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"The rector lived in Hampshire, the spectre was not focused on the evil dust in the air" - Spectre Vs Rector, The Fall
"What's a mob to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer?" - No Church In The Wild, Jay-Z & Kanye West
"To thine own self be true" - Polonius from Shakespeare's Hamlet, also the motto for Conway Hall
Well, that was just about the best Conway Hall all dayer I've seen the London Fortean Society put on. Normally there's at least one or two sub-par talks but at yesterday's Haunted Landscape:Ghosts, Magic and Lore all nine speakers (over eight talks) delivered and delivered well. My notes at the end of the day were copious and most of them are in this blog but stay with me, there's some good stuff.
And there was a good crowd there for it too. There was a queue, very orderly, which I don't think I've ever witnessed at a Fortean event before. The day's first speaker, E. Jay Gilbert, got off to a slow start but soon warmed to her theme in a talk about linguistic archaeology and the volcanic things that live underneath us in a talk she's called What Lies Beneath.
She talked about a trip she'd made to a former reform prison in Cornwall that is now both a hotel (where she stayed) and a tourist attraction. She was so creeped out she left the television on all night before the next day delivering an underground speech in a room that was accessed through a door disguised as a bookcase. An area E. Jay Gilbert described as more a forbidden space than a liminal one before going on to suggest that there is something about going underground that triggers something in us humans.
What do we think we're afraid of? In Grimsby they talk of a local witches circle (write your own jokes) but witches don't live underground so it seems more likely, at least folklorically - not actually, that it's a fairy ring. I lost the speaker a bit here as she went on to talk about Tokien, witch trials, the ballad Tam Lin, Naples, and the Amalfi coast of Italy. She went off on a lot of tangents but my ears pricked up at the use of the word "goblinesque" and the assertion that "we've moved beyond goblins".
Speak for yourself! The ghosts we find, or believe we find, underground these days are often former aqueduct workers or disappeared miners who seem to have replaced fairies and goblins in modern folklore. The talk touched on susperstitious miners (which I wanted to sing to the tune of Suspicious Minds) and their belief in tommyknockers or, simply, knockers. I'm afraid even at my age I sniggered when I heard her say "release the knockers".
It's understandable, though, that miners should be superstitious. Much of their waking life is spent underground and it's dangerous too. The spectral ex-colleagues and strange lights in mines they speak of, it has been suggested, may come from the fact that they're burrowing further away from God and closer to the devil. Back in the 1860s, the Reverend John Cumming, a virulent anti-Catholic, believed the building of the London Underground would hasten the end of the world and if you've ever spent time on the Bakerloo line at Elephant and Castle you might say he was on to something.
Tube passengers, like myself, regularly pass through former plague pits, monasteries, and Roman ruins so the dead are all around us when we're down in the tube station at midnight or any other hour. One section, just one stop down from Elephant and Castle, is particularly notorious. The Kennington loop (where Northern line trains that don't go all the way to Morden turn round and head back north) is said to the best bit of the tube for spotting ghosts and eager ghost spotters have been known to sneak on trains that are supposed to be passengerless on this stretch. Tube drivers, too, have spoken about an eerie feeling when passing through the loop.
The second speaker, Mark Norman, delivered what to me was one of the most enjoyable talks of the day in the form of The Folklore of Churches and Churchyards. As you might imagine, there's a lot of it and his half hour slot wouldn't be enough to cover it all so we got straight to the highlights. Even though it would have been nice to hear a bit about another book he's written:- Zoinks! The Spooky Foklore Behind Scooby Doo.
I didn't get the impression Mark Norman was a religious man as he began by suggesting more war had been waged in the name of God than anything else but he certainly seemed to know his churches and churchyards and, as he said, as a folklorist it's not about if things exist or if they're true. It's about what people believe and why they might believe that.
