Saint Patrick's Chapel, Heysham

What links the patron saint of Ireland to the pioneers of heavy metal?

The answer is the village of Heysham in Lancashire, and specifically St Patrick's Chapel, which stands on a headland by St Peter's Church. Heysham village is a small, and rather scenic, part of Heysham town. Looking around it seems that you don't have to be an artist to live there, but it certainly helps. Next door to the south is a nuclear power station and ferry to the Isle of Man, and to the north are the endless sands of Morecambe Bay. Across the sea the mountains of the Lake District are usually looming out of the clouds. 

The church itself is older than the Doomsday Book. There's the remains of a high cross, a stone depicting Lazarus, or maybe Jesus, rising from the grave and, best of all, a wonder Viking Hogback Stone. This is a grave marker decorated with stories from Norse mythology and was outside before being brought in for safety. These are a North of England thing, although there is one in Ireland, and may be the Vikings learning to do art like the Anglo-Saxons. Unfortunately, the church is usually locked, so most people only get to see it through the window.

The chapel is round the back, perched on the crumbling headland. It supposedly marks the place where Patrick returned from Ireland after spending six years a slave there. Paddy had supposedly been kidnapped by pirates from his home, although some scholars have speculated he was simply dodging the rather onerous public service on the town council.  

There's no other evidence that this was where Paddy landed here. In his own account he landed in a  'wilderness' and had to walk 28 days to civilisation, growing faint from hunger, which doesn't say much for the welcome he received. However, he must have come ashore somewhere, and nowhere else has a serious claim. 

The chapel itself is in ruins now, but there is enough left to see what it would have been like. It's interesting enough and an important part of the history of Christianity in England. Interestingly, they found a pagan burial in its grounds when the archaeologists last had a poke around. However, what's really interesting is the unique rock cuts graves nearby; six to the west and two to the east. In the year 2000 Sanctuary Records released an 'unofficial' Best of Black Sabbath and put a moody black and white picture of the western graves on the sleeve. 

The graves are orientated east to west, which suggests they are Christian. When in use the probably had stone lids, and they have sockets by their head, which probably held crosses. Although some are roughly person shaped, they are too small to hold a whole adult. The suggestion is that they held the preserved bones of particularly venerated individuals or saints.  

So, who would be the most venerated saint that they could have got their hands on? Well, the answer is obvious, Saint Patrick himself. The Irish will tell you he died in Downpatrick, on 17 March 461CE. However, they admit he had been living in England for a number of years before then and claim he took ship across the sea because he wanted to peg out in the Emerald Isle, which seems a little far-fetched. It's rather more believable that he died at home in England, and the idea that his bones eventually made their way to the spot where the sacred spot where he had first returned to England.

Hollinshead Hall Holy Well

Location: Tockholes, Lancashire

Hollinshead Hall today lies almost totally in ruins, a relic of a less equitable time. The one building that remains is the Well House, where water pours into two stone troughs out of the mouth of a stone lion. Why does this one building survive?

Well, you can't have a liminal place without a bit of mystery, can you?

The West Pennine Moors are a wild, and windswept, part of the Pennines near Manchester. Their natural beauty is possibly not as dramatic as the Yorkshire Dales to the north, and the Peak District to the south, although they are wild enough in places, but they make up for it with their human story, especially the mysteries.

Take Tockholes, for example, a small village near Blackburn. Something grisly happened here in the Civil War, but what exactly is a mystery. Less mysterious, and also less bloody, was the conflict over the construction of the M65 motorway through Stanworth valley. They lost, but nearby Darwen Tower commemorates a victory by an earlier generation of eco-warriors over access to the moor.

Then there is Hollinshead Hall.

The hall stands in woodland on the edge of the edge of the moors. The obvious reason for it being called 'Hollinshead Hall', would be that it was the home of Hollinshead family. However whilst the Hollinshead family did ev.entually end up living there, the hall was more than 400 years old by this stage, so the name clearly came form somewhere else.

