VICTORIA PLUMS FOR THE FEAST OF FIRST FRUITS

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle "The Feast of First Fruits" was celebrated at the beginning of August as a Christian festival. The festival of Lammas, associated with the wheat harvest, is also celebrated between 1st and 2nd August.

POLITICAL ECOLOGIES, PARLIAMENTS OF BIRDS & TWITTER

The above image is taken from the Wikipedia entry for "The Conference of the Birds", a twelfth century Persian poem whose central metaphor of a feathered political congress was tweeted around the medieval world. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Parliament of Birds" takes up the theme in fourteenth century England.

I want to use this theme of avian concourse to explore the modern concept of "political ecologies", a term that I shall use with reference to the work on deep ecology of Joanna Macy and John Seed. A Buddhist scholar, Macy developed the notion of "A Council of All Beings" as a means of a extending human spirituality and political accountability back into the natural world, in the manner of many indigenous peoples.

In fact, the provenance of animal councils, bird congress and natural governance in general can be traced back to the dawn of civilisation, and extends from ancient times to the present day. Moreover, in periods of political and religious oppression, the use of creature conferences to air grievances and suggest alternative forms of secular and spiritual governance is commonplace, with the species represented usually having particular national cultural resonance

The advent of the social networking facility called "Twitter" can, therefore, be interpreted as providing the masses with the means of such avian and animal concourse, and it is most appropriate that the facility has been activated around the world by people seeking progressive change in local and central governments. More specifically, it was this "new conference of the birds" which heralded the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

THE POETRY OF BIRDS - EDITED BY SIMON ARMITAGE & TIM DEE (VIKING PENGUIN)

A family of fledgling tits who, having outgrown the nest roost rather precariously by the roadside, remind me of Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope" from "The Poetry of Birds" anthology.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

"The Poetry of Birds" is an excellent collection: a veritable aviary of verse.

The numinous landscape of South Worcestershire, shown here in the Malvern Hills, has long been the inspiration for music, of which Elgar's is the outstanding example, and poetry, including the less well-known Poly-Olbion - please see my other post for today @ http://woodwose.wordpress.com/

However, the wider landscape context created by the Malverns, the Severn Valley and Bredon Hill, an outlier of the Cotswolds, has perhaps not received the cultural attention it merits. I have, therefore, resumed a longstanding personal project focused on Crookbarrow Hill, at the edge of Worcester, as the starting point for an exploration of this cultural landscape.

Incidentally, the slow progress of this project is largely due to my involvement in various spatial planning sagas - see
www.crookbarrow.com/
http://crookbarrow.wordpress.com/
http://smartlimits2growth.wordpress.com/
In case the slow pace continues I've decided to publish the introduction :

MESSAGES FROM THE MOUND

A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill

Introduction
For some years now I have intended to write a history of Crookbarrow Hill, but the time has never been right. Today, 30 October 2010, I resumed “The Green Man Project” blog with a post (see below) on “The Story of Silbury Hill”, a book recently published by English Heritage which suggests that Europe’s largest man-made mound may have been developed over many centuries as part of an even more extensive landscape project in what is now the Avebury World Heritage site in Wiltshire. My own intuition is that the man-moulded mound known variously as Crookbarrow Hill, Brockhill and the Whittington Tump, next to Junction 7 of the M5 Motorway in Worcestershire is also part of a much larger ancient landscape discourse, I shall call it: a “big conversation” extending back into prehistory circumscribed to the west by the Malvern Hills, to the east by Bredon Hill, and with the Severn River providing the north-south axis.

Having at last set the scene for “A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill”, I shall explain why I have chosen this intellectual form of inquiry rather than a more straightforward historical account, or the cultural history which I also considered. The reasons for this in part reflect my academic education in both English literary and urban and regional planning studies, and the fact that I am neither a historian nor an archaeologist. I also have a strong interest in depth psychology, particularly Jungian, in contemporary green spirituality, in the historical relationship between the Christian religion and Britain’s pagan legacy, and in what are widely known as “earth mysteries”, including ley lines. More mundanely, I am concerned with how modern society, and more specifically government agencies, value and protect the historic environment in different parts of the British Isles, especially in England and Wales. “A Cultural Study”, therefore, seems to lend itself best to the diversity of my interests and, indeed, to the intellectual plurality of perspectives inspired by the visual panorama from Crookbarrow Hill itself.

The study is intended to cover the following issues and themes:

• Description of Crookbarrow Hill at the present time
• The numinous landscapes of South Worcestershire
• Seasonal festivals, religious events and local folklore
• Wider interpretations of the role of hill barrows etc
• Depth psychology and Earth Mysteries movement
• Future management of Crookbarrow and environs*

* These are presently used for horse pasture: see my recent post @ http://horsework.wordpress.com/ In short, there is no management of Crookbarrow Hill and environs by the relevant agencies, in sad contrast to the attention given to ancient sites elsewhere. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Crookbarrow Hill falls within an area identified for urban development at the present time.

THE STORY OF SILBURY HILL is a new publication by English Heritage which explores the development of the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. Latest research suggests that construction of Silbury Hill may have taken place over many centuries as part of the unfoldment of an "unconscious collective" master plan for the wider landscape of Avebury. As such, "The Avebury Project" might be interpreted as the co-operative work of prehistoric society's "Collective Unconscious"*, and a message in a mound for modern man.

* A term coined by Carl Jung