The Voice That Thunders, page 8
If the story has its roots in prehistory, “Macclesfield” was not necessarily the town, a paltry nine hundred years old: it could just as well be, in memory, the Forest, the land south of the Mersey, west of the Goyt, north of the Dane and east of the Edge. If that were so: and then came the intuitive flash.
In the boundary survey of 1598, we find a reference to “the Beacon”. The Beacon, from my childhood, was a ruin on a mound on the highest part of the Edge. Before the trees were planted, it commanded a view for almost 360 degrees of an horizon that varied from eight to seventy miles in distance. But the mound is not contemporaneous with the building. It is a characteristic bell-barrow, from the surface of which I have frequently picked worked flint identical to that excavated more recently elsewhere in Cheshire, including the field next to my house, and assigned to the Bronze Age.
The Beacon does not occur in the Legend of Alderley, nor does it have any folklore of its own recognised by the old families. But it is an isolated habitat of the rare fern Moonwort (Osmunda lunaria), and that plant, though the Houghites do not know it, or have forgotten, has the alleged property of being able to draw the nails out of horseshoes.
It may not be irrelevant now to mention some of the foreign analogues of the Sleeping Hero. King Wenzel rides from his hill every night. Wild Edric rides as a portent of danger. Brian Boru rides round Curragh of Kildare every seven years on a horse with silver shoes half an inch thick; and, when the shoes are as thin as a cat’s ear, the spell will be broken by a trumpet sounded by a miller’s son with six fingers on each hand. At Cadbury, on the night of the full moon, Arthur rides with his men round the hill on horses shod with silver, and when they have ridden, they stop to water their horses at the Wishing Well.
We seem to have splinters of tradition here, where the Sleeper, the hill, horseshoes, silver and moon are linked. And, at Alderley, there is a well below the Beacon; but I shall return to that. For the moment, let me just stress that, although unconnected now with the Legend of Alderley, the Beacon has a force.
In 1959, I had been brooding over why the farmer from Mobberley should be riding a white horse over Alderley Edge on his way to Macclesfield Fair at dawn on a day at the end of October. And why was the Golden Stone grey? And what kind of beacon was the Beacon? I took the Ordnance Survey map and drew a straight line from the Beacon to the Golden Stone, 475 yards away. I projected the line in both directions. In one direction, the line passed through the centre of Mobberley; and, in the other, through the highest peak of Macclesfield Forest, Shining Tor, a crag of lustreless grit.
Shining. Beacon. Golden. Three words fortuitously connected with light. Mobberley, the Edge and Macclesfield could be linked. The farmer was in the right place at the right time: dawn on a day at the end of October. Along that line at Samhain, 1 November, the ancient beginning of winter and of the year, the sun rises, when viewed from the Beacon, over the Golden Stone and Shining Tor. And so does the moon at Lammas. Along that line, with a swing of only three degrees, the sun, when viewed from the Beacon, sets in Mobberley churchyard mound, marked by a glacial erratic boulder and a triangulation point, on May Day and at Lammas. Mobberley, the “moot-berg-ley”, the “mound of the assembly”.
A word about lines on paper. Many people seem to derive innocent pleasure from drawing straight lines in pencil across Ordnance Survey maps. They claim that they are able to find alignments, varying in number, over distances that are also not a matter of universally agreed lengths, between disparate, yet significant, features, usually four to each line, such as, inter alia: trig points, tumuli, crossroads, churches, erratic boulders and farm gateways. These lines, when “proven”, are called “leys”. The conclusions drawn about their meaning vary, but tend towards the arcane.
It is true that such lines can be found, which appear to pass through such objects. By the same process, however, it is possible to find that cinemas, post offices, filling stations, sewage works and, indeed, almost any feature one may choose, can be found to be connected by straight lines; but I have not yet come across any claims for their importance.
We should look at what is happening when a pencil is drawn across a map. Firstly, a map is a two-dimensional approximation to a curved surface. If we consider the most popular Ordnance Survey map, the 1:50,000 series, statistically, pure chance will give us fifteen hundred apparent optical alignments, and at least seventy-two will fulfil the requirement of “significance”. But, to this, we have to add the width that the pencil mark represents. Even a sharp point makes a swathe approximately 17 yards wide.
We then must look at the conventional signs used on the map to indicate the features so precisely aligned by that swathe. A church-with-tower symbol covers an area on the map equal to about 50 by 45 yards on the ground. Clearly, no claim for precision of alignment can be made for such a conflation of potential for error. In the exquisite words of M. H. Moroney, those who seek truth by such means suffer from “delusions of accuracy”. The only way to question whether there can be more than coincidence of error on the map is through the application of mathematics.3 It is then that the smirk may be taken off the face of the archaeologist.
It does appear that the drawers of lines, in their omnium gatherum lack of discipline, have nevertheless discovered things of archaeological importance. A strong argument can be made for the existence of sky cults and of calendar markers that date from the Neolithic onwards almost accurate now and precisely accurate when erected.
Yet still there is need for caution. It is one thing to say that in prehistory Man could measure time from a given concurrence of data; but it does not show that in reality he did, or that he even felt the need. This quandary strikes close to home in both a figurative and a literal sense.
