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Chronicon de Artur, Padiham (2026)

09/11/2025

Lovely sky on my walk this morning

06/11/2025

A bit of a brighter finish today

06/11/2025

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh

There are cliffs in Northumberland where the wind carries memory. Where Spindleston Heugh rises jagged against the sky, the sea gnaws at its base, and gulls wheel above like watchers in a silent court.

On some nights, the spray and mist seem almost alive, curling around the rocks, hiding something that moves too slowly to be seen, yet leaves the earth trembling in its passage.

This was where the Laidly Worm made its home.

In Bamborough Castle there lived a king with a fair wife and two children, Childe Wynd and Princess Margaret.

When Childe Wynd went forth to seek his fortune, the queen—his mother—died, and the king mourned her long. In time, he brought a new bride to the halls, a woman whose beauty was as striking as it was false.

Princess Margaret greeted her with obedience and courtesy, handing over the keys of the castle, bowing low with cheeks blushing, eyes to the ground.

The new queen, however, whispered curses beneath her breath: “At least your courtesy might have excepted me… I’ll soon put an end to her beauty.”

That night, the queen, a woman versed in dark arts, went down to a lonely dungeon, stirring spells three times three, passes nine times nine, weaving a charm meant to enslave.

With incantation she bound Margaret in form:

“I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
And borrowed shall ye never be,
Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son,
Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
Until the world comes to an end,
Borrowed shall ye never be.”

When dawn broke, Margaret rose not as herself, but as a coiling, dreadful worm. Her scales glimmered like wet iron, her snout lifted to the sky, and her eyes burned with a sorrow no one dared approach.

The maidens fled shrieking, and the worm crept, uncoiling, across the castle floors, down to the Heugh, where it wrapped itself around the stone and sun, a creature both monstrous and mournful.

The land came to fear her.

Livestock vanished.

Hunger stalked the hills.

The people, desperate, sought the counsel of a mighty warlock. He decreed that she be fed: seven kine, their milk carried daily to the foot of the Heugh.

This sustenance quelled her hunger, yet she remained ensorcelled, a form neither fully human nor beast.

To break the spell, Childe Wynd, her brother, must come—across the seas, shielded by rowan timber and courage alike.

The journey was perilous. The witch-queen, sensing fate against her, sent storms and imps to thwart him, but the rowan-keel of the ship bore Childe Wynd safely.

When he arrived, the Laidly Worm emerged to confront him, yet she struck not.

Her jaws opened, and Margaret’s own voice came forth:

“O, quit your sword, unbend your bow,
And give me kisses three;
For though I am a poisonous worm,
No harm I'll do to thee.”

Three kisses, three heartbeats, and the enchantment shattered.

The worm’s scales fell away; the princess stood restored. Childe Wynd approached the witch-queen, touched her with a rowan twig, and she became a toad, hopping away as punishment for her malice.

Order returned to Bamborough, but the land never forgot. Sometimes a loathsome toad is seen, a whisper of past curses, a shadow of ancient magic lingering on the Heugh.

Dragons Without Death: Celtic Memory in the Laidly Worm

This tale is older than the scribes of 1778 might suggest. Childe Wynd does not slay; he redeems.

The dragon is not a foe to be pierced, but a burden to be understood, fed, and released.

In this, it recalls Celtic and Pictish traditions, where serpents, dragons, and wyrms were embodiments of the land itself—its hunger, its fertility, its storms.

Where the Saxon or Norse tales depict heroes vanquishing beasts in the name of conquest or kingship, the Laidly Worm demonstrates mercy, patience, and ritual care.

The rowan—a sacred tree in pre-Christian belief—protects the hero; the number seven—cow, milk, kiss—carries echoes of Indo-European numerology, sacred cycles, and cosmological order.

Dragons here are weather, desire, hunger; they coil and breathe as expressions of forces beyond human command.

The wicked stepmother is the true antagonist, yet she too is bound by the magical logic of the story.

Transformation, rather than slaughter, carries the lesson: malevolence is contained, balance restored.

Magic is woven not merely for spectacle but to mark thresholds, maintain equilibrium, and teach stewardship over the land and its unseen currents.

The cliffs of Spindleston Heugh are sharp and wind-swept still.

The gulls cry above, and the sea coils in rhythm with the tide, as if echoing the old wyrm’s coils.

Rowan trees grow in the hedgerows; numbers echo in stone and place: seven crags, three gulls, nine folds of cliff.

This is not a tale of conquest.

It is a memory, older than the Saxon chronicles, older than the Norse sagas, rooted in the pre-Indo-European landscape where dragons were not killed, but named, fed, and understood.

