Introduction
Last night was that of the 8th/9th November 2022. An ordinary day. There is nothing special about. But last night also brought a full moon[1]. Not just any full moon, but the first full moon after the mid-point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. If we were living 2000 years ago, the intelligentsia of our society would have been counting the days from the equinox, keeping a waxing watch on its luminescence, pre-empting the arrival of this special day. For at a time without a fixed calendar, the moon of this night would have marked the awe-inspiring and fearsome festival of Samhain [see Blog 1].
Paired with Bealtaine (the May festival), Samhain was the most important in the Celtic year, and would therefore have been a special day for the people of Dumnonia, the tribe who lived in the south-west of the British Isles[2]. In my previous blogs I have been pulling together some of the Irish Mythology, British folklore, and academic research on Samhain and Halloween, so that I could learn about this festival. My reading had indicated that it was thought that the main Celtic festivals had their origins, not just in the seasonal rhythm of the year, but with a pastoral transhumant cycle – where cattle was currency and a moving between summering and wintering lands was bookended by these key fire festivals.
In this fourth blog I wanted to turn what I had learnt into an exploration of my local landscape, to think about Samhain on Dartmoor. I have found this hard. This is because, whilst there is a good body of myth, and folklore, supported with some archaeology, of Samhain in the south-west, nothing is known. Therefore, to try and place Samhain in the landscape of Dartmoor is entirely conjectural. I have found this a bit overwhelming and uncomfortable. Whilst I like the freedom my blog gives me as an amateur, to be able to be play with evidence and be creative in interpretations, I do like to keep it informed and tethered by academic literature. That said, because the widespread celebration of Samhain across Celtic cultures is not disputed, it would be very unlikely for it not to have been observed on Dartmoor. This being the case, what features and places might (and I stress the word might!) be good candidates for a Samhain fire on the moor?
Before I get going, here is a re-cap. I split ‘Samhain Dartmoor’ into four digestible chunks, posted in a series of blogs:
- In the first part I provided a broad outline of what Samhain is, what is known about when it falls, and how it relates to the other key Celtic festivals. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 1 – What is Samhain?]
- In the second part I explored the myths that surround Celtic Samhain and what they tell us about the mindset and practices of the people who celebrated this pre-Christian festival. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 2 -Samhain Myths & Practices]
- In part three I looked at Halloween folklore, to examine how it built on Samhain practice, but in a Christian guise, including reference to local practice in the 18th century.[Samhain Dartmoor: Part 3 – Samhain vestiges in All Hallow’s Eve]
- In this fourth and final part I am turning this research into a sketch of Samhain Dartmoor; to imagine what parts of landscape might have been culturally important for this festival.
And finally – to minimise citations, I am only going to reference new material here. Please refer to the previous blogs for references to this material.
Possible ‘Festival’ Hilltops
Samhain fires – according to the mythology, history, and archaeology of Ireland – consistently show they were on hill-tops. And not just any hilltops. Hilltops were used whose archaeology and legend indicated ceremonial use and burial on the summits. On Dartmoor there are a great many tors and hills topped with (burial?) cairns – the landscape is littered with them. There are far fewer candidates that have archaeology that goes beyond this, with earthworks or enclosures that might serve a ceremonial function.
White Tor above Peter Tavy, with its double ring of stones enclosing a summit of three major cairns, is a contender. The summit, once interpreted as being a fort, is now questioned as a fortification (HERa, n.d.). The tor has a flat top but the enclosure walls are low and the interior very rocky. Unusually small but abundant hut circles pock its hillslopes, often built into the walls of stock enclosures which are also plentiful around this tor.
The enclosure of White Tor is thought to date to the Neolithic, not the Late Bronze age or Iron age of Celtic culture. However, Davies (2010) interprets White Tor, and other south-west tor enclosures, as spiritually important places, monumentalised by Neolithic people . Might this site of previous spiritual significance have continued to be revered by later cultures? Might pre-Celtic cultures also have celebrated a similar feast to Samhain, connected to their transhumant pastoral way of life here at White Tor? Just as Christianity turned Samhain into Halloween, did the Celts turn an earlier festival end of summer festival into their version of Samhain?
