INTERVIEWS – A SELECTION
The following article written by Doris Gundry appeared
in the West Sussex Gazette some time in 1989, I think, in ‘Sussex Writers’, a
series which also featured interviews with Simon Brett and Christopher Fry.
Research and writing about the study of landscape
processes is Rodney Castleden’s speciality. Doris Gundry meets the academic
whose method of writing is described by his wife as ‘The Rodney Rush’.
Rodney Castleden
has a wonderfully clear mind and great fluency of expression, both in speaking
and writing. I had been fascinated with his books and was eager to meet him.
After a difficult drive, during which I got lost three times, I arrived at his
home. It lies in what must have been a small farming hamlet, but has now become
partially absorbed into the northern edge of Brighton .
‘So you’re an archaeologist?’ I began the
conversation.
‘By training I’m a geomorphologist,’ he
said. ‘Geomorphology is a well-recognized branch of physical geography - the
study of landscape processes.’
He has been interested in landscape ever
since his Sussex childhood
and eventually made it his special research subject when he took his Master of
Science degree at Oxford
Both Rodney and his wife are teachers. So
far, besides research, writing and editorial work on Geography (he co-edits the
‘Classic Landforms’ series for the Geographical Association), articles in
‘Exploring the Supernatural’ and ‘Unknown’ magazines, he has published two
books, ‘The Wilmington Giant’ and ‘The Stonehenge People’.
In both books he told me, he was trying to
get across a holistic approach to problem-solving, breaking across conventional
disciplinary boundaries. He was also trying to demonstrate a different way of
looking, believing that on can get an enormous amount from visualizing what a
landscape would have looked like at different times in the past. ‘Stand on a
hill, look, and imagine,’ he advises.
In the Stonehenge book, Rodney Castleden
was covering the whole subject of the neolithic way of life in Britain
We talked about his method of writing. ‘By
far the hardest part is the preparation,’ he said. ‘It may be months or years
before I gather the facts and ideas I need and then I have to mull them over.
The actual writing is the easy part.’ His preparation results in a file of
neatly ordered notes which eventually develop into a detailed plan. He then
starts on a skeleton outline, divided into chapters. Finally, he does a longer
synopsis of about 60 pages, and only then is he ready to write.
He writes in longhand at speed to get a uniform
style and form, and on one side of the paper only, leaving the opposite side of
the paper blank for additions, alterations or suggestions. He writes right
through to the end, then starts all over again with a fresh eye as a reader
would. Sometimes he will clarify a point, or a sentence will be toned down. The
book at this stage is really complete; he is only tinkering.
He does not try to keep to office hours;
some days he might have to hunt out fresh information, make notes for the
preface, or design an illustration, or even take a day off in the countryside.
Sometimes a different route to where he wants to be presents itself. When a
section comes easily, he goes at it until it is done; up to ten thousand words
a day. ‘The Rodney Rush’ his wife calls it.
Rodney Castleden has a large fund of
information and ideas from his earlier research which will be used as a basis
for further books when he is ready to write them. A book on Knossos
The following
contribution appeared in ‘Contemporary Authors’ in 1993.
‘I am an educator
as well as an intellectual explorer by instinct. I feel it is a duty of
academics to communicate with general readers, offering lucid, rational, and
well-informed accounts of their work, without unnecessary jargon. I want to
stimulate readers into thinking in longer time scales, ‘deep time’ as some call
it, and in a more radical, assumption-questioning way than is customary.
Politicians deal in the apportioning of resources on a very short-term basis,
five or twenty years, but we need to be more radical and look much further
forward, and much further backward, in time if we are to find lasting solutions
to the serious problems of man-land, or indeed man-man relationships.
One of my primal experiences was seeing
the neolithic carvings in the Newgrange passage grave during the 1960s
excavations. The archaeologist in charge, Michael O’Kelly, said no-one knew
what the carvings meant and that people had gone mad trying to find out. It
made me determined to find out everything about the neolithic people: not just
the conventional archaeology, either, but what they thought and felt and
believed. A rational, holistic and empathetic approach has been the hallmark of
all my writing since then. I believe that retrieving the thought-worlds of
prehistoric cultures is as essential as saving animal and plant species from
extinction; we need as large a ‘gene stock’ of spiritual, social, economic and
intellectual techniques as we can retrieve if we are to redeem or replace our present
civilization successfully. I believe the past offers keys to the future.’
