New Talk for 2021

 

The Folklore of Underground London went very well: over 1000 bookings and 600 viewers (it is normally around two thirds of bookers who actually show up, live or online, it would appear). Some interesting questions in the Q&A afterwards.

Secret Tunnels of England has now sold out and I must consider whether to reprint as a paperback in 2021.

There will be another online talk in February 2021 for the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea's Fantasy February. The Folklore of London will be a more general overview of some of the unusual customs and ceremonies, pub lore and folkloric characters of our capital city.

The colour photograph above is from The Lions Part who enact a number of theatrical ceremonies around London during the year. 

Bookings for the talk can be made via Eventbrite here. There have already been around 100 bookings and it was only advertised yesterday evening. 

The Ludham Dragon

While I ponder whether to republish Secret Tunnels of England, here's an extract about an unusual event in Norfolk (pp.68-69).


The Norfolk village of Ludham was said at one time to have been terrified by a fearsome winged dragon, twelve to fifteen feet in length, which appeared every night, forcing the residents to stay indoors between the hours of sunset and sunrise. For its lair, the dragon excavated a series of tunnels beneath the heart of the village: from the corner of St Catherine's churchyard they passed under the high street and local inn. At dawn, after the monster retired to its subterranean home, the villagers desperately tried to fill the entrance with rocks and rubble, only to see the creature burst forth once more each evening.

On a particularly sunny day the dragon unexpectedly emerged from the tunnels to bask in the warm sunshine in the centre of the village. Seizing the opportunity, one brave man laboriously rolled a huge boulder into the entrance to the dragon's tunnels, sealing them shut. Returning to its lair, the dragon found the obstruction impossible to dislodge. Furiously lashing its tail, the enraged beast flew towards the Bishop's Palace (now the site of Ludham Hall) and along the causeway to the ruined Abbey of St Benet, where it passed under the great archway and vanished in the vaults beneath, never to be seen again. The dragon's tunnels were later filled in.

This legend, recounted in a manuscript in the Norfolk Record Office, is undated, but may have been based on an actual event. The Norfolk Chronicle for 28 September 1782 contains the following brief report:

'On Monday the 16th inst. a snake of an enormous size was destroyed at Ludham, in this county, by Jasper Andrews, of that place. It measured five feet eight inches long and was almost three feet in circumference, and had a very long snout; what is remarkable, there were two excrescences on the fore part of the head which very much resembled horns. This creature seldom made its appearance in the daytime, but kept concealed in subterranean retreats several of which have been discovered in the town ... The skin of the above surprising reptile is now in the possession of Mr J Garrett, a wealthy farmer in the neighbourhood.'

A few years ago I was passing through the village and took some photographs see above. The King's Arms pub, St Catherine's church and a local information panel with the story of the dragon.

Bricked Up Borley

Browsing through the Reader's Digest guide to British folklore I found the following story regarding  Chilbolton (near Stockbridge) Rectory in Hampshire:

'Chilbolton is said to be haunted by a nun. The window where her apparition most often appeared was bricked up to discourage her but, a few years ago, her ghost was again seen by two guests at the rectory. One said that he had seen a beautiful nurse gazing out of a window; the other awoke in the night and saw a nurse standing by his bed. The rector confirmed that there was no such person in the house on either occasion. In 1393 a nun named Katherine Faukener ran away from the nearby Benedictine Abbey of St Cross at Wherwell. On her return seven years later, she is believed to have been walled up alive on the site of the rectory which was then a nunnery.'
Reader's Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) p.174. See also Wendy Boase The Folklore of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (1976) p.78.

This story once more brought to mind Borley Rectory, with it's bricked up ground floor window and peeping nun. The window can be seen in the photograph at the top of this post. Here is Harry Price's rather repetitive description from The Most Haunted House in England (1940 pp.17-18):

'speaking of windows, the first thing a visitor notices when he enters the carriage drive from the road is a large bricked-up window to the left of the entrance porch ... The disfigurement quite spoils the appearance of this side of the house and one immediately wonders why it should have been done ... I began to make enquiries and from three different sources learned that the window was bricked up because the spectral 'nun' ... habitually peered into the room from the drive thus annoying the Rev Henry Bull, who had the window removed and the aperture bricked in.

