Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  § According to the Reverend Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1756–9), Bertoline (also known as Bettelin and, most commonly, Bertram) was the favourite disciple of Guthlac at Crowland Abbey – the romantic Fenland ruin close to where I grew up, and which John Clare and L. P. Hartley wrote about.

  ¶ Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll was his pseudonym) lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He developed the Alphabet Cipher – one of a number he invented – in 1868, three years after the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  ** Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Red Shift’s director John Mackenzie would, shortly afterwards, helm the seminal London Docklands crime thriller The Long Good Friday. Mackenzie also directed an extended 1977 public information film in the tradition of Lonely Water whose body count approaches that of his best-known work. Apaches highlights agricultural dangers to unwary children – a warning to the farm-curious.

  †† Over a decade at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, a woman originally from my own south Lincolnshire, Lady Charlotte Guest, brought together and published for the first time the entirety of the tales in their native language (she had married a Welsh husband, the Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil), and introduced them to a wider audience by translating them into English.

  ‡‡ The pattern is thought to be by the influential designer Christopher Dresser (1834–1904).

  §§ Another Stone of Gronw does still stand nearby along the Dovey – a near-replica that was made for the 1969 ITV television adaptation. Unfortunately I did not have time to search for it during my visit.

  ¶¶ The presence of Gillian Hills, the twenty-four-year-old actress who played Alison, probably adds to this. At fifteen she’d starred in the lead role of the cult Soho-set film Beat Girl, going on to have a stint as a French pop star before appearing in a notorious naked scene with Jane Birkin in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

  Chapter 11

  TROUBLE OF THE ROCKS

  Time passed lazily after my mother’s death.

  It was just Chris and me, the population of the house halved. Four months disappeared in a numb haze of exams before my A-levels were over, then off to begin university in September. My brother got a job as a trainee reporter on the local newspaper, a fledgling John Gordon. Not much sticks out to me now from that time of only the two of us, apart from one incident. Towards the end of my first term, I arrived back on a Friday evening for the weekend, knowing Chris was himself away and hadn’t been home since he set off for his girlfriend’s in Yorkshire that morning. As soon as I unlocked the front door I could hear loud music upstairs; I recognised the song, it was a track titled ‘Babes in the Wood’ off the Irish folk musician Mary Black’s album of the same name. I was more than a little disturbed, my immediate thought being that we’d been burgled, although there was no sign of anything out of kilter when I switched on the hall light. I made lots of noise, waiting at the foot of the stairs and shouting up warnings; had someone emerged I’m not sure what my plan was, but nobody did. After that I went around the house, opening every door and checking no one was hiding under a bed or in a wardrobe. My brother’s CD was still playing when I entered the room from which the sound emanated – our old playroom, as we called it.

  I was shaken, knowing that Chris wouldn’t have left the stereo blaring away when he’d gone from the house after breakfast – and knowing there was no autoplay feature engaged that would have made the album repeat in a continuous loop. (When I told Chris later, he was adamant he hadn’t had any music on that morning, which I believe.) The track wasn’t the first on the disc, but the fourth, and though I rationalised the whole thing as being the result of a freakish power surge that happened to occur approximately twelve minutes before my arrival (and which solely affected the CD player), at the time I definitely harboured suspicions that some weird agency was involved. A small part of me half-wondered whether it was an enigmatic spirit message from my mother – I always came to associate the incident with her, and never with Dad: the ‘Babes in the Wood’ theme was suitably allegorical, but the more I considered it the more ridiculous that seemed. Setting aside my lack of belief in any kind of afterlife, it just wasn’t a song that would have had any relevance to her (Chris bought the album after she had died), and I couldn’t decode any Pheneas-esque meaning in what she’d possibly be attempting to say in such a cryptic fashion. Still, it was an odd occurrence – and it’s understandable that I found it unnerving: I was eighteen and returning alone to an empty family home recently stripped of its two most longstanding inhabitants.*

