Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Desperate Earth
If Gaia speaks, what does she tell us? I'm writing in a small, quiet room in a meditation
centre on the edge of Dartmoor, and have just come back from a walk amongst the rocks,
streams and open moorland of this wonderful open country in the south-west of England.
As I gazed out over the dun coloured hills before me on a brilliantly sunny afternoon on
the last day of January, a gentle, cold wind blew over the barren land. Where once, thou-
sands of years ago, there was a vast, windswept forest, now there is only open moorland
peppered here and there with a few lonely trees. What happened? The rocks and the thinly
scattered trees have the answer: they tell of the first Neolithic agriculturalists who came
here over 4,000 years ago with their stone ploughs and their fierce, sharp stone axes. The
great granite tors recall how these men cut down the trees to plough the light soils for
their crops. They remember the fires and the felling, the new fields and the foreboding
as the axes cut deep into the flesh of millennial trees. The stones speak of this even now,
and so do the few lonely trees that have been lucky enough to escape the endless pressure
of fire and over-grazing. Despite 4,000 years of abuse, the land still gives us beauty and
grandeur, for there is still great presence here—the wild consciousness of a place dimin-
ished, but not yet fully desecrated.
