West Penwith,
Cornwall.
A twisting lane, sunken between such high walled hedges, steeped in vegetation, might have given some inkling of a portal to an ancient site, but a track ending up in a farmyard with disused buildings and a pile of rubble, less so. There is nothing to go by, just an isolated farm with an idiosyncratic monkey puzzle tree, an iron railing leading up granite steps to a house with an abandoned porch and a lawn cradling a private swathe of primroses. And beyond it, the only marker point, a grimy whitewashed stone indicating the start of the path uphill.
The grassy path is puddled by overnight rain, and follows a gentle gradient weaving through low scrub, mounds of bracken, bramble and gorse contoured by the wind. Here and there are soft lobes of foxgloves tucked in to the edge of the path, promising a firing of pink rockets and a buzz of idling bumblebees yet to come.
Although now a significant area of heath, the whole of Chun Downs would have been created by woodland clearance in the 3rd or 2nd centuries BC and is an important nature reserve offering a haven for nightjars, hen harriers, Dartford warblers, skylarks, adders and butterflies. Picking my way through the gorse, the rasp of a stonechat and splintering of a wren cut through the ruffling wind, and I can hear a babble of skylarks rising from adjacent pastureland.
But there is no real preparation for the enormity of the structure that rises from the plateau on the crest of the hill, invisible from the approach below. The path leads directly to the raised walls of Chun Castle, an Iron Age hill fort, its distinct entrance marked by two granite uprights leading to an overgrown amphitheatre of collapsed defence walls.
Its inner circle of crumbling walls tips away to the surrounding heath and beyond to all the patchwork fields of West Penwith, and from the dismantled ramparts, offers a vast, sweeping panorama north and northwest to the Atlantic and south towards Mounts Bay. The engine house of Ding Dong mine pokes up on the horizon with its omnipresent thumb, an insistent marker of scale and past industrial activity. In the distance, the village of Morvah lies as a small cluster on the land’s edge. There is a wind turbine revolving on a farm, a satellite dish on a nearby hill, and a yacht leaning in a corner of sea.
Within the ancient walls, there is a jumbled informality, with bumps and mounds buried beneath a blanket of heather, bracken, grasses and moss. Even the granite uprights marking the entrance are graced with ivy and scabious at their base, and covered in lichenous growth as loose and scattered as the scudding clouds and pools of light falling between the stones. Stonecrop and ferns stitch the surface of the inner walls together like a rockery. Footpaths criss-cross the interior, weaving between remnants of stone walled houses that once stood. In one corner there is a spring-filled well with submerged steps leading down to a small peaty pool, still offering its open eye to a mirror of sky.
Despite its neglected air, the fort retains a sense of its impressive former stature. 85 metres in diameter, it consists of a central area surrounded by two concentric granite walls with external ditches. The inner wall stands at over two metres high in places, and probably would have been as high as six metres in the past. Evidence from excavations in the 1930s and 1940s date the main period of occupation from the 3rd century BC until early into the 1st century AD, with possible later re-occupation in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, when some fifteen or sixteen houses were built around an inner courtyard and a furnace made for smelting tin. The alignment of the original entrance towards the Neolithic chamber tomb, just 250 metres to the west, suggests that the fort may have been built on an even older structure.
Even in its present diminished form, the size of the fort and its commanding views are evidence enough of its significant position in the surrounding area as an imposing, defended hill top. And though now hidden from below, it is astonishing to consider how Chun Castle would have shouted its presence far and wide in the surrounding landscape had its stone not been so extensively removed in the 18th century for local building works.
I find a hollowed rock to sit on, beneath the inner wall and out of the wind. From here I can take in the undulations hinting at structures buried in the undergrowth around me. And there never is just the wind up here. From inside these sheltered walls, birdsong is carried from all directions of the hill, a rotational soundscape of meadow pipit, skylarks, mixed in with the occasional snapshot of traffic and hum of distant planes taking off from the small airport on the coast.
More an abandoned place than a preserved monument, the fort has been left as a free-flowing skyspace, unencumbered by definition, labels, or formal interpretations. There is nothing to say what this place is, or why it is here. Any visitor who finds their way up here is left instead with the freedom to feel what this place is about, to puzzle about what may have been here in the past, and to drink from its bowl of emptiness, a ring of tumbling granite, scoured by air, light and wind.
Nothing is happening here now, yet the evidence of human activity lingers amongst rocks that were carefully placed by hand. All that remains is testimony to a huge concentration of labour, a need to protect livelihoods and a strongly defended habitation. Despite its isolation, it’s strangely comforting to realise that people lived here 2000 to 3000 years ago, talking, laughing, arguing, cooking and sleeping, eating, fetching wood and water, lighting fires and telling stories – a whole signature of thriving human occupation –with all their bartering, exchanges, ceremonies and rituals.
As a modern visitor, there is also something tranquil about stepping into this tumble-down place, open to the sky. It is extraordinary that somewhere as historically significant, is tucked away and hidden from view. And that it is possible to walk into it today, on ground trodden for millennia. Isolated, perfectly positioned and distinctive, immersed in the landscape, Chun Castle lies unobtrusively above working farms, with cattle grazing between neolithic walls in the fields below.
Its sheltered halo offers a perfectly secluded place to watch clouds and the space between them, and to let go of thoughts and allow space between them. And to rest in this space. There is a feeling of containment sitting amongst the circle of ruins, with enough standing structure to give protection from the weather. Untended, uninterpreted, the fort is simply here, with all its layers of human presence. What was once an occupied defensive structure has been abandoned to the energy of the elements. It has become a wild place, a hidden cup of wildflowers, a green crown on a hill.
I can feel any sense of time slipping away here. Everything escapes definition in the cauldron of sky. There is merely a continuity of moments, shaping reality as vividly as the tangle of dried bracken and fists of foxgloves at my feet. My immediate awareness is completely contained within this ring of white stones, a simple meeting place with what has gone before, with what is here now and what is to become. Sitting out of sight in the middle of an Iron Age hill fort is just another departure point of limitless possibilities moving towards an unknown future. I am a transitory presence following countless others who sat in this same spot in the distant past.
Our conceptual understanding of time is so linear, limited to a timeline of here to there. Yet everything around me in this place speaks of a continuum, where human activity is deeply embedded with cycles of changing weather, the passage of sun and moon and the turning of the seasons. It feels like an invitation to become more porous, to allow a glimpse of the vastness of evolution to be a small transfer of life, like the well in the corner, spring-filled, its waters still flowing into the present.
And when it comes down to it, if there is anywhere it could be possible to let go of fixed concepts about time, it is somewhere as ancient as this, with space to trust in something more mysterious and undefined. And for once to let this overflow the brim of understanding, and allow a more intuitive sense of place, without the encumbrance of words, or thoughts, or pre-determined knowledge.
How can we possibly know the reality of life here thousands of years ago, or what will transpire from this passing moment, facing into the future? There is only the earth, and the vision and purpose on which this ancient structure was built, drawing me here on this spring day. Leaning back, I feel firmly placed amongst bramble and fern, in this pocket of ancient wall. And sensing all the human voices, although silent now, imprinted in the scattered stones around me, still speaking, like seeds carried by the wind to the spaces beyond.
