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Sunday 11th July was the day of the final match in the 2010 World Cup so what better time to get away from all that shite and drive into the hills of Cumbria looking for scratchings on rocks. As I was also enrolled on a flint knapping course with Woodsmoke, taught by Will Lord of www.beyond20000bc.co.uk which was due to start on Monday 12th I decided to make a weekend of it and head over to the mountains early on Sunday morning.
As soon as I crossed the Tees the weather changed and the bright sunny skies of the east became greyer and wetter until the drizzle became rain and the clouds covered the tops of the hills. Driving into Great Langdale from Ambleside the rain began to get heavier and it seemed certain that today was going to be a classic Cumbrian hill day – wet and cloudy.
The Copt Howe site comprises a series of large erratic boulders on the western fringe of Chapel Stile in Great Langdale. Driving up the narrow lane that leads to Dungeon Ghyll the boulders are to be found in the fields on the right side of the road, there is a narrow and gravelly scrap of land at the side of the road that provides an adequate, if precipitous, short-term parking point and it was here, with cars whizzing past and rain battering the windscreen that I parked.
My first impression of the Copt Howe site was anti-climatic. The setting is truly beautiful and the views up the valley to the summits spectacular but the art does not, in my opinion, live up to the location. Many of the inscriptions are faint and show up only in oblique light or via rubbings so there was little to photograph but more than this the main panel, on the face of a very large boulder, seems to lack a coherent graphic intent and appears to be quite random and confused. Many rock art panels show complexity, with interconnecting channels, cups and rings but there is a difference between complexity and confusion. Copt Howe looks to me to be confused and poorly thought out, a rock doodle site rather than a rock art site.
The site was discovered in 1999 by Paul and Barbara Brown, authors of the invaluable “Prehistoric Rock Art In The Northern Dales” (PRAND), which has been my bedtime reading for the last eighteen months and without which many of my recent trips would have ended in failure but reading around the subject it appears that there is some controversy as to whether the site is what is purported to be. There is a theory, which I found on Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian site, that some of the inscriptions at Copt Howe are the work of a local man named Ken Corfe who lived a sort of proto-hippie life in Great Langdale in the 1930s and 1940s. Locals seem to remember him camping in the field close to the boulders and taking a great interest in them. Was Corfe responsible for the rock art?
The central enigma that surrounds rock art, especially the cryptic designs of cups, rings and concentric circles is what does it mean? Theories abound as to how it should be interpreted and I feel that many of these theories say more about our modern minds and ways of thinking than the people who made the art. I am far from convinced that rock art should be interpreted as maps or way-markers to guide people through the landscape. Anybody who has ever walked in the hills will have the greatest difficulty in thinking that prehistoric peoples found it necessary to encode “maps” of their landscape in inscriptions on rocks because there simply is no need – the way is obvious, the valleys are so large and the peaks so prominent that maps carved on stone slabs would be redundant. It may be that rock art is intrinsically linked to landscape, that it celebrates and marks significant points such as high hills and river valleys but I feel that these functions are not to be confused with a “map” anymore than a computer is to be confused with the internet.
Ultimately we will never know if the art at Copt Howe is genuine or fake and we must take from it what we will each according to their views but for me the faintness of the inscriptions when compared to other panels in the north of England, the recent discovery of the site in one of the most visited dales in Cumbria and the haphazard nature of the design makes me wonder if we are looking at a modern pastiche rather than ancient rock art?
Great Langdale is dominated by the Pikes, a series of peaks rising to around 700 metres from the valley floor. Of all the peaks in the Cumbrian mountains these are the most elegant, the most picturesque and amongst the most visited. I parked in the carpark at the foot of Dungeon Ghyll, paid my £6 to the LDNPA and set out up the track.
What is there to be said for a long climb in wet weather? You just get on with it, head down and arse up. The run off was flooding the streams and crossing some of them was tricky – I was traveling light and had decided not to carry anything up the mountain that was not needed, which included waterproofs. As I carried on upwards and met others coming down, soaked to the skin with hair plastered to their faces, the rectitude of my descision to visit the axe factory began to run through my mind. Not the for the last time that day.