Margaret rises from the story as both serpent and woman, a reminder that fear and magic are not always foes, and that mercy can restore balance where violence might only destroy.

The Laidly Worm waits in legend, coiled beneath the cliffs, in every shadow, every whisper of wind along the Northumbrian coast.

A reminder that some dragons are only tamed, never slain.

06/11/2025

Bit of a grey start to the day today. No lovely sunrise this morning. Hope you all have a great day

05/11/2025

When The Marsh Breathed Thunder

There are places in Lancashire where the ground remembers storms.

The marshes near Unsworth are quiet now, drained, built over, but once they were restless.

Mist rising from black pools. Rushes shifting when no wind blew.
Something enormous was said to move there. Coiled in the reeds, scales gleaming like wet iron, breath steaming in the morning chill.

It took the cattle.

The sheep.

The children.

Its eyes glowed at dusk. Its roar shook the hills as if the sky itself had broken.

Thomas Unsworth knew it by sight, or by instinct.

The dragon had come to his lands, a storm in flesh, a hunger that could not be reasoned with.

Men fired at it with muskets, but bullets rang harmless off scales harder than steel.

Only one plan remained.

Thomas loaded his musket, not with bullets, but with a dagger.
He heard the hiss and rattle of the monster’s approach; the marsh steam thickened; something vast moved behind it.
He raised the weapon.
The beast lifted its throat to strike.
The dagger found its mark.

A shudder ran through the creature. It writhed. It shrieked. Then fell, shaking the reeds flat as it died.

The village remembered.

Thomas carved the story into oak, a great table, hewn and shaped by his own hands.

St George and the dragon. An eagle and child. A lion and unicorn.
And at the centre, himself: a man in black armour, battle-axe raised, the Unsworth crest above his head.

Other carvings circled the edge: serpents with wings like sphinxes, serpents with the faces of old men, serpents whose tongues and tails both stung.

Beneath one, the initials C. V., craftsman or owner, no one remembers.

The hand mattered less than the pattern.

Seven heads. Three children devoured. Two days and a night.
The serpent turning three times twice.

Those numbers echoed in every dragon tale, the Worm of Lambton, the Worm of Wantley, the beasts that throttled the land until pierced.

Hardwick saw it. Harland and Wilkinson copied it down in 1873.

The dragon was never merely a beast.

It was the storm, the drought, the hunger that swept across the moors when the rain refused to fall.

When the marsh dried to cracked clay and cattle starved, the story gave the suffering a face.

To slay the dragon was to break the spell of weather.
Every county had its version of that same rite.
Each hero his own storm to face.

The carved table is gone; Unsworth Hall demolished in 1960.
But the family crest endures, and the old field names whisper their history, Dragon’s Croft, Wyrm Brook, Serpent Marsh.

Sometimes memory does not fade; it hides beneath foundations.
When the wind moves across the lowland, it carries an echo of scales, breath, and triumph.

I have walked where the marshes once lay, among housing estates, roads, and trimmed hedges.

But at dusk, where the land still dips and rainwater pools, there is a listening quality to the air.

Not for a beast, but for something that once demanded to be named.

Thomas Unsworth did not merely strike a dragon.
He translated fear into form.

He carved it into oak so that others might remember and, by remembering, contain it.

Like the shepherd above Clitheroe who waited for the Midsummer fires before driving his flock uphill.

Like those who rolled burning wheels into rivers to “cool the sun.”

All were rehearsals of the same battle, fire against storm, courage against what the weather might do.

We make our dragons so we can name the forces that undo us.

In naming them, we make them something that might be faced.

The dragon of Unsworth sleeps now, if it ever woke, but the pattern lingers, in the crest, in the drained marsh, in the rhythm of stories told by those who could not command the storm,
but could give it a name.

04/11/2025

The Flower That Swam Upstream

Along the wet banks of the Ribble,
where the meadows lean into the ditches
and the wind smells faintly of salt and iron,
there grows a small white flower that witches cannot cross.

A hedge-bloom so slight the wind might forget it, yet one petal pinned to a coat could turn aside the Devil himself.

The old name is Pimpernel.

In the fields near Preston, and the lanes of Lune, folk once called it Christ’s Ground Herb —
for it was said to spring only where His blood once fell.

When fear of witchcraft hung over the county like mist, women wore it at the breast, and men stitched its likeness into their caps.

A charm against deceit.

A shield against the evil eye.

A hedge between the soul and malice.

They tell that if the flower were dropped into running water, it would move against the current — a sign that no darkness could drag it downstream.

