All Creatures
Came over the fell pass last night, the howling wind tearing the fog to shreds of white out and void black; metres of visibility. I had seen no one for maybe 25 miles, even when stopping in the gas green glow of the automated petrol station, and then nothing but my headlight on a wall of mist climbing all the way up the dale, hazards syncopating with the strobing cloud. Coming over the col and deep in the fog, creeping along the edge of the hairpins down looking for the verge, I suddenly got the feeling someone was sat behind me, pillion; someone cold, someone unheimlich. With the strongest compulsion against feeling behind me or sliding back, I worked my way slowly through to the valley floor without relief, my cold companion staying with me all the way there, and all the way into the next dale, through villages and passed churches, across stone bridges and woods of alder and rowan. All the way home. All Creatures Great And Small country this maybe, but what creatures in the fell fog at night my friends; what creatures...?1
19 Nov 2022
Notes:
1
Some time after writing this, I came upon the following from a 1930's book on the area:
"Bowen's map of 1785 gives [the road] as 'The Devil's Causeway', which suggests that people of that date had sensed something unusual in this well-made road...Such a
place seems made for ghosts... If a man
was riding, his horse generally saw it first, and would shy off the path, and as often as it was driven back it would shy again, though [a local] seldom tried the path more than once.
He would make a wide detour if he knew the ghost was about, struggling frantically through bogs and peat, and often leaving his horse to its fate."