Pursuing my enquiries I then heard that the window was not blocked up because of the too inquisitive 'nun', but because people passing along the road could see the Bull family having their meals. Candidly, I do not believe that this was the reason at all, because (a) very few people use the road past the rectory, and fewer must have used it at the time when the window was removed; (b) the carriage drive is so wide ... that it must have been a sheer impossibility to see through the window from the road, as I have proved to myself by trying to peer through the other windows on the side of the house; (c) the hedge and belt of trees separating the drive from the road form an impenetrable screen that would discourage anyone trying to peer in at the window, even if the drive were not so wide. In any case a light curtain or blind would have prevented any person from seeing what was going on in the room. That is, any normal person. But it might have been thought that such a screen would not prevent an entity such as the 'nun' from peering into the room. Whatever the reason, a drastic remedy was decided upon, and the window was strongly and permanently bricked up, as it remains today, completely spoiling this side of the house. The illumination of the room by day is obtained only from the bay window overlooking the lawn.'

The Haunting of Borley Rectory, A Critical Survey of the Evidence by Dingwall, Goldney & Hall (1956) pp.25-26 is characteristically more critical:

'In The Most Haunted House in England Price discusses the mystery of the bricked-up dining room window at the rectory which, it is suggested, was blocked by the Rev. Henry Bull (and therefore prior to 1892) to prevent the nun peering through the window from the drive. No testimony is available other than the mute evidence of the window itself, or if it is, none is offered by Price. The rectory was built rather close to the road and was separated from it by the narrow drive only and there would probably have been some lack of privacy if this window had not been bricked up.

The room was adequately lighted by another large window facing the lawn and had indeed the same amount of natural light from this one window as the drawing room, which was identically illuminated. The other principal rooms on the ground floor, the drawing room and the library, had complete privacy from passers-by (facing on to the lawn as they did) and the bricking-up of the small dining-room window merely made this room uniform with the other two in this respect.

Indeed Price admitted in MHH (p.18) that when pursuing his enquiries in Borley he was told that the window was bricked up "because people passing along the road could see the Bull family having their meals"; but adds that he does "not believe that this was the reason at all." It is curious that he does not disclose that this explanation was made by Mr Walter Bull who, as a son of Henry Bull, was presumably entitled to speak with some authority.'

So, was the window bricked up because a ghostly nun persisted in peering through it, or because it was close to a road where curious passers-by might spy the inhabitants eating and relaxing?

As with many ghost stories, no dates are provided for the Chilbolton haunting, but the resemblance to  Borley is noteworthy - does it predate Borley or does it originate from the popularity and influence of Price's book? Are there a number of similar tales of ghostly bricked-up windows around Britain that post-date the Window Tax (1696-1851)?

Another coincidental aspect of bricking-up concerns the unfortunate nun. Legend at Borley tells of a novice from the nunnery at Bures - 7 miles south of Borley on the River Stour (there is no evidence for the nunnery) - attempting to elope with a lay brother from the monastery on the site of the Rectory (no archaeological or written evidence has ever been discovered for this claim). Their escape in an anachronistic coach was thwarted and she was captured and returned to her nunnery to be bricked up alive as her cruel punishment - the monk was hanged. It may be her ghost that haunted Borley and was seen on the 'Nun's Walk' - see The Borley Rectory Companion (2009) 'The Phantom Nun' pp.230-233.

Bricking up of nuns was a motif (often anti-Catholic) in popular literature such as Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion (1808) and one also recalls Poe's tale The Cask of Amontillado (1846) in which the Italian nobleman Fortunato is immured in the wine cellar of the narrator Montresor for some unspecified insult (for more see here).

A well-researched online essay by Rene Collar that deals with immurement, especially in the work of H Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon's Mines and She - who incidentally lived in St Leonards; the house - North Lodge - is still there, with a plaque) 'They Walled Up Nuns, Didn't They?' can be found here. It references a book called Walled Up Nuns & Nuns Walled In by W Lancelot Holland, see here.

This would appear to be another example of Harry Price's entertaining but speculative use of local legend and folklore to bolster his arguments for the haunting of Borley Rectory.

2020 Talks

Three talks have been confirmed this year, with more in the pipeline.

NEW ADDITION: DECADENT LONDON at TREADWELLS BOOKSHOP
Thursday 20 February 7.30 pm: see their website for details. HERE

Thursday 27 February SECRET TUNNELS: FOLKLORE OF UNDERGROUND ENGLAND
Kensington Central Library Lecture Theatre  6.30-7.30 pm FREE. More information and book through Eventbrite here
Part of a mini Folklore Festival in which, amongst others, Christopher Josiffe should also be giving a talk.