With some effort and after a few stops for water I finally made it to the wide open hanging valley that opens out from Loft Crag. There are sites at both Loft Crag and nearby Thorn Crag that evidence axe manufacture from the Neolithic but I had no time to tarry if I was to see what I had planned to see and I pressed on. From here it was a short and easy walk, along relatively level paths to the Pike O’Stickle and the huge chute that leads back down to the valley floor along it’s eastern flank. This scree chute is comprised of the spoil and debris from the Neolithic quarrys where the band of green hornstone was came to the surfaceand it was down this chute I intended to go, to find the man made cave that exposed the seam of Group IV Langdale Tuff that was prized for the manufacture of axe heads.
The path at the top of the chute was busy with walkers, who rustled past in their waterproofs with GPS clipped to the collars like some sort of outdoor robo-cop. The last time I had been up here the cloud was low and the rain was falling hard, the chute was filled with thick rolling mist and looked like the entrance to some sort of Wagnerian theme park but now the rain had eased, the sky was almost blue and when nobody was looking I stepped off the path and into the chute.
The first thing that struck me was how fragile and moveable the scree slope was. I sank past the tops of my boots in the gravel and I noted, with some apprehension, that the boulders around me ranged in size from the size of a mircrowave oven to things considerably larger. It was going to be a delicate and balletic descent, although aided as I was by the superhuman powers bestowed by my Haglofs equipment I had no reason to fear.
My intention was to visit the cave not to cause an avalanche so I moved off the bare slope and proceeded down, as far as was possible, along the grass on the far fringe of the chute. This was easier footing but still dangerously wet and slippy. The rocks in this upper section were mainly reddish, not the dull battleship grey of the Group IV Tuff I had come to see but the only way was down and I meant to continue.
This was not a place to bring your granny for a nice walk in “The Lakes” and as I progressed down the chute I became overpowered by the scale of the landscape around me. The valley floor with its wide obvious path leading up through Mickleden lay a long way below me, the crags of the pikes rose up in vertical walls all around me. The sky seemed to be just in front of me and I experienced that feeling of wanting to launch myself off into the void that people feel on tall buildings or exposed rock.
I saw the cave come into view around a crag on the opposite side of the chute, a dark irregular opening in the rock wall. This was the site. Here, thousands of years ago, prehistoric prospectors who were intimately acquainted with the properties of stone and the uses it could be put to came to quarry the green hornstone, knapping roughouts from the raw material of the mountain before carrying away their loads to be polished into axe-heads that represented the apex-technology of their time.
I crossed the scree slope and entered the cave. It was cooler than outside and wetter, water trickled down the walls and dripped from the ceiling. The floor was made of rough chips of grey-green tuff, mixed in with papers and cigarette ends left by earlier thoughtful visitors. After exploring the cave I re-crossed the scree back to the east side of the chute and found a fairly stable tuffet of grass to eat my sultanas and banana. Later that night around the Woodsmoke camp fire I talked with Will Lord about Langdale axe heads and my trip to the axe factory and he was to express some amazement that I’d bothered to get up there in the first place and he also offered his own experiences of working with the tuff, not least the problem of find somewhere to put your hammerstone so that it didn’t roll down the mountain never to be seen again.
Why come to such dangerous, liminal places to quarry stone when suitable stone for blades could be won elsewhere? Was there something attractive and necessary about accessing such places, in winning blades from the peaks of mountains? Was exposure to risk and hardship part of the process of making the blade, a process that continued when the blade was finished and it was passed on to others, along with it’s lineage and the circumstances of its creation? Up here a threshold has been crossed, even to the herdsmen of the Neolithic this was not home all year long but a place to come to graze their flocks in the long grasses of late summer, a place that afforded views and vistas into other valleys before the clouds came down again and the world withdrew from sight.
How was the stone won from the mountain? By the labour of felling trees and carrying the lumber up to the faces, in the skill of know how to build the right fires that would produce enough heat to crack out the blocks but would not make the stone brittle with too much heat. A skilled and technical process that had to be learned and practiced, experience gained as the rock sang and screamed with the release of steam from trickles of water, a living element that relinquished its secrets slowly and with mystery.
The clock was against me, and though I would have gladly lingered in this place of 45-degree angles and trickling water to ponder the lives of those people who first climbed up – or down – to the site, I had to be back to the car to be on my way to the Woodsmoke rendezvous for 4.30. It was then that I made a descision that was to commit me for the rest of the afternoon – to climb back up the chute and go back down the way I came or to take the direct route down the scree to the Cumbrian Way below and peg it along the valley bottom.
