The Horsingdon Transmissions No.181: The Lightning Tree

This tree was apparently once held sacred by the Horsingdon Coven, on account of it being struck at the culmination of one of their hideous rites by a monstrous bolt of lightning: one which not only fell unexpectedly from out a cloudless night sky, but which also split the uppermost part of the trunk into what appear to be two great goat-like horns. 

It is said that when the tree was thus sundered, a swarm of horrible, bulbous white spiders poured from out its innards onto the hapless high priestess, devouring her. It is also said that, in this fashion, her body was returned to the earth, and her consciousness made one with Those who dwell within it; thus was the ritual deemed a success, and thus did the coven believe themselves to have earned the favour of Those Who Wait. 

Whether this was indeed the case remains a matter of speculation; what one might conjecture, however, from this freakish and grotesque episode of the region's praeternatural history, is that the Hosingdon landscape remains forever hunger - and is equally willing to consume the flesh and to drink the blood of friend and foe alike in order to sate its endless, mindless appetite.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.180: Forgotten Dwellings

This overgrown and dilapidated cottage near Horsingdon Wood dates back less than a century - but is built on far older foundations. Indeed, as far as the extant parish records are concerned, there has been a dwelling on the site since before the 15th Century; what is missing from these ledgers, however, is any clear indication of its inhabitants. This may be significant: this area of Horsingdon has long associations with the practice of witchcraft and sorcery, and it has always been a trait of residents of the region to wilfully ignore and ostracise those locales and individuals deemed to be tainted by even the least hint of the uncanny: as if their erasure from everyday discourse somehow expunges the very existence of these troublesome people and places - as well as their memory. Indeed, one sometimes discovers that those sites least spoken of are the ones which hoard the most terrible histories.

I have yet to ecounter anyone in the borough willing to disclose anything about this particular house, let alone acknowledge its existence. In this instance actions do, indeed, speak louder than words - signifying the fact that this building must have once memorialised something so truly, unspeakably monstrous that it necessitated a collective unremembering. Needless to say, such locations are best avoided by the curious - regardless as to how much their grim secrets call to us.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.179: Desolate Abandonment

'Desolate abandonment' is a term that aptly describes both the mood and composition of - as well as the aftermath of lone urban encroachments upon - the Horsingdon landscape. In the latter regard, all too often one discovers below some isolated cleft, over the rise of some unfrequented hill, or in some secluded part of the woods, the unexpected remnant of prior habitation. Invariably the question then arises: 'who would live here, and why'?

Each of these dilapidated structures have, of course, their own singular, neglected histories; even so, an underlying lattice of tragedy - often with more than a hint of the praeternatural hard at its heels - typically binds their disparate stories into a unifying narrative: of things invoked that should not have been; of rituals enacted regardless of the consequence; of a witch unintentionally slighted; or of a stubborn intrusion into a solitary space best left uncolonised.

It is as if, in all these instances, there exists a secret intention to provoke - seemingly in as spectacular and grotesque a fashion as possible - the malice of the landscape; but perhaps that is also why we choose to live here - and perhaps this is the very thing which Horsingdon seeks to draw out of us.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 178: Black Bowers Redux

Above is one of the oldest and most elaborate of the Black Bowers to be found in Horsingdon Wood, marking the route to the grove where, in the 1700s, the Horsingdon coven met to conduct nameless rites before the stone idol in the form of an anthropomorphic three-eyed goat.

Evey decade or so, this particular Black Bower is rebuilt anew - although no one knows by whom; regardless, it is always the case that one piece of the preceding structure is resused in the building of the new, so that a continuity of sorts is retained with the Old Times. Thus those temporal disjunctures which a coarse modernity seeks to induce are buffered by a simple barrier of wood - bolstered by the weight of memory of a time when the woods echoed with words of power spoken in a monstrous language, and when the frightful names of Those Who Wait were shouted freely into the endless dark of the night sky.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.177: Burnt Earth

A strange circular burn in a field near Horsingdon Hill.

