If this is your land, where are your stories?
With these words. A tribal elder defended his people against the grasp of state officials in British Columbia.
He invoked a uniquely human quality.
Our ability to derive a sense of belonging through oral tradition.
To create relationships with police through story.
My grandfather told me a story. He told it in the dock of his forge and beside his hearth and in his garden as we pulled rhubarb.
It was his truth. A part of him which he passed on.
There's a farmer living down Moberly and he has him a white mare.
And you must go take this mare and seller at Macclesfield Market.
So Officer, it's one day at the back end of October and he gets the thieves howl just as it's coming light.
The mayor stops. And will she shift herself?
She will not choose what he does. And they're against the side of the road.
He sees a tall, old chap, thin as a Russia wind, and he's got a proper sort of a stick in his hand.
Oh, he says this chap. That's just the mayor I'm after.
How much do you want for it? I'm not selling to the likes of you, says Farmer.
I'll get more at market. You go your ways, says the old chap.
You'll not sell. And I'll be waiting for you tonight.
So off Rod's farm at the market, and he stands market all day long, though everybody says she's a grand beast.
No one offers to buy that mare. And at finish.
Yes. To get him back to Moberly with a. When it comes to these old it's fetching night.
And there's the old chap waiting for him. Now in your cell, he says.
I'm actually a good sized farmer. You know, if he says you come with me and if he tramps, we've fallen behind him.
They go from thieves hole by seven furs and gold and stone to stormy point and subtle bow.
And on saddle ball they come to a rock because our house nearly on the old shack touches the rock with his stick and the rock splits open clatter.
And behind the rockers Simon Gates, he tortures them with his stick and they open.
And there's a sort of a hole into the hill. This time, Farmer is asking the old chap to let him go and keep the mare.
He wants the money for her. But the old chap tells him you'll not come to know, Army says.
So Farmer takes them down into the hill after him.
They come to a cave and it's full of knights in armour snoring and a king with them.
And their heads against a white horse, each except one.
All this is, as the old chap is asleep in army with the top man waiting on the last battle of the world.
And whenever that day is, I must wake them.
But I'm one no short. And you also do nicely.
Oh, you come with me. And it takes Farmer to another cave.
And this one is full of gold and silver and all sorts.
I have as much as you can carry, he says. And we'll call that payment.
Well, Farmer, he sets to and he his boots in his pockets, his britches and his shirts with treasure and his hat on when he can hold them all.
The old chap takes him back to the iron gates and shoves him through.
Another clattering, abandoned farmer turns him round. Just the wrong.
And it's black as a black outside. Well, Farmer He gets home as best he may and tells his tale.
And the next morning, him and his neighbours, they go back to fetch more treasure.
But neither they nor any sense have seen the iron gates again.
That's the story my grandfather told.
And it's the legend of Alderley.
Alderley edge in geological terms is a Pomo, Triassic, Galena,
Calico Pyrite and Barite Mineralised multi fault at host rising from the eastern aspect of the Cheshire Plain, which is spectacular.
But today we're in search of a different spectacle.
Story. My grandfather did not know and would not have cared if he had known.
The legend is a version of the myth of the Sleeping Hero, which is distributed widely in space and time.
Incidents differ, but at their most simple and comprehensive.
The stories involve the encounter of a mortal with an immortal, a sleep under the ground.
Here, I should say, what is meant by legend.
The technical definition of a legend is a fanciful story associated with the place and believed to be true by the people that lived there.
I remember as a child during World War two, listening to adults joking, yet only half joking that if the Knights were ever going to wake.
Now was the time, they would need white tanks of white horses.
The story fulfilled the definition of a legend.
Legend is oral. When it's hijacked by those that do not believe it.
And make the vernacular polite, quaint, romantic and trivial.
Then the importance, the memory and the truth are lost as a printed example of 1820 shows.
The introduction declares its hand. This tradition was long held in high estimation and credence by the peasantry of Alderley.
And although the belief in enchantment is extinguished by the gentle but sure flow of religious instruction,
yet there are many who would take pleasure in reading the tale of the powerful wizard who once held sway in the very place they now inhabit.
The former. Nay.
Tell me more. The session cried. Why are these steeds in order tide?
Why all those men all bright in arms? And why prepared for wars alone?