The Charm of Mother Bumby

In a faded manuscript kept in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, an old hand — perhaps trembling, perhaps deliberate — wrote:

“The herb pimpernel is good to prevent witchcraft, as Mother Bumby doth affirm.”

And beneath it, the gathering words:

Herb pimpernel I have thee found,
Growing upon Christ Jesus’ ground;
The same gift the Lord Jesus gave unto thee,
When He shed His blood upon the tree.
Arise up, pimpernel, and go with me,
And God bless me, and all that shall wear thee. Amen.

Harland and Wilkinson record that it was to be spoken fifteen days together, twice a day — morning early, fasting; evening full.

A discipline of hunger and faith.

A prayer made with the lips and the body.

They called such verses white charms —
Christian words folded around pagan memory.

Each repetition was a binding:
herb and speaker twined together, the holy and the hedge-grown reconciled.

A County of Wards and Tokens

Charles Hardwick wrote that Lancashire,
“where witchcraft most fearfully raged,”
was a land thick with protections.

At Goosnargh, they say a farmer’s wife
tied pimpernel and rowan with red thread above her churn, so no spell could steal the cream.

Rowan-twigs guarded the doors.

Horseshoes, turned point-up, caught the Devil’s stride.

And in the rafters of old barns hung a sprig of pimpernel, dry but watchful, set there to keep the night-hag from pressing on the dreamer.

In such houses the herb was not ornament but sentinel.

It watched by the cradle.

It guarded the milk.

It whispered between the beams and the smoke.

And when misfortune passed — a cow gone barren, milk soured, a child fevered — they said it was pimpernel that had stood the first watch and turned the curse aside.

The Living Prayer

To hold a sprig of pimpernel was to hold a fragment of order in a world that trembled at every sickness and shadow.

It was no grand relic, no priest’s reliquary, only a field-flower that remembered light.

The wise women — those half-believed, half-feared — used it to cleanse their blades,
to draw a circle of safety before the working of charms.

Others whispered that the herb carried its own will, and when placed upon water it sought its master, moving upstream until it found him.

Such tales do not ask to be proved.

They endure because someone once believed them.

Because belief itself is a kind of magic.

I walked once through the lanes near Garstang in late spring.

In the ditch-banks, small white heads lifted to the sun.

Pimpernel, they said.

Hard to tell among the grasses — but I thought then of the old verse murmured fifteen mornings in a row, and of the hand that wrote it in the Chetham’s book: faith inked into paper as surely as it was spoken into air.

A prayer against what cannot be seen.

A hope that still bends the water upstream.

Brother Artur’s Marginalia

In older lands, the Romans called it pimpinella,
a herb of purification and courage.

Monks later traced its power to Christ’s passion — a neat grafting of older green magic onto holy ground.

Every age rewrites its protections.

The pimpernel endured because it lived at the border:
between prayer and charm, field and altar,
science and superstition.

Perhaps that is why it was trusted more than most.

It asked for no temple, no priest — only belief.

And belief, like a root beneath stone, will always find a way to live.

04/11/2025

Good morning Tuesday everyone hope you have a great day

03/11/2025

The Devil at Cockerham

They still speak of a churchyard at Cockerham
wind-bitten, sea-facing, ringed with stones as grey as bone.

They say the Devil himself once walked there,
unfettered and unchained,
his coat a strange weaving of blue and green —
a colour the world has never seen again.

He came when the wide gates of Hell yawned open,
and his crew — spirits of smoke and mire —
rose from the ground like steam from a dying fire.

They took what shapes they pleased:
snakes, plumed worms, shadows that whispered laughter.

And where they passed, order faltered.
Bread failed to rise.
Cattle sickened.

Men crossed themselves twice at dusk.

At last the folk of Cockerham gathered in fear.

They called upon their schoolmaster —
a man of letters, proud of his craft —
to see if learning might bind the Devil fast again.

So one dim evening, in the schoolhouse by the churchyard,
he barred the doors, sealed the windows,
and began his conjuring —
with the gypsies’ blarney, the witches’ cant,
and words he half-believed and half-feared.

From the shadows, the air thickened…
and there stood the Devil himself:
horns curled like rams, eyes wide as saucers,
tail uncoiled behind him like a living whip of night.

The Devil thundered:

“Three questions shalt thou ask of me —
fail, and thou shalt come with me to my hut below.”

The poor man trembled, yet managed to speak.

“Tell me,” said he,

“How many drops of dew hang upon yonder hedge?”

The Devil’s imps flew forth, counting each glimmering bead before it fell.

“Then tell me,” said the master,

“How many stalks of wheat stand in this field?”

