summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice.  It was celebrated at Stonehenge by 37,000 people who gathered around the stones overnight to watch the sunrise, according to the Independent.  I found myself wondering how English Heritage had accommodated their visit.  Did they all book tickets in advance, as you are now required to do, paying £13.90 a head (unless they were members of the National Trust or English Heritage), and get the shuttle to travel the one and a half miles from the swanky new £27 million visitor centre to the stones?  That doesn't sound very pagan.  Or did they file in a great procession?  After all, they had plenty of time to fill, since the sun doesn't come up until around five, even on the longest day in southern Britain.  The photograph in the Independent doesn't look at all mystical, ne'er a druidical robe in sight, just a lot of people in sweatshirts and anoraks.  It gets parky at night on Salisbury plain, even in late June.  They are standing about patiently, not unlike commuters waiting for news of their delayed train at Liverpool street, except that several have mobile phones or cameras lifted above their heads to take pictures of the sunrise.  You couldn't honestly call them 'revellers', although Independent does.

They've all gone home now, and English Heritage have closed the site for the rest of the day, while they clear up.  That is almost as sweet as the story about the Japanese football fans at the World Cup, who took black bin bags to their first game (which Japan lost) and stayed after the match to pick up the rubbish in the stadium.

If I were going to make the tremendous effort of staying up all night, or even getting up early enough to see the sun rise, I'm not sure I'd bother to do it for the summer solstice.  I'd probably rather save myself for the dawn chorus, and get up earlier in the year, when the birds would be in full song.  Sunrise would be a bit later, too, so getting up would be less of a shock to the system.  I certainly wouldn't go and stand with 36,999 other people if I wanted to experience mystical union with nature.  Nobody else would be better, or at most the Systems Administrator or one or two close friends.  The English tradition of celebrating the summer solstice sounds pretty muted anyway, according to Wikipedia.  The key date is not the solstice, but Midsummer Eve, 23rd June, and since the church tried to ban gluttony, lechery and mystery plays through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, about the only genuine extant tradition seems to have been lighting bonfires.  Which I'm sure you aren't allowed to do at Stonehenge, among a crowd of 37,000.  As for doing as the druids did, I don't believe that was recorded for posterity, so whatever modern druids do is entirely made up.  No harm in that, but it doesn't have any more mystical significance than the Charleston, or Gangnam style.

If you want to get an idea of what Stonehenge might have been about, I would just stay in your armchair and read John Masefield, and let your imagination wander:

Up on the downs the red eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribes did thus on the downs, on these downs burning
Men in the frame.
Called to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes.
On the chalk downland bare.

And yes, I know it is about downland and not the plain, and there are no stones, and we don't know what Stonehenge was used for or whether sacrifice had anything to do with it.  But doesn't in conjure the spirit of what the monument might have been about or been like, when it had a current meaning and resonance, and no fences or shuttles or £27 million visitor centre, and there weren't 37,000 photo-taking non-revelling revellers standing politely in their anoraks, as if at a railway station?

Meanwhile in the garden all sorts of plants will know that the season has turned, and the nights are getting longer.  Long-night species like chrysanthemums, that have held off flowering so far, will detect as the days get short enough and the nights long enough to trigger flowering, and some trees will know that it is autumn, and that they must make buds safe for next year.  Nature is still truly in touch with the solstice, even if we aren't nowadays.