  By the autumn of 1994, Chris had completed his various bouts of treatment and was on the mend, so we went down together to the tip of Cornwall. It was a destination I’d come to with him five years before during October half-term, when I was in the fifth form. On that initial visit we were meant to be visiting the Isles of Scilly – an outcrop, some say, of the lost Arthurian land of Lyonesse – but gales around the Land’s End peninsula marooned us on the mainland for several days. As a keen new birder this wasn’t such an imposition: I got to watch my first firecrests – indescribably beautiful, miniature stripe-headed migrants that fed in the sycamores and thin elms of the sheltered seaward valleys – and a delicate, rare wader from North America that I’d never before seen, a lesser yellowlegs.† We returned to the area twice the following year, and again later on sporadic long day trips or weekends from Chris’s house in Dorset. In this way, the Far West – a contrasting mix of wild coastal moorland and granite tors that almost rival Dartmoor, rough-walled fields that have stood unchanged since the Iron Age, verdant valleys where giant Gunnera plants overhang streams like it’s the Cretaceous period, and high cliffs that guard sandy smugglers’ coves – became one of my favourite parts of the country.

  At the time of our 1994 trip I was in the grip of a fad for ancient sites and monuments, fuelled by a copy of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain, a gazetteer of standing stones and timeworn earthworks. The birding was quiet – not unusual on the Land’s End peninsula, where there are seldom large numbers of autumn migrants, though interesting rarities from both America and Asia can be found when weather conditions align. However, the quietness of the valleys did allow us to visit a site in my book I was particularly taken with: Mên-an-Tol.

  Today, I drive a mile or two inland from the wild north coast at Morvah, stopping off at Lanyon Quoit, an impressive table-like Neolithic structure – probably the remains of a burial chamber, though it could feature as some sacrificial faery altar out of one of Arthur Machen’s stories. From the lay-by on the minor road where I leave my car I walk along a high-banked track bordered by autumn-browned bracken. It’s a bright afternoon, but typically for this final Atlantic-jutting vestige of England, the weather is changeable and has already caught me out with a sharp shower; it may do again as storm clouds are hurrying across the sky. I pass a huddle of granite walls – a farm cottage in earlier days, I suppose, now being used to store hay – and on the horizon recognise the outline of a defunct tin mine’s engine-house rising from the heather, its asymmetrically placed chimney giving it the characteristic silhouette of this landscape.

  The area’s copper- and tin-mining history can be better seen a few miles to the west around the clifftops of Levant and Botallack, now preserved by the National Trust and forming part of a World Heritage Site.‡ Terrifyingly, to me at least, the workings extended for more than a mile underneath the sea, reaching down to a depth of 350 fathoms (historically, mines used fathoms as a unit of measurement). The miners, however, had more to worry about than the weight of all that pressing water and the threat of tunnel collapses, given the shocking life expectancy that resulted from the caustic dust in their lungs, or the arsenic that was a by-product of the mining process. If you did somehow survive to middle age and beyond, then the longer-term effects of breathing in radon were another risk – when I take a tour of the remains of the Levant Mine and its beam engine (major exca
vations at the site began in 1820), the knowledgeable guide is obsessed with the radioactive gas, going off on a long and sad tangent about its effect on pet dogs and cats in local houses. He also tells us about the ghostly ‘knockers’ – spirits that signalled through their tapping where rich lodes could be located – before leading us along a narrow tunnel carved through the cliffs till we come to a metal grille that straddles an endless black space: the shaft in which thirty-one miners died in a devastating 1919 accident. Peering down into the darkness it’s like the pit below the mansion in The House on the Borderland, a sombre spot in no way improved by my fear of heights.

