James Canton takes us on an adventure through England, seeking to see through more ancient eyes, in Grounded: A Journey Through Landscapes, Sanctuaries and Sacred Places. Photo: Supplied.
The emotions that emanate as you stand in silence, in stillness, bring forth a welcome peace, a sense of feeling grounded. Simple sentiments, but they evoke the “need to realign my sense of what was sacred in the landscape around me”.
Dr James Canton comprehends that our natural world has never been under more threat. So, if we relocate our sense of wonder, veneration and awe in the landscapes around us, we might just be better at saving it.
He takes us on a journey across ancient England: from stone monuments to sacred groves, places of pilgrimage and sites of religious worship … to help us understand the people who came before us. For thousands of years, our ancestors held a close connection with the landscapes they lived in.
Canton is seeking that lost connection. Like a visit to the 13th-century St James’ Chapel, near the village of Lindsey, Suffolk. The chapel of flint beneath a thatched roof, in a peaceful countryside setting, was built around 1250. It may have been associated with a nearby monastery on the site of Chapel Farm. St James’ Chapel was probably built to serve the Castle of Lindsey, whose earthwork remains lie just southeast of the chapel site.
Those first steps to the chapel were the start of a journey, a personal crusade.
“I was driven by a keen curiosity to seek out those places where there was a sense of calm that seemed to seep from the earth, or from the buildings that had been built upon that ground,” Canton writes. His descriptions are vivid, the words deeply emotional.
“…. Inside the chapel, a dim light reveals a bare, stone-walled space – an earthen floor. It is so cold. I peer about me – at the bare walls, at the wooden table at one end, at the fractured light in the window. There is a stillness here which is so tangible. It is not of this world. I close my eyes and simply stand there alone in the silence. There is a peace in this place that is profoundly appealing.
“Tucked down in this most elemental place, enclosed in the darkness, the notion strikes me that I am actually in some ancient cave under a stone roof and with that thought comes a sense of security and solidity that seems to fill my body. I open my eyes. There is the same square space: just flint and brick and mortar and air. But within me there is calm of a sort that I have not known for months and that seems to have come merely by being here, by spending a few moments away from the mundane world beyond these aged walls, by simply stepping into this sacred place.
“I feel earthed. I am grounded. For a moment more, I stand immersed in that square of stone and silence. There is nothing but this bare, frozen place and my presence here on this small patch of ground. In that stark simplicity, all fears fade.”
Across human time, certain places upon the earth have been seen as especially significant. It appears the easiest route was to look to those who had gone before, to see how others in times past had made sense of the world, how they had seen the lands around them. They imbued it with meaning. In our modern world we have to a large extent lost that enchantment and intimate knowledge of place.
The director of Wild Writing at the University of Essex understands that history and meaning are encoded into the lands and places we live in, if only we take the time to look. We are taken on a journey through England seeking to see through more ancient eyes, to understand what landscape meant to those who came before us.
We visit stone circles, the West Kennet long barrow, a Crusader round church and sites of religious visions. We meet the Dagenham Idol and the intricately carved Lion Man figure. We find artefacts buried in farmers’ fields.
Everyone has times when they wish to peer more deeply into the profound reality of what we are as living individual beings, what life is all about. It was a time of reflection in Canton’s life, some more basic existential calling.
From the author of The Oak Papers comes a beautiful meditation on how to foster a profound and healing spiritual communion with the natural world.
Grounded: A Journey Through Landscapes, Sanctuaries and Sacred Places, by James Canton, Black Inc., $32.99
