Echo Festival at Lanercost — What's happening

The Dacre Hall Paintings:

Meg

Long Meg and Her Daughters is a stone circle in Cumberland that I have loved since I was a child.

Meg. Mother. Guardian.

Standing double the height of man in her fiery red sandstone, she watches over her dancing daughters. This defiant giant of the Cumbrian Fells stands guardian for those dancers who were turned to stone for dancing outside the accepted time. Yet far from being still they have become a monument to those who dare to step out of the prescribed box and they are dancing still with all the many visitor's feet that weave between them. And was Meg dancing? She has a strength, a calm stillness about her, so maybe not, but like Janusz Korczak, she chose to share the fate of the children in her charge.

Is it any wonder then, that when you visit you will so often find offerings — flowers, a feather or a chosen pebble — laid at her feet, and the trees within the circle have dancing ribbons attached. This is my homage to her and all she stands for.

Tree of Life

The Bewcastle Cross was made to bring Peace to the wild and dangerous Reiver Lands of the Borders. An early Christian outpost, this cross would originally have been painted and, I believe, used as a teaching aid to bring that word of Peace. We do not know for sure what colours were used so I chose colours similar to those used in the Lindisfarne Gospel, since they were created in the same era. The colours were made with natural pigments, often mixed in shells gathered from the beach. The side of the cross shown here depicts the Tree of Life. The beasts are mythical and the vivacity is undeniable.

The sister cross at Ruthwell lives over the border in Scotland, overlooking the Solway Firth. Both have been under attack at different times. Bewcastle has lost its circle crosspiece, leaving only the magnificent shaft, and Ruthwell was buried to protect it until it was safe to reconstruct it.

That the monolithic totem of the Bewcastle Cross still stands is iconic — what can it teach us now in our own troubled times?