The following is an extract from
Andrew Joynes’ programme, ‘Horse, Man & Giant’, made for for the World
Service, broadcast in October 1995. Other interviewees for the programme
included David Miles, then Director of the Oxford Archaeological Unit, and Martin
Brown, then Assistant County Archaeologist for East Sussex.
AJ: Finally I’ve come to Cerne in
Dorset, at the western end of nthe long stretch of chalkland that runs across
southern Britain. I’m sitting on a steep hillside above a water meadow and
beside me and below me, laid out on the turf across the hillside, is the figure
of the Cerne Abbas Giant. He’s naked, he brandishes a club in his right hand
and his left arm is stretched across the hillside towards the south. His most
distinctive feature, the feature for which he has been celebrated for
centuries, is his enormous phallus. It points up towards his rib-cage and his
head and the top of the hill. It’s a remarkably graphic figure to find in the
English countryside.
RC:
I think there’s a sense in which the Cerne Giant is a huge seaside postcard, a
huge cartoon, a low comic. Some people are quite content to get that out of it
and nothing else. But thee are others, I think, who see that this is a figure
that was carved with religious faith; there are people who feel that they are
in touch with the remote past when they look at these figures.
AJ: One of the earliest examples of
representational landscape art in the world is the White Horse of Uffington,
the first of the three mysterious hill figures in Southern England that I
visited this summer. The figures are extraordinary in many ways. They are
extraordinary in their mystery, in their size and in their design. And they are
extraordinary in the way they have survived into the late twentieth century.
All of them share the landscape with commonplace aspects of modern society:
power stations, housing estates, motorways. For many years these figures were
themselves regarded as commonplace. Now, they are becoming the focus of a new
public interest, in the past in the landscape and the environment and in what’s
been called by the devotees of the so-called New Age philosophies the spiritual
heritage of Britain. But what is known about the origins of the figures
themselves? Who carved the? And why? Rodney Castleden is a schoolteacher who
has written a book about the hill figures. I asked him whether all three of the
designs were likely to have been the products of a single culture or tribe in
prehistoric Britain.
RC:
I don’t think so. We’ve got different groups of people, possibly at different
times, discovering that if you cut away the turf you can expose the chalk, and
it makes a dazzling image that you can see from a long distance. It doesn’t
have to be one culture. Now, having said that, it is possible that all three of
the hill figures, the Cerne Giant, the Wilmington Giant and the Uffington
Horse, they may be contemporary, but they don’t have to be. If we’re going back
to a time between shall we say 1000 BC and 100 BC then Britain was not united.
It was a number of separate territories, different societies, different
chieftains, so we’ve got to think of separate communities who were doing this.
AJ: There have been many cultures in
Britain since prehistoric times. Many civilizations have used the Ridgeway, the
ancient track that runs along the top of the southern hills. Beside it, the
remains of the Horse, the Man and the Giant stand out like notices on a
highway. In the bronze age, thirty centuries ago, folk from the Mediterranean
brought goods along the Ridgeway. In the iron age the Celts used it to maintain
contact with the network of Celtic tribes of Europe. Two thousand years ago the
Roman legions marched along the Ridgeway to absorb Britain into their Empire.
500 years after that, it was an Anglo-Saxon civilization. Given the confusion
of cultures, it isn’t surprising that there have been many theories about which
particular people made the hill figures that stand beside the Ridgeway. The
Uffington White Horse is a good example of this; as David Miles of the Oxford
Archaeology Unit says.
DM:
There are two argument that have gone on for almost the last 300 years. That is
that essentially the White Horse at Uffington was either an animal that was
carved by Celtic tribesmen about 2000 years ago because the shape of the horse,
this rather abstract and segmented animal, like a piece pof modern art, is very
similar to the horses that are shown on Celtic coins of 2000 years ago. One argument
is the stylistic one. The other one is that the horse has changed its shape
over the years. It was origibnally a more realistic animal and that possibly it
therefore sated to the Anglo-Saxon period. And this was an unresolved argument
that had gone on for about 300 years. Our idea initially was to excavate into
the Horse to see if we could show that it was made up of layers and to possibly
date them. The other thing is that we wanted to see if the shape had changed
and whether this abstract shape that you see today has always been there. In
fact I think we’ve answered both the questions. The abstract shape has always
been there and fortunately while we were working on the Horse we also developed
a new dating technique, OSL dating and that’s a technique by which we can date
buried layers of soil. The Horse originated around 3000 years ago, the end of
the bronze age, much earlier than people had expected.
