There's a very strange feeling that comes across me in Britain sometimes. Like I'm walking with the ghosts of the people that have come from me - a psychic geography, if you will, where you can see the past superimposed on the landscape, or feel goosebumps at your neck as if someone is walking behind you. Once, at an old well near Cerne Abbas in Dorset, both my husband and I saw a woman in white drawing water. It wasn't til we spoke of our experience on the drive home that we realised we'd seen the same person. I used to imagine the Roman soldiers marching through the fog over the Somerset levels, driving to Glastonbury Tor on a winter's day. I could see the tops of their heads as they walked past the leafless oak trees floating in the middle of that wet soup of water droplets that blanketed the freezing ground.

It's particularly strong for me in Somerset, as I visit the churches, graveyards, streets and houses where my mother's grandfather was born, and his mother and father before him, and so on going back to the 1600's in Wiltshire. Do they see me? Does Worthy Watts see his great, great, great granddaughter exploring his home parish?

Some of the ghosts I feel are not so close by blood, I do not think. But still, walking up a windy hill on an April day, I feel as if I'm walking up to Maebury Castle with people going about their day to day. Villagers, mainly, poor folk, dressed in simple clothes, carrying faggots of wood and with goats and children, carting water, picking daisies for poor folk's crowns.

Maebury - possibly from 'mae' (field) and 'burh' (fort) - was a boundary between'the Romano-British Celts and West Saxons during the period 577-652 AD, when the nearby Wansdyke fortification comprised part of the border.'¹ is disappointingly not so much a turreted castle, with stone ramparts and turrets, but an outer ditch with two entrances and a circular area in the middle. Much of the ancient remnants of settlements and structures are simply mounds and humps in fields - but still, one gets a sense of what was.

Earth works at Maesbury Castle

The view from the top is quite lovely, and we can see Glastonbury Tor in the distance. We meet a couple who walk here often. Last week was his birthday, and they had breakfast kava and croissants at the top. They're as cheerful as us to be out walking, and say they've walked more since lockdown than they have ever. They're lucky - they have a cleaning business, and business is assured once this is over. Their son, however, had quit his job, spent two weeks in Thailand at the beginning of a grand world adventure, and had to move home when the pandemic was announced.

I think again of ancestors. The plagues and pestilence they suffered, and wars. And all the while, they walked this landscape, with their hopes and their griefs. They looked out from the high fields into the blue and green landscape, and stood and talked to the people around them about life and dreams and how they'd survive the years ahead of them. I feel them keenly. I wonder if they'd felt us, looking into the future, and wondering.