JW: Beyond there be dragons

I've long been fascinated by ancient maps that drew a line between the known world and the unknown territories beyond, marking the boundary with the warning sign:there be dragons.

However, it is beyond that boundary marker where adventures lie, where sirens sing their tantalizing songs, where smoke from distant campfires bring the smell of strange tales and friends unmet. This weekend as an unnamed ailment kept me housebound and comfy-chair captive, I caught a captivating whiff of story which deposited me, oddly enough, five millennia ago amidst the megaliths of Stonehenge. Odd because I had only the faintest interest in that place where Druids dance. Odd because the technology of YouTube seduced me across the boundary and loosely wove an ancient story as pregnant with unfilled spaces as the finest lace. 

Slowly, the story entwined the mysteries of who and when, why and how, into the green and rock-strewn landscape of my neglected ancestors, who've never before reached out or interested me in the least with all their kings and queens and vast flung colonies. I've always been an inhabitant of the New World, a today person, turned resolutely toward the future, dismissing and resisting the black holes of history.

But it was an inevitable slide, feet first down a graveled hill into a waiting lake of questions without answers, past dragons that I swear were laughing. Suddenly, there I was in Adventure Lake, exploring the possibility of a month in the medieval cathedral city of Salisbury on the confluence of the rivers Avon, Nadder and Bourne, nine miles from Stonehenge, on the fringe of North Wessex Down and a cluster of other neolithic sites, an hour and a half from London, home of organized piles of possible answers and clues, and, looming just beyond, the White Horse vision from my childhood.

Adventure beckons ... discover a world more filled with mystery than answers? delve into roots unexplored? tell a story beyond language?

Possible time line: mid-September - mid-October.

Does this puzzle piece fit our journey in anyway?

EWR It most certainly does! There's a few documents I have that might help us. One is a self-guided walking tour of Cornwall and the other is an itinerary my dissertation chair worked up for a trip across southern England. Mostly food for thought not a proposal.