I’ve never been one for sticking to paths and I do like to go to places that few people have been before so with that I tightened my straps and went down the slope. Let this be a word of advice to anybody else who may wish to experience the grandeur of the Pike O’Stickle axe factory – do not go down the scree slope. I was very conscious that I was in the middle of a scheduled ancient monument and that I should tread as lightly as possible but even so, and keeping to the grass as much as possible, I still got knocks and cuts from the sharp edges of the rocks. My progress was painfully slow, each step worked out so as to cause the minimum disruption to the site and to minimize my chances of breaking my ankle. Eventually I reached the tree line, if three scrubby rowans clinging to the crags can be called a tree line but my troubles were not over yet as several hundred metres of scree lay in front of me and now there really was no way back.
I struggled and sweated downwards and I have never been more happy to see bracken. I left the open scree and made my way down through the deep green bracken jungle, but as the fronds reached to chest height and covered what was basically a steep boulder field it was not exactly plain sailing. I still had visions of having to explain to some angry Mountain Rescue team what the fuck I was doing up there but as I pressed on the slope became less steep, the ground underfoot less rocky and it was with a light heart and a blithe spirit that I walked the last hundred metres across the open grass to the path at the foot of the mountain.
On the walk out to the car I pondered the meaning and the importance of this place. It is obvious that as a source of stone to make axe-heads Great Langdale was a special place to the people of the Neolithic. This was a transitional time that saw nomadic hunter-gatherer bands form into more settled communities of pastoralist and agriculturalists and this process of change would have necessitated the clearance of the woodland that covered the islands. These people would have been skilled timber workers used to building structures and were obviously experienced tool makers. Polished stone axe-heads would have been prized high status possessions that endowed their owners with the ability to extract a living from the land and their distribution across the British Isles and as far a field as Poland and Morocco speaks of their importance.
The sites of axe manufacture in Great Langdale have been called the first industrial landscape in Britain. The tracks that we use to move around the valley and access the fells may well be the same that the people used 5000 years ago, indeed it would be strange if they were not – people always want to take the quickest and easiest routes across the landscape.
A study of stone axe heads from all over England and Wales came up with the surprising discovery that 27% were made of Group VI Langdale Tuff and originated from the sites around the Pikes. A number of the axe heads from Langdale have been found deposited in wet places — marshes, streams, pools. and show no sign of having been used. This may indicate that the axe heads were not intended for practical use and that they had been placed in significant spots as some kind of religious offering or it may show that the tuff is harder than wood! The predilection of archeologists to attach ceremonial significance to things they do not understand is quaint and amusing; Will Lord told me that his father had ground a replica Langdale axe-head from the Group VI tuff and had leant it to an archeologist who wished to undertake a practical experiment to see what damage it sustained from prolonged tree felling. When the head was returned, having been used to cut down dozens of trees and having been attempted to be tested to destruction it was as good as new and showed no chipping or flaking from use. This stuff is not called Tuff by accident.
How many man hours went into polishing a finished axe-head? I asked Will this and he estimated approximately 130 if the roughout was to be worked by hand, although this could be reduced to around 40 if one was prepared to do away with authenticity and use a power grinder with a diamond bit. Why did people put so much time and energy into their tools, when a couple of hours knapping a roughout would produce a head that could be hafted and cut timber? The answer is in efficiency – the roughout may cut wood but it will not do it as well or for as long as the smooth lines of the polished axe-head. The shape of the head, with its elliptical profile, is a very efficient cutting tool - so much so that even after heavy use no signs of wear are visible.
There are deep lessons for us to learn in the history of these ancient axe-heads. Lessons about the relationship between form and function and the skills people once had for sustaining their own life and meeting their own needs, lessons about our relationship with the landscape and how our presence on these islands has been sustainable only through the extraction and processing of minerals and materials, lessons about the need that people have had, seemingly since earliest times, to explore their locations and make sense of their presence. To follow in their footsteps is to ask oneself the same questions and look for the same answers. Some things do not change.
The following interview was conducted with Noah Gadke in May/June 2009. It has yet to be published so for the few people who follow the blog I include it here as a curiosity.