One theory is that it is a corruption of 'holy head', derived from the Anglo-Saxon name for a spring-fed holy well. This is certainly what the locals call it today: Holy Well.

The hall itself has not been lived in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and has pretty much ceased to exist apart from its foundations, with the stone half-inched by the local villagers. However the Well House survives, and indeed looks pretty spruce and well cared for.

Records of a belief that the water had healing properties goes back to at least 1877, although the finding in the 1970s of a hoard of medieval coins, possibly an offering, suggests the place has been venerated for a lot longer. I guess don't just let your local healing well fall into ruin, though by what mechanism this building was saved whilst the rest crumbled I do not know.

There are a number of ghost stories associated with well although most, like the account of the traveller who spent the night in the well house and was accosted by a series of spectral entities, are so poorly documented to be almost worthless. In says past when the car park was open I spent the night here in the back of a transit van, and nothing happened to me.

In the even more distant past the Well House was also open to the public, and so I have drunk from it. I wasn't cured, but then I wasn't ill. Today though you can only look at the water through the barred windows. Someone will have a key, but I don't know who.

The absence of any real facts about the Well House, and the demise of the hall that gave it some context, leaves us with a true liminal place, one where the imagination takes over where reality ends. The moors, the trees and water coming from the lion's mouth are all real enough, but meaning, purpose and truth can only be found in the realm of the imagination.

Holy Well, Hollinshead Hall, Tockholes, Lancashire. The Northern Antiquarian

Hollinshead Hall Holy Well by John Crawshaw

Savernake Forest

Location: Marlborough, Wiltshire

Liminal places, by definition, are edges. It therefore follows that Savernake Forest should be disallowed as here, in the grandest of English woodlands, you don't just stand at a threshold, you plunge yourself into a different world.

It is said, quite correctly no doubt, that there was a time when a squirrel could travel the length and breadth of the country without touching the ground. in Savernake Forest you can imagine what that world would have been like.

Or you almost can, as walking in Savernake you realise how limited we humans are being unable to fly, or even climb particularly well. In a great forest like this there seems to be at least two worlds; one of the ground and the undergrowth which we experience, and another in the canopy overhead that we don't. We are like creature who live on the bottom of the ocean, and who never get to see the waves.

But whilst you may imagine that being in a big forest, like being at the bottom of the ocean, is to be lost in a place with no landmarks, in Savernake that is not the case. With a simple map it is easy to find your way about. Even without a map it is always possible to at least know where you're been, as the paths, the clearing, the density of the trees, the undergrowth, or lack of it, and above all the mighty individual trees, all provide a memorable landmarks.

And of course it is the trees that make the forest. There are mighty oaks a-plenty. Seven are names in on the OS map, which is a fairly mythic number of oaks, but there are far more with personal monikers: Big Belly Oak, Saddle Oak (One and Two), Cathedral Oak, Bumble Oak, Queen Oak, New Queen Oak, Spider Oak, Amity Oak and King of Limbs. The latter is worth finding, not only because Radiohead named an album out of it, for also because it sits in a quieter part of the forest and so, with it's huge, but lazily reclined limbs, it stands out as a destination in its own right. At least two of those trees are over a thousand years old. There is nowhere else in Europe with this many great trees.

But it's not just about oaks. There are the avenues of magnificent beech trees, as well as the weird and wonderful specimens in the arboretum, which range from a monkey puzzle tree to a mighty redwood.

As you might imagine, a place like this has acquired a fair amount of myth and legend. The nearby town of Marlborough supposedly gets it's name because Merlin was buried there, but that is surely just a medieval mistake. Ghostly horses are supposedly heard on the Grand Avenue, some with headless riders, and a large black dog is claimed to stalk the grounds of the nearby hotel.

But the truth is Savernake Forest does not need these embellishments. If you want to make the forest a true liminal area all you need to do is visit, not on a summer's day, but on a winter night, preferably when the moon is full, and the stars illuminate the forest floor through the bare branches of the trees. Add the barking of the red deer and the mating cry of a vixen, and you have as wonderful a place of mystery and terror as you could ever wish for.

