The Archive — The Kistvean

Plate I

The Kistvaen

A Bronze Age stone burial chamber on Dartmoor, photographed in tones of sepia. The cap-stone is displaced from its proper position. — Plate I · The Kistvaen, displaced

From the E.H. portfolio. Glass plate, slightly damaged at the lower edge. Date and location uncertain; consistent in style with E.H.'s 1864 walking journals, though the photograph is not directly referenced in any surviving entry.

The cap-stone has been displaced. The chamber, when the plate was made, was empty.

The shepherd's boy referenced in Fragment I would not approach this stone. The photographer evidently did.

Composite I

The Witness

A digital composite: a face dissolving into water, warm sepia bleeding into cool blue. — Composite I · A face dissolving into weather

Mixed digital media. Contemporary, by a hand the archive has come to recognise.

The figure has been recorded in many registers — photographic, painted, drawn, described — across centuries that should not contain a single recurring face.

He is not the subject of E.H.'s journals. He is the witness to them. He has been witnessing them for a long time.

He is looking for someone.

A Folk Note

On Beltane

Recorded in Widecombe village, 1923, from a girl of nine. The rhyme is not catalogued in any printed collection of Devon folk-song known to the archive. It survives only here.

      Mayfire, Mayfire, burn through the night,
      Keep us in dark and keep us in light.
      Mayfire, Mayfire, burn till the morn,
      Keep what is buried from being reborn.
    

The fire-festival is widely understood as a celebration. The cottagers of the western moors understood it differently. The fires were not lit only for joy. They were lit to keep something out.

What is being kept out is a question the archive has not yet answered. The reader is invited to consider why a child in 1923 would learn the word reborn before the word burned.

Parish Records

From the Parish of Postbridge

Transcribed from the parish register, October 1864.

19th October. Stone at the high enclosure disturbed in the night. Capstone displaced. Cause not determined. Seven sheep within two miles found dead by morning, no wound apparent. The constable declined to investigate further. — Rev. J. Penhale

The Reverend Penhale's hand is steady. He records what is in front of him. He does not speculate.

E.H. photographed the displaced stone the day before this entry was made.