I watch through the window of the only house on this street not lit by party lights, the only one where ivy grows, the one that seems shrouded by darkness and by sorcery.
The steady sound of hoofbeats has been coming to the North since before the beginning of time, the beginning of myth, the court of Arthur, and still he comes, the one we call Gawain.
He does not expect a woman this time crowned in holly and ivy.
He cowers away from the blood-red berries of my eyes and averts his gaze from the scars on my arms, imagining some distant rite of passage even I can no longer remember.
I have been sharpening my axe for a long, long time, waiting for the day my Lord will no longer have the time to play this game.
I commend his courage, speak of the mathematical percentages of the people who would take the Green Knight’s challenge, those who would return to meet their fate.
“You’re the only one,” I laugh aloud.
His eyes are big as portals to the Otherworld.
One day I will step through them and he will follow.
But not today because the blade of my axe just nicks his neck, a small cut, which will leave a scar beside the others.
I straighten up with a blood-red stare and send him on his way because my Lord and I have no more time for games.
I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level One* on the 28th of September.
The day before Gwyn’s Feast. “Happy Autism Day,” he said, “welcome to my people.”
Still, I didn’t feel much like celebrating. I’d hoped that a diagnosis would bring clarity. However, being told that I have a lifelong neuro-developmental disorder or disability cast me into a fog of wondering how much my autism had played a role in my difficulties with social relationships and to hold a stable career in the past and how it was going to affect my future.
I’ve been a trainee with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust on the Manchester Mosslands since April. It’s been a great job, on great sites, with great people. Yet my enjoyment of the practical work of growing, planting, translocating, clearing scrub, building dead hedges, of the remarkable opportunity to restore the last remnants of our mosslands to their boggy glory has been overshadowed, fogged, by my anxiety about what people think of me, whether I’m doing well enough, measuring up, whether I will be able to progress to the next position up in this competitive job industry.
I’ve felt like I’ve been on trial and in some ways I have and in some I have not. I know my colleagues would rather I enjoyed my traineeship than see it that way. Still, I’ve had to meet my short term objectives and training targets. When it comes to progress I will have to meet the next person specification.
Good news is that a meeting with my line manager and project manager recently revealed in just six months, in spite of being autistic, I am nearly there.
Job-wise I’m good. Still, I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on how my autism and the anxiety that stems from being an autistic person in a neurotypical world, finding it hard to read people and projecting negative opinions of myself, has skewed my perceptions of others and affected my relationships.
Few of us are psychic, but being autistic leaves me less able to judge what others think and feel unless I am directly told. Living with uncertainty is tough but, I’m learning, is better than living with the false certainty everyone hates me.
One of the upsides of living in the fog is the moments it parts like when a friend and I were lost on Cadair Idris and, after a man and his dog approached, the mists shifted and we found ourselves looking down on Llyn Cau. Being able to see and speak the uncomfortable truths that others avoid or ignore.
At least I know I’m living in the fog and, as a devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd, ‘White son of Mist,’ can know and embrace it as my patron god and as a friend.
“Welcome to my people,” he says and I see the faces of all the others down the centuries who have been able to swing an axe or a mattock or push a wheelbarrow, to write poetry under the trees, to walk light-footed as a will-o-wisp across a peat-bog but could not endure one day of electric light in the office.
“Welcome to my people,” he says, “to doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, and truth.”
In the fog, in the unknowing, I walk along the bunds that will bring the peat-bogs back then disappear into the moss as it swallows its surroundings.
It’s cold here and it’s November, but at least I know I’m living in the fog.
*This is the current term for what was formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome.
for the torn apart all the parts of our bodies will ride tonight, crawl up from the bogs onto our swampy horses,
not the bog bodies who were found, but those who were not found.
*
You summon back our voices like the mast on Winter Hill.
You make us appear again like television. Your hunt would make a good film but most times myth is better told in softly spoken words and half-seen visions.
Radio broken. Someone smashed the television.
*
You are always off screen. You are the one who is not named. You are the one whose face is the face of a god.
The howls of the wind are the chorus of your hounds,
your words are furies and each has a hand, clutching, pulling, ripping, tearing.
*
You are the god of illusion and the rending apart of all illusions.
The one who tears our false truths to shreds.
The jostling elbows, stuck-out toes, the heels dug in.
*
This is the time of fire, flood, rain, and catastrophe, yet the beech leaves are yellow, gold, and green
in the kingdom beyond the kingdom beyond the kings
and we call you a king without knowing the true meaning
of sovereignty, that your throne means more than gold.
*
Are you silence or the breaker of silence?
So long ago I wrote:
“The universe began with a howl and from the howl came death.”
