Blog for the first visit of my residency at Corinium Museum, Cirencester

Note this blog first appeared on the Corinium Museum website.

Last year, I swam, walked and waded along the River Churn, just over 23 miles from its source at Seven Springs to its confluence with the Thames at Cricklade. My intention was to write a series of interlinked poems about invasion and migration in response to my (literally) immersive return to my home river. However, during the journey, my focus shifted to ideas of home, belonging, motherhood and a conversation with the genius loci embodied in the ‘goddess’ Cuda.

Romano-British votive relief depicting three hooded godlets (genii cucullati) and a goddess (mater), found at Daglingworth, Gloucestershire, in 1951 (Corinium Museum)

A sonnet sequence, ‘Churn’[1] and a fragmentary poem ‘Cuda ex nihilo’ emerged from this experience. My interest in the Romano-Celtic mother goddess cult that had Corinium at its epicentre was sparked, drawing me to the Museum which holds the votive relief on which the name ‘CUDAE’ is carved and now barely visible (see above photograph). My residency will explore the museum collection with a poetic lens, deepening and illuminating our understanding of the mother goddess cult and associated genii culculatti, the three guardian spirits that accompany the matres and honour the significance of triplism in Celtic belief systems.

**Romano-British limestone votive relief depicting three cloaked godlets (genii cucullati), found in Cirencester, probably in the Ashcroft area, in 1892 (Corinium Museum).**

On my very first visit to the Museum as poet in residence, I was welcomed to the Winstone centre by Emma Stuart, Corinium’s Learning and Development Manager. She gave me some books and a box containing a fragment of a mother goddess statue and left me to ‘contemplate’ the statue.

How strange, I thought, at first.

But spending time in the presence of a 1700 (??) year old statue is a uniquely powerful experience: handling the weight of it, feeling the surfaces with my fingertips, seeing up close the fragments of fossil and quartz held within the oolitic limestone. The head and body of the mater is missing - whether deliberately desecrated by later Christians or victim to the ravages of time – but it is still possible to clearly make out the heavy draping of fabric over the leg and the shape of the foot. The stone is marked by cuts and paler areas where the surface has worn way. To my surprise, there was an embodied energy in the figure that it was hard not to respond to.

Me with the mother goddess statue fragment, Corinium Museum

After my time in the Winstone centre, I popped upstairs to pay respects at the cabinet where the other mother goddesses are held. Each time I visit, I notice a different aspect of the stone reliefs – a carving mark here, a detail on a figure there.

I took some photographs, as I always do on research trips – keeping a visual aide memoir is a vital part of my practice. I was especially taken by how the frame on my phone camera kept popping up to frame the faces of the matres when I took pictures of the stone figures. It was as if they were somehow reaching into my world from the past. And it was this image that stayed with me in the development of my first piece for the residency: Matres. Click on the video below to hear the poem.

[1] ‘Churn’ was commissioned by Cardiff University academics Charlotte Bates and Kate Moles as a contribution to the monograph Living With Water (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2023). This brings together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, artists and poets to explore the way water binds, immerses and supports us.

This piece was originally written for the blog at Corinium Museum, Cirencester.