The Wansdyke & District Forums

RevdMargaretA

<t>It is a sound instinct, Edmund. The church court records of that period are thick with it, presentments for "witchcraft and sorcery," most of it spite and a bad harvest, but a few that ended at the rope. A community that got wind of a coming visitation might well have melted away before it landed...

RevdMargaretA

<t>Crossroads were where suicides and the unbaptised were buried, outside consecrated ground, so the folklore clings to them thick. A grey lady at a crossroads is very nearly its own genre. Which is not to say your chap saw nothing. Only that he saw it through a very old lens that was waiting there ...

RevdMargaretA

<t>The vanishing passenger is one of the oldest road-stories in the world, Gary, and every county has its stretch. The A4 was the great coaching road, and a road that old gathers them. The classic shape, which yours has a piece of, is the traveller who asks to be taken home to a place the driver can...

RevdMargaretA

<t>It was going somewhere, Gary; the somewhere is what has gone. A holloway that ends in an empty field is very often the road to a place that is no longer there, a farm, a hamlet, a mill, a chapel. The lane outlasts what it led to, because a deep holloway takes centuries to wear and longer to fill....

RevdMargaretA

Holding you both in my thoughts, Anne, in whatever way you find welcome. Hospitals are wretched for the waiting. Be as kind to yourself as you are being to Roy.

RevdMargaretA

<t>It is one of the most consistent kinds of apparition there is, and the detail your neighbour gives, visible only from the knees up, is the one that persuades me he is not embroidering, because it is the detail people who invent these stories do not think to include. It is reported wherever an old...

RevdMargaretA

I shall lower the tone and admit to a detective novel, the sort where nothing very bad really happens and the vicar is a comfort rather than a suspect. After forty years of the real thing I cannot be doing with grim. Nan, if you find the quince cheese method I should be glad of it too.

RevdMargaretA

<t>You can if there was a church there once, Brenda, and there very likely was. A Park name often marks an emparked village, one cleared so a landowner could have his deer or his view. The people were moved, sometimes to a new model village at the gates, sometimes simply turned off. Your Tuckers wil...

RevdMargaretA

Welcome Brenda, the registers and I are old friends, do ask.

RevdMargaretA

Thank you Janet, I think we shall. A list of the holy field-names of the hundred, before they go the way of the chapels themselves. I shall start a notebook. It is the sort of work that matters precisely because no one is paid to do it.

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