Written and published by Linden Alexander Pentecost, published on the 20th of August 2026. An earlier form of this publication (now deleted) (not the version on this page) was originally published elsewhere, before extensively more work being added to it, and a whole other topic; this article is therefore also unrelated to and separate from any and all of my other publications, no AI was used and it was published in the UK; I the author also took the photo for this article/blog post, which contains in total 2722 words.
One thing I have slowly come to ponder, is how sometimes, not saying a word, or choosing not to describe, or name something, can be more potent than attempting to name or to describe them. The same applies to places, to the names and descriptions we connect to certain parts of the land. Names, and descriptions create conscious recognition. But in some places, I feel beautiful vibes, things that are present, but which I cannot name, nor connect to folklore and language. There is something potent and inherently mystical about such things, and something that feels inherent good and uncorrupted about them. There is a space between what I feel in such places, and the little that I know and can name, and in that space, there is something untouched, pure in a different kind of sense. The lack of ability to name, explain and quantify these feelings, and these places, in a sense seems to protect them, as though they exist as an expression of a particular magical realm, that still remains in certain parts of our own world.
One such place that these feelings apply to for me, is the Trough of Bowland, a region of high moors, covered in heather, rocky outcrops, and dramatic dark clouds and mists, overlooking gentle valleys, with ancient forests, and braided rivers that tumble and sing, the ancient soul of this land speaking through the music of the rivers, and through the names given to them. I feel personally that the river names Brennand and Hodder are connected to the ancient magic of this place. The name Brennand is explained as coming from Norse, and meaning "Burning", whilst the word Hodder is connected to Welsh Yr Odre - "the boundary", or to what would in Welsh be the words hawdd-dŵr - "easy-water".
Both of these explanations are possible, but one thing I would like to point out, is that these names are unique to this region, they stand out, and do not easily make sense semantically. The idea that the Brennand means "Burning", seems odd, given that rivers, consisting of water, tend to do the opposite of burning. It could be a poetic reference to the light on the water, but again, going back to a simpler question - why only here? In terms of the name Hodder, there could indeed be some kind of Celtic connection, especially when the River Calder to the south may mean "hard water", as opposed to "easy water". But the names Brennand and Hodder are still specific to this region. And within this "space" of being possibly connected to existing languages, but not quite making sense, is where I feel a beautiful mystery about Bowland may lie.
Note: my mum has also told me that my grandad knew one of the moors at the top of the Brennand Valley as having a name associated with "burning", because of the colour of the light upon that moor, so the idea that Brennand is connected to Norse brennandi may be true. Nevertheless, this does still represent a local application of meaning that is unusual and specific, and furthermore, Norse interpretations of the name could also relate to non-Norse root words that were reinterpreted, but this is speculative.
Photo below: an example of one of the beautiful and sacred landscapes of Bowland, as is typical, being displayed between a range of dark shadow, mysterious clouds, and bright sunlight upon its green pastures and patches of wind-blown trees.
I recently went to the area, when researching for another article I am writing about Tolkien's linguistic connections to Northern England, which will I hope be published next month in a magazine. I was mostly thinking about the trip there in terms of research. It wasn't until I was making the long drive home, when I reached a certain valley, full of old, tall, beautiful trees, when I had this sudden feeling, and in my mind I felt a sense of "hang on a second", as I started to consciously register the feeling.
The feeling was that, when I reached this particular wooded area of the valley, I felt something so pure, and beautiful, and like it spoke to me. I smiled without knowing why, just knowing that whatever it was, it felt like it came to meet me, and that it was meaningful.
I remember years ago, when I was in Bowland with two friends, we found a pine forest, or rather, an area of pine-groves, scots pines that blew in the wind on the moorside. It was just after I had had a rather sad breakup with someone, and I felt kind of empty, not in a totally depressed way, more like I was small, and wanted to just walk and move slowly in the vastness of desert and sky, which are metaphors here for the beaches I was walking on at the time, and are metaphors for the empty spaces of my own soul which I explored. I remember that coming to this wee forest in Bowland, felt, at the time, very healing. Something about the place met my feelings and I felt content there.
I was not the one driving when heading back from Bowland recently, when we went through that valley that felt really sacred to me. As we continued, I had an experience with what the ancient Welsh mystics called Awen, a kind of inspiration, but I do not think of awen as simply the mental, individual idea of inspiration; awen rather, is like a flow, a power, a river, a wind. The person who feels awen and who becomes its vessel does not create or manifest the awen through their own mental abilities, rather, a person has to become susceptible to the awen, but the awen comes according to what I see as the most holy inspiration, that we neither control, nor can grasp. The word awen may be related to the Welsh word awel - "a breeze", and the awen is in a sense akin to a breeze, it comes from somewhere other, somewhere beyond, and yet something which, at our spiritual core, was always us, and it comes exactly when it's meant to come.
In this instance, I experienced awen starting when we first drove into the river valley. After that point, I smiled, and was shocked, at every gift of nature I saw, and how it made me feel. Every scene of a river, the purple flowers on the heather, the great branches of oaks, their leaves singing in the wind. It filled me with a certain joy and love and I didn't really understand why, and it's in that space that the awen flowed. I felt a sense of joy, familiarity, spiritual awakening, not in the sense of meaning "I am an awakened man", no, I mean in the sense of awakening to something profoundly beautiful. Translating my thoughts into English words and descriptions, the following is what I wrote as I went past various trees and the river:
A tree with leaves so shapely
And presence so bright
The way you blow in the wind
On moors and mountains
Giver of safety and love
In realms of tears and deep thought (tears as in, water from the eyes)
Your joy takes me to innocence
Beyond complex dreams
And to things ancient and true
Personal and full of emotion
My heart dances with a love so pure
I am a bird of golden light in your presence
I could be the most unimportant man in the world
Yet you make me feel like I am everything
A note: "feel like everything" in this context does not mean "everything" in terms of all importance. English does not easily express the distinction, but I am saying here "feel like everything", in the sense of "everything" I always was and was meant to be, in the eyes of the Creator. In other words, something that makes me feel like I am as the Great Spirit sees me with its heart; and I am that person, that in the heart of God, I always was. Such feelings and places can also be experienced in high places with lonely trees, I am not the only one who understands this by any means, I think that Tolkien understood it too, as did Emily Brontë.
