21st-Century Yokel

top two of them more eye-catching than the others, owing to the three dead crows nailed to each. In all the sub-Wicker Man imaginings of my failed novel there was nothing this starkly horrifying. In Rumburgh, near Bungay, I happened upon a field of ten immaculate white bedsheet ghosts, not dissimilar to the one seen in the 1968 BBC adaptation of the M. R. James ghost story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad. The ghosts were overseen by a fake bird of prey on a wire. This was crop protection escalated to performance art. But on closer inspection there was even more to the tableau than I’d first assumed. In the far corner of the field I found a faceless scarecrow ‘boss’ in a turquoise boiler suit, hanging from a tree by a noose. A foreman of death. At the north Norfolk village of Wolferton, during the same summer, I queued to park with crowds stretching into the hundreds to witness organised and elaborate scarecrow exhibits, but found nothing nearly this inventive or disturbing. The scarecrow censors would have banned it. It found its place, out of necessity, Off Grid, outside the rules, where it had space to be itself – as increasingly did I.

Similarly agriculturally enthused spiritual brethren sometimes told me about scarecrows via the Internet and gave me the grid coordinates of their locations, but if I followed their leads I always felt like a fraud. A lot of the thrill of the hunt came from the fact that it was not meant to come replete with a user-friendly digital guide. I didn’t want to be a customer at Scarecrow Argos. I had no wish to browse laminated or virtual pages for the scarecrow I wanted, type the scarecrow’s number into a keypad and wait for it to emerge, flat-packed in wastefully proportioned cardboard. Scarecrows weren’t supposed to be accessed via a gleaming online portal. If anything they were supposed to be behind a real, three-dimensional door set in an old wall, made of heavy oak, weathered with arcane scratch marks and opened with a long iron key that you usually had to rattle in the lock for three minutes before it worked. I found most of the best scarecrows – and most of the other finest examples of the macabre lurking in the soft creases of rural Norfolk and Suffolk – by the ancient art of Going Outside And Looking Really Hard, or by the almost as ancient art of Going To A Small Settlement Of Houses Based Around A Place Of Worship And Talking To Some People Who Might Know. On a regular walk which circled the villages of Old Buckenham and New Buckenham I became intrigued by the remains of Buckenham Castle: a keep of an unnervingly perfect circularity, thought to be the oldest of its kind in Britain, guarded by a moat and a padlocked gate. A patron of the Gamekeeper pub in Old Buckenham who sat and chatted to me in front of an inglenook fireplace he was visibly proud to have built told me that you could visit the castle but only if you gave John at the Robin Reliant garage in New Buckenham two pound coins. On the brink of Guy Fawkes night 2012 I visited the garage – one of those charmingly shabby ones at which Norfolk still excelled, harking back to the days when you still needed to say petrol pumps were ‘self-serve’ to acknowledge they were different to the norm – half-expecting John – sixtyish, blue overalls, blue dungarees – to sigh at another practical joke his friend had played on an innocent, but sure enough, after I had handed him a couple of quid, he bestowed upon me the hallowed key to the padlock, but not before he had extracted a promise that I would return before closing time and spun me a yarn about the castle being the place where the gunpowder plot was born, members of the castle’s owning dynasty, the Knyvets, providing sanctuary for the plotters. ‘Is this confirmed?’ I asked John. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘By me.’ I got the distinct impression that he had a different story like this for every big date on the national calendar, this innocuous pile of stacked earth and old flint a few minutes’ walk from the local butcher’s, vitally, inexorably, shaping our island’s history.

I had driven past John’s workplace countless times, but it was not until I walked away now, turning back to admire its proud fleet of Robin Reliants, that I took in its name: Castle Hill Garage. Not totally a statement of sarcasm. It was a hill, of sorts. You got a few of them in this soft sandy twenty-mile run up to Norwich from the south, where the heaths of Breckland and the last fragmented chunks of Thetford Forest fall away. Norwich itself was built around one, with another castle on its summit. I stood halfway up it that same autumn with another shadowy Norfolkian storyteller who favoured a monochromatic colour scheme: the Man in Black, the host of Norwich Ghost Walks. Pointing to the steep grass bank above us, the Man in Black told me and the rest of the evening’s crowd about urban Norwich’s own sort-of-scarecrow, the rotting spectre of the sixteenth-century rebel leader Robert Kett, who was often still seen up there, wobbling in the breeze in his phantom gibbet. The Norwich Ghost Walks didn’t begin until 1997. Their original host, Ghostly Dave, retired four years ago to open a pub in King’s Lynn, allowing the Man in Black to step in: a narrator with a skull-headed staff and an impressively hawkish, Victorian face. His mystique was in sharp contrast to, say, the ghost walks in Dudley, which Seventies Pat, who lived there, reliably informed me were hosted by a man simply called Craig. That said, the Man in Black’s blood-red business card did lose something of its spine-tingling aura by