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The Bondwomen by W G Collingwood Find!

Well Helen, I haven't yet read Thorstein of the Mere but I have read the sequel, The Bondwomen. Like you I have found my eyes opened to the historical significance of parts of our county's landscape, areas which were home to the Norsemen, Anglo Saxons and English who waged endless raids on each other to gain the upper hand!

In this saga of Langdale, Collingwood tells the story of two slave-girls, Deorwyn and Tate, who are sold to descendants of the first Viking settlers in Westmorland. From start to finish, the book draws a picture of the domestic side of life in the Langdale district at the time when Christianity was first appearing, while at the same time allowing us to follow the mixed fortunes of the two slave girls and their changing role in the society in which they are forced to live. The effect the girls' arrival has on the families of Oddi, Arni and Brand is enormous, and will change their life in the dale for good.

I loved the way Collingwood describes the land beyond the homesteads, there is a real sense of wild loneliness on the open fells compared with the homestead environs. Whether you've been to Skelwith or not, look how Collingwood describes Deorwyn's walk to gather berries there one day:

"She.....had wandered up the ridge from dell to dell and knoll to knoll through the wild wood......To climb the brow above Skelwith in the days of old was like roaming through a great palace, with its dark stairways and secret passages, from chamber to bower, and from chapel to hall. She had come through green porches, between door-posts wreathed and knotted with ivy-snakes, like weird carvings of the Northmen, and over arched with dark roofs of yew; and out into golden aisles hung with bright tapestry of drooping leafage, massy, flickering, flaming of hue- dazzling after the gloom of the evergreens. Through the rustling curtains she had pushed, and through the nets of honeysuckle, flowering agsain after early frost and sweet for the bees' last feast, into mirk and cave-like dens where the ground was red between the rock-edges with last year's fir-needles, deep, and soft as any bed: and then out again into open spaces, dewy breaths of unbroken grass, downy like children's hair and green as the clear pools in a valley of white stone_the grass that grows only under the pines, where their pillars, stark and straight, shoot up through the rafters of the forest roof."Collingwood's descriptive narrative continues until finally Deorwyn finds "blaeberry gardens thickset with bloomy globes of purple."

I too have walked up valley sides through coniferous woods and have wandered through woods of silver birches over springy turf until I too have finally found the juicy Bilberries ripe for picking among the clumps of Heather. What a great descriptive passage and how true to reality!

The photo I've added was taken on a recent walk I did with my husband over Pike O'Blisco and onto Crinkle Crags. It was a beautiful September day, the views were stunning and this view down Langdale captures the valley on a particularly benign day! The last time we had a walk near here was earlier in the year when we went up Lingmoor, a relatively small fell on the other side of the pass into Little Langdale. (Just where the road on the map loops round!). What a difference ~ that day we couldn't see the top of Pike O'Blisco across the valley for all the swirling low cloud, there was snow underfoot all the way and not a soul to be seen, or a car to be heard all the time we were out. I can't help but sympathise with the early residents of the valley on a day like that! 

26 September 2009 from Anne

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