In search of sacred places

'Farming as the root of all environmental evil is an increasingly adamantine trope'

- Kate Green, John Lewis-Stempel, Jamie Blackett & John Goodall

Grounded: A Journey into the Landscapes of our Ancestors James Canton (Canongate, £18.99)

THE author is a lecturer in 'wild writing', which suggests opium-fuelled poems by Thomas De Quincey or Woolfian stream-of-consciousness novellas scribbled in wind-blasted lighthouses. Rather, the discipline studies the links between literature, landscape and the environment. James Canton writes of what he teaches, Grounded being a personal exploration-both the literal act of journeying and mental voyage-around sacred spaces in Britain.

The obvious question is: what is 'sacred'? He generally means somewhere 'numinous', divine or spiritual. Churches are obvious cases, and he duly starts in musty, silent St James's, Lindsey, Suffolk, where he also gives us the direction of travel of his thesis: the need for a keen sense of calm', relief from the hurly-burly of modern life, connection with Nature, the wanting to be 'grounded'.

Dr Canton is not religious, but he is possessed by a sense of Other, and takes Buddhist meditation classes. More, he has a liking for deep history. Consequently, the 'spiritual essence' emanating from the sacred landscapes of our Palaeolithic ancestors is of particular focus, and so we visit the strange sarsen stones at Alphamstone, the haunting burial chambers at West Kennet, mysterious Blick Mead spring on Salisbury Plain. As he notes, the peoples of the past may be long gone, their monuments too, but 'the ground is slow to relinquish the signs of spaces that once held such importance'. Prehistoric barrows show up as contemporary crop circles, a link to the past that is at once ghostly, at once tangible.