SITE HISTORY for the "White Flight - Swan" artwork:

Swans & ancient burial grounds on the Fowlea Brook, Stoke-on-Trent.

This is my history of the site where the swan hill-figure was made...

The Fowlea Brook runs down the valley from Tunstall. It turns around the new Westport Lakes, then runs in a concrete culvert under Longport before flowing down the west side of Middleport and through wide unkempt meadows beside the giant 1-mile long derelict Shelton Bar Steel Mill. Passing through Etruria it goes to meet the early River Trent somewhere near Stoke church. An insignificant little brook? Perhaps, but its name may unlock many secrets, including those around Stoke, Halloween and swans.

The flooding valley: The Fowlea Brook formed the historic boundary between the Stoke 'mother town' of Burslem and Wolstanton/Newcastle. It has long been crossed at Longport by a pack-horse track using... "a number of stepping-stones, forming a causeway across the meadows, which were afterwards superseded by a bridge" (Pigot's Typology of England, 1841). Longport was probably the best crossing for miles -- we know a track came from Tunstall to cross here, and the valley became progressively more waterlogged as the Fowlea flowed south -- there are records of a Wolstanton Marsh below Wolstanton (probably roughly where The Sentinel newspaper's offices are now)... "with coarse grass and tall rushes, in which children were often lost". The Trent ('the trespasser' in Old English) was infamous for bursting its banks, and low-lying areas south of Stoke church may have been underwater for most of the year. The entire valley must have been alive with vast flocks of wildfowl.

The derivation of 'Fowlea': What does the word Fowlea mean? Well, it was probably originally two words. In a 1568 will, Fowlea is given as "Fowle Ley". A 1775 map shows "Fowl Hay". These instances suggest the modern name is a shortening of an early English name which was probably "Fuwel Haylee" ('Wildfowl hay & water meadow'). The word "brook" is the same both in Old English and in modern English.

The steelworks & the burial ground: These indications of a wide valley-bottom of marshy meadows and wildfowl throw an interesting light on a 20th Century discovery. An early fire-hardened pottery urn, circa 400 BC, was reportedly found... "when the foundations for the Etruria/Shelton-Bar steelworks were being excavated". (E.J.D. Warrillow; A Sociological History of Stoke-on-Trent, p.6). This type of urn had a 'herring-bone'-pattern and held ashes after cremation. Its burial suggests the meadows of the Fowlea valley may have been seen as a symbolic place for the Cornovii villagers of the hilltop settlement at Penkhull to bury ashes after death.

Why bury the dead here? If the ground was a burial place, then why would the locals trek down from their large stockaded hilltop village into the marshy meadows to bury ashes? Surely somewhere along the track on the valley ridge would have served better? Was there some religious significance to the location?

Sacred wildfowl: The attraction of the Fowlea water-meadows may have been the wildfowl. We have already seen from the derivations of Fowlea how the wide valley bottom of the Fowlea must have been rich in wildfowl such as swans and geese. Caesar noted of the British tribes... "geese they think it unlawful to eat", apparently keeping them much as we keep dogs today; a sort of combination of good-luck charm, entertainment, and guard-dog. Celtic poetry from Wales also suggests that eating or killing larger wildfowl was taboo, and that the swan especially was revered as being "between earth and water", therefore considered to belong to the next world. So perhaps there was a sacred aspect to the swans and wild geese of the Fowlea valley, which led to burials there?

Pagan beliefs: There are two peices of evidence for this. Firstly, we know that All Souls Day in November (31st Oct/1st Nov) was traditionally the day of 'the Wild Hunt'.... "when the horde of wandering souls flew through the winter night sky, sometimes disguised as swans or wild geese", being led by the god of hunting to the afterlife. This tradition is common throughout northern Europe, and a distorted folk-memory of it persists today in our tales of witches and ghosts riding through the sky on Halloween. Miranda Green (Celtic Goddesses, British Museum Press, 1995) tells us that... "Both iconography and early written myths provide rich evidence for bird-goddesses. [...] The birds involved were generally either ravens/crows or aquatic/wading birds such as swans". The stories of the transformation of young girls to swan-form are... "overwhelmingly ones of love and innocence" and of "sexual love between a god and the swan-maiden". These myths can be traced from the pre-historic Irish Dream of Oenghus [the god of love] - when a spell caused the moral Caer to become a swan each All Souls Day - right through to the modern day with the Swan Lake ballet. So it seems possible that taking funeral urns into the breeding grounds of swans and wild geese may have been important in local people's beliefs about the migration of the soul to the afterlife.

Early Christian beliefs: This might just be an interesting speculation, if it were not for a second crucial fragment of evidence. An early English Christian church was built where the Fowlea meets the Trent. This 'Stoc' ("summer place", with the implication of "special or sacred place/enclosure", in Old English) church later became 'Stoke' church. A stone altar and cross from the original AD 805 stone church can still be seen in Stoke churchyard today. Now - we know that this first stone church had a large carved swan or goose above its south door, and some other web-footed bird above the north door (the webbed feet were all that remained above the north door, by the time someone wrote about it; see page 463 of The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent by John Ward). We also know that early Christian missionaries usually wove existing local beliefs into their teachings. So it seems certain that wild geese and/or swans held some special place in the beliefs of the local people. Was there a goose above the north door to cackle and hiss of the approach of the Devil (who traditionally was believed to try to enter through that door) and a Swan above the south, wings outstretched like the arms of Christ?

Perhaps the hazardous decision to site the church on low-lying land, at the confluence of two flood-prone watercourses (Trent and the Flowea), was itself influenced by the area's early religious beliefs about wetlands and wildfowl? We may never know for sure, but the fragments of evidence that we have certainly point to some kind of folk veneration of the larger wildfowl in the Stoke valley. The valley's canals and lakes still abound in breeding swans and the nearest local pub to the artwork is called 'The White Swan' - and nearby Burslem which overlooks the Fowlea valley has a Swan Square in the town centre.

My swan hill-figure, completed just before the All Hallow's Eve of 31st October, is thus a way of symbolising all this cultural memory, of taking a neglected and almost forgotten place and showing how that memory can be reconstructed and carried forwards to the future through a combination of historical research and art.

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Project supported by: PUBLIC ART WEST MIDLANDS, c/PLEX and JUBILEE ARTS.