He was detectoring on a hill by the Test Valley – I don’t know which hill, he wasn’t saying, so it could have been anywhere between Michelmersh and Longparish. The Test Valley is full of archaeological finds and stories of treasure. At the top of the hill, the detectorist came across an old ruined cottage – nothing really left of it except the oblong shape of the footings, all covered in moss and lichen, and surrounded by elder bushes. It was a warm day, but when the detectorist stepped into the oblong, everything went freezing cold, and he stepped out again in alarm. As he did so, he heard the signal through the headphones, so he put the detector down and stepped back into the oblong with the spade.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ said the farmer, clutching a shotgun.
‘Sorry mate,’ said the detectorist, ‘I hope I’m not trespassing.’ Of course, he knew he was trespassing, but it’s unwise to pick an argument with a man clutching a twelve bore, and if you’re not too antagonistic then the worse that can happen is that you’re asked to leave. The farmer escorted him down the hill and warned him not to come back, but he also said a strange thing, ‘It’s not for my benefit I don’t want you digging up there; it’s for your benefit – lowlife though you may be. It’s a bad place.’
‘Does he seriously think he’ll frighten me away?’ thought the detectorist – like scaring a child with a ghost story – and yet it was a strange place. Anyway, the detectorist had to walk down the road to his white van, and drive back to Andover. The metal-detector had signalled, though – so he was going to return. He returned on a night of the full moon (which is not the best time to go creeping about the countryside) but it was also a very cloudy night.
As he walked up the hill, he felt a real foreboding, and, tough guy though he thought he was, he was tempted to head back to the van. He carried on to the top, though, and, as he approached the oblong shape of the old cottage, a black cloud drifted in front of the face of the moon and everything went pitch dark. He stepped into the stone oblong and was immediately overwhelmed by fear; it was like being crushed by one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming but you can’t wake up. He was crouched at one end of the oblong, his face contorted with terror, and there was something terrible, darker than the darkness itself, at the other end of the oblong – and it was squelching, sliding, slithering towards him.
Just then, the cloud cleared away from the moon, and everything lit up. Then there were voices, and the beams of torches, and there was the farmer with two policemen. Well, the detectorist hadn’t got anything, and he’d caused no damage, but the police knew him, and were happy to bang him up for the night in Andover police station. This, then, is nearly the end of the story.
‘There is just a bit more,’ the detectorist told me, ‘and I’ve not told anyone this before, because I know they’d take the piss – but you’re a storyteller so you might know what I’m talking about.’ And this is what he said:
I was up there, crouched in that oblong, with something bad coming at me. Well, before the cloud cleared away from the moon and the bloody boys in blue arrived, something else happened. All the fear just slipped away from me. I felt all light and happy inside, and I wasn’t on nothing! What had been dark was light: and I seemed to see right through that light into the hill. I’ll tell you what, there were people there, but they weren’t like us, they were the other people. There was music too, but I didn’t hear it with my ears, I heard it more with my mind. Time was different – what might be a hundred years in our time was just a minute in theirs. I was going to step into that light, and do you know what, if I had done so I reckon I would never have been seen again, but it was then that the farmer turned up with the boys in blue. I’m glad he did, but I still wonder what would have happened if I had stepped into the hill.
What if …?
That was the story that the detectorist told me, and I thought to myself, ‘This is a folk tale; it’s the hollow hills again, the Kingdom under the Hill.’ The Test Valley is full of fragments of treasure legend: the horse with golden shoes buried under Money Bunt Wood, near Longstock; the treasure buried in a bank of earth by the fool who thought that was what was meant by putting your money in the bank; the treasure under Wherwell Abbey, with the body of a man entombed with it … and these stories are still growing – there is now the story of the metal-detectorist on the hill.
If I could credit this man, and so properly attribute the story, I would. This is one reason why I’d like to find him again. The other reason is that he flogged me his white van, and two weeks later it seized up on the M3. I reckon he stitched me up.