It's about stories and we all like a good story. It's also about shared beliefs, traditions, and superstition and in Britain and elsewhere it's about how Christianity has subsumed and adapted Pagan cultures. In Rome and the Vatican there are very clear and obvious examples of this in the form of St Peter's Cathedral (built on the site of a pagan necropolis) and the Parthenon (a former temple dedicated to the ancient Greek goddess Athena) and in Britain we see it on a more low key level in the form of holy wells in places like Buxton and Malvern and even in Bromley and Oswestry.
Christian missionaries didn't completely remove heathen beliefs or heathen monuments as they didn't want to alienate potential local converts but the authorities within, and higher up in, the church were less charitable. They deemed heathen belief to be "evil" and "detestable by God". God does seem a right moody bastard. He, or she, seems to hate almost everything. Which is a bit rich as God also claims to have created everything.
Before Christianity, yew trees were associated with rebirth. Christianity tweaked that belief so that they're now linked with resurrection (cue I Am The Resurrection and a tribute to the recently, and sadly, departed Mani from The Stone Roses). But as yew tree wood was used to make long bows they also gained a reputation as trees of death. Many churchyards still have resident yew trees.
Most churches also have a spire but few are as celebrated as the Church of St Mary and All Saints in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Its crooked spire is so much a symbol of the town that the local football team's nickname is the Spireites. But the spire (which, as its name says, aspires to heaven) was once straight when it was built in the 13th/14th century. So how did it become so crooked that it now leans and has a forty five degree twist?
There are plenty of rational reasons why this may happen over time but we came for the folklore and that's what we got. Some say a blacksmith accidentally hammered a nail into the devil's foot and a wobbly Satan stumbled into the spire. Some have it the devil sat on the spire (I imagine it going right up his demonic arse) but accidentally wrapped his tail round it and others say the devil twisted the spire because he was sneezing at some incense or perving over a local bride.
One story has it that the building was so surprised when a virgin got married in the church (the suggestion being that local women very rarely wait until marriage before making the beast with two backs - and why should they) and in the unlikely event that another virgin bride ever gets married there the spire will revert to its original form.
This took our speaker from crooked spires to gargoyles and grotesques (which all seem to be descended from, and related to, a dragon in Rouen) and a fish with the head of a quadraped as well as church doors that are said to be lined with 'daneskins' or skin flayed from Danish viking invaders. All 'daneskins' ever that have undergone any scientific analysis have proven to be animal hides. Maybe it's not so easy to catch those pesky vikings after all.
Pentagrams seem unlikely church features and are more often associated with the other side but were once symbols of the five wounds of Christ and can still be found regularly in many churches. The earth of the graveyard was once deemed to hold similar powers to holy water in that it offered protection and then there's the rather bizarre practice of 'toad magic'.
The idea being that you cut out the hearts of three toads and the livers of three frogs and then bury them in a stone jar in a graveyard where they would act as immunity to potential witch visitors. Sounds legit. As does the story of a young man who took a piss against the wall of a church while holding a communion wafer and accidentally found out that this causes a toad to magically appear and give you, the pisser/wafer holder, the powers of a witch.
Lingering for a while on stories of lychgates and exorcist clergymen we reached the story of the phantom hole of Yealmpton church. In 1947, Reverend Byles was the vicar of the church of the small Devon village and one day both he and his wife noticed a hole in the church path. He thought, initially, it was a small sinkhole but soon it grew much bigger and deeper. Reverend Byles threw a rock in and it fell so far he felt it must surely be the site of an old well. So he bought planks of wood to cover the hole so nobody fell in it.
But when he returned to carry out this task the hole had disappeared and was never seen again. It was rarely mentioned again until, in 1985, the story was told on the television show Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World of Strange Powers in which Reverend Byles, nearly 40 years later, was interviewed.