1.You’ve previously stated in interviews that TenHornedBeast did not take its name directly from the Book of Revelations, but does the name or music carry any religious or spiritual connotations for you?
The name was revealed to me one day as I watched light and shadows move on a wall. It literally jumped into my head and I saw it as one word rather than three separate words, as if the concept of a ten horned beast was something that those English words were unable to convey on their own. At first I did not know what the name was or what it meant but it nagged me and would not let me go until I began to work with the current that it contained and began to understand and appreciate it’s meaning.
I am interested in tracing things back to their roots, back to the beginning when there was no separation between man, beast and god – when these things were the same. I believe that the books we call “The Bible”, especially the Pentateuch, have echoes and traces of this original and sacred truth. Obviously these texts have been revised and edited so many times to fit in with so many political and social exigencies that it is now barely possible to find the truth but if you look hard, and critically and with your heart as well as your brain things will be revealed.
Why did the later Hebrew prophets such as Daniel and Saint John use the imagery of horned beasts to portray earthly power and menace? What is it about horns, horned animals and horned beings that so frightened and upset these people? I believe they were exorcising something from their own history and culture that caused them great distress – the God of the Old Testament is not the kindly, benevolent father or the Good Shepherd, he is a vengeful and baleful storm-god worshipped in mountain-top wildernesses by shaman-prophets. He is a god of massacres, plagues and holocausts. A God of the tophet pit who is appeased by human sacrifice. When Moses spoke with God on the mountain he was marked by horns, when he descended with the Law he found the people worshipping a Golden Calf. The shadow of the horns is long and dark and when YHWH was changed into a God of the Covenant, worshipped in a Temple by a professional caste of priests these former signs and symbols were cast off, demonised and made unclean. Just as archaeologists find more in middens than in palaces I believe that we should look closely at what has been thrown away and discarded if we would find the truth.
2.You maintain a blog where in addition to talking about music and literature you discuss hunting and tracking, how did you become so passionate about this subject? Do you actively hunt? How does this part of your life influence TenHornedBeast?
Tracking is a form of literacy and something that I have always done instinctively, although in recent years I have began to hone the skills needed to do it right. For me tracking is a meditation, one that requires physical activity and a heightened awareness of the weather, landscape, local flora and fauna and the behaviour patterns of the quarry. It is fairly easy to spot animal tracks and signs just as it is relatively easy to distinguish a book from a bucket but being able to read the signs, to be able tell how old the sign is, what sex was the animal that made it, what gait the animal used in making the track and what that tells us about that individual animals behaviour at that specific point in time and how that behaviour fits into the wider context of species, habitat and ecosystem is a much bigger task.
Learning to track is actually learning to see the world from a non-human perspective and that provides a window onto a deeply ancient mindset that has been lost by almost every modern human in the developed world. I know people who have tracked with the San bushmen in Namibia and even their tracking skills are being lost – several generations ago people could tell which animals were moving through the bush by listening to the various alarm calls of birds, and as every bird species had several different alarm calls for different kinds of predator a bushman who knew that “language” could accurately deduce that a lion or a black mamba was somewhere in the vicinity by listening to which birds were making which calls. Today the bushmen have all but lost this knowledge, obviously they can tell an alarm call when they hear it but they have lost the knowledge to link the specific call to the specific predator behaviour that caused it. I’m sure our Mesolithic ancestors also knew these languages but they have become lost to us through thousands of years of “civilisation”; trying to re-learn them is a slow and painstaking process.
No I don’t hunt. The kind of hunting I am interested in requires stalking and tracking skills, or in the case of Persistence Hunting tracking and running skills, but any kind of hunting in the United Kingdom has become a very difficult and expensive pastime. Successive governments have made it increasingly difficult to own a firearm, as a result of high profile crimes such as the Hungerford and Dunblane incidents where deranged gun-nuts ran amok through communities killing people as they went. I think we can all agree that shooting children in a nursery school is wrong but I also feel that the Government have used incidents like this to ratchet up the climate of fear and to justify the erosion of freedoms. So as nobody is allowed to hunt, except on private land at considerable cost, the population of deer in lowland Britain has exploded and they are doing a lot of damage to woodland. My local woods are crawling with roe deer, I see them every time I go into the woods but as there is no natural predator and hunting is prohibited they are condemned to starve to death in the winter by the same people who think hunting is “cruel”.