The Devil laughed, swung his scythe once,
bound the sheaves, and gave the number true.

The schoolmaster’s heart sank —
but his wit did not fail him.
He spoke a third time:

“Make me a rope of sand, good sir —
one that shall bear washing in the Cocker stream,
and lose not a strand.”

The Devil twisted a shining rope from the shore, dragged it to the river. The moment the water touched it, the rope fell apart, crumbled to dust, and was gone.

With a roar like thunder, he knew he was beaten.

Up he flew to the steeple,
and thence in one stride to Pilling Bridge, a leap of seven miles across the moss.

They call it still The Devil’s Stride.
When the winter fog rolls over Pilling Moss, some say his fury still murmurs beneath the soil.

I have walked that ground —
the church quiet, the stones green with age.

There was no scent of brimstone,
only the salt of the sea.

But I thought then of the schoolmaster —
a simple man who faced the darkness
not with holy water,
but with a riddle.

And I wondered if cleverness, too,
might be a kind of prayer.

Have you walked the mosslands near Pilling?

Do the locals still whisper of the Devil’s stride?

Tell me what stories you’ve heard — and keep Lancashire’s old voices alive.

Source: Harland & Wilkinson in Lancashire Legends (1867), who gathered it from the folk of Cockerham parish.

Image credit: owners

03/11/2025

Happy Monday people. Have a great week

02/11/2025

The Pilgrim’s Shadow: Santiago de Compostela

There is a road in the north of Spain that has walked with time.

It stretches beneath the weight of centuries — stone and earth, dust and sky. With every footstep, it hums: a low, eternal call to those who would listen.

The Camino de Santiago is not just a journey. It is a memory. A breath. An answer.

Every pilgrim who walks its path carries something unseen — a burden, a question, a ghost. The lost, the weary, the broken — all walk within the same silence.

The air, thick with ancient footsteps, presses close.

And yet it is the silence that speaks the loudest.

The Road of Lost Souls

The wind here does not whisper. It calls. It has always called.

It carries the weight of centuries — the steps of saints and sinners, of the broken-hearted and the broken-bodied who have left their mark, like ghosts, in the dust.

And though the road has been worn smooth by a thousand journeys, there are moments — in the quietest places — when the earth feels unfamiliar, as though remembering something it cannot forget.

The stones crackle beneath your boots — not the sound of a well-travelled path, but of something ancient stirring beneath the surface.

There are places where the road seems to speak. Where the earth breathes. Where shadows linger longer than they should.

They follow you, but never too close — a flicker at the edge of vision, a stretch of darkness cast by a fading sun.

You may never know if it is your own, or another’s — someone who walked this road before, or who will walk it long after.

But they are there, waiting, until the night falls and the earth remembers.

The Call of Santiago

The pilgrim’s journey is not measured by the miles behind them, nor by the weight of their pack, but by what they leave behind — the burdens shed into the dust: fear, regret, hope, even faith.

The road does not promise answers, only questions.

Who are you, when no one is watching?

And yet, above all the doubt, there rises a call — a sound like a distant bell, ringing across the sky.

It is Santiago’s voice: the saint whose bones rest in Compostela, whose steps echo through the centuries, whose whisper draws the weary onward.

The land itself remembers. Some say the spirit of Santiago walks with every pilgrim, unseen, guiding, pulling.

The air is heavy with the memory of those who gave everything — their breath, their belief, their blood.

“El Camino es la vida.” The road is life.

But sometimes, it is also death.
And sometimes, death and life walk hand in hand.

The Pilgrim’s Reckoning

As the day wears on, the pilgrim’s steps grow heavy. Muscles ache. Breath grows shallow.

In the stillness of midday, beneath the olive trees, the air seems to hold its breath. Even the wind hesitates. The land here is old — older than saints, older than prayer. The soil still remembers blood.

And the pilgrim feels it — that slow shift from body to heart.

The question presses closer:
What am I walking towards?
And, more haunting still:
What am I walking away from?

Nearer to Santiago, the ache deepens — not in the legs, but in the soul. The cathedral glimmers faintly on the horizon, not as an ending, but as an answer deferred — or perhaps, as another question.

A Step Beyond
At last, Santiago de Compostela rises before them — the cathedral like an altar of time, its spires cutting the sky.

The pilgrim enters its shadow, carrying the dust of a hundred miles.

Inside, the air is thick with incense and the scent of old stone. Beneath the floor lie the bones of Santiago — and something older still: the road itself, alive in the silence.

Here, the pilgrim feels a stirring — not of arrival, but of release.

The road has not ended. Not truly.

The moment of arrival is the beginning of another. The Camino begins again.

