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.

St Helen's Well - Thorp Arch.

I went to my love's window last night

 Just as the moon was shining bright 

And such a light came from her clothes

 Like the Morning Star when it first arose

 I went to my love's bedroom door 

Where I had been oft times before

 But I could not speak nor yet get in

 To the pleasant bed where my love lay in

 I turned down her milk-white sheet 

To view her body so fair and neat 

And underneath I did espy 

Two pillars of the finest ivory 

 Beneath those pillars a fountain lay 

Which my poor wandering eye betrayed

 But of all the fountains e'er to be found

 I could have wished myself there drowned

Thorpe Arch trading estate never really struck me as a very interesting place, although I'd had the pleasure of visiting the British Library a few times and knew it to be in a very beautiful part of the Yorkshire countryside. I didn't know of the estates history as a WWII ordnance filing factory, the size of a small village with a circumnavigating railway system, underground storage bunkers and test range. That alone would have pricked up my ears, being fond of all things railway and bunker related.

However it was the old well that drew me there, having noted the close proximity to many items of antiquarian interest nearby whilst browsing my OS maps one winter eve. I tend to be less drawn to wells in general, perhaps fallaciously seeing them as something domestic and commonplace in comparison to the esoteric mysteries of standing stone, ring or earthen mound.

 The Goddess of the well is as yet unnameable. She has a sense of humour and humility, her pseudonym St Helen, mother of Constantine - the first christian roman emperor, found the true cross. Perhaps she does not want to be known to someone who neglected the watery aspects of nature so readily, instead throwing up coy clues as to her identity - a mermaid hidden in St Helen's church (which also has a sheela-na-gig) nearby, closely resembling Verbeia, idol of the Wharfe, which St Helen's well flows into.

The well lies within Chapel Wood, next to the Rudgate ancient road. This road followed north leads to Boroughbridge, a town where n'er a library window is safe as the Devil's arrows there lead the youth astray despite the preventative mandrake-like turnip charms planted nearby.

There are a few old photos of the well complete with clootie rags but there are marked differences in the locations depicted. The well is now dry but the stream bed is deep and easily located next to the beautiful hawthorn lined path of the Rudgate, overlooked by a sewage works on the western side. It is an unlikely place to have any deeper kind of experience of natural forces but the isolation and strangeness persists despite the near destruction of it's beauty, a small triangle of land next to the Wharfe demarcated by the empty steam bed but still distinctly another world.

A cross shaft was discovered on the hill next to the woods, supposedly still standing in Victorian times and marking the spot where John Leland recorded in the 14thC that a small chapel stood there and was dedicated to St Helen. The cross was moved to a local antiquarian's garden around the turn of the century, times changed fortunately and so the cross was moved to the more public location of All Saint's church slightly NW of the site.

The custom was to go to the well at night unnoticed. Then tear a strip of clothing (usually garter or ribbon trim) and tie the rag to the tree that grew over the well head. Then you would see your true love. 

Rags are recorded at the site as late as 2007, we could not locate any at our last visit but intend to visit again and hopefully revive some part of the magic of the well.