Ghost Wall tells the tale of Silvie and her family, who attempt to live like Iron Age Britons in the North of England. What comes next but human sacrifice?Ī story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the "primitive minds" of our ancestors. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs-particularly their sacrifices to the bog. The students are fulfilling their coursework Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession.
They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.įor two weeks, the length of her father's vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times.
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