It was a double whammy of church related talks as next up was the excellent Jeremy Harte with The Devil In Church. Jeremy speaks quickly and knowledgeably and doesn't even revert to notes. I've found in the past it's almost impossible to give a precis of what he's spoken about because it's often so deep and involved so what I have done in the past, and will do again, for Jeremy is to simply list a load of things that cropped up in his speech and let you get a feel for it. So here goes:-
Dartmoor, cagoules, the great storm of 1638, Puritanism, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, Bishop Paul of Exeter, the devil rampaging through Antwerp, invocations of Satan, the devil in the form of a Franciscan friar, the devilish theft of church bells (Satan, apparently, hates 'sacred sound'), campanology, Bungay in Norfolk (the town with the highest proportion of atheists in the country), Trier, Cologne, dragons, a black pig in a church in Andover during Xmas 1171, Bermondsey, Reading Abbey, a dog killed by lightning, black dogs, devil dogs, St Albans, the Great North Road, and an overall message that quite simply says "AVOID CHURCHES, STAY IN THE PUB".
Rachel Poulter's Unseen:Sussex Landscape and Lore was much better than some previous talks I've seen given by photographers and artists. There were lots of nice photos (many of them black and white) of trees and forests and the talk visited lots of places I have visited on walks and some I hope to visit soon. Rachel Poulter writes books on philosophy but when she's not doing that she likes to walk the chalky hills of Sussex taking photos of ancient sites.
Of which there are many. Cissbury Ring, Chanctonbury Ring, chalk figures like The Long Man of Wilmington. She's looking for the sublime, tailoring her walks according to the season and using walking as a means to connect to a place. It's what I try to do, more or less, with TADS. Unlike the TADS walks however, Rachel Poulter's walks are intuitive and rooted in psychogeographical and hauntological ideas. That's not so easy to do when someone is asking you "how long until we get to the pub?".
With an interest in both myths and histories, her walks make her feel as if time itself is stretching. Air cools and warms, waters ebb and flow, and life is lived directly and away from the spectacle. She spoke of the uncanny auras and primordial ghosts she'd find on South Downs hikes, of fairies dancing at Cissbury Ring on Midsummer's Eve (hmmm), of subterranean shafts and tunnels and former neolithic mines, of wild ponies, of mushrooms, and of sites where human bodies have been found.
Across a landscape that ranges from Chichester to Cuckmere Haven and crosses the Seven Sisters and the river Ouse where Virginia Woolf ended her own life, and from Bognor Regis and Lewes to Glynde and Mount Caburn, she spoke of UFO sightings, WWII pillboxes, Roman temples, telecommunication towers, medieval ghost villages, skylarks darting, sheep grazing, and a lot of fog. There's even one hundred and forty burial pits containing weapons, tools, and coins as well as both human and animal bones.
During the summer solstice, druids celebrate on the day when the light is the strongest and longest and John Barleycorn, the green man of the harvest, sacrifices himself each year. It is said if you walk round Chanctonbury Ring seven times that the devil will offer you a bowl of soup which seems a better deal than angry old God ever offers anyone.
She spoke of May's Beltane festival to celebrate fertility, of psychocosmology, of Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape, and, inspired by that, the Gurdy Stone, an artwork made by Jimmy Cauty (KLF) and Jem Finer (The Pogues) that blends jungle breakbeats and hurdy gurdy melodies with Welsh slate and will finally reveal its true intent when the green comet next passes Earth in about 50,000 years time. Suddenly, Finer's Longplayer (a thousand year long piece of music you can hear in London's Trinity Buoy Wharf) begins to look like Napalm Death's You Suffer.
For Rachel Poulter, these walks, her walks but we can all do them or similar, are times when you become both nothing and everything and to quote the German poet Hans Jurgen von der Wense,as Rachel Poulter did, "understand my walks are pilgrimages". I can get on board with that and it was a very good way to take us into lunch where Jade and myself visited the popular Kozzy Cafe on Red Lion Street and I had chips, beans, halloumi, toast, and a vegetable sausage that I didn't like the look of and left untouched. All washed down with a cup of tea, it was - sausage aside - just right even if the after effects made me feel a bit sleepy in the afternoon.
