VERBEIA’S COURT

 VERBEIA’S COURT

Hawthonn

(Layla & Phil Legard)

Originally published in Reliquiae Journal Volume 10, no. 2

“That the second Cohort of the Lingones abode heere, an Altar beareth witnesse, which I saw there, upholding now the staires of an house, and having this Inscripti∣on set upon it by the Captaine of the second Cohort of the Lingones, to VERBEIA, haply the Nymph or Goddesse of Wherf…” - William Camden, Britain (1637)

Goddess

The river Wharfe is a meandering waterway, flowing for 65 miles from Beckermonds in the Yorkshire dales to Cawood, south of York. Although we live in Leeds, where the Aire runs in the culverted depth beneath the city streets, it is the Wharfe, marking the West Yorkshire boundary north of Leeds that has been the major riverine presence in our lives. We call the waters Verbeia more often than ‘Wharfe’: Verbeia being the name inscribed on a Romano-Celtic altar stone at Ilkley Church, and long identified as being the name of the goddess of the river.

The altar, erected in the second century AD by Clodius Fronto, commander of the second cohort of Lingones (Gaulish soldiers), depicts a goddess in pleated robes, grasping two snakes - their heads pointing downward, their bodies zig-zagging like lightning-bolts or the winding of the river itself. The etymological derivation of the name ‘Wharfe’ from the Old English weorpan, to twist, has cemented the Verbeia-Wharfe connection.

Much of our spare time is spent wandering one length or another of Verbeia’s twisting body. Downstream towards Tadcaster, you can follow the Rudgate pre-roman road north. Starting from the now lost holy well of St. Helen at the banks of the Wharfe, several miles walk brings you to the ancient church of St Helen’s at Bilton-in-Ainsty. The church has two impressive corbel tables, now inside the church after centuries of alterations but originally these were external features, typical of the local style of Romanesque architecture. On the river-facing side of the church, opposite the Sheela na Gig, is a Mermaid or Melusine corbel, complete with two snaking coils of hair, which she holds in a way that strikingly mirrors the stance of Verbeia on the Ilkley altar. You can always find some manifestation of the Goddess along the Wharf, and here the medusa-like gaze of the water spirit beckons us back towards the river. 

Upstream, from Harewood to Wharfedale proper, we swim. We’ve regularly dipped into Verbeia’s waters for about five years now, having spent many hours at her riverbanks in the half-decade before that: first paddling to cool our feet after long walks down from Ilkley moor, later swimming at Barden, Appletreewick, Ilkley, Burley in Wharfedale, Arthington and Netherby. These waters are never predictable and never safe. It has been said that Verbeia is a life-demanding river. While the moors that surround her, dotted with stone circles and carved stones were in prehistory the high places of the dead, Verbeia also has a reputation for gathering her own ghostly court.

Lammas

On the 1st of August, the wheat looks dry and ghost-like in the fields as we walk across them. The river swells and irrigates the fields, although it has not done so in these weeks of summer drought. We are walking from Harewood Bridge to a stony bank at the Wharfe’s edge nearby. The abandoned facade of Harewood Castle glares in the sun from the hills beyond the water.

We baked bread – an ornate harvest loaf – and picked flowers from our gardens to offer to the river, and to celebrate our dearest friend Em, whose ashes were given to Verbeia at Kettlewell several months before. The sacred river, flowing through the valleys we walk and worship now holds Em. Like the river, she was - and is - a constant presence in our lives. The Wharfe, her banks, the water itself, and the sunlight seen upon her from afar, all present spaces of interaction with the honoured dead. Every polished river stone along Verbeia’s course is part of a great serpentine cairn. Every subaqueous chasm is the vault of an inverted shrine. We paint red ochre serpents across our chests and enter the waters.

The bread floats down the stream on a raft of flowers, out of sight. Into Verbeia’s realm.

Depth

 

We swim most at Netherby Deep - a spot we call the ‘Secret Beach’, which was a solitary haven of kingfishers, otters, damselflies and tiny fish when we first started visiting some six years ago. A large metal sign on the bank above puts off most swimmers, describing the tragic loss of two children who drowned there in the sixties: “If you care for your children please take them away. Avoid this place as you would a plague.”

 

The water there is deep, dropping sharply from the sandy shore into a void of over nine meters depth. At this place, the character of the river changes daily. Several people have described it as “hungry” to me. On hot, still August days it has the laziness of a lake, with pond weed growing occasionally on the surface. I swim to the middle through the red, peat-stained waters and feel the abyss beneath me, large fish brushing past my legs and dragonflies catching mosquitoes in front of my face. 

