Perceptions of Maiden Castle

Bill Brandt, Maiden Castle, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Lilliput, May 1946

British Movietone, Maiden Castle Site, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdO-4TDc8DM


William Barnes, from Dorset Folk and Dorset:

Arthur Mee:

“Here are 100 acres as thrilling as any piece of English earth, the home of thousands of people thousands of years ago, with a story unfolding itself in dramatic chapters which must move the mind of an Englishman with a sense of mystery almost too deep for words”.

Frederick Treves:

“Maiden Castle – the Mai-Dun or Hill of Strength…remains to this day the most stupendous British earth-work in existence”.

Thomas Hardy:

“Acoustic perceptions multiply to-night. We can almost hear the stream of years that have borne these deeds away from us. Strange articulations seem to float on the air from that point, the gateway, where the animation in past times must frequently have concentrated itself at hours of coming and going, and general excitement. There arises an ineradicable fancy that they are human voices; if so, they must be the lingering air-borne vibrations of conversations uttered at least fifteen hundred years ago.”

John Cowper Powys

“It is hard to believe that objects of frantic invocation, however weird and monstrous, do not release, when freed from their long imprisonment, something of the magnetic potency that the minds of their far-off worshippers communicated to them as they prayed”.

Hardy and Barnes on Maiden Castle


See also, William Barnes, Earthworks of the Britons. from Notes on Ancient Britain and the Britons (from page 90)


A British Earthwork (An Archaeologist Speaks), William Barnes

(First Stanza)

The grassy downs of Dorset,
        Rising o’er our homes of peace,
E’er teem with life and riches
        In the sheep and precious fleece;
And charm the thoughtful roamer
        When, like us, he climbs to scan
Their high-cast mounds of war – the works
        Of Britain’s early man,
Whose speech, although here lingers yet
         His mighty works of hand,
Has ceased a thousand years to sound
         In air of this green land,
And startled may it be to hear
         The words of British kin —

                An gwaliow war an meneth
                An caer war an bryn...

(“The ramparts on the mountain, the stronghold on the hill”)

Paul Nash, Maiden Castle, watercolour


Paul Nash, Maiden Castle, 1943


Paul Nash, Maiden Castle, Photograph (No, 23)


Paul Nash, Tate negative


Another Tate negative


Ronald Jesty print


Walter Tyndale (includes Maiden Castle) - ninth illustration


Thomas Hardy, from Ancient Earthworks at Casterbridge:

John Ireland, Mai-Dun, Symphonic Rhapsody