It could have been worse. There was a 'maid cafe' next door which is something I'd never heard of but Jade informed me but they're popular in Japan and the waitresses, and sometimes waiters, dress as maids and treat customers as masters and mistresses. Sounds a bit odd to me but then I like odd things. I was attending a day of talks by the London Fortean Society and it was time to get back to Conway Hall for Roger Luckhurst and Living With The Dead.
Roger began by talking about how he spent his allotted hour outdoor time during lockdown tracking lost, sometimes half preserved, graveyards in and around Clerkenwell where he lived and how he's continued on that theme. And then he ran through a list of some of the curious places he has discovered and visited.
Starting with Charterhouse Square which is situated on the site of the old Carthusian priory of the Salvation that was set up for victims of the Black Death and included a plague pit. Nearby Bunhill Fields is a dissenter's graveyard and home to the graves of William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, and Isaac Watts. In fact at one point Blake had three graves there. His real two (it's a long story) and one that was set up for the filming of Slow Horses.
Not so far away you can find Wesley's Chapel, a burial site of celebrated methodists and, if you enter it from Tabernacle Street, you can have a bbq, park your bike, or play table tennis among the tombstones. A nearby Quaker burial ground, and one where Quaker founder George Fox is buried, now has a basketball court!
Hawksmoor's St Luke's on Old Street is home now to the London Symphony Orchestra and right next to it you can find the former City Pesthouse which was demolished in 1736. Fortune Street Park is on the site where they used to bury Irish people living in London, sometimes a dozen deep, and Golden Lane was once home to the London Coroner's Court where the bodies of those who'd drowned in the Thames were stored.
The Barbican wildlife garden was once Cupid's Court, a slum (or rookery as they were called then) with a graveyard in the middle, Seward Street had a pauper's boneyard for bodies from St Bart's that had not been claimed (and it's now a kid's playground), and Spa Fields near Exmouth Market had a bonehouse that caught fire in 1845 and continued to burn for a whole week.
Much of these sites were saved, if only in part, by one Isabelle Holmes (1861-1945) who spent twelve years working on documenting London's graveyards. There's a Jewish cemetery on Brady Street and a specifically Ashkenazi resting place on Alderney Street on Mile End. That one got written about by W. G. Sebald in 2001's Austerlitz.
Then there's Crossbones graveyard in Southwark where the 'Winchester geese' (prostitutes who operated around the area) were buried. It's now in a much desired area and real estate developers are desperate to get their hands on it but so far, and who knows what the future holds - these people are very persistent and powerful, there has been sufficient cultural resistance and Crossbones graveyard remains.
Location wise, the talks moved from London to the North with the arrival of Icy Sedgwick and her talk Northern Ghosts:The Barghest and Gytrash. The Barghest is a huge, constantly howling, sometimes invisible, black dog. Or at least one version of it is. It seems to be some kind of shapeshifter and has been experienced not just as a dog but also as a cat, a rabbit, a pig, and a headless human.
Most agree it has horns and fiery eyes (though I'm assuming in its headless human version it has no eyes at all) and one observer claimed its eyes were formed of red, white, and blue concentric circles. Others have claimed it can't be seen but that its howls are so horrible they can kill you on their own. Some say the barghest is a ghost and others say it is a death omen.
It's been seen in and around Leeds, Darlington, and Whitby and even been seen leading bizarre processions of local dogs at night. It is said the wounds it causes can never heal and some say it wears rattling chains. The descriptions of its howls at night, cynics have noted, sound very much like a barn owl. But folklore, as we've learned, prefers other explanations.
One man was determined to shoot the barghest dead and went out on the moors with a gun but it was his body, the man with the gun's, which was found mutilated and dead the next morning. The gytrash, it seems, is a more harmless beast. Described variously as looking like a cow, a horse, or a dog it roams the lonely roads of Yorkshire and Yorkshire only.
