Yours sincerely.
Charles Miller
Inst. of Chartered Surveyors
Member, British Society of Dowsers.
Merrily closed the database, switched off the computer. Sometimes logging on to the Net was like turning over an old log in the woods, a whole unexpected ecosystem under there.
Gentle people. Well-meaning.
Yes. Most of them.
23
The Hill, the River and the Moon
‘It’s not gone,’ the archaeologist said. ‘Just gone back underground, it has. Like a big earthworm.’
His name was Harri Tomlin, from the South Wales Valleys, now based in Worcester with the team in charge of the Dinedor/Rotherwas excavation. Young guy. Blond curls fringing his orange hard hat. Bliss had been given one too, before he’d been allowed on the site. Health and Safety. At least it kept the rain out.
‘When I say worm,’ Harri said, ‘that’s not much more than conjecture at this stage. Worm, dragon, serpent… we have nothing to measure it against, see, that’s the problem. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere.’
They were standing on a bulldozed mound of clay. Caterpillar tracks below it had filled up with cloudy water. A bunch of trees had been sawn down, their trunks lying around like dead soldiers on a battlefield. Behind the site was the sprawl of the Rotherwas Industrial Estate and the civic waste tip — on the edge of that, unexpectedly, the Rotherwas Chapel, medieval and Tudor, an historical gem.
Mass of contradictions, this part of town. Directly ahead was Dinedor Hill, wooded and misted, towards which the Serpent apparently coiled.
‘So let me get this right,’ Bliss said wearily to Harri Tomlin. ‘You’re saying it definitely wasn’t an ancient road.’
‘We very quickly ruled out an actual road, Mr Bliss, because it doesn’t have any substructure, see. It’s also built on undulating ground, rather than having the ground flattened as you’d do for a road. So it has this kind of flow.’
He’d talked about fire-cracked stones, sourced nearby. The Bronze Age guys would heat up big stones, then drop them into cold water which would break them up into the kind of small pieces they could use.
‘And it contains a lot of quartz?’ Bliss said.
‘Fair amount.’
‘And it was exposed for a while after you found it.’
‘For too long. Even after a few weeks, there was some erosion. We were actually glad to get it covered over again.’
‘Weeks,’ Bliss said. ‘So in that time anybody could’ve nipped up here, under the fence, and pinched a handful.’
‘Or a bucketful. That’s what worried us. Sightseers often like to go home with a souvenir.’
‘So people were actually nicking stones?’
‘It’s ten metres wide. How could we tell? Why do you want to know if some were missing, Mr Bliss? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘How long is it?’ Bliss said.
‘How long’s a piece of string? We cleared sixty metres, but that might be just a small segment. May go all the way up the hill, to the Iron Age camp on the top, behind those trees. The Serpent is pre- Iron Age, obviously, but then there could’ve been something interesting up there before the camp.’
‘I’m not really getting an image, Harri.’
Bliss was cold and his hands were going numb and whatever the Serpent had been they’d reburied it, so the council could put their road across it. Just another construction site now.
‘Ever seen the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, Mr Bliss?’
Bliss shook his head. Didn’t recall ever being in Berkshire. He did remember a white horse in Wiltshire, in the context of a miserable camping holiday with Kirsty before they were married. Kirsty whingeing the whole week.
‘May have seen one on the Wiltshire Downs. Chalk?’
‘That’ll do. Now, forget the chalk and instead of a horse think of a snake. Or, if you like, think of a river. Think of the Wye. Could our structure have been designed to replicate the actual course of the Wye, winding from the top of the hill to the banks of the river itself?’
‘That far?’
‘It’s not very far. The river’s down there, behind those industrial buildings. This is about the hill, the river and the moon.’
Harri told him the theory about this sinuous spectral form winding its moonlit way to the top of the hill.
‘Prehistoric son et lumière?’ Bliss said.
‘The sound would be chanting. A sacred hill, see. A lot of hills were sacred. And the river. Water was always very significant, and the Wye’s a magnificent river so it would be venerated above all others in the west. Therefore, if we imagine…’
Harri walked to the top of the mound and started weaving his arms about, the way blokes used to air-sketch a voluptuous woman.
‘… If we imagine something mystically — and very visibly — connecting the hugely powerful River Wye with the highest hill in these parts. Something suggestive of a coming-together, a confluence, of these great power symbols, the hill, the river and the moon.’
‘Now about to be trashed by a new road slicing through the middle, courtesy of the Hereford Council,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that be a fair assessment?’
‘Hey…’ Harri Tomlin put up his hands. ‘Wasn’t me done him, guv.’
‘So much for a quick result. Where do you lads go from here, Harri?’
‘Probably try to extend the excavation in the direction of the river, see how far the Serpent goes. Which means digging on private land, so may take a while to organise.’
‘And when you say these places are sacred, what’s the significance of that, in terms of what they were doing here back then?’
‘Ritual.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Search me. That word covers up a lot of ignorance. We don’t know what rituals were involved, of course we don’t.’
‘Human sacrifice, maybe?’
‘Ah, see, people like to think there was human sacrifice all over the place, but it probably wasn’t all that widespread. It’s common to think of Bronze Age people as primitive savages, but they must’ve been quite sophisticated.’
‘Savagery itself, Harri,’ Bliss said quietly, ‘can sometimes be quite sophisticated.’
Harri Tomlin looked across at the stripped ground and the slaughtered trees, his legs apart, his fluorescent yellow jacket gleaming with rain. Then he looked at Bliss.
‘What are you after? You really think somebody killed Ayling because he was being so negative about this discovery? I mean, you actually think that’s a possibility?’
‘It’s a possibility, Harri.’
‘Can you tell me why you’ve made this connection, because from my point of view—’
‘Nothing personal, Harri, but it’s not my decision how much we reveal and when. I can tell you there was a ritualistic element. And the connection with this site… that’s beyond argument.’
‘Which is why you borrowed some quartz chippings from us yesterday?’
‘And if you can think of anything else that might help us, I hope you won’t hold back.’
Bliss let the silence dangle, looking at Harri Tomlin through half-closed eyes.
‘Look,’ Harri said. ‘You want me to get fanciful here, is it? I mean, I’m not going to have to repeat all this in court at some stage?’
‘I’m not writing it down, Harri, and I’m not wired. Be as fanciful as you like.’
‘All right, then,’ Harri said. ‘Heads.’
‘Heads, plural?’
‘I’m not so much thinking of the guys who laid out the Serpent, I’m thinking the people who built the camp or fort on Dinedor Hill. The Iron Age Celts, who came over here from Europe, two or three thousand years ago. They were very into heads. They believed that the seat of consciousness — the soul, if you like — was located in the head. So the Celts tended to take off the heads of their enemies.’