What seems to be the white noise of the wind is, on closer listen, both polyrhythmic and multi-tonal. There is a single background hum and, weaving around it, the rise and fall of other winds: sidewinds and crosswinds and eddies. The house is on a hill, or, to be more precise, on the head of a ridge running off a hill into the Wye Valley. You can therefore, on a clear day, see down the valley in both directions, and across the valley to the Hergest Ridge and, behind it, the Radnor Hills, which are sometimes dusted with snow. Behind the house’s promontory is Little Mountain, which is not really a mountain, but a big hill.
You can see everywhere, and the wind can get everywhere. Perhaps because it comes from everywhere at once, channelled down the broad valley but refracted through many other places, it creates a cacophony, always altering, never resting. While the patter of windless rain is calming in its soft consistency, there is something rousing about the wind, which is not relaxing. It is like a restless chant.
It was after another white night of wind that I drove, sleep-deprived and in a condition not suited to adverse road conditions, along the length of the Golden Valley as it follows the path of the Dore down from the hills that loom above the Wye. The road was, in its better parts, a conduit for water flowing from one field to the next and, when it sloped, a waterfall. This was a good thing, for the movement of the water meant that it did not pool deeper. Red mud coursed along past abandoned cars left in last night’s floods, which had, for the moment, subsided. The static bodies of water were the scary bits, because you did not know where they would end. There were fewer of these, but the road had been carved away at its edges, which fell aside like glacial moraine, and the road, like the washed-out cars, looked fragile. An unremarkable journey alters when its success cannot be taken for granted. The water was winning.
We live in an age controlled by humans and human technology. One current assumption, the pessimist’s, is that human technology is so efficient and invulnerable that it will, eventually, kill off the planet. The optimists take a different line, which is that human ingenuity will evolve to solve all problems regarding human survival. Both rest on the assumptions that human ingenuity is unique, for good or for bad, and that human technology is more robust and powerful than nature. It took a month of angry storms to make me consider this more critically than before.
There was something about the surfeit and force of elements that made me want to go back to Kilpeck, which is where I was headed. I felt as though the aggressions of the weather might make more sense there, or perhaps that Kilpeck would make more sense in the light of the storms.
Kilpeck is a village in Herefordshire, about twenty miles away from my home near Hay-on-Wye. The village itself might have come straight out of The Archers, a westerly Albion of rolling hills and well-kept pretty cottages and a smart-looking pub with good food. At its edge are two noteworthy things: a motte-and-bailey castle and a church, which is not really, to my mind, a church in any conventionally understood Christian sense at all.
In the eleventh century, the parishioners of Kilpeck would have been trying to understand their landscape and the weather that altered it as an expression of a greater will. As human endeavour moulded the land, with clearings and mounds and buildings, so it was moulded by the land, existing in conflict, and in symbiosis, with nature.
Our rational belief in a mechanistic world of things enables us to find effective ways of operating in it, and our ways of operating in it further build that belief. We seem to be very adept at shaping the world to our will, and think little of the idea that the will and the ways of humankind might fall prey to any entity other than our own self-destruction.
But this sustained attack from untamed nature together with a big cultural wave of environmental doom-tales had made me question our narrative of human progress, our sense that comfort can be gained from our capacity to build and improve our world. It all seemed a bit anthropocentric. People looked small on stormy days. Once upon a time, the storms would have been attributed to a pagan deity of some kind, or an angry Old Testament God.
When I was seven, I was politely excused from Sunday school on the basis that being a vociferous atheist was fine but poorly suited to its aims – a gentle dismissal that leaves me with a residual fondness for the Church of England. I am not inclined towards religion, or superstition, or anything much that can’t reveal itself empirically.
I was not in a mood for finding God or redemption, or, for that matter, its pagan equivalent. I was interested more in how to simply understand a relationship with nature and the land in which both were considered to be alive, and not just alive but conscious. I wanted to get into what I had come to think of as the Kilpeck headspace. There is a sense of godliness revealed in nature that characterises the architectural decoration and, I would venture, would once have characterised the creed of the Kilpeck church. I was starting to wonder if taking a worldview which encompassed the idea of a will that is everywhere, whether of God or object or ether, might actually be a more practical way of understanding the things that modern-day scientism sometimes doesn’t.
The rain had stopped and the wet road, lit up in the first sunshine for weeks, glared its path to the village. The church stood, calm and flesh-pink in the new light, as though the storms had never happened. Behind it, through a yew-lined uphill avenue, the ditch around the castle motte had flooded into a moat, cutting it off apart from a foot of raised track. Rather than concealing the structure of the space, the water clarified its depths and heights and the even circle of the motte. Now that the rain had stopped and the sky was blue, its bright reflection shone in the flash moat.
