** (1) **
Struggling against the near-horizontal,
freezing-cold rain, Karen Hill walked down Dean Street towards the
place where she usually caught her taxi home. Holding her gaze
downwards, she ignored the occasional leering and commenting from
passing drunks. The fact that she was wearing a very short skirt
and an absurdly small top did not go unnoticed by many of these
ale-addled minds. It was late on a Friday evening, in mid
November, in the north eastern English city of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There were many people in the city centre
starting to make their way home after a night of drinking and
socialising. Karen, who had recently turned twenty years of age,
was mildly affected by the four bottles of alcoholic soda that she
had consumed that evening. As a result, she felt slightly
euphoric, and began thinking about the Christmas shopping trip
that had been planned with friends for the following
day.
After about five minutes into her walk home,
the rain began to pour down even more heavily. Karen hunched up
her shoulders, and with a noticeable scowl on her face, began to
walk faster down the long sloping street that had a taxi rank at
its end. It was as if she felt that having a bearing like this
could somehow lessen the effect on her of the rain, the wind and
the cold. The inadequacy of her clothing, however, was beginning
to take its toll. Together with countless other young people in
this city, she had insisted on dressing as if it was a balmy
summer’s evening. They had all agreed to this pretence, and to
dress otherwise, even on a night like this, would be to invite
peer derision. The men wore short-sleeved shirts or tee shirts,
and women wore light or short dresses together with summer tops.
But now, rain-lashed and engulfed by the numbing coldness, Karen
began to feel miserable.
The temperature hovered slightly above two
degrees Celsius, but it actually felt very much colder because of
the dampness that imbued the night air. A dampness that seemed not
only to come from the falling rain, but which also seemed to rise
up from beneath the wet glistening pavement stones, and to exude
from the cold stone walls of the splendid Georgian buildings which
ran uninterrupted down Dean Street.
In the yellow rain-strewn light surrounding
the street lamps, she could see further down the street a group of
young men eating takeaway food near to the entrance of an Indian
restaurant. Steam could be seen coming out of their opened
Styrofoam packages of ethnically contorted food. The group ate
voraciously, no doubt to satisfy a beer-induced hunger, and
peppered their late supper with succinct but loud conversation
delivered in the local Geordie dialect. Karen decided to cross
over to the other side of the street to avoid them. The street was
wide and she passed by on the other side without ever being
noticed. Even the rain was not able to dampen out the aroma of
curry that drifted across the street. This evening, however, she
did not feel like buying anything to eat, and just wanted to get
home as quickly as possible. Her arms, legs and face were now
anaesthetised with the cold, and her body was so soaked with the
rain that the top she was wearing had nearly become translucent.
Soon, she approached a part of Dean Street
where there was an old stone staircase, called Dog-Leap Stairs,
which led up to ruins of the city’s ancient defensive walls built
nearly one thousand years ago. This part of the street was
relatively quiet, and was even more so because of the foul weather
and the fact that it was now rather late. Despite the distraction
of her extreme discomfort, Karen managed to recall that her great
grandfather had once owned the old shop that stood at the foot of
this staircase. He had been a cobbler, but the building was now a
shop selling storage chests and suitcases called The Cargo Cult.
There had once been direct access to this part of the street from
the river Tyne, which now lay some fifty yards away. The staircase
had become known as Dog-Leap Stairs because apparently dogs were
apt to leap on to the staircase from docking sea vessels. The
recollection of this fact was the last thing Karen Hill ever
thought. She never saw her murderer, and never felt the lurking
presence as she passed by the staircase. It was all over in an
instant. And she never heard a voice call out from some point
nearby shortly afterwards: “Snaz, are you there? I’m back again.
Come on, we’ve only got ten minutes to catch it.”
** (2) **
Wet Rain Hill is a small village in the north
east of England. It is situated roughly five miles east of the
Northumbrian market town of Hexham, and about eighteen miles west
of the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The village is built on top of
a relatively large hill, and represents a perfect vantage from
which the windswept and rain-fed beauty of the surrounding
landscape can be seen. Vestiges of Hadrian’s Wall, also known as
the Roman Wall, can be seen to the north just beyond the Tyne
Valley. This wall, built around two thousand years ago, marked for
a time the northernmost boundary of Roman Britain. Most of the
stones used in the original wall, however, have long since been
removed and recycled into the many dry stone walls, which for
centuries have been used as lines of demarcation in this
agricultural landscape. Land used for grazing sheep and cattle
together with ploughed arable land combine to form a patchwork of
field colours and textures.
The layout of Wet Rain Hill is much like any
other of the picturesque and quiet villages in this area. It has a
wide main street, simply called Main Street, along which most of
the original village dwellings lie. These include a sprinkling of
small stone cottages and a few larger stone houses. On the north
side of Main Street there is also a public house called the
Blackbird, together with a general store and a post office. In
between the Blackbird and the general store lies the small village
green and war memorial. Visible behind a stone wall at the back of
the village green and accessible only via a lich gate situated on
Church Lane lying slightly further to the west and running
approximately northwards off Main Street, is the village church of
St George’s. The church lies almost in the middle of a large
graveyard, surrounded for the most part by a stone wall. Sections
of the church, including the belfry, date at least as far back as
the early seventeenth century and possibly even earlier. The
village church was the scene of a recorded clash between the
Scottish Covenanters and King Charles 1’s Royalist forces during
the First English Civil War of the early 1640’s.
