Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

Lol opened out the OS map on the bonnet of the Volvo. There were several pencil lines drawn on it, one of them, lengthways, more defined than the others.

‘This is what Jane found. A north–south line along the spine of the range, touching all these hills – Midsummer Hill, Hangman’s Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Perseverance Hill, North Hill – on, or at least close to, their summits. Cutting along the side of Herefordshire Beacon and passing through Wychehill Church.’

‘You can’t fault the alignment,’ Merrily admitted. ‘Not without a bigger map, anyway.’

‘And if we extend the line south…’ Lol continued it with a thumb ‘… we can see that it begins at…’

Whiteleafed Oak .

‘Obvious when you know,’ Lol said.

‘Is this a ley line?’

‘I don’t know. Most of these are natural features. But they were probably all ritual sites.’

‘Or part of one huge ritual site,’ Merrily said. ‘ Moel Bryn . The sacred Malverns.’

She was quite glad to see Whiteleafed Oak marked on the map. Didn’t even recall seeing any road signs pointing to it. Although it was only a few miles out of Ledbury, past the Eastnor Castle estate and into a twisting single-track lane, this was a place you would never find by accident. Nor particularly search out. Nearby villages like Eastnor and Eastwood were picturesque in the traditional sense, Whiteleafed Oak was not.

Lol folded up the map.

‘Better find this place before it gets any darker.’

Still be light enough to find your way. Park where you can and go through the five-bar gate and keep walking .

‘Which five-barred gate?’ Merrily opening out her hands. ‘Over there? Along there?’

‘It’s apparently the hamlet itself which marks the point at which the three counties merge.’

‘Nothing obvious here. Not even a church.’

‘Only a possible Druidic processional way.’

This was what Athena White had told Lol although she hadn’t been here in many years.

The fact that they’d been directed here by Athena White was why Merrily was wearing, under her thin sweatshirt, her pectoral cross. Why she’d slipped a pocket Bible into her jeans and taped to the Volvo’s dash the text, as if she could ever forget it, of St Patrick’s Breastplate.

Merrily said, ‘What on earth happened here?’

Thinking, And why didn’t I know about it?

With the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak out of sight, nearly half a mile behind them, she was standing on what might have been – might still be – a processional way.

Looking around in the calm of the evening. Finding that the place was instantly familiar and perceptibly strange. Familiar because of well-known landmarks, like the stone obelisk projecting like a stubby pencil from Eastnor Park in Herefordshire. And May Hill, in western Gloucestershire, identifiable from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds by the stand of pines on its summit.

At the tail of the Malverns, three counties were drawn together by landmarks and legend. The closer countryside was scabbed with odd mounds before it scrolled out into low hills, woods and copses and isolated clumps of conifers, all of it textured like velvet in the softening light.

And it was strange because none of this seemed random. It was as though each feature of the landscape had a special significance, a role to play in some eternally unfolding drama. And if they carried on walking into the arena – and it did feel like an arena – they’d be given their own parts to play.

Perhaps this was the great lesson to be learned about all of nature, although there were only certain spots where you could receive it with any intensity. Places of – oh God, wake me up before I turn into Jane – palpably sentient scenery.

They were alone in the landscape but, as they followed a vague path over a shallow rise, the sunset turning flat fields into sandbanks, she couldn’t lose the feeling that something knew they were coming.

You won’t miss it , Winnie Sparke had said. Nobody could .

She was right.

Merrily saw that Lol had stopped about twenty paces away, as though he was wondering how best to approach it, if he should take off his shoes.

‘Nobody said it was still here.’ His voice quite hoarse.

‘Nobody said it was still in use,’ Merrily said.

OK, it probably wasn’t the original one, after which the place was named, but it had to be many centuries old. Even without white leaves, it had grown into the heart of an earlier belief system which conspicuously lived on.

There were several other oak trees nearby, young satellite churches around this ancient, ruinous cathedral.

‘Venerated,’ Merrily said. ‘Still. On a serious scale.’

There was enough veneration to cover several Christmas trees, but the great oak, with its enormous swollen bole, had easily absorbed it all.

Offerings. Ribbons tied to twigs, fragments of coloured cloth, foil, labels with handwritten messages, flowers, balls of wool. Tiny intimate, symbolic items stuffed into folds and crevices, snagged in clawed branches. Hundreds of them, some fresh, some decaying, some fusing with fungi on the blistered bark.

Small sacrifices. People were still coming here – now – to make small sacrifices. Immense in the muddied light, the oak represented an everyday, naked paganism.

‘You uncomfortable with this, Merrily?’

Lol walking softly all around the oak – considered steps as if he was moonwalking or something.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just … It’s very … human. All these people making their pilgrimages, leaving their small offerings in … what? A celebration of survival?’ She dared to touch the tree with one hand. ‘What about you?’

‘To be quite honest, it kind of excites the hell out of me.’

‘Mmm, thought it might.’

‘Like, you read about ancient theories on music, and it seems so remote and … theoretical. But when you actually find a link with a bit of landscape only an hour or so from where you live. And then you come, for the first time, and it’s…’

‘It’s a tree, Lol.’

‘Merrily, it is so palpably not … just … a … tree .’

‘Well, it … it’s certainly the oak in the big picture over Tim Loste’s fireplace. I’m sure of that.’

It was all rolling at her like the ball lightning that Spicer had talked about, connections forming: all the saplings in the pots outside Loste’s house and the one planted in his garden … had they been grown from acorns picked up here, descendants of the Whiteleafed Oak?

It was as well to keep reminding yourself that the central reason you were here was finally to get to meet Tim Loste, without whom…

Lol stepped back, as if the atmosphere was too charged so close to the massive tree. You brought a blocked musician to what was alleged to be the most powerful source of musical energy within his ambit, you had to expect a certain … fascination.

‘If a few white leaves appeared on your oak tree, it was taken as a sign of major change.’

‘Athena?’

‘So if there was a tree here that was full of white leaves, maybe it was seen as a place where you could find transformation.’

‘That figures. Winnie’s blueprint for Tim Loste seems to be all about transformation. Like The Dream of Gerontius . The processing of the soul.’

‘You mentioned there were some other pictures on Loste’s walls,’ Lol said.

‘Mostly, they were places I didn’t recognize. Hills. Churches. But some were well known.’

‘Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury?’

She stared at him.

‘What the hell else did that woman tell you?’

Lol sat down in the grass, outside the growing shadow of the oak.