White Tor’s name itself might suggest a link with spirits and the otherworld, themes important in the Samhain narrative. The name White Tor is unlikely named because of its colour. In fact, the dolerite of White Tor is darker than granite and not at all white. The ‘white’ of White Tor is much more likely linked to wite/whit/wight in the sense of a ‘wise man’. From here there are a host of etymologically linked words such as witan – a council of wise men; witness – which means knowledge, understanding, wisdom and observance; and wight – a supernatural creature or unearthly being (see entries in the OED). Barrows are often named ‘white’, and Tolkien even used this etymology to create his Barrow-wights in The Lord of the Rings. With Samhain associated with druids, the congregation of wise men, and the crossing of preternatural beings from the otherworld un the liminality of the new year, I think that White Tor’s name has much that is suggestive about a ceremonial and spiritual past.
What other places might have a similar claim? Dewerstone, like White Tor, is another Neolithic Tor Enclosure, and therefore has a pre-history that marks it out as special. But, whereas White Tor has three very large cairns on its top, Dewerstone has none; well, none extant today. Perhaps it did in the past? Cox Tor, on the other hand, does possess a very large cairn, of 32m diameter. (HERb, n.d.), surrounded to the east by an enclosure, shown on the Historic Environment GIS map. Like White Tor these features appear monumental rather than settlement or fortification related.
The tors mentioned so far are on open moorland in today’s landscape. To these suggestions I want to add hill-tops that might have been spiritually special in pre-Christian times but which have continued to be sacred, now sporting sites of Christian worship. Many Christian churches are thought to have replaced sites of pre-Christian significance. An iconic place like Brent Tor, sitting on a conical volcanic hill, is an obvious choice. Earthworks on its flanks have been assigned to the iron age, interpreted as fortifications (HERc, n.d.), although it should be noted that the site has never been excavated. Whether fortified at some point or not, topographically, Brent Tor stands out for tens of miles, visible from large distances. Even today, this tor draws us to it, and inspires veneration. Surely in the past, it had a similar phenomenological impact?
A third type of site that ought to be considered, but one I am less convinced by, are those who have the place-name ‘beacon’ within them. There are plenty of beacons ringing Dartmoor and, with beacon in their name, they have an obvious link to burning fires. Beacons, historically are known as hill tops used for communicating information, such as an alert or threat, using fire. However, just because these beacons had a more recent fire history, this does not rule them out as also being used for fire gatherings at an earlier time. What made them good beacon places was their moorland edge locations, where their fires were highly visible. These natural attributes may also therefore have made them good for ritual fires – accessible visible hilltops in psychologically imposing places. Some of the Dartmoor hills called ‘beacon’ are topped with burial monuments, giving them this other important characteristics for a Samhain festival locations. Ugborough Beacon on south Dartmoor, with its summit cairn and ‘orthostat’ is but one of a number of examples.
Using these criteria – hill tops with burial archaeology and earthworks of possible ceremonial significance; hilltops that later became places of Christian worship; places that link to fire such as through place names like beacon; and visible edge-land locations – a range of possible ritual Celtic fire festival sites might be speculated upon. The examples I have given here clearly have a western Dartmoor bias because that it the part of the moor I know best. Perhaps you know of other locations that you think fit the bill that I haven’t considered?
How Many Hill Tops?
Now that the characteristics of what might make for a good Samhain site have been considered there is another spatial component to think about. How many Samhain fires would there be dotted about the landscape?
To illustrate this point, let’s look at two extremes. On the one hand it might be imagined that there was but one fire in a kingdom, where the king held his Samhain ceremony and collected his taxes. Irish myths tell of this connection between the Samhain festival and high status individuals. If this was the case for Dumnonia, which comprised the whole of Devon and Cornwall (plus a bit more of Dorset and Somerset), then this is a very large area for people to travel to the Samhain fire.
It might be that only high-status Samhain fires are those recorded for posterity in myths and that in reality there were many fires. So, at the other extreme we might imagine a proliferation of fires, where even the smaller units of community, perhaps a number of family groups who lived together under the protection of a warrior, held their own fire. We might liken this, for example, to our bonfire night celebrations, where villages might put on a modest bonfire and fireworks, whilst towns, cities and the capital, can put on ascendingly bigger and better ‘shows’.
The trouble with the first scenario is that, over a large territory, this means people having to travel a very long way and congregate in large numbers at one place for the Samhain fire. This doesn’t sound very practical, although DNA evidence from Durrington Walls at Stonehenge shows that midwinter feasts were held there in the Neolithic with cattle and pig bones indicating they had travelled to Salisbury Plain from as far afield as Wales, Northern England and Scotland (English Heritage, n.d.). Conversely, the problem with the second scenario is that, whilst it solves the practicalities of attendance – just a short walk to your nearby low-key eminence – it doesn’t allow for the high-stakes terror and tithe giving that appears to be a feature of Samhain ritual.
