The Ghost Lake, page 14
I know several women walkers, solo walkers like me, who go out on the Wolds and the moors and explore ruins and deserted medieval villages and hidden waterfalls. And we all know that inherent in our solo female walking is a danger to our personal safety. My friend was sexually harassed at a well-known beauty spot. A man masturbated openly, directing himself towards her. He exposed himself in an act made to make her feel frightened, uncomfortable, intimidated. She didn’t have phone signal and had to do what we, as women, often have to do – ignore it, and hope for the best while walking away, knowing full well that we are vulnerable. She refuses to be cowed by the experience and I’m glad, but so angry for her, for us, for our vulnerability, for the fact that women cannot even access this space, that to be a woman and exist in a public space, even a semi-wild space, is to be in the arena of men.
In a 2021 article in the architectural journal The Developer, Dr Ammar Azzouz and Professor Pippa Catterall wrote about the difficulties of creating safe spaces for minority groups because ‘most public spaces are male spaces’. The article continues, ‘It is men that do the looking in such spaces and whose voices carry and dominate their soundscapes, while marginalised groups tend to seek invisibility within these spaces or avoid them altogether.’ The article stayed with me because it rang true. How does this apply to the experience of being a woman in a rural environment? There is nothing architectural here, but I might draw parallels to the way that land management is dominated by white, middle-class males. And because the lens through which we view that environment – through nature writing, through television, through journalism – is predominantly a white, middle-class, male experience, it perhaps automatically creates the impression that these environments are for men first and foremost. At this point in my Folkton Wold pilgrimage, I am certainly feeling that sense of not belonging. Even if my perception of the events unfolding before me is wrong, even if this man is completely innocently going about his job, or he doesn’t understand in any way that he might be causing me to feel intimidated, my perception of the situation hasn’t simply arrived from nowhere. It has arrived through my experience as a woman who has lived her life in rural and semi-rural areas. Once, walking down a local lane with my elderly dog, a man in an enormous four-by-four slewed round the corner and nearly knocked me and my dog down. I was so frightened and unnerved that I shouted at him as he drove away. Minutes later he returned and drove repeatedly up and down the lane, at speed, forcing me onto the verge with my old dog. It was terrifying and yet I wasn’t sure whether to report it to the police. I questioned whether anyone would take me seriously, whether my perception was skewed. So many men do not live these experiences and seem to have the opinion that most men are harmless and that women are misinterpreting their lived experiences.
Standing here, in front of the plough blades, waiting to see what happens next, I feel exhausted by it, by the hypervigilance, by the necessity to know what might occur, even if it probably won’t. Eventually the farmer drives away and resumes ploughing and I continue on, making sure that every now and again I check behind me. I feel I might be giving farmers or farm workers rough treatment here. I should add that I know plenty of farmers, men and women, who are welcoming and lovely and interested in the stewardship of their land, especially if there is a public footpath running through it and especially if there is an interesting history, a tumulus, a long barrow, a cairn on the land.
I stop just before I reach the place I’m heading and take a video on my phone. I’m trying to capture the peacefulness. I am facing the Neolithic burial site, where a little child was buried with the Folkton Drums. I think of what it must have been like to be alive during the Neolithic period, when the people of this place were beginning to farm, were beginning to make their mark, were moving through the landscape feeling a sense of ownership, and how this was being explored through the ritual grave goods and the building of henge structures, the stone temples made to align with the solstices.
The sound of the tractor dies away. I think, deliberately, about the child in the grave. When we buried my daughter, we put items into her grave. We were not leaving gifts to be taken into the next life, we were still caught in a need to care for her – that instinct was all-consuming. We left a photo of us and the dog, a letter, a toy cat. In the Neolithic grave: a bone pin, the Folkton Drums.
There are so many theories about the drums and their purpose. Some people believe they were used as a tool for building stone circles and henge sites. The theory is that they are measuring devices, that each drum circumference was a specific measurement and that by winding string around the drums a person could create symmetrical spaces using that measurement. Other people believe they were purely decorative. Some people think they were toys. To me, they look like teaching aids, or a kind of seasonal clock. The winter on one side, the summer on the other, the days narrowing to a point in the cross of the year. It seems to me that the cycles of the seasons move round the drum, a continuous turning. Why three drums in one grave? Why the graduating size? Perhaps they represented different seasons, perhaps they represented different events.
Fifteen miles away, in the village of Burton Agnes, another chalk ‘drum’ from another child burial was found in 2015. Whereas the Folkton Drums were three ‘drums’ in a single child burial, aligned along the child’s back – the largest behind the child’s head, the smallest behind the child’s pelvis – the Burton Agnes drum was a single ‘drum’ in the grave of three children. It was placed behind the head of the oldest, largest child. In front of this child, two other little bairns faced each other holding hands, the older child embracing them.
In a strange thread of the web that is my life, Burton Agnes is a few fields west from the industrial estate where I worked on a production line in a cake factory, the place where I first realized I could live independently from an entirely unsuitable man with whom I lived in Bridlington. And many years ago, when my dad drove buses, he would take day trippers to Burton Agnes Hall and tell them stories of the screaming skull, a head bricked into one of the walls there. Once again, I am reminded that this landscape is a mycorrhizal network of memory to me, that my life is embedded in place, my memories too.