Say, are they doomed to mortal toil or destined to on earthly broil?
On this. The Wizards changed his face, assumed mild and brighter greys, and a two to his tone was something given as from a messenger from heaven.
These are the Cavan troops by fate for doomed guardians of our state.
England's good genius here detains the armed defenders of her planes,
doomed to remain till that failed day when Foreman marshalled an array and feuds in test time shall combine to seal the ruin of our line.
Against this. John Ruskin stands by my grandfather with his essay Listening to the printed text.
It is in the speech of Carter's and Housewives.
In the speech of blacksmiths on the old women.
That one discovers the magic that sings the claim of the voice in the shadow.
All that chance. The rhyme of the fish in the well.
Plutarch in his book Concerning the Failure of Oracles written in the first century A.D. quotes the report of Dimitrios,
who had been sent from Rome to gather information about the islands of Britain.
There is, man said, an island in which Cronos is imprisoned with grey areas, keeping guard over him as he sleeps for, as they put it.
Sleep is the bond forged for Kronos.
They add that around him? How many divine beings?
His knights and his soldiers. Now, I'm not suggesting that Plutarch is referring to Alderney.
What I am saying is that the story existed in this part of Europe in the Iron Age.
And the question is. Why?
When and how did the legend begin its journey to me?
Through my grandfather's mouth and that the edge.
Legend I found can be, in its origins, an attempt to retain, perhaps to explain a reality.
News that time has walked. A game of Chinese whispers passed from generation to generation until the meaning may be lost.
But the elements remain. So how may we find them without floundering in subjectivity?
By the time I was 18, I'd learnt an important rule of research.
Pursue the anomaly. If something doesn't make sense, what is it saying?
Anomalies are in the truth. My grandfather told me about the land he knew best.
The first, which should have been obvious to my grandfather who was brought up to work with horses,
is that it's irrational for a farmer wishing to show off his mare to lead her more than 12 miles over bad terrain involving a climb of 400 feet.
When by waiting a week he could have sold out at not knutsford horse fur less than three miles away on level ground.
The next anomaly is the start of the quest. The old man stops the farmer at a place on the edge called Thieves Hole.
To get to where the old man opens the way to the cavern at a rock known as the Iron Gates.
The farm is led from thieves hole by seven furs and golden stone to stormy point and saddle blue.
That is impractical. We work from the bottom until the 18th century.
The edge was an open heath. The wounds that we see now are the result of landscaping.
Why then did the old man traipse the farmer across the heath in a zigzag?
Which increased the journey by more than 20%. What truth was my grandfather telling about the land he knew best?
I went to look for the why in the what? And in trying to answer these questions, I set out on a journey.
A journey no less mysterious than the farmers.
It was a journey into the land.
And the land was itself the telling of a story,
the narration of a tale that followed a path and took its line from William Arthur's, as the legend does.
At each of the named places on the route from fields home to the iron gates.
I came upon peculiarities in the forms of mounds, big stones and above all boundaries.
I was confronted by something old.
The places mattered to my grandfather. And since place names in England tend to be early when names described what was then seen as fact.
Here was where to start to look. I began to question the names.
The old man stops the farmer at thieves.
Who? Old English thief is thief.
Old English Hall means valley depression or hollow way.
Thieves hole is just such a hollow way.
Not a hole in the modern sense, but a linear earthwork.
It could be both way and boundary that are often one and the same.
It's not a border of any existing land division now.
But it could have been used as such, whatever its original purpose in the Middle Ages for a state now lost.
A charter of 108 from Rolleston, Staffordshire, describes one of the Millers or mark points of a boundary.
As one for another.
The three of us, Liska. To The Thorn.
Where the thieves lie. And at Witney, Oxfordshire in 1044 that occurs of Aquinas felt that the commuters discussed.
From Atkins field where the lines lie.
The old English verb lich means to lie not in weight, but as a corpse.
It indicates a place of execution and or burial.
And for this purpose the Anglo-Saxons came to favour boundaries.
It wasn't always so. Anglo-Saxon initial attitudes to boundaries.
Showed more a sense of the divine than of dread.
But with the introduction of Christianity, there was a movement from pagan respect.
To God goaded fear. From Thieves Hole by seven furs and Golden Stone to Stormy Pointe and Saddle Bow.