Perhaps therefore, Samhain fires occupied some middle territory. According to Cartright (2021) large tribal territories could be composed of ‘confederations of tribal chiefs and individual tribes run by councils of elders’. Under this structure it is perhaps easier to imagine a number of Samhain fires across Devon and Cornwall at significant hill-tops.
Whilst virtually nothing is known of the sub-units in the Dumnonian south-west, perhaps there might be clues in landscape divisions we do know about. Do, for example, the ‘Hundred’ boundaries, preserve anciently established territories? They are certainly known to have been highly stable over the last 1000 years. Might they offer an approximation as to the catchment areas of each Samhain fire? If so, then Devon alone would have over 30 Samhain fires.
Perhaps other, even earlier territorial divisions give clues, such as the reave systems on Dartmoor, as identified by Andrew Fleming (Fleming, 2008). If each of the larger reave units was a distinct social and economic unit, then perhaps these zones are a proxy for the level at which festivals were celebrated? Lastly, the work by Harold Fox (2012) on transhumance on Dartmoor, pieces together various forms of evidence to establish links between Dartmoor and lowland locations in the Middle Ages. Communities travelled from far and wide, up to Dartmoor for the summering of cattle. For example, people from the Torbay area had a territorial relationship with the area of Dartmoor around Bagtor and Dewdon. Perhaps Samhain fires were held on the moor linked to where the people of lowland tribes/communities did their summering?
Whatever the structure, one fire or many, the tithe gathering purpose, so strongly evident in Samhain records, indicates that this function would need to be facilitated. Perhaps then, it might have been the case that local Samhain fires allowed local collection of resources, which were then transmitted up the pyramid to those at the top? Perhaps representatives from communities attended the highest status fires, and took their offerings and taxes to these? I clearly need to do a lot more reading on the structure of Celtic society to try answering some of these questions.
Different Sites for Different Festivals?
I have been concentrating on the Samhain festival only for this blog, but there were other fire festivals throughout the Celtic year. I therefore have the question – would different hill tops have been used for different festivals? Would, for example, the same place be used for a Bealtaine Festival as the Samhain one, or did different parts of the landscape serve different celebratory functions? For example, might Cox Tor[3] , whose name might derive from the Old Cornish for Cuckoo, have a springtime association and be a ‘Bealtaine place’, whilst White Tor, with its otherworldly and supernatural associations, be a ‘Samhain Place’? We will never know, but I think it is worth posing the question.
Thoughts about seasonality
There is a final element of the landscape of Samhain on Dartmoor that I haven’t touched upon yet that I want to mention. It is the the story connecting the seasonality of wild flora and agricultural land-usage to the ritual culture of Samhain. I have not been able to research this adequately yet, so I am only going to mention some ideas briefly, and some of the questions that I would like to know more about.
For example, beer had a central role in celebrating festivals – they would most definitely have been on the lash! – so questions about types of beer (such as that made with Myrica Gale – Bog Myrtle), crop husbandry, and the seasonality of beer making may be interesting (Styring et al, 2017). It is thought that, because of ample ingredients and ideal temperatures, autumn was an ideal and main brewing time [4]. How was this abundance of ale part of Samhain? Did it facilitate this late autumn festival and its character in a way that was different than other festivals?
“the political importance of drinking and feasting in Early Iron Age society was reflected in crop husbandry practices”
Styring et al 2017, p357
Also of seasonal interest are the role of wild plants such as nuts, fruits and fungi. Hazelnuts, apples and the types of food offered in tithes and sacrifice (meat, oats, crops, milk), give Samhain its own cultural cuisine. These in turn became part of the symbolism and experience of the ritual of Halloween (nutcracker night, apple bobbing) and new year foods (like haggis). Again, I would like to understand better the distinctiveness of Samhain food from that of other festivals and relate this to my local landscape.
Mushrooms are of particular interest because, as hallucinogens, they are likely to have had a very significant role in making Samhain what it was. This might have been by inducing visions of spirits for divination, inducing euphoric states for celebration, and drugging those earmarked for sacrifice. The role of transcendental fungi and other autumnal bounty as integral to Samhain – it being the most otherworldly and fantastical of all the Celtic festivals – is a theme emphasised by Sarah, who I am collaborating with on this exploration of dairying, and the pastoral rhythm of the year. We spent an evening by an autumnal fire, experimenting with some of the foods cited in the old Irish literature that featured as part of this festival. In a small way, we tried to recreate some of the tastes – oats, meat, nuts and fruit – of what a Samhain feast might have tasted like. I held off the hallucinogenic mushrooms though.
