In this series of six articles, one of which was originally published in the August 2018 edition of The Great Outdoors magazine, I explore my life-long connection with the town of Haworth in West Yorkshire, as it’s association with the Brontë family.
During the summer months of the 1970’s the river Aire ran bright and singing past the meadows of Kirkstall Abbey, we caught Sticklebacks in jam jars from the streams and the summer heat fair split the granite setts in the avenues. My sister’s house stood close by Burley Park Station on the Leeds-Harrogate-York railway line. I recall a boy who lived in the house at the very end of the avenue, from where there was an unobstructed view over the railway tracks. By some process of divine cognition he knew exactly when the British Rail heritage locomotives would come steaming up the track from Leeds. How I loved to watch over the backyard wall as these behemoths of a bygone age thundered past, carrying families to Scarborough for the day.
A real treat was when my sister suggested we take a trip from Leeds City Station on the draughty and noisy class 110 British Rail diesel units along the Airedale line to the market town of Keighley, home of the Worth Valley Railway. From here the former Midland Railway 4F class steam locomotives would strain at a sedate and stately pace against the gradient – one-in-fifty-eight at its steepest point – issuing bellowing clouds of bituminous steam, climbing three-hundred feet in five miles up the Worth Valley to Oxenhope. Imagine my delight when my sister informed me that Oakworth station was used as the location for the 1970’s film The Railway Children, the famous petticoats waving scene having been filmed at the Mytholmes tunnel a few hundred metres further up the line.
The tour of the engine sheds at Oxenhope, where the line terminates, held a certain fascination for a young boy. My sister however, was more enthusiastic when we alighted from the train at Haworth station and walked the half-mile to the town high street. Here she would relate tales of three remarkable sisters who had lived there many years ago.
Thirty-seven years later it was not the engine shed at Oxenhope but those three remarkable sisters that drew me back to Haworth.
The Parsonage Museum, Haworth
It was a slate grey missal morning as I set out over the heights of the M62 motorway into Yorkshire passing the famous Stott Hall Farm, located in the centre of the carriageways not, as urban myth would have, because of a dispute of land ownership, but rather a simple necessity of geotechnical engineering. The weather had not improved by the time I reached Keighley and did nothing to alleviate the dreary aspect of a town, which has over the decades sadly succumbed to industrial decline and mercilessly functional architecture. Keighley main line station is a case in point and has few charms to be recommended but the branch line platform retains many of the original Midland Railway features, redolent of the platform scenes in David Lean’s Brief Encounter.
Emily, Anne and Charlotte, from Korea. Keighley branch line station.
The arrival of the matt black locomotive, hauling several maroon and cream British Railway carriages, exhaling sulphurous steam like an asthmatic dragon, was greeted with universal delight by children and adults alike. Soon the hyperventilating engine was pulling us away from the black, gaping windows of abandoned factories and mills. We passed over bridges of creamy mustard sandstone beneath which the river Worth plunged and tumbled over weirs and cascades. We travelled at the speed of horses in the passing fields, that trotted to keep pace with the engine, past embankments where free range bantams scurried in panic from the approaching fire-breathing beast. In time the clickety-clack swaying of the carriages began to exert a somnambulant effect on old men and babies.
The Worth Valley Railway, Keighley Station
The weight of my head nodded me awake as the train halted at Haworth station and I quickly gathered my belongings and stepped down onto the platform. Placing my feet carefully, diffidently, as I had done back in those hazy summers of the 1970’s, I began to climb the steep hill of High Street, past the holiday cottages, the gift shops selling Yorkshire Relics, craft shops, ladies fashion boutiques, old maids’ parlours, the notorious drinking houses and enough tea shops, cafés and restaurants to keep the Duke of Wellington and all his armies fed and watered.
It is perhaps easy to see Haworth High Street as evidence of crass commercialism, but in comparison to many of the high streets of Britain, it has retained something of its independent charm and has not (yet) succumbed to the invasion of global chains that homogenise so many towns and cities. Behind the Black Bull Inn a side street leads past the Victorian parish church of St. Michael and All Angels, built to replace the previous building in 1879, past the church yard, closed in 1856 due to over crowding, to the former parsonage house which was once the home of the Brontë family.