Behind the castle tump, above the spiky tips of a pine forest, loomed the massif of the Black Mountains. Today the mountains were not black, but white with snow. As I drove back down the Golden Valley later, the snowline looked as though it were painted on in one vast stripe along the Cat’s Back. Birds sang from above the village. Beneath us, I thought I could hear a distant hum, or roar, and braced myself for revelation, but it was the A465.
The most famous thing about the Church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck is probably the Sheela-na-gig carved among the corbels that encircle it. A woman baring her dilated vagina in an aggressive fashion is not the stuff we are led to believe that the Church, however early, is made of. But to see the Sheela-na-gig in isolation is to fall prey to our own post-Victorian prurience at such things – she sits in a line of extraordinary carvings of animals and men, song and dance and food and love that look like a pagan celebration of the stuff of life.
The Kilpeck Sheela-na-gig is seen as a warning against the sins of the flesh. It is true that, with her bald head and staring eyes, she looks bellicose rather than buxom, as though she’d glass you after a few drinks. But in the context of the other corbels it is very hard to see her as an aberrant warning against sin, because none of the others have that function.
As a point of comparison, the Abbaye d’Arthous is in the French Basque country, close to the Pyrenees, much in the same way that Kilpeck lies in the last flattish part of the Welsh Marches before they ascend into the Black Mountains. It was built at the same time, in the late twelfth century, and its corbels are similar in their Romanesque style and carving technique to those at Kilpeck. It is thought that the Herefordshire School of stonemasonry that graces Kilpeck and, somewhat less after desecrations and rebuilds, the nearby churches at Eardisley and Shobdon, consisted of a number of local craftsmen overseen by someone who had trained in France. There are, however, substantial differences in the subject matter.
The corbels at the Abbaye d’Arthous are clearly about the Christian conception of sin. There is a man either drinking from a barrel, or vomiting over it, as though the ambiguity links cause and effect. Adam’s modesty is covered with a fig leaf; a wolf seizes a lamb – it is sound biblical stuff. The corbels at Kilpeck include a Green Man presiding from his pillar across the main south entrance, two people either dancing close or getting amorous, someone playing a rebec as though warming up for a party, a number of animals – rams, pigs, fish, something like an armadillo – and, of course, the Sheela-na-gig. The Church that oversaw these could not have been the same in character as the Church that decorated the Abbaye D’Arthous.
And this is why the Kilpeck church had always intrigued me as a place, for how it showed how little we understand of the mindset of what must have been a fragmentary Church in the early Middle Ages, and how little we know of the old religions that pre-dated it. It takes the form of a church, and it is known and recorded as being one, but its character and location make it feel far more like a pagan site judiciously taken in by the Church.
It is easy, in an age of scandals deriving as much from its obsession with maintaining institutional face as from the endless abuses of power by sexually wayward priests and sadistic nuns, and conscious embrace of the AIDS pandemic for fear that women might gain bodily autonomy, to think of the Catholic Church as driven by a unified doctrine at all costs. But its development in the Dark Ages belies the etymology of its name: it set itself out as a universal Church, one that could take in a breadth of existing beliefs and rituals. The sense of ‘catholic’ as liberal and all-embracing is more developed in English than in other languages, and at the wild outer reaches of our wet and windy island, far from Rome, there was greater room for compromise.
Just as the early Church adopted pagan festivals of Christmas and Easter into a chronologically reshaped Jesus myth, so it took in bits of pagan iconography. You can see it as a simple cost-benefit exercise: on the one hand, you want to grow and maintain universal rule over a vast and diverse congregation; on the other, you want to preserve doctrinal integrity and get them all to toe the line. One option happens at the expense of the other. If your institution is in a growth mode, you let them keep their sun-worship Sabbath and their parties. Austerity and heretics can happen later.
And so the Church of St Mary and St David was built, its axis from chancel to nave following the line of a stream arising from a holy pagan spring, its altar beneath four half-heads of green men or something like them, and its exterior ornate with idolatry. It was at this altar, with its holy quaternity that bore no obvious physical or numerical resemblance to Christian doctrine, that the inchoate sense of God-in-nature I had always found here formed into something more concrete. Maybe what troubled me about the storms, and the journey, and the strangeness of Kilpeck, were all the things tied up in the Green Man myth.
