As the road turned at the valley head, I pulled up by a giant beech, felled in some storm as its days worked towards their end. Driving the car up the bank at an unnerving angle, one wheel hanging in the air, I got out, retrieved a small box from the car boot, walked into the shelter of the roots, and, crouching low in the hollow, carefully trowled a compact handful of chalk and loam from its roots into the box, taking time to rub some of the mix into my cheeks and forehead. Capping the box with a layer of rotting beech mast, I returned to the car, and placed the box carefully into the centre of the boot. I then got into the passenger seat, before awakening to myself and shifting carefully over the handbrake and into the driver's seat. After a little skidding on the frosted bank I managed to reengage the lifted wheel and continue my journey.
The road ran through a deep holloway, the surface steadily becoming more and more decayed, until scattered across the middle was the odd tuft of green and yellow, which I realised, with surprise, were spring primroses. Indeed, as I drove, they coated the banks and the surrounding woodland with a strange brightness, little expected in the otherwise drear undercanopy. A little further and I entered the village of Upper _________.
Although only a matter of yards from the lower village geographically, I realised now the distance was entirely theoretical, for while the villagers should certainly have been able to shout to their neighbours, the intervening hillslope was almost entirely impassable, being both steep and heavily wooded, and the two settlements were less two halves of a whole than mirror images reflecting each other in the intervening wild. While Lower _________ was homely and healthy, a brief explore made it apparent that Upper _________ was a mere scattering of houses that remained of a much larger settlement, presumably medieval like the church, now almost entirely vanished save some cropmarks in the snow dusted fields and an uninviting brick hut on the edge of the farmland that covered the complex winding gear of a deep and once important village well, barred with a doorway of split hazel posts. The only notable house was a significant modern farm adaptation, entirely out of place with the rest, with a sizable yard and outhouses, and on the roof of which a plethora of satellite dishes and arials sprouting in a confused variety of directions.
This peculiar dwelling brought to mind two notable comments by my family when I had told them of my trip. Firstly, my father, Sussex born and bred, had told me of rumours of a intelligence services' safehouse in the village; though I found it unlikely they would advertise it with such a strange luxury of technology; the second, one of my brothers telling me that he had once exited the ancient woodland above the neighbouring valley into a field he had never seen before, rare for him, and rarer still, had found, attached to a tree, pointing in this direction, a small satellite dish, of no obvious purpose, the wiring for which trailed along the fencing before disappearing underground. How these facts related to the reality of the place I could not determine, despite giving it considered thought and examination. Next to this strange building, down a short dirt track, was the small church of St Michael's, fresh hellebores in the porch.
This simple church could have been a delight in the warmth of a sunny day, but I suspected it would, in fact, be as I found it: cold and wet, even in the brightest of English summers. The walls were covered in a patchwork of damp Medieval paintings; not the usual scenes of hellfire and saints, but so fragmented as to only display a confusion of strange crosses and circular symbols. This continued outside the church, where there were a surprising number of modern grave plagues on the wall decorated with a variety of strange engravings, each celebrating some notable member of a scientific or military community, all, apparently, at one time or another residents of this vanishing hamlet and choosing to be buried or otherwise scattered in this strange churchyard.
23 Dec 2019