High Street, Haworth
There is little that has not been written about the Brontë family, that most enigmatic, celebrated, tragic, quasi-mythological family of this Yorkshire moorland and darkly industrial town. Of Patrick, the ambitious, diligent, pious clergyman; of his only son Branwell, the much maligned, unrecognised and ultimately alcoholic artist and poet; of Charlotte, the celebrated literary sensation of her time, proto-feminist and heartbroken author; of Anne, the affectionate, unassuming, oft overlooked novelist; and of Emily, the uncompromising, sensitive, often reclusive lover of nature, who penned perhaps the most singular work of fictional prose in the English language. Indeed, over the course of the one hundred and fifty years since their untimely deaths, whole forests have been felled in service of the Brontë myth and the propagation of a legion of fictional, biographical and psychological tomes. Certainly, a single chapter of discourse would not do justice to their intricate and fascinating story, nor to any half-hearted critical appraisal of their works. I do not intend to enter into that room. The road to Haworth is paved with a thousand authors, many falling bereft at the wayside, each offering their own particular interpretation and spin upon the saga. I came here only to remember and to experience once again a place I love.
The Church Yard, Haworth
I cannot remember how I lost my sister. She was perhaps busy still in the parsonage museum, but I recall vividly the wind stirring the tops of the sycamore trees in the church yard and the arguments of the rooks in their lofty canopy and the tranquillity, which is different to quiet, of that moment. Wandering amongst the sepulchres and tombstones I found the cemetery boundary wall, which to my juvenile frame appeared tall and insurmountable. Using the copingstones as leverage I pulled myself up and looked over the wall into the fields beyond. The enclosed meadows stretched for some half a mile, separated by an array of parallel dry stonewalls and beyond, the briefest glimpse of moorland heather where the ground rose to the horizon. I was gripped by an overwhelming desire to take flight over the wall and be off. As I began to find a footing on the protruding tie stones, the familiar treble of my sister’s voice sounded across the graveyard, calling me back.
At 854m in height, Arenig Fawr lays no claim to be amongst the mightiest of peaks in Snowdonia. The late W. A. Poucher ranked the rocky summit of this remote mountain as 24th in an ordinal list of the Welsh Peaks. But a mountain is more than a mere measurement of its ascent above ordnance datum, as obsessive peak-baggers and list tickers may fail to acknowledge. It is a massif of geological history, an eco system of flora and fauna, a facilitator of meteorological phenomenon, a catalyst of story, myth and legend, a home of spirits from an earlier age.
Afon Tryweryn
I first fell under the spell of this less well known area of the Welsh mountains as a student at Aberystwyth University. As Michaelmas term progressed and the nights began to draw in around the somewhat claustrophobic collegiate town, we looked with increasing anticipation to our weekend forays into the Welsh countryside to find space and light. And so we stumbled across the mountains to the south of Llyn Celyn, since when something has called me back time and time again.
On the autumnal equinox I set off to spend the night at the MBA hut situated rather apprehensively just below the slightly Heath Robinson looking dam at Llyn Arenig Fawr. As the hut is situated less than two miles south of the A4212 Y Bala-Trawsfynydd road I decided to extend the journey by starting at the Llyn Celyn dam, picking my way through the farms and fields around Mynydd Nodol and crossing a rather boggy Nant Aberderfel, where the Ordnance Survey indicated path seems to vanish into purple moor grass, bog myrtle and waist-high heather. After four rather gruelling miles I arrived at the bothy, which was, thankfully, empty. The hut is only just large enough for one person, or perhaps two if they know each other well, and probably dates from 1830 when Llyn Arenig Fawr was first adapted as a reservoir to provide the town of Y Bala with drinking water. The lake gains some shelter from storms as it lies in the lee of the crags of Simdde Ddu, but as an autumnal wind began to get up across the silvery waters, as the light began to fail and the rain began to pitter-pat on the steel chimney cap, I determined the best course of action was to light a fire in the somewhat smoky grate and settle down for the night.
Llyn Arenig Fawr Bothy
In geological terms Arenig Fawr was born 490 million years ago in a sea of fire and foam in a part of geological time known as the Ordovician. The collision of continental plates gave rise to an arc of fierce volcanic activity. The volcanoes erupted into a shallow sea with explosive force, spuing out pyroclastic flows of white-hot ash and lava, which roared with breathtaking speed into the surrounding waters, making them boil and hiss. These “nuées ardentes” or burning clouds, rapidly cooled in air, in water to form solid rock: ignimbrites, tuffs, breccias, from which the lofty crags of Arenig Fawr were chiselled.