Thursday 26 March WHISTLER: CHELSEA'S GREATEST ARTIST Chelsea Library 6.15-7.15 pm
More information and book through Eventbrite here FREE

Thursday 9 April DECADENT WESTMINSTER City of Westminster Archives Centre 10 St Anne's St, Westminster, SW1P 2DE (details to follow)  FREE

More Ghostly Activity at Museum Station

This month's Fortean Times (December 2019) features an interesting article on Egyptology, mummies and curses (the Birth of the Egyptian Gothic by Maria J Perez Cuervo). Inevitably the 'Unlucky Mummy' at the British Museum has to be included - also mentioned is the alleged secret tunnel from that institution to the closed Museum station (see previous posts on this blog).

However, another strand is added to the story: the author notes about the 'priestess of Amen-Ra' haunting the tube station: 'Its malignant influence was supposed to have caused the stations's closure: the authorities were merely trying to protect Londoners from it.' I think this is the first time that the closure of the station has been attributed to the presence of the ghost, rather than the fact that it was superfluous, given the recently-opened interchange with the Central at nearby Holborn.

By another coincidence, my recent bedtime reading has been The Platform Edge, Uncanny Tales of the Railways (British Library, 2019), bought on a visit to the excellent National Railway Museum in York. Amongst the usual mixed bag of quality such a collection offers, one finds The Last Train by Michael Vincent, an obscure author - this may be his only published short story, in The London Mystery Selection 1964.

A mere handful of pages long, it tells the tale of a tube train driver on the Central line. As it explains: 'between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road, there's a ghost station. It used to be the old Museum stop, but they closed it and blocked it up. If you watch carefully out of the window you can still see the walls and the exits and bits of the platform. All deserted and no lights.'

The shaking driver tells a workmate: 'Tonight I was on the up. Came through Holborn about half ten. I stopped normal like, and while I was waiting for the bell, I thought I saw lights ahead, A sort of glow. Well, I knew it couldn't be Tottenham Court Road, because it doesn't show from Holborn. I got the bell and started off, very slowly, even though I had the clear. Then I saw it was Museum, just like it was before the war. All lit up, and people ... lots of people on the platform waiting. Gave me a terrible shock. I just accelerated straight through with my eyes closed and pulled into Tottenham Court. I got through to the guard on the handset ... and asked him, careful like, if he'd seen anything unusual back down the line. And he said he hadn't. And that's it ...'

One night his colleague agrees to come with him on the last train and also sees the brightly lit platform with passengers in 'funny looking old fashioned clothes', but they don't tell anyone as the driver is due to retire shortly. On the next occasion the driver tells his workmate that he intends to stop at Museum to see what happens ... and he is never heard of again.

Crowleyan Folklore at Netherwood

There's a large amount of stuff that's accumulated this year for the blog that I just don't have time to write up properly. Anyway, as it's the day after Halloween I thought this piece from my current research was appropriate.

At the moment I'm looking into Aleister Crowley as a figure from English folklore, the most ubiquitous historic candidates are, I suppose, Dick Turpin, Nell Gwyn and Oliver Cromwell, about whom a wealth of folklore exists, much of which concerns various secret tunnels that they used/had constructed - that's all covered in my book 'Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact'.

What I want to look into at the moment are the connections that have been forged over the years between Crowley and various English or UK locations, some of which he may never have even visited. This was sparked by reading this week The Tregerthen Horror by Paul Newman, which I'll try to review in the next post. In a nutshell: this is an entertaining enough book that starts out fairly sensibly inquiring into an apparently 'mysterious' death in a remote Cornish cottage, but then attempts to trawl in so many murders with ostensibly 'occult' links and a cast of Bohemian and eccentric characters so vaguely connected (although many had met Crowley) that towards the end it becomes hard not to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all - we even get the Occult Nazis thrown in.

To start with let us return to Hastings and Netherwood. As I say in p.5 of that book: 'One can still occasionally read in the 'Hastings & St Leonards Observer' about "Crowley's Curse' on the town, whereby if you live here you will never be able to leave and if you do leave you will always come back eventually. It is said that throwing a stone with a hole in it into the sea will lift the curse on any Hastings resident.' What seems strange is that Crowley would curse a place where he enjoyed a reasonably comfortable time, albeit increasingly subject to illness, in the intellectually stimulating environment of Netherwood and with access to the famous Hastings Chess Club to pursue his favourite pastime.

