These quiet spaces are profoundly haunted, and yet Salisbury Plain possesses few, if any, actual ghost stories. I know of no one who claims to have seen an apparition of what must have been one of the most beautiful and tragical funeral processions in the world’s history, when for two nights and the best part of two days, Sir Lancelot and his seven companions went on foot the long forty miles from ‘Almesbury unto Glastonbury’, escorting the bier upon which lay, with face uncovered, the body of Guinevere the Queen. Sir Thomas Malory tells us that ‘an hundred torches were ever burning about the corpse of the queen, and ever Sir Lancelot with his seven fellows went back about the horse bier, singing and reading many an holy orison, and frankincense upon the corpse incensed’. If strength and poignancy of feeling are the cause of hauntings, one might expect still to meet those figures on that long way of sorrow, but the beautiful vision has never been seen.
The Tattoo beaten by the Drummer Boy of Salisbury Plain is not heard to-day; and no one has seen the desperate chase when Mr. Dean, the farmer of Imber, pursued Benjamin Colclough, the highwayman who robbed him on his way home from Devizes market one October evening in 1859. Surely it might be expected that the turf would still echo the footfalls of those galloping horses, for the chase lasted full three hours, and only ended when Benjamin at last was ridden down by the farmer, and fell dead on Chitterne Down. There is still to be seen by the roadside the sinister grey tombstone-like monument which was ‘erected as a warning to those who presumptuously think to escape the punishment God has threatened against Theives [sic] and Robbers’.
These intense personal emotions do not touch the great impersonal changelessness of the Plain. They vanish in it, as the passing traveller is swallowed up in those great spaces, leaving them still unalterably lonely. No The hauntings of the Plain are not personal, they are universal. The word ‘Revenant’fits them better than ‘Ghost’. Abstract presences seem to come and go upon the Plain, and they pass like the cloud shadows which move eternally over its still, impassible face.
Among such apparitions are those hounds of an uncouth and ancient breed which, within the memory of man, have been met pursuing their unattainable quarry in King John’s hunting ground of Cranborne Chase. Thus they hunted, not on one day in any one year, but day after day and year after year throughout the centuries which we look back upon as a compact and definite epoch, and which we call the Middle Ages. Or again, there are the two white birds with widespread wings which never beat the air, who rise up from the spaces above the Plain, when a Bishop of Salisbury has died. They are mourning for no individual. They merely tell the passing of one more figure in that long line of Prelates who have sat in the Bishop’s Throne beneath the spire which has watched the Plain for six hundred years.
And now comes my own experience, as impersonal as any; and so unlike the ordinary ghost story that it was years before I knew that it contained any element of the supernatural.
It was a dark October evening during the war, when I was superintending the Wiltshire Women’s Land Army. In those unhappy years, my work was of all others the least unhappy, for it took me, not to scenes of pain in hospitals, nor to hear the endless whir of machinery in munition factories, but instead, to peaceful farms, where girls milked cows, or ploughed the fields, or harvested the crops. In those years I learnt my way about every part of Wiltshire, much of which had hitherto been unknown to me. That evening I asked the way from Devizes to Swindon and then drove on alone in my small two-seater car. It was between five and six, and a wet, dreary night.
After a few miles, I left the main road, and then I soon entered a very strange avenue. I was passing through a succession of huge grey megaliths, which stood on either hand, looming like vast immovable shadows within a curtain of softly falling rain. At once I knew where I must be. I was evidently approaching Avebury, that great prehistoric monument, older perhaps than Stonehenge and with a far more complicated plan. This part of Wiltshire was at that time quite unknown to me, but I had often seen pictures of Avebury in archæological books.
Like Stonehenge, Avebury was originally a circular megalithic temple, but unlike it, it was approached by stone avenues, extending in some instances for over a mile. In the old days, this must have added immensely to the impression created by the place; and now, coming upon it thus unexpectedly for the first time, I immediately felt its grandeur, and was dominated, even at some distance away, by the sense that I was nearing an ancient and a very wonderful place. By now it was raining hard, but I told myself that wet or fine, I must certainly get out of the car when I reached Avebury for nothing would induce me to miss this first opportunity of seeing it.
At the end of the avenue, I reached the great earth-work which surrounds the temple, and I climbed on to the bank. There beneath me I saw the huge stones, not standing more or less undisturbed in their lonely circle as they do at Stonehenge, but, far fewer in number than they once had been, standing or fallen in irregular formation, with cottages built among them interrupting the ancient plan. This did not surprise me, for I
