Tag: The Ice Age

What if a mammoth

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was found buried beneath the snow?

What if it was found by a ragged band of hunters
and amongst them was a young man who spoke a single word
that rolled like a stone from the back of his throat onto the tip of his tongue
recalling the unblocking of a passageway to an ancient cave

where an unknown creature was painted in red ochre with long tusks?

What if, when he spoke its name, those old bones
and the ragged chunks of skin and dirty frozen clumps of fur
began to shudder and something massive began to raise itself from the ice?

What if, when it shook itself off, the boy climbed onto its back like a monkey?

Would you stare with eyes wide as frozen lakes or would you run
or would you take his hand, climb onto mammoth-back,
put your arms around his chest and ride away?

I wrote this poem based on a journey I undertook to find out more about my haunting by visions of mammoth graveyards. I have recently found out such places exist, for example at Yana-Indighirka and Volchya Griva in Siberia and that, more disturbingly, as the ice melts due to climate change, more mammoth remains are being exposed. This has sparked a ‘Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush’ and, in Yukatia, guided tours to mammoth graveyards are being offered along with the opportunity to join hunts.

I also discovered that people in Dolní Věstonice, in the Czech Republic, and in Mezherich, in Russia, built houses out of elaborately arranged mammoth bones and that, at Kostenski, a 40 foot circular building created from the bones of 60 mammoths was unearthed – possibly a temple? These buildings are some of our oldest examples of human architecture and are suggestive of a spiritual relationship with the massive creatures with whom they shared their tundral landscape. Such care and shared communal use contrasts with the individualistic money-grabbing in our time.

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) roamed not only Siberia but Europe during the Ice Age. Its remains have been found in Scotland but are most concentrated in southern England, where the glaciers did not reach for so long, particularly on the Thames.

Remains of the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii), the woolly mammoth’s older larger predecessor, dating back 600,000 years, have been found on West Runton Beach in Norfolk.

It seems likely the mammoth played a central part in the religion and culture of Paleolithic people in Europe too. The Red Lady of Paviland (who was really a male hunter) was buried with mammoth ivory in Paviland Cave, on the Gower Peninsula, 33,000 years ago and is our earliest ritual burial. In the Franco-Cantabrian caves are numerous paintings of mammoths including the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths in Rouffignac.

There is a mammoth-shaped hole in our psyches which cannot be filled in an interglacial. Yet the memories of mammoths continue to speak to us in visions, in dreams, and, more hauntingly, in physical reality as their remains are removed from the ice.

Memories of the Ice Age

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Speak to me of dead ice
and glacial erratics.

Tell me the tales
of wandering stones* –

granodiorite from Southern Scotland,
Criffel granite, Shap granite, Eskdale granite,
granite from Loch Doon, Borrowdale volcanics,
Thornton limestone, Chatburn limestone.

Speak to me of glaciers that had no names.

Speak to me not of the death of your children
and how they laid their gravestones
in a ritual long long lost to us.

Speak to me not of your sacrifice in shaping this land.

We must be as stone
and not mourn the snowflakes
vanishing from the palms of our hands.

Outside the office at Brockholes Nature Reserve there is a 2.5 tonne boulder made of grandiorite which was extracted from Number One Pit beside the M6. Unlike the sandstone boulders nearby it does not fit with our local geology. This has led geologists to the conclusion it was transported from the Lake District or Southern Scotland by a glacier during the Last Ice Age 115,000– 11,700 years ago.

This reached its maximum 24,000 years ago and two of the ice advances, Heinrich 2 and 4**, extended to and covered Lancashire and Cheshire, whilst Heinrich 1 and Loch Lomond did not. When the glaciers melted they deposited their ‘suspended load’ of ‘boulder clay’ or ‘glacial till’. At Brockholes the sand and gravel were 20 metres thick leading to the area being used a quarry.

With these materials the grandiorite boulder was removed along with other erratics such as granite from South Scotland, Borrowdale Volcanics from the Lake District, and Chatburn Limestone from Clitheroe. The sandstone boulders near the car park may be local or from Pendle Hill or Longridge Fell.