Like a folkloric version of Geoffrey Boycott, Fred Trueman, and Michael Parkinson it no doubt bored everyone by droning on about Yorkhire constantly but it was known to help travellers when it's in a good mood. When a bad mood it could be a little more malevolent but never as evil or murderous as the barghest.
The gytrash even gets a namecheck in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and seems to regularly be sited in the village of Goathland where they filmed Sunday teatime drama Heartbeat. Perhaps it was a big fan of Nick Berry or even Bill 'The Gaffer' Maynard who played Greengrass. We just don't know. All that is certain is that the gytrash has a fatal rivalry with a wailing woman who carries an invisible thread.
Tabitha Stanmore was up next with Cunning Folk:Life in the Era of Practical Magic. She asked us to imagine ourselves in the 16th century, living in a village of just ten to twenty households. The only means of transport were boat, horse, and foot. Most people can read but few can write and health care is basic at best. At least one parent has died too young and most likely we've lost a sibling or two as well.
Everyone believes in God but also angels, demons, fairies, and sprites. Magic is real. There is a strong sense of community and there are upsides and downsides to that. The upside is that everybody knows you and the downside is that everybody knows you. Grudges and grievances can linger long.
There are midwifery tools and incantations, some in Latin, for women in labour and there's a woman who can, or is trusted to, cure most diseases. She claims her knowledge comes from the fairies. Some say she is in league with the devil. There is a fundamental acceptance that the supernatural is real and there are people, cunning folk, who work as 'service magicians'.
The fact it's work means they charge for their services and their services are many. They can, or they claim to be able to, heal, to find lost or stolen goods and buried treasure, to counter-curse those that may have cursed you, to predict the future and even to be able to carry out love spells.
Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James I of England/VI of Scotland weren't always fans of this kind of stuff and all three of these monarchs encouraged witch trials Henry made it a crime to cavort with demons which is a pity as it sounds rather fun. Magic or witchcraft was made punishable by death by hanging and any heirs you leave behind would be banished from any inheritance. 'Witches' were punished particularly harshly by Henry who, I think it's fair to say, had a bit of a problem with women. I mean he was a serial killer.
Elizabeth outlawed digging under crosses for treasure and 'provoking unlawful love' (whatever that actually means) but healing magic was not made a crime. With Elizabeth, imprisonment mostly took over from the death penalty or Henry's other favourite, cutting people's ears off. James bought back execution for second offences of magic and witchcraft but it was believed to have never been enacted during his reign.
The church was pragmatic and needed to be so because many claims made by the church, holy communion for example, could easily be defined as magic or witchcraft or at least supernatural activity. The spectre that so often fought with the rector seems to be working in tandem with him when it comes to some of the church's more occult leanings.
The last talk of the day was a great one for me. So many ideas for future walks and trips. Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook's Legend-Tripping in the British Landscape began with a visit to the statue, and grave, of Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh (and also the nearby black mausoleum - one of Edinburgh's most haunted sights - but that's a whole other story). People bring sticks to Greyfriars Bobby's grave and these people, according to our speakers, were 'legend-tripping'.
Not a phrase I'd heard before but one that soon made perfect sense. It seems the concept arose in 1973 where, in America, Gary Hall wrote about a haunted tunnel known simply as "the big tunnel" that many young people were visiting to see if they could witness any paranormal activity. It reminded me of a legend of my youth where people in my village would drive to Purley near Reading in the hope of seeing 'the Purley witch'.
Something the Internet has no knowledge of it seems. Legend-tripping was more popular in the US, possibly because American teenagers are more likely to have motors, but we were at Conway Hall to learn about British folklore so it was time for a whistle stop tour round the country from Wookey Hole's petrified witch to the Soldier's Leap in Killiecrankie.