Lud Church

Location: Gradbach, Staffordshire

If there is a place in England that is crying out for a decent mythology to be attached to it, it is this magical place.

Hidden away in the Staffordshire moorlands, you don't spot this place until you turn off the footpath and descend into it. If you did not know it was there you would walk straight past, and not realise you had just missed one of the wonders of the Peak District.

What you find, when you do explore, is a great fissure in the rock, about the length of a football pitch, and magnificently green with moss and ferns. The sheer sides are sixty feet high, and only a few feet apart. It is like exploring the underworld.

As I have said repeatedly on this blog, our ancient ancestors walked the same lands as we do. Indeed, it is the only thing we can say for sure that we have in common with them. They must have seen this wonder too. We can only wonder ourselves what they thought of it.

If they thought of the earth is a goddess, then there is only really one part if her body this can be.

However the only clue to what went on her is the name - Lud's Church - which suggests a connection with a male deity. Lud is a character who turns up a few times in British mythology, and we will meet him again in the Peak District when we get to Lose Hill. He is usually connected with Lugh, the Irish god of light who fought alongside Nuada against the Fir Bolg (see Cockersand Moss Temple), although in this case there may be a less prosaic explanation: a Walter de Ludank, or Lud-Auk, who was a local Lollard.

The Lollards were fourteenth century 'pre-Protestants', protesting against the corruption of the Catholic Church. There was a lot of Lollard activity in this area, so this much might be true. However the story of the daughter of a local Lollard being buried her after a tragic death is probably just myth. Equally mythical are connections with Robin Hood and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

No, this place needs better legends than those, and here's why. Firstly, there's the face in the rock. Can you see it above? Some people call him the Red Knight, but that is probably a very recent name.

Secondly, and this fact really doesn't seem to be very well known, even amongst people who make a habit of visiting these sorts of places, the chasm is aligned so that the sun shines directly into it at midday on the Summer Solstice. I've been there myself and can verify this is true. How many days either side of the longest day this is works for I cannot say, but given how narrow the place is, not many. This fact alone surely puts this on the A-list of spiritual places in England?

So here we have one somewhere that is very special, is there no legend at all we can hang on it? Well, yes there is. And, as befits an A-list liminal place like Lud Church, it's a A-list legend.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the preserved stories we have of King Arthur and his Round Table companions. It was a story that interested, and inspired, Tolkien. A story of the brave Sir Gawain (Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail - if that doesn't spoil the ambiance) who beheads the mysterious Green Knight one Christmas at Camelot, and has to go and meet the chap again a year later to have the favour returned at the mysterious Green Chapel.

Pagans get very excited about the story because, although the faith and piety of Gawain is mentioned at every opportunity, the knight goes off on his adventure with a pentagram on his shield. On his way from Camelot - which appears to be Caerleon in this story - he passes through the 'Wilderness of Wirral', where he fights trolls under bridges and other such perils. Parts of it are still like that. Eventually he arrives at the castle, of the red-faced Sir Bertilac, who tells him the Green Chapel is nearby.

Could it be Lud Church?

Possibly. The name certainly fits this church of nature. The landscape the noble knight passes through on the way also sounds right: "Mist hugged the moor, melted on the mountains, Each hill had a hat, a huge cloak of mist". The entrance to the Chapel though is "Nothing but an old cave, Or a crevice in an old crag." 

There is other evidence to suggest we are in the right neck-of-the-woods, so to speak. Who wrote the poem is not known, but the chief suspect lived in nearby Cheshire. The date of the work we are a bit more certain of, the fourteenth century, which mean he may have been writing it whilst the Lollards were lolling in Lud Church, which raises interesting questions.

In the end Gawain doesn't lose his head. Thanks to his honesty the Green Knight spares him, and turns out to be the alter-ego of Sir Bertilac.

