We are walking on sacred ground, that’s all I can say, there is a strange feeling which comes down upon you of connection with the land, its history and ourselves. You feel it as you follow the weaving path along the damp forest floor where we carefully tread. We pass through dark thickets of holly and enter the steep rolling banks and ditches of Loughton Camp, an iron-age enclosure made around 500 years before the Romans landed here on the British isles, bringing with them the irrepressible power, prestige and culture of the Mediterranean world and changed this little island forever. Among the tall trees, glorious coppiced beech and hornbeam, the banks and enclosures remain easily definable. The old camp is situated deep in the forest, only the small barely noticeable footpath winding away through the trees will lead you here. Invariably when you visit you are by yourself, you seldom meet other walkers here. There is a distinct quietness in this place, only the chittering comments of small forest birds passing or the whispering sounds of branches swaying high in the breeze above, scattering pools of light along the leaf litter floor. This is a place of memories, poignant, abandoned, forgotten. Nothing else. A melancholy exists in the air. Nature in its indifference has reclaimed this place, the small round thatched houses and earthen enclosures have tumbled, wrecked and rotted away over centuries. Families had once known this land, lovers had wandered into the forest, children had played beside the smoking hearths, the cattle had loomed through the morning mists, generations of people had lived and died in this place, an ancient culture which still remains mysterious to us. Their existence now catalogued by what we find, circles of stone, their art and mastery of metals, the written experience of the colonisers, the Romans, who gave this place and its peoples its first recorded names: Trinovante, Catuvellauni, Britanniae, Londinium. Now they have all gone, replaced by the quiet wanderings of deer and the circling paths of buzzards in the air. And with all these places where humanity has been and has made its mark on the landscape, the feeling persists that ‘others’ are here, watching, not in any distinct supernatural sense, no sign of ghosts or ghoulish peculiarities, only in the feeling that the place itself holds something in its residual being that is still palpable to us, a memory of ourselves forgotten, an absence long empty, an emotion that is geographical, yet just beyond our reach of understanding. People have been here for a long time and you can still feel it.
