The Devil's Chair
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By Hannah Green:
We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.
We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.
The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness.
Or so it seems - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it.
Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing - from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were.
The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally - he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day.
My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again.
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Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here.
