THE NORTH
Beeston Castle
Visible for many miles around, Beeston Castle crowns a high sandstone crag towering over the Cheshire Plain. On the very summit is the inner bailey, enclosing the famous castle well, which, at over 100m (328ft) deep, is among the deepest in any English castle. From at least the 18th century this well has been believed to conceal a great treasure. Some say it was hidden there by Royalists during the epic Civil War siege of 1644–5. But most maintain that it was concealed by Richard II in 1399, shortly before he was captured in north Wales and eventually murdered by Henry Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV. It’s valued suspiciously exactly at 100,000 marks (£66,000) in gold coins and the same amount in precious objects (including jewelled badges of Richard’s white hart emblem).
Richard may indeed have hidden valuables at Beeston during an unrecorded (but possible) visit in 1399, as he more certainly did in ‘water cisterns’ in other places around this time. But the same contemporary sources which record this also note that Bolingbroke’s agents soon recovered the hidden treasures.
Neither this fact, nor the belief that anyone who searches for it will be struck dumb or driven mad by its guardian demons, has deterred many determined efforts to find the treasure. The well was investigated in 1794, again in 1842, in 1935–6, in 1976 and more recently in 2009 using cameras. There are at least three openings off the well shaft, one a nine-metre-long tunnel apparently leading nowhere. But no treasure has yet been found, and no-one has yet been struck dumb or gone mad. That we know of.
Lindisfarne Priory
Lindisfarne Priory is among the most atmospheric of English Heritage sites, all the more so because the ‘holy island’ on which it stands can be reached only at low tide. It’s redolent of the memory of St Cuthbert, greatest of the saints of northern England. Here he reluctantly served as prior of the Anglo-Saxon monastery, before retiring to live as a hermit on still more inaccessible Inner Farne Island. There his turf-built oratory was sunk and walled so that vistas of sea or land could not disturb his contemplation of God. Buried in the priory in ad 687, his body was transferred to a new shrine 11 years later, and found to be untouched by corruption, a sure sign of sanctity. Later driven from the island by Viking raids, the monks carried the relics through many wanderings, eventually enshrining them in what became Durham Cathedral.
St Cuthbert’s life (and afterlife) inspired numerous legends, many about his relationship with animals. When he was hungry, on one occasion an eagle dropped a fish into his boat; on another his horse (which he called his comrade) miraculously found a meal for him concealed in the thatch of a cottage. (It would be impious to suggest that this was somebody’s workaday lunch.) On both occasions, he shared the meal with the provider. After he’d been praying naked in the sea – something the resolutely ascetic saints of the ‘Celtic’ tradition were much given to – two otters were seen to dry his feet with their breath and to warm him with their fur. To medieval hearers, such legends didn’t so much show that the saint was kind to animals: rather that, like St Godric of FINCHALE PRIORY and St Hugh of Lincoln, Cuthbert’s holiness was so great that all God’s creation instinctively served him.
The saint’s well-attested protection of eider ducks nevertheless chimes with modern (though totally un-medieval) principles of conservation. Still relatively common on the Northumbrian coast, and still known in local dialect as ‘Cuddy’s (Cuthbert’s) Ducks’, these striking birds shared the saint’s Farne Island retreat, even tamely nesting beside his oratory’s altar. Cuthbert decreed that they should never be killed, eaten or disturbed, posthumously backing up his prohibition by fatally striking down monks who disregarded it. They were, however, permitted to harvest the highly valued ‘eider down’ from nests after the ducks had used and abandoned them. Cushions of ‘Cuthbert down’ were among the most prized possessions of the saint’s Durham Cathedral shrine.
Sewingshields Wall
Sewingshields crag on the Whin Sill ridge, just over a mile from HOUSESTEADS ROMAN FORT, is one of the best places to view HADRIAN’S WALL. A cavern under the nearby (but now vanished) border fortress of Sewingshields Castle was one of several places in northern England where King Arthur and his knights were believed to lie sleeping. The Sewingshields version of the legend has a nice local touch. A shepherd was sitting on the castle ruins knitting – hand-knitted long stockings were produced by Border and Yorkshire Dales shepherds until well into the 20th century – when his ball of wool disappeared into an underground passage. Pursuing it, he found a vaulted chamber lit by magic fire, where the king and his retinue lay in enchanted slumber, accompanied by a pack of hounds. A sword, a garter and a horn lay on a table in their midst. Being well-versed in legend, the shepherd knew enough to use the sword to cut the garter. But when the sleepers began to rouse he took fright, sheathed the sword and failed to blow the horn. Before sinking back into unconsciousness, Arthur just had time to declaim:
O woe betide that evil day
On which this witless wight was born
Who drew the sword, the garter cut
But never blew the bugle-horn.