The death-hounds within me giving tongue to a mythos that came to me before my world had begun.
*
AWEN is not always a smooth chant in the mouths of druids, but the broken vowels of an awenydd when language cannot help and poetry fails.
Still, the body, its dislocated limbs, remember how to ride tonight.
*
And where is she in all of this? Riding ahead treading air un-abducted? Did you take her from the underworld or did she take you there?
Time, the clock does not obey, pivots like she on her wild white mare
like a dislocated limb. I have found that myth dislocates too, frees itself from time and space, free and true.
This poem marks the first time I have felt inspired to share something here for a long time, something I felt compelled to share for my god after a walk near Winter Hill on Nos Galan Gaeaf. Maybe there will be more, maybe not, no promises, no deadlines…
Last August, at Brockholes Nature Reserve, I helped on work parties common cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium). Winnowing the tiny dark seeds from the fluffy white heads, placing 1 – 2 into each cell of a 60 cell tray, which we had firmly packed with compost, covering them over, praying they would grow.
We sowed 10,000 plants in total. Some have grown better than others. Later I learnt they were for Little Woolden Moss – a strange synchronicity for it was through contacts at Brockholes that I recently gained a six week contract planting common cottongrass and other peatland plants on this mossland (which was purchased by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust in 2012 after having been badly damaged by peat extraction).
Prior to gaining this work I had discovered my patron god Gwyn ap Nudd’s connection with peat bogs/mosslands* in the medieval Welsh poem ‘Y Pwll Mawn’ ‘The Peat Pit’ by Dafydd ap Gwilym. I promised to make an offering to Gwyn next time I visited one. As we were in lockdown I hadn’t expected to go to a peat bog soon (the only area of lowland raised level bog in South Ribble, Much Hoole Moss, has been drained and, to add insult to injury, commandeered as a paint balling site). On receiving the contract, when I asked what Gwyn wanted, he showed me a common cottongrass plant.
So my planting on Little Woolden Moss had meaning in terms of both conservation and devotion.
I loved my time there in spite of the difficulty and what some might call the monotony of the work – pushing heavy wheelbarrows of plant trays along unstable bunds and repeating the same motion of digging five holes with a spear-spade, planting common cottongrass plugs, moving on, for seven hours.
Although we had many cold starts and some days were grim – with constant rain and up to 50mph winds – most were temperate and we were surrounded by the spring song of skylarks and meadow pipits, curlews, lapwings display flighting, brown hares racing up and down the bunds, and deer tracks (but not deer) were often seen.
When encountering the glacial till, seeing the ancient bog oaks exposed by the excavations (with 8 metres of peat 10,000 years of the archaeological record had been stripped away, unknown stories, our exploitation only slightly redeemed in that the compost had been used to nurture new plants) I experienced profound feelings of sorrow, awe, and privilege in partaking in the restoration process.
I later learnt ‘Little Woolden’ derives from the Viking Vuluedene ‘Wolf’s Valley’. This was significant for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I had previously agreed to write a series of poems for a Ghost Wolf Trail in New Moss Wood, just down the road, for the Carbon Landscape Partnership. Secondly, Gwyn and his father, Nudd/Nodens, are associated with wolves.
Little Woolden Moss is one of the few places that, in the words of storyteller Martin Shaw, I have felt ‘claimed’ by. The only others are my locality of Penwortham and the stretch of the Ribble from the Douglas estuary to Brockholes and those to which I have been a fleeting visitor such as Glastonbury, Cadair Idris, Borth beach, and Coed Felenrhyd (beautiful in their own ways but not truly ‘mine’).
Thus I was disappointed when, after succeeding with an application, and attending an interview, I didn’t gain either of two paid Great Manchester Wetlands Traineeships. I received positive feedback from Lancashire Peatlands Initiative Officer, helpful for other interviews, but assumed I had no future in peatland restoration.
So I returned to my voluntary internship at Brockholes, which I continued to enjoy, 3 – 4 days a week. One of my jobs was watering the common cottongrass, which we planted last year, and is due to go to Little Woolden Moss in mid-June.
On Thursday, after watering the cottongrass, I heard my phone ringing and just missed the call.
“That’s odd,” I said to the Assistant Reserve Officer, with whom I was working, “nobody every rings me.”
When I checked the number I saw it belonged to the Lancashire Peatland Initiative Officer.
“You’d better ring him back,” my colleague said, with a knowing tone in his voice.
So I rang back and, to my surprise, was offered the Great Manchester Wetlands Traineeship on the mosslands, based at Little Woolden Moss, as the previous candidate had chosen another job.
