GHOSTWATCH
ALAN MURDIE explores the ghosts and folklore of a mysterious prehistoric complex
In 21st century Britain, it might be thought the day of the M R James-style ghost story, where a scholar or antiquary heads off to some unexcavated archæological site steeped in local legend and digs up more than he bargained for in the form of nasty supernatural shocks, is well and truly over.
However, just over the last year a locality not far from the village of Great Livermere in Suffolk, where James himself grew up as a child and treated as his college vacation home for many years, is rapidly becoming recognised as the site of a mysterious prehistoric complex with intriguing legends attached. Previously mentioned in FT last year by Paul Devereux [ FT312:17], this cursus monument (also classed as a ‘causewayed enclosure’ by some prehistoric specialists) consists of straight lines and ditches on so large a scale that it can only be fully comprehended from the air (key traces are apparent by way of crop marks visible on Google Earth). A section of this colossal monument runs along the River Lark, stretching between the villages of Hengrave and Fornham All Saints, and has been awarded Schedule Ancient Monument status, with portions dating back to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It qualifies as the oldest surviving man-made structure in East Anglia and is almost wholly unexcavated. Situated at its heart is the church of Fornham All Saints, indicating a past Christianisation of the old pagan site and a continuing tradition of sanctity.
The full extent of this ritual landscape is not yet known, but it could stretch north into the Brecklands of Norfolk, out west to a Bronze Age barrow cemetery on Risby Heath and east to the village of Rougham and a prominent burial mound called Eastlow Hill. The orientation of the earthworks points south, direct towards St Edmund’s Abbey, at Bury St Edmunds. The presence of the monument perhaps explains why Bury was chosen for the shrine and tomb of St Edmund, an East Anglian King martyred by the Danes in AD 869, as the district had already been established as the traditional burial place of kings and chieftains. Traces of a Bronze Age burial ground lie close to the monument, together with a significant concentration of folklore and ghost stories in the wider area, perhaps hinting at earlier religious practices on the site. In short, it is nothing less than part of an enormous spiritual landscape used in one form or another for some 6,000 years and awaiting proper investigation and study.
According to some archæological theories, causwayed enclosures occur at focal points where different cultures met, and this aspect is currently attracting attention from as far away as Wales. The President of the Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society and veteran folklorist and ghost writer the Revd J Towyn Jones has expressed support for the suggestion of archæologist Dr Duncan McAndrew that the name ‘Hengrave’ is a composite derived from words from two different languages – the ‘grave’ portion coming from the old German for grave or earthwork, dating from Anglo-Saxon period and the old British or Welsh language providing ‘Hen’ which means ‘old’ – hence ‘Old Earthwork’. The Anglo-Saxons called Suffolk, ‘Selig Suffolk’ which is thought to have been corrupted into “silly Suffolk” but the original meaning of ‘selig’ is holy, the place of the blessed dead. (Sources: East Anglian Daily Times, 1 Feb + 31 May 2014; Revd J Towyn Jones and Dr Duncan McAndrew pers. comms.)
The location of an ancient ceremonial and burial site above a river valley is reminiscent of the positioning of Sutton Hoo in East Suffolk, itself linked with ghostly sightings of warriors by Mrs E Pretty on whose land the famous ship burial was found in 1939. (See ‘My Buried History’ by John Preston Daily Telegraph, 29 April 2007; ‘Sutton Hoo – Finding the Hoard’ by Rodney Castledean in The Unknown, Dec 1986).
Folklore around the Fornham complex similarly includes a tradition of ancient royal burials and ghosts. John Gage in The History of Hengrave (1810) mentions a local hill known as Kingsbury Hill in Fornham Park and a tradition that three ancient British kings are buried nearby. Today, the village pub at Fornham All Saints commemorates the tradition, being named The Three Kings.
This has a resonance and indeed pre-dates one of M R James’s most famous stories, ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925). Written some 15 years before the Sutton Hoo discoveries, James used the conceit of the ‘Three Crowns of East Anglia’ buried in antiquity to protect the land from invasion. One crown was lost to coastal erosion that consumed the ancient city of Dunwich, where Siegbert, son of King Rædwald, established a palace in AD 630. The second crown was dug up at Rendlesham in 1687 by workmen, who melted it down, whilst the third remains undiscovered. Folklorist Jacqueline Simpson maintains that it is an inspired fiction by James (See ‘The Rules of Folklore in the Ghost Stories of MR James’ in Folklore vol 108, 1997, pp9-18); whereas Enid Porter in The Folklore of East Anglia (1974) tended to treat it as a local genuine tradition that may have been utilised by him. In James’s story the third crown has a ghostly guardian who wreaks a terrible vengeance upon a reckless excavator and treasure seeker. Was the Fornham complex folklore an inspiration for him?
However, at the Fornham site there are not stories of guardian spectres or soldiers, but a marked and exclusive concentration of female phantoms variously dressed in white, grey, pink and red.
John Gage’s History and Antiquities of Hengrave (1810 and 1822) states that female
water spirits haunted the River Lark through the village. Gage seems to have been captivated by the idea of female water sprites troubling the builders of a mill around which they were supposed to frolic, writing in the style of Chaucer: Now there spreaden rumour that everish night The (pitts) ihaunted by many a sprite The miller avoucheth and all thereabout That they full oft hearen the hellish rout Further along the River Lark one finds further traces of these beliefs with pools called the Mermaid or Merrymaid Pits; in East Anglia mermaids were not cute fairytale creatures, but often malevolent sirens dragging victims to watery deaths.
