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The Green Man

 

[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]

 

As a child, my bedroom overlooked the village green. I have been fond of greens ever since. Ours was the meeting point for my brother and me and our two friends from over the road. It was our amphitheatre: the scene of day-long two-on-two rugby matches and our cricket pitch for many years (with the twin hazards of horrific bounce after the cows had been herded over the green, and the risk of lost ball if an exuberant hook sent it flying into the garden of the grumpy man who lived in the squatter’s cottage [one hastily erected within 24 hours a couple of centuries ago] in the centre of the green).

Village greens are the essence of rural England and Wales. A green is any land on which a significant number of inhabitants of any area has indulged in lawful sports and pastimes, for 20 years, as of right. Story-book images of village greens tend to be of an expanse of grass in the centre of a village complete with oak tree and seat, or a carefully-manicured recreation ground just outside the village, where cricket is played in the lengthening shadows of a summer evening, and the villagers dance round the maypole.

Historically, a village green was common grassland with a pond for watering cattle and other stock, often at the edge of a rural settlement, used for gathering cattle to bring them later on to a common land for grazing. Most village greens in England originated in the Middle Ages. Individual greens may have been created for various reasons, including protecting livestock from wild animals or human raiders during the night, or providing a space for market trading. Later, planned greens were built into the centres of villages. The village green also provided, and may still provide, an open-air meeting place for the local people, which may be used for public celebrations such as May Day festivities.

Apt then, given that it was the beginning of May, that the pub on this pretty, bucolic village green was called The Green Man.

Found in some variant in many cultures throughout the world and spanning almost all of history, the Green Man is perhaps best described as a motif or a symbol. No two representations of the Green Man are the same, and they manifest a bewildering variety of features, but the Green Man is essentially a face or head sprouting, surrounded by, or even entirely made from, leaves and foliage.

He is most commonly found carved in wood or stone in medieval European churches and cathedrals, and is usually interpreted as a symbol of rebirth or the cycle of growth each spring.

Unlike with dragons, lions, centaurs, mermaids and other images of Christian iconography, we have no old tales or medieval literature to satisfactorily explain the meaning of the Green Man. The origins of the phenomenon are lost in the mists of time, and he has waxed and waned throughout history in both his presence and his influence, although never quite disappearing.

In the modern world of increased environmental consciousness and New Age sensibilities, the idea of the Green Man has once more struck a resounding chord and has been co-opted in recent years for any number of purposes, ranging from corporate advertising to environmental campaigns to pagan festivals.

Although the Green Man is most often seen incorporated as a carved decorative ornamentation on European churches and other buildings, dating from the 11th Century right through to the 20th Century, these were not the first Green Men.

It was Roman artists and sculptors who first developed composite figures (such as those in Nero’s Golden House in Rome), as well as complex carvings of life-like intertwined vegetation. Indeed, Dionysus is often considered one of the most likely precursors to the Green Man of the Middle Ages, especially given his usual portrayal as leaf-crowned lord of the wilderness, nature and agriculture. 

According to the sign on the front of the pub, ‘The Green Man was one of the names given to the leaf-clad Mummer, approx 1775-85. He was a chimney sweep who walked encased in a framework of wood or wickerwork which was covered with leaves and sometimes surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. He would dance on May Day and other pageants at the head of the procession to clear the way. Other Mummers would surround him and collect money from the crowd. As time went by the Green Man or ‘Jack’ was accepted as a sign of May Day celebrations.’

The Gaelic festival of Beltane is one of the Europe-wide celebrations of spring that takes place on May Day (see my piece on Imbolc too, the spring equinox festivity.)

One of the four quarter day festivals, Beltane saw members of communities come together to celebrate the return of the summer. The observance of this hugely important time in the turning of the wheel of the year was characterised by a celebration of the return of the fertility of the land, and would have been a time when livestock would have been put out to pasture.

The word ‘Beltane’ roughly translates as ‘bright fire’ and, as such, one of the most important rituals, which survives today in the modern festival, concerns the lighting of the Beltane bonfire. Fire was seen as a purifier and healer and would have been walked around and danced/jumped over by the members of the community. Farmers would also have driven their cattle between bonfires to cleanse and protect them before being put out into the fields. It is about casting off the darkness and celebrating the light. Particularly fitting this year, after months of cold wet weather and the great gloom of a locked-down year.

‘The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said,’ 

wrote Larkin.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Cheered not only by the green trees, the village green, and the fact that the Green Man pub was opening in a couple of hours, I cycled out of the village (past the old telephone box now converted into a community larder and library, past the Polling Station where votes were being cast in local elections across the country: Green voters across the country made clear their hope for a Greener future after the Covid pandemic, perhaps due to the difference in most countries between a real climate policy and greenwashing guff.)

I turned down a rutted farm track wedged between hedges of hawthorn and holly. The verges were flush with bluebells, a clue that this was once ancient woodland, for some woodland species linger like lonely ghosts once the trees themselves have been felled, their roots grubbed out and the land turned over to cattle.

