It's odd how you get interested in something, possibly because of just one word or idea. Of course, one thing leads to another. Soon, it becomes so complicated you want to call in the experts.

I was reading about a town in England called Wormshill:

"A 1994 landscape survey identified woodland to the north of the village as having contained ancient flint tools and what appeared to be flint boundary markers, the latter apparently gathered from loose-lying surface flints. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman. These holes, which may be up to 30 metres (100 ft) deep, were often dug at the edges of fields, onto which the chalk marl would be spread."

Wormshill is a very ancient place with a name connected to a Viking god, Odin.

I began wondering about the origin of chalk. I've never found any deep deposits of chalk in my yard or heard about any such discoveries in the yards of anyone I know. I typed in the search term origin of chalk, and the first entry was about mineral deposits in Belchalwell in southern Britain. It seems that chalk and flint are associated minerals.

I wondered what the meaning of the place name Belchalwell might be. It sounds like belch well, but that couldn't be it. I had already read that the town name Wormshill was derived from ancient times:

"The village is thought to be much older, its name derived from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden (a cognate with the Norse god, Odin) and meaning 'Woden's Hill'" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormshill).

Knowing this, there might be an interesting interpretation given to the name Belchawell. One Internet site gives the meaning of of Belchawell as "hill by the cold stream". My first guess had been about "Bel", associated with Beltane and fires on the hills.

Another site added to this by saying:

"Many written references state that 'Bel' or 'Bell' is Old English for 'Hill', though this seems to be a rather simplified version, as more detailed interpretations seem to give it the meaning 'sacred hill' or 'hill of sacrifice'...

Our own thoughts are that the name could originate from much earlier times, and be associated with the Celtic festival of Beltain (Beltain, Beltane, Beltaine), which was still widely celebrated up to the 17th century, and still is in places. The hill was an important place to our ancestors, with evidence of use and occupation stretching back thousands of years into the neolithic period. The ancient earthworks around the boundaries and the tumuli at the summit evidence this significance, and the multiple layers of field systems from different periods patch-working the hill show it's fertility and usefulness to many hundreds of generations."

Belchalwell is still in existence today. This site has photos from the not so ancient past. My favorite was:

"The Cross, now known as Post Box Cottage, taken 1949. We don't know who the gentleman in the picture is, but the building is remarkably little changed today compared with most properties in Belchalwell Unknown, donated by Jack Yeatman."

Hmm, maybe I was on to something after all, but what? Digging for obscure meaning is much like digging in my garden for fossils and other mineral deposits, very hard work and very interesting.

Let me explain.

Where do I start?

It seems that people actually read my blogs. For some time, I have been treating my blog as a sort of note -taking pad, using my own mental shorthand to sort of, kind of, map out a few things I want to say, mostly to myself.

Now, I feel I really must give them all a quick once-over to see if they make sense in a public way, like having a lot of children hanging from the chandeliers and subsequently finding out the rector is on the way over for a little chat.

Whoops, kiddos!

My garden space was the worst place in the world to plant a garden. The garden site was sloped so that if I turned over the soil at all, I risked losing the bit of fertile soil there was with the first rain. Digging into the minimal topsoil, the shovel would crunch into rocks covered with a sticky red clay. The site was so bad that I considered buying some type of large containers to fill with topsoil and put the garden plants in them instead of in the ground. Then I thought that would become too expensive, for the number of containers I would need might be more than one hundred, so why not turn the clay soil into ready-made pots in the ground and fill the holes with fertile ground. I dug holes about two feet deep, and when the digging got especially rough I would fill them with water and let it soak in for a while. I used all the big square rocks that I could find to terrace the slope a bit. It turned out to be a pretty good idea.

I began the task, but it was really strenuous. Sparks would fly every time I unexpectedly struck a rock with my shovel. I would often have to pry the rocks out of the tough, sticky clay. I worked at it all spring and summer, usually piling the debris in small heaps throughout the garden, the summer heat making me lazy about carting them out in a wheelbarrow.

As the spring and summer rains began, the clay slowly washed off from all the rocks, and I began to think some of them looked peculiarly like fossils, but who would ever think that untold eons ago, some process, maybe a melting glacier, would dump so many proofs of ancient life right there, right where millions (Dare I guess how long ago?) of years later I would try to grow tomatoes?

One day, I picked up what looked like a thin slice of shale and dipped it into a bucket of water to clean off the last remnants of dirt. There, looking right into my face, was an unmistakable face of a creature who had once been alive, however long ago. There it was, grinning, ghost-like, back at me, with obvious mouth and eyes, and maybe a glob was once a nose.

After that, my garden began to look more like an archeological dig than a proper garden. The tomatoes grew beautifully too in their underground containers.