Eight
THE FAR NORTH
In Derbyshire, the village of Eyam is well known for its plague story: how the plague struck the unfortunate village, and the rector organised the villagers to selflessly quarantine themselves until the plague had run its course. Most of the villagers died, but they kept the terrible infection from spreading. Hampshire has a similar story – but the horror is greater, because the humanity it shows is all too flawed, as it usually is.
CHUTE’S BROADWAY
If we go north of Andover, we come to some really wild countryside: the high, windblown border between Hampshire and Wiltshire. We also come to Chute’s Broadway. Chute’s Broadway is part of an old Roman Road, but it isn’t straight! It skirts the hill above a crescent-shaped dry valley, and, for once, the Romans allowed the road to follow the topography. Down in the valleys the whole area is a maze of country lanes, though it’s possible to spot the villages from the high downs. It is not so easy to spot Vernham Dean, however, because it sits in a hollow in the hills, and when the trees are in leaf it disappears altogether.
It was bad luck for the village to be hit by the plague; maybe someone from the pox-ridden Great Wen of London had passed through. The rector said they must all go up to Haydown Hill, up on the fresh and airy heights of the downs, by that ancient old road, Chute’s Broadway. The rector then undertook to bring food and drink up to the strange camp of traumatised villagers. The community built themselves rough huts, and waited for provisions, huddled together, as the wind blew across the high downs.
The rector fully intended to return – he was a humane man and he loved his parishioners – but his nerve failed him; the thought of those terrible buboes growing in the damp places of his body appalled him. He couldn’t bring himself to ascend that hill with food and drink, and remained, cowering, in the village, hoping he could sustain the villagers with his prayers. Up on the hill, up by the lonely sweep of Chute’s Broadway, the villagers perished of thirst, hunger, and plague. The plague had already infected the rector, though, and so he himself perished, away from his flock.
Now, should you go walking on Chute’s Broadway by the light of a full moon, you might see the rector of Vernham Dean toiling up the hill with sacks of provisions and containers of water – but, like poor Sisyphus, he can never reach the top.
The memory of plague continues to haunt Chute’s Broadway. Another story tells that a man – and maybe it was the man who brought the plague to Vernham Dean – had lost his family to the infection, and he fled into the countryside to live like wild old Merlin, or King Orpheus, torn apart with grief and pain. One night, he was sleeping in a copse, when he was awoken by music. When he peered out from between the branches, he saw, advancing along Chute’s Broadway, a whole host of shades and spectres, playing flutes and drums, and all of them swirling and whirling around a black carriage pulled by black horses. At every step of the horses, the crowd of spectres seemed to increase.
The terrified man seized a stick from his smouldering fire, but, as the multitude drew closer, the stick grew two legs, extended two arms, and the glowing end became two fiery eyes. The stick leaped from the man’s hand and started to dance around the fire. The man seized his axe and tried to swipe at it, but the axe grew long black hair and joined the stick in the dancing. As the throng passed, they joined it too.
The man realised that Mistress Plague herself
was in the carriage, and, as it proceeded down Chute’s Broadway, he saw the trees, the bushes, the owls and the foxes all transform into tall, thin spectres, and dance around the carriage. All the man could do was to thank God he was still alive, and the next morning he turned his face south, and began the long walk to Southampton and a ship to faraway Newfoundland. The shock of the plague remains strong in the folk tales, and it is little wonder. Hampshire is not so very far from London, and the fear in the county of that foul pox brewing up in the Great Wen must have been strong. There is, indeed, a story from Preston Candover, not far from Basingstoke, that a man who was fleeing London and the plague entered Preston Candover, and there succumbed to the disease. The villagers wouldn’t touch him; they shot his horse, and dragged man and horse into a pit, and buried them. His valuables went with him – and so we get another story of buried treasure!
COMBE GIBBET
Those high border-country downs do seem to attract terrible tales, and, much though I’d like to provide a ‘happily ever after’ story, the countryside thereabouts won’t oblige!