During the last ice age some 14,000 years ago, sheets of ice would have submerged these valleys, with only the mountaintops protruding above, a veritable flood concealing the fertile valleys from hunter gatherers and forcing them south to warmer climes. As the valleys and human imagination began to emerge from beneath the ice, stories were woven by the Celtic people about a race of giants who lived among them. Idris was one such giant, living upon his seat “Cadair Idris” and who would initiate contests between other giants, Yscydion, Offrwm and Ysbryn who also lived amongst these hills and mountains. There is an account in the Welsh Triads of the bursting of Llyn Llion that resulted in the deaths of all living people, with the exception of Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who escaped in a boat without sails, and went on to repopulate the British Isles with their offspring. Arenig Fawr seems a likely place for the grounding of this mythological boat, the Welsh for Ark being Aren or Arene. Similarly, it is believed locally that the ruins of an ancient and legendary city lie beneath the waters of Llyn Tegid, or Bala Lake as it is know in English, once lost in a great flood. The lake, formed by glacial melt waters following the last ice age, is one of the last habitats of the Gwyniad fish, a small salmonid creature. Three rather forlorn looking specimens of this remnant of a post-glacial ecosystem sit pickled in formaldehyde in the White Lion Hotel on the main street of Y Bala. Another local legend tells of a farmer who once found a fairy calf among the rushes of Llyn Arenig Fawr, and reared it as one of his own cattle. For many years it produced many fine offspring, making him a wealthy man, until one day a small man playing a pipe appeared by the lake and by his eerie music, led the animal back into the waters to rejoin the fairy herd. Born from water and returned to water.
I awoke to a cold, wet, grey morning and struggled to raise myself from the warmth of my sleeping bag. After a breakfast of kippers cooked on the old iron pan I found hanging on the bothy wall, I carefully balanced across the rickety old iron ladder spanning the water out-flow of the dam, and began to ascend the limb of Y Castell to the south-west of the lake. As I climbed higher and the expanse of open country to the south gradually began to reveal itself, I could see three sheets of water dominating the landscape: Llyn Celyn to the north, Llyn Arenig Fawr in the corrie below, and across the moorland to the south, Llyn Tegid, cradled in the valley beneath the lofty crags of Aran Fawddwy.
The spirit of Arenig Fawr can be deceptively passive, imbued with an air of amiability, beneath which lies a dark and angry character. On clear spring days, with the song of skylarks lifting high into the azure sky, the climb to the summit is a little more than a strenuous walk. But in winter, when the mountain is draped in snow and ice, reminiscent of that long ago age, when black clouds tear across the summit ridge propelled by winds strong enough to lift walkers from their feet and dash them onto the jagged rocks below, then one might imagine giants battling in these hills.
On a moonless August night in 1943 the deep thrum of aircraft engines could be heard above the wind, echoing along the Dyfrdwy Valley. The aircraft was a United States Air Force B17 Flying Fortress, “Mr Five-by-Five”, on night training manoeuvres, many miles off course. It is thought that the crew never saw Arenig Fawr in the darkness. Had the aircraft been just fifty metres higher they would have cleared the summit ridge, secured their location and returned to base for cocoa and a good night’s sleep. The summit cairn now bears a slate memorial to the eight American crewmembers, each one originating from a different state of the Union, who were killed that night. The area is even now scattered with fragments of metal, mostly fused, one would suspect at very high temperature, into the volcanic breccias that form the rocky outcrop, such that it is impossible to tell where aluminium ends and the natural rock begins. The bodies of the crewmen were never found.
Memorial to the crew of the United States Air Force B17 Flying Fortress
To the south of the summit, Moel yr Eglwys, Church Hill, lies an area of rare simplicity and beauty where a scatter of crystal-clear pools, encircled by rich, red bog grasses, lie amongst undulating crags and rocky tors. Westward, across the boggy col of Ceunant Coch, I climbed to the summit of Moel Llyfnant and was rewarded with a view across Coed-y-Brenin, the King’s Forest, to the Rhinogydd, dark and silent like sleeping giants, beneath a blanket of cold-grey cloud.
To the north of Moel Llyfnant, on the descent towards Amnodd-bwll and Amnodd-wen, there are remains of shielings, or hafod in Welsh, buildings associated with the summer grazing of livestock, probably dating from the 18thCentury. Many are of considerable size and extent, belying the once active agricultural history of this barren landscape, populated now only by walkers, lone forestry workers and the occasional sheep.
In twenty-four hours I saw not one other person until I reached the sleepy hamlet of Arenig, from where I crossed Afon Tryweryn to reach again the A4212, where the cars and lorries race at foolish speed. Circling the lake I was reminded of the latest tale in these chronicles of fire and flood. In 1965, the construction of the reservoir of Llyn Celyn, built to provide water to the city of Liverpool via the river Dee, resulted in the flooding of Capel Celyn, a small village, which was a centre of welsh cultural activity. Local bitter feelings were exacerbated by the insensitivity of the authorities involved and the passing of the legislation for the reservoir in Parliament despite the opposition of thirty-five of the thirty-six incumbent Welsh members. The incident is remembered as a moot point for advocates of the Welsh Language, most notably by a piece of graffito on the wall of a ruined stone cottage by the A487 at Llanrhystud, outside Aberystwyth bearing the inscription “Cofiwch Dryweryn” Remember Tryweryn.
