Tag: nt/FOGOU

He goes inside, angrily scuffing dirt off his boots on a mat already saturated with mud and crusted in woodland debris. 

The stone walls swallow the sound.  He always feels an obscure sense of punishment in here.

“I could always leave,” he says to the walls.  But the house knows he can’t and so does he.

He wrestles with the boot jack and pads into the house on thick socks in need of darning at the toes.  Do people still darn?, he wonders, looking down at this own feet.  That felt like an archaic word.  Darning was probably a lost skill, buried in the garden of the modern under the boxes that the cheap replacement goods arrived in from the internet.  Who darned a sock when a few coins brought new socks to your door?  Well.  Not coins.  It’s not like the people in the town and the city touched money any more.  Money was a signal.  It teleported from bank to bank in little flurries of sparks.

Banknotes were only invented fourteen hundred years ago. The oldest coins made in Britain were struck in bronze two thousand years ago. The fogou was probably three thousand years old.  No money had ever sparkled here. 

He had wanted to manage and maintain the purity of this place.  His stupid modern arrogance.  The costs of mystery are counted in things other than money.

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He had wondered if the use of a fogou did not in fact connect across theories.

What if, during a long period of upheaval and invasion, people went down into fogous not to hide, but to escape?  What if they passed through a door into Annwn?

Or had believed they had.  He imagined a ritual use of magic mushrooms, datura stramonium, white henbane.  Persons gathering their flocks in times of deadly fright, giving them entheogens and poison to drink as they prayed before the wall and waited for it to open and gather them into Annwn.  His wife called it the Jim Jones Hypothesis.

He and his wife had carefully cut a single exploratory trench out of the floor of the fogou.  There were human bones under the thick cold mud, none of which exhibited cut-marks from sword or axe.  But not enough to suggest the fogou as site of a suicide exodus to Heaven.  Further trenches, they agreed, could compromise the structure of the fogou. One day, when things calmed down out there, they would arrange for geophysics surveys.

But things did not calm down out there.

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He wanders back towards his little stone cell of a house.

The clattering plastic drone swarm broke his sensorium utterly.  A cacophony of birds and insects, now, and the distant machinic hum of the town and the city.

They – the town and the city, the other people from the other world – told him over and over it was unlikely fogous were used for ritual, as druids practised in the open air and their belief system was tied to living things.

The problem with that argument is that nobody really knows what druids believed or practised, because they didn’t write anything down and no practise of theirs survived into modern history.  They were an oral culture, relying on memory rather than paper.  Whatever they actually did, it went extinct with them on the tip of a Roman sword.

Further: everything was a living thing. 

He stopped at the standing stone closest to his house, and laid his palm on its face.  He closed his eyes, and tried to force out the world and focus down on the stone. 

There.  That.  The geologic heartbeat.

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A fogou is an underground chamber.  There are several of them here in Cornwall, and also in Brittany.  At some point in the distant past, there was a drive among these people to claw slopes into the ground, and to dig out rooms beneath the grass.

Nobody knows why.  Some said they were storage areas, but nobody living through a Cornish winter, or even a Cornish spring, can believe that.  The slopes become mudslides and the chambers fill with rainwater.  Some said they were hiding places, where villagers could shelter from raiders.  But, with only one entrance point, fogous would surely become traps and kill-boxes.

Fogous share one property.  The opposite end of the chamber from the entrance tunnel is a flat wall.  Hence its other proposed possible use: a ritual space.  In many mythologies from the west of the British Isles, the Other World, Heaven, Annwn, the place of gods and the dead, was underground. 

The wall was a door, if you could learn to see it.  And beyond it was the Other World.  In times past, he believed, people came down into a fogou to commune, and to travel.

He knew someone had travelled.  He lived alone now because someone had travelled.

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He stands as still as he can and listens for the breathing of the trees.

He stands so still, in this place so silent, that sometimes he can hear the hiss of blood in his own brain.  He tries to tune that out, and to seek instead the sound of sugars being pulsed through cellulose. The tidal ripple of stomata moving air.  The micrometer rising of bark.

He wants that moment where he can feel his place secretly alive.  If it is alive, then it is complicit.

There is the sound of angry plastic bees in flight, and he looks up to see a cloud of drones passing over the northern line of his property.  Heading back to the town in the distance, perhaps even the city beyond the town.  He can no longer remember the names of these places.  They are just the town and the city.  Less names than pronouncements.  Or sentences from his bench.

They’re still watching him, even now, because of what they think he did.

His courtroom is an old stone house, a scattering of outbuildings, twenty wild acres, and the reason he and his wife bought this place, three years previously.  He looks in its direction, past the stands of trees, the scrub and the bracken, the bushes and the ponds, even the standing stones leaning drunken with the exhaustion of millennia on their feet.

Over there.  Its gravity plucking at his skin even from all the way out of sight over there.  The fogou.

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