On the north-west corner of Hampshire, the Wiltshire border gives way to the Berkshire border, and if you wander along the Test Way (now a long way from the River Test), and over Inkpen Beacon into Berkshire, you will see a strange and unsettling sight – a tall double gibbet, known as Combe Gibbet.
‘Your map will tell you that you are in Berkshire, but your heart will tell [you] you’re still in Hampshire.’ I can do no better than once again quote Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, because I’ve come across no one who writes about Hampshire better than he does.
I am standing on Inkpen Beacon, a thousand feet high. And I am not in Hampshire at all, but in Berkshire. And that only goes to show how foolish are the maps. Not so very long ago Inkpen was in Hampshire. Spiritually, geologically, in every way but cartographically it is in Hampshire still: geographically, too (despite what the maps may say), for Inkpen is the natural frontier on the north. Inkpen belongs to the Hampshire downs and not to the Berkshire downs that are so different from it in every respect. And so to look on those wild hills I stand on the greatest of them. I am in Hampshire. The map lies; not I.
Now, this is the story about how a piece of Hampshire ended up in Berkshire, and it isn’t a pleasant story. Combe Gibbet isn’t the original gibbet; it has been a tradition that, as one gibbet starts to rot away, or gets struck by lightning, or – as in 1965 and 1969 – gets sawn down in protests against capital punishment, it is replaced. The original gibbet was erected in the seventeenth century.
Once upon a time, in a seventeenth-century sort of a time, there was a widow woman who lived in Combe, and a married man who lived in Inkpen. The widow woman was ample, and warm, and friendly – and a most excellent cook – and they began an affair. How the affair began I don’t know, but I know how it ended.
The man grew more and more bitter against his wife; she was far too busy with the hard graft of being the wife of a farm labourer, and with bringing up their children, to spare him much attention. One summer’s day, the adulterous couple stole up onto the downs, but these assignations had been noticed by Mad Tom of Walbury. Oh dear me; dribbling with anticipation (for Mad Tom was a peeping Tom), he followed them up the path, and crouched behind a bush. The couple set to with gusto, and Tom watched, sweating profusely. But then Tom saw someone else come up the track, and, oh dear me, it was the man’s wife. Tom’s eyes goggled at the thought of another kind of encounter. The wife saw the couple and let out a terrible cry. Oh dear God – the man leapt up and seized his wife, and pushed her face into a hornets’ nest, with the widow woman screaming and clawing at him, and trying to drag him away. But he held his poor wife till she was dead, and the widow was nearly mad with horror; then he took the body to a dew pond and threw it in. Ever since then, the pond has been known as Murderer’s Pool.
But Mad Tom was back down in the village, and he was screaming and gibbering, ‘Murder – murder – oh dear God – murder!’ and the villagers ascended the hill and found the couple, and found the body floating face-down in the dew pond.
The villagers sent to Winchester for a justice, so that a proper trial could take place. In Winchester, though, the wild hills of Combe and Inkpen were far away and useless. To the Winchester authorities, it was an area more foreign than London Town, and they weren’t interested. So the people appealed to the authorities in Berkshire, and Newbury is a lot closer to Inkpen Beacon than Winchester. So the Berkshire authorities arrived and erected a double gibbet, and hanged the man from one side and the woman from the other. This, plus the trial, put them to some expense, and so they claimed Combe and Inkpen Beacon as payment.
Now, the real reason for the boundary change (which came a lot later than the seventeenth century), may have been about roads and accessibility, but stories, as they travel through time, absorb information like sponges. This story is based in historical fact, but I haven’t, for instance, found any mention of Mad Tom in any versions of the story preceding 1949 – though I’m prepared to be put right on this. In 1948, one Alan Cooke, along with a chap called John Schlesinger, made a film called Black Legend. Schlesinger was still a university student, but he went on to become a famous director – Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man are two of his films. Black Legend was based on the Combe Gibbet story, and there was a character called Mad Tom, played by a young Robert Hardy. Black Legend was first shown in the Village Hall, Inkpen, on 10 June 1949, and if Mad Tom entered the oral tradition that evening, it only goes to show that folk tales are always developing.