I live on a site that shows evidence of occupation in every archaeological period from the Mesolithic onwards. From the middle of a Neolithic circular earthwork, or complex of concentric earthworks, the observation of sunrise at the Equinoxes and possibly other calendrical events can be marked with precision. But this is not evidence that it ever was. With such caveats clearly stated, we can proceed with a more flexible mind and return to my own drawing of lines.
Why should the line from the Beacon miss Mobberley church? I checked backwards from Mobberley and found that the Edge obscured Shining Tor, so that the sun rose later, but from behind the Beacon, and that accounted for the three degrees. Yet there is something to add.
Archaeologists appear to have become afraid of speculation in this area, and I am not the one to blame them. On all sides, if they listen, they are threatened by Old Straight Tracks, blind springs, New Age mystics, dragon roads, and spacesuits. But I am not an archaeologist, so it does not matter if I make a fool of myself.
In archaeology, commonsensical explanations have not always taken entrenched positions. For example: it is useless to argue that if Neolithic man could do a, b, and c, why did he not do x, y, and z? Perhaps he did not want to. Or: that’s impossible. It would have taken an enormous common effort and years of labour. Well, perhaps they wanted to. You and I may not wish to hack out the Golden Stone and to move it, but all that prevents us is our greater concern for other matters.
The pity is that idiots have driven a chariot of the gods through the greater wonders and the true mystery, and archaeologists have shut their minds, in self-defence, to all but the laboratory. One exception is Dr Euan MacKie.4
It is too soon to unravel the whole mystery at Alderley Edge. I shall confine myself to two lines of elucidation.
The first is that, about four thousand years ago, in the Bronze Age, there was a settlement of people on Alderley Edge. The second is that a structure existed for the measuring of time. These inferences are drawn as a result of my having examined an oral tradition, treating it as a literal report, and pursuing the anomalies, which I might not have noticed without an intimate and inherited knowledge of the place. What little there has been possible to examine on the ground has given positive results. And there are other intriguing questions: why are there iron gates? Why a hundred and forty-nine knights plus one? But I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may plausibly be put upon it. So I thank Joseph Garner, whitesmith, of the Hough, for being true; and am grateful for what has come down through him, and leave it at that. Yet I should not be his grandson if I did leave it at that. I shall end by offering a few of my own observations.
The legend is the showpiece of Houghite oral tradition; but there are other, shorter, tales. Some 60 yards from the Beacon, and some hundred or so feet below it, is the Holy Well. It is a trough of four stone slabs under a cliff, with, next to the trough, a shallow quadrant cut into the bedrock. From this well have come dozens. of bent pins, now in the University Museum. My grandfather remembered the well as a cure for barren women. By my time, it had become a wishing well for weekend visitors, from which I collected my pocket money every Monday morning. And my children find it an irregular but still productive source of income. The only yew trees on the Edge grow there, and my grandfather remembered seeing rags tied to a dead hawthorn. He gave no explanation, and I was not curious enough to ask while he was alive. Below the well the ground is almost precipitous and is a deep bog, deep enough to strand a child. In it is a rock of unknown size, but of several hundred tons. It is reputed to have fallen from the cliff in the year 1740, and to have shaken all the cottages of the Hough.
There may be historical truth in this, for in the Court Leet of 1598 it is called the “Hanging Stone”, but in the Leet of 1763 the same spot is the “Holy Well”. More to the point, it is said that the rock landed on an old woman and her cow, who are as a result presumably still there. I find it too remote a chance that at the one moment in geological time the Hanging Stone should detach itself an old woman and her cow should have been up to their respective thighs and udders in mud on a near-perpendicular slope. I do not doubt the story; only the literal origin.
Elsewhere on the Edge there are other romantic items. The Wishing Well, which is a few yards from the Holy Well; the Wizard’s Well, complete with portrait carved in the rock and the inscription, “Drink of this and take thy fill for the water falls by the wizhards will”. A stone circle, called the Druid Stones. These are the reputed work of my great-great-grandfather Robert Garner, stone-cutter, who was happy to oblige both the Stanley and the Trafford families in the provision of dreams. I must own to Robert, because, although his hand is obvious to the initiated, he could draw a false trail across Alderley Edge.
Better evidence for the ancient pedigree of the Edge occurs in a charter of John de Arderne to John, son of Edmund Fyton. It is undated, but a study of the witnesses’ names suggests a period between 1230 and 1250. Here, the same boundary of the Court Leets is followed, and the area of the Iron Gates is called “Elfgrenhoks”: “ad Elfgrenhocks ascendo”. “Elfgrenhoks” means “the sandy ridge of the elves”.
The charter also contains the words “Fytoune strystre”: “exinde ad Fytoune strystre”. And, in the 1763 Court Leet, we find “to an Angle called Fitton Chair”. It is another stone.
So we have: – a legend containing place names that coincide with the possibility of Bronze Age remains; hints of an alignment of man-made, with natural, features for solar, and perhaps lunar, measurements; a mortal, riding the sacred white horse in a sacred place at a sacred time, “dawn on a day at the end of October”, that is, Samhain, the divide between summer and winter; and the mortal is taken by an intermediary to witness a dead, dying, or dormant bright Hero waiting under the earth, and to whom the horse may be said to be sacrificed.
