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‘There’s some evidence of ritual,’ says Jamie. ‘There are hearths on some of the shaft floors which may have had a ceremonial purpose. We found the skeleton of a dog but maybe he just fell into a shaft. There are rabbit and fox bones too. But, as I say, primarily this was a sophisticated mining operation.’
‘Maybe women even came down here to give birth,’ says Leo.
‘My wife is nearly nine months pregnant,’ says Jamie. ‘I can’t imagine any woman going underground to have a baby.’
‘I thought you’d found a fertility figure in one of the shafts,’ says Leo, sounding disappointed. ‘Also chalk phalluses. The mines could be seen as vaginas and the phalluses a symbol of penetration.’ He grins at Ruth, yellow teeth glowing in the darkness.
‘You said the mines were wombs a minute ago,’ says Ruth. ‘I hate to break it to you, but they’re not the same thing.’
‘Anyway, the Venus figure is thought to be a fake,’ says Jamie. ‘It’s unlike any Palaeolithic or Neolithic carving that I’ve seen. It’s smiling, for one thing.’
‘Maybe she had something to smile about,’ says Leo.
‘Would they have had light down here?’ says Ruth, rather hastily. ‘You mentioned them feeling for the flint.’
‘We’ve never found lamps or tallow in the mines,’ says Jamie. ‘One theory is that they would have had a mound of chalk here at the bottom. The sunlight would shine down the shaft and reflect on the white stone.’
‘What if they were here in the night?’ says Leo. Ruth is certain that he’s imagining midnight rituals, probably involving nubile virgins.
‘That’s unlikely,’ says Jamie. ‘Shall we go up?’
Ruth agrees immediately. She’s the first to climb the ladder, this time going forwards into the present. When she gets to the surface, she steps out of the kiosk and breathes deeply. The air feels wonderfully sweet, smelling of grass and dew.
‘Fancy a coffee?’ says Jamie. ‘There’s a machine in the exhibition centre.’
Now you’re talking, thinks Ruth.
Sitting at the picnic table, drinking the surprisingly good coffee, Ruth feels her archaeologist’s sense returning. She asks about the excavations.
‘A clergyman called Canon William Greenwell was the first to explore one of the shafts,’ says Jamie. ‘That was in around 1850. About twenty-eight of the mines have been excavated since then.’
‘I seem to remember that there are over four hundred of them,’ says Ruth.
‘We think there are at least four hundred and thirty-three,’ says Jamie. ‘They were numbered in 1915 but there may well be more. The surrounding land is owned by the Ministry of Defence so we can’t dig there.’
Ruth hadn’t been so far wrong when she thought of the ghost fields.
‘What about the Anglo-Saxons?’ says Leo. ‘They were the ones who gave the place its name, after all. Grim’s Gaben.’
Ruth remembers that Leo had used the archaic name in his email.
‘Or Grim’s Graven,’ says Jamie. ‘The Anglo-Saxon kings of East Anglia saw Grim, or Odin or Woden, as their direct ancestor. They definitely saw this place as special. There’s Grimshoe Mound at the eastern end of the site. It was probably a meeting place of some sort.’
‘I’ve had some interesting meetings there myself,’ says Leo.
Ruth wonders what he means. Leo has a way of making the most ordinary remarks sound somehow unsavoury. She wants to know more about Grimshoe. She knows that ‘hoe’ or ‘howe’ means a low hill or a burial mound. Her dig had excavated nearby but she seems to remember that they found only some indifferent pottery and evidence of a Bronze Age midden.
Leo seems reluctant to abandon the god Grim. ‘The Anglo-Saxons made sacrifices to Odin, or Grim, before wars,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to imagine that happening on Grim’s Hoe here. It’s always a good thing to appease the gods. Isn’t that what your friend Cathbad would say, Ruth?’
Ruth is jolted. She didn’t realise that Leo knew about her connection to Cathbad. She manages to reply, fairly coolly, ‘Cathbad is very interested in belief systems. Are you still in touch with him?’
‘Sadly no,’ says Leo, sipping his cappuccino rather noisily. ‘We were brothers once, united in our spiritual and emotional journey.’
‘You mentioned the dig here twenty years ago,’ says Ruth. ‘Cathbad took part in that, didn’t he?’
Jamie, perhaps embarrassed by the sudden intensity of the conversation, mutters an apology and moves away, pretending to tidy the leaflet display outside the cabin.
‘Yes,’ says Leo. ‘That was an unforgettable weekend.’
