Rabbits dart off down holes with a bobbing flash of their white tails as a figure in animal skins with black crows feathers in his headdress dances on they grey limestone rocks with a rattle in his hands. Another man pounds a steady beat on a loose-s
kinned drum.
The man's head dips and weaves as his arms and knees flail to the hypnotic rhythm. The sun is setting red and orange behind the steady black hills of Simonside. Perhaps a raven's throaty caw pierces the air as it flies overhead,
I reckon that the mysterious cup and ring marked rocks at the Iron Age fort of Lordenshaws are a map.
Not of the rough Northumbrian terrain, but of the inner space io the mind of a Shaman.
With his face bearded and painted, the fur of an animal over his broad shoulders and a leather crane bag bouncing off his thigh containing bones and pebbles, he dances, hallucinogetic psylcybinmushrooms giving him a vision that can heal the tribe.
Two symbols in a Celtic Shamanism match almost exactly the ring marks - the spiral maze, used to receive a healing dream, and the Celtic symbol stone for life.
Religion plays a big part in any society - the church is invariably the focal piont of most Northumbrian villages - and will certainly have played a part in life at Lordenshaws.
Long before St Aidan brought Christianity from the Holy Island, Animism - or the applied Animism of Shamanism - could have been the religion of the Northumbrian wilds.
Foxes, badgers, deer, red squirrels, trout - the abundant native wildlife in the valley's lives - wil have been intricatly linked with the people that inhabited the area.
Similarly marked rocks can be found in California, Mexico and Australia. All places with a Shamanic tradition.
My old headmaster Stane Beckensall may disagree, but I feel that it is another possiblity to throw open to debate.
I can picture the smoke billowing from the centre of the heather roofs of the building of a thriving society with a Shaman, a medicine man, the soirtiual leader of the place on the hill looking down on the silver ribbon of the Coquet.
Such an important man would wish to leave his mark.
Perhaps Tony Robinson and the Time Team could shed more light on the subject.
It's about time that they came to the Coquet Valley and got digging.
