Sue Vincent's Daily Echo

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… After watching the, again, somewhat recalcitrant sun-up, we decide to head back for breakfast via the cluster of, albeit haphazardly, positioned stones which we have come to call ‘the recumbents’.

This is something of a risk, as we do not yet know what the stones represent and our Companions will undoubtedly be expecting a little more than, ‘we have a vague notion based on the feel of this place that it is something, although, we are not quite sure what.’

However, as an example of how we work, in and with the landscape, it is accurate and will highlight the experiential approach which both we and the ancients favour.

And this we do, telling the story of the site’s gradual introduction to our consciousness and the subsequent discoveries over the course of our last few visits.

We don’t have an ending, of course, except that we now do and that ending has become a beginning for, as we turn to leave the site by a slightly different route than we have done previously, Wen sees it.

“It’s a giant’s head and breast!”…

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This formation of stones, cunningly crafted into an unmistakable form, by the ancients, stands on the edge of Ilkley Moor and can be seen from the beer garden of the Cow and Calf hotel…

From that vantage though, it does not look quite like the photograph, above, which was taken after a ‘greeting the sun’ on one of our early landscape workshops.

The art of the ancients depended in large part of finding the correct perspective from which to see things…

Which in landscape terms translates as discovering the right angle from which to look…

We stumbled on the form above or, alternatively, were gifted it because we took the time to listen to the land, entered into a ‘conversation’ with it, and undertook to share this process with others…

In this respect the land really does behave like a Cauldron of Plenty, which the ancient myths speak about with such awe and reverence…

Indeed, awe and reverence are two of the keys which will unlock the magic of the land and its living, breathing, loving reality.

Once this is done, as Sue and I found, the world shows forth its true colours…

Sue’s sobriquet in her family of boys was, ‘the hobbit’, which although she pretended to hate, she in fact quite liked, as she was a huge fan of Tolkien, and she also ‘begrudgingly’ allowed me to use the moniker… If done carefully, and sparingly…

At Sue’s funeral last March we walked out to the theme from the recent series of films of that name…

Sue was, it is true, a woman of small, if not diminutive, stature, yet that frame held a heart big as a cauldron, and a spirit that would gladly take on the gods…

Sue grew up on the moors and wrote a fictional tale encapsulating her love of their wild and rugged beauty which was published as, Swords of Destiny.

A year on from her premature departure from the world she loved we returned to mark her passing at the landscape form which she discovered on the edge of her beloved moor.

Maybe you would like to do the same if ever you are passing that way…

You will, though, have to find it first!

Spring 2022