The Burton Agnes drum has a design that is similar to the Folkton Drums, but with differences in artwork. It has similar diamonds and shading on the one side, but on the other an extraordinary swathe of concentric circles like a Van Gogh night sky. Found with a bone pin and a chalk ball, this discovery allowed for the drums to be dated, and thus allowed a better idea of the age of the Folkton Drums, which had previously been difficult to date. I was lucky enough to see all the drums together at the British Museum on my trip down to the ‘World of Stonehenge’ exhibition, and my breath was taken away. The condition of the Burton Agnes drum is pristine. When I saw them in the quiet reverence of the softly lit exhibition, I felt a strange sense of pride, as if I had anything at all to do with their making, their finding, but perhaps this is about that link again, the mycorrhizal network, the fungal spores of belonging and identity. These beautiful, important things came from my homeland and are a part of me and my story too.
I was moved by the art, the markings on the drums. In some places the design was rough, uneven, not quite as symmetrical as the carver might have liked it, in some places it was perfect. There was something so human about it, about the compulsion to create, capture, express.
This sort of art is similar to other Neolithic art around the UK, from the furthest islands of Scotland, to the furthest south our little island stretches. At some point in the Neolithic period, there seems to have been a surge of visual art, and at the same time an increase in grave goods, houses, structures. In the chain of expression, the drums themselves have inspired contemporary artists to create. Like Rose Ferraby, archaeologist and visual artist, who was commissioned to create art for the British Museum. One of her linocuts, my own personal favourite, depicts a landscape influenced by the patterns on the Folkton Drums. The star on top of one of the drums is depicted shining brightly above a pod-like grave, and inside the grave a child is foetal, a sleeping skeleton. Rose’s artwork accompanies a poem by Michael Rosen. The poem is about grave goods and features the Folkton Drums. I find this tribute particularly moving, knowing Michael himself suffered the death of his son. I wonder where the connection point is in this case – death, loss, art. It feels like the ripples on those concentric circles are pulling us towards each other, art influencing art influencing art. I like that I too am attached here, and I feel a genuine sense of belonging when I think about this network of expression.
Looking around the field, there is nothing to see of the Folkton burial mound. It has long ago been removed or ploughed out. It is marked on older maps. It is simply a slope of the landscape, even the wound of itself healed. But being here feels special anyway. I am taken back to the day I buried my daughter. A day of soft breeze and blossoms. I imagine the little bairn in the ground with the drums at their back. And a family like mine at this grave, as my family stood at my daughter’s grave, and then afterwards the people who would build the mound around it, building it carefully with permanence in mind. We only know them through what they left behind: a mound that used to be visible to anyone travelling this way, three mysterious chalk objects. We cannot know the people at all. We cannot even imagine the people who were here. But I can imagine the mother’s pain. That pain is unchanged because it is a wild pain, a pain born from instinct.
As I turn towards the path home, something catches my eye in the exposed roots of a hawthorn. It is a fossil, hard chalk, about the size of a fifty-pence piece. It has concentric ridges, a part of a mollusc perhaps. It is much less defined than some of the fossils I own. When I run my thumb over the surface it feels gritty, the ridges are almost striped a sandy brown. This then, another link, the shallow sea that this place was before any humans walked here. It reminds me of the star shapes on the Burton Agnes drum, the concentric circles like light glowing from a central point. I pick up the fossil and put it in my pocket. It shall sit on my desk as I write. Another pilgrim badge to mark my journey.
The Yorkshire Wolds Way and the Centenary Way, both very popular walking routes, stalk off from here and I turn and follow one back up and out of the valley, passing two older women walkers on the way. We chat about the landscape. They ask where I have walked from. I’m local, I say, I came from down in the valley. I’ve come to see the place where the Folkton Drums were found. I point it out to them, tell them to see it in the British Museum. They’ve come from Staxton Wold, and they tell me about the paths they’ve walked that day and how they keep telling their friends to come and walk the Yorkshire Wolds Way, how beautiful it is, but that people don’t know it very well, people don’t seem to have heard of it as much as other walking routes. They’re not from round here, and they can’t stay for long. They must make the next stop on the Wolds Way before nightfall, and I don’t want to hold them up.
I emerge onto the road and move down the slope towards Folkton village. I am back in the land of hedges and birdsong, and it feels like emerging from an entirely different type of landscape. I’m on my way back down again, back to the village, back to my car, and back and back to a hot shower, the light in my office. My husband returns and we visit the old pub, eat, drink and, later, a glass of wine, a shared remembrance of the time we held our daughter, a million years ago and no time at all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eastfield
It is mid-May and all around are the bright yellow fields of oilseed rape. The village lanes are thick with plants. Each square foot of verge is crowded with green. Cow parsley, bluebells, campions, garlic mustard, cleavers sticking to everything, a feast for my elderly dog who slow walks and stops often to sniff and eat. The trees are now in leaf, even the beech, even the oak, even the ash, all delicately presenting themselves to the heat of the sun.