  It’s good to emerge into the freshness of the cliffside air again, and as I poke around the remains of the mine’s old office – beautiful, decorated tiles still adorn a roofless remnant of floor, fully exposed to the wind and the rain – I hear a familiar metallic pinging sound somewhere above me before I pick up the broad-winged, tumbling form of two medium-sized birds that alight on the top of the closest chimney stack. They are choughs: red-billed, cliff-dwelling crows that are the rarest British member of their family and a traditional symbol of Cornwall, appearing on the county’s coat of arms. Yet this seeming esteem did little to preserve their status. The widespread removal of grazing clifftop livestock (choughs feed on invertebrates in the soil with their thin, curved beaks, so require a cropped sward) sparked their precipitous decline throughout the nineteenth century. The last successful nesting in Cornwall was in 1947, though an aged, non-breeding pair was resident near Newquay up until 1967, when one of them died; its mate clung on, alone, for another six years. So, when I first came here with Chris, there were none of these charismatic corvids to enliven the day. Cornish choughs were barely more than a memory – like Dolly Pentreath, the eighteenth-century Mousehole woman popularly regarded as the last fluent speaker of the county’s dead language.§

  Back on the Neolithic moorland, I climb a stile and am into a short-cropped area of turf in the middle of which stands the holed circular stone of Mên-an-Tol. It’s smaller than I remember – around three feet in height – flanked either side by two upright, round-topped slabs of granite that, originally, were arranged in a triangle. (I’m sure the distinctive stone and its two outliers appears in the top right-hand corner of Paul Nash’s surreal, and rather phallic, 1938 painting Nocturnal Landscape.) There’s no traffic noise, no man-made sounds, only the mumbling of the wind overlaid with the thin, overhead seeps of passing meadow pipits.

  Dorothy Pentreath, a Cornish-speaking fish seller, line engraving by R. Scaddan. Wellcome Collection. CC BY

  Virtually every field in this edge-of-the-world tip of England seems to contain some sort of noteworthy ancient stone, but this one is for me the most extraordinary. When I came here with Chris, having read in Mysterious Britain about how crawling through the hole was said to cure various ailments, I made him pass himself through, then followed myself for good luck. It can’t hurt, I said, and I think I might just have believed – at least a little – the possibility that the stones possessed a magic that would keep Chris’s illness at bay, even though we undertook the whole thing ostensibly as a joke. My book talked about ‘powerful currents passing through the earth’ that could conceivably be focused onto such sites. Elsewhere, according to the testimony of a Mrs Jane Tregurtha from Newlyn in W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s 1911 The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, a benign pixy (or Cornish ‘pisky’) is responsible for the site’s health-giving properties:

  At the Men-an-Tol there is supposed to be a guardian fairy or pixy who can make miraculous cures. And my mother knew of an actual case in which a changeling was put through the stone in order to get the real child back. It seems that evil pixies changed children, and that the pixy at the Men-an-Tol being good, could, in opposition, undo their work.

  I decide to crawl through again now, something that, nearly a quarter of a century on, is not so easy to accomplish – at least with any kind of dignity. Fortunately no one else is around (except perhaps the pisky), though a Dutch couple turn up as I’m leaving; I’m relieved they didn’t arrive a few minutes sooner to witness my ungainly scramble.

  After that initial traverse, Chris was given a clean bill of health – at least, until the end of 1996: the odd patches on his lungs that previously had showed up on his check-up X-rays and been dismissed as ‘fatty deposits’ were now deemed malignant. In a flourish he underwent pioneering stem-cell treatment in Bournemouth – a few days after getting married – that offered him a final hope.

  It was a success.

  My brother’s shadows had been seen off – something confirmed each subsequent year when he returned to see his specialist, and matter-of-factly told me weeks or months later (if he even remembered to at all) that he was in the clear.

  The pisky had come good.

  A short drive from the doughnut-shaped stone, tucked back from the rugged northern coast, is Zennor. Alphabetically the last of England, this charming collection of cottages sits in a kind of dip, clustered around the Tinners Arms and the partly Norman church of Saint Senara. Like Orford in Suffolk, it has its own legend of a strange visitor from the sea – though in its case a mermaid, rather than merman – celebrated on a carved fifteenth-century bench inside the solid, grey-stoned place of worship.

