A pleasant day for both science and history sleuthing and although it’s a summer day, it’s an English summer day. Enough heat to anchor a few butterflies but not enough to stir the notably ugly insects who make a daytime dormer of flower baskets. The hanging flower baskets attached to the old museum building are thoughtfully placed high enough to not be a head-bumping hazard which is a mark of intelligence on the part of the museum staff who are helpfully informative about local history. This ancient Abbey town of Winchcombe recently attracted a blaze of publicity when top scientists tracked a meteorite arriving to land in the driveway of a modest house on the edge of town. I’ve come here curious to find the very spot where it landed and I do easily locate the small dent in the driveway. I consider kneeling there like a true pilgrim for a selfie but then remember that the much-heralded voyager is now in fact lending its curious corpus to a shelf in a London museum I am usually commendably germ-phobic about possible nasty viruses borne from outer space but today my intrepid spirit abandons all caution. In the absence of the actual fragment of meteorite, I substitute a nearby voyaging snail in order to add drama to my selfie pose. With no squeamishness at all, I place in it on my brow and lie down on the tarmac, reminding myself that snail gunk is a miracle booster for re-vitalising human skin. Despite the unnerving lack of hand-washing facilities to deal with any residual cosmic dust, I find myself able to shrug off any foreboding thoughts of alarming diseases.
Cosmic dust or merely common street dust, I shake it off my heels and stride out of town to my next encounter with a puzzling Time capsule: a challenging trek up to a lonely escarpment will take me to a Stone Age burial site called Belas Knap Long Barrow. I have read the tourist guidebook (held aloft like Florence Nightingale’s lamp, all the better to use as a flyswat) and know to expect only a grassy mound. So I’m not surprised when I arrive at the barrow and there’s nothing thrilling to see. I do, however, feel it my scientific duty to tarry atop the turfy tump to monitor the local legend about Spirit Sensitive visitors: Spirit Sensitives, such as myself, are said to get a creepy feeling of Being Watched when venturing alone to Belas Knap. But today, despite my authentic openness towards Time Travelers, I can really only attribute any dodgy light-headedness to the stiff gradient of the hill. Or slight panic that I have too long lingered and thunder clouds have hove into view and I may get caught in a summer storm. Struck by lightning. Or catch pneumonia after a drenching from the welkin’s o’erbrimming chalice.
So many hazards on this type of expedition! I summon a suitably stout heart and matching legs and start wending my way back to town via lush-pastured fields which hide the isolated hamlet of Charlton Abbots. Here, in medieval times, the Abbey monks of Winchcombe built a summer outpost dedicated to caring for the sick. Nothing remains of it now, not even a wall to give relief of shade to a couple of restless horses whose fly-masks are obviously uncomfortable in the way a plague doctor’s beaky mask was uncomfortable. The splendid bucolic creatures do have obstructed vision due to their face masks but I feel it’s their native boldness and not trifling hunger which causes them to nibble persistently at my guidebook. The footpath is overgrown anyway, so I trust to chance, following a hoppity crow down to a stream, hoping in my heart he does not have the newly-arrived bird flu. The stream is clear-running but there is a sadly stagnant pool beside a small debris-draped weir. I pause to wonder if it was the Friday-fasting, fish-eating monks who constructed the weir. No doubt the bright green swathes of watercress came in handy as a healing herb or just enjoyed as cream of watercress soup ( a recipe from olden times with their risky reliance on unpasteurised dairy products).
The crow is agitated, keeps hopping around the pool, not dipping his beak in for a drink but watching me in a sombre way. Then with a menacing loud caw he takes to the air, franticly rocketing about until finally diving between the two horses who were ambling down to join me. The sudden strike on the ground of cantering hooves gives a jolt to my memory. For now I recall the conversation I had with a local historian when covid was closing in on us: she had the distinctive name of Anne Crow: yes, now I remember
Its old name
of Lepers Pool:
abundant watercress
shivers