Cofiwch Dryweryn
Arenig Fawr is an old, old mountain and has seen much in its lifetime, has many stories to tell of giants and fairies, fire, ice and flood. And although now it ranks as only a lesser Welsh peak, in a wild and desolate location, it has the spirit of a fiery volcano still.
“Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to.”
Ursula le Guin
The words of Neil Philips reverberated around my head for some considerable time. “to explore the disjointed and troubled psychological and emotional landscape of the twentieth century through the symbolism of myth and folklore.” This was the landscape I had only too painfully come to know as a young adult, both the landscape of the novels of Alan Garner, but also “the troubled psychological and emotional landscape of the twentieth century.” At the age of just fifteen I had found myself contemplating thoughts of suicide, thoughts which left unchallenged and untreated continued to fester, with age ripening into a dark self-hatred, which at the age of twenty-six compelled me, in a desperate cry for help, to act upon those thoughts. One vigorous stomach pump and a good night’s sleep later I found myself at the mercy of the on-duty psychiatric team, who seemed to offer as much empathy and compassion as Caligula, and some time later I was cast out onto the streets with the vague promise of some follow up sessions with a psychotherapist, in about six months time, they said.
By some miracle of self-determination I fought my way through to my mid-thirties only to be faced with a further personal crisis of calamitous proportions, the consequences of which – a failed marriage, two estranged step-children, a flat-lining professional career, mounting personal debts – lay around me like the victims of a massacre. Something had gone wrong, horribly wrong. There were so many questions, but the materialist culture surrounding me, to a certain extent smothering me, seemed to hold no answers. The messages, both intentional and subliminal, seemed to be saying that my only purpose was to work to earn money to spend in cycles of the unrestrained satiation of morbid desires. I was lost. I needed a place of familiarity from which to assay what I had become. So it was that I returned to those books of my childhood: The Weirdstone of Brasingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Red Shift, in some vain attempt to find answers beyond the material.
So again I found myself on Alderley Edge, as I had on many, many occasions since that first encounter, many years ago. On this particular bleached winter’s morning, an oatmeal sun straining to peer over the tops of the birches, I headed out from the warmth of the Wizard Tea Rooms to retrace familiar steps around the three hundred acres of woodland now owned and managed by the National Trust.
No more than three hundred metres through the trees I arrived at Engine Vein, a section of open cast and collapsed mine that once was over twenty-five metres deep but was capped with concrete in 1979 for reasons of safety (the chasm into which my younger self gazed with such awe and wonder). A small iron door on the southern side of the cleft leads through a narrow passageway to the extensive chamber below, from where a labyrinth of drifts, levels and adits criss-cross and interconnect for mile upon mile. Back filled passages are still being discovered at Alderley, often by the Derbyshire Caving Club who have taken responsibility for the up keep of the mines under the direction of the National Trust, and who regularly hold open days for those wishing to take a subterranean exploration of these fascinating features[i].
Engine Vein, Alderley
The earliest evidence of mining at Alderley is to be found at Engine Vein and dates to the Bronze Age. The main ore extracted was copper, but cobalt, iron, lead, silver and even gold have also been found[ii]. In their book Prehistoric Cheshire, Victoria and Paul Morgan recount how an oak shovel found by 19thCentury miners in a section of mine at Brynlow to the south west of Engine Vein, has been radiocarbon dated to approximately 3,700 years old[iii]. A large number of stone hammer heads and similar tools were also discovered in material that had been used to backfill the open cast mine. The process of open cast mining at Engine Vein is believed to have involved the digging of small circular pits into the rock, the adjacent sides of which were then knocked though to expose the full length of the mineral vein. Evidence of this process can still be seen along the side of Engine Vein today, together with significant blackening of the rock, indicating the use fire setting to make the rock faces brittle in order to ease excavation.
From Engine Vein I headed to Beacon Lodge and crossed the Macclesfield Road. The hollows and depressions of the thick oak woodland still held the frost of the previous night as I made my way to lower ground and a clearing of sandy deposits. This was known as Sandhills, and is all that now remains at surface level of a considerable mining enterprise that took place during the 19thCentury. In 1857, James Mitchell obtained a twenty-year lease from Lord Stanley to extract ore in this location, initially using open cast excavation, which became known as West Mine. By 1860 the excavations were extended using tunnels into the rock both at West Mine and also at a new location in Windmill Wood, the no less imaginatively named Wood Mine. Between 1857 and 1863 the Alderley Edge Mining Company excavated an estimated 80,000 tons of ore producing 1,071 tons of copper metal with an estimated value of £84,132.[iv]Extraction of copper ore continued until 1878, by which time competition from overseas mining operations became too great, resulting in a global fall in the price of copper. The Alderley Edge Mining Company opted for voluntary liquidation and all mining activity ceased. At the beginning of the 20thCentury there were brief periods of renewed interest in ore extraction at Alderley, but again global economic forces resulted in very little profit for the prospectors and by 1919 the mines were once again abandoned. This heralded a darker era in the history of the mines and one that I must confess to having played a minor (not miner) role in, the problem of trespass. In 1929 two young Stockport men had wandered into West Mine and had become lost in the labyrinth of passageways, their torches eventually giving up, unable in the dark to find a way out. Their emaciated bodies were found in a side passageway three months later. Public concern at the fatalities did little to deter persistent trespassers. Between 1934 and 1937, forty-one people were fined by Wilmslow magistrates for offences of trespass in the mines[v]. In 1946 a man fell sixty-five feet to his death in ‘Plank Shaft’, again in West Mine, but the mine was not filled-in and fully sealed until 1960, the year The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was published.
