A while ago I went for a walk with my mum on the marshy north Kent coast. It was one of those days where the sand, sea and sky merge into one grey mass and the wind whips away the horizon and the shoreline so that all you can see is the marshy grass you’re walking through and the thick stone shape of the half ruined abbey in the distance, and we battled on through the mud and wind towards it, eyes stinging with salt spray, to read the vague visitors information board at the foot of the stone. I learnt there had been a Roman fort here, then an Anglo Saxon monastery and then one of the Cinque Ports of the South East. The sea took most of the settlement that used to be by the twentieth century and it became a quiet place where things used to happen long ago. A place where spirits lived unobtrusively, only visited by dog-walkers and people who like looking at the North Sea in all its moods.
There was something about the place that snagged at me, but by the time I got home I had let the feeling fade and I didn’t think of it again for some time. I can’t remember now how the ruins at Reculver rose to the top of what I like to think of as my imagination compost, perhaps that’s part of it, but for some reason that walk came into my mind and I began to research the place, knowing that I wanted to write about it in some way. I browsed google, looking for that spark of something interesting to me that made me think there was a story I might want to tell. I read that during an excavation archaeologists had found the remains of babies under the walls of the Roman fort. They thought those babies might have been sacrificed to make a kind of guardian spirit for the place. I had found what I was looking for.
I first read this story at an Unsung Live event at Kings Cross in July 2018 on a hot night where Londoners acted like Romans and stayed out in the streets, chatting and laughing with iced drinks on the tables hauled onto the pavements long into the night. It was far away from the drizzle that inspired the story, but somehow it didn’t matter. We know, if we live in the British Isles, that the drizzle is always coming back.
I’m thrilled to see the story here at the Wild Hunt, where I think it fits perfectly with the other weird and fantastic tales. Enjoy!