— John Ireland, ‘Sarnia: Le Catioroc’
‘Sarnia, completed after Ireland had spent a year living on Guernsey, is closely connected to the pagan origins of Guernsey’s store of prehistoric burial chambers and rock monuments, imagining the kind of rites and jamborees that might have occurred around the tumbled stones such as Le Trépied. The score for the first part, Le Catioroc, contains a passage from De Situ Orbis, a text by Roman writer Pomponius Mela dating from 50 BCE: ‘All day long, heavy silence broods, and a certain hidden terror lurks there. But at nightfall gleams the light of fires; the chorus of Ægipans [fauns] resounds on every side: the shrilling of flues and the clash of cymbals re-echo the waste shores of the sea.’…’
– Rob Young, ‘Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music’
