The Angel and The Girl

I was wed by the Witch's stone last week to the most wonderful man I know, we were married by the talented poet Becky Cherriman with all our dear friends and family in attendance. Graham Vasey took this beautiful silver gelatin plate of us on the big day, our friend Rory played us to the stone and back again on his hurdy gurdy, Briggate danced with us in the streets by the Meanwood Institute and we were lucky enough to have a performance by Herb Diamante (with Emily Clavering on Piano and Backing Vocals!) for our first dance and entertainment. Phil's aunt wrote a lovely blog post about it here, which is probably a much better write up than I could manage of a day filled with bliss but one that went incredibly quickly!

I am so proud to be Layla Legard, the path we took to get to where we both are now was so full of light and dark, such great leaps of faith in each other and our pairing! This is the Edwin Muir poem Phil sent me the morning after we first confessed our love for one another:

See, they have come together, see,

While the destroying minutes flow, 

Each reflects the other's face 

Till heaven in hers and earth in his

Shine steady there.

Songs for the Dead

I'm very pleased to be working on a project (which is currently mostly a secret) with an old friend who is also billed as Aghartha for the Bang the Bore event mentioned in an earlier post. More on this soon!

 Tonight I went and sat by Meanwood Beck and listened for the low voices you sometimes hear in the rushing water, the moon was bright orange, low in the sky and dissolving from the top.

The melting snow had given the water a more oppressive sound though, Meanwood beck was in too much of a hurry to talk today. 

~

I'll be performing my first Morris dance out at the Field of Wakes on the last weekend of February for the Rhubarb Festival, one of the dances will be a NW Morris version (with stomping and whooping!) of Mona's Delight, a lovely dance collected from the Isle of Man:

I'll be the one messing up the last figure. 

Mary Bateman

Image by Simon Bradley

The Yorkshire Witch is on display at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds. Her incomplete skeleton, held together by sinew and flakes of mummified flesh seems to me to serve little purpose as an educational tool for children, more a spectacle of the kind supposedly abandoned along with side show 'freaks' and public hangings. A woman, who was nursing a baby at her breast in the hours before her execution at York, who has paid a far greater price than just death; not only was her corpse pickled, displayed, flayed and sold as strips for charms but now she is dealt further indignity as a permanent exhibit, an item of morbid curiosity.

I feel haunted by viewing her remains, I see little benefit in viewing them, more so an uncomfortable understanding that her status as 'cunning woman' alone resulted in the series of post-mortem assaults. She lived on Timble Bridge, near Leed's Parish Church, under which flowed the beck I see daily. I think of her every time I see the beck, and have traversed through the underground culverts to view the now-subterranean bridge, where once she too must have daily seen the water pass by.

I wish to free the Yorkshire Witch. I hope that within the next two weeks I can implore Leeds University, who own her remains, to give Mary Bateman's bones a burial. The 202nd anniversary of her execution falls on Sunday 20th of March 2011, the vernal equinox. I will write a letter, and post up a petition in the next few days to send to both the museum and the university.