Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm propped up on a stone leaning up against a boulder high up on Dartmoor and I'm looking west sheltered by this tall boulder behind me.
It's probably about five,
Six foot high standing out of the ground and the wind is coming from the east so I'm just sheltering looking at some very ominous dark clouds in the western skies and marvelling at the changing colours all around me,
The oranges and golds of the bracken that is slowly and steadily changing and shifting colour on the hillsides and the boulder I'm leaning up against is not any old boulder.
This is part of a burial cairn.
If you look at the moorland of Dartmoor it's a national park.
There are lots of different stone circles,
Stone rows,
Standing stones,
Burial cairns that are scattered across the landscape.
Probably in years gone by the whole of the landscape of England would have had these different monuments and standing stones built into the landscape but over time the lower lands have been taken over by agriculture farming communities and roads whereas the moorland is pretty much untouched in many places so you still see these old old remnants from the past.
I actually came up here several weeks ago.
I was curious.
This burial cairn was one that caught my eye and is a place I keep coming back to but it particularly caught my eye at the summer solstice.
I'd walked past it and realised it was certainly not aligned with the rising sun of the summer solstice so I made it my intention to come back here on the equinox,
The sunrise of the equinox.
I was curious to see whether the cairn might be aligned to the rising sun and sure enough that very much seemed to be exactly what it was.
It's hard to tell.
There's a scattering of old stones.
There are two large stones that have been placed in the landscape by man which are aligned east so I think pretty much that this was aligned to the equinox,
The sunset at the sunrise of the equinox and I'm really curious because these boulders were placed here thousands of years ago.
I estimated about 5,
000 years ago.
I was talking to a friend who said she'd been on a walk with a historian who had placed it that they were 7,
000 years old.
What I'm leaning up against now was placed here deliberately into the landscape by a community of people.
It couldn't have been an individual.
These are very large stones so a community for some reason placed these stones here and it must have had some ritualistic sacred reverential place in their life.
This wasn't a place they lived in.
This was something that they revered in the landscape and I'm always a bit baffled by the history because who knows why these stones were actually put here but what I do know is that they were placed here and there's something about sitting here that I feel the legacy and the wisdom of our ancestors,
Of my ancestors,
The ancestors that lived on these lands and here I am several thousand years later sitting at a place that they marked in the landscape knowing that there is something significant here and was something significant here even though I don't fully understand what that was and this has me reflect on legacy what we leave behind and what is there for somebody else to pick up once we've gone and I'm not going to overthink this and I'm not asking you to overthink this but there is something about what is it that we leave for future generations but what do we leave behind?
What do we leave that we have invested time,
Energy,
Reverence,
Compassion and love into?
It's a question I'm asking myself I don't have the answer yet but I feel as though I am moving into that part of my life where I feel as though I will be leaving a legacy I think it's a legacy for women and I'm really excited to see what might occur.
I won't be placing granite boulders in the landscape but I do feel very strongly pulled to support women,
Particularly older women and to find a way of having the voice of women heard in the world.