So… of course… I have taken it. The funding for the job will last a year. I will hopefully be starting on Monday 26th April and I have arranged to work my contracted 30 hours a week Monday – Thursday so I can continue with my internship at Brockholes one day a week on a Friday. So it looks like I may be both watering the common cottongrass we planted at Brockholes and planting it on Little Woolden Moss.
In total there are another 45,000 plants to be planted on Little Woolden this year. When Gwyn asked me for an offering of cottongrass I wasn’t expecting it to be in quite such numbers or to be planting it later in the year and, if this traineeship leads to a permanent job in peatland restoration, for many years to come.
III. You were here before someone wounded the Fisher King
red dripping into blue
the blood from his groin
like blood from his queen’s menses
flowing into the sea
(when male and female had to bleed).
IV. You were here before the fae danced in your colours
in the hall of the King of Annwn like devils
burning red and cooling blue.
V. You sat on your perch and you watched
the gods –
some say you advised the Fisher King.
VI. His wound
is beginning to heal with the demise
of industry.
The red rivers are flowing blue.
VII. You are no longer a myth
we cannot reach
on boats of fish bones
sailing for halcyon days
because they are here like you
on this river.
VIII. The Fisher King is fishing.
The red world is turning blue.
This poem is the third of three pieces about creatures who build their nests in sandy banks and can be seen at Brockholes Nature Reserve. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago when I was applying for a paid traineeship on the Kingfisher Trail – a 14 mile recreational route following the rivers of the Croal-Irwell Valley connecting ‘the rural West Pennine Moors to the urban communities of Bolton, Bury, and Salford’ (HERE). Although I didn’t get the job (of 300 applicants I made the top three) I intend to walk the trail.
In this poem I link the kingfisher to Nodens/Nudd, an ancient British god of hunting, fishing, healing and dreams, from whose mythos the story of the Fisher King may have arisen (although Brân is a candidate too) and to his son, Gwyn ap Nudd, a King of Annwn/Faery, whose people make merry in red and blue costumes in his feasting hall.
Coincidentally, around the same time, Gwilym Morus-Baird published a video on ‘Gwyn ap Nudd and St Collen’ (HERE) where he discusses the symbology of Gwyn’s people wearing red and blue, which might have alchemical significance. Intriguingly he linked this to the two streams, Y Gwter Las and Y Gwter Goch which flow into Llyn y Fan Fach, the location of a story where a fairy bride is given away by a Fairy King-like figure.
‘It lives in Europe, in winding holes in sheer sandy hills’ – Linnaeus
I. Riparia riparia from ripa ‘of the river bank’ sounds like their djirr djirr prrt beside the Ribble
as they arrive in sixes, sevens, in their twenties, swoop in from Africa
tumbling for gnats.
II. Excited by the sight of their forked tails and white bellies
we run to prepare the nesting boxes –
all 300 with their sandy tunnels, dark and cavernous interiors, tightly locked back doors,
dig out the moat to protect them from predators.
III. When the world is too big, the arguments at home intolerable
I think of them snug in their hotel on their little island paradise.
“That’s it,” I tell my mum and dad. “I’m moving in with the sand martins.”
IV. I pack my rucksack full of feathers, gather twigs, bits of reed, to make my nest
and push my way down the long, dark, sandy tunnel
to the cave where I stay all summer between three pairs of sand martins and a mouse.
V. As I sit alone and listen to the chatter of males and females and soon their chicks I realise it is not unlike being at home –
surrounded by happy families.
I listen to the tales they tell their young – of the rite of leaving the cave, exiting the tunnel, of the bright sunlit river and countless flies that lie outside.
Of how all this was made for them by the goddess of the Ribble.
Of how mighty Belisama loves riparia riparia and her river-light guides them back.
VI. I hear them tell of distant gods, distant flying insects, distant animals whose shapes I see dancing on the cave walls –
gazelles, cheetahs, wild dogs, buffalo, hartebeest, scimitar-horned oxen with us no longer.
VII. I hear the tales of the drought years passed down from the legends who survived
(they have names like Long-Brown-Wing-Fly-Catcher White-Belly-Diver-River-Dancer… chattering on and on that I can’t pronounce in one breath)
the concerns of the elders who have seen future droughts in the patterns of flies.
VIII. I listen to their final farewells to their young and hear them depart to roosts where I cannot follow because
I do not have brown wings, a white belly, a forked tail.
I am not marked by a bar across my chest. Thus barred from becoming a bird where will I go this winter?
~
In early March, one of my tasks, as a conservation intern at Brockholes Nature Reserve, was preparing the sand martin nesting boxes on Number One Pit (this is the name of a lake that formed in a pit dug for sand and gravel quarrying).