I blooming love May. Everything is blooming and beginning again, even in the unremarkable landscapes of southeast England. I pootle happily down grassy footpaths, unlikely to accidentally veer off course with the abundance of passive aggressive ‘please keep to the path’ signs (backed up with ‘no through route’ signs plastered everywhere away from the slender green line I’m permitted to tread). But this is a morning for expansive enjoyment, so I choose not to feel unwelcome.

The morning after rain the air is warm and fresh. Blue sky, white clouds, and the hornbeam trees – the hardest wood in Europeun, chosen by the Romans for building chariots –furling their new green leaves above banks of greater stitchwort’s pretty, star-shaped, white flowers. Greater stitchwort grows in woodland and along roadside verges, hedgerows and grassy banks. It has many other common names, including ‘wedding cakes’, ‘Star-of-Bethlehem’, ‘daddy’s-shirt-buttons’ and ‘Snapdragon’ – the latter because its stems are brittle and easily break. Its pretty, star-shaped, white flowers bloom from April to June; as the seed capsules ripen, they can be heard ‘popping’ in late spring.

I shove my way through a tangled overgrown byway and emerge into a shaded woodland resplendent with bluebells, carpeting the earth in every direction. Some things you can make look more beautiful with a camera – faces, for example – whilst other things, like bluebells, look better to the eye than they ever do with a camera. You have to go the woods and actually see them for yourself to get the true effect, which is a reward for being out here, I guess. I do my best to capture the flowers’ effect, but the glory I see all around me trumps anything I can conjure up down my lens.

The footpath is pocked with horses’ hoof prints and I wonder idly why they wear shoes but other animals do not. Wild horses amble long distances daily, usually over rough grassland, which gradually builds up hard hooves. Domestic horses usually grow weaker hooves because of intermittent exercise, often over softer, damper ground, and sometimes exacerbated by an unbalanced diet. In horses expected to perform arduous rides on hard surfaces, horseshoes can prevent particularly weak hooves wearing and splitting.

 

I certainly need to wear shoes here, for the path slicing through the field of green spring wheat is strewn with sharp white nodules of flint. The formation of flint is a complex process which began in the chalk seas millions of years ago. Organisms such as sponges use silica from sea water to manufacture the biogenic opal which forms their skeletons. When the organisms die and the organic parts decay the microscopic silica is scattered on the sea bed and becomes incorporated in the accumulating sediment. The chalk sea bed is deeply burrowed by many different organisms, such as shells, echinoids and worms etc. Some of these burrows are quite deep or branching, or have open living spaces. The burrows fill with sediment after the organism has died, this is slightly different material from the sediment around it. These filled burrows act as preferential pathways (conduits) for the chemical reactions to occur. Flint formed within these old burrows often has a nodular shape which reflects the whole, or part of, overgrown remnants of such burrow systems. 

Early in human evolution people discovered that stone can be used to make tools. They found that flint, which is close behind diamond in hardness, fractures easily to give razor sharp edges. In the Palaeolithic period, or early stone age, humans developed great skill at fashioning beautiful tools such as hand axes. People were nomadic hunter-gatherers who probably made tools on the spot to skin and butcher large game. Later, in the Mesolithic or middle stone age, still nomadic, people developed skills at making flake tools including tiny Microliths that could be mounted in a wooden shaft to make arrows or spears and the first purpose-designed carpentry tools like a Tranchet adze. In the Neolithic or new stone age, people began to live in agricultural settlements. They had time to make intricately flaked tools such as scythes and polished axes.

My circle almost complete, I concede to myself that a fair part of my mind today has been taken up by looking forward to returning to The Green Man. It’s the first pub that has been open on my map due to the dreariness of COVID. So I make haste back to the village green to sit outside in the sunshine and sip my first hand-pulled beer in far too long. It is, needless to say, exquisite.

I’m halfway through my year on this map, 26 weeks and 26 squares down. As I sip my pint (resisting the urge to down it in one and settle in for an all-day session) I think a little about the experience of getting outside and seeing what is different every week of the year. Documenting it as I go is helping me pay proper attention (as opposed to, say, walking the dog with my headphones in). I’ve immersed myself in the turning of the seasons, explored places I never knew existed and learned a lot of random information about the world.

I have also established a better feel for the area on my map than I have ever managed in many years of long distance runs and bike rides around its lanes. I’m beginning to work out a circle of land on my map that is my real favourite area to explore. I’m enjoying the built-up grid squares more than I thought I would and enjoying the agricultural squares less so, for their monocultures and mania for keep out signs means there is little to catch the eye.

With half my year on this map under my belt, any grid square with a patch of woodland on it wins my affections the most. I love being in the trees whatever the season or weather. Yet whilst today’s coffee in the bluebell wood was delightful, not even that could match a beer in the sunshine, with summer and freedom on the horizon once more.

 

 

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