“The widest shaft they had yet come upon lay before them, and stretched across its gaping mouth was a narrow plank.”[vi]
The ancient mines of Alderley claimed their last victim in 1974 when a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl fell thirty feet into Engine Vein, prompting the capping of the open cast shaft with concrete[vii]. In the fields and heathland to the north of Sandhills there is now no visible sign of West Mine or Wood Mine, although the lower levels are still accessible by means of two shafts dug in 1975 by the Derbyshire Caving Club, now kept firmly under lock and key.
To The Edge
Heading back through the woods further to the north, I arrived at the Macclesfield Road by a rusted early 20thCentury sign, now a protected monument, bearing the inscription “TO THE EDGE”. The sign pointed to Castle Rock, a beautiful outcrop of the Helsby and Wilmslow conglomerates and sandstones, from which the escarpments of the Alderley edge were hewn, which were laid down during the Triassic period of geology some 240 million years ago, in an arid environment prone to flash floods, which brought down debris from the surrounding mountainous areas, rich in mineral deposits[viii]. Despite the name, no evidence exists to suggest there was ever a castle on this site, however, evidence has been found of Neolithic implements and what the Morgan’s refer to as “an original Neolithic floor” of “friable brownish sandstone” and “loose bleached sand”, dating to around 5,000 years before present[ix]. Neolithic hunter-gatherers would no doubt have been attracted to the Edge because of the shelter it provided from the prevailing westerly winds and the plentiful supply of fresh water, the Edge being irrigated by at least three natural springs.
I climbed down under the face and ran my hands along the beautiful banding within the rock, tracing the ebb and flow of ancient sand dunes and river channels, tiny crystals of silica and mica coming away on my fingers. These exposures continued to the north, gradually sloping downwards towards the village, where one of the natural springs seeped from the foot of the cliff. Looking up I saw the face of a bearded man looking back at me – Wizard’s Well. This enigmatic carving is folly believed to have been carved into the rock by the great grandfather of Alan Garner, whose family lived in the area of the Hough below the Edge (pronounced huff)for over three hundred years. Although increasingly illegible, the letters read:
“Drink of this and take thy fill for the water falls by the Wizard’s will.”
Now faced with the suburban gardens of Mottram Road, I about turned, following the sculpted sandstone eastwards to where two further springs, known as Holy Well and Wishing Well, appeared each on either side of a buttress several metres in height. By the second well, the rock was dank, coated with a curtain of moss, dripping with water rich in minerals, from deep within the ground. I cupped my hands underneath the lush vegetation and let them fill with the crystal clear water, and drank.
Beyond the wellsprings, the ridge of Alderley Edge climbed to an eastern prospect over looking Glaze Hill. Here at Stormy Point an impressive crust of the Triassic conglomerate sat defiantly above the softer red mottled sandstones of the Wilmslow formation, bearing the scars of past mining activities. A long fissure in the conglomerate rock around fifty centimetres wide and up to two metres deep, topped by an unusual rectangular stone capping a circular hole, is known locally as the Devil’s Grave.
“If you run round theer three times widdershins Owd Nick’s supposed to come up and fetch you.”[x]
As children we would dare each other to take up the challenge and thus by encircling the stone in and anti-clockwise direction, would invoke the very devil himself. Of course we were always bitterly disappointed when having circumnavigated the offending monolith, nothing happened.
Devil’s Grave
By early afternoon the Edge began to fill with the routine assault of families of over excited children, lolloping dogs and couples wearing matching Hunter wellington boots and Barbour jackets. Barley able to contain my resentment towards these interlopers, I quickly took the path through the fir trees behind the old Pilkington Family memorial and descended into the beautiful beech woodland of Saddlebole, where the path dropped steeply into a hollow, then through the beech trees to the break of slope.
Stories are important; the telling of stories more so. In his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands describes humans as “the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves[xi],” and there is a very real part of myself, a part that perhaps a psychologist would refer to as the child ego state, which still wishes to believe in the legend of Alderley. And although it may be my inner child who turns up the undergrowth in the nooks and dingles of Alderley wood in search of ….what? something, some recognition, some identification, this desire is by no means childish. It is the desire that has driven the creation of myth and the telling of stories since humans first acquired the ability of speech.
