Sitting Where The Drums Were Found

Detail of the schematic face on one of the drums
Johnbod, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A country child I roamed around from an early age, it was safe then, where these stone drums were found, I knew about them from my mother who had lived very close by and ancient history etc always fascinated me.

I used to ride on my bicycle past the wooded slope where they were found, stopped several times and explored. At eight I was regularly sent the seven miles to my grandparents, alone, no phones or anything to check if I’d arrived or what day I might return, Different days, different times sadly.

In 1889, a round prehistoric barrow was opened by the scholar and amateur archaeologist William Greenwell near Folkton in North Yorkshire.[4] Inside, he found a neolithic grave dating to the time of Stonehenge, estimated to be between 2600 and 2000 BC. The remains of several bodies were unearthed, one of whom was a child beside which the three drums were found. The rarity of this find suggests that the child came from an elite group in society. Four years after the discovery, the drums were donated by Greenwell, along with other parts of his collection, to the British Museum.[5]

The three drum-like forms are made of locally quarried chalk and are decorated with stylized human faces and geometric patterns. On the top of the cylinders are a series of concentric circles and two of them have pairs of eyes that schematically denote a human face. The decoration of the drums has similarities to objects made in the Beaker culture and early British Bronze Age, including the use of chevron and lozenge forms.[6][7]

 

 

Sitting Where The Drums Were Found

 

We’re not so different you and I,
Same timeless earth, same timeless sky.
I nestle here in the high Wold grass
My lurcher, Shadow, at my knee
She pricks her ears, she hears your voice
The slightest highest fluttering sound.
Bronze Age girl We sense you here
Feel a frisson through the air.
I run my hands through dickory grass
Listening to its rattling seeds
Did you do this, did you lie  low
Watching as the drums were carved
An ancient offering by your tribe.
Sitting here where the drums were found
Now uprooted from their native ground
I wonder too so many things,
Did you eat brambles, seek out nests
Watch birds, pick violets, know what’s best
To salve and heal when skin is broken,
Skin the prey your Shadow caught.
Did you lie on Summer nights
Watching dusty covered moths
See glow worms wriggling through the grass
I’ve seen those too but only once.
So many years, so long ago
I sat there open to the past.
Now you and I will be two more
Of all the layers of all our tribe
Inhabiting this ancient place.


 

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