We opened up the backs of the boxes, cleared out old nesting materials (which can be a hot bed for parasites), added fresh sand and re-filled the tunnels with sand for the birds to push their way through in imitation of tunnelling into a sandy bank. They usually excavate horizontal tunnels up to 1m in length with a chamber at the end.
At this point in time the sand martins had started arriving in sixes and sevens and the day we finished twenty were seen over Number One Pit. They tend to arrive between mid-March and mid-April and to lay their eggs in late May.
This poem was written following a conversation with one of my colleagues, who I prepared the boxes with, about how good it would be to move in with the sand martins.
One of my tasks as a conservation intern at Brockholes Nature Reserve over the winter was helping to clear the vegetation from the sandy banks, which are used as nesting sites by mining bees. Brockholes is next to the river Ribble, whose shifts of course since its valley was carved by a glacier during the Ice Age, have laid down sandy deposits (although most of the sand and gravel was quarried over a decade ago some remains).
These sandy banks are the perfect homes for mining bees (Andrena species). It is little known that, in Britain, of over 270 species of bee, there is only one species of honey bee, 24 species of bumblebee and around 250 species of solitary bees. 65 of the latter are mining bees. They make homes for their young in soil, sand, or clay, and can be found on river banks, road and railway embankments, cliff faces, garden lawns, allotments, open woodlands, and moorlands.
During their brief life-span of four to six weeks, in spring and summer, female mining bees gather pollen on their hind legs and take it to where they have excavated their nests. They dig a tunnel to a chamber, add pollen to strengthen the walls, lay an egg, seal it shut, and move on to the next. Once laying is complete they perish. The only function of the males is to mate with the females, after which they die. The larvae over-winter in the chambers and emerge in the spring to restart the cycle.
One of the most common species is the ashy mining bee (Andrena cineraria). TheLatin term cinerarius means‘of ashes’ and refers to the broad ash grey bands on the thorax of the female who is otherwise black. It flies from April to August and is an important pollinator of fruit trees.
Another is the tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva). The female has bright red hairs on her thorax. It flies from March to June and feeds on a variety of nectar-producing and pollen-bearing plants and trees.
The early mining bee (Andrena haemorhhoa) is named for the blood-red tip on its abdomen and red hairs on its thorax and flies from April to July. One of the defining behaviours of the wool carder bee (Anthidium maculatum) is collecting hairs from plants for its nest. The small sallow mining bee (Andrena praecox) is a sallow specialist. There are many more species of these intriguing bees.
Learning about mining bees and their favoured habitat in sandy banks has led me to contemplate how I have long intuited a connection between Belisama, ‘Shining One’, the goddess of the Ribble, and bees. At first I thought this was because she is connected with light and sunshine and the coming of spring and summer, when bees emerge and take flight, but now I see she has a particular connection with mining bees who build their homes on the Ribble’s banks and sandy banks left by the river.
Gods-Speaking is by Judith O’Grady, an elderly druid and biologist who had a career in veterinary medicine and lived on a tiny urban farm in Ottawa, Canada. She sadly passed away in December 2020.
Judith, like myself, was one of the long-standing writers for Gods & Radicals and I felt a kinship with her as somebody who honoured the old gods and had a deep relationship with the land and its spirits, upheld not only in ritual but in action such as going out and litter picking and planting trees. It is with regret I write this review after her passing. I hope, somehow, my words may still reach her.
In the first section of this readable little book Judith outlines what it means to be a ‘God-Speaker’. She relates this word, which she coined herself, to the better-known terms ‘visionary’, ‘seer’, and ‘mystic’ and says this is about ‘the belief in the Gods that I believe that are speaking to me, the belief that They can and do speak to me, and the belief that our communication has some purpose’.
Judith describes the ‘process of God-Speaking’ as ‘two-way communication’ and also refers to it as ‘Gods-Bothered’ as ‘the Gods don’t enter communication with us to pat us on the back or congratulate us on a job well done, but instead to give us difficult tasks and teach us unpleasant truths.’
She speaks of how most societies ‘have a place for the person who troubles hirself to speak with the Gods and whom They trouble in return’ and notes most Gods-Bothered people are segregated in some way, for example, in ‘the detached dwelling of the shaman’, ‘the hut of the hermit’ and ‘the monastery’. This draws to attention the lack of a place for the God-Speaker outside traditional religions.
She outlines some of the problems faced by the Gods-Bothered, one of the most common, for those who see visions and hear voices, being walking the fine line between being a seer and being crazy. This is distinguished by the ability to use discernment and free choice in accepting advice from the gods for the better of themselves and their communities rather than engaging in destructive behaviour.
