When Barriers Come Down

The Wildflowers Bloom | A Rima episode

I’m up high on Hergest Ridge, standing next to a boulder cairn, each stone coated with a multitude of coloured lichens - sulphur orange, pale blue, silver white. Minute cities of life. There are many cairns here, some Bronze Age, others just piles from modern field clearances. To an untrained historian like myself it feels like a ceremonial landscape, accidentally created, the randomness of the monuments containing a wild beauty that only comes from the random.

Below me are many smaller hills marking the border: Hanter Hill, Herrock Hill, Rushock Hill, Stanner Woods, Bradnor Hill. They’re like vast cairns rising from the landscape, or fortresses, lookout posts, defences. Across Herrock Hill is a deep score mark, a sword slash, the line of Offa’s Dyke. On some of the bare, sheep-bitten tops I can see traces of old settlements: banks and ditches, tumps. Within a mile radius of here are several castle remains, moated houses, camps, motte and baileys. It was once the most fortified area in the UK, which is perhaps also to say, the most fragile.