In 1689, a Scottish solider who was being pursued by Jacobites, is said to have jumped 18ft across a river to safety. It's a few feet short of the long jump record but still a fairly unlikely event to have happened nut nevertheless the legend lives on and people visit the site to see where it is said to have happened.
Stoney Middleton in Derbyshire is home to the Lover's Leap. It is said a disconsolate woman who was unable to marry her sweetheart jumped to what should have been her death but due to the intervention of some tree branches and a relatively soft landing remarkably survived and later married said sweetheart. In 1840 a pub opened nearby called The Lover's Leap and as it was on the main road into Derby and the Peak District became a tourist attraction and remained so for about seventy years.
The Lover's Leap in Llandrindod Wells doesn't even have a legend attached to it. It just looks like the sort of cliff top a lover might leap from so was given the name. When Llandrindod Wells became a popular spa town, the Lover's Leap became a kind of additional tourist attraction. Something different to do while in town taking the waters. Unfortunately the legend, or lack of it, soon attracted potential suicides who saw it as a perfect place to throw a seven.
There's a lot of strange rock formations with legends attached and Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire features The Druid's Idol, The Druid's Alter, and, yes, a Lover's Leap but for an even more macabre attraction how about a visit to the south west coast of Scotland, not too far from Ayr, where lies the cave of Sawney Bean.
Sawney Bean's not someone you'd want to meet on a dark night - or even a brightly lit day. He was a cannibal from a family of cannibals who lived in a cave. He is said to have lured dozens of people back to his cave where he murdered and ate them. It's only become known as Sawney Bean's cave in recent decades but it has attracted many legend trippers and now the cave is covered in graffiti and full of discarded beer cans.
Which I suppose is still an improvement on a pile of human bones. A more famous cave is Mother Shipton's Cave in Knaresborough which is said to be the oldest continuous tourist attraction in the country even if most people complain that the cave itself is disappointing. Mother Shipton is said to be the daughter of the devil and to have magical powers and the gift of prophesy.
There's a 'dripping well' near the cave where, it seems, you can petrify almost anything and among things that have been petrified there you can find teddy bears, kettles, ice skates, Labubus, and even Sarah Lancashire's shoes.
But it's in Nottinghamshire where perhaps Britain's most celebrated folkloric character Robin Hood is said to have lived and worked. Although it wasn't always that way. Early versions of the Robin Hood story have him in Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire. Robin Hood's Bay is, of course, in North Yorkshire and there are Robin Hood's Butts (barrows - where the merry men are said to have honed their archery skills) all over, the most famous being in Somerset. There is, I remember from local radio traffic reports, a Robin Hood roundabout in Newbury.
Sleepy Hollow author Washington Irving (1783-1859) was such a Robin Hood fanboy that he visited Britain he insisted on touring Sherwood Forest and soon decreed that nearly every hill and cave he saw claimed a link of some description to the Robin Hood legend. He visited something called Robin Hood's chair and was once told he was looking at Friar Tuck's cell.
For a more Londoncentric version of Legend-Tripping, and this is the LONDON Fortean Society, there are the ghost tours that take place, and have taken place for decades, almost every day in the capital city. The best story about these is the one of Horace Walpole, the Whig politician and antiquarian, wondering why ghosts only appeared after 7pm.
But with the Haunted Landscape that's not the case. We'd spent the equivalent, nearly, of an entire working day in the Conway Hall and we'd encountered ghost after ghost after ghost. It hadn't been scary. It had been fun and of course we retired afterwards to the Enterprise pub for a serious debrief and a chat about labyrinths.
Thanks to Jade, Paula, Michael, Labyrinth Richard, Liberty, and Sam for joining me. Thanks to Scott Wood and Deborah Hyde for hosting, thanks to the Kozzy Cafe and the Enterprise pub, thanks to the London Fortean Society and Conway Hall and thanks to each and every speaker who appeared. It was a pleasure. Let's do it all again next year.