These floral and faunal components have been too much for me to research in time for this blog, but I am keen to return to these at a later date. In connecting Samhain to Dartmoor’s flora, land use, agricultural practice, food and drink, I feel sure this will raise more interesting questions.
Summing up – as far as Samhain 2022 goes, this is as far as I am going to get with understanding where this otherworldly Celtic festival might be placed in a Dartmoor landscape. Where Samhain was celebrated – putting a local and spatial element into this story – has been a speculative exercise. However, I do feel it has been of value because, in trying to put this celebration in the ‘places’ of Dartmoor, it has helped me to ask useful questions that go beyond stories of myth and ritual, spirits and sacrifice. It has got me thinking in a more functional way about how festivals fitted with social structures, power, land divisions, agricultural practices, cuisine and seasonal rhythms of the year; themes that with more time and research, I hope to be able to dig deeper into.
It has also been worthwhile linking this festival back to our transhumant herder predecessors. I therefore want to finish by remembering this festival as marking the time to get off Dartmoor, hunker down and be less active; taking livestock to less exposed ground, to be fed on winter fodder. Samhain does, after all, mean ‘end of summer’[5].
If you have ideas about places you think may have been important for fire festivals, please do comment. I would love to hear your ideas and justifications.
| The Landscape and Mammary Approach For the Landscape and Mammary series, I am working with Sarah Boreham. Sarah uses a creative embodied processes of movement and sound as a tool for research and self-development. She works with ecological embodied phenomenology as a methodology to understand the hidden voices and movements of marginalised individuals, groups and species. She brings her ‘Eco Sound Movement’ approach which uses a multi-modal method including: dance/movement; improvisation; sound/song; film/photography; creative writing: and composition/decomposition. I approach the subject differently. I come from an academic science background. I draw on landscape, archaeological, historical literature and place-names to develop my understandings. I spend time within landscapes to develop my experiential conceptions and complement this with an obsessive love of map and aerial imagery data. Between Sarah’s embodied and creative approach and my natural and social sciences approach there is a place where we can help inform and be informed by each other’s way of experiencing, researching and discovering. |
References
Cartwright, M. (2022) Ancient Celtic Society, World History Encyclopedia. Available at: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1720/ancient-celtic-society/ (Accessed: November 8, 2022).
Davies, S.R., 2010. The early Neolithic tor enclosures of Southwest Britain (Doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham).
English Heritage, No Date. Food and Feasting at Stonehenge. www.english-heritage.org.uk
Fleming, A., 2008. The Dartmoor Reaves: investigating prehistoric land divisions. Windgather Press.
Fox, H. 2010. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages. Edited by Tompkins, M and Dyer, C. University of Exeter Press: Exeter.
HERa , No Date. White Tor Camp, Peter Tavy. MDV4101. Devon & Dartmoor HER
HERb , No Date. Enclosure on summit of Cox Tor, Peter Tavy. MDV56609. Devon & Dartmoor HER
HERc , No Date. Hillfort at Brentor. MDV1669. Devon & Dartmoor HER
Styring, A., Rösch, M., Stephan, E., Stika, H.P., Fischer, E., Sillmann, M. and Bogaard, A., 2017, December. Centralisation and long-term change in farming regimes: comparing agricultural practices in Neolithic and Iron Age south-west Germany. In Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (Vol. 83, pp. 357-381). Cambridge University Press.
[1] It precisely occurs at 11.02 am according to the Royal Museums Greenwich, and is called the Beaver Moon or the Frost Moon.
[2] a tribal area covering Cornwall, Devon and some of Dorset and Somerset – https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/tribes/dumnonii/. The realm of the Dumnoni is known from the writing of Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD. This is though, just a snapshot in time. How stable this was and how long it existed as a unified kingdom is unknown. Earlier in pre-history no doubt, there were more and smaller territories
[3] Cox Tor is first mentioned as Cockestorre in 1618 (Gover et al 1931, p233) but the origin of the name they admit is unclear. They say the name ‘may derive from some man named Cock’. I speculate that instead the name might derive from the Old Cornish word for cuckoo (‘Kok’) or cuckoos (‘Kokes’). With other Cuckoo place names on Dartmoor – Cuckoo Rock, Cuckoo Ball – a name attributed to this bird has precedent.
[4] https://www.craftbeer.com/craft-beer-muses/fall-seasonals-history
[5] https://www.etymonline.com/word/samhain
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