There is plenty of information on the folklore of stones with natural holes in them, called Hag Stones, used to deter witches, often hung outside the front door of a house.  See for example here and here. Interestingly there is also Crowleyan folklore attached to the quoits of Cornwall, which I will mention in another post on the Beast in the West Country.

As far as Netherwood itself is concerned The Tregerthen Horror includes some interesting material that I hadn't come across before about the house after his death. I quote from pages 114-115 - my comments in square brackets:

'Crowley may have been dead, but his spirit hovered around Hastings and its environs. A newspaper report on his deserted room being hung with mysterious, oppressive paintings like 'totem poles' [probably The Pier, 1934, known to be in his room], the purpose of which could not be understood. After the boarding house closed [c.1969/70] Netherwood acquired a spooky reputation and lapsed into dilapidation. Packs of boys would clamber over the high barrier and explore the grounds. One youthful marauder recalled entering the Victorian ruin and creeping down to the cellar where a startling sight awaited him. Strewn around the darkness were what might be termed 'cardboard sculptures', cut-outs, man-shaped and emblematic, heavily crayoned and held together by string. They were 'relics' Crowley had used for ritual purposes. It was indefinably creepy, seeing them forlornly hung up on rusty nails and over the backs of broken chairs in that static, dust-filled silence.

'The magician had long passed on, yet his eerie, slightly childish devices lingered like vestiges of an arcane purpose beyond resurrection. [Or maybe they actually were just children's cardboard cut-out figures, or some 'artwork' by an earlier resident. There are a number of quite detailed accounts written by visitors to AC at Netherwood and while they mention the paintings there is nothing about these artefacts.]

'Thus the myth was born in Hastings, the myth of the demon Crowley who, some allege, cursed the place, sapping the willpower of its occupants and making it impossible for them to leave. Hastings became Ixion's wheel, a destiny to which one was tied in the same way that one was tied to drugs, alcohol or the dole queue. In the last two decades [the book was published in 2005] the fortunes of the town started to decline. Crime, narcotics and  powerful Goth scene [more Steampunk these days] dominated the youth culture and Crowley - a heroin addict himself - naturally featured in the myth-making. Although Netherwood was no longer standing, teenagers would point to any brooding property and identify it as the place where the beast had once lived [ a number of gloomy candidates still existed along The Ridge when I first moved to Hastings over 10 years ago, but most have since been demolished, including the Robert de Mortain pub, right next to the site of Netherwood, which was demolished and rebuilt as a small 'gated community' over the last couple of years.]

'Hence Crowley, who had planned to usher in a new aeon of light and love, became associated with the darkness of addiction, dehydration and spiritual inertia. The joyous dance of Pan was reincarnated in the wavering stagger of the junkie negotiating the chip-spattered, polystyrene-carton-clogged streets desperately seeking his ultimate fix.' [ Doesn't make you want to come here on holiday, does it?]

What I always find exasperating in books of this kind is that there are no footnotes and very few references that would enable a researcher to verify various statements and accounts - many of which are taken from novels that the author believes are actually romans a clef that can be taken as 'factual'. At least there is a bibliography, which I am currently exploring.

While working on the revised edition of Netherwood I was told that film maker and Crowley obsessive Kenneth Anger had visited Netherwood when he was in this country toward the end of the 1960s, at a time the house was still operating as a guest house - he stayed for a period with Jimmy Page in his amazing house in Kensington (before he had Robbie Williams for a neighbour). I wrote to Anger at an address I was given in Las Vegas but I never received a reply.

Legendary folk singer Shirley Collins, who grew up in Hastings, recalls (as David Tibet notes in the foreword to Netherwood and as I heard at a folk horror conference) that as a girl she was told not to enter the grounds of Netherwood as a 'black magician' lived there and she would either cross over the road when walking along that part of The Ridge or peddle past furiously on her bike.

A local band has made a record about Crowley's Curse: here

To conclude for now: at a talk I gave a few months ago in London - not on Netherwood or Crowley - an elderly woman approached me afterwards and told me that she had lived in Hastings as a young girl and teenager in the 1960s. She had visited Netherwood many times, as her boyfriend was the son of the owners. They would make love in the house when the parents were out - their favourite room for making the beast with two backs was No.13, the room in which Crowley had stayed.