So far, this year has been wet. The greening up of the landscape has occurred almost overnight after a few particularly heavy days of rain. When the rain stops, it is like a magic trick: sweeping aside like a curtain to reveal that, where just a couple of days ago there was muddy grass and bare branches, there is now green, green, green.
On the day the swifts return it is the first day this year that I’ve left the house without a jacket. I am back in my happy place – T-shirt, shorts, walking sandals, dog, road, the endless adventure of seeing nature developing, cycling through life stages. Already I pass head-height hedges and hear baby birds being fed within, already the orange tip butterflies, small whites, peacocks too are drifting and spinning and the swifts, oh, the joy of their return. A familiar screech in the sky above the village then the sudden stream of them overhead. To everyone I meet I say, The swifts are back, and we share the excitement.
Today’s pilgrimage is a strange one. I want to return to my secondary school and then I want to follow the path of my life, my trail away from the lake site, looking for myself in the cafés and holiday flats and hotels where I learned how to work, how to change myself to be what an employer wanted me to be. How sometimes that was impossible. This, I think, is a pilgrimage of forgiveness and acceptance. First, I want to confront the utter misery of school, return to the school gates and wave at the forlorn ghost of myself, show her where we are now. But before I can do any of that, I need to drive out to see my mum.
I have the windows down and am driving a circuit around the lake site, revelling in the quiet time before the tourist season starts and the roads become near impossible to get through, the towns impossible to park in, walk in, visit, exist in.
I have always enjoyed the idea of people as guests here, that we might share this glorious place, in the same way I feel myself a guest in London, experiencing the museums, the bars, the restaurants, the history. But sometimes it’s wearing. In the local ‘moan’ group on social media, someone, a local, has the audacity to be cross at the number of camper vans parked on the road along the cliff tops. The returning anger from tourists in the group who feel a connection to this place is palpable. We pay your wages. If it wasn’t for us your town would be nothing. And it’s true, to a certain extent. Tourism is the trade of the towns on the coast here. But the towns here are not a theme park. These are living, working places, often with complex fishing and agricultural industries and other non-tourism-related trade.
When I get to my mum’s house, she is a bit stressed. She’s heading out on holiday in a few days with her sisters. I can’t tell how much of this is holiday stress and how much of this is grief stress. It’s not even a year since my dad died and every new experience brings an element of guilt, for leaving the home, for leaving without him, for leaving and putting herself first, for even having fun without him. Guilty for smiling, guilt and a terrible sadness about the things he is missing. She is at the stage of grief when there is a breaking away, as if he is still being carried along with her, but she is now having new experiences, ones that don’t involve him. It hurts me to watch her struggle with this stage of grief, the letting go stage.
I’m looking after her chickens while she’s gone. We’ve talked recently of scaling down the smallholding, losing some of the enormous veg patch, getting rid of the chickens. It might be too soon yet, but it’s good to have the ideas floating about. We agree that we should keep options open. I want her to be happy. I know Dad would want her not to be in a state of worry, but grief is glacial, it moves slowly through a life, reshaping it, grinding the edges off it. It is a slow, slow process. They worked so hard for this place, not just to have a life full of adventures, but to own their own land, to live where no one could come and remove them on a whim.
After I leave my mum, I find myself navigating the lakeside again. I am travelling the ancient trade routes: first to York, then inland to Hunmanby and Filey on the coast, then crossing the land bridge from south to north, then up and eastwards towards Scarborough.
I park up and enjoy a walk through the decaying Victorian grandeur of Scarborough town, revisiting some old haunts. First the holiday flats down the road that my dad once owned, then the hotel where I was employed at fourteen as a kitchen hand, then on to the seafront where I’d worked as a waitress for the shortest amount of time ever. Then up into town to sit in my favourite café, a place that used to be a trading shop selling coffee and tea and all things domestic when Scarborough was in its heyday as a spa town.
People forget, though, that before the rich folk discovered the healing benefits of what mid-seventeenth-century people called the ‘spaw’, the town had a thriving fishing industry. The people who lived and worked here did so at the edge of the land, bringing fish in to salt and trade. Filey, too, was a fishing town, and up the road Hunmanby was an important place of trade. These are Viking landed towns, or some of them are, at least. It’s all a bit murky, history wise, but that doesn’t stop people from celebrating their ‘Viking ancestry’. Flamborough, just a little way up the coast and known for its white chalk cliffs and its smugglers’ coves, takes the Viking heritage quite seriously with a New Year’s Eve fire march, everyone dressed up as Vikings.
The café I am sitting in is just around the corner from The Grand Hotel, which sits on the site of the holiday cottages where Anne Brontë died in 1849. Her grave is a ten-minute walk away at St Mary’s Church. It’s nice to sit and watch the people go by. I enjoy that sense of familiarity, though I’m not here as often as I used to be, preferring the small-town quaintness of Filey. At one time I came here to work, and later I lived here, in a tiny Victorian terrace, the front door opening directly onto the street.
