Back from a weekend away. Purely by coincidence, the friends we visited live within a stone’s throw of Harrow on the Hill, which made an impressive silhouette against Saturday’s sunset.
But back to business, such as it is. I’m going to allow myself until the end of the week to finish deconstructing Hollow Hills, after which the plan is that I’ll be in a position to structure the project(!?). Yes, that is the plan. And I do feel that this period of analysis is helping me to see where the potential ‘art’ lies after such a long period of uncertainty.
Also, I realise I’ve never set down here the reason for the project’s title. If you know that a howe is a barrow, then it becomes obvious. I think it’s a local name here – certainly, there’s both a Howe Hill and a How Hill. Not to mention a village named Howe. Surely it also relates to hlaew and lowe. I’d find all this stuff interesting enough if a barrow always meant a grave mound, pure and simple. But knowing that the fact that something is a natural hill is no bar to it being called a barrow, and that a grave mound can be called a hill, just seems amazingly intriguing. I need to continue to think about the implications of this, and how to translate my own intrigued-ness into something that might intrigue others. Anyway, back to Jeremy Harte’s article:
The early antiquaries, when trying to describe gravemounds to each other, were often at a loss which word to choose. Sir Thomas Browne speaks of ‘artificial hills, mounts, or barrows’ in correspondence with Dugdale, who had consulted two other scholars on the subject, none of them being certain what the monuments really were. Lambarde, in 1576, calls them ‘Barowes . . . which signifieth Sepulchres’. Leland refers to gravemounds west of Exmoor by the local word tors, adding that they ‘be round hillockes of yerth cast up of auncient tym for markes and limites’, with never a mention of sepulchres. As a rule, writers until the 1690s communicated the connection of barrows with burials as a fresh discovery. From the Isle of Wight, Sir John Oglander noted triumphantly that ‘buries’ were ‘hills whose name in ye Danische tounge signifieth theyre nature . . . Dig and you shall find theyre bones’. In 1621 two speculators turned up ‘to dig in a hill at Upway . . . for some treasure that lies hidden underground’, but three days’ labour turned up ‘nothing but a few bones’.
Here again we have that fluidity as to the names and natures of hills. Also we now have the search for treasure – or bones – or treasure that turns out to be bones. Also we have the first appearance of the ‘Danische’ – i.e. the Vikings, as the likely inhabitants of such hills.
What constitiutes treasure, anyway?
