Nobody is quite sure when the Wansdyke was built, but the most commonly advanced theory is that it was built by the Romano-British after they were abandoned by the Imperial power to defend their stronghold in what is now Gloucestershire, Somerset, and northern Wiltshire, in the face of Saxon expansion spreading northwards from the English Channel. This would date it to around the end of the 5th Century. Regardless of exactly at which point in the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England it was built, it seems that the much later Anglo-Saxons had lost any idea about its purpose when, despite several centuries of Christianity, they named it Woden’s Dyke, after Odin, the king of the Norse gods, around the 9th Century.
The eastern section, in Wiltshire, has been much less disturbed over the centuries by agriculture and building than those further west, and this section, north of the village of Bishops Cannings, is particularly dramatic when lit by low late afternoon sun from the south in autumn and winter.
On a rainy day in midwinter, with the rain belting down for weeks, it can be a little disappointing, a flat bank of mud surrounded by dirty puddles. Yet the sun can transfigure it into mysterious magnificence in all seasons, always easy on the ankles, even for someone with my short legs and my fat belly. The ground remains springy and fast when in a hot dry spell when the surrounding terrain is drained and hard; and also when it is surrounded by wet muck.
It is as much as 4 metres high in places. It is followed by a long-distance footpath for all of this stretch. The view in the distance reaches to Tan Hill, at 294 metres above sea level the joint highest point in Wiltshire.
This is deep England. The countryside is not especially dramatic but rolls with a heart-healing, gentle, beauty. I walk here regularly, with various circuits of 12-18 miles (19-30 km) starting and finishing from my home in Devizes taking in stretches of it. When the light is like this, it makes my soul sing and fills me with gratitude for being alive.
To be a curate is to know that in three years’ time one will not be where one currently is. In a culture that celebrates autonomy and self-direction, curacy is a life of subordinacy and dependence. What it shares with the mode of life most celebrated today is perhaps its most worrying characteristic, impermanence. Contrast that impermanence with the earthwork that has survived more than a millennium and a half intact, despite long periods of neglect and unawareness.
There is a tremendous peace in that. Like those that provoked the construction of the Wansdyke, even the life-and-death struggles that consume us today will eventually be mystifying and irrelevant to those who find fragments of them in the future. Only God is eternal.
More mysterious yet, the re-creation of last meal Jesus’ ate with his friends on earth unites us with Him and with the Saxons who named this already mysterious earthwork after a pagan God, along with its creators desperately seeking order in the new religion in the face of the collapse of a once impregnable-seeming order.
The sacrifice of Christ on the Cross destroyed death and opened the way to eternal life for the apostles; for the patricians of the sub-Roman West Country writing desperate petitions to Rome in good Latin even as they spoke to one another in a language that was an ancestor of modern Welsh; for the Saxon peasants enjoying the bounty of long-forgotten Octobers and enduring the hunger of long-forgotten Junes; and you and me, wherever you read this via the Internet in our hyper-connected early 21st Century.
In the story of the Transfiguration, the Peter, James, and John tell Jesus, “’Tis good Lord, to be here”, but rapidly reveal that they haven’t a clue what is going on by wanting to put up shelters for a transient in-breaking of the heavenly realms into the earthly.
Like the apostles on the mountain, I have no clue as to what God’s purpose for this transient phase of my life is: an Irishman from the bowels of the city in the deep English countryside, called in a time of plague and death to proclaim the Resurrection that Jesus Christ opened for all of us on the first Good Friday. And he did open it for all of us – Irish and English, Saxon and Romano-British Celt, Jew and Gentile, gay and straight, male and female, slave and free – for we are all called to be one in Christ Jesus. I only know that when the sun of golden October casts deep shadows on the Wansdyke, ‘tis good, Lord, to be here.
