Woodland fright

In 1960-61 my friends and I had a passion for what we called Tracker Bikes. These were stripped down pushbikes, which were ridden wildly down rough tracks, and we were constantly searching for new places to ride. One summer we discovered the ideal spot, a small wood just outside of town [Knutsford in Cheshire]. There was a circular track, and even a den already made from fallen branches. For the next few weeks we spent every moment we could riding in there, until we knew every twist and bend and bush in the wood – or thought we did. It was a considerable surprise when, one morning, we found an entrance to a path we had never noticed before. Naturally, we set off to explore it.

We seemed to be riding for a long time, until we came to a marshy patch where we had to carry our bikes. It was about then that we realised we were lost, and when we became aware of the stillness, the utter silence, with no bird song or sound of distant traffic. Then we heard an odd clicking sound. We pushed through the undergrowth until we found the source. In a clearing was a mound of reddish earth, sand or clay perhaps. On the summit of the mound was a dead tree, and the clicking sound was made by two branches banging together in the wind – but there was no wind. Thoroughly spooked, we could see glimpses of what seemed to be open fields not too far away. Crashing through brambles, we escaped, and found ourselves by a main road, a mile or so from the wood we had entered. When we got home there was a panic on. Although we thought we had been lost in the wood for perhaps two hours, it was nearly dark. We had been gone for 12 hours or so.

I have told very few people about this. I have incorporated a fictionalised version in a novel, but it has never been published and only about four people have read it. I am very clear about which bits are fiction and which are not. I would not be writing this now if it had not been for Chris Pollard’s article ‘In the land of the Chaneques’ [ FT339:42-46], in which an oddly similar story is told. It involves bicycles, being lost in a wood that you thought you knew well, finding a mysterious tree, and escaping to find that many more hours have passed than you imagined. The only element missing from my experience was the little people in the tree (we don’t have Caneques in Cheshire).

If this were a folktale, an account of something that happened once upon a time to a distant cousin of a friend of a friend, then the only mystery would be in understanding the methods by which such stories are spread around the world. But it is not a folktale, but something that really happened to me, and to Ana and her friends in Mexico. So what is going on? And if our experiences are in some way real, then how many other folktales, of phantom hitchhikers or alien/fairy abductions, have some kind of root in reality? Tim Beswick Saltburn by the Sea, North Yorkshire