If beorh had always meant a hill rather than a grave, it is easy to see how the passage of a thousand years might obliterate the memory that certain hills had once been raised over the dead. The notions of country people about barrows show little memory of their purpose: the tumuli on Bincombe Down, to which the disgruntled commissioners of 1621 trudged after wrecking Upwey, were known principally for the fairy music which could be heard from inside if you put your ear to the top at noon. Something similar was proposed by James Walsh, the cunning man of Netherbury, when hauled up before the authorities at Exeter in 1566 and asked how he was able to commune with the fairies. ‘He speaketh with them upon hyls, where as there is great heapes of earth, as namely in Dorsetshire. And betwene the houres of xii and one at noone, or at midnight he vseth them’.
Earlier, in the fifteenth century, a recipe for summoning a fairy involves burying hazel wands ‘under some hill whereas you suppose fayries haunt’. In the 1670s a Yorkshire healer did his business ‘with a white powder which, he said, he received from the Fairies, and that going to a Hill he knocked three times, and the Hill opened, and he had access to, and converse with a visible people’. He was acquitted, though not without the threat of a whipping.
It seems that fairy hills, like the Tardis, are larger inside than out. Isobel Gowdie ‘went in to the Downie hills: the hill opened, and we came to a fair and large braw room in the day time. Another woman accused of witchcraft, to the far north in Orkney, confessed to seeing a fairy people rise out of the hill called Greinfall as they made their way to feast at the expense of mortals during Yule. In 1613 Isobel Halfdane of Perth was carried out of her bed and into a fairy hill, where she stayed for three days learning secret knowledge.
Among the arts of the seventeeth-century ‘walker between the worlds’, then, was a knowledge of fairy hills. Some of these were what we would call hills, some were what we would call barrows: fairies and magicians, like the Anglo-Saxons, saw no difference between them.
Today’s chunk of Hidden Hills deals with hills or barrows (I note again that no difference between them seems to have been made) which have traditionally been seen as a habitation of the fairy folk. From the perspective of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlers in Norfolk, these supernatural hill-dwellers would presumably be equally likely to be seen as elves, wights, trolls, giants and dragons. There is also a line of thought that the Iron Age Eceni tribe looked to Scandinavia for their stories (Eceni coins seem to show Northern myths, cosmology and even a version of Woden) – and who knows how far back before them? Norfolk is right out there, sticking out into the North Sea and may have had more in common with tribes from the North Sea basin than with those in other parts of Britain.
Now I realise I need to start thinking again about how these notions (which excite me, at least!) might actually inform an art project. One question is how far it should be ‘local’ to Norfolk. I think it has to be, in that I am here and it’s the layers in the landscape under my feet (and all around, in every conceivable medium) that I want to draw attention to. Starting out with my first ideas, I thought that the ‘hills in Norfolk’ thing might be a reaction to all those who – and believe me, this is sooooo common – when confronted with the words ‘hill’ and ‘Norfolk’ will assure you that the county is completely flat, usually by quoting Noel Coward. The dozens of hill names I know I can find on large scale maps of Norfolk will surprise those people. I’m looking forward to that as part of the project, but beyond that I need to seek – if it’s not a contradiction in terms – depth.
