'A Wet Weekend at the Glastonbury Festival' by Elisa Hill

A wet weekend? Wet feet! Wet kids! Ankle deep mud. A sea of tents, stretching up the surrounding hills. Old tarpaulins to keep the rain out! Large, old buses converted in to homes. An instant city!..
One day this was an empty field, with a few bored looking cows. A few days later it has a new identity. There are: places of worship, fairground attractions , shops, buskers, open showers, smelly toilets and dogs running free. After a few days it’s an empty field again and all that life and energy have gone.
Is this how it’s been all over England. Once there were vibrant living communities and now they have gone. An iron age village where a wood now stands - once a saga played out as engrossing as a soap opera. Whole families lived out their existence, babies born, old ones died; and now no trace, except a few broken cooking pots.
We live in an ancient land. The hillside I live on is covered in red brick. Maybe once this was a sacrifice site for the druids or a temporary home for animal drovers who watched their flocks graze below? Many people walk as I walk, many mums thinking of their children. Fathers despairing over what to put on the table, an empty pocket, soon empty bellies again.
How many families have lived in my house in the last hundred years? One of them, the granddad of my son’s friend, who walks past my house and stares at the dirty front step, his job to scrub till it shined, as a child planted the apple pip which grew into our 60 foot apple tree. When he lived here his mum was ill, terminal, his father’s mistress moved in when she died it was not a happy house. I hear children cry for their mother in the night and they are not the cries of my children..
Do archaeologists see this land as it was then? Is it an overlay of time zones, repeating like a video. Do they see battlefields as the places they are today; or do they see them as the scenes of chaos, grief and despair they once were?