Land Art, rootscapes and holloways

A stuffy, foggy morning, up at 5.30 to travel through Liverpool in memory. Very foggy. We went to see the 'land art' piece that Justine worked on in the woods at the Rodd on a sculpture course run by Richard Harris. Two felled hazel trees, woven into a bow and tied with willow whips, strung like a taut bow over an old ditch. Almost invisible in the green gloom and mist, it looked as if it had grown there. The ditch (one of a pair in parallel) is a listed ancient monument and was apparently once used to store wood, although we couldn't work out how this would work as surely it would flood; the bottom was boggy and full of mud and stream sticks.

The ditch leads down to the small stream where Justine showed me a landscape of bare roots, mainly oak and hazel I think, worn smooth by the sheep. A very Welsh wild place, overlooked and everyday. Snags of wool, fleece, on sharp twigs. Bare of earth, roots like stone, gnarled knuckles of living wood. Everything the same old cream colour of the dry ground. A rootscape.

The ditches reminded me of holloways, prehistoric roadways cut by usage into soft rocks. A southern British phenomenon, northern counties have too hard a stone. I have been reading about them in R MacFarlane's book 'The Wild Places' and was reminded of the holloway I found on the western slopes of Shobdon Hill. Eight or ten feet below the surrounding fields, choked with brambles and tons of rubbish (including what looked like a demolished house) and not used as a road for decades if not longer. But it still hugs the hill on the way to the summit. I was there for the possibility of a Bronze Age religious site which I had thought was more likely to be on the valley foor; there were two possibilities for the site of a sacred spring. But I wonder now if the holloway originally led up the hill to the sacred site. I will go and try and see this again.