Please tell me if I can be of any further assistance to any of you, and I look forward to experiencing the church if ever it is built. But we must get together before that.
With every good wish,
Starlight
PS Some of my old, as Electra would say, ‘out of the world’ associates are inclined to think your friend’s interpretations of his remarkable discovery tend toward the prosaic, but I suppose his provincial background is a bit of a constraint!
That night, Jane went out with Eirion and Merrily went over to Lol’s. They set off to walk to Coleman’s Meadow, and she showed him the email.
‘If one of them’s Elgar, it’s probably going to be Sirius.’
It was a warm night, the northern sky still a shimmering electric blue. Lol said that the weather forecast had suggested tomorrow would be the hottest day of the year so far.
‘So Electra … ?’
‘Would be Alice, who’d died some years earlier.’
‘Music of the most exalted power,’ Merrily said. ‘What does that say to you?’
‘I think it says, even with a Boswell guitar don’t get any ideas.’
Coleman’s Meadow was empty. Lol said there’d been Hereford cattle last time he was here, but now only a few rabbits bobbed around on the eastern fringe, by the thorn hedge.
The path through the middle of the meadow was strikingly evident, even among the shadows. Even when it disappeared through the gate and into the undergrowth, you could feel it burrowing like a live cable to light up the summit of Cole Hill, which, at nearly ten p.m., was ambered by an almost unearthly sunset afterglow.
‘What do you think?’ Lol said. ‘Worth saving?’
PART THREE
‘From chanting comes the word enchantment and it was largely by chanting that the Druids kept up the spell of enchantment which they spread across each of the Celtic kingdoms.’
31
On the Line
No point in worrying. It probably wouldn’t be in today’s paper, anyway. After Jane had asssured him that no other media had been in touch, Jerry Isles had said they might well hold it over for a day. Later, media-savvy Eirion had explained that it was a soft story, therefore expendable.
Every time she’d awoken in the night, Jane had been hoping, increasingly, that they’d just dump it. After all, it wasn’t much of a story in the great scheme of things, was it? And what, in the end, was it likely to achieve, apart from dropping her in some deep shit with Morrell?
Still, she was up before Mum and outside the Eight Till Late not long after it opened, this horrible queasy feeling at the bottom of her stomach. Despite the shop’s name, Big Jim Prosser opened around seven, with all these morning papers outside on the rack – Suns, Mirrors, Independents.
No Guardians, however, this morning. Maybe not many people took it in Ledwardine, or they’d all gone for delivery.
The air was already warm, in line with the forecast on Eirion’s car radio last night that this would be the first really hot day of the summer. Ledwardine looked impossibly beautiful, quiet and shaded and guarded by the church, with its glistening spire, and the enigmatic pyramid of Cole Hill. Everything serene and ancient and … vulnerable. Jane felt as though she was carrying the weight of all that late-medieval timber-framing on her shoulders, and was about to duck away when Big Jim appeared in the shop doorway.
‘Lovely morning, Jane. Looking for anything in particular, is it?’
‘No, I—’
‘Daily Telegraph? Times?’
‘Erm, it was just a Guardian, but if they’ve all gone it doesn’t matter.’
‘Just a Guardian, eh?’ Jim Prosser had his hands behind his back, looking kind of smug. ‘Oh, they’ve gone, all right. Every single one. Last one got snapped up five minutes before you come in. ’Fact, I just had to turn one feller away.’
‘Oh.’ Jane edged towards the door. ‘Right. Never mind, then.’
This didn’t necessarily mean anything.
‘Lyndon Pierce, it was,’ Jim said happily, the words coming down like the blade of a guillotine. ‘I think he’s driven over to Weobley to try and get one there. Didn’t look a happy man, somehow. Can’t imagine why.’
‘Oh God.’ Jane went hot and cold. ‘They used it, didn’t they?’
‘Used what?’
‘Don’t make me suffer even more, Jim. What did it say?’
‘Well, seeing it’s you, Jane…’ Jim brought a paper out from behind his back. ‘I’ll let you have a quick glance at my own copy, if you like.’
‘You take the Guardian?’
‘I do today,’ Jim said.
He led her inside and spread the paper on the counter, folded at an inside news page, and, Oh God, there it was: in Guardian terms, a big spread, although – Oh God, no – most of the space was taken up by the full-colour picture.
The photographer had been standing on the stile at the bottom of Cole Hill, focusing down on Jane, and now you could see why she’d done it from that angle: Jane’s face was in close-up, unsmiling, moody, with the path racing away over her shoulder, all the way to the church steeple. They’d done something to it with a computer, shading the edges so that the ley looked almost as if it was glowing.
Underneath, a second picture showed a section of Ordnance Survey map, with the ley points encircled, just like Alfred Watkins used to do it.
Altogether, not a story you could easily miss.
Village future on the line, schoolgirl warns
—————————
Jeremy Isles
—————————
A schoolgirl is fighting county planners to defend the legacy of the man whose discovery of ley lines has been causing nationwide controversy for more than eighty years.
Planning officials in Herefordshire were ready to accept an application for new housing in the historic village of Ledwardine in the north of the county, when the vicar’s daughter Jane Watkins, 18, accused them of destroying the sacred heritage of the community.
Ms Watkins says a proposed estate of 24 ‘luxury homes’ would obliterate what she insists is a prehistoric straight track, or ley, linking several sacred sites including her mother’s church and the summit of what she claims is the village’s ‘holy hill’. Ley hunters all over Britain are now set to join the protest.
The theory of ley lines was floated in 1925 by Alfred Watkins (no relation), a Hereford brewer and pioneer photographer, in his book The Old Straight Track, which is still in print and something of a bible for New Agers and ‘earth mysteries’ enthusiasts. The latest theories suggest that Watkins’s leys are lines of earthenergy or possibly spirit paths along which the souls of the dead were believed to be able to travel.