Jon Pountney (Member n0: 1058)

Rollright Stones

I painted my own stone circle because I’m so engrossed in the idea of the placement of stones; the idea that they contain a trace and aggregation of events and feelings; that they draw people across time

My first visit to the Rollright Stones was on the cusp of my teenage years, either in 1990 or 1991. Under the canopy of a winter white Cotswold sky I was the back seat passenger bouncing along in the family Metro, with my parents in the front. I watched a lot of the world go by through that back window, and I think that mute observation developed my interested in looking, and exploring. We had been on a tour around a school I didn’t want to go to, and then to peep at Chastleton House (this might be the time me and my Dad broke into the grounds and found an elderly Humber in a collapsed garage, but that’s another story), and from there it was to the muddy lay-by and the scruffy hedges and scotch pines that signalled arrival at the Stones.

This isolated B road where a few cars can squeeze onto the verge seems to scrape along the underneath of the sky, and the borderland between Warwickshire and Oxfordshire has the feeling of a limitless vista. Much later in life these scruffy hedges and scotch firs would sketch in the scenery for me while reading ‘A Warning to the Curious’ by M.R James, and I often ruminate on the way seeds are planted in youth, that grow into adult imaginations, and the long shadows cast by events that at the time seem ordinary and everyday.

The colours and particularly sounds of that place seep through my everyday and into my art and imagination- lichen yellow, chalky whites and dirty umbers. Passing cars, far off voices and birdsong; the persistent hiss of a soft, keening breeze through leaves and branches triggers a kind of peaceful flashback.

In lockdown I found great solace in exploring local areas that were totally new to me, and discovered places that were heavy with that same atmosphere of the Cotswolds. Now living in Treforest, just south of Pontypridd, I was very familiar with an idea of the South Wales valleys as places of post-industrial ruins and terraced houses, but not quiet lanes, dry stone walls and ancient churches. In discovering that atmosphere at Eglwysilan (church of St Ilan) in the May of 2020, I took many pilgrimages up to those stones to escape the claustrophobia of lockdown- ironic because Eglwysilan lies on the route of an ancient Christian pilgrimage. To walk along those well-trodden paths is to escape the suffocating present and feel past and future as a continuum; to feel your eyes soothed by views that so many have looked on.

I painted my own stone circle because I’m so engrossed in the idea of the placement of stones; the idea that they contain a trace and aggregation of events and feelings; that they draw people across time. And the stones themselves- colours and forms, unchanging in a human time frame. A fixed point in time and space, reminding us we are small in an ocean of time- maybe an imprint on my memory made over 30 years ago at the Rollright Stones.