  This is a harsh, ancient country, full of such stories and superstitions. Walter de la Mare, on his first visit to Cornwall, felt its strange power, writing later that he didn’t feel safe until he’d crossed back over the Tamar into Devon. A similar sentiment was expressed by the painter and sculptor Sven Berlin, who vividly describes this wild meeting of land and sea at the start of The Dark Monarch, his libellous 1962 memoir-cum-novel about the nearby St Ives artists’ community:¶

  Everywhere there was a brooding Presence over the hills, like Saul, emanating desolation, loneliness and destruction: the Dark Monarch who wrecked men’s lives, smashed their ships on the rocks and cut off terror stricken fingers to snatch at the jewels of eternal life.

  D. H. Lawrence had come to Zennor too, in February 1916, with his German wife Frieda, who happened to be the cousin of the ‘Red Baron’ – not a popular relative to possess in wartime Britain; they lived initially at the inn before moving outside the village to a house at Higher Tregerthen. Lawrence hoped to found an idealised writing commune called ‘Rananim’ and had persuaded the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her future husband to occupy the neighbouring cottage; the pair lasted only six weeks before the landscape’s bleak dampness and Lawrence’s angry intensity became too much for them. In October 1917 the Lawrences themselves left, but not voluntarily: anti-German feeling was running high and accusations of spying were being whispered, though the intimacy of Lawrence’s relationship with a Zennor farmer, William Henry Hocking, didn’t help to endear him to the locals. Following a search of their property a military order was drawn up under the Defence of the Realm Act ordering the couple out of the county at short notice – events that are depicted in Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo.

  Two decades on, rumours of occultism swirled around the area following the puzzling death, in May 1938, of Rupert Brooke’s Cambridge lover, Ka Cox (by this point married and known as Katherine Arnold-Forster), who lived with her politician and artist husband in a house on the hillside above the village. It was an incident in which, at least in the popular imagination, no less than the ‘wickedest man in the world’, Aleister Crowley, later became implicated – despite being in London at the time. He did come to Cornwall briefly during 1938 – the Lamorna-based artist Ithell Colquhoun’s odd, compelling book about West Cornwall, The Living Stones, has a chapter devoted to the 62-year-old’s eleven-day August visit, when he stayed at the Lobster Pot in Mousehole. And even if he didn’t have the opportunity to partake in any of the black masses or orgies that it’s rumoured he was involved in on that sortie to the south-west, then it’s to be hoped that he at least got to enjoy the salty air and the county’s
famed light.

  Lamorna, with its trout stream, lush tree-lined valley and picturesque cove, has its own special magic – and the clarity of that Cornish light played a big part in attracting the artists who followed in the brushstrokes of the pioneering Samuel John Birch – ‘Lamorna’ Birch – who settled here in 1892. In the early years of the twentieth century over a hundred professional painters, sculptors and potters, as well as a smattering of writers, lived in the secluded valley a few miles south-west of the artists’ colony at Newlyn and the nearest sizeable town of Penzance. I can see the appeal: turning off the winding B-road, the narrow route runs beside the stream down to my left, with large sycamores forming a dense canopy above. This Arcadia carries on for almost a mile before the Atlantic emerges dramatically before me – along with the daylight. A comfortingly thick sea-wall offers protection to the cove’s right flank, while opposite are giant scree slopes of oversized boulders left behind by former quarrying operations. On both sides the cliffs crowd in, and now and again a peregrine powers between them. The tide is high, lapping just below the car park, and a whirling flock of black-headed gulls in their winter plumage are hovering over and swimming on the sea’s surface in a frenzy of feeding; I pick out two Mediterranean gulls, distinguishable by their clean white wingtips and thicker, blood-red bills. Later, I walk east along the coast path to Mousehole, passing through the silent shadows of the clifftop nature reserve of Kemyel Crease, where towering Monterey pines rise from the steep slopes like I’m on the cusp of some undiscovered Shangri-la.