And, of course, the terrified shepherd either couldn’t remember or wouldn’t tell where the entrance to the passage was.
A very similar story was told about a vault under RICHMOND CASTLE in Yorkshire (where dithering ‘Potter Thompson’ failed even fully to draw the sword). There’s also a highly coloured variant version from DUNSTANBURGH CASTLE, complete with flaming-haired enchanter, two giant skeletons and a living maiden trapped in a crystal tomb. Drawn mainly from the lurid imagination of the best-selling Gothic novel writer ‘Monk’ Lewis, this doesn’t specifically identify the sleeping warriors as King Arthur’s knights. And the penalty for choosing the offered horn rather than the sword was that ‘Sir Guy the Seeker’ lost the maiden forever.
Most stories about the sleeping king and his knights agree that they are awaiting summons at the hour of England’s greatest need. So, if they really had been awakened at Sewingshields (or Richmond) by a chance-come horn blower, wouldn’t that have been somewhat premature? But this is to apply logic to folklore, something we should never do. And perhaps, after all, that is why the king and his knights have yet successfully to be woken.
Biographical Notes
Edward Carey
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator whose books include The Iremonger Trilogy: Heap House, Foulsham, and Lungdon; Observatory Mansions; and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. His artwork has been exhibited in Florence, Collodi and Milan in Italy; in Kilkenny, the Republic of Ireland; in London, UK; and Austin, USA; his essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, the Guardian, the Observer, Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, and other places. His most recent novel, Little, about the early life of Madame Tussaud, has been sold in 16 countries. A new novel, Fish House, about the two years that Geppetto, Pinocchio’s father, spent inside the whale, will be published in 2020. He is currently working on his eighth book, probably about a hospital filled with monsters.
Alison MacLeod
Alison MacLeod’s most recent book, the short story collection All the Beloved Ghosts, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2018 for best single-author short story collection in the UK and Ireland. It was also a finalist for Canada’s 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and named one of the Guardian ‘Best Books of 2017’. In 2016, MacLeod was joint winner of the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. Her most recent novel, Unexploded, was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and serialised for BBC Radio 4. It is currently optioned for film, while her short stories are often heard on BBC radio. MacLeod is a citizen of both Canada and the UK, and is currently at work on her next novel in Brighton, her adopted city.
Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth is the author of two novels, two collections of poetry and three works of non-fiction. His debut novel, The Wake (2014), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Gordon Burn Pr
ize. It is set during the almost-forgotten, decadelong war of underground resistance which spread across England after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and is written entirely in Kingsnorth’s interpretation of Old English, recreated for modern eyes and ears. He is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, a global network of writers and artists producing work for the age of ecocide. He is also founder of the Wyrd School, a peripatetic wild writing academy in the west of Ireland, where he lives.
Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall is the author of five novels and three short story collections. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Haweswater (2003) was winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, The Electric Michelangelo (2004) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Carhullan Army (2007) was winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, How To Paint A Dead Man (2009) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Portico Prize for Fiction and The Wolf Border (2015) was shortlisted for The Southbank Sky Arts Awards and the James Tate Memorial Black Prize, and winner of the Cumbria Life Culture Awards Writer of the Year prize. Her first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference (2011), won the Portico Prize for Fiction and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the lead story, ‘Mrs Fox’, of her second collection, Madame Zero (2017), won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013.
She is an honorary fellow of Aberystwyth University and the University of Cumbria, a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged a number of prestigious literary awards and is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award. She was born and raised in Cumbria and currently lives in Norwich.
Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born and brought up in the industrial town of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. In 2013 he won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and in 2017 was named Author of the Year in the Herald Scottish Culture Awards.