On the south side of Main Street, together
with a row of stone cottages, is a small school building that is
still in use as the village primary school. The oldest part of the
school, as indicated by a stone inscription above the main
doorway, dates back to sixteen forty-nine, the year of King
Charles 1’s execution. To the rear of the school there is a large
yard surrounded by an imposing tall stone wall. This wall serves
to protect the children playing in the yard from the cold winds
that sweep across the land for most of the year. It also blocks
the view down to the foot of the southern side of the hill,
stretching for roughly one mile. This particular hillside is
locally referred to as Wet Rain Hill, though strictly speaking the
name also applies to the entire hill on which the village is
built. The southern aspect of the hill would seem to be thus named
because, given the slight declination of the village towards the
south, much of the surface rainwater drains down this part of the
hill into the valley below. A small stream, or burn as they are
called in northern England and Scotland, called Liz’s Burn flows
through this valley. One explanation for the name is that the word
Liz is used in reference to a woman’s name. But as to whom the
Elizabeth in question might be, or why she had this modest flow of
water named after her, is not known and not recorded anywhere.
Liz’s Burn then runs into the river Tyne, which flows eastward,
through the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, into the North Sea.
Apart from providing the name for the
village, another notable feature of Wet Rain Hill is a large,
almost anvil-shaped, sandstone crag protruding from its side. This
large rocky outcrop is situated nearly at the foot of the hill
close to Liz’s Burn. It is known as Liz’s Rock, and stands alone,
a relic of the glacial activity that gouged out the valley and the
surrounding countryside during the last ice age. Carved patterns
in the form of concentric circles, cup-shaped depressions and a
series of chiselled markings are found on its upper and relatively
flat surface. These ancient man-made markings are thought to be
around five thousand years old. It has been suggested that they
may represent some form of primitive Neolithic pictograms or
script, though this has not yet been established; their meaning
has long been lost in the mists of time. What has been
established, however, is that to produce the markings would have
required a great deal of skill, patience and motivation. The
markings were very important for some people in the past, and had
great significance and meaning for them.
Liz’s Rock represents one of the three
significant features of the village and the hill mentioned in most
tourist guidebooks. The second feature is a deep cave or pothole
on Wet Rain Hill, just above Liz’s Burn, called Bell Hollow. It
has been given the name Bell Hollow according to one tradition
because some villagers during the First English Civil War of 1642
to 1646, motivated perhaps by the religious tides of the period,
tried to hide the village church bell inside the cave. By the same
tradition, it is said that the cave accepted the bell so to speak,
but because of its depth and inaccessibility, never returned it.
Innumerable efforts to locate and retrieve the bell were, it
seems, not successful. For over one hundred and fifty years, the
church of St George’s was without a large bell in its belfry until
a new one was cast and installed in the early nineteenth century.
This same bell is the one currently in the village church. The
church of St George’s, and its replacement bell, represents the
third significant feature mentioned in most tourist guidebooks.
That Bell Hollow is a dangerous place to
enter is emphasised by a prominent warning sign placed by the
local council around the cave entrance on the north bank of Liz’s
Burn. The sign points out the dangers of approaching too close to
Bell Hollow, and strongly advises against using the cave for
potholing explorations. The sign explains that Bell Hollow is
known to consist of a main chamber approximately
two-hundred-and-seventy metres in depth falling vertically with an
average diameter of about four metres. At least one smaller
subterranean passageway, and occasional underground stream, is
believed to branch out from the chamber at a lower depth. The cave
is generally considered to be an anomalous feature of the
landscape, and its geological mode of formation is not yet fully
understood. Apart from the extreme danger and difficulty of trying
to enter the cave, the sign also warns of the risk of drowning
inside the cave as a result of sudden flooding. On those days that
it rains, which a cynical observer might consider to be every
other day in this part of the world, the proximity of the entrance
of Bell Hollow to Liz’s Burn leaves it particularly exposed to
over spill and hence flooding. For this reason especially, Bell
Hollow remains unexplored and largely unknown; neglected even by
the most foolhardy.
The entrance to Bell Hollow is visible from
across the opposite side of Liz’s Burn. It is possible to ford the
burn at several places or to use a small wooden footbridge near to
Bell Hollow. Standing high up on the other bank, the entrance to
Bell Hollow resembles a dark unblinking eye gazing upwards to the
top of the opposite hill, known locally as Menzie’s Hill. Lying on
Menzies’s Hill, approximately two miles south of the village, is a
deserted and derelict dry stone shepherd’s hut, referred to
accordingly as Menzie’s Hut. The eponymous Menzie was a local
shepherd who, slightly more than a century ago, tended his sheep
on the surrounding hills. Menzie apparently went mad and abandoned
his home and possessions, including the sheep in his charge, and
fled the area never to be seen again. And such was the impact on
the local imagination of the shepherd’s abrupt and mysterious
departure that the old name of the hill, Scaly Peak, was forgotten
and the hill renamed after him. From the top of Menzie’s Hill,
looking northwards, the village of Wet Rain Hill stands out
against the backdrop of the Cheviot Hills where at some point
decided by man England meets Scotland. (Click here for Chapter
3)