This same place on the Edge is called “the sandy ridge of the elves” in the thirteenth century; at which time the name would have been no superstition or ornament, but a supernatural recognition. Compare, too, the Devil’s Grave 50 yards away. And, separated from the main story now, but inseparable on the ground, a Beacon set on a tumulus, and the story of a woman and a horned animal and death at a sacred well. The Edge is as full of significance and function and continuity as a cathedral. We see a kaleidoscope, but not a random one. There is a pattern.
A clearer understanding of the Edge may be found in Máire MacNeill’s definitive work for the Irish Folklore Commission, The Festival of Lughnasa (Oxford, 1962), which is our Lammas, where the themes to be found at Alderley are visibly coherent: white horses, boundaries, beacons, hill-tops, caves, treasure, buried heroes, intermediaries, old women, cows, fertility wells, sacred trees, the Devil associated in a place name, stone alignments, stone chairs, elves, the sun, the moon, and town fairs.
It is not that the list is arbitrary but that it is so selective. Time and again these elements cluster, as they do at Alderley. It is in its present manifestation a Celtic cosmos, not an English one. It is old, and it is alive. I inherited it from an old man who would not have had the patience to listen to me speak at such length. But if he had not made me listen to him, I should not be holding now this polished, immaculate, perforated stone axe, an insignia of power of the Middle Bronze Age, from the Golden Stone. Coincidence, error, fantasy or folklore: this is a reality. And for this I care.
* * *
1 This lecture was delivered at Manchester University on 10 December 1977.
2 A local court of record or appeal.
3 See Appendix on p. 242.
4 The author of many works, including The Megalith Builders
6
Hard Cases
FOR THOSE OF my generation, the increasing number of adolecescent doctors has become a commonplace; policemen have been our juniors for almost as long; it is not the law or medicine by which we plot the years, but a more startling hallucination that marks our tally. Hitler is getting younger.1
Those newsreels, familiar for a lifetime, no longer show senescent mania, but a madman in the prime of life. It is a salutory lesson in coming to terms with age; and, having made one such adjustment, it is with relative equanimity that I can face the implications of having been a published writer for a quarter of a century.
Twenty-five years; and over and throughout that time, certain elements have been a sustained part of experience. One of them is a dialogue with the teaching profession, which has shown me that there can be differences between our respective attitudes to books; I admit to a bedevilment by the concept of children’s literature and writing for children. It may be that an examination of a particular view of the relationship between writing and reading will resolve the matter.
The puzzle is created for me through the letters I have received and which fill four filing cabinets. Each letter annotates a one-to-one engagement between the reader and the author. It is not a balanced engagement; for the reader knows the author intimately, through the book, whereas the author knows the reader fragmentarily, through the letter. But what the reader does not know, and what the author comes to realise with time, is that the reader is a part of a consistent pattern of reaction. What is revealed by the pattern could raise questions for you both general and particular, about your purpose and mine. To begin with, it may be helpful for me to outline something of the background, of the letters and of the writing that has prompted them.
When I realised that I had to commit myself to the task of making intelligible marks on blank paper, I was forced to ask what it was that I could write and to whom it would be of use or even of interest. I felt that, at the age of twenty-one, I was scarcely in a position to tell anybody twice my age how the world should be run; nor, I considered, had I seen anything, so far, of startling originality and worthy of record. What, then, had I to say? And who would listen? Twenty-one years, it began to appear with painful clarity, was not time enough to equip a novelist. The more I pondered this, the more unavoidable the implication grew: I was making a big mistake.
Then I had a thought. If I were to write flat out, to the limits of my ability and experience, perhaps the result would be of use, and say something new, to people not twice, but half, my age. It was plausible. I should write for children.
Some weeks later, I took a sheet of paper, and, thinking that the moment would be either of import or it would not, wrote: “4.03 p.m., Tuesday, 4 September, 1956. Page One Chapter One.
“Colin and Susan Whisterfield, ten-year-old twins, sat in the attic window and looked gloomily out over the dismal London roof-tops, watching the rain slide steadily and stickily past the window, as it had done for over a week. It was the most boring rain imaginable; there was no wind to fling it against the windows and make you feel extra safe and cosy by the fire as the drops rattle angrily against the glass; there were no huge, black cloud mountains to eat up the daylight and make you feel just a little uneasy, even though you are safely tucked away in the middle of the largest city in the world. The rain just fell slowly out of a dull, grey sky into dull, grey streets.”
And so on, until, mercifully quickly, I felt ill, and gagged on the mess I was perpetrating and stopped. I had learnt the first lesson: the duty of the writer is to the text. To think of writing for an unidentified audience is to forgo the prime commitment to literature. Conscious writing “for children”, or “for” any other limiting group, is ghetto writing and not at all related to what I was setting out to do. It was not until the first of several visits to Moscow that I saw what can happen under the full flowering of such a prose. The only difference was that, there, it was not called a ghetto but a Union of Writers.