One of the enigmas of the edge is the occurrence of six flat top mounds of no known age, all purpose.
They could be prehistoric burials. They could be romantic additions by the aristocratic standards for the new planted woodland.
They could be both or almost anything, with one exception.
They have no name. But the route from Thieves Hole to Saddle Bowl takes in three of them, including the exception which is called seven fors.
A geophysical survey here has recorded seven discrete signals, which could be the remains of tree roots.
Only excavation would answer the question of what the circular features are.
But it was common in the 18th century for landscapes to be improved by the planting of clumps on old bumps.
From thieves who buy certain furs and golden stone to Stony Point and saddle bow.
The earliest surviving mention of Golden Stone is in a poor ambulation of the boundaries of overall elderly and in nether alderley in 1598.
And so to a great stone called the Golden Stone.
On the north side of the way. In a way. Golden Stone is a freestanding block of conglomerate sandstone.
Notable for its content of white quartz pebbles.
It seems to have been shaped by battering. That is not with metal tools.
And it's not golden. It's grey. It weighs about 12 tons and was brought from a distance when there was plenty of other stuff nearby.
This, together with the nature of its tooling, is consistent with a prehistoric origin for its placement.
But. Why is a grey stone called Golden?
We need to look at language again in place.
Names Old English Golden can mean several things.
Gold coloured. Plainly not the case here. Sacrifice.
Tribute. Tax treasure. Wealth is splendid. I intuitively reject sacrifice and tend towards tribute.
A boundary is neutral. A symbolic place for the transfer of wealth.
Since when? It's at the boundary, the tribute is nowhere.
And can belong to no one. Behind Golden Stone is the second flat topped mountain.
From Thieves hole by 7000 gold and stone to stony point and saddle bowl the route from Golden Stone to Stony Point parts over and never alderley.
As it reaches stormy point, it touches the third flat top demand.
Old English. Stormy is stormy. Middle English from old French Point is a place, a spot.
There's a lot going on here. There's the devil's grave.
An artificial chamber entered by a trench that runs down one side.
It's unique on the edge. And as Guildenstern, there's no signs of metal tooling.
Devil is used frequently in the naming of strangeness, especially of early works in the landscape.
The sense is that they are other unsafe things from long ago and a different kind of time.
Also naming and renaming matters where places of things are already recognised, have meaning and need to be dealt with,
which is often done by demonisation of prehistoric remains at the time of conversion from paganism to Christianity.
Old English graph is essentially something dug a cave or a trench.
Again, the description is apt. The tricky trench.
Close to the devil's grave. Is a circular mound popular?
Old English pictured pointed and old English floral mound and well attested is the most common meaning artificial mound.
Burial mound barrow. What makes Piccolo significant beyond its appearance is that three parishes and four townships meet at its centre.
Boundaries when first defined often used visible well-known aspects of the landscape for reference.
Natural features are common, as are pre-existing artificial ones.
It's likely that Golden Stone was used because it was already there.
Similarly, Pi Clu was not built as a marker, but was chosen because it was important and beyond dispute.
The line was strung between.
From Thief Hole by Seven Ferns and Golden Stone to Stony Point and Subtle Blue.
We and the farmer are on the last leg of the journey and it's the most intriguing one.
Saddle bow. b0le is a spur from story point with a dip, the shape of a saddle about halfway along its length.
The ridge ends in a convict slope. Old English saddle, old English bone, a smooth, rounded hill.
But another etymology for bowl may be better applied to this part of the edge
where copper and led have been worked from early periods and amounts of iron,
cobalt, antimony. Arsenic. Manganese, sulphur, silver.
Mercury and tin occur. Old English bolla is a round hollow.
A bowl. A crucible. Boule as a mining term is first found in print in four deny regardless all
the history laws and places of the Chief Mines and Mineral Works in England,
Wales and the Irish pale. And also of mint and of money.
With a Clovis explaining some difficult words relating to minds, etc.
By Sir John Pettus Night 1670. Sir John was deputy governor of the Royal Mines, and his book was The Standard Treatise of the 17th Century.
In the this there is the entry bowls or bowls students are places were in ancient time before smelting mills were invented.
