(Nimue)
I live in an area where my family has lived for many generations. Different family lines belong to different parts of Gloucestershire, and some lines go back to Cornwall via Bristol. I have a fairly good sense of how my blood ancestors relate to my landscape, which is something of a blessing. I'm also fortunate in that I have stories about places passed down through my family. Mostly from my maternal grandmother. It gives me a feeling of rootedness.
I did try living somewhere else for a decade, and in that time I struggled with the lack of stories in the landscape. There wasn't much folklore for the part of the Midlands I ended up in. I learned that story had been an important part of how I related to the landscape. Sometimes what's important isn't obvious when you can just take it for granted, and only becomes visible through absence. I took the landscape I grew up in for granted, with its prehistoric sites, family tales, history and folklore. Moving to a new town, (not merely new to me, but fairly newly built) where there were few stories, little history and nothing that related to me was a bit of a system shock.
Storytelling is a wonderful thing to be able to do as part of a walk. When I first came back to Gloucestershire, I spent a lot of time introducing my (then) young child to the landscape and its stories. I saw how those stories helped him orientate in a new place, and I think the connection with family and history was helpful to him as he handled a dramatic upheaval. Walking with him as an adult I note he now has the same urges to tell landscape stories when he has them.
Learning the stories that relate to the land is a good way to connect with what's around you. There are extra layers of magic and possibility when you start telling those stories to other people. Unstoried landscapes are also fair game for imaginative engagement.
There is a hill, and when my great grandmother was a child, the ruins of the smallpox hospital were still visible. You can see the uneven ground from the last of the walls now, if you know where to look. It's especially interesting because the hill isn't so very far from Berkeley, where Jenner discovered vaccines and how to tackle the smallpox disease. Officially the hill is called Downham, but local people used to call it Smallpox Hill. On the side of the hill are two prominent rectangular bumps. Local folklore has it that these are the mass graves from the smallpox hospital. You could get a lot of people in there. However, the more likely explanation is that these are man made rabbit warrens from the days when rabbits were fragile things and had to have homes built for them.
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