The Green Man is a twentieth-century name given to the many carvings across Britain and Northern Europe that bear the image of a man whose face is made from vegetation, or who grows it from his mouth or beard or hair. He is a sort of forest-god, an emblem of the birth-death-rebirth cycle of the natural year. He was worshipped in hope of good harvests, and guards the metaphysical gate between the material and immaterial worlds. He is the entry-point to Faerieland and the Small Folk of British and Nordic myth.
He is also a reminder of the superior force of Nature over human enterprise, that Nature will, in time, consume us all. This underlying power – the quiet threat of force that makes power power – is something that haunted the storms. Those Kilpeck stonemasons and, I’d wager, the priest and congregation, were not about to give up on their Green Man. They gave him godly stature in that church, and I bet they didn’t only pray to Jesus for their crops to grow and the long, wild, wet winters to end.
I walked around the church again, to the spot at the edge of the graveyard that marks out one of Alfred Watkins’s first leys, and looked out across the land. It was a secure spot to stand awhile, as though the church and castle tump had got your back. You can see for thirty miles or more, from the line of Offa’s Dyke across to the softer hills of Herefordshire. It is the sort of place where invading forces of Welshmen or weather can be viewed coming in like distant waves. Pagans understood location.
In the meantime, in our time, people were getting cross with the Environment Agency for not dredging undredgable places or removing floods from the flood plains they lived on, and with trains that were not running, and with the schools that had just re-opened. From my bedroom window a fragmented ribbon of water sat across the broad Wye Valley where the river had broken its banks.
The water had settled, and was silver rather than brown. Over the course of the day it retreated, leaving the land scattered with oxbow lakes and ponds, changing by the hour. In the sunlight, the day after the biggest of the storms, the water looked benign. It sprayed up into rainbows when you drove through it, and the background rush of spontaneous streams and waterfalls underscored all other sound.
Driving back down the Golden Valley, my earlier trepidation about the state of the road dissipating along with the falling floodwaters, I did not thank the Green Man, because that would have been a credulous thing to do, and I was not, or not yet, in credulous mode. I did think about him, though. I was going to meet him again – and another storm came.
Someone on Twitter mentioned that the Peterchurch road was closed again. I had intended to go out Green Man hunting – Dore Abbey, Garway Church, back to Kilpeck and home. Instead, I watched sheets of rain tear down the valley, and then there was a knock on the door, because water from the garden was overflowing into the boiler room, a shed on the side of the house.
Not long ago a brook flowed through the garden, providing the water source and outfall for what the house had of plumbing. You could tell, because the water had reappropriated its old path. I dug a drainage trench while my landlady cleared leaves from the ditch by the house and mopped the water from the floor. The rain soaked through my coat and stuck my hair across my eyes, and the water level in the ditch rose and fell as more mud fell in and was scooped out, and at some point it fell beneath the doorstep and stayed there, and I went back inside.
When I got inside, where it was warm, because the boiler was still working, I was not at all sure that I wanted to be inside. The obvious thing to do was to strip off the layers of wet clothes – denim, leather and wool, all the worst things to wear in the rain – get warm and dry, and get back to work. But it didn’t feel particularly like work: what is reading about late-Victorian metaphysical disputes compared to digging a ditch? I never did proper work now; when I lived up the mountain and there were logs to bring in every night, and external plumbing that needed fixing through thick undergrowth or at the bottom of waterfalls, and snow to clear for a couple of months every year in order to get the kids to school, I did enough of it to have no need for more. And there was no point in pretending that a bit of emergency scrabbling in the mud was anything more than a fantasy version of hard physical labour, in much the same vein as Marie Antoinette’s toy farm at Versailles. I was not of the outdoors, even if I was more of the outdoors than my contemporaries back in London who found it exotic to walk fifty metres with the compost every day and considered an umbrella to be rainwear.
The satisfaction of being purposeful in the rain was both a rural fantasy and, as I considered it further, related to an unusual sense of the fragility of our bubble of creature comforts, and an urge to preserve them. I generally preserve my quality of life by staring at a screen, as I am now. The interventions that result in capital are virtual, immaterial, as they are for anyone whose place of work is a desk. They are not real in any concrete sense. Many of us exist in a state of privilege that places few demands on physical labour. There are systems out there to create and maintain the infrastructure of comfort, and we pay for them with bills and taxes. Sometimes, on the mountain, the phone line would be blown down in a storm and there would be no Internet, which seemed terrible and perilous, and then a few days later some men would arrive and would interface with real mud and hardware to make the virtual world reappear. I marvelled at them.