The miners did fine. They're led. An investigation on Saddle Bowl in 2007 produced led Scottish and other smelting waste
together with broken unburned led all future work will show whether or not bowls are present.
This part of Saddle Bowl would suggest that they are the concentration of metals in the soil here.
Prohibits any kind of vegetation. The Hill may have had an importance that anachronistic modern thought would miss.
The four deny of the galas is concerned not only with metallurgy, but also with alchemy.
And the division between the two was once more permeable than it is today.
Subtle bow may have been associated with a perception of science amounting to a mystery.
To add to its other ancient otherness.
At the side of the track along side elbow, which again is a multiple boundary between Stony Point and the saddle.
There stands the rock of the iron gates.
Now I have not seen the name identified as being that rock in any written or printed form.
How then, do I know that it is the iron gates of the legend?
The way to the sleeping hero. My grandfather told me.
And how did he know? Somebody told him.
As they too had been told. We are dealing with the legend, and legend is belief of truth.
It is not fiction. It is not imagination. It is not invention.
It is reportage. But why the iron gates?
A solid rock should not need iron gates.
Gate is clear. Old North Dakota road all way.
I'm old English. Iran is less obvious, but the Peterborough lapidary of about 1500 has the entry.
Iron is a stone. There was an archaeological excavation of parts of the Boundary Ridge in 1999.
The Excavation Lowe Ltd revealed beneath the bank.
What seems to be an earlier structure consisting of a wall of rubble and masonry cut stone.
And the wall appears to have run as far as Stony Point.
If that was so. It would have been impressive.
Well, well-deserving, the name of Stone Way. If legend is news that time has changed, it could explain why.
After the wall was covered with turf and earth, the name was applied to the rock next to it.
The significance of Iran and Gaza lost.
What has not been lost is the importance of the special places.
The memory in the markers of the zigzag journey.
Yet. There are questions to be asked of the legend from the start, which take us beyond physical topography.
To the numinous. Why was it that the old man stopped the farmer on thieves whole?
And what was a farmer travelling from Moberly doing there in the first place.
He could not have been on any modern road. No road remains today.
Yet he was not lost. Recent archaeology has interpreted the ditch as a prehistoric route along the crest of the edge.
In the right conditions, the track may be seen as a crop mark heading towards Macclesfield.
In the other direction. The track continues past Beacon Mound, the highest point of the edge across fields, later through grandiose gardens,
then as an unbroken series of paths and waves over the fine spot of a middle Bronze Age pole.
Steve at a boundary broke. By the fringe of the waters of Lindow Moss with its bog bodies of Iron Age Lindo men to mobility village.
But we still have to cope with the old man of thieves hole.
Why did he stop the mayor here? Today, a farm tract crosses the ditch at right angles, filling in the Depression and in the legend.
It's here that the old man and the farmer engage.
If the track does indeed pass over thieves home, it should be the later feature.
But roads are deceptive. In that their function alters through time, which causes changes in size and surface.
Should there be a true relationship and intersection then Thieves Hole would have formed a crossroad here and a crossroads.
Share the uncertainty and the uncanny with boundaries for the same reason.
They are ambivalent. The centre of a crossroad.
It's going nowhere. Just as a centre of pi clue with its seven join ings occupies nowhere.
Such liminal places are worse, space and time are weakened and other dimensions may break through.
That is why I suggest boundaries play so great a part in the legend.
I'll go further and say that if a crossroad did not exist on Thieves Hole.
The old man would not and could not have met the farmer there.
In the legend. We're dealing not only with a physical, but also with a spiritual topography.
Centres and boundaries are a large part of the structure.
They are midpoints or midway lines between opposites.
These divisions without dimension.
Symbolise the supernatural in space.
The same phenomenon. Is represented in time.
As the juncture between years, seasons, days, each kind of division is occupied by a power which notably when applied to time,
breaks through on November eve and a may Eve in Celtic.
That is Iron Age culture. They are the hinges of the two great seasons.
November eve, the start of winter and of the year was a solemn and a weird festival.
The mounds were open and their inhabitants were abroad.
The barrier separating the living and the dead was breached.
And which temporal boundary is the back end of October when the farmer goes out of his world to the sleeping hero.
Consider also how the first meeting with the old man is at the crack of night and day.
Dawn. On the second dusk.
The moment was called into cannon at Lupo.
