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‘This site, important for its grandeur, its design
and its astronomy, is a complex,
of a diminutive stone circle, an avenue,
three rows and a chambered tomb…’
– Burl
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“To be ‘called’ is not the same thing as wanting to go somewhere!”
“I know.”
Continue reading at France and Vincent
First in this week…
Wanting to witness,
Place where sky connects with earth,
Travelled on and on,
Illusions, I realise,
Magical disappointment.
Poetry form :- Tanka ( 5/7/5/7/7 syllables)
Acknowledgements :- Thank you Sue Vincent for running the #writephoto challenge. For rules please refer here. Thank you all for stopping by and reading.
Welcome to this week’s #writephoto prompt!
You can find all last week’s entries in the weekly round-up, which was published earlier today.
Throughout the week, I will feature as many of the responses here on the Daily Echo as time and space allows, usually in the order in which they are submitted.
All posts will be featured in the weekly round-up on Thursday 23rd July, linking back to the original posts of contributors.
Use the image below as inspiration to create a post on your own blog… poetry, prose, humour… light or dark, whatever you choose, as long as it is fairly family-friendly.
Submit your link by noon (GMT) Wednesday 22nd July.
Link back to this post with a pingback (Hugh has an excellent tutorial here) and/or leave a link in the comments below, to be included in the round-up.
Use the #writephoto hashtag in your title so your posts can be found.
There is no word limit and no style requirements, except that your post must take inspiration from the image and/or the prompt word given in the title of this post.
Feel free to use #writephoto logo or include the prompt photo in your post if you wish, or you may replace it with one of your own to illustrate your work.
By participating in the #writephoto challenge, please be aware that your post may be featured as a reblog on this blog and I will link to your post for the round-up each week.
Regular contributors are also welcome to come over as my guest and introduce themselves (click here for details).
Please note: As I do not share my political opinions on this blog, please do not use the challenge as a platform from which to share yours. Party political or racially offensive posts will not be reblogged.
This week’s prompt ~ Glisten
For visually challenged writers, the image shows a twilit beach, the sea shimmering in the low light. There are rocky islets silhouetted against the water and what might be a figure, running towards…or away from the waves.
There were fires in the valley below as the procession arrived. Such a long journey, so many turnings of the sun in the walking. She had learned to read the flames, she who was marked for the sacred enclosure, serving her clan and their gods.
There had been fires on the hilltops, dotted across the landscape in a line that followed the contours of earth. The fires had faded now, banked against the night. There were none here as she waited for the sunrise, no flames to help her find vision…
Her hand crept to the feather at her throat. Her gift from the gods, the colour of flame. She had strayed from the path, seeking silence… preparing her Self for what was to come.
The great bird had wheeled overhead, soaring above the trees in the morning. She had looked down and seen the rainbows caught in the feather, bright against the grass and smiled. Cutting a thin strip of leather from her girdle she had bound the feather at her throat, hearing the keening cry of the bird on the wind.
Touching its softness, she found confidence. What would come would be as the gods willed. Life or death, success or failure… They saw clearer than their fledgling seer. She was theirs to take…
She pulled the furs close around her, the ground wet with the dew as the dawn came closer. The time of her testing on the hill of vision.
In the half-light, the valleys were shrouded in low mist, making the land unreal and seeming to shift… islands in an unseen sea.
She had been prepared by those who waited with her, high on the hill. She had been bathed in the sacred spring that ran from the chalk below this place, winding as a clear stream into the valley. There was a shallow pool beneath the trees. She could not see it in the half-light, but she knew its course and felt for it in her mind and body.
She had not eaten, only drunk of herbs steeped in its water for three days. She was marked with ochre and dressed in a clean robe. She heard them stand to greet the sun, but did not turn to the east with them.
She watched them through other senses, familiar with the rite, seeking to feel herself within the land and sky. She saw her shadow on the grass as the sun rose, gilding the mists. It was time.
Below the summit, where the flat plateau echoed the one so far away, a fire bird wheeled and keened to the sun. She wondered if it was her bird, the one whose feather she wore…
No matter. They were kin and she would ask its help.
Sending thought into the air, she sought the bird in her mind, feeling herself meld with its grace, letting the sensation of flight take her skimming the wind, feeling the swoop and rise in her stomach…
Excerpt from The Initiate ~ Stuart France & Sue Vincent
The photo for this week’s prompt was taken halfway up the earthwork known as Cymbeline’s Castle, or sometimes Belinus’ Castle, just outside Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England. The lower part of the hill is officially classed as a motte and bailey, with several other associated earthworks, the remains of a Roman villa, a medieval nunnery and a sacred spring close by.
Behind it, the higher part of the hill is a Beacon Hill, crowned by a round barrow, and hiding the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers. This area is rich in archaeology, going back to the most ancient times, and the five-thousand-year old Ridgeway runs through the site.
For us, though, it is a strange place, where, on our first ascent, we seemed to be ‘carried’, for want of a better word, to the top of a hill that should have left us breathless and panting. We watched the red kites wheel below us and named it the Hill of Vision, for that seems to be its function.
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Thank you to everyone who took part, visited or reblogged the posts or left comments for their authors. A new prompt will be published later today. As always, I will reblog as many contributions as space and time allows as they come in… and all of them will be featured in the round-up next Thursday.
All the posts are listed below, so please click on the links below to read them and leave a comment for the author!
Pingbacks do not always come through… if you have written a post for this challenge and it does not appear in the round-up, please leave a link to your post in the comments and I will add it to the list.
