Collections of this Kind

Fata Morgana

The small sign to "Old Town" that I regularly pass on the way across the Dales has always fascinated me – given there's no town I know of in that deeply rural area, and it points to a less than likely single track road. And so last month, with a little time on our hands, I convinced my family to turn off the main road to finally explore it1. As is so often the case with such diversions, the track became thinner and thinner, the tarmac patchier and patchier, and the grass in the middle of the road longer and longer. Nevertheless, being familiar with the ways of the English landscape, I had hoped to perhaps come upon some village square, a few farms, an old church, a duck pond. It was not to be. Eventually we passed straight through the location marked on the map as "Old Town" without seeing more than a couple of lone cottages strung out along the track, and, just as the lane appeared to be running to ruin, we hit its end, and a main road I didn't recognise. Reluctantly, then, I swung the car in the vague direction of home, and I was beginning to wonder whether the place was a peculiar Argleton, added to reality to protect some divine copyright, when we found ourselves descending into a dale and entering a small town of gritstone buildings, with a splendid market square and a fine Norman church. We stopped, perhaps with some little disorientation at the size and location of this unexpected settlement, and looked around.

It seemed a perfectly normal town, save this... From a small shop on a side-street, my daughter bought, as is her want, an antique print of a kitsch Victorian painting, pulling it from a piled miscellany of equally odd prints and frames. On it, a girl looked bashfully out from a pastoral scene while a small lapdog in her arms stared adoringly at her face, with the undoubted message that chastity in the face of all one's desires breeds adulation. Not, beyond that, disturbing, except that, on settling down for a tea in an old café shortly afterwards, we found ourselves being served by a young girl who was not just similar to the girl in the print, but, infact, identical in every respect. We finished quickly, and left with a certain feeling of unease, which lay thickly on a foundation of eeriness; for I can tell you, I have lived a short drive from this valley for 30 years, indeed, have driven by it and down it on many occasions, and yet not once have I seen this town, nor any sign of it beyond an out of place shop by the roadside and a garage some distance away. Driving out, I took the opportunity to divert away from home, back passed the town on the main road, and, even knowing it is there, it is impossible to see. And so it is that I wonder if it actually exists in any normal sense, but, instead, is simply willed into existence as one travels into the place made ready for it, like some geographic Brigadoon, missing in space not in time, and inhabited by all those youths, chaste and coy alike, trapped forever in the oils of sentimental bucolic landscapes.

06 July 2024