchings and ale then headed out to the muir with dowsing rods made from bendy drinking straws.
We walked in from the west over corrugated fields, consecrated groves, urn-fields, half-frozen sumps, past wooden bog-deities shaggy with moss organs, on roads full of furious battering traffic. We were making for a barely-surviving kernel of Atlantic rainforest hidden deep in a fold of the Blackshaw Hill abutting the Haupland Muir and a stone table chock full of ancient and incomprehensible pictograms.
CRAWL SPIRALS
in pursuit of ideologies and inspired by ideas, men perform actions of a kind never observed among other animals.[3]
The table would speak to us of deep time and smoke-reddened eyes peering skyward, tracking stars and planets over generations then creating complicated cosmologies we’d never unlock. The green enclosure in its moorland fastness was sealed on all sides by a drystane dyke to keep us out or perhaps to keep something inside the perimeter. It bubbled and popped with mosses that had spent hundreds of years cloaking floor, rocks, trees, everything really. We dowsed for bad juju with the rods and cones of our eyes, the heavy metals in our cortex resonating with buried stone batteries placed by an hallucinating (from hunger) priesthood back in the New Stone Age. The interior had been ritually-charged by visitors who had left plenty of ‘surface scatter’ for future archaeologists to ponder over: tonic wine bottles, salt n’ vinegar crisps (unopened but out of date), camp chairs, charred tents, a hot-rock-pocked onesie and a range of bulk hydration post-work out products (Warrior Rage et al). We worked out that it had all happened over lockdown a couple of years ago when everyone had decamped en masse to local beauty spots for some communal fun. Either way bits of the forest had new fruits dangling from its branches, or sprouting from the leaf litter and there was rumour of nightly widdershins processions; the spiral route reversed accompanied by the screaming of hares as supplicants searching for standing stones found buried cathedrals.
There was a distinct feeling that everything was going awry when we mistakenly dowsed the spiral route widdershins and to prevent being taken by the fairies had to enact a reverse tribute to Genius loci asap. Instead of making an offering to the sacred landscape of Haupland Muir we found ourselves bagging the trash left behind by modern day celebrants as up there the irksome chains of morality had been shattered once and for all by a bacchanalian frenzy as these modern day Maenads had partied till dawn and beyond.
A LOCKED-UP FORCE
the pagan gods are not so long dead.[4]
The rumour was that a conspiratorial cohort of the local gentry—which these days meant a broad coalition of buy-to-let landlords, Airbnb entrepreneurs, influencers and petit-bourgeois craft gin producers—had taken the reigns of the local occult society The Hermetic Order of the Spiral Vortex, bending it to their will such that no one moved in or out of the area without their say so. Either way they were intent on powering up the dormant ley lines and earth energy so as to help in their bid to obtain levelling up funds from central government and no one would get in their way unless they wanted a thorough hexing for their trouble. Sacrificing a Land Rover full of cheviots to The Old Gods was considered par for the course if fifty mill was there for the having. In these straightened times every lever had to be used to the full or you’d go under, or even worse Inverclyde would get their mucky hands on the moola.
We slid underneath a moist duvet of epiphytes, pulling it down over our heads. At first it felt rather chilly but as our bodies warmed it moulded itself around our forms and we began to feel a sense of being nestled, held, two large endosymbionts all cosy in the ground. After a few weeks of stealthy insertion we had merged completely with our host and began to apprehend the submerged cathedral immensity of their senses and they in turn grew to understand our fleeting meat life.
Smith, J. (1895) Prehistoric man in Ayrshire. London: Elliot Stock. p. 17-18 ↑
Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997) Dialectic of enlightenment. London: Verso. p. 3 ↑
Childe, G. (1986) What Happened in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 21 ↑
Morris, R. W. B.(1968) The Cup-and-Ring marks and similar sculptures of Scotland: a survey of the Southern Counties Part II. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland ↑
