Bluer than the sky, bluer than the sheen on rooks and the lustre of oil beetles, the milkwort flowers are sewn like gems into the sward. Polygala calcarea is the chalk milkwort, with a gentian-blue far brighter than the common milkwort flowers I’m used to seeing on Wenlock Edge. High on Salisbury Plain, open to the winds and shafts of sunlight through distant showers, the little blue flowers take shelter in the lee of earthwork rings, an archaeological monument within the largest remaining area of calcareous grassland in north-west Europe.
Milkwort gets its name not from increasing milk yield in grazing cattle but from herbalists prescribing it to new mothers to aid breastfeeding, although I’m not sure anyone would now. It has also been used as an anti-inflammatory and a hepatoprotector (against liver damage), but perhaps its most important cultural role here was that it was collected at Rogationtide.
In the Christian tradition, Rogation is the time between the crucifixion at Easter and the Ascension. Since the 7th century in Britain, communities would march in procession at Rogation, beating the bounds to mark their parish boundaries and blessing fields; priests wore violet-blue vestments. These rituals had much earlier origins, such as the Roman agricultural festival of Robigalia, and there were surely others stretching back to the origins of this place.
Figsbury Ring, once described as an iron-age hillfort, is now thought to have been a causewayed enclosure that was later developed into a neolithic or early bronze-age henge, like that of Stonehenge not far away. People still process here: wending, winding, along chalky bounds around elliptical earthworks and ditches, with dogs and kids, though they may not be conscious of any ritual observance.
The whole place seems to turn in clockwise and anti-clockwise orbits simultaneously, a hauntingly beautiful 6.4 hectare theatre open to the sky. The milkwort is a hemicryptophyte scapose plant – its overwintering buds hide under the surface, waiting for the moment to announce the rites of spring. This is it, and with a dazzling blue in which human history is but a passing moment.