AJ: There’s a heavy weight of legend
and tradition associated with the White Horse.
Ruth
Langsford
The following interview with Ruth Langsford (the best
and far and away the nicest and most sensitive interviewer I’ve ever
encountered) at St Augustine’s Well in Cerne Abbas was broadcast as part of a
Westcountry TV programme in 1999, in a series called ‘Stranger than Fiction’.
Stranger than Fiction: the Cerne Giant
RL: Modern technology has revealed that once the Giant
was holding something in his outstretched hand and it certainly wasn’t a very
pretty sight. Rodney Castleden has studied the Giant intensely and he
discovered the hidden feature that could reveal the figure’s age, and at the
holy well that lies at the Giant’s foot he came up with a candidate for the
Giant’s companion. [to RC] So what’s the connection between the spring and the
Giant?
RC: Well, the
water that you can see bubbling up in the corner there is actually coming out
of the hill that the Giant is on. The Giant is not visible from here but it’s
up on the hill just over the top there. It was quite common for people in the
iron age to believe that springs were the haunts of gods and goddesses, so I
think this is all part of one sanctuary, one iron age cult centre that ran from
here right up to where the Giant is.
RL: So he’s a sort of sacred symbol, you think?
RC: He’s a sacred
symbol. I think he’s the protector god for the people who lived in this area
and there may have been a partner. It may be that the goddess or sprite who
lived in this well was his partner.
RL: That’s nice. I like that. [To camera] Her choice of
companion leaves a little to be desired. The Cerne Giant wasn’t exactly a
gentle Giant. In fact he seems to have had a very unpleasant habit. . .
RC: Over the last
few years I’ve done several geophysical surveys, particularly round the
outstretched arm, which doesn’t seem to be doing anything, and a number of
people have thought that there was something held in the hand or something
hanging from the arm. I did a survey of that area and re-ran it because I
couldn’t believe what I saw. What I’ve actually found is that below the hand there
seems to be a blob, and I did another survey of that and I saw that it was a
severed head.
RL: A severed head?
RC: A severed
head.
RL: That’s a bit gruesome, isn’t it?
RC: Yes, but -
RL: Why would he be carrying a severed head if he was
an object of worship?
RC: Well, it was
quite common for iron age warriors to cut off the heads of important enemies:
not just anybody, but maybe the chief. They would take his head and take it
home, embalm it, show it off to visitors. It was a trophy.
RL: A nice ornament for the mantelpiece!
RC: Absolutely.
That’s exactly where they hung them. The Cerne Giant is obviously meant to be a
picture of a warrior-god returning home from battle, after defeating the
tribe’s enemy.
The following interview with Garry Broome
took place on the Garry Broome Show, 22 November 2011. It was about ‘On
Blatchington Hill’, the newly published history of East Blatchington.
GB: When did you
start working on this book? How long has it taken to produce?
RC:
I moved to Seaford, to Blatchington Hill, six years ago. I’m interested in
history, geography and archaeology, and wanted to find out more about the place
I had moved to. It was obvious that this part of Seaford, from Blatchington
Pond up Blatchington Hill and the southern half of Firle Road, had once been a
separate Downland village and that it had been swamped by the growth of
Seaford. I expected to find that someone had written a history of this village,
and was surprised that no-one had. It was a forgotten village. So I decided I
would try to fill the gap. I’m a writer by trade, and I had written 30 books
before I came to Seaford, so researching and writing the history was the most
natural thing in the world for me to do.
GB: How have you
written this book: is it in straightforward chronological order?
Local
history is one of the hardest types of writing to do. There’s an almost
irresistible temptation to put in absolutely everything that ever happened, and
in strict chronological order. Which is completely logical; first this happened,
then that happened. But you can end up with some very odd chapters. A man falls
down a well; the manor house is sold; a new bell is hung in the church tower;
there’s a shipwreck on the beach; in 1802 the 80-year-old rector falls ill and
goes to Bournemouth to be nursed; the rectory is let to tenants for two years.