Right now, across the country, tens of thousands of people were bailing out their homes with buckets and building makeshift sandbag dykes and reappraising their sense of urgency in a way that I could not imagine. Bricks and mortar and all the sturdy technology that feeds our normal lives can fall apart pretty quickly in a storm. Meanwhile, my brush with the edge of comfort was over, and I was back in my warm kitchen, beneath an expensive lamp that mimics the colour of natural light, and not really working in any sense, but reading about the Green Man.
The term ‘Green Man’ was coined by Julia Hamilton, Lady Raglan, in a paper published in the journal Folklore in 1939. The paper consisted of a set of observations regarding foliate heads on a number of churches across England, Wales and elsewhere in north-western Europe. Raglan talks about the fifteenth-century Robin Hood cult, which she sees as a corruption of Robin of the Wood, an anarchic celebration that troubled all factions of the Church.
A half-century earlier, James George Frazer’s Golden Bough had forged a new and comprehensible way of looking at the rituals of the past: the central theme of death and rebirth that unified creation myths, whether pagan or Christian. It was part of the birth of anthropology; as an exercise in comparative religion, it was also heretical. Frazer’s account of the Crucifixion was judiciously removed to an appendix, and an abridged edition was released to suit late-Victorian sensibilities. By the 1930s, folk mythology was all the rage. Lady Raglan’s aristocratic husband FitzRoy Somerset took up anthropology while stationed in Sudan and published a well-received book about hero myths. Educated feudalists were ready to take their ritual ground back from an enfeebled Church. Green Man studies flourished.
One of the controversies around the Green Man myth is that Lady Raglan’s account is seen as being pretty mythical itself, in the sense that it is an under-evidenced speculation about things that we know very little about. There is no such thing as a simple stock image of the Green Man, for starters. There are subsets of Green Men – the foliate head, covered in oak leaves, and the disgorging head, where foliage sprouts from the mouth and, in a more grisly variant, all facial orifices. These are sometimes elided with the ritual May Day figure of Jack-in-the-Green, a man dressed in leaves, sometimes resembling a moving Christmas tree and with an effect more comic than awesome.
There is something compelling about a partial account, where there seems to be ground for a story but it is incomplete, so that the gaps to be filled bear the possibility of an openness of interpretation. So it is with the Green Man myth, which is not one myth, but an interconnected and fragmented series of images from various times and places, all riffing on a common theme. It is difficult to ascribe any single story to the foliate heads: there is only the fact of their imagery, and speculation about their role.
These figures adorn churches, but there is no doctrinal account of their genesis or existence. It is easier to say that there is no hard evidence for their pagan function than it is to suggest a credible Christian alternative. And it was the Church that had the monopoly on the written word back then, and that therefore guarded written history.
If the best information I could find about the Green Man was speculation, then the only response was to speculate further, and I needed a forest to do this in. It was time to go for a walk up the hill.
The footpath to the top of Little Mountain, where kites and buzzards circle on calmer days, passes through the boundary of a wood that falls sharply away to one side, on the left if you are headed uphill. From here, in the crook of a rocky outcrop, you can see down to a waterfall carved deep into a ravine. Today a vast ash lay across it, perhaps fifty metres long, snapped at its base like a trodden stick. The wood was light and healthy; the path itself was crisscrossed with the corpses of rotten trees, their cores orange-brown with mould, some of them less recent to the floor, their bark thick with moss. It looked as though the upper part of the wood had been knocked by the hand of a petulant child. It was a mess. The wood could have done with a guardian spirit. If the wood had had a spirit, you’d think that he or she would not have been happy.
There is a big flat rock that juts out above the steep fall of the ravine, and I sat there, surveying the damage. It is the sort of place that you take your children for a picnic while they still believe in fairies, but are big enough to be trusted not to fall off the edge. It didn’t look too idyllic and it occurred to me that part of the reason was the lack of obvious signs of life: the badger setts with no marks of fresh exit, the absence of green undergrowth, the graveyard of branches.
Humans have a talent for anthropomorphising things in the world. If the basis of our ability to think is about forming patterns out of information and using them, the patterns we like to recognise best are those that reflect ourselves. We do it today with our apparently insatiable need to front all information with the recognisable face of celebrity. I wondered, briefly, if the celebrity pantheon fulfils a role similar to the Mahabharata, or the exploits of the Greek gods, in mirroring earthly virtue, vice and frailty in a series of interlocking, entertaining morality tales for the mortals.