That is a difficult thing to explain in English, but there. Yes, the poem is romantic, in a romantic love sense. But the awen itself is the essence of romance. I am sure that Emily Brontë, in writing Wuthering Heights, also felt this same thing, that romance, in its essence, is about romantic love, but simultaneously it is about a love and empathy for creation, and a joy in knowing life and that our world is full of living things, animals, plants, spirits painted onto the clouds, and rocks and moors, that are also living aspects of God in their own way. Romance is not always about euphoria, the mentally and physically ultimate, nor about completion, in a way yes, but in a way no. Romance exists in a space outside of material and mental completion, our relationship with it is never fully complete nor absent. The romance is in the longing and in the completion simultaneously, but the most romantic things exist in that eternal space between the two.
Which is why I think love is so hard to understand, across one's experiences. The romance in the poem I wrote is not about a specific individual, it is something less defined, that I have felt with different persons, and which is connected to them, symbolically or literally. I remember a couple of years ago, I really liked somebody, and I remember that when I realised this, I was on some mountains, actually in West Cumbria, and there was something about the August atmosphere of the trees moving in the wind, among all the green and life. I noticed some possible archaeological sites that day, others which I simply haven't had time to write about yet. Perhaps I never will, perhaps I'll just share it with the right people and let the right people come to it; I have written so much, including about archaeology, I am not sure if I really need to discuss all the places, I have discussed a lot of them already.
This exact dimension of romantic love connected to the awen, is not "more" sacred than other forms of Romantic love, but I think it is at the innermost core, and essence of ourselves, those parts of us that we cannot name, yet it seems like they have always been us at a core spiritual level. This level is I think also connected to the highest facets of supernatural defence and protection, not because we become "most powerful" at this state, but rather that, like the awen enters us, so also can a power to protect at certain crucial moments. I have encountered this in dreams before, one of which I discussed in a different blog post, about how I saw a vampire-like entity in a dream, but by working my true centre, was able to create a "patronus charm" like forcefield, which essentially ejected and washed away the vampire entity, out of my sight and beyond me, within less than a second.
Just like a "patronus charm" in Harry Potter, I think that this power, and the awen can also be invoked, but that this takes a high level of concentration and self-awareness. It means being able to identify and connect with a specific feeling of love and freedom, that we felt at a specific point in our lives, and to then invoke that, embody it, and project it.
There was another dream in which I invoked a similar power, and again, the other thing to understand is that it can only be granted when there is a worthy and true reason to do so. In this other dream, I was in some kind of "dark", nightmarish university, helping an ex-girlfriend and students to escape from it, as these, largely-unseen, draug- or zombie-like beings chased us with madness.
At one point I directed the people to run behind me and up the valley, at a right angle to where my back was, but then one of these zombie things started running very quickly towards all of us, and I stood between it and the university students. I remember seeing blue flashes of electricity, like lightning in my lower arms. I then placed my hands together as though in prayer position, and, with a sound like a crack of thunder, this bolt of bright-blue energy shot from my hands, and burned a hole right through the chest of the zombie, killing it and dropping it to the ground.
Of course, this was just a dream, but the principle that I invoked was something akin to "praying" and then God, or a higher protective being, momentarily granting me the highest divine, protective energy, and I used it in that moment to protect a large group of others. In a sense, I do feel that oftentimes, protective energy that is "good" and which is truly powerful against evil, does function like this.
In physical reality, this kind of "granted power" never results from the individual's own actions like it did in the dream, but it can manifest itself in a kind of karma. Think of it as the higher, protective forces in the universe, balancing an injustice. For example, one person might, over a long period of time, use others, and to a large extent knowingly, knowing that their behaviour is causing damage, but still doing it anyway. Say this person has a large group of friends, and some of those people suffer as a result of that person's actions. Some of these people may have been really unfairly hurt, and it takes just one member of that group of friends, to be like "actually nah, haha, this isn't good, I no-longer feel like being in this situation".
And that one action of moving away and not engaging, on a physical level but also on a level of consciousness, seems perhaps to give permission to higher forces to step in. It's almost as though they need the innocent people to move out the way and grant the higher powers "permission" on some level to peacefully solve the problem.
And in such a situation, once just one person wakes up and steps away, do not be surprised if only a few days later, that the bulling person has suddenly lost a lot of friends. Not because of anything said or done by the person who walked away, but simply because by walking away, that person "dropped" the emotional field of protection and no-longer consented to it, giving permission to a higher power to step in. This doesn't happen with everybody though, it needs to be a particular individual who "leaves" the group with a connection to those higher powers, normally.
In this kind of situation, the balance is restored peacefully, by causing others to walk away too, but the actual moment of revealing the bully's true nature, and it suddenly becoming clear to others, can seem akin to the idea of God intervening with a sudden flash of lightning
Note also that my reference in the poem to a "golden bird" also in a sense relates to the жар-птица I discussed in an unrelated blog post on a different website.
This article is dedicated to Bowland, to its ancestors, and all who love Bowland, and to the awen and to all beings that protect with genuine care and love. I hope this was a good. read.
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