I am not saying any and every kind of hunting is a good thing – I find the kind of “hunting” where fat liquored-up men sit in trees waiting to shoot bears that have been attracted into a killing zone by the smell of peanut-butter abhorrent – but I also find the battery farming of chickens and orange processed cheese abhorrent. Hunting has been demonised by an urbanised and sedentary population who are now totally disengaged from the methods used to produce their food whilst at the same time hanging on to a view of the countryside that is childlike and sentimental, they have lost all sense of where they fit into the wider ecosystem. I hold a contrary view, I feel that reconnecting with these truths can only be a good thing.
3.Given that many of your references and pictures from the TenHornedBeast blog are related to nature how far removed are you from the larger urban areas? Is this where you have always lived, or a conscious decision to relocate to a more remote environment?
No, I’ve always lived here – other than several years I spent at university when I was younger. My mother has been doing some research into our family history, which she has traced back to 1826 – the interesting thing is for the last 183 years my family have lived within about 5 miles of where I live now. The Germans call this Heimat. I live in the valley of the river Wear, in north-east England. The largest urban areas are Newcastle, which is about 25 miles away and Middlesborough, which is about 20 miles in the other direction.
I live on the edge of a small town, the woods are literally outside my back door but these are not woods as a North American or a Scandinavian might think of them – we have very, very little ancient woodland left in the UK and what little we have is a patchwork of small areas hemmed in by fields, roads and houses. I flew over France last year and it was amazing to see how much forest is left there, all the way from Paris down the valley of the Rhone you see huge expanses of wooded hills and uplands. That has gone from Britain – we are small island with a large population, we were the first country in the world to experience both the agrarian and the industrial revolutions and that has come at the cost of our wild places, very few of which are really “wild”.
My local woods are a mixture of native broadleaf - oak, ash and beech and planted conifers, mainly spruce and larch. It is not the natural, primeval woodland that our ancestors would have known but it’s all we’ve got left. The paradox is that as people have become more urbanised and sedated by TV, Wii’s and broadband they now go to the woods less than they did a generation or two ago – this has allowed the woods to become wilder and less managed, and for the animals that live in them to expand and re-populate. There are otters in the river now whereas when I was a kid in the 1970s nobody would have believed they would have come back. Last weekend I flushed out a brown hare that was as big as a labrador! Personally I would love to retreat even further away into the hills but you need to strike a balance between isolation and the need to earn a living.
4.How does TenHornedBeast record its songs? Do you have a preference between digital and analog recording technology?
All my songs are recorded digitally. I can not imagine going back to using analog technology, I did that in the early years of Endvra because that was all we had – it was slow, laborious and did not allow for any fine control of the sounds. I’m not a musical purist at all, I don’t get excited about amps, guitars, vinyl or any of that bullshit that supposedly enhances the authenticity of the music. All that matters to me is the end product – the way I get to that end product is matterless, I am prepared to throw out any aspect of the work if it doesn’t fit and to spend as long as it takes to get it right but in doing so I want to be able to work quickly, easily and to have as much control over what’s going on as possible. If other people want to record to tape and splice things by hand let them.
5.How long does a typical TenHornedBeast track take from conception to recording to mixing? Have your refined and improved this process over the years?
Some songs take a very long time. Because I record at home and work alone I don’t have to worry about studio time or fitting around other peoples schedules, this means I can work on as many or as few pieces as I want. Sometimes, if the muse takes me, I’ll complete a piece very quickly other times I will spend months or years revising and tweaking a track, recording many different versions until I am happy that I have caught its essence. The songs on the “Hunts & Wars” album, which I have just “finished” have been in existence since 2005, being worked and re-worked. The process is unrefinable – I know what I want but I don’t always know how to get it, or having got “it” I find that actually I now want something else. I have in the past spent months recording and mixing a piece only to wake up the next day and scrap it all, I’m not interested in just releasing things, it has to be right and I have to be happy with it.
6.On several of your releases you have utilised runic imagery within the artwork of TenHornedBeast. Do these images have any significant meaning?
I have used an inverted Algiz rune on the split CD with Marzuraan and on the remix CD there is a sigil composed of a bindrune and several skulls, the bindrune is two inverted Algiz runes and an Sowilo rune. I find the runes fascinating for many reasons, firstly I took my degree in medieval literature and I am interested in the language and literature of Northern Europe, but secondly I am interested in the layers of meaning and symbolism that have clung to the runes over the years, including the use they were put to in the twentieth century. The runes are like waves, or starlight – they have been travelling for a long time and although the original idea that generated them may no longer exist they continue to resonate with that energy, and other energies that have adhered to them as they travelled. So when I use an inverted Algiz rune I am well aware that it was used by the Allgemeine and Waffen SS to denote death and that the Sowilo rune is as much a symbol of the Hitlerjugend as it is a representation of divine wisdom earthing through the fulguration of a lightning bolt.
I think at their most pure the runes are an ur-source of inspiration and symbolic meaning that goes back into the deeps of our ancient northern European past and those who look within themselves will find that they carry them already encoded in their being – just as Havamal tells us Odin hung on a tree and won the runes by sacrificing himself to himself. One of my favourite pieces of rune lore is the myth that the runes reflect the angular, branching shapes of trees; from a palaeographic perspective this is probably erroneous but I can see why the link happened and whilst it is probably true that the futharks that we know today are adapted from Latin and Etruscan alphabets I think that it is also true that at their earliest incarnation the proto-runes were symbolic representations of those things people saw about them – trees, the horns of aurochs, lightning, the sun, serpents, spears, axe-heads, women.
7.Cold Spring Records is set to issue a CD of remixes from “The Sacred Truth”, called “My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth”, how does this differ from the original album? How did the idea of remix album come about?
The idea came about because Cold Spring asked me to consider remixing some of the tracks. When I was first asked I didn’t want to do it because I was already sick of that material and had started to work on other tracks with a different tone and character but when I considered again I saw that within some of the pieces were other sounds, other constructs that were buried way down in the mix that I could bring to the fore.
The track on “My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth” are not straight “remixes”, rather they are re-recordings or even totally new tracks using sounds from the earlier pieces. During the recording of “The Sacred Truth” some of the pieces grew into monsters and became difficult to control, for instance the track “In The Teeth Of The Wolf” just expanded into a very complex and difficult piece that took months to mix down – in the end I was happy with the final version but there were so many things buried in the mix that when I stripped them away and opened the track up so that the two duelling lead guitars could be heard I realised that by contracting and deconstructing the pieces something new could be made, so “In The Teeth Of The Wolf” was taken to bits and rebuilt into “Fenris Wolf”.
8.What can we expect from the new full length album, “Hunts & Wars”?
Something quite different from the material on “The Sacred Truth” and “My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth”. If I was a synaesthetic I would describe “The Sacred Truth” in very earthy and telluric terms, it reminds me of blacks and browns and very deep shades where as “Hunts & Wars” – to me at least – is much more epic and golden. With “Hunts & Wars” I was influenced to a large extent by the writings of Lord Dunsany and Robert E Howard, the phrase Hunts & Wars is taken from Howard’s poem “Cimmeria”, where he describes a dream-memory of a land of dark wooded hills. I tried to capture the grandeur and sense of scale of these writers in the music and I also set out to allow the music to be much more “progressive” and structured – I used a lot of percussion, gongs, drums and bass and whilst a lot of the music has ambient textures it is not a dark-ambient album. I “finished” the album in early January 2009 – you never really finish recording anything but at least I came to a point where I felt that any further work would do more harm than good. This will be released on Cold Spring Records.
9.How do you regard the current ease of recording and releasing albums compared to times past? Do you feel this has been better for artists to express themselves or just created a glut of records?
Regardless of what I feel there actually is a glut of records, you don’t need to be Columbo to work out that increased access to recording technology and the ease by which people can duplicate CD-r has lead to a lot of music being “released” and that a lot of this music is not just in limited editions it is also of limited merit. The worst culprits are the so-called Noise and Drone artists, this is probably the easiest music to do badly and a lot of people are doing it very badly - however the best always rise to the surface and those with creativity, passion and something interesting to say will make their mark and get their music released on quality labels using professional formats – the rest can carry on releasing 200 CD-r’s a year in editions of anything from 3 to 15 units. You know who you a
