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?

Introduction: Through the Doors

 ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite' 

William Blake

A liminal place is a threshold between the mundane and the , somewhere where you can be 'between the world's'. It is a place of the gods or the spirits, what the Romans called the numinous, a word that Tolkien would later use and adapt.

In 1972, the year after the first Glastonbury Festival, Janet and Colin Bords produced a book called Mysterious Britain. It was a guide to Britain listing a smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects: ley lines, UFOs, which were so popular at that time that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land, as well as stone circles and holy wells, ghosts, 'pagan' folk customs and King Arthur.

The book was part of the 're-enchantment of Britain', a second era of romanticism, when hippies and flower children, fed on the vibes emanating out from San Francisco, sought Avalon in England's green and pleasant land. In doing so they linked up with the Celtic revival movement, and the rebirth of paganism in the British Isles.

The publication of similar books persists to this day, and it seems I own most of them. As a result I have now been to enough of these otherworldly spaces to write my own blog. So here are the places that have moved me most. Whether it is their history or their beauty, their use by pagans old or new, their importance to Celtic culture or counter-cultures, what they have in common is that they are places for retreat or spiritual contemplation.

Visit them yourself, please, but follow these rules: be reverent both to the genius loci of the place, travel wisely, litter not, and leave only your footprints behind you.