Spite and Malice, Rawdon

I remember hunting for these some five or six years ago with no luck, so I was very pleased to find it within 15 minutes of getting off the bus this time.

The Cragg wood area of Rawdon is a lovely rambling maze of wall lined carriage-ways and ginnels, with very charming eccentricities to the layout.

Further down the hill towards the Aire Valley, the neat walls start crumbling, the ivy begins to encroach. We asked some friendly locals for directions, who pointed us towards the dark ginnel that leads out of the woods. 

We had sought the Spite and Malice ginnel, named for a feud between the owners of the estates it separated, Barbara Jones in her excellent work Grottoes and Follies suggested that a folly built here still stood in the grounds of a now-demolished house.

The story goes that the Ripley's at Acacia to the west, and the Briggs at Cliffe Cottage to the east disliked each other for some unknown reason and built progressively taller and taller walls to prevent their neighbours from viewing their property. To complicate things further, they both built follies near to the walls which overlooked even the towering walls.

 A much more comprehensive history and theorising as to the background of this story can be found at A History of Rawdon, but as I have found only one old image of the folly online I thought I would share mine too. 

Druid's Temple, Ilton

Druid's Temple is a folly contrived to evoke the pagan temple of Stonehenge, huge trilithons set in an oval with a sheltered cave and a sinister block altar. Pine woods surround it, enclosing an artificial ritual landscape of dolmens and balanced pillars of stone, suggesting natural temples such as Brimham Rocks and the Cheesewring up on Dartmoor.






Its an impressive place to visit and with no restrictions on opening it has become slightly notorious for its modern, unofficial ritual use.

My second visit to Druid's Temple was at night, in the midst of a turbulent period of my life. I was angry before I got there, and sad that it was in the circumstances that it was. The misplaced pine woods seemed colder and more alien than ever, discordant against the surrounding landscape. I thought that viewing it in the dark would bring some kind of significance to the place, which had seemed cold and soulless to me in daylight. I usually have a boundless, if hugely irritating, enthusiasm for going to unusual places repeatedly. This time I didn't want to get there or leave the car once we arrived.

Walking towards the stones past a pile of felled trees, I felt as though something was watching us from the top of the folly. I fully expected us to bump into a group of equally jittery people, perhaps up to no good, and us both leave sheepishly. When we got nearer, the quiet became oppressive, the air slightly scented with freshly felled pine but thick with something less tangible. I started to see movement in my peripheral vision, something not unusual for me as a migraine sufferer but this time less prescribed and more sudden. I thought I saw glimpses of a huge black creature, wolf-like and immaterial. I could taste a metallic taste, as if blood had been split. Every step towards the encirclement of the stones brought the creature more vividly to my senses, and I started to panic.

Once we stood within the stones, I could not keep my fear under control any longer, and I started to babble about the demon stalking us. As I stood there, it was as if I could see the beast circling us along the top of the stones, waiting for me to be deprived of my only exit before it ripped me apart. I stopped being able to focus or concentrate on reality. Wild images of demonic dogs chased before me, darker than the shadows we stood in, dripping with some kind of unearthly gore that I could smell and feel the heat of. It seemed to me that if I approached the altar, all hope would be lost.

I was completely lost in this vision, it felt like an age before I was able to leave or talk but eventually I remember begging to be allowed to go back to the car. I think I ran. Not an experience I would have shared at first consideration, but as I sorted through old photos I came across my disinterested snaps from my first visit, and wanted to juxtapose the two contrasting events in a post. I guess a blog on the fateful and strange places I visit should include the unpleasant, uncanny aspects of visiting England too. The experience was formative in my current situation and self knowledge, it made me consider how strong emotions seem to arise from something residing in locations I visit that seem beyond the places themselves. The genii locorum of Druid's Temple were roused by something in me that evening, and I genuinely felt as though the place would devour me, or at least a part of me.

Castle Howard Hawksmoor pyramid of 1728

The large pyramid is easy enough to find as it looms high on the hill, we found it on a dark december night in the mist and snow. From the village you can walk up the first footpath you see on the left hand side (going into the village from the Castle Howard estate turning) and walk up the field, bearing right when the sign directs you to do so. The pyramid can be seen in a north easterly direction from the footpath, on top of the prominent brow of a hill.

The pyramid is flanked by 8 towers, which seem designed to hold lamps atop them.
The architect for this folly was the Freemason Nicholas Hawksmoor, described as 'the Devil's architect' because of his use of risky quotations in the religious themes in his work from throughout history, from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and other non-christian ideologies.

We threw caution to the wind by visiting the twenty-eight feet high pyramid with no prior preparation, no map, no real directions beyond a knowledge that the pyramid was on a hill over the village. A dog barked in the distance the whole time we climbed the hill, but when we reached the pyramid there was (finally, short lived) silence. The mist around the hill was below us so we could finally see the stars. One of the towers was partially destroyed and we stood on it to see across the land. The inscription on the side of the pyramid had deteriorated quite badly:

TO THEE O VENERABLE SHADE

WHO LONG HAST IN OBLIVION LAID

THIS PILE I HERE ERECT

A TRIBUTE SMALL FOR WHAT THOU'ST DONE

DEIGN TO ACCEPT THIS MEAN RETURN,

PARDON THE LONG NEGLECT.

TO THY LONG LABOURS, TO THY CARE

THY SONS DECEAS'D, THY PRESENT HEIR

THEIR GREAT POSSESSIONS OWE:

SPIRIT DIVINE WHAT THANKS ARE DUE

THIS WILL THY MEMORY RENEW

IT'S ALL I CAN BESTOW

The pyramid has a tiny door to the rear, you can only access it on special tours but we found a photo of the bust of Lord William Howard housed inside the beehive shaped interior:

Yoinked from Neil Levine's Castle Howard and the Emergence of the
Modern Architectural Subject.

Is there a correct way to disembark from viewing such a magnificant folly, you may or probably will not ask? One of our number log rolled from top to bottom of the ridge on which it stands, and it did seem the finest way to do it. Not so much so that the rest followed suit!