the sacred poetry of milton keynes

[woolymonkey]

I find this phrase from a student essay is pure poetry:

the seemingly number of endless roundabouts.

Doesn't that perfectly convey the feeling of befuddled alienation you get when driving round Milton Keynes?

Lots of them are writing about Milton Keynes because it's one of the examples of places that might be considered sacred. Yes, really. It has ley lines, and streets aligned on solstice sunrise/sunset. Really. (It's in the course materials, admitedly without the bits about Satan and Heathrow airport, but I thought you'd like to have those too.)

It's a pity the assignment is Religious Studies and not Creative Writing because I'd love to be able to reward him for that.

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

If you ask most people who have experienced Milton Keynes, I doubt that "sacred" would be the first adjective to spring to mind.

[smtfhw.livejournal.com]

As someone who drives through MK most days, you're so very right...

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should stop off and check out the sacredness. Since watching the course DVD with me, my kids want to stop off there and find the alignments, concrete stone circle, tree cathedral etc. There would be a replica Silbury Hill too, but the money ran out :(

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

But people pray as they drive round it. "Oh God, not another bloody roundabout!"

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

There are 14 roundabouts on the route one has to take to get past Milton Keynes going from Cambridge to Oxford. In just over 7 miles. I know. I counted.

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Me too. Not that I go there often, thank goodness. But I find it all slightly less boring now I know that the planners deliberately skewed the whole central grid to achieve solstice alignment, and Willen Park sounds like it might actually be a nice place...

[dorispossum.livejournal.com]

a poet tho he don't knowit indeed! And a sacred MK is a whole new universe to me!

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

I had no idea either until I started teaching this course. MK gets in as a contrast to Stonehenge, Avebury and Glastonbury because it has the same alignments plus other deliberate connections. We know the planners did this on purpose, but not what they believed or were aiming to achieve by it. The unit is supposed to start students thinking about how and why places get to be considered sacred.
MK was supposed to have a replica Silbury Hill too, only the money ran out. Luckily this wasn't a problem for neolithic planners,due to the non-invention of money.

[dorispossum.livejournal.com]

I like the planners' sense of humour (cf the famous cows). I wish they'd added a concrete Arthur's Tomb too :)

I wonder how far sense of humour gets serious consideraton in the students' assignments on religious origins? Scientology, obviously, but there must be others...

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

They could have buried a concrete Arthur and Merlin under Silbury Hill 2.

So far, nobody seems to have considered humour as a possibility, but then the materials make it sound very serious--lots of stuff about bowler-hatted men and the influence of the bloke that wrote about Glastonbury, Stonehenge and the pyramids all being expressions of cosmic planning. They were known as the Grunt Group.

No, wait, that does sound less than totally serious.