Saint Patrick's Chapel, Heysham

What links the patron saint of Ireland to the pioneers of heavy metal?

The answer is the village of Heysham in Lancashire, and specifically St Patrick's Chapel, which stands on a headland by St Peter's Church. Heysham village is a small, and rather scenic, part of Heysham town. Looking around, it seems that you don't have to be an artist to live there, but it certainly helps. Next door to the south is a nuclear power station and ferry to the Isle of Man, and to the north are the endless sands of Morecambe Bay. Across the sea the mountains of the Lake District are usually looming out of the clouds. 

The church itself is older than the Doomsday Book. There's the remains of a high cross, a stone depicting Lazarus, or maybe Jesus, rising from the grave and, best of all, a wonderful Viking Hogback Stone. This is a grave marker decorated with stories from Norse mythology, and was outside before being brought in for safety. These are a North of England thing, although there is one in Ireland, and they may be the Vikings learning to do art like the Anglo-Saxons. Unfortunately, the church is usually locked so most people only get to see it through the window.

The chapel is round the back, perched on the crumbling headland. It supposedly marks the place where Patrick returned from Ireland after spending six years a slave there. Paddy had supposedly been kidnapped by pirates from his home, although some scholars have speculated he was simply dodging some rather onerous public service on the town council.  

There's no other evidence that this was where Paddy landed. In his own account he landed in a 'wilderness' and had to walk 28 days to civilisation, growing faint from hunger, which doesn't say much for the welcome he received. However, he must have come ashore somewhere, and nowhere else has a serious claim. 

The chapel itself is in ruins now, but there is enough left to see what it would have been like. It's interesting enough and an important part of the history of Christianity in England. They found a pagan burial in its grounds when the archaeologists last had a poke around, but what's really interesting is the unique rock cuts graves nearby; six to the west and two to the east. If they look familiar, in the year 2000 Sanctuary Records released an 'unofficial' Best of Black Sabbath and put a moody black and white picture of the western graves on the sleeve. 

They are orientated east to west, which suggests they are Christian. When in use they probably had stone lids, and the sockets by their head may have held crosses. Although roughly person shaped, they are too small to hold a whole adult and the suggestion is that they held the preserved bones of particularly venerated individuals or saints.  

So, who would be the most venerated saint that they could have got their hands on? Well, the answer is obvious, Saint Patrick himself. The Irish will tell you he died in Downpatrick, on 17 March 461CE. However, they admit he had been living in England for a number of years before then and claim he took ship across the sea because he wanted to peg out in the Emerald Isle, which is possible. However, it's rather more believable that he died at home in England, and the idea that his bones eventually made their way to the spot where the sacred spot where he had first returned to England.

Sadly, all the archaeology places the chapel well after the time of Patrick, but there must be the slim chance that something else was here before this chapel and maybe there is some truth in the story. 

Worm Stones

 Location: Glossop, Derbyshire

Many of the liminal places in this blog aren't just on the edge in the imagination, they also occupy a place somewhere between certainty and speculation about the past.

Every square metre of Britain was, of course, once pagan, and mystics of old would have looked at every natural wonder and given most them a place in their shared mythology. Very occasionally we have an historical record of sorts. More often we have nothing at all. Sometimes, though, we have a clue.

The Worm Stones stand on Shaw Moor, clearly visible from the A624 as you leave the market town of Glossop heading towards Hayfield. They stand on the edge of open access land. To their east is Chunal Moor, and then the high plateau of Kinder Scout. To their west is the Greater Manchester urban conglomeration. Depending on your point of view, they either stand guard over the town, or hold back the urban jungle.

For most ramblers they are, at most, a place for a rest and a sandwich. There is a, now very hard to find, footpath that leads to the shooting cabin that can be seen to the north, or you can carry on to the trig point called Harry Hut, then turn left to climb Kinder, passing on the way the wreck of a Liberator bomber. This crashed during World War Two, and is one of the better preserved wrecks in the area. Although both crewmen were injured, they lived to tell the tale, which was unusual.