Between the dog and the wolf.
Boundaries of territory as with boundaries of time, all where the supernatural intrudes through the surface of existence.
It is why the old man has to meet the farmer at a crossroad.
A road without direction or commitment.
At a time when time is stopped.
Once the farmer turns from his way home, he is entering another reality.
The approach to the Sleeping Hero begins on Thieves Hole, and with each step he moves out of his reality into that other.
That other may be remembered in the earliest account of the edge.
It's a grant of land dating from the 13th century,
which uses the stone or earthen ridge on settlement as the boundary from the content of this document.
I see the legend active 800 years ago.
All the way, Marcus noted, are interesting, but one is more.
And from the pick ID law to avowed this dispatcher.
Old English personal name. Alward Old English hatch gate.
Outward is a personal name yet, I wonder.
It consists of two elements of self.
And in the Middle Ages, ELF was no whimsy but a force.
And. Ward. I felt that this was too important to risk.
So I wrote to one of the most respected of English language scholars, Professor R W.V. Elliott of the Australian National University.
Here's his reply. Virus Hatch.
Your suggestion. This is not Alfred's gate, but the Elf Guards gate is perfectly possible.
In the West Midlands, the word elf elves are recorded as Alva Alvin.
These words occur several times in LeMond's boots, circa A.D. 1200.
Thus the Gate of the Elf God is a good West Midland reading and perfect for Alderley.
The Sleeping Hero would correctly be called Elf in this context.
And the old man, his ward. And the gate from gate and gate from hatch may be no more than a happy fluke of convergence.
Boundaries can echo Saxon State's Roman and Iron Age foundations, Bronze Age Feel systems, even the Neolithic and some combine all.
They are among the longest surviving of all monuments.
Whether they use artificial structures or natural features as here a Mesolithic site
and way marker beyond of out of this hatch where the lip of the rock is in one parish.
The path below in another. And the vertical face nowhere.
So where does this take us?
The Anglo-Saxons developed an ambivalent attitude towards the space, less spaces they feared them and yet employed them because of the mentality.
For such purposes as execution. These negative associations came with Christianity.
At first, the Anglo-Saxons were in awe of monuments, especially of early Bronze Age round barrows,
which they adopted as marker points for the boundaries of their land divisions, intensifying that liminal power.
And they reused the barrows, inserting their dead.
Into the realm of the more ancient. Yet these places dangerous because of their lack of contact with the world, while yet defining it.
And unknown to God, were chosen as meeting places for assemblies, both political and social,
perhaps for that very neutrality where arguments of this world held no sway.
Moberly. Which means the mound of the assembly has its church sited on an artificial circular earthwork, which may be the eponymous mound.
The change in level of the graves helps delineated.
From here. Beacon Mound on the edge.
Skirted by the line of thieves. Hole is visible. If there was a connection between the edge and the mound of Moberly.
Has it been preserved as the route taken by the farmer?
And what connection could there have been? I suggest that the links between Mons, Lindo, Moss and Hill together with the zigzag journey.
Point to a landscape of the sacred. And that the legend records it in memory.
It is a memory that covers more than one era.
The swing of belief increased the Association of Ancient Burials and boundaries with the uncanny.
The new places became synonymous with the supernatural.
Their evil was confined until into 10 a.m. at LuPone.
Darkness dissolves the barriers from view.
It is clear in bills which dates from possibly the seventh or eighth centuries.
The viewpoint of the poem is Christian, but its material is pagan.
Beowulf is a tale bracketed by boundary and barrow.
It contains a spatial topography understood by an eighth century mind.
Bear Wolf's first hero. Victory is the killing of Grendel, whose epithet is mere stop a boundary walker.
And his last is in battle with a dragon guarding a treasure in a barrel.
Steig on the lie alone.
Uncouth. Men did not know the way to it under the ground.
Nor did the farmer from Moberly. Burrows in tradition and in reality could whole treasure now called grave goods,
and the findings of them during secondary use of the burrow would give an extra bond with the past and add to the otherworldliness of the site.
Piccolo may be such. One.
I was taking photographs to illustrate today's entertainment.
My wife mooching about. Picked up a Flint arrowhead from the out wash at the base of the mound.
Pikachu is almost certain of the Bronze Age. This.