Being both red and green Sir Bertilac sounds like he should be an environmentalist, but perhaps we shouldn't put too much of a modern interpretation on the story. This is not a place for modern stories.

Worm Stones

Location: Glossop, Derbyshire

Many of the liminal places in this blog aren't just on the edge in the imagination, they also occupy a place somewhere between certainty and speculation about the past.

Every square metre of Britain was, of course, once pagan, and mystics of old would have looked at every natural wonder, and given most them a place in their shared mythology. Very occasionally we have an historical record of sorts. More often we have nothing at all. Sometimes, though, we have a clue.

The Worm Stones stand on Shaw Moor, clearly visible from the A624 as you leave the market town of Glossop, heading towards Hayfield. They stand on the edge of open access land. To their east is Chunal Moor, and then the high plateau of Kinder Scout. To their west is the Greater Manchester urban conglomeration. Depending on your point of view, they either stand guard over the town, or hold back the urban jungle threatening the Peak District.

For most ramblers they are, at most, a place for a rest and a sandwich. There is a, now very hard to
find, footpath that leads to the shooting cabin that can be seen to the north, or you can carry on to the trig point called Harry Hut, then turn left to climb Kinder, passing on the way the wreck of a Liberator bomber. This crashed during World War Two, and is one of the better preserved wrecks in the area. Although both crewmen were injured, they lived to tell the tale, which was unusual.

This was once the land of the pagan Brigantes, before the Romans came, and then after they left the home of the Anglo-Saxon Pecsaetan tribe, who were equally pagan, in a different way. They have left us little but their name, which means peaklanders. Glossop also got its name from the Anglo-Saxons. It was originally Glott's Hop. Glott must have been somebody in his time, which was probably the seventh century, and his Hop was his valley.

We don't know how old the name Worm Stones is. However, there is reason to think that it too might be Anglo-Saxon. In the language of their mythology a drake was a flying dragon, like Smaug in The Hobbit,  but a dragon without wings that crawled was a wyrm. A better translation would be 'great serpent', and wyrms are clearly related to the beasts of Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Biblical stories.

Visit this place with that in mind, and it is not long before the eroded limestone brings forth a face and other features. These rocks on which the occasional weary walker rests is bottom soon become a sleeping dragon, a secret guardian of this wild places.

Tread carefully, and respectfully.

Cockersand Moss Temple

Location: Cockerham, Lancashire

Cockersand Abbey is the remains of a twelth century Christian priory, located between Blackpool and Lancaster on the Lancashire coast. All that remains today, apart from a few fragmens of wall, is the octagonal chapter house, and only because the it was used as a mauseleum by the local landed gentry. It stands on the edge of concrete sea defences, with a view of Heysham nuclear power station. Nearby a coastguard station stands empty and derelict. Perhaps not the most liminal place you can imagine, but there is more here than meets the eye.

In 1718 two Roman statuettes were found nearby. They have since been 'lost' - which we can read as stolen - but the inscritions of them have been recorded. These state that the figures were dedicated to Mars Donotus and Mars Nodontis. Now we are all familiar with the pantheon of Roman gods Mars, Jupiter etc. But when you get a god with a double barrelled name, like these, it usually means that the Romans have grafted on to a local deity the name of the god they think he or she most resembles. An example is Sulis Minerva, the goddess of the baths in Bath.

Donotus and Nodontis are probably the same chap. A local spelling, or a mispelling, of the Celtic god Nodens, who has a well preserved temple in Lydney Park, Gloucester-shire. Nodens, who also appears as one of the good guys in H P Lovecraft's mythos, appears to be the British version of the Irish god Nuada, who appears in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, otherwise known as the Book of Invasions, as the man with the silver hand to helps the good people of the Tuatha De Danaan defeat the Fir Bolg, but dies in the final battle.

So thanks to the Romans we know name of one of the local Celtic gods of this area. The odds are that there was a tmeple round here then. We don't know where abouts exactly, but in the past the marsh would have been a lot marshier, and as neither Pagans nor Christians like getting their feet wet when they worship, both the abbey and temple were probably built in about the same place. 

