The Wansdyke & District Forums

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>Oh Sam. Write that down today, exactly as she says it, and get her voice on your phone if you possibly can. That is a transference charm, the sickness sent out of the body and into a stone or a tree, and yours has a turn of phrase I have never once met. "Asking before it goes with her" is the who...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>Push it all you like Bran, that is exactly the layer I am after. The smuggling dates it, eighteenth century, excisemen and all. The raking of the moon is far older and we will never date it. Both true at once, which is how the best of these work. Thank you all. The Crammer it is for the record, w...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>The one tale every soul in this county half knows, and I should like to gather the proper local version before it gets flattened into the tourist board's. The Moonrakers. Smugglers, the story goes, had sunk their brandy kegs in a pond to hide them from the excisemen, and went back of a moonlit ni...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>And for a splash of colour for the project, Jordan: the old story is that the Devil dug Wansdyke in a single night, which is what country people always said of anything too big to have been made by ordinary men. The same is said of the Devils Dyke and a dozen others up and down the land. It tells...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>Trevor is right that we have no drowned village, but the story is older and stranger than the reservoirs, Dave, do not dismiss it too fast. Long before anyone dammed a valley, people told of bells ringing under water, under lakes and meres and out under the sea: the bells of churches swallowed fo...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>There IS an old druid-ghost tradition at Avebury, Dave, to be fair to you; the robed figure among the stones at dawn or dusk goes back well before Bran and his friends. But here is the lovely thing, and Bran will forgive me for it: nobody can ever tell the difference. A robed figure standing sile...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>All true, Trevor, and yet. The fashion for cutting them in the 1700s did not come from nowhere. People cut new horses because the chalk wanted a horse on it, because there was Uffington up the way being scoured every seven years by the whole community in a great fair, time out of mind. The Georgi...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>You are not the first sensible man to lower his voice there, Trevor, nor the first to leave a coin and tell himself it was only in fun. That is how these things keep themselves: we half believe them even as we explain them away, and the half is enough. The smith does not need our faith. He only n...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>One of my favourites, and just up the Ridgeway from us. Wayland's Smithy is the long barrow on the old road, and the legend is older than the English: leave your horse tethered there overnight with a silver coin on the capstone, and in the morning the horse will be shod and the coin gone. Wayland...

Aldbourne_Annie

<t>Your uncle was keeping an old courtesy, Bill, and he was wise not to explain it; the not-explaining is part of the keeping. The mad March hares are the does fending off the bucks, science will tell you, and science is right, and it is also not the whole of it. A thing can be a doe fending off a b...

The Wansdyke & District Forums

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The Moonrakers - everybody's tale, but whose is it really?

Wayland's Smithy - leave your horse and a coin