Only a few meters upstream from here is a stretch where the current changes: becoming strong, pushing against the swimmer and holding them in place. When the river is high these waters create a whirlpool: potentially deadly to the weaker swimmer: the fatal gate of Verbeia’s domain. On the morning of the day that we laid our offering to Em in the river a man, around our age, appears to have vanished along this stretch. It is haunting. We had seen him swimming here with friends in earlier days. We visit the river by compulsion over the coming weeks, walking up and down either side as far down as East Keswick, pitted against Verbeia’s mercurial waters in the futile attempt to solve a mystery. As fat dragonflies swoop along the banks, police divers are painstakingly surveying the depths of Netherby Deep, foot by sunken foot.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in her vicinity, and I still find Verbeia’s ambivalence terrifying. The whole landscape seems to tumble down, toward the hungry river; a black hole stretched out, incising itself into the land. At Netherby Deep, as at the swirling Strid forty-five miles North-East, the sense of standing on the edge of the veil is profound. I find entering the waters an existential drama. As the sand turns into the pebbly river bed, Layla laughs at how nesh I am, urging me to go deeper. With the waters at shoulder-height I feel the pebbles below skittering down into the depth every time my feet shift. The fear is primal, as if all I know could be snatched away in an airless instant. In shallower waters I try to float, but it feels in my case that the goddess wants all or nothing. I shudder as my son blithely splashes along this liminal edge with little sense of his mortality or how precious he is to me.

Light

The river comes alive in the moonlight. Rippling waves cluster into the simulacrae of living creatures, dancing and leaping together in playful races of the current. Verbeia’s court frolics on the surface of the water. 

Wild-camping upstream from Netherby Deep, our tent screened behind the Himalayan Balsam on the banks, gives the perfect vantage point for this uncanny display. In one place, the moonlight, filtering through the trees and catching upon wavelets resembles a spinning, dancing figure. We both see this spectral form and comment upon it. I see it as Em: a dancer in an endless spin of reverie. Beyond the figure, flashes of silver occasionally glint beneath the overhanging trees on the bank, suggesting lights flickering in some faraway abode beneath the bank itself. I ache to swim across: they feel like the distant lights of a forgotten home. There are a thousand voices in the babble of water over rock, amplified by the still darkness. I listen carefully for a familiar voice as I fall asleep.

Flow

For us, Verbeia and her domain are the Wharf. Verbeia is not some abstract intelligence that hangs above the waters: she is the whorl and water itself. Verbeia is not a transcendent being, but is as alive as we are. She may demand life, but she also sustains it: without these waters the fields, the fish, the mice, rats, otters, caddisflies, dragonflies, kingfishers, and ourselves would evaporate. To draw close to the goddess is to engage in some form of gnosis: whether divining her voice while encamped on the riverbank, pecking out geomantic divinations on the sandy banks of Netherby Deep, or entering the waters to be shocked into life by a sense of one’s own mortality, there is always a sense of touching upon some mystery.

On the high moors the cup-marked rocks and their rippling rings evoke Verbeia’s body: raindrops falling on the surface of the waters below. Springs issue forth becks and rivulets, which flow down the moors, through the fields to her. All along her meandering course, Verbeia is inescapable: all waters run to her, even her tributaries command tribute.

Boston Spa - Jackdaw Crag Carvings

Hverfr flows slowly here, the wide, deep waters look calm but complex whirlpools and undercurrents reveal themselves in the sunlight. Boston Spa is a pretty little village, we walked through Holgate orchard, past the 18th century lockup, the greengage tree was full of bright little fruits and mushrooms were springing up everywhere.

The Jackdaw crag carvings are listed as possibly Napoleonic, carved by off-duty church masons. There are numerous military figures and a fine fox. 

The limestone cliffs loom over-top rather threateningly, this is a site of recent tragedy, it is a precarious ledge to get to see the carvings and the  rock above seems loose in places. 

One of the many beautiful spots alongside the Wharfe, we stopped while the boy slept and listened to the sounds of the river, watching the tiny fishes sheltering in the harbour of a tree root.

Horsforth Low Hall Cup and Ring stone

These stones were found during the renovation of Low Hall in Horsforth, down a stretch of road rarely traveled. The abandoned Clariant pharmacological factory and desolate workers' houses block the Aire from view, walking further along the footpath you reach suddenly farmland, pastoral scenes and snaking bend of river that coils unexpectedly into the landscape. The woods here are very beautiful, with a well near the footpath and copious flora and fauna

It doesn't seem like cup and ring territory, no height nor grave to accompany this one. I would be interested to know of any other C+R markings low down by large rivers, I know of quite a few standing stones beside rivers (the Devil's Arrows for example) but no rock art. The stone was placed in a rock garden at Kirkstall Abbey, until it was moved back to Horsforth to accompany the millenium stone opposite the museum, slightly further up the hill but still not probably it's original height.

Cup and ring marks also exist on stones in woods close to Horsforth station, near where the youthful viking head watches over the southern entrance to Bramhope tunnel. Perhaps the rock was carted down from one of these higher points during the building of Low Hall in 1575, especially as there was a quarry near here on the 1851 OS map.

Also near the Horsforth railway line is a place called Troy, now a housing estate. It shows on the1851 map as open fields, perhaps this has some history as the site of a labyrinth?

Adel woods carving of Cocidius

Not far from Adel crag, we were, a year or so ago, shown a carving of the celtic god Cocidius. Recently both me and my friend Phil Legard have been searching for the carving to no avail, until today when I was wandering through the woods and noticed I was in a familiar grove.