2019 Talks

I think that the talk I gave at Treadwells Bookshop on Thursday went very well and as usual I met some interesting people afterwards. I signed a few books, some had even brought in copies of the first edition of Netherwood for signing. I'd like to thank everyone who came along and especially Christina and her staff at Treadwells who have been the best bookshop outlet for Netherwood.

One young man told me about a writer I have to confess I'd never heard of before called Stephen Volk. He recently wrote a book called Netherwood which features as part of a trilogy of novels about famous men and the locations they are often associated with: so we have Peter Cushing at Whitstable and Alfred Hitchcock at Leytonstone (with Aleister Crowley and Dennis Wheatley at Hastings - although I should point out that these two never met at Netherwood in 'real life').

I'll try to get hold of this book The Dark Masters Trilogy see here.

Also various interviews with the author online. In this one there are a couple of details mentioned that  make me think that the author may have read my Netherwood although he doesn't mention it by name.

Certainly the dramatic and fictional possibilities of Crowley's last three years at Netherwood are still ripe for mining - I have met a couple of lovely chaps who wrote a play about it, although I'm not sure if it's ever been staged and it crops up in A Chemical Wedding (by Julian Doyle & Bruce Dickinson, have to be honest I thought this book  wasn't very good; I haven't seen the film with Simon Callow as AC) and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Century. I'm sure there must be many others. Obviously, the novel of that name by Jane Sanderson has nothing whatever to do with the Hastings guesthouse.

One point I made in the talk was about the huge amount of misinformation on Crowley (and indeed Netherwood, often referred to as a 'cheap' 'shabby' or 'seedy' boarding house in numerous books, articles and online sources). As just one example see the first post here correcting numerous mistakes to be found in a biography of Led Zeppelin (which also includes a very favourable reference to my book in the 11th citation - thank you to the poster).

Further talks in 2019:

Thursday 31 January Folklore of Underground London Kensington Central Library 18:30-19:30 FREE  BOOK HERE

Thursday 21 February Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London 18;30-19:30 FREE
BOOK HERE

Tuesday 9 April Underground Folklore of England Kensington Central Library 18:30-19:30 FREE BOOK HERE

In July I shall probably be talking at Westminster Reference Library about Decadent London and the 1890s. TBC

As usual my books will be on sale at all these talks at discounted prices.

British Museum Station Spectre? Part 3

One morning last week I spent a couple of hours at the Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre looking through the Holborn & City Guardian newspaper for 1933 and 1935. Fortunately, the newspaper came in bound volumes, rather than on microfilm, so it was easier to scan whole pages quite quickly. I was looking for any mention of British Museum station and, in particular, any references to ghost stories - later accounts say that 'shortly' before it closed there were rumours of its being haunted by the ghost of an ancient Egyptian (see posts below). The newspaper included weekly columns devoted to 'unusual' stories and local oddities, but I found only a couple of surprisingly brief pieces that mentioned the station and both were to do with its closure when the expanded Holborn station reopened in September 1933.

I also checked from July, the month in which the film Bulldog Jack was released, up to the end of October 1935 to see if there were any news stories about mysterious disappearances of women in the borough, especially at Holborn station. I found nothing. As noted in the previous post I had already checked digital files of major newspapers and the British Library online newspaper archive, to no avail. One source claims that a newspaper had offered a reward to anyone who would spend the night in the closed station - although it is highly unlikely that the London Passenger Transport Board would have agreed to this arrangement.

However, in my searches I did find a few interesting snippets gleaned from the British Library's online newspaper archive. There were two incidents of suicide at British Museum station, in February 1930 and May 1933 (curiously, not mentioned in the Holborn & City Guardian), both males, a traditional explanation for some hauntings, but not in this instance. After the closure of the station, a young traveller had a disconcerting experience, as reported in the Lancashire Evening Post 22 Sept 1934 p.4:

'Marooned Underground in London: Burnley Student's Ordeal' by 'North Westerner'

'A Burnley young man, while a student in London, had a quite remarkable experience recently through being marooned in a disused station on the underground railway.