At Ridgeway Wood I came across a small waterfall, which tumbled over loose shale into a deep ravine. In late November of 1745, rumour spread amongst the families of the Hough that a Jacobite army loyal to the ‘Young Pretender’, Prince Charles Edward Stuart were heading south from the undefended city of Manchester to Derby, their route taking them via Alderley. The alarmed inhabitants took their beds, blankets and family heirlooms and hid out in the ravine until the ill-fated rebellion had past by.
From above the wood I returned north towards an earthen mound topped by a memorial stone. Marking the highest ground, this was the site of an Armada Beacon built around 1577 as part of an Elizabethan early warning system comprising a chain of fire signals strategically located on high ground, stretching from the south coast of England, to London and onwards throughout the country. The original building was a simple construction of four walls around a fire basket or pot, within which wood, pitch and tar were to be lit should the need arise, as it did in 1588 when the Spanish fleet attacked the English coast[xii]. Lord Stanley, owner of the Alderley estate during the 17thCentury, arranged for the beacon to be re-built as part of landscaping works, with higher walls and a pitched roof. This building collapsed during a storm in 1931, the remains of which lay scattered around the site and were used to build the current memorial stone.[xiii]
The earth mound upon which the beacon stood has been scheduled as a Bronze Age barrow, a type of prehistoric burial site also found at Seven Firs just to the south of Engine Vein and in Brynlow wood, nearby[xiv]. It is not inconceivable that the association of the legend of the sleeping knights with Alderley Edge lies in the presence of these barrows, possibly the burials of Bronze Age chieftains. Alderley was certainly of great importance to Bronze Age people because of the mineral wealth held within the earth. As the Bronze Age passed into the Iron Age, the ceremonial rights and traditions of the former people would have been forsaken, remembered only as stories and passed from generation to generation by oral tradition.
Through the thickness of trees: fir, pine, oak, ash and birch, I could hear them shouting after me, calling my name. Adult voices, distant and dislocated from the hypnotic draw of the open wound in the Cheshire woodland. I believed I had found the fabled Iron Gates deep within the tactile rocks of Alderley Edge and was intent on discovering the whereabouts of the elusive Wizard. Unbeknown to the child, the wizard in question was not Ambrosius, or Merlin, or Cadelin, but Alan Garner himself. For undoubtedly a spell had been cast over me, one from which I would never recover, and what in fact I had discovered was not the mythic Iron Gates, but something far more precious. Precious to the child, even more precious to the man as he now found himself, stumbling around in the mid-life forests and spiritual vacuity of twenty-first century Britain, desperately searching for some vestige of meaning.
[vi]Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Op. cit. pg127
[vii]Carlon, Chris, J. The Alderley Edge Mines, Op. cit. pg124
[viii]The nomenclature of the Upper Triassic sequence was changed during the 1980’s. What had originally been referred to as the Bunter and Keuper Sandstones, became incorporated into the Sherwood Sandstone Group. The two main stratigraphic sequences visible at Castle Rock, Alderley Edge are the Upper Mottled Sandstone (formerly part of the Bunter sequence), above which is the Engine Vein Conglomerate (formerly part of the Keuper sequence). See Benton, M.J., Cook, E. & Turner, P. (2002) Permian and Triassic Red Beds and the Penarth Group of Great Britain, Geological Conservation Review Series, No. 24, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough, 337 pp.
[ix]Victoria & Paul MorganPrehistoric Cheshire, Op. cit. pg33.
[x]Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Op. cit. pg33
[xi]Rowlands, Mark. The Philosopher and the Wolf, Granta Publications, 2008, pg2
[xii]Stanley, L. Alderley Edge and its neighbourhood, Op. cit.
So, while the light fails On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England
T.S. Eliot
Many years ago, before the onset, or so it would seem in retrospect, of cultural consumerism, the unbridled self-gratification of Thatcherism, the ubiquitous narcissism of social media, and all the other ills of the neoliberal dream, on a russet-red sandstone escarpment on the eastern edge of the Cheshire Plain stood a ten year old boy: precocious, intelligent, a bit of a misfit, crowned with a mop of white-gold hair, dressed in a rather tatty C&A jumper, flared corduroy trousers and Start-Rite sandals. Offspring that he was of the homogenous council estate tucked away as an afterthought at the southern limit of a hazy industrial city, he none-the-less yearned for magic and enchantment, in pursuit of which he now gazed with unbridled awe and wonder into a slim chasm cut some seventy feet into the jagged rock below, a dog-eared copy of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamenclasped firmly in his slightly grubby hand.