The aftermath of an unspeakable rite dedicated to Those Who Wait by the guardians of the Black Bowers?

The remnants of a Pyramid of Fire, marking the carnal and shockingly loathsome celebrations of stunted and serpentine neolithic survivals which still lurk beneath the hills and barrows of Horsingdon?

The site of a Ministry conspiracy, the irradiated earth of which provides damning evidence or disclosure of visitation by some vessel or entity from one of the many terrible worlds that impinged upon our own?

Whatever the case, the indifferent Horsingdon landscape remains silent on the matter - as it has done with regard to so many of the many terrible secrets it has secured over ages.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.176: The Watchers in the Wood

This crudely-carved wooden owl sits watch over a rarely-trodden path through Horsingdon Wood.
Similar figures are scattered throughout the area, and are used by the region's cunning folk - the guardians of the Black Bowers - to demarcate the boundaries of a particular site deemed sacred to Those Who Wait, or of some grove to be used by the guardians for the enactment of nameless rites  dedicated to those inscrutably ancient masters.

Owls figure prominently in Horsingdon folklore, where they are commonly presented as familiars to the guardians of the Black Bowers - but also as manifestations of a mysterious group of beings known as 'The Watchers in the Wood'; in the latter instance, there seem to be intriguing points of convergence between the lore surrounding The Watchers in the Wood, and the appearance of owls within more recent ufological abduction narratives (including those involving both Horsingdon Wood and Hill), where these nocturnal avians perform the role of 'screen memories', supposedly masking the true (and more horrifying) nature of the actual abductors.

In any case, it is best not to tarry too long in the vicinity of these silent icons; nor is it advisable to step too far across the boundaries which they oversee: for the crossing of such thresholds constitutes an act of transgression into unknown and forbidden zones of being - zones whose inhabitants do not take kindly to such intrusions, and from which there may be no returning.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.175: Aberrant Airwaves

Even the more rural areas of Horsingdon have found themselves colonised by the transmitter arrays which have increasingly come to populate the region's skyline, and whose strangely occulted signals have contaminated the borough's airwaves with their uncanny taint.

As a consequence of their social isolation, the inhabitants of these less-populous areas have typically been more prone to mental aberration and alienage than their urban counterparts; but with the appearance of the mysterious transmitters, both Horsingdon police and psychiatric services have reported a twofold increase of violent psychosis amongst residents of these parishes...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.174: Uncanny Valley

This ancient sunken bridleway runs through Horsingdon Woods - although few riders these days find themselves able to spur their mounts forward into the curious, submerged track: most horses whinny fearfully and remain stricken and sweating in place at the sight of the time-worn trail.

No one is quite sure why this should be; it is, however, said that on certain nights the thunderous gallop of something akin to a monstrous charger might be heard coursing down the steep hollow of the bridleway - even though no such beast is visible to mortal eyes.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.173: Ancient Springs, Unsated Hungers

The stream which emerges from this old brickwork duct - feeding the Grand Union Canal as it flows past Horsingdon Hill - has acquired something of a macabre reputation locally: there have been a number of accounts of late-night passersby having witnessed something skin to a thin, scaly arm bearing a three-fingered, webbed claw emerging from the conduit, groping around blindly as if in search of something.

The building of this this section of the canal in the early part of the 19th Century necessitated the disturbance of a nearby neolithic site - at the centre of which lay a small sacred spring from which the feeder stream originates. Local legends holds that, in ancient times, sacrifice was regularly made at the spring to propitiate that which dwelt within - lest it seek more regular sustanence from amongst the nearby population.