The incident occurred soon after the closing of the British Museum station, whereby by some mischance a tube train stopped and swing-gates at the carriage entrance opened. At that moment the Burnley student who had been ready to alight at the next stopping place stepped from the train onto a station pitched almost in inky darkness. Then he had the more horrifying feeling when he heard the gates of the carriage close and the tube train restart. By the light of matches he felt his way towards the station exit to find that it was boarded up.

Minutes that seemed hours passed and the traveller marooned in the tube had, so he said later on, the sickly feeling creeping over him when first one and then other trains swept along. Ultimately, a train stopped and the guard, having received a message about the stranded passenger, alighted to hail the young man and take him aboard.'

In what seems to have been some pre-publicity for Bulldog Jack, a number of newspapers carried reports of the filming at Gaumont-British Lime Grove Studios in Shepherds Bush. According to the Birmingham Daily Gazette 19 Dec 1934: 'They have had to construct in the Gaumont-British studio a replica of a tube station, a tube tunnel, and a tube train. And the station which has been made is one that is no longer in existence. It is the British Museum station, which has been merged with Holborn. The Hastings & St Leonards Observer 29 December 1934 also noted 'The Gaumont-British studio at Shepherd's Bush now has its own 'tube' station - dubbed 'Gaumont Station' another set represents the British Museum', while the Daily Herald 21 December 1934 added 'Shepherd's Bush studio replica of the former British Museum station has been built together with live rail and train', which must have been rather hazardous.

Addendum 07/08/18 Today my nine-year-old son showed me his copy of Horrible Histories: Loathsome London (Scholastic Children's Books, 2005) p.121 which has a cartoon of a terrified man fleeing a male in ancient Egyptian garb who says 'I haunted the British Museum station. Because your trains disturb my mummy. I'm a pharaoh way from home.'

The Haunted City Conference

I am delighted to have been asked to speak at The Haunted City: Modern Monsters and Urban Myths, a conference to be held at Conway Hall in central London on Saturday June 30.

Booking details here.

There is a fascinating array of speakers including many whose works I have cited in my own books and research. For example Mike Dash has produced excellent archival work on Spring-Heeled Jack, banishing the myths perpetrated by Peter Haining; Dr David Clarke has not only written on folklore but is the (co) author of some of the most clear-eyed books on UFOs, particularly the British experience, based on meticulous research through government files in the National Archives.  I am also interested in hearing more about Slender Man, who infiltrated the online community a few years ago.

I hope to have books for sale throughout the day.

I imagine tickets will go fast, so make sure you get one.

'Mad' Jack Fuller's Follies

To Brightling in East Sussex on Sunday to visit some follies associated with John Fuller (1757-1834), member of an ancient family of local iron-founders, known because of his eccentricities as 'Mad' Jack Fuller.  An MP and firm supporter of slavery, he also donated large sums to the Royal Institute of Great Britain, purchased Bodiam Castle when it was threatened with demolition, was a friend of the artist Turner, and had a number of unusual structures constructed in the locality which still survive and some of which can be visited.  There is a nicely-produced pamphlet written by Geoff Hutchinson available to buy in the church that tells you most of what you need to know about the man and his follies.

Twenty four years before his death he had his mausoleum built in the form of a pyramid, probably modelled on the tomb of Cestius in Rome.  It can be found in the churchyard of St Thomas a Becket in Brightling, an imposing 25 feet high and built of sandstone blocks.  Folklore says that he was eventually interred within sitting at an iron table, a full meal before him, a bottle of claret at arm's length, dressed for dinner and wearing a top hat (also of iron in some accounts).  Sadly, this was disproved some years ago: prior to removing the rotted wooden door and bricking the entrance up it was found that Fuller was buried in a recumbent position below the floor (there is now an iron grille, that enables a view of the interior).  Another story is that Fuller offered to make a gentleman for life of any man who volunteered to live in the mausoleum for one year without washing, shaving, cutting his hair or having any human contact - there were no takers.

An impressive observatory (completed 1818, now a private house) can be seen further down the road and an obelisk 65 feet high and 646 feet above sea level.  Two follies we did manage to get to were the Tower, an atmospheric structure, especially on a darkening winter's afternoon - in the middle of a small copse in dung-strewn fields close to the church.  35 feet high it can be climbed - it was damaged in the hurricane of 1987 but the previous night's hurricane (which smashed one of our windows) had no affect.  From there we went to the Sugar Loaf, a conical building 35 feet high with a base 15 feet in diameter with a door and window, which was used as a house for many years.  The story attached to it is that this strange structure was hastily thrown up to enable Fuller to win a bet made in London that he could see the tower of Dallington church from his estate.  When he realised that he was wrong he ordered the tower to be built in one night.  Photographed above in the fading light.  The afternoon was rounded off by a first visit to the lovely pub close to the Sugar Loaf at Wood's Corner The Swan Inn for a meal in the back dining room with a welcoming log fire.