The Road Does Not End
The pilgrim leaves the cathedral. The weight is gone, yet something lingers — a hum beneath the earth.

The road that brought them here is not finished. It never is.

It calls again, soft but certain — pulling them onward, beyond the city walls, into the dark hills where another pilgrimage begins.

For the pilgrim has crossed more than distance. They have crossed a threshold.

They know, now:
The road is never complete.

It is not Santiago’s face they see, but the shadow of the road itself — stretching ahead into the night.

And as the first stars rise, they step forward once more. The earth shifts beneath their feet. The road hums softly.

Somewhere in the distance, another pilgrim’s footsteps answer.

Photo credit owners

02/11/2025

Sunset over Waddington to finish off the week. Anyone get up to anything Halloweeney this weekend?

02/11/2025

Foundations of Lancashire Folklore – Day 56 The Battle of Billington Moor, 798 AD

There are places in Lancashire where time does not lie in a straight line.

Where the earth remembers what was done upon it.

Billington Moor is one of those places.

A gentle sweep of fields now, rolling above the Ribble.

A view toward Whalley Nab. Toward Pendle, distant and watchful.

But in the year 798, the moor was alive with war.

The Chronicle’s Words

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it briefly:
"In this year Eardwulf fought at Billington against Wada, who was put to flight."

No numbers. No speeches. No heroes named.
Just one line. Stark, like a spear through history.

Yet within that line lies a story of betrayal and vengeance.

Of a son avenging a father. Of a kingdom teetering on decay.

Æthelred, Eardwulf’s father, had been slain by his own nobles. Among them, Wada, lord of these valleys, betrayed him.

Years later, Eardwulf rose to the throne. And one day he came west, to confront the man who had killed his blood.

The Battle

Billington Moor commands the Ribble’s crossings.

No soldier would meet an enemy there by accident.

On that day, two forces clashed.

Eardwulf’s men pressed forward. Shields rang against iron. Spears shattered.

Wada’s men held briefly, then scattered.

He himself fled into exile; the precise destination is uncertain, though some later sources suggest he may have found refuge in Mercia.

For one day, Eardwulf’s vengeance was complete.

For one day, the blood of kings ran through Lancashire soil.

What the Moor Remembers

The land has been ploughed, fenced, and built upon.

Yet old voices claimed the soil never rests where battle once raged.

Shepherds and farmers still speak of hollows that feel “uneasy underfoot,” where cattle will not graze after rain, and where mist sometimes lingers longer than anywhere else.

Lines of mist march across the grass, vanishing if approached.

Faint hoofbeats echo when the wind shifts.
A clatter of iron, though no forge lies near.

Antiquaries in 1842 found spearheads and rusted metal near the moor’s edge.

The items were lost, as such things often are.
But the landscape itself remembers the clash of men and the weight of history.

Autumn light falls low across the moor, brushing the grass with gold and shadow.
A sudden gust carries the chill of coming winter.

The land remembers. It breathes. It shifts.

Time Shifts

Step onto the moor now.
The motorway hums below.
The river bends broad and calm.
The hills hold their silence.

But stand long enough, and time blurs.
Eardwulf’s men forming ranks.

Wada fleeing. Spears rising, shields clattering.
The air smells of iron and smoke.

Rain begins to fall, cold and thin, carrying the echoes of what was done.

The soil remembers, stubbornly, like memory itself made flesh.

The wind moves across the grass. A faint cry rises.

The moor whispers what the Chronicle could only compress into one line.

Here, vengeance was exacted. Here, betrayal fled.

The blood of kings stained the earth.

Brother Artur’s Marginalia

I have walked Billington Moor at dusk, boots sinking into the soft grass, and felt the weight of centuries pressing down.

The moor does not sleep.

It holds the shape of what happened. Not a ghost in the usual sense—but memory itself, carried in the wind, the bend of the river, the slight unease in the soil beneath your feet.

Shepherds and farmers still speak of hollows that resist the plough, of cattle that will not graze certain spots, of lines of mist that march where men once fell.

Not legend, not invention. Observation. A quiet persistence of history.

The hoofbeats come. The lines of mist march.
Not to frighten, but to remind.

To mark what was done, and what never leaves the land.

The moor whispers of Eardwulf’s vengeance, of Wada’s flight into exile, and of blood spilled for kings and revenge.

It whispers of time layered like sediment, of memory that does not fade.

Of the moral weight of vengeance, and the way violence imprints itself upon both land and story.

And when the sun sets, the Ribble glints dull and red, as it did that day.

The moor does not forget.

It remembers everything.

Chronicon de Artur

09/11/2025

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