The Seelie Fair
It was that brief and confusingly delightful period in the pandemic when we could travel, but only within our local area, and in the Dales surprisingly few felt the inclination. One must remember that at this time there were still severe restrictions on visiting others, the police were acting inconsistently towards drivers, and the nomads of the English countryside had been forcibly settled in hotels and houses; in short, I hadn't seen but a single car the entire time I was out. It helped that it was late: dusk was turning to night, and I had ridden my favourite loop up our dale, across the watershed, and had begun the return journey towards the single track that crossed the local dam, hopeful I might get back without encountering the increased wildlife in the dark, unfamiliar with motor vehicles as it was.
I had just begun my descent towards the dam, with the moonlight through the scudding clouds playing on the water's surface below me, when I was brought up suddenly by a vision from the opposite valley side. In one field, high above the wooded reservoir, was a vast mass of brightly lit circular tents, striped in all colours, and interwoven with more substantial huts and antique amusements. As far as I could tell, there was no one outside to see, but it had the strangest feeling of activity and attraction; a feeling of life and communal delight so out of kilter with those dark and isolating times. I must admit I was somewhat used to the occasional pub of some of our more isolated communities being rather better lit than one might expect, but a funfair stood starkly outside of reality in those days of austere quarantine. Having stopped my bike I tried to work out which field the fair was in, if fair it was, for the road I intended to travel must by necessity have run close by. Nevertheless, in the falling darkness, it was hard to reason it out, and I decided the better course was one of action - to ride across the dam and take the road, hoping, indeed, fully expecting, to see these amazing revels close up.
However, on reaching the other valley side, it was clear the road travelled nowhere near the field, for as much as I drove up and down the road and its various offshoot lanes, the fair had vanished. Disturbed, by the disappearance and the combination with the falling night, I turned to my previous journey, and headed home, perhaps a little faster than I might.
It was some months later, when the world had opened up again and I was digging for treasures in the damp basement of a secondhand bookshop in the Lakes, that I picked up a copy of an early Victorian guide to our local area. Foxed and somewhat mildewed, it was nevertheless a cornucopia of fancies from that period in the Dales when people still recalled the stories from before the mills. Sitting at home, reading the book one rainy evening, I was brought up suddenly once again, as I read that before the dam was built, before even the majority of the farms in the area, there was told of a great and bright settlement of ancient origin, on what is now the farmland near the dam; a place of luxury and pleasure, so utterly taken into the ground by the crack of an earthquake, that one day it was there, and the next not a trace remained beyond the memory of the rural dalesfolk. By what fey chance of circumstance and timing I happened to see what I saw I could not fathom, nor, indeed, could I be sure what I saw, but, still, each time I travel that route a little later than I should I tremble when I reach that spot, though whether it is with fear or desire I could not begin to tell you.
4 April 2020