These things might have happened consecutively, but they make unsatisfactory
reading because they’re not connected by cause and effect. In fact they’re not
connected in any way – except for the old rector. And a lot of local histories
are constructed in this way. I decided I wanted my book to tell a story, or a
series of stories.
So there’s a chapter about an interesting
Victorian rector, who was appointed by the squire, arrived at Blatchington in
1845, fell in love with the squire’s daughter, and was prevented from marrying
her by the squire. They had to wait, but in the end the rector gets the girl
and the girl inherits half the parish. It’s a classic Victorian novel plot,
with a happy ending – a Barchester novel. The rector died in 1892 and his widow
had the lychgate built in his memory.
There’s another chapter that in
time terms overlaps with this, about the late Victorian squire. It starts in
1850 when young Robert Lambe moves into Blatchington House with his parents –
his father was a tenant farmer, William Lambe – and ends when he dies in 1922.
His is a different sort of story – a story about property, more like the
Forsyte Saga. Robert Lambe is Soames Forsyte!
So the chapters of the book are separate
but overlapping narratives, and they can be read separately. The rector has a
walk-on part in the Robert Lambe chapter, and vice versa. I think it makes the
book more interesting to read. At 300 pages, it’s a long book, but it’s a
village where a lot has happened.
GB: When you were
researching this history, what did you find out about East Blatchington that
you were not expecting?
More
than I expected! It’s a small place, so I was expecting only 50 pages’ worth of
history. But a lot of interesting people have lived here.
A particular chapter that was unexpected
was the story of Robert Lambe, one of the last bailiffs of Seaford and the last
squire of East Blatchington. My neighbours let me look at their property deeds
and I found many pieces of his story there, including the huge scale of his
debts. I was curious to find out just how he got so deeply into debt, and how
he managed it. He was interested in acquiring property. Not so much in paying
for it, just acquiring it. He managed to buy Blatchington Court and most of the
parish. It’s a fascinating story of huge over-reaching ambition, complex
property deals and escalating debts. In the end the debts were overwhelming and
the land had to be sold for building – to pay the debts. That’s when the surge
of building happened in Blatchington parish, and the village was engulfed.
It’s also surprising how many clues to
Blatchington’s past are still here, on the ground or in the buildings. One
example - When I walk up Firle Road now, I notice the two dips in the grass
verge, one opposite Firle Drive, one outside St John’s School. Old maps show
that 200 years ago there were ponds at those places, as there often were at
road junctions. The hollows are still there, though the water has gone. . . .
So the past is still here with us, and I hope the book will help people to see
more & understand more of the past as they walk round this forgotten
village.
Chronological list of interviews
01/05/68 May Day
folklore, with Gordon Snell for Woman’s Hour
05/06/83 The Long
Man of Wilmington, with Mike Debens for Southern TV
11/06/83 The Long
Man of Wilmington, with David Rowlands for Radio Brighton
24/04/88 Interview
with Doris Gundry for ‘Sussex Writers’ series
25/01/90 Minoan
human sacrifice, for BBC World Service
25/05/94 The Cerne
Giant, with Margaret Feord for Meridian TV
11/08/94 The Cerne
Giant, for Meridian TV
16/08/94 Site
meeting with National Trust at the Cerne Giant filmed for NT centenary
programme, produced by Eddie Mirzoeff
28/08/94 The Cerne
Giant, for Country Watch, HTV West
09/09/94 The Cerne
Giant for Evening Argus, Radio 5, Radio WM
11/09/94 The Cerne
Giant, with Tommy Boyd for Southern Counties Radio
20/06/95 Stonehenge, for Radio Wales
21/06/95 Horse, Man
& Giants, with Andrew Joynes for Omnibus, World Service
04/03/97 The Cerne
Giant: Problems with Hill-Figures. Talk to Oxford
University Archaeological Society,
Christchurch College, Oxford.
15/08/97
Stonehenge, for Radio Wales
11/12/98 The Cerne
Giant, with Ruth Langsford for Westcountry TV.
23/12/98 Atlantis
Destroyed, with Colin Bull for Radio Scotland.
30/01/01 Ancient
British Hill Figures: Talk to the Pagan Circle, Eastbourne
12/03/02 The Long
Man of Wilmington: talk to Worthing Archaeological
Society.
09/03/04 Knossos –
palace or temple?: talk to Worthing Archaeological
Society.
22/11/11 On
Blatchington Hill, with Garry Broome for Seahaven FM.
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