The cessation of such rites is, perhaps, to be expected in the face of the inevitable advance of modernity; nonetheless, there are things within the darkness for whom the reasoned light of that modernity holds no meaning; things which, once disturbed and denied their due, will never again rest until their unspeakable appetites are sated.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.172: A Horsingdon Solstice

The images above are a rare instance of the guardians of the Black Bowers allowing themselves to be captured on film - on this occasion performing the traditional, costumed midsummer pantomime at the foot of Horsingdon Hill.

The white 'Obby 'Oss supposedly represents the monstrous, supernatural horse summoned forth from some nameless realm by the Saxon warlord Horsa. Supposedly buried somewhere beneath the crest of the Hill, it is said that the remains of Horsa are guarded still by the spectre of his praeternatural mount. The second figure is that of Old Hob Underhill (or sometimes more specifically 'Old Hob from Under the Hill'), which the guardians of the Black Bowers consider to be a folkoric representations of one of Those Who Wait - an entity whose monstrous form (oddly mirroring Horsa's fate) has slumbered for aeons in some black abyss beneath Horsingdon - but who is here quaintly disguised in this charmingly bizarre (yet still disturbing) costume.

Local interpretations of the pantomine have the 'Obby 'Oss as the protector of the region, chasing off Old Hob from its attempted depredations of the land and its people; the performers themselves offer an alternitive reading: the 'Obby 'Oss is the harbinger of Those Who Wait; that rather than seeking to drive Old Hob away, it is acting as midwife, forcing Old Hob Underhill's passage from the womb of its previous state of being into a glorious rebirth and renewal within the substance of this world. And such births, as the guardians of the Black Bowers are found of reminding anyone willing to listen, are inevitably accompanied by the most terrible of hungers.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.171: Fearful Frequencies

A transmitter array by the side of the train line which runs berween Northwich Park Station and Trentford Station. The exact purpose of this lone transmitter remain unclear - as do the reasons for its construction at this particular location (an area of the region replete with witchlore of the most disconcerting kind); regardless, since 1985, the same signal has been transmitting from the site: a perfect sine wave of continuous and uninterrupted repetition, its numb, mindless drone oscillating endlessly through the airwaves.

Those who have heard the transmission typically warn others not to seek it out. They report that it seems to resonate along a scale of harmonics entirely alien to the human experience, registering its vacuous and indecipherable signal in a frequency as fearful as it is unfathomable. These percipients also claim to have been so deeply unnerved by the experience of what they heard that, for days afterwards, they suffered regular blackouts and periods of memory loss. Fortunately, this part of the Horsingdon region remains sparsely populated, suggesting that the array functions as some kind of warning beacon, ensuring that the surrounding landscape - and whatever monstous powers inhere therein - remains forever free from human habitation and interference..

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.170: A Field of Secrets

This archive photo of a Ministry listening post from the late 1950s - located in a field containing a neolithic barrow not far from Horsingdon Hill - depicts what appears to be a circular or spherical aerial object of unknown origin on the extreme middle-right of the photo. Indeed, newsletters produced by HUFOS (the long-defunct Horsingdon UFO Society) at the time noted regular sightings of unidentifable aerial phenomena in and around the installation, as well as making mention of the supposed disappearance of at least one of the station's personnel around the time of these sightings.

The intallation is now long gone - but the field in which it stood is not entirely bereft of the secrets it once kept: rumour has it that on certain moonless nights ghostly figures, wearing relatively modern military dress, might be observed flickering in and out of reality - all the time wreathed in phosphorescent spectral fire and screaming silently at the unimaginable experiences they endure whilst forever trapped between worlds.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.169: Gateway to Entropy

More signs and portents manifest as a merciless, sweltering closeness drips sluggishly from the firmament, dissipating into the strange occult economy of the Horsingdon landscape. A triangular maw in the sky - a gateway to entropy - announcing the eventual heat-death of the universe to the uncomprehending populace of the region...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.168: Farrow Wood

Travelling in a southerly direction past Horsingdon Hill, one encounters what was once a relatively small parcel of common land - covering only a few acres - known as Farