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A review by halfmanhalfbook
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden
4.0
The well-known phrase of the estate agent; location, location, location; where the right spot can be very beneficial to your financial position. But in this book, Marsden is looking for something much, much deeper in meaning than that superficial statement, and what he wants to consider is the word place.
Certain places affect people in very different ways, some are what they call home, and that isn’t always where they are currently living, others are where people feel great spiritual meaning or significance. There are places that have a long history of ritual activity, and as he travels around places near his home in Cornwall, he starts to peel back the layers of time, even going as far back as the Mesolithic.
He visits the still visible Neolithic landscape on Bodmin Moor, and with the help of an expert learns what it may have meant to the people then. In Tintagel, home of the Arthurian legends, it is packed full of myths but very little in the way of solid evidence and yet still draws the crowds to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the place. The granite Tors that spike the skyline on the Cornish moors have held men’s gaze for millennia. There is even evidence of bronze age stone rows on the Scilly Isles, the islands far from the end of Cornwall. Lands End too comes under his gaze, it is a more contemporary place, a focus for end to enders these days, but it is a remote place of dramatic cliffs.
It is such a lovely book to read too, not only is the prose careful and measured, almost haunting at times, but he has a way of weaving the history, the landscape and the sacred into a beautifully written book. I like the way that each chapter begins with a place name, a definition and an image to set the scene of the next location; it is a clever addition to the book to set some context.
The evocative way that he describes the landscapes makes you want to go too, absorb the atmosphere as others have done before, and contemplate the personal and real meaning of that place to you. All these places are deeply ingrained in our culture and psyche now, and as much as we have formed them, they have moulded us too.
Certain places affect people in very different ways, some are what they call home, and that isn’t always where they are currently living, others are where people feel great spiritual meaning or significance. There are places that have a long history of ritual activity, and as he travels around places near his home in Cornwall, he starts to peel back the layers of time, even going as far back as the Mesolithic.
He visits the still visible Neolithic landscape on Bodmin Moor, and with the help of an expert learns what it may have meant to the people then. In Tintagel, home of the Arthurian legends, it is packed full of myths but very little in the way of solid evidence and yet still draws the crowds to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the place. The granite Tors that spike the skyline on the Cornish moors have held men’s gaze for millennia. There is even evidence of bronze age stone rows on the Scilly Isles, the islands far from the end of Cornwall. Lands End too comes under his gaze, it is a more contemporary place, a focus for end to enders these days, but it is a remote place of dramatic cliffs.
It is such a lovely book to read too, not only is the prose careful and measured, almost haunting at times, but he has a way of weaving the history, the landscape and the sacred into a beautifully written book. I like the way that each chapter begins with a place name, a definition and an image to set the scene of the next location; it is a clever addition to the book to set some context.
The evocative way that he describes the landscapes makes you want to go too, absorb the atmosphere as others have done before, and contemplate the personal and real meaning of that place to you. All these places are deeply ingrained in our culture and psyche now, and as much as we have formed them, they have moulded us too.