One agnostic went on a excursion that tested his sentiment. Or the lack of them. Recently, Gawan Mac Greigair has bought an Ordnance Survey( national mapping organization in the United kingdom government) hiking map, and find a place of worship emblem in the “middle of bloody nowhere.” “It’s 4cm to 1 mile, so it’s the right scale to be able to include symbols for intriguing things in the landscape, including historic monuments, ancient earthworks, places of adore and so on, ” Gawan told Bored Panda . Pondering what that particular one actually was, he decided to see for himself.
“I happened to have a free afternoon on that day, and there was heavy cloud blanketing the highest level of the North Downs all day, ” he said. “I couldn’t defy the chance of an otherworldly walk in mist.”
“The North Downs is a range of chalk mounds in Kent( which give the White Cliffs of Dover their whiteness)- it’s classed as’ Ancient Countryside’, and it is full of secretive nooks and crannies, and has a long history. I had seen this symbol on the map before and it had intrigued me because it seemed unusual that a place of worship would be located quite far from any village and that it would be right on the leading edge of a woodland.”
Gawan doesn’t consider himself a adherent in heaven. The human, however, still acknowledges places where other forms of reality become tangible, where past and present interlace. “This place is certainly one, helped by the apparent unite of this ancient human arrangement with the woodland mobbing close.”
“The most memorable proportion was the moment when- after believing I had lost my route in the timber- I was approaching where the symbol on the map seemed to suggest the place of worship ought to be. I was straining to find it through the fog, which was difficult given that I didn’t know whether to look for a ruining, a heap of stones or an actual church. I guess I gasped at the moment when I realise I was seeming straight at it.” Scroll down to join Gawan on his unforgettable journey and follow in his footsteps!
“I’m ever moved by age-old woodbanks, just knowing that they’ve acted as bounds for centuries, and this timber was bounded by one, topped with spaghetti beeches and hornbeams”
“The first section of wood was characterized by hazel coppice, which I feel I don’t encounter very often. I ever imagine hazel as a friendly tree, which is just as well in this very Poe fog”
“I went across a sudden immerse hollow. It seemed unmarked by any horsehoe of close contour line on the OS map, so this is when I first started to suspect that I’d lost my way”
“I checked my map again. Three sides of a squarish rectangle was my route. Two right angled turns to the right. Just past the hollow a muddy but confident way went fogward at 90 degrees. This must be my second turn. I must be pretty close”
“Last year’s beech leaves were still clinging on to saplings in the understory, where the winter winds weren’t be permitted to dislodge them. A strange bright confetti in the murk”
“But this side of my square itinerary was getting absurdly long, it didn’t make sense any more. This imperious beech appeared to give me directions, but I couldn’t interpret its gestures and I don’t speak beech”
“I decided to take the next obvious right and hope for the best. It took me through a recent coppice, where the felling had uncovered another monumental beech( a very unusual standard tree in a coppice, where oak is much more usual”
“I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for- a recognisable structure, a hollow overgrown by hornbeam? But suddenly the mane on my neck stood up and I recognized I was already looking at it”
“I find it hard to state this without hugging myself and clapping my hands in childish gaiety, but this church had not yet been electricity and is still lighted by running gas lamps”