Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above Photo.
www.deborahroberts.biz
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The solstice is a time for wonder and the imagination,
But sometimes you need facts, figures and measurements:
Lines of latitude and longitude – maritime chronometers too,
Were needed for New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land,
For those weavers, cloth-workers, hatters, labourers and servants,
Transported as convicts, far distant from their Painswick homes,
On ships such as the Emma Eugenia, Florentia, Lady Ridley,
Duncan, Gilmore, Persian, Lord Hungerford, Bengal Merchant;
People such as Ann Alder, Henry Beard and Samuel Beard,
John Birt, Isaac Estcourt, James Green, William Haines, Charles Cook;
And at winter solstice-tide, we gathered at Painswick Beacon,
Latitude 51°48’27″N and longitude 2°11’44″W; 283m / 928ft.,
SO 86836 12076, ready for sunrise at 8.14, on the 22nd of December,
A dozen of us, to welcome the mid-winter dawn,
Close by an Iron Age hill fort,
The ghosts of our prehistory all around the scarp,
(At a beacon: ‘from the Saxon’,
Meaning a sign, portent, light, lighthouse,
A source of light or inspiration),
Welcoming the first lengthening day of the season,
As it spread its light and inspiration
Over the Malverns, the Cotswolds, the sinuous River Severn,
Over a landscape etched with names and signs and portents
Such as Ongers, Kimsbury, Paradise,
Spoonbed Hill, Kites Hill, Popes Wood, Saltridge Hill, Cud Hill,
Holcombe, Brentlands, Podgewell, Bacchus –
Distant memories for our exiled Painswick ancestors,
Their ghosts gathered to witness farewell
To the longest day of the year,
Near Botany Bay,
33.9930° S, 151.1753° E …
But today,
We reunited them with their landscape,
And their history,
With a toast to their memory and to the sun:
Painswick Beacon, Botany Bay,
New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land,
Mid-winter and mid-summer conjoined,
With solstitial imagination,
A lighthouse of time and space.