An invitation to writephoto writers…
As there are usually too many contributions to reblog all of them every week, and so that we can get to know their writers, I would like to invite all writephoto writers to come and introduce themselves on the blog as my guest! Click here for details.
Come and join in!
Thank you to all Contributors!
Kerfe Roig at K-Lines that Aim to Be
Shweta Suresh at My Random Ramblings
Craig Towsley at A Bunch of Dumb Words in a Row
Christine Bolton at Poetry for Healing
Fandango at This, That and the Other
Jaye from Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie
Aashi D Parekh at Falling Upwards
Annette Kalandros at Hearing The Mermaids Sing
Frank Hubeny at Poetry, Short Prose and Walking
Happysoul at Live Love Laugh Learn
Daisybala at freshdaisiesdotme
Christine Bialczak at Stine Writing
Dr. Crystal Grimes at Mystical Strings
Balroop Singh at Emotional Shadows
Brian F. Kirkham at The Inkwell
Goff James at Art, Photography and Poetry
Aseem Rastogi at Transition of Thoughts
Joelle LeGendre at Two on a Rant
Trent P. McDonald at Trent’s World
Jez Farmer at About the Jez of It
We left Dragon Hill and parked a little way further up. My two legs was a bit cautious here, ’cause there was a lot of sheep to worry about, but to be honest, I was too excited to be getting up into the hills to bother about them. I’m not keen on sheep. The only ones I’ve met close up stamped at me! And anyway… I had enough to do, trying to herd my three two-legses.
Aerial view of Uffington Castle: Geograph © Copyright Dave Price Creative Commons Licence.
Off they went up the hill, and as soon as she thought it safe, she let me off the leash again. Well, one of the girls went off ahead, so I thought I’d better follow her. After a while, I looked round to check on the others and realised I couldn’t see my two-legs! She couldn’t have gone far, I thought, and anyway, I knew where she’d left the car. As I still couldn’t see her, I thought that’s where she must be hiding, so I ran all the way back down the hill. No two-legs. Then I hear her and the others shouting and whistling for me from up top! Where had she been hiding??? I had to run all the way back up again! By the time I got there, comments were being made about my rear end, which I thought a tad unfair. Much more of this up-and-downhill business and my rump would be positively sylph-like!
I made a point, after that, of herding them better… or at least, I tried to, but a dog can’t be everywhere at once… and they can! So, I stuck close to mine and we walked around the castle. Now, Uffington Castle is not what you might call a proper castle, so I had to do some ‘vestigating. There are no walls or drawbridges… and ‘pparently, there never were any. But the hill is crowned with rings and ditches of earth with ‘gates’ in. She called it a hillfort. And the Ridgeway, an ancient track that crossed the country, runs close by.
Continue reading at The Small Dog’s Blog
A vista shows us more than we
Can gather in our hands.
It’s there and there majestically.
We gasp and understand.
Continue reading at Poetry, Short Prose and Walking
Open to the light
Secrets unfold one by one
Inner heart exposed
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I met my husband, in a trip organised by few family friends many years ago. We went on a trek and the view was very similar to this pic in the prompt. So was tempted to write something around “Love “. Not exactly my story, here’s my take on Sue Vincent’s #WritePhoto prompt.
Year ago, they met, at this same place
A trek organised by common friends .
Continue reading at Live Love Laugh Learn
Our morning began with an early meditation upon the hillside, turning our attention to the light, both in literal and symbolic terms. It was a moment to drink in the beauty of the land as a ‘false dawn’ opened a window in the clouds and we placed the work of the weekend under the aegis of Spirit. Each of us brings our own peculiar interpretation to that word and concept… and that is how it should be; the relationship between each of us and whatever we conceive of as spirit, divinity or a guiding presence is both unique and personal.
In simple rituals and in spite of a multitude of perspectives, we can set differences easily aside, colouring the symbols we use with our own interpretations in order to work together towards a common goal. That is one of the ever-present joys of such workshop weekends. We were using a five-pointed star, but there is always a hidden point to any symbol and, magically, that always operates on a different level to the symbol itself. The opalescent horn of the Unicorn would be both the guardian of the threshold and would point the way for us.
Having established the Unicorn as a symbol of Spirit the night before, we were about to begin a more personal journey into the elements of our own nature. Using imagination, knowledge, memory and the senses, we would map that journey onto the five points of the pentagram. Dean had carefully chosen passages from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to illustrate the psychological aspects of the elements as they are played out within the human psyche. He had chosen stones with different colours, patterns and textures to represent the physical elements with which we would weight down the ribbon paths we were to walk around the pentagram and chosen sites for us to visit that reflected the elemental principles too. In other words, he had tied the journey together beautifully on all levels.
Our next stop would be Duffus Castle, built around 1140 and abandoned in the eighteenth century. But the visit was not about the details of its construction and historical ownership, but was to take a more personal perspective.
The castle is surrounded by the remains of a moat, now a pure, clear stream, teeming with wildflowers and small creatures. It was here that we began to get an inkling of Dean’s deep love and knowledge of the natural environment of his adoptive home, much of which he would share with us over the weekend. It is a very beautiful site, an island in a green land. Rising from the Laich of Moray, it dominates the landscape and, from a distance, seems to epitomise our idea of a ‘proper’ castle.
Continue reading at France & Vincent
Every morning Sheena would step out of her little thatched that stood at the far end of the little village that was cut off from the main road by a good eight hour walking distance.
The city, as such, didn’t hold any major pull; she hadn’t had even a glimpse of urban life in her over a decade and half existence on Planet Earth.
It was the hills that kept her awake, day and night.
Continue reading at Neel Anil Panicker
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 