Beyond the walls of the old house and buried in a tangled mound of short tufted shrubs and undergrowth, is the mouth of a cave - or 'fogou' as it is known in Cornish. The entrance, lipped with pillars of granite, nestles between two mossy banks, sucking life into its womb.
You
feel drawn in.
It is a passage made by humankind, long, dark and narrow, slabbed with massive granite lintels, curving gently as it slides into the earth. Inside, its walls are wet with the earth's juices, and the air is heavy with soil musk. Silence hugs you, squeezing out the sounds of the world with a gentle contraction.
You stand still, sensing the earth's pulse, waiting.
Soil sweat drips from the massive lintels above your head. In the fast fading light you can see a bat flitting back and forth along the passageway.
Your heart pumps. Suppose it flies into your hair?
You retreat a couple of steps, then force yourself forwards just as the creature flies straight at you, lightly skimming your head. The bat retreats into a crevice and darkness closes in. The only sounds are your breathing and heartbeat.
And then the voices come.
You want to cling to reality and block the voices out. But they are insistent, and you listen because although you hear them with your mind, they speak with a voice that is not your own. And locked in here for centuries, they want to be heard.
The
Celts came first.
Refugees from Brittany, they beached their leather-sailed boats at Lamorna Cove, made their way up the valley beside the stream, and settled on a small promontory a mile inland. There they built their homestead, ringed with a stone-walled bank. In time it became a place of knowledge, linked with a network of similar sites at the Land's End. They were a courteous and civilised people, bonded by kinship, and they stayed preserving their cultural tradition throughout the Roman occupation, only leaving when the Saxons came.
Two thousand years later, you can still see the remains of the fortified settlement and feel the presence of those people. Traces remain in the landscape of the mysterious network of stones and ancient sites, and people from the twentieth century are reawakening to their meaning and power.
The Fogou is located at the head of the Lamorna Valley, near Land's End on the site of a three acre Iron Age fortified settlement. An oval ring of defensive works and embankment would have protected it in times of danger. The occupants of the fort were protected by a chieftain. I shall call him 'Clwydd'.
Clwydd's
people, and the local community, used the fogou as their spiritual centre
for ceremony, initiation and teaching. Birth and death rituals were conducted
in it, a transition zone between this world and the next. It may also have
been used for initiations involving entombment, the initiate being sealed
in for a time to face the underworld in order to over-come fear and so emerge
'reborn'. It was never used for burial. The whole site was considered a sacred
space and its oval defences were perhaps raised not so much to keep invaders
out as to keep certain forces in. The place still has the feel of a world
apart.
Clwydd's
descendants left the fort to return to Brittany some time after the Romans
went. The Romans themselves had left them alone, seldom travelling this far
west, their nearest centre being Exeter. With the Romans' departure Saxon
invaders in the East began driving refugees westwards, and Irish Celtic raiders
also created trouble.
The Celts, or at least their keepers of wisdom, the Druids, may have held keys to knowledge which could benefit us today. But as they never left anything in writing, we shall never know what they knew. Living in this land of theirs we can only learn again, our way.
In AD 937 the fields surrounding the site witnessed the slaughter of the last of the Cornish Celts led by Howel in their final battle against King Athelstan and his invading Saxon army. The fogou is known as the 'Boleigh fogou', and Boleigh' means 'place of slaughter'. Legend has it that after the battle the stream by the fort ran red with blood.
Extract from 'Fogou - A Journey into the Underworld' by Jo May.
Gothic Image Publications.
"A remarkable book by an extraordinary man" - Colin Wilson
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