08/02/2017
A description of a wonderful day out in Somerset, by Jordi Viatges Foraster. Beautiful writing Jordi!
Clare is a really busy woman. Today she had yoga but she left to drive me to Stanton Drew stone circle, the second or third most important after Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is a most spectacular and important English stone circle but now it is full of tourists, with an interpretation centre and closed with a fence to prevent the stones from being touched.
Stanton Drew is a little village with farmers and typical English country houses, a little church with a cemetery beside it, and three fields where you can find ancient stone circles. One of them, the biggest is composed of two concentric circles, the small more complete than the big. In a side field there are more stones, and also between the church and the pub, where you can see three big stones.
I was surprised to find big stones in the middle of the grass field, specially transported and placed from far away. They have time marks, erosion, many holes and covered by microscopic lichens on their shady side. We turned around some of them, and hugged others waiting to receive something. We don’t believe and don’t allow ourselves to believe, but we know these stones have been here for millenia standing under day and night, watching the pass of thousands of generations, peace and war, culture and inculture, love and hate, like the trees which I sometimes also hug.
After, we visited the church and cemetery. The village and the church, remind me of the little Pyrenees villages full of little churches, with their square tower and with a little cemetery at the side.
All in all we aren’t so different, English and Catalans.
