The meaning behind our name and the ground beneath your feet.
Almost nobody speaks of her these days. That was part of the appeal.
Nemetona was a Celtic goddess, 'she of the sacred grove'. Her name comes from the old Celtic word nemeton: a sacred place. Not a temple. Not a building. The people who honoured her largely didn't worship under a roof at all. They gathered outside, in clearings, among standing stones & beside springs. They held that the earth itself was sacred and needed no walls to make it so. Nemetona was the guardian of those places and of the community that gathered within them.
We held her name for ourselves because that resonated, deeply.
Most of us have felt it without ever naming it. The particular hush of a wood at first light. The way a hillside asks something of you and in return hands something back far greater. The Celts had a word for that feeling and built reverence around it... We think they were onto something the modern world has mostly forgotten: you don't need a building to stand on sacred ground. You only need to go outside.
For me, this isn't abstract. I spent years of my life up in the trees, a working arborist. Amongst the green long before I ever set the word sacred against it properly. I lived, worked and enjoyed my free time around the Peak District and surrounding areas for years, which if you know where to look, you too will contest to it being one of the quietly sacred corners of these islands.
You don't have to take the poetry on faith. A few miles from my door is Buxton, its Roman name was Aquae Arnemetiae: “the waters of Arnemetia,” a goddess whose name grows from the very same root as ours, she who dwells beside the sacred grove. Only two towns in all of Roman Britain were given that watery, sacred prefix, Buxton and Bath. People came to the spring and gave what they had: more than two hundred Roman coins have been lifted from those waters, each one dropped in as an offering.
And here is the detail we can't quite get over. That sacred spring at Buxton is famously rich in magnesium. Now magnesium, in another form entirely, is what we chalk our hands with before we begin that great accent. We're not claiming they're the same stuff: the spring carries dissolved mineral magnesium you can drink, while our chalk is seawater sourced magnesium carbonate, a dry powder that grips. But a magnesium-bright sacred spring, still rising in our own hills after five thousand years, while we climb the grit above? We'll happily enjoy the beauty of that thought. I mean our upcoming liquid chalk 'Sacred Spring' didn't get its name by accident.
Walk a little further and the stones appear. On Stanton Moor, in a clearing among the birch, a ring of Peak gritstone has stood for four thousand years. The Nine Ladies, the same gritstone we climb on around the crags of the peak district. Even the goddess's altar, unearthed at the old Roman fort at Brough, was carved from it. The rock beneath your fingertips and the rock they made holy are one and the same.
We are not a museum and we are not here to keep the past under glass. We're claiming the idea in our own right, for our own time. That the crag is a nemeton. That the moor at dawn is a nemeton. That a hard hour in the gym, a long run into the hills, a first ascent, a slow walk with someone you love, all of it is time spent on sacred ground, and all of it builds toward something.
That's why everything we make is built to be worn out there, in the wild, taking as little from the earth as we can manage. And it's why, on every label and at every step, we say the same four words:
Every step is sacred...