At nearby Hengrave Hall a ‘Pink lady’ is supposed to haunt the Tudor manor house, which between 1895 and 2005 was run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of the Assumption. The Pink Lady was said to have disturbed guests in their bedrooms as recently as the 1990s since the building has been converted for secular purposes, being seen to glide out through an upstairs window.
At the former gates of the ill-fated Fornham Park, which lies adjacent to the Monument across the river, a dangerous female apparition known as Red Hannah was said to appear at dusk, serving as a bugbear for threatening wayward children. The Park itself was prowled by a sinister White Lady, walking from the lake to Fornham Hall and the ruined church tower. The square tower is all that remains of St Genevieve’s church, which burned down soon after building and landscaping for the Hall commenced in the 18th century. According to local tradition the fire started in a freak accident on 24 June 1782, caused by a man shooting at rooks or jackdaws, with the shot setting the roof alight. June 24th or Old Midsummer’s Day or Night was considered a particularly numinous date for ghosts and the supernatural, though other historical evidence places the fire occurring seven years earlier on 17 May 1775.
Despite having at one time being owned by a wealthy Norfolk family, the once beautiful Hall suffered a long decline. Numerous skeletons, laid out in strange positions, were found in the park beneath an ancient pollard ash felled in 1827. Opinion has been divided as to whether the 30 skeletons were dead from the Battle of Fornham in 1173 or from an earlier, perhaps prehistoric burial.
From the late 1890s Fornham Hall was shut up and abandoned by the owners, being requisitioned by the army in both World Wars and later used as a POW camp. After 1945 the Army remained in occupation and inflicted a great deal of damage on the building. One soldier recalled, “It was a weird place if you can imagine something like Miss Haversham’s place in Great Expectations. Four poster beds, sheets still on the beds and when you tried to pick them up they fell to pieces in your hands.”
Further major disturbance of the soil occurred with the park being developed as a training ground. Following this, troops at the Hall were frightened by appearances of the White Lady apparition which continued until the soldiers left, whereupon the hall was completely demolished in 1951, save for a stable block. Pits and craters created by the army were later used for a while for gravel extraction and in the mid-1970s were earmarked as a toxic waste dump; fortunately the alternative that was developed was a water treatment plant and sewage works. The stable block was turned into private dwellings in 2009.
Another White Lady is said to wander Barton Hill, the nearest prominent high point lying due east of the Monument, in the neighbouring parish of Fornham St Martin. Back in 1978 I heard from a local lady, a Miss Smith who lived in the village all her life, of her childhood encounter with this figure along with her father, who was deeply troubled by the experience. Completing this collection of female spectres to the south is the Grey Lady of Babwell Priory, further linked with the notorious and dangerous Grey Lady apparition of Bury St Edmunds. (Sources: West Suffolk Illustrated, 1903, by Horace Barker; Haunted Bury St Edmunds, 2007, by Alan Murdie; Fornham File, Bury St Edmunds Record Office).
Such a concentration of female phantoms in around an ancient site is remarkable. Could these be folkloric clues that the site was once a focus of female-centred worship and veneration of goddesses?
How long do oral traditions last? Leaving aside claims of extraordinary human longevity so beloved in fortean circles, an influential academic view of Lord Raglan in 1936 was that no oral tradition endures reliably for more than five generations, or approximately 150 years ( The Hero, 1936, by Lord Raglan). However, given that the last Briton with an 18th century parentage died only in 1970 (admittedly with a father born in 1799) many exceptions doubtless exist (‘Last link with the 18th century’ a former category in The Guinness Book of Records). Indeed, at the other extreme there have been suggestions that some oral cultures may preserve history as myths for thousands of years, with up to 10,000 years even being proposed (See When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, 1994, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T Barber). In Britain, an oral tradition spanning the centuries between the Bronze Age and the mediæval writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth in The History of The Kings of Britain (1136) has been proposed concerning the legendary origins of Stonehenge (cited in Quest for Merlin, 1986, by Nicolai Tolstoy), whilst the prehistorian Leslie Grinsell considered that popular folklore might carry clues about changes to the coastline which occurred in prehistoric times (see The Folklore of Prehistoric Sites of Britain, 1976).
Currently, only parts of the ritual complex are protected under the Scheduled Ancient Monument Act 1979, despite in 2007 the then regional director of English Heritage visiting the area and telling locals it was the 48th most important historic site in their records for England. In particular, a large section of land containing much archæology within 50 metres of the Monument is being threatened by a major road development scheme proposed by Suffolk County Council in a deal with Countryside Properties of Brentwood to put 900 houses on the site. Trial digging in this field by the Suffolk Archæology Service has already found hundreds of flint tools, a palisaded enclosure, a Bronze Age cremation urn and human remains, with only five per cent of the field excavated. Nonetheless both the County Council and Countryside Properties are shutting their eyes to the situation and trying to force their scheme through, the latter even claiming that there are no areas on the site “that can be classified as a cemetery’. (Source: ‘Archæologist’s woes for oldest cemetery’ Bury Free Press, 13 Feb 2015) But then putting 900 houses on the oldest burial ground in East Anglia is hardly likely to be a selling point for marketing luxury properties, certainly if prospective purchasers know their M R James.
Sympathetic readers are encouraged to send polite protests to the Development Control Committee, St Edmundsbury Council, Cllr Graham Newman Suffolk County Council and Countryside Properties of Brentwood. As locals told Peter Vaughn in the 1972 BBC television adaptation of A Warning to the Curious: “No digging!”