There’s a place a short drive from home where I’m often drawn to watch the sunset. It’s been special for thousands of years – a high point on a pre-Roman trade route and a gateway to the chalklands of the Yorkshire wolds. The area is thick with prehistoric archaeology, including mounds, cursuses and earthworks.
Here at Aldro, the banks of a vast bronze age ditched enclosure would once have stood out white against both land and sky. It is a truly spectacular vantage point, with unobscured views west and north across the vales of York and Pickering to the dales and the moors. From here it is also possible to see almost all the setting stations of the sun as they track north in summer, south in winter, falling fully west only during the spring and autumn equinoxes.
There’s no signage or permissive arrangement encouraging people to explore, but also, happily, no attempt to prevent access. The banks are cloaked now in trees, and a single mound survives inside the north-eastern bank. Originally, there was a second in the north-western corner. It is surely no coincidence that the eastern mound contained the remains of a young boy, the western one the body of an elderly woman. Dawn is to dusk as youth is to old age.
At this point in December, we’re into the period when the sun stalls at its southernmost rising and setting points, heralding the times for midwinter celebrations that are older than Christianity and older than England.
But I had forgotten until I came that we are also entering something called the major lunar standstill. Explanations are complex, but suffice to say it happens only once every 18.6 years, and means that on recent nights the full moon soared to the highest positions it ever finds at these latitudes.
These celestial events elude most of us today, but they would have been impossible not to notice when all there was to do between dusk and dawn was watch and wonder, and when the heavens provided the only calendar.
Meaning has been stripped from the land here like soil pared from the mounds by each transit of the plough. But I only have to stand here a while on a midwinter night to know, for certain, that it all still exists.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