He is the author of three novels: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), His Bloody Project (2015) and The Accident on the a35 (2017). His Bloody Project was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year and won the Saltire Prize for Fiction and the Vrij Netherlands Thriller of the Year Award. It has been published in 22 languages and variously described as ‘astonishing’, ‘fiendishly readable’ and ‘spellbinding’. He is currently working on his fourth novel.
He is fond of black pudding, donkeys, train stations, trashy Euro-pop, mongrels and autumn.
Sarah Moss
Sarah Moss is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of six novels and a memoir of a year in Iceland: Names for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2013. Of her novels Night Waking (2011) was one of the eight winners of the Fiction Uncovered Prize, Bodies of Light (2014), Signs for Lost Children (2015) and The Tidal Zone (2016) were all shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, and her latest, Ghost Wall (2018), was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Prize. Her work is translated into 15 languages. She was born in Glasgow, grew up in Manchester and after moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik and Cornwall now lives in Coventry, where she is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.
Fiona Mozley
Fiona Mozley’s first novel, Elmet, was published in 2017 by John Murray Originals. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Dylan Thomas Prize. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize. Mozley has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Financial Times and British Vogue. She was born in East London, raised in York, and has lived in Cambridge and Buenos Aires. She now lives in Edinburgh and is completing a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her second novel will be published by John Murray in 2020.
Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and began his career as a mime. He is the author of 7 books of poetry, 11 novels, 2 collections of stories, 2 works of non-fiction, a stage play, many radio plays and broadcasts, and numerous reviews. His work has been translated into many languages and his translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2011) and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (2014) were published by Vintage Classics. In 2007 he was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award and the South Bank Show Award for the year’s best novel (Between Each Breath). Hodd (2009), a dark version of the Robin Hood legend, was shortlisted for the Sir Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2010.
Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), received the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was dramatised for BBC Radio 4. It was described by Karl Ove Knausgård, author of My Struggle, as his ‘favourite English novel’ and ‘a brilliant, very, very good and very unBritish novel … It’s magic, a magic book.’ Thorpe’s nonfiction, On Silbury Hill (2014), was chosen as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Hilary Mantel has recently written: ‘There is no contemporary I admire more than Adam Thorpe.’
ILLUSTRATIONS, INTRODUCTION AND AFTERWORD
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Clive Hicks-Jenkins is an artist renowned for his explorations of folklore and mythology. Fresh from illustrating the 2018 Faber & Faber edition of Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he was commissioned by English Heritage to create the visual styling of their interactive ‘Map of Myth, Legend & Folklore’, launched online in the spring of 2019. Working in collaboration with the Bristol-based digital agency Gravitywell, the artist produced all the artwork and animations for the map, and afterwards continued with the theme by making illustrations for a range of publications commissioned by English Heritage. The year 2019 marked the publication of three books illustrated by the artist: These Our Monsters for English Heritage, Simon Armitage’s Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, published by Design for Today, and The Book of the Red King by the American poet Marly Youmans, published by Phoenicia.
James Kidd
James Kidd is a freelance writer based in Oxford. His writing has appeared in The Independent, the Literary Review, the Observer, Esquire, the Daily Telegraph, the South China Morning Post, The National and Time Out, among others. He hosts This Writing Life podcast (thiswritinglife.co.uk), featuring interviews with writers such as Hanya Yanagihara, David Mitchell, Michel Faber and Karen Joy Fowler, and co-hosts Lit Bits (litbits.co.uk), named by the Observer as one of its top three literary podcasts. He also works for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, which looks after the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.
Charles Kightly
Charles Kightly lives in the East Riding of Yorkshire and in Radnorshire in the Welsh Marches. A professional historian, he has particular interests in the late medieval period (the period of his PhD) and the 17th century. He is currently historical editor of the English Heritage Members’ Handbook and has also written two English Heritage Red Guides. His numerous publications include Folk Heroes of Britain (1982); Country Voices: An Oral History of Rural England and Wales (1984); Customs and Ceremonies of Britain (1986) and The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore (1989). He has overseen the recreation of historical interiors in many buildings in Wales, England, Belgium and Scotland. A trustee of several charities, he has been an Anglican churchwarden for 30 years.
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