When visiting Cockersand Moss then you need a bit of an imagination.

Ignore the sea wall, the nuclear power station, the nearby farm with its huge slurry tank, and even the crumbling stones of the abbey, and think your way back to Britain before the Romans arrived, when all that would have been her was the wind, the sea, the marsh, and whatever simple temple was built here.

If you do so, then you can perhaps get close to how it may have been, two thousand years ago, when our ancestors visited this desolate, and probably dangerous, marsh to worship the warrior god with the silver arm.

References

http://roman-britain.co.uk/places/cockersand_moss.htm

The Roman Inscriptions of Britain by R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright (Oxford 1965)

Nuada The High King by Jim Fitzpatrick

Lindow Moss

Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire

If you want to know what a liminal place was for the ancient Celtic people of this land, look no further than Lindow Moss, in Cheshire.

Located next to the well-healed commuter town of Wilmslow, where the 1% of Greater Manchester live, not a lot of the original moss is left.

However if you visit Lindow Common, on the outskirts of the town, preferably in the early morning, when the dog walkers are thinner on the ground, and ideally when a mist still hangs over the waters of the mere, you get some idea of what it was like here two thousand years ago. Seeing your reflection in the black water, the Otherworld of Celtic myth, a place of light and shadow, joy and terror, that lurks just beneath or below our world, can seem very real.

Most of the rest of the moss has now been drained, allowing the peat that has built up over the centuries to be dig up and used as an extremely unsustainable form of compost. In 1984 it was peat cutters who found the person who makes this area famous: Lindow Man, or, as the locals called him, Pete Marsh.

What they actually found first was the head of a woman. The police used the discovery to prompt a Mr Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in 1960, but it turned out the body was much more interesting, being nearly 2000 years old.

The next year the even better preserved body of Lindow Man was found. A healthy young man, who had done no hard labour prior to his death, he was naked and died either by strangulation by a  leather cord, a blow to the head, drowning, or possibly all three. He also had traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids. His 'triple death' mirrors that recorded in Celtic myth, and coupled with the liminal place in which he was found, suggests human sacrifice. We can't be sure, and don't know if he was genuinely posh, or just given a year or so of living like king in exchange for being given a ritual death.

Radio carbon dating places his death in approximately the first century AD, right about the time that the Romans were conquering this part of the known world. Could Lindow Man have been an offering to the Gods, asking them to turn back the seemingly unstoppable legions with their suspiciously straight roads?

When I first came to this area it was also to stop something. As anyone who visits the place will immediately notice, we are right next to Manchester airport here. In 1997 protesters were occupying land nearby to stop the construction of a second runway, living in primitive camps. I, like the notorious human mole Swampy, was busy digging myself into the clay soil, with the aim of making it more difficult for us to be evicted, and hoping I would not be sacrificing myself in the process.

In the end we were all removed by the forces of law and order, and just before the construction crews
moved in, archaeologists were allowed to explore the area. Underneath our camp they found the remains of a bronze age village.

Did the people of this village know Pete Marsh, I wonder? And if so, what did they do when they
realised their magic had not worked? Did they continue to visit this liminal place, and to worship the old gods, or did their faith come to an end?

I still visit the moss, and I still believe that we will one day rediscover the value of nature. On one day in April 2010 my faith was rewarded. An Icelandic volcano had grounded flights, and I walked across the moss to an airport that was as silent as the woods I passed through.

So this is a very special liminal place for me, one that links this world to the Otherworld, the present to the Celtic past and my life as it is now to the more carefree days of my youth.

Incidentally, ignore the grid reference for the location of the find given on Wikipedia, in the guide book and the various press releases. The actual spot is just off Moor Lane. Peat cutting has now finished here, so nobody knows if there are more bodies waiting to be discovered, including the unfortunately Mrs Reyn-Bardt?