Circles of Stone – Katy Soar, Editor
“Withered blossoms were always on the ground amongst the grass, and on the stone fresh blooms constantly appeared,” and like rare blossoms fifteen stories from 1893 to 2018 are gathered by Katy Soar as an offering for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, their roots running deeper than the passage of the mere century-and-a-quarter they span, exploring “pagan sites and ancient rites” which echo forward from ages long passed to the modern world, focused within the Circles of Stone which dot the landscape.
Opening with a fragment of Sarban’s Ringstones of 1951, it may be only an excerpt of a longer work set on the Northumbrian Moors but it prefaces the collection in much the same way as Soar’s own introduction, succinctly encapsulating an important understanding in all enquiries into the past, that “as new religion ousts the old it tenants the latter’s temples,” occupying spaces still inhabited by the ghosts of the past.
A holiday enjoyed by two men sees them taking an old stone cottage in Cornwall near a circle known as the Council of Penruth which they believe should have an associated place of worship, but where? Those who are familiar with such stories can see where E F Benson’s story of 1924 is going as The Temple is located, exactly as described, the friends who make the discovery blinded to the implications of its presence by their own excitement.
Although many refer to it, only Jasper John steps within the most iconic of all the ancient stone circles though he singularly fails to invoke The Spirit of Stonehenge in a slight story dating to 1930 which ticks boxes rather than venturing outside them, offering scant description of the location and creating no atmosphere; harvested ten years later, The First Sheaf is everything the preceding story isn’t, intelligent and articulate, filled with foreboding and retribution for those who trespass, effective despite many familiar elements, though oddly the barren remoteness described by H R Wakefield turns out to somehow be Essex.
Stepping back to 1921, Algernon Blackwood sends his survivor of the Somme on a walking tour of the Lake District where even before he locates The Tarn of Sacrifice he reflects on memories of friends hobbled and blinded; “the dead, it seemed to him, had been more fortunate.” The first story where rather than “the other” deviating from the expected default of Christianity it is the protagonist, though only in the privacy of his own thoughts, any lingering vestiges of faith having been lost in the fields of France, he broods on the stab and slash of the bayonet, paralleling it with older images of the of the flint knife in a revelation of ghastly belonging which echoes appropriately in Alan Garner’s Red Shift.
“Who could write a horror story on a night like this?” questions the novelist Gerald Jarvais in Stuart Strauss’ urgent offering of 1928, yet all seems perfect, a weekend in rural Humbledon, the still night accompanied by silvery moonlight even before a scrap of paper provides a clue to the secret circumstances of a recent death in the area, the writer unable to help himself from investigating despite the warnings of the locals, tempted by a glimpse of what appears to be a female form beneath his window, The Shadow on the Moor.
Prompted by an examination of church records from the 1600s, the ministrations of the Reverend John Pacey who apparently did “vanish from the eyes of mortal men takying with hym that wytch chylde called Lisheen,” the discovery of the diary of that same man expands that single line with rumours of an ancient city destroyed for the wickedness of its inhabitants, all that remains the stone circle of Bryn Glas, Frederick Cowles’ 1948 tale placing heathen acts within a respectable religious setting, the orphan adopted by the church a source of corruption which increases as she grows into a beautiful woman.
Composed of jumbled childhood memories and sensations, the only discernible fixed point the old stone in the woods, The Ceremony of Arthur Machen dating to 1897 is potent despite feeling incomplete, whereas The Dark Land of Mary Williams from 1975 leaves only a few blanks, spaces as conspicuously empty as the decaying house named Hob’s End by the last occupiers, artists Ken and Julie Carrington, the landscape penetrating her work even as his dried up, faces concealed in brushstrokes of branch and undergrowth, and in contrast to many of the works with which it shares space it is the cool silence of the church which offers sanctuary and solace.
A story which would have as easily sat in Cornish Horrors, as would many of the companions it shares space with, the oldest selection in Circles of Stone is from J H Pearce, a tale told in the local dialect with helpful explanatory footnotes of a bargain struck beneath a Cromlech with a stranger who offers to share his peculiar knowledge, the deal made with The Man Who Could Talk with the Birds inevitably carrying a price.
Apposite for a candlelit tale recounted during a winter power cut titled, where most of the inclusions have been parsimonious in terms of dramatis personae, A L Rowse’s 1945 story The Stone That Liked Company opens with a convivial gathering of Fellows in the rooms of the Dean before moving to a teenage boy who in amateur archaeological pursuit takes it upon himself to excavate around “the Devil’s Walking-Stick;” the warning signs unheeded, the pattern of the past repeats, and the learned men sagely nod.
A writer whose work often tangled past and present, in 1949 Nigel Kneale built a bungalow named Minuke by the family who were beset by alarming incidents which escalated from annoying to dangerous, the house apparently possessed of a malicious presence presumably tied to the rock upon which it stood, a theory untested for none will remain near, and staying within living memory, from 1937 L T C Rolt writes with engineered proficiency of an extension to a racetrack which cut through the former site of a stone circle to create the New Corner, the drivers arriving with their high performance cars for the event finding the strange circumstances which plagued the construction persist during the time trials.
Unique in the collection in that it has a frame set in America, Lisa Tuttle sees the pragmatic attitudes of the new world at odds with the mists and myths of the old, a man recalling the tragedy of his childhood visit in the early sixties to a village on the coast of Devon Where the Stones Grow, upon the rocks the Three Sisters about whom he was told contradictory tales of how they came to be and how, on certain nights, they secretly made their way down the cliff to the water, persistent memories which penetrate the supposed safety of his homeland in 1980.
Closing Circle of Stones is the most recent story, Elsa Wallace reflecting her own childhood in Africa in her story of a woman who grew up the same way and presumed to be unaccustomed to sophisticated things, interested in but unintimidated by Stonehenge and Avebury as she visits distant cousins in England, among them Edie in the farm cottage in Puttsford who tells her of The Suppell Stone nearby which is something quite different, last vestige of a broken circle and full of resentful menace at the violation upon its sanctity.
Circles of Stone is available now from the British Library
