Wanda Pedersen’s Reviews > Upon a White Horse: Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland > Status Update

The long horizon of the Irish Sea was an altar laid for mass, a pair of lighthouses the candles.

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There is a sort of cowardice in seeking solace in the past, but sometimes the headlines are too much, and the desire to get away too great to resist.

Prehistoric burials sometimes come with grave goods and always come with mysteries. They bequeath us their bodies, but not their biographies, and each is a story prompt.

"We are solemn about archaeology as a science," Jacquetta Hawkes observed, "but the discovery at Sutton Hoo was the most glorious demonstration there has ever been in Britain of archaeology as pure romance."

To see the teddy now, within a glass case, felt like an encounter with one of those rotted martyrs you sometimes find being venerated in European churches. Biscuit-brown, worn and stitched and patched, the bear wore a woolen vest and an expression of fathomless ursine sorrow.

There is something about ancient places that seems to fill some hollow in our souls.