Castle Rock, Alderley
As I recall, the book had been given, or lent (though possibly never returned) to me by a school pal named Stewart whose father taught at a school in the village of Mobberley, Cheshire, a rather bourgeois settlement to the south of what is now Manchester Airport most famous for being the home of the ill fated George Mallory, who died attempting to summit Mount Everest in 1924. Why one of my school pals from a rather run down primary school on the southern fringes of the city of Manchester should have a father teaching in such an esteemed location I cannot remember, but I do remember being taken to the school one day to look for ‘conkers’ which had fallen from the lofty horse chestnut trees that encircled the school. Perhaps my pal’s dad was the gardener or something like that and I’ve got it all wrong[i]. Notwithstanding, it was he, the father that is, that introduced me to the book, the legend of Alderley and vicariously, the works of Alan Garner.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a children’s novel about a geographically displaced brother and sister, Colin and Susan, who encounter Cadellin, the Wizard of Alderley and are pursued through the Cheshire landscape by the forces of evil, was the first book I had an emotional relationship with. I was not an avid reader as a child. Having a propensity for attention deficit long before the advent of Ritalin, I preferred picture books. Raymond Briggs and Jan Pienkowski were particular favourites. But the progressive social policies of Manchester City Council’s Education Committee of the 1970’s meant that books were regularly thrust into my hands, and by the time I entered lower Primary I had an above average reading age. For a child with a tendency towards visual dominance, the Weirdstone appealed not only because its narrative was particularly visual but because the book also contained maps, two of them, which gave me enough confidence to face head on the pages of daunting text, knowing that should I lose my way, I would have the maps to help locate myself.
Stormy Point, Alderley
The Weirdstone and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath were Alan Garner’s first two books, most decidedly intended for children, published in 1960 and 1963 respectively. Although perhaps somewhat dated in terms of characterisation compared to more recent popular children’s fiction, the books had a compelling energy and mystery that appealed to the adolescent mind. More importantly for me, they were rooted in a verifiable location; and not merely the broad brush of a fictional narrative located in a particular town or city, which might as well have taken place in any town or city, as with, for example, Holden Caulfield’s relationship to New York in J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but a narrative entwined within substantive geographical features, which were as much a part of that narrative as the human characters who inhabited them. The Weirdstone of Brisingamenand The Moon of Gomrathcould only have taken place on Alderley Edge, a prominent ridge of sandstone escarpment some three kilometres long and reaching over a hundred and ninety metres above sea level, which all the more engaging for my younger self was less than ten miles from my parents house, and easily reachable by bicycle.
“And late one Sunday afternoon at the end of the first week in January, Colin and Susan climbed out of Alderley village, pushing their bicycles before them. They walked slowly, for it was not a hill to be rushed, and the last stretch was the worst – straight and steep, without any respite.[ii]”
With my bicycle chained to an old fence post and the headlamp employed as an improvised miners lantern, I would spend many hours exploring the near surface adits and passageways of the old mines. Locations such as Devil’s Grave, Pillar Mine and Doc Mine were familiar places for adventures, following in the footsteps of Colin and Susan. Upon the Edge I discovered that where Colin and Susan had “walked down the trench, and were rather disappointed to find that it ended in a small cave, shaped roughly like a discus, and full of cold damp air,” there was in fact, upon Stormy Point, among the towering Scott’s Pines, such a cave where, “there were no tunnels or shafts: the only thing of note was a round hole in the roof, about a yard across, which was blocked by an oblong stone.”The Wizard Inn with its “white walls and stone roof”, and above the door a painted sign showing “a man, dressed like a monk, with long white hair and beard[iii]” actually stood alongside the woods on the Macclesfield Road. The Weirdstone was a picture book then, except that the pictures existed in the landscape.
Castle Rock, Alderley
The story of the Weirdstone was partly inspired by the Legend of Alderley, the first known publication of which was in 1805 in the Manchester Mail. A newspaper correspondent is thought to have obtained the story from a servant of the local Stanley family, a Thomas Broadhurst, also known as “Old Daddy”. However, Parson Shrigley, the Clerk and later Curate of Nether Alderley was believed to have recounted the tale as early as 1753, himself believing the story to have originated a good eighty years prior to his telling.[iv]
The fable tells of the meeting early one morning on the Edge of a farmer from Mobberley and a tall, strangely dressed older man, who attempts to buy the farmers milk-white horse. Preferring to take his chances at Macclesfield market, the farmer is disappointed to find that his horse will not sell. Upon returning to the Edge that evening the farmer again meets the stranger and having reluctantly agreed to his proposal of sale, is led by the old man to a pair of iron gates mounted in the rock, the entrance to a large cavern deep within the hillside. Here the farmer is shown countless men lying in enchanted sleep, each but one with a horse by his side, his own mare to make the numbers complete. The farmer is richly rewarded with jewels and gold for his troubles and led from the cavern, the iron gates closing behind, never to be seen again.