Knucker Hole, Lyminster

To Lyminster in West Sussex to investigate an interesting piece of local folklore.  Knucker Hole is a deep round pool, close to the church, fed by a strong underground spring.  According to Notes & Queries (1855) such deep pools:

are called by the people thereabouts Nuckar Holes.  They are very deep, and considered bottomless, because such strong springs arise in them that they never require to be ... emptied and cleaned out.  A mystery ... attaches to them among the common people, who seem to have a vague notion of their connexion with another bottomless pit.

The Lyminster pond has been measured to a depth of thirty feet, but a local story says that village men once took the six bellropes from the church tower (a pub nearby is called The Six Bells) tied them together and still could not touch the bottom.  The word Knucker derives from the Anglo- Saxon 'nicor' or 'water-monster' (nicoras appear in Beowulf) and the Lyminster pool was said to be the home of a fearsome dragon.  For years he ravaged the surrounding area until a brave knight slew him.  A very worn medieval tombstone, believed to be that of the knight, could for centuries be found near the church porch, but more recently was moved inside to stand by the font.

Another local tale ascribes the slaying to a young villager called Jim Pulk.  The canny lad baked a huge pie, lacing it with poison, and drew it on a horse cart to the pool, where he hid behind a bush.  The dragon emerged from the water, sniffed the pie, ate it together with the horse and cart, the poison soon took its course and the dragon curled up and expired.  Having cut off the creature's head, to celebrate his victory Jim went to the Six Bells for a beer, but collapsed and died when he wiped his hand over his mouth - he'd forgotten to wash the poison off his hands; the tombstone has also been claimed as his.  Another version features a hero called Jim Puttock.  For more see Folklore of Sussex by Jacqueline Simpson (Tempus, 2002, pp.34-39).

Inevitably, there is a secret tunnel involved.  Simpson notes that: 'Some seek a rational explanation, saying, for example, that there was a nunnery in Lyminster, linked to the church by a tunnel, and that the nuns invented the story of the dragon to scare soldiers away from this tunnel at the time of the Conquest.'

Inside the church of St Mary Magdalene we were pleasantly surprised to find a stained glass window commemorating the Knucker Hole tale.  Between two angels representing sun and moon a fearsome dragon is approached by the figure of Jim Pulk bearing a much-reduced pie that would have been unlikely to finish off the monster.  The window is, however, very beautiful.  It was made by Caroline Benyon.

Unfortunately, the Hole itself - a couple of hundred yards down a wide grassy path from the church - cannot now be easily seen and sits heavily fenced off (complete with barbed wire!) and behind thick high hedges.  Only small glimpses are available through a gate.

Pictures above:  Stained glass window, tombstone and limited view of Knucker Hole through gate.

Reading for June

There are less than 10 places left on next month's Hogarth walk.

Books I've been reading this month:

Roberto Calasso   The Art of the Publisher

Guy de la Bedoyere   Roman Britain

Marc Morris   King John

Readable - if rather confusing chronologically - biography of the king whose death anniversary comes up on 18th October.

Robert Aickman   Cold Heart in Mine

Aickman's strange and unsettling tales - such as 'The Swords' in this collection - stay in the mind much longer than the vast majority of ghost stories.

John Robb   Death to Trad Rock

Skim-read after a surprisingly powerful, relentless and rocking gig by The Nightingales at The Carlisle pub in Hastings a couple of weeks ago, only temporarily halted by someone leaning on the jukebox and dislodging the plug for the mixing desk.

Brix Smith Start   The Rise, the Fall and The Rise

Fair to say that MES doesn't come out of this too well.