Intangible concepts, like the processes of fertility or regeneration, or love or war, might seem as though they resist a simple line-drawing until you embody them in a character whose face and body tell the story with something approaching clarity. All the early animist rituals and beliefs that we lump together into paganism or the Old Religion reified these sorts of processes into godly objects. An easier job still is to embody things that you can actually see into a god – the sun, the moon, the sea. And it is not as though some bright pagan spark came up with the idea of marketing ideas as gods; a fearful deference to the entities that mattered so critically in day-to-day human lives needed to be enacted, and became ritualised, and then the rituals needed to be communicated within tribes and communities, and were institutionalised, and the outcome of this was the godheads.
I gazed out across the wet, broken forest and wondered what it would look like embodied in human form. A strong, injured man or woman – there was no obvious gender judgement to call here – sleeping in silent recovery. If you found this person, you might want to leave them something while they slept: food and water, or a blanket.
Today we have so little forest that we manage most of what is left. You could get the humans in to amputate all the damaged stuff, and clear the strewn branches from the floor. But in an age long before chainsaws, when trees were bigger than people, the best consolation might have been psychic, symbolised in the ritual of offerings to the forest-god.
It is this idea of psychic communication that is so far removed from how we think about the physical world now. And yet, if you lie on a rock hanging over a forest, as I did – in a state of slight discomfort because my coat was not quite waterproof and becoming less so by the minute – and give it time, a strange thing happens that is eerie, in eerie’s original sense. You need to lie in silence, and allow the sensation of lying on a rock, breathing and listening, to expand. I suppose you could call it a meditative state, but there is no real need to, because it is only the ancient art of lying down for a rest.
After a time the silence is less silent. Beneath the distant, constant rush of the waterfall there are, in fact, sounds, but sounds whose patterns are too muted or too long to be heard as you tramp across the ground. They are not sounds that we tend to acknowledge or talk about. It is not clear which part of life in the forest they come from, but they are the sounds of life, of earthly process. They are merely patterns of waves, from undefined sources, and because the sources are undefined it feels as though the whole forest is breathing, which, in a sense, it is. The longer you stay there, the longer the detail builds.
Something similar happens if you find yourself trying to work, or sleep, next to a field of sheep. We describe their voices as a reductive ‘baa’, which is a pretty effective onomatopoeic description. If you hear them for an hour or so, distinctions emerge: there are deep-voiced sheep and higher-pitched sheep, some sounds like a dark bellow or cough, some plaintive, and some strident and bossy. It is our human reduction of the vastness of the world that creates the assumption of simplicity of non-human things. There is nothing intrinsically simple about any of it.
Back in the forest, I was getting seriously wet, and it was not conducive to attempts at communion with nature. I brushed the mosses off me and walked back down the hill. One of the few fairy-tale aspects of the stormy weather had been the proliferation of rainbows that you get with perpetual fronts of rain, and now one emerged, faintly, out of the curve of the hedgerow along the line of the hill. As I walked, the rainbow moved east along the valley with its raincloud, so that by the time I got home it had made a good ten miles from Clyro to Bredwardine.
I thought about the forest, and about the way that it is possible to hear it, and about the idea that things that are too small to see have a spirit. Panpsychism, the philosophical position that all matter has consciousness, is not short of adherents who are otherwise held to be in the sensible mainstream of thought. If you want to bridge the apparent reality of the material world and its capacity to behave unpredictably, it is a position that works.
In the late twentieth century, a reaction against the dangerous superstitions of organised religion led to most spiritual woo being cleansed from Western ideas of how the world works, and with it the idea of will across all scales, large and small. It was the most anthropocentric of times.
What if the pagan conceptions of the forest were about an idea of a mutual consciousness, so that while it might not be possible to literally feed the forest-god with an offering or sacrifice, the ritual itself might exist as an acknowledgement of the forest-god’s will, and of the goodwill of man? It would then be a meditation on the connectedness of man to forest, and of life to life.
And so all of the messy possible meanings of the many and varied Green Men, who may not have been called Green Men at all, seemed to me to be indicative of these sorts of meditations: meditations that could sit unthreateningly on a church altar as a reminder of the God in all things, and of all the things that could be God.
Sometimes, when you see something unencumbered by prior knowledge or expectation, it can feel like a truer representation than those framed by other people’s stories. It was in this way, with a carved sandstone image of a head, that I had become attached to the Green Man myth, or had somehow constructed my own. I’d got to that point that people of faith get to where you want to believe. We could do with a reminder that humans are fallible, and finite. We do not think enough about the fragility of our strange, sanitised reality. If ever there was a time to rekindle a Green Man cult, it is now.