There is more to the story, though. Tarred and wrapped in chains, the bodies swung back and forth as the winds blew across the wild downs. Finally, the skeletons and the chains fell to the ground in pieces. Shortly after this, a local farmer found trouble: his sheep took ill and wouldn’t feed, and began to die. He tried everything to cure them, but to no avail. One day, however, he came across pieces of the chains in Murderer’s Pool. So the chains were buried, and the rector of St Michael’s Church in Inkpen came up, and so did the rector of St Swithun’s Church in Combe. The two rectors said words over the buried chains, and the farmer’s sheep grew fat again. But St Swithun wept, and the reason he wept was human folly, carelessness and violence – not because Newbury had purloined a little piece of Hampshire from Winchester!
THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY
A mate of mine is a tarmac doctor – that is, he has a doctorate in tarmacology. He is an expert on road surfaces, and nothing pleases him more than sitting in the pub looking at moving images of the heat transference between road surfaces and vehicle tyres on his laptop. One evening, he told me that the next day he had to go back to the Devil’s Highway. I was intrigued; did he mean the M3 or the M27?
‘Motorways are the safest roads,’ he told me – no, he just meant a very minor road called Park Lane on the border between Hampshire and Berkshire. It was just that, regardless of how the road was surfaced, it always seemed to end up with potholes, and there seemed to be no logical, geological or engineering reason for this. And the men working on the road didn’t like it; they called it the Devil’s Highway. I didn’t particularly expect to hear of superstition from road workers in hi-viz jackets, but there were some very odd stories of men becoming somehow possessed and marching off down the road.
‘Possessed by what?’
‘Roman soldiers.’ Ah.
For Park Lane is near Silchester, the site of the important old Roman city of Calleva Atrebatum, where the Roman road from Londinium forked off in different directions: one to Clavsentvm (now Bitterne Manor in Southampton) and one to Durnovaria (now Dorchester). Park Lane follows the boundary between Hampshire and Berkshire, and I later discovered that the Roman highway from London to Silchester was known as the Devil’s Highway. There was a legend that travellers on the road could be seized by the spirits of those old marching Roman soldiers, and find themselves marching down the road at an unforgiving pace, looking straight ahead, unable to stop even though they we
re exhausted and their feet were bleeding; so this story was still alive. The picture of a man in a hi-viz jacket, marching down the road like a Roman soldier, seemed rather comical to me, though I’m sure it wouldn’t seem comical if you were that man.
There are, though, stories in this part of Hampshire that lose the macabre nature of those stories from the high downs, and start to become really rather silly.
ONION AND THE IMP
Once upon a time in Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum, there was a giant, and his name was Onion. He wasn’t the brightest of giants, though it has to be said that giants are not generally known for their intellectual powers. Not far away, on the border between Hampshire and Berkshire, there lived an imp, and he was irritating, as imps tend to be. His greatest pleasure in life was to tease the giant Onion by shouting rude things at him, such as ‘onion bum’ and ‘garlic brain’ and ‘shallot shanks’, and then watch the giant leap around in a helpless rage. One day, however, the imp went too far, and shouted, ‘Pickled onion brain – beetroot bum.’ The enraged giant scooped up a stone and hurled it at the imp; it landed on top of the imp and flattened him. That was the end of the imp and it serves him right. Ever since then, there has been a stone next to the Silchester Road, where Hampshire meets Berkshire, and it is called the Imp Stone. If you look at it carefully, you will see the imprints of the giant Onion’s fingers.
The rotting city of Calleva Atrebatum must have been a strange sight to Saxon eyes: a city from a past that was more technologically advanced than their present, just mouldering away. Stories attached themselves to it; it was said that Arthur was crowned king there. Camden, in 1610, writes that by then it was surrounded by great oak trees, and that to enter within you had to stoop through an old postern called Onion’s Hole, and that you could dig up Roman coins; folk called them Onion’s pennies. But let’s leave Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum, and wander down the road to Tadley God Help Us.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales Page 12