The Alton Barnes Goddess -  (May 2023)

     

This wonderful neolithic artwork represents a gigantic woman on her back. Her pregnant tummy is the hill to the right, her breast with prominent nipple and highly attenuated head to the left. This figure, of course, is actually almost totally natural, yet the deliberate addition of Adam's Grave Barrow represents the Goddess' missing nipple. This relatively small construction brings the whole ensemble to life, which represents the height of economy of effort if you think about it! - the creation of one barrow creates an enormous figure in the landscape. This photograph does not show the Milk HIll breast (which you can see if you view her from farther east).  The Goddess has accompanied me on many, many drives I have made to and from Pewsey. Of course her main temple is the main Avebury complex to the north. For more information about her please click here.

The bright object behind the cloud on the left is Venus, and the star center-right is Capella. If you look carefully at the top of Adam's Grave Barrow on the larger version of this photo (accessible from the blue button at the top right of this page) you can see a dot, as if someone is standing on top of it! Very M R James.


 

 

When I was a photography student at Kingston a visiting photojournalist examined my portfolio. She told me I was the kind of landscape photographer who would painstakingly set up the camera on a tripod and wait as long as necessary for a cloud to arrive at a pre-determined part of the sky before pressing the shutter.  This image of the Alton Barnes Goddess reminds me of this comment, I was indeed extremely lucky that the tiny cloud arrived and occluded Venus just in time to complete my composition. Of course, it might not have been luck at all, perhaps the Goddess herself was helping me! Because of the extreme luminosity differences across this image I had to darken the Venus cloud in post-production so that the planetary disk becames visible in the photograph, but essentially the cloud appears here just as it did to my naked eye when I pressed the shutter. Not a repeatable image, a unique moment.

 


 

Image copyright David Baldwin Night Photography