One of the helpful analogies she uses is the ‘crazy train’ – it is always possible to ‘get off at “ask a question junction” or “find a guide halt” and refuse to descend to “the platform of destructive thinking”’.
Judith outlines how her conception of how God-Speaking relates to biology. ‘Imaging technology’ shows that when a person is having a mystical experience ‘a tiny part of the brain’ ‘lights up’. She calls this the ‘God-Speaker’ and suggests there is an evolutionary purpose to speaking with the Gods.
As an awenydd, an ‘inspired one’ or ‘seer’ in the Brythonic tradition, I found this section insightful and relatable and imagine anyone who speaks with or has been spoken to by the gods would also relate.
In the second section Judith speaks of her personal experiences with the gods and spirits of the land. As someone with an important relationship with my local river goddess and her ‘daughters’ (my local streams), I empathised strongly with Judith’s account of getting to know the spirit of her creek, Pinecrest Creek, which is piped from near her home, under a bus transitway and shopping centre, into a Parkway, then ‘comes out into a pool to flow for a brief free stretch before flowing into the Ottawa river.’
Judith provides an account of how her Druid Grove came to honour the Spirit of the Creek by collecting water and using it as an offering in ritual and by litter picking. Her vision of this spirit, who they came to know as Sionnach Du ‘Black Fox’ stood out to me as vivid and very real.
‘Ze steps out from the shadows, taking the form of an urbanized wild creature, a fox, to personify to me. But it was a humanoid-shaped being, apart from the fox face, and dressed in dark colours, black, and heavily cloaked as befitting a land spirit largely confined to sewer pipes and storm drains. Androgynous…’
Judith speaks of how the spirits of the grove, Black Fox Watershed, Singing Memory Frog, the ghost of large Snapping Turtle and the dragons, were slowly and organically gathered. I related to this way of discovering gods and spirits within the land rather than calling them from outside.
Throughout the book Judith, who is clearly not only wise but well-read in philosophy, outlines her conception of the gods. She says that rather than being ‘friends’, ‘allies’, or ‘partners’ to ‘work with’ they are ‘timeless, wise, philosophical, powerful and motivated by a greater understanding and comprehension than I have access to.’ The come from ‘Gods-Land’ and speak ‘God-ish’ not English or any other language (it is a function of our human minds that translates their language into our own).
Most profoundly: ‘I do not think that my belief or the lack of belief of others affects the beings of place or the Gods; I believe that They are present whether believed in or not. They see us regardless of what we see when we look towards Them. Their world lies behind ours like a bright shadow of reality: the shadow does not reflect what we have built (or destroyed), but what might be.’
These are the words of a true God-Speaker, a seer, a wise woman in the modern Druidic tradition.
This book is essential reading for all who are new to God-Speaking, for in Judith you will find an older, wiser guide whose voice is filled with love of the land and the gods, rich in counsel and humour. It will also resonate with those who have been speaking with the gods for a long while. I would recommend it, too, to those who are curious about whether they can speak with the Gods (yes, you can – I believe, with Judith, this is a capacity we all have and can develop with practice) and to those who don’t want to try it, but would like to find out more from an experienced practitioner.
Gods-Speaking is available through Gods & Radicals Press HERE.
Farewell Little Woolden Moss. Farewell Great Manchester Wetlands – an end of contract and news of a failed job interview fall on the same day but I haven’t failed because we planted that last plant,
that last little plug plant of common cottongrass,
greening and rimmed with red like a sunset, ready to turn golden next month’s dawn.
Farewell to hare’s tail cottongrass, tails showing like the tails of brown hares racing up and down the bunds like celebrities.
Farewell to all eleven species of sphagnum, bog rosemary, cross-leafed heath, long may you grow and prosper beauties.
Farewell to the oyster catchers who we saw back-to-back on the bund, reflected in the water, who cried weep weep in the air far from human tears.
Farewell to the lapwings in their black-and-white mating flight.
Farewell to the curlews with their cur-lee cur-lee-eee, to the four flying over with down-curved beaks.
Farewell to the skylarks keeping our spirits up and to the meadow pipits piping away.
Farewell to those I worked with now friends.
Farewell to the porter cabin and the fact we had a toilet.
Farewell to the journeys down the M6 (busy and contentious).
Farewell to a journey now complete – back home now I will wait, again, to hear the will of the gods…
~
This poem relates to the completion of the contract work I have been carrying out planting on Little Woolden Moss for the Lancashire Wildlife Trust and my failure, on interview, to gain the paid position of Great Manchester Wetlands Trainee.
These photographs show the development of common cottongrass on a mossland over time.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 