The most fantastic recent experience that photographer and writer David R Abram has had in the Cotswolds took place, he says, not at some off-the-beaten-track secret location, but on Selsley Common, visiting Toots Barrow:
‘It’s an enormous trapezoidal Cotswold-Severn-type Neolithic tomb. I had been there a few times, and this was just a normal late spring / early summer’s evening. I walked up the track across the common and people were flying their kites and model aeroplanes, and picnicking.’ He pauses, then says:
‘The moment you first set eyes on this wonderful long barrow is the same moment when the amazing view [beyond] is visible for the first time: the two coincide. The feeling of awe that you experience – you can see all across the Forest of Dean, up to the Malverns and into Shropshire on one side; and all the way down beyond the Severn on the other, across the Severn Vale, the river glinting in the sunlight – it just took my breath away. And you know that is precisely why prehistoric people put the tomb there.
‘The fact of knowing in your bones that they felt the same way about that as you, in that moment, gives you a really tangible connection with their lives in the past,’ he continues. ‘So, you have this wonderful combination of engagement in landscape and engagement with people that inhabited the landscape a long time ago. It gives you a great sense of euphoria.”
People familiar with David’s drone photography of prehistoric sites will recognise the feelings he describes. Through his lens, time falls away and a transcendent, elemental sense of place is revealed. A captivating view of the Rollright Stones features on the cover of his acclaimed Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain, and Toots Barrow is among a cluster of culturally connected Cotswold sites that he has been investigating as part of his latest project revealing ceremonial landscapes: ‘Barrowlands’.
SACRED GEOGRAPHY
From childhood and at school, in Wales and the Mendips in Somerset, David grew up surrounded by prehistoric sites. He also developed an interest in sacred geography through his master’s degree in visual anthropology, which included visiting a Native American reservation in Montana and living among people with a strong relationship with the landscape.
Having become a guidebook author, travel writer and photographer, he says it was around 10 or 11 years ago when he took up aerial photography ‘really seriously’ that he was struck by the potency of viewing prehistoric monuments from above – and suddenly all his interests came together in his work:
‘I could sense immediately how these structures, earthworks, tombs and stone circles were all related to the landscape, and I could imagine how people in the distant past might have construed the landscape, because of the anthropology I had done. It was resonant with meaning.
‘Of course, these are things that cannot be proven [...] but I can hint at the connections in my photography. Most of my pictures are taken at 30 or 40 metres – the height of a hovering kestrel – so you can see the form of things in a way that you can’t at ground level; you can show the monuments in context of their landscapes and can therefore accentuate or amplify the connection between the site and the topography [...] how sites relate to the line of a ridge, or the direction of a river or valley.’
People at the talks David gives are often moved to tears by the visual impact and sudden visceral understanding of the landscape sparked by his aerial images, he says.
SPECTACULAR COTSWOLDS
The Cotswolds – ‘very, very rich in prehistoric remains, particularly Neolithic long barrows’ – provides David with lots to explore. Early in the 4th millennium BC, pioneering Neolithic settlers probably followed the Thames westwards to its headwaters in the Cotswolds’ limestone uplands, and then discovered the escarpment as a spectacular place to locate their tombs, he says.
‘The sense of awe when you encounter that vista from the scarp was, I suspect, central to their religious sensibilities. They used the properties of the landscape to accentuate the religious feeling to a greater feeling of transcendence. These tombs were above the normal realm, silhouetted against the skyline, and visible from where people lived, so they could look up at them.’
Returning to Toots Barrow: David’s aerial images make it look both familiar and mysterious as your eye leaps from its elevated location to other high points in the landscape, realms above realms, with the shimmer of the Severn in the distance.
David likes to visit sites at sunrise, when the play of light and shadow is magical, intensifying emotional engagement with monuments that are, literally, thresholds between life and death. Fleeting moments of change are captured: a cloud burst casts vistas around Hetty Pegler’s Tump (aka Uley Long Barrow) in ethereal rays of sunshine. Belas Knap Long Barrow slumbers like some ancient giant creature, emphatic in its presence high above fields while modern houses melt away into valley shadows at Winchcombe.
Meanwhile the uncovered chambers of Nympsfield Long Barrow, viewed from directly overhead, bring to life one possible idea that the mound could be in the symbolic shape of a female torso: the dead were placed in the chamber (representing a womb) as if they were returning to the earth or mother. Randwick Barrow, hard to appreciate at ground level amid its woodland glade, suddenly emerges into fresh perspective too.
David says his compulsion to research and photograph prehistoric monuments, the well-known and the forgotten, has become ‘like a life drug’ – ‘I feel so uplifted by them, we all do. Our ancestors knew all the best places.’
You can find out more about David’s work at davidabram.co.uk