Flint is the first proven evidence of the Neolithic on the edge.
Up to 2000 or years earlier, as opposed to the established Mesolithic spanning five millennia before that.
The importance of place may reach further than we can ever know.
Accounting for that deeper nature of the edge is not easy.
The hill has been used since the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago worked imported flint and chert, mainly from the Yorkshire Wolds.
100 miles to the north east is found here from that time.
But the cultures of the Mesolithic and the Neolithic could not be expected to leave much beyond Flint and Chert.
However, by the age of 21.
I felt that the legend of Alderley as told by my grandfather.
Contained, as it were, a guide to an unrecognised Bronze Age 4000 years ago.
I was nearly 60 before persistence won and made the archaeologists look.
Which justified both grandfather and legend.
The Edge is the earliest dated site of metalworking in England.
And the radiocarbon figure is 4000 years.
Yet. Why should archaeology appropriate an almost universal myth?
And vice versa. I can only proffer cause and reason.
The Edge is a remarkable thing, which stands out when seen both from the plane and from the Pennines to the east.
I would say that it is of itself liminal.
A Temenos especial a holy or a haunted place, provocative of archetypes.
Dependent on the historical view of the observer and the colours of its formation are striking.
Such details are important at many levels of consciousness.
Metallurgy is a magical and dangerous art.
Its practitioners are magical and dangerous men.
Who else but the rightful king can draw the sword from the stone.
Yet. It may be that the edge was important before copper was worked or alchemy was born.
The edge could have been valued and even revered.
As a source of pigment. Pigments were traded over distance and their source was considered to be a place of power, a seat of spirituality.
We, as children of the Age knew where to find our body.
Paint the green, the red, the blue, the yellow, the white, the black.
And how to mix it, though. Who taught us? In a post of Precious Lord or dripping stolen from our mother's jars in World War Two.
John Houghton, the mildest of boys when daubed became a god.
There's more in the legend when we listen. But I'll end at the start.
If some supernatural agency has gone to the trouble of creating a cavern beneath the edge,
this one is manmade from the 19th century to how's an enchanted army against the day of ultimate trial.
Why is the the logistical error, the cock up of being one horse short.
Did no one count. And why is that required?
Horse a mare. What is it the sleeping hero needs?
Mars weren't used in battle. Stallions were.
Why is there a white mare on the edge?
What is it this hero lacks? I knew that.
I knew. But what? And then, of course, I remembered Gibraltar's, Cameron says.
Gerald wrote In the late 12th century, he starts Chapter 525 of the third part of his topography of Ireland with these words.
There are some things that if the urgent demands of my account did not require it, shame would prevent their being described.
But the severe discipline of history spares neither truth nor modesty.
He then relates a ritual alleged to be used when a king assumes power.
At the inauguration. The king before witness of the people copulate.
With a white mayor. The measure is then killed.
The measure is butchered and boiled. A bath is made for the king from the broth.
He sits in the bath and partakes of the meat and his immediate companions, his knights.
If you like it also, then and only then he enters into the kingship.
The merger is the complement of his strength.
The receptacle of his palm. The act is a new creation, a cleansing.
The sacrament. Yet. Can the ceremony be a survival spanning three millennia to your elders?
I see no reason to reject the thought. As the tribal elders stood his ground in British Columbia.
So Australian law has been forced to allow the validity of an Aboriginal oral memory beyond historical time.
It is our ability to read. That inhibits our capacity for retention.
Support for a Bronze Age survival in Ireland and by implication in the legend comes from Scandinavia.
At Boston. In Sweden, there is Bronze Age rock art.
That depicts the copulation that Gerald US describes and resolves the anomaly of all the lives missing horse with vigour.
I set out on a journey to find why my grandfather told me a story.
And I've told that journey as a story. With the former.
It has been a long way to market. I found my answer in the land because the land itself is a narrative path and way markers its stories.
The reworking of oral tradition and the reworking of landscape go hand in hand.
And the mayor and the man are one.
Is it coincidence? I think not.
The length of the legend. Is a story told to a child.
Fragments of timelessness. Embodying archaeological and spiritual truths.
Passed down in the memories of unlettered minds.
The importance, if not the meaning and understanding retained.
Faithfully over 4000 years.
To me. And.
To my people. Thank you.