The carving lay here, the Red One sunk in mottled green rock. The tall beech trees give the clearing a cathedralesque quiet, the air is cool and the deep leaf litter slows your tread to a mindful pace. Jack-By-The-Hedge grows near and fills the air with heavy scent.


In the shrine of the war-god I am given courage to continue a difficult path. He is protector of both the hunter and the hunted, the tarot card 9, Adjustment, continually recalled at this spot.

A return visit a week later, darker still and the leaves have started to fall. My mind clear I picture a figure in the trees clad in red, who comes here before battle. What dark days lay ahead I do not know. My heart sways between being as heavy as a stone beneath a stream and being lighter than a feather.

The Grey Stone ring carvings, Harewood and Almscliffe Crag

The grey stone erratic boulder overlooking Harewood house and across to Almscliffe, stone 399 on the Boughey and Vickerman survey. Its very easy to locate for rock art, a bridleway through some imposing gates opposite a turning to Wike on the A61 road lead up to New Bridge over the river, the grey stone is on the hill 340m SE in Grey Stone Pasture (appropriately!) on the left just before you reach the woods and bridge, theres a large oak tree on the hill behind it too. The concentric circles of the carving face west towards armscliffe, the natural rock boulder mirroring the silhouette of the outcrop in minature form, the midwinter full moon of the bronze age would have set behind Almscliffe viewed from this point. We visited for the winter solstice sunrise of 2009 and the glow over the valley was beautiful.

The 7 circles without inner cup remind me of some circle lightning I saw as a child, ever decreasing mirroring without end. We elaborately disguise our feelings and thoughts to give ourselves the impression of change but ultimately the patterns remain the same. Microcosm of life on a microcosm of the focus of this area. Almscliffe draws the eye from a full circle around it, from all points you notice its mushrooming intrusion on the landscape.

I've been particuarly interested in Paul Bennett's findings about Almscliffe's Faerie's Parlour, the existence of which had also been confirmed to me by a climber friend. Apparently its a very small enclosed tunnel which you can crawl so far comfortably but then becomes extremely claustrophobic. This tunnel supposedly leads from Almscliffe to emerge out from under the bridge I mentioned below the grey stone at Harewood. The Northen Caves entry on the cave however details an exploration by Royal Park middle school in the 70's.

The tunnel has been an obsession now for months! We have explored it to at least a depth of 50 metres, but time and fear has kept us from our goal.



Me and my friends have created an E-book related to Almscliffe, and music to accompany the text.

http://almias.org.uk/

I'd like to think this is a project which will grow with time, as we didnt cover everything we discovered due to time limitations. Specifically the connections between almscliffe and the grey stone, which are referred to in the local folklore of Rombold the giant. He lived in Ilkley, on the moor, and frequently argued with his giantess wife. One arguement resulted in a chod of rock being thrown from Ilkley at the retreating giant, and where it landed it formed Almscliffe and a smaller piece, the Grey stone.

Doll Tor stone circle, Birchover in the Peak District

Doll Tor, a minature bronze age beauty tucked away a little south of the better signposted Nine Ladies stone circle, north east of the ruined stone circle Nine Stones Close. A small cairn lies next to it, which seems to be slightly rearranged every time we visit. The cairn contained a cist which held a cremated female burial.

This bead found at the circle during an early excavation is thought to be from egypt, from around 1300 BC.

The circle was vandalised during the spring of 1995 and reconstructed in 1997 by a team of archaeologists, restoring it to bronze age condition. The photo in Julian Cope's Modern Antiquarian shows it meddled with,

. During a Heathcote excavation in the 1930s three of the stones were mysteriously smashed overnight, you can see the (deteriorated) cement joins holding them together.
The relatively modern woodlands surrounding the stones give it an atmosphere of calm and solitude that is missing from its companion Nine Ladies. I try to picture the place alone atop a moor as it must have been every time we visit and fail, I take solace in the fact that, tucked to the side of the proto-temple of the andle stone, its location always bore it more to the shelter of its landscape than to crown it. The quarry a few feet north of the stones is shockingly close, and gives me quiet horrors as to what could have been the fate of this place. I presume the local interest in archaeology borne of Thomas Bateman who lived in Birchover and excavated this site in 1852 saved it from certain doom.

You can look across from the edge of the woods by the circle to Robin Hoods Stride, and easily walk it should you wish to, I imagine with the trees clear you could view Doll Tor from Nine Stones Close and vice versa. We've seen many offerings and ribbon on the trees, but haven't once chanced upon any other visitors at any point, and we come here often. Halloween was particularly special, we put a lamp in the middle of the circle, the boys climbed the Andle stone in the dark (the girls + jeff sensibly abstained) and the stars were bright in the sky. We do sort of think of this place as ours, as I'm sure many other people do!


We found a fallen tree, with some rocks beneath its roots just beyond the cairn. There were some carvings on it, possibly a figure and an ear of corn.