“There are upward of ninety on the wold and I have surveyed sixty-one. Sixty of them are graves and the country walks over them to reach the water. The interesting question has never been what is in the ninety. It is why the dale can tell you, without consulting anybody, which one is the sixty-first.”
As the graziers of the High Wold tell it
The drove came up the middle wold in the grey of the morning, and a quarter of a mile short of the best grazing on the wold the lead man stopped at a stone, or a thorn, depending on who is telling it, and turned the flock. The road bent there, and the bend cost half an hour. It was older than anybody’s mending of the road. A stranger walking with the drove asked which mound it was, and nobody pointed. Four of the five barrows the dale leaves alone have a name and a story apiece: a battle, a drowning, a plague pit, a hunt that did not come back. This one had neither. It was only ever the bad barrow.
The dale knew it by the animals. Sheep put on it drifted off within the hour, quietly, however often they were put back. The crows came down on the turf a chain off and never on the mound. An antiquary called Strangeways surveyed sixty-one of the mounds over four seasons, said in print that nothing marked the five out, and was not believed. The dale had never needed him to tell it which was which.
Then the old men tell the three times. In two centuries a flock has been pastured on one of the five three times. Twice the parish book says nothing afterwards. The third time it says something about a shepherd, and does not say what became of him. An upland man will allow that the odds look fair, and add that he does not mean to be the fourth.
What is known
There are upward of ninety barrows on the High Wold, in the northern march. Strangeways surveyed sixty-one, and in 4614 he published his finding: that neither size, nor shape, nor siting sets apart the five the country will not go near. Four of those five have names, the Harrow, the Nine Ridges, the Tarn Mound and the Long Man, and each has a story; of the four stories, three can be put to the test, and all three fail it, for the parish book shows the flocks already turned from each mound before its story was ever told. The bad barrow has no story at all. It has only the habit of going round it. That barrow and the Harrow are the two that no one within the record has opened, and at no barrow on the wold is any bell rung.
It is the priory’s position that the five are dangerous, on evidence that nobody now living can weigh, and that the avoiding of them should continue. The wardens begin elsewhere, with a single question: does the ground want anything? A presence, which is to say something there that may be addressed, will answer to offerings. A work, by which the wardens mean the lasting residue of something done in the ground long ago, has nothing in it that could answer. Which of the two the bad barrow may be, nobody knows. It is one mound on one wold; the settled shires have nothing like it.