Near Kirkham and Oldham, where ‘the rate of the ice melt’ was ‘equal to the movement of the ice sheet’ for a long period of time, lines of moraine (accumulations of glacial till), were deposited.

The vast volumes of water from the melting glaciers were also responsible for forging the valley of the Ribble – ‘the meander belt between the river cliffs is too wide to have been created’ by the river.

When dead ice was left behind by glaciers, became surrounded by sediment, then melted, it left kettle holes. This resulted in the formation of lakes such as Martin Mere and Marton Mere and the others that formed Lancashire’s Region Linuis ‘Lake Region’ and some of its numerous ponds.***

Since then we have dug out the sand and gravel and drained the lakes yet new lakes have formed in old pits. Number One Pit at Brockholes, where the grandiorite boulder was found, is now a lake and 182 species of birds have been recorded there including bittern, curlew, lapwing, and sand martins.

The Nature Reserve as we know it has originated from a combination of geological and man-made factors. In the shaping of the land during the Last Ice Age I see the work of Winter’s King and his glacial children. When I touch the glacial erratics or watch birds descending onto the lakes I see his hand.

*The term ‘erratic’ originates from the Latin errare ‘to wander’.
**Heinrich events are caused by the the collapse of northern hemisphere ice shelves and release of icebergs which affect the climate elsewhere.
***Most of the present-day ponds in Lancashire formed in former marl pits dug in the 18th century.

With thanks to Geolancashire from whose Brockholes Geotrail Guide I gained most of this information.

Birch Wood

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Birch trees. Carr Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a land of ash with no future.
Out of the ice age they came, colonizers
Silver-black and delicately snake skinned,
Shedding white edged leaves on the ash-clad winds

And singing do you remember, remember
The ice age and peat and lost Vindolanda,
Sentinel cities and burying oaths
Enstyled on bright birch to placate the world?

And singing do you remember, remember
The strange black peal of the blacksmith’s hammer,
Street lights of amber and echoing roads,
Cities estranged by the gathering smoke?

And singing do you remember, remember
How empire fell that fatal November,
Civilized monuments crashing to dust,
Swaying white fields and the soft song of ghosts?

Silver-black and delicately snake skinned,
Shedding white edged leaves on the ash-clad winds
Out of the ice age they came, colonizers.
Their land was ash, with an unknown future.

Birch trees, Carr Wood

Winter Ride

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Preston

 

 

 

 

 

Fay bells chime. You ride a pale horse tonight.
My white mare pines for infinite horizons.

From this false security’s plastic peace
I breathe a prayer for ecstatic release.

Wrenched like tendons, reality is severed.
You open a snow storm, marvel and terror,

suburb stripped bare, hung trees and glittering ice,
a spectral host bathed in sweeping starlight.

Some people don’t see them. The rest run scared.
With my reckless steed I join the nightmare.

Our heart beats quicken to Annwn’s dread trance.
Street lamps flicker. Roofs slip into the distance.

Fairy lights and festive chants spread the county
from Blackpool Tower to Winter Hill, bright fountains

dissolve to torch parades. The present falters
revealing a past of village and bonfire,

chill chapped hands, hungry gatherings at cauldrons,
a labyrinth of padways mazed across Pilling

buried by snow fall, entombed beneath glaciers.
A cold unbearable sets in to kill.

And I fear I’m trapped in the Age of Ice
on the day of doom at the end of time

I cannot move my frozen mind. I scream
“Why? Winter King, bear me to these extremes?”

Your look commands; survey this fragile land,
ice crafting the mythos you toil to grasp,

reshaping the hills, renaming the towns,
creating the isle you know as Britain.

Wild laughter rings from the hollow landscape.
The fate of worlds tilts on a teetering brink.

I see your task, unruly guardian
of streaming vast ancestral tradition.

History rushes back and my course is clear,
My return to Penwortham swiftly steered,

shaking off snow, flexing my cold fingers,
I whisper thanks for your winter visions.