It Happened to Me...

Legend tripping

Alan Murdie’s piece on ‘Arthurian Legend Tripping’ at Cadbury Castle [ FT401: 18-21] reminded me of a visit a group of us made there in about 1978. As we entered, we got what I think is a fairly typical effect at Cadbury: a sense of a vortex of spiralling winds in the trees as we climbed to the inner camp. We spent several hours there, each wandering off and doing their own thing, being caught in something like personal reveries.

I found myself at a high point at one corner, above the upper rampart, and just stood, gazing into the distance, and musing or meditating on – possibly invoking – the Arthurian atmosphere. One friend found a long staff-like stick and took on a pantomime knight persona as he wandered, making appropriate gestures, round and round the ramparts below my vantage point. Another friend in the lower part of the summit, diagonally across from me, climbed a small tree – though because of the lie of the land, we weren’t intervisible. After a while, another of us came and sat to meditate about four yards behind me. I was half-aware of him, as I was of my knightly comrade, but no contact was made. By that time I was pretty deep and settled in whatever I was doing and I recall finding it hard to stir.

I must have stood stock still for a couple of hours, and when I finally shook myself out and turned round, my meditating friend jumped out of his skin. He swore that I hadn’t been there when he sat down – but I could assure him I was; he decided I’d stepped half-out of this world and gone invisible. We wandered back across the site and the friend had just come from his tree, and asked us if we’d seen anything over where we’d come from, because while he’d been sitting he’d heard the sounds of horses and carts and calling, and children and things as if there was a market or something going on. We’d heard nothing of the sort, of course. We all drifted back together piecemeal, and related what we’d been doing – the ‘knight’ felt he’d been in a ‘warrior’ state of mind, and another declared she’d also taken up a steady position as a kind of ‘guardian’. We all felt that we’d been ‘somewhere else’, and a little ‘otherworldy’. No drugs were involved, unusually for us – I think we all looked like the kind of people liable to be given the once-over by the police.

Alan also refers to faces in the clouds. Fifteen years after the Cadbury visit, I climbed St Michael’s Hill at Montacute in Somerset. It was a rainy afternoon, I was alone on the hill, and I climbed to the top room of the tower. I was aware of the legend about a dream leading to a cross being found on the hill in the 11th century; the cross was put in a cart, the oxen started walking and didn’t stop till they came to the site where Waltham Abbey now stands in Essex, by ‘divine’ foundation. So the hill is a kind of ‘hill of revelation’. I glanced out of one window – facing towards Cadbury, I realised afterwards – and a clear image of a man’s face appeared in the clouds – jaw-length hair, bearded and like a picturebook face of a mediæval warrior, and gazing straight at me. I looked away, refocused my eyes, and looked back – ‘he’ was still there. There was no sort of revelatory message, no ‘I see God!’ kind of thing, but I made a mental acknowledgment of the vision, addressed to a goddess, before realising that the face and St Michael’s Hill suggested some genderinappropriateness. As soon as that thought came, the clouds seemed to swirl and reform, and became a female face, again looking straight back at me. After a few minutes, the clouds became just clouds again. I was left feeling that something special had occurred, but what? – one of what I have come to know as ‘meaningless meaningful experiences’. But Cadbury seemed implicit in it, and a link across the 15 years.

John Billingsley

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Key returned

Re the “Nose pad windfall” or JOTT (“Just one of those things”) [ FT396: 70]: Some years back, we moved to an old twin Oast house in Kent. The house itself had a slightly odd atmosphere. My wife and I would often feel as if we were being watched. We witnessed several rather odd occurrences during the few years we lived there. One of these was particularly strange.

We had been in the house for about a year. I was paying a monthly direct debit for our electricity, but the energy company asked for an up-todate meter reading. The meter was housed in a very robust wooden cabinet attached to the outside of the kitchen wall. I couldn’t find the key to open it anywhere. We asked the landlord and the agents, but no one could help. After weeks of searching, I thought that I had better just prize the door open with a crowbar. I figured I’d get a new lock from the hardware shop. I had this in mind as I left the house that morning to go to work. I recall thinking about leaving the offififice a bit early to go to the hardware shop on my way home. As I walked up to my car (parked on the gravel drive), I found a very old and slightly rusty key on the ground right by the driver’s door. There was no way this had been on our drive after all this time; we would have spotted it a few days after moving in – not after the best part of a year. It was a solid

“We all felt we’d been ‘somewhere else’ and a little otherwordly”