Leskernick a meditation

1. I see stones... I think of reed thatch, sod fires, posts and ringbeams the lives of people who lived here, the hair on their faces...

I see stones. I dream of cattle, figures in file, thick hut-shadow, sooted women, a boy with a stick, a man with meat on his short back, fur-shod, self-conscious because of his welcome, a conclave of elders, bickering and parley...

I see stones. I see stones, one edge meeting another, upright three stones together a stone post fallen, a backstone, bedrock, a hearth and stones pushed out of alignment by turf weighted by stone, by water, turf and stone... I see the stones of thirty huts scattered. I pick my way where walls were. I face the wind where hands and feet fretted.

Where are the people? We trouble this place with buckets and pegs, tripods, stratigraphies and excavation, the rational grope of theories and spades.

2. Man climbs to get away from sadness. Man climbs the hill and the hill falls away around him. The hilltop surges flat, is grass... is grass, grass nibbled by sheep who run and stop and stare. The cairn is broken. He cannot climb any higher He looks where he can look. That's everywhere. The moor rotates before and behind him, waved, and also nicked by rock. He looks for places. For crinkles, habitation. He sees passes, passes...

He looks for what will arrest looking. He sees a windfarm and blueish space beyond which has the appearance of a sea, beyond this sea.

The world is not his.

Skylarks, ponies, sheep skurf the shoulders of decaying granite. Runkled shoots of bog and sod pare each other to the horizon.

Man has gone from this city. He cannot people the sky.

Jan Farquharson 1995

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