Atmosphere

I have long noted that certain places, for me as also for many other people, have what I would describe as an ‘atmosphere’ – a psychological sense of something other, an eventful presence, a lingering memory. I have placed the word atmosphere in quotation marks not to belittle it but to indicate that we may not all have the same appreciation of this ‘out of the ordinariness’ and what it might mean. Out of the ordinary certainly, but by no means ‘spooky’ in my opinion – the location with ambience is nearly always in the open air and is always experienced in broad daylight.

The atmosphere that comes to awareness may have a feeling of events past, though still in some way evident, a characteristic of heightened emotionality or a significance in the light of a person’s particular understanding of the nature of the Cosmos. Other people sensing the atmosphere of a place may also experience a feeling of déjà vu along with the ambience of the location, although this does not apply in my case.

While the presence of an atmospheric location for an individual person will always be affecting for them - and is sometimes disquieting too, for me at least there is a relatively small number of significantly atmospheric places, possibly because I have not deliberately sought them out. Perhaps this is just as well, one would not wish to be overwhelmed. In those atmospheric locations that I have come across however the atmosphere is strong, consistent and persistent over time. Certainly for my part I have no intention of playing down this personal experience and so declining an opportunity to share with others and the insight that may be present as a result.

I think that a lot of people who have had similar experiences of atmosphere are deterred from talking about them for fear of being made to appear foolish by those people who are easily unsettled by any questioning of the ‘ordinariness’ and comprehensibility of their world. If this is so, then let me be the fool on their behalf. In my view the world is very far from being an ‘ordinary’ place and although it cannot be an inconsistent or illogical one, there are many properties that can seem strange to our current understanding, there are multitudinous unplumbed depths and our present knowledge of time, space and matter is far from being complete and is also subject to periodic upheavals as research progresses.

Two of the most atmospheric places that I know are, not surprisingly, quite near to where I live in Birmingham and they are also close to each other. The first location is Wychbury Hill. I’m not referring here to the unusual and precarious obelisk or to the notorious crime that took place near there but to part of the woods further back and some way down from the top of the hill.

Whenever I go to this place I have the sense of a lot of people, as a mind’s eye impression from many centuries ago, possibly during the Iron Age, running chaotically - presumably to save themselves from some threat, real or presumed, emanating from what or from whom I do not know. Although I would dearly like to understand more, I am in truth aware of little else and it doesn’t change.

The second nearby place with a distinct atmosphere is Clent Hills, which is very close to Wychbury and is also possibly connected in its atmosphere since this is the direction in which the ‘runners’ appear to be headed. It is not all of Clent that has the ambiance that I sense, but two particular parts – within the beech trees at the top of Nimmings Hill and an area near to a pool located much lower down. I first noticed this atmosphere when taken there as a child and it has always coloured my thoughts about Clent and conditioned my enjoyment of this beautiful area in the Midlands of England.

Much grander locations possessing an atmosphere that I have sensed at further remove are on a substantially larger scale. They include what little remains of the city of Carthage. The original city was vindictively razed by the Romans, but a fragment of a residential area is still preserved in which you are able to walk and look around, gaining a sense of the time and it certainly does have a distinct atmosphere – for me at least.

But, out on its own for atmospheric magnitude, is Snaefells in Iceland. Snaefells is an ancient volcano with the distinctive cone shape, its own glacier and which last erupted many centuries ago. Many people sense that the whole of the Snaefellsness area is somehow psychologically special and I understand that the mountain itself has been placed on a ‘Ley Line’ alignment, although I am not into this sort of thing myself. But such is the strength of the ambience that it is hard to see how anyone could visit the Snaefells area and not notice something out of the ordinary here. Although it is not clear to me what its character is, there are those who relate its special atmosphere to what they describe as energy.

I suppose that in my case having read and re-read many times since childhood Jules Verne’s captivating novel ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ I could have gained an expectation of there being an atmosphere surrounding Snaefells from that source. But I think there is more to it than a childhood impression. The atmosphere surrounding Snaefells is certainly compelling and people who have never read Jules Verne’s work also sense that atmosphere strongly. And the question naturally arises as to why, in the first place, Verne chose Snaefells as his location for his story of the heroic descent into the depths.

How could all of this come about and what might its meaning be? Of course, there is always the possibility of self deception – an unconscious effort to achieve personal significance and a special position as a human being. If this were the case however I would probably have gone to more impressive lengths to find something of wider and more unusual scope on which to claim authority! But mention of the unconscious brings to mind C. G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and its connections, one human being with another, which conceivably could take place over time as well as space.

Feelings of oddness could also arise from more mundane causes - an unusual lie of the land, exposure to the elements, the particular flora, an absence of fauna (particularly birds), the behaviour of other visitors or prompting by other characteristics of the immediate natural environment or one’s own personal history. But if any of these elements are present, they may also be connected with things that are deeper and more obscure to which I refer - albeit indirectly. One does not rule out the other.

I think that my personal impressions of atmospheric locations, and those of many other people, are authentic and that this has implications for the nature of reality itself and the part that we can play in it. One thing is certain, the world is not a straightforward, linear, billiard ball sort of place. Nor can there be an infinite, straight line, past to time (or else we would never be able to complete an infinity and arrive at the present) although, in logical if not in cosmological terms the future itself is not limited.

The oddities of the quantum world are legion and include the strangest of connections, such as entanglement. Our stable, consistent, ‘ordinary’ experiences in everyday life amazingly have this profoundly counter-intuitive underworld as a foundation, so should we not be expecting the unusual, or experiencing phenomena that will challenge us for an explanation?

But how could such past events still be perceivable by people today? Is there a record that is laid down in some way that can be accessible to sharing? This may be ethereal or otherwise, perhaps via transmission to a Jungian collective unconscious or etched onto a universal ‘stone tape’ as it were and of which, in certain special circumstances people can become aware.

But these admittedly rather stretched possibilities may not be required if time is not all that it seems. We are in our today. Those runners at Wychbury Hill were in their today but there is a sense in which it is always today – a superimposition of times usually veiled from each other - but perhaps not always and not impenetrably.

That’s about it. I readily admit that my personal perceptions cannot be all that sharp since at Clent I can see nothing specific although I do sense from the definite atmosphere that a dark echo lingers, that there are murmurs from the past, which something profoundly unhappy has marked its presence there. And I am equally sure that other people have had much clearer experiences of atmospheres like this and I shall retain an open mind as to what is signified.