Devil’s Grave, Alderley
The tale is not unique to Alderley. The myth of a hero and his knights entombed within a particularly striking feature of the landscape has been associated with several locations in Britain, notably the Eildon Hills of the Scottish borders, as recounted by Sir Walter Scott in his Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer[v]and the precipitous face of Y Lliwedd, which forms part of the Snowdon Horseshoe range in North Wales[vi]. In the Welsh version of the tale a shepherd is seeking a lost sheep on the slopes of Y Lliwedd when he stumbles across a small cave, known locally as Ogof Llanciau Eryri. Letting his curiosity get the better of him he enters the cave to find, as in the Alderley tale, an army of sleeping knights.
Although never specifically mentioned, is has been assumed by various authors and by Garner himself, that the Alderley knights were the companions of one Arthur Pendragon, the bearded stranger met by the Mobberley farmer his well known magical companion, of whom Gerald of Wales referred to as Ambrosius[vii] but whom we know more commonly as the magician Merlin, and despite Alan Garner’s decision to name his wizard of his book Caddelin the legend of Alderley is in folklore often referred to as the legend of King Arthur and his knights.
Such geomythological tales are often the remnants of a folk oral tradition, the purpose of which, for ancient communities, was to make sense of prominent geographical features or to facilitate the remembrance of a specific event in the oral history of the community. Often these stories were inspired by an emotional human response to the landscape. This emotional response may be described as a subliminal ‘sense of place’ or what is often referred to as genius loci, a term often used by the 20thCentury artist Paul Nash to describe the essence of his work, and what the author Merlin Coverley describes as “an eternal landscape underpinning our own”[viii]. Although unable to describe my emotions in such a manner as a child, for my adolescent self, both The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath evoked the genius loci of Alderley and the surrounding landscape, both books being firmly rooted in the mythology and landscape of eastern Cheshire. As Neil Philips puts it, “The importance of place to these two books cannot be over emphasised. Alderley is not simply the setting: it shapes the stories.[ix]” Or as Garner himself states in the notes to The Moon of Gomrath, “every thing and place mentioned (…) does exist, although I have juggled with one or two local names.[x]”
Holy Well, Alderley
More than this the landscape of the stories is embodied with its own sentience, a consciousness that drives the narrative. Take for example the following passage from The Weirdstone:
“They all looked. A mile away, above the crossroads on Monk’s Heath, a grassy hill stood out above the land. It was like a smaller Shuttlingslow – or a tumulus. It had the tumulus’s air of mystery; it was subtly different from the surrounding country; it knew more than the fields in which it had its roots.[xi]”
The union of myth and landscape was to become the defining characteristic of Alan Garner’s writing, and in subsequent works, such as The Owl Service, which won for Garner the Carnegie Medal and later Red Shift, the relationship between landscape and mythology, and the psychological effect of these twin forces upon the lives of the characters who inhabit the stories, became increasingly complex, possessing an emotional maturity, which drew into question the idea of Garner as being ‘merely’ a children’s author. Always seeing the past as a key to the interpretation of the present, Garner employed the juxtaposition of myth and landscape to make a dissection of contemporary society, as Neil Philips states, “Garner is one of the most able of the writers who have sought (…) to explore the disjointed and troubled psychological and emotional landscape of the twentieth century through the symbolism of myth and folklore: myth is used as a diagnostic tool in the examination of contemporary ills.”[xii] As already indicated, for my younger self these concepts were if anything, subconscious, leaving only an emotional response to what I encountered both in the pages of the books and on the hills above Cheshire. But the very power of this emotional response, its hypnotic appeal, cannot be overstated.
Saddle Bole, Alderley
[i]With the wonders of the internet I discover that the school did indeed exist and was in fact an ‘Approved School’ for boys aged between thirteen and fifteen and under the control of Manchester City Council, which makes perfect sense. The school closed in 1986 and is now a Health Spa. Thus the gentrification of North Cheshire marches on.
[ii]Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, William Collins Sons & Company Ltd 1960, pg99.
[vi]Sir John Rhys, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx(Clarendon Press, 1901) pg.660 as referenced by Jim Perrin, Snowdon, The Story of a Mountain, Gomer Press Ltd, 2012.
[vii]Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales, Book II, Chapter 8, translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books, 1978.
[viii]Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, London 2010.
[ix]Neil Philip, A Fine Anger, a critical introduction to the work of Alan Garner, William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1981, pg13.
[x]Alan Garner, The Moon of Gomrath, Harper Collins Ltd, 1963, pg187.
[xi]Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Op. cit. pg219.