A. J. Lees   Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment

Very interesting autobiographical account by one of the world's leading neurologists of the influence of the writings and thought of William Burroughs on his scientific work, particularly with regard to drugs.  Could usefully be read in conjunction with Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (Sacks, of course, features here).  His thoughts on modern medicine (pp183-4): 'The NHS regarded neurology as an expensive, largely talking speciality with woolly outcomes and there was never enough funding.  Performance was now judged by waiting times, not quality of care or innovation.  Professionalism was being replaced by brainless accountability reflected in meaningless league tables... In the pretence to be more scientific, only the very latest and most immediate data was now considered trustworthy.  Painstaking, clinical, pharmacological observation in small numbers of patients was disparaged as "eminence based medicine". New was better than old, more was superior to little, and early detection of disease was essential - such truisms reflected the prevailing zeitgeist.'

Lees also mentions a piece of underground folklore (p.12) included in my Secret Tunnels of England.When he was training in anatomy at the London Hospital in the capital's East End: 'A rumour that passed from one generation of students to the next was that at the end of each term the mauled cadavers were transported on a dead body train from the hospital to Whitechapel station and then to a place of rest near the necropolis of Brick Lane.'  For more on this classic urban legend see here.

A friend managed to get me an inscribed copy, as I couldn't get to the book launch.  Notting Hill Editions were partially an influence on the book design of Accumulator Press.  It's a great book - I cannot comment on the scientific and medical information contained therein, but what I can say is that (adopts whining nasal tone) it would be highly unusual to get a train from Liverpool Lime Street and arrive at King's Cross (p. 7 and p.9) rather than Euston.

The Owl Service

Just finished watching The Owl Service on DVD - how this could have been shown on children's television seems inexplicable these days, with its very adult subject matter. I found parts of it quite disturbing and I'm still not sure if I actually understood it - no wonder Granada included a resume at the start of each installment telling you information that hadn't in fact been made clear in the previous episodes! Based on the book by once-popular author Alan Garner (I asked for it in East Sussex libraries and they don't have a single copy)it tells the story of a recurring piece of Welsh folklore and its effects on two boys and a girl in their late teens. The girl is played by Gillian Hills, a bit of a cult star, with a career in French pop and parts in A Clockwork Orange and Blow Up (now married to the manager of AC/DC apparently).

There are some amazing camera angles in the earlier episodes that make parts of it fairly avant garde and a scene at the end that prefigures The Exorcist. It's one of those productions that is supposedly 'cursed' and I was very upset to read that Michael Holden who played the Welsh boy Gywn (not a great performance but he showed promise) was beaten to death by two louts in the Rose & Crown pub, just off Piccadilly (mentioned in my Folklore of London) in an unprovoked attack in September 1977. Talking of cult early 1970s television - Found Objects (see list opposite) has a link to Penda's Fen mentioned in an earlier post (Old Weird Britain) - at last I (and you, dear reader) have a chance to see it in its entirety.

The Museum of British Folklore

Through one of the other blogs I subscribe to I've just found out about the Museum of British Folklore, set up by Simon Costin, a designer and collaborator with the late Alexander McQueen, who apparently regularly takes part in Hastings Jack-in-the-Green festival. It sounds like a worthy venture. By the usual strange coincidences he is planning an exhibition on witchcraft in Britain in the 1950s called Dark Britannica. Here's the text from their Facebook page:

"In 2011 it will be 60 years since the 1735 Witchcraft Act was repealed in Britain. To coincide with this the Museum of British Folklore is to mount an exhibition in central London, which examines a very particular time in British history. In 1951, while London hosted the forward-looking Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank, the Witchcraft Act was repealed with the enactment of the Fraudulent Mediums Act.

Dark Britannica looks at the history of Witchcraft in the UK and at the host of colorful characters who were later to take centre stage in Britain's growing interest with Witchcraft and the Occult from the 50’s onwards. It was a time of 'Witch Wars', involving court cases, dramatic newspaper exposure and quite a lot of self-publicity for some people. Out of this grew an increase in public interest and a certain amount of misinformation as well as much learned and genuine exploration of the subject of Witchcraft.

Using film footage, press reports, artifacts and archival letters, Dark Britannica seeks to celebrate those who were to be the founders of the modern Neo Pagan movement and asks, is Witchcraft the only religion that Britain has given the world?"

Another excuse for a witchcraft pic.

I should also mention the recent release by the BFI of Here's a Health to the Barley Mow, a 2 dvd compilation of British custom and folklore films which sounds absolutely fascinating. There's also an insightful piece by Philip Hoare (who wrote an interesting Decadence-related book called Salome's Last Dance) in this month's Sight and Sound which can be read here.