Long before that though this was the land of the pagan Brigantes. This was before the Romans came, and then after they left it was the home of the Anglo-Saxon Pecsaetan tribe, who were equally pagan but in a different way. The Pecsaetans have left us little but their name, which means peaklanders. Glossop also got its name from the Anglo-Saxons and was originally Glott's Hop. Glott must have been somebody in his time, which was probably the seventh century, and his Hop was his valley.

We don't know how old the name Worm Stones is. However, there is reason to think that it too might be Anglo-Saxon. In the language of their mythology a drake was a flying dragon, like Smaug in The Hobbit,  but a dragon without wings that crawled was a wyrm. A better translation would be 'great serpent', and wyrms are clearly related to the beasts of Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Biblical stories.

Visit this place with that in mind, and it is not long before the eroded limestone brings forth a face and other features. These rocks on which the occasional weary walker rests his bottom could easiy be a sleeping dragon, a secret guardian of this wild place.

Tread carefully then, and respectfully.

Cockersand Moss Temple

Location: Cockerham, Lancashire

Cockersand Abbey is the remains of a twelth century Christian priory, located between Blackpool and Lancaster on the Lancashire coast. All that remains today, apart from a few fragmens of wall, is the octagonal chapter house, and only because the it was used as a mauseleum by the local landed gentry. It stands on the edge of concrete sea defences, with a view of Heysham nuclear power station. Nearby a coastguard station stands empty and derelict. Perhaps not the most liminal place you can imagine, but there is more here than meets the eye.

In 1718 two Roman statuettes were found nearby. They have since been 'lost' - which we can read as stolen - but the inscritions of them have been recorded. These state that the figures were dedicated to Mars Donotus and Mars Nodontis. Now we are all familiar with the pantheon of Roman gods Mars, Jupiter etc. But when you get a god with a double barrelled name, like these, it usually means that the Romans have grafted on to a local deity the name of the god they think he or she most resembles. An example is Sulis Minerva, the goddess of the baths in Bath.

Donotus and Nodontis are probably the same chap. A local spelling, or a mispelling, of the Celtic god Nodens, who has a well preserved temple in Lydney Park, Gloucester-shire. Nodens, who also appears as one of the good guys in H P Lovecraft's mythos, appears to be the British version of the Irish god Nuada, who appears in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, otherwise known as the Book of Invasions, as the man with the silver hand to helps the good people of the Tuatha De Danaan defeat the Fir Bolg, but dies in the final battle.

So thanks to the Romans we know name of one of the local Celtic gods of this area. The odds are that there was a tmeple round here then. We don't know where abouts exactly, but in the past the marsh would have been a lot marshier, and as neither Pagans nor Christians like getting their feet wet when they worship, both the abbey and temple were probably built in about the same place. 

When visiting Cockersand Moss then you need a bit of an imagination.

Ignore the sea wall, the nuclear power station, the nearby farm with its huge slurry tank, and even the crumbling stones of the abbey, and think your way back to Britain before the Romans arrived, when all that would have been her was the wind, the sea, the marsh, and whatever simple temple was built here.

If you do so, then you can perhaps get close to how it may have been, two thousand years ago, when our ancestors visited this desolate, and probably dangerous, marsh to worship the warrior god with the silver arm.

References

http://roman-britain.co.uk/places/cockersand_moss.htm

The Roman Inscriptions of Britain by R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright (Oxford 1965)

Nuada The High King by Jim Fitzpatrick

Lindow Moss

 Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire

If you want to know what a liminal place was for the ancient Celtic people of this land, look no further than Lindow Moss, in Cheshire.

Located next to the well-healed commuter town of Wilmslow, where the 1% of Greater Manchester live, not a lot of the original moss is left.

However if you visit Lindow Common, on the outskirts of the town, preferably in the early morning, when the dog walkers are thinner on the ground, and ideally when a mist still hangs over the waters of the mere, you get some idea of what it was like here two thousand years ago. Seeing your reflection in the black water, the Otherworld of Celtic myth, a place of light and shadow, joy and terror, that lurks just beneath or below our world, can seem very real.

Most of the rest of the moss has now been drained, allowing the peat that has built up over the centuries to be dig up and used as an extremely unsustainable form of compost. In 1984 it was peat cutters who found the person who makes this area famous: Lindow Man, or, as the locals called him, Pete Marsh.

What they actually found first was the head of a woman. The police used the discovery to prompt a Mr Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in 1960, but it turned out the body was much more interesting, being nearly 2000 years old.

The next year the even better preserved body of Lindow Man was found. A healthy young man, who had done no hard labour prior to his death, he was naked and died either by strangulation by a  leather cord, a blow to the head, drowning, or possibly all three. He also had traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids. His 'triple death' mirrors that recorded in Celtic myth, and coupled with the liminal place in which he was found, suggests human sacrifice. We can't be sure, and don't know if he was genuinely posh, or just given a year or so of living like king in exchange for being given a ritual death.

Radio carbon dating places his death in approximately the first century AD, right about the time that the Romans were conquering this part of the known world. Could Lindow Man have been an offering to the Gods, asking them to turn back the seemingly unstoppable legions with their suspiciously straight roads?

When I first came to this area it was also to stop something. As anyone who visits the place will immediately notice, we are right next to Manchester airport here. In 1997 protesters were occupying land nearby to stop the construction of a second runway, living in primitive camps. I, like the notorious human mole Swampy, was busy digging myself into the clay soil, with the aim of making it more difficult for us to be evicted, and hoping I would not be sacrificing myself in the process.

In the end we were all removed by the forces of law and order, and just before the construction crews moved in, archaeologists were allowed to explore the area. Underneath our camp they found the remains of a bronze age village.

Did the people of this village know Pete Marsh, I wonder? And if so, what did they do when they
realised their magic had not worked? Did they continue to visit this liminal place, and to worship the old gods, or did their faith come to an end?

I didn't stop Manchester Airport's second trunway either, but I still visit the moss. On one day in April 2010 my faith was rewarded though. An Icelandic volcano had grounded flights, and I walked across the moss to an airport that was as silent as the woods I passed through. For a little while I could pretend we'd won. 

So this is a very special liminal place for me, one that links this world to the Otherworld, the present to the Celtic past and my life as it is now to the more carefree days of my youth.

Incidentally, ignore the grid reference for the location of the find given on Wikipedia, in the guide book and the various press releases. The actual spot is just off Moor Lane. Peat cutting has now finished here, so nobody knows if there are more bodies waiting to be discovered, including the unfortunately Mrs Reyn-Bardt.

Liminal Places of England

 If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite' 

William Blake

A liminal place is a threshold between the mundane and the numinous. It is somewhere where you can be 'between the world's'. The Romans used the word 'numinous' for the divine or the supernatural, and Tolkien would later use and adapt it for his Atlantis-like island, Numenor.

In 1972, the year after the first Glastonbury Festival, Janet and Colin Bords produced a book called Mysterious Britain. It was a guide to Britain listing a smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects: ley lines, UFOs - which were so popular at that time that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land - as well as stone circles, holy wells, ghosts, 'pagan' folk customs and King Arthur.

The book was part of the 're-enchantment of Britain', a second era of romanticism, when hippies and flower children, fed on the vibes emanating out from San Francisco, sought Avalon in England's green and pleasant land. In doing so they linked up with the Celtic revival movement and the rebirth of paganism in the British Isles.

The publication of similar books persists to this day, and it seems I own most of them. As a result I have now been to enough of these otherworldly spaces to write my own blog. So here are the places that have moved me most. Whether it is their history or their beauty, their use by pagans old or new, their importance to Celtic culture or the counter-cultures; what they have in common is that they are places for retreat or spiritual contemplation.

Visit them yourself, please, but follow these rules: be reverent to the genius loci of the place, travel wisely, litter not, and leave only your footprints behind you.