Winter Solstice walk 2017 - part 1


Winter Solstice walk 2017 from Long Compton to Charlbury via Rollright Stone circle.

The purpose of the walk was to use the time and location to develop some work I am doing making drawings in movement. It was also an opportunity to spend some time thinking about the experience of being alone in a landscape.

This walk was to have been three days, from Shipston-on-Stour to Charlbury, but I caught a cold that led to bronchitis, so my health wasn't quite up to three days unfortunately. I chose instead to walk from Long Compton to Chipping Norton via the Rollright Stones  the first day, then to make the decision to walk on to Charlbury the next morning, depending on how I felt.

The Solstice and the Stones
The winter solstice is to me the most hopeful of the pagan festivals. Since midsummer, the days have been getting shorter and shorter. At Samhain/Hallows Eve the darkness has really got a hold of us and the season between then and midwinter is for me the most creative time of the year. It's a time of dark and cold and a time of rigour, a time when we are tested. The physicality of the natural world touches all of us in winter, no matter how urbanised we are, the ice, fog, frosts and rains affect everyone.

It's also a time for fairy tales and ghost stories, a time for ancient things to be remembered. The foliage is dead or dying and the bones of the land and it's trees are revealed. Winter is a time for wights and graves, for archaeology and stone circles, for embracing melancholy and revelling in solitariness.

And then, in the middle of all that, there is the solstice, the shortest day. It won't get any darker now. This is the lovely moment, in the middle of the dark and cold and mud, when the distant song of summer and growth and green things is promised. I love it.


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