The Wansdyke & District Forums

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 is the smith of the gods, Weland, lamed and captive and making wonders. The Saxons knew the barrow was already ancient and gave it to their invisible smith, just as they gave Wansdyke to Woden. You do not see the smith. That is the rule. You leave your work and your payment, you walk away, you do not watch, and it is done. I have always loved that you must not look.

It is one of the great ones, Annie. And the rule about not looking is the heart of it, is it not, the same rule as in so many old stories: do not look back, do not watch the work, do not open the door before the time. The help is real but it cannot bear to be seen. I think the old people understood something we have forgotten: that some kinds of help only come if you are willing not to understand them, not to demand they show their face.

I have left a coin there myself, I confess, late one evening, more in the spirit of the thing than from any expectation. It was gone the next time I passed, though I dare say a walker pocketed it rather than a lamed god. But I will say the place earns its legend. It is the only barrow on the Ridgeway where I have felt I ought to lower my voice, and I am not a man given to that sort of feeling. The beeches around it do something to the sound.

More pictures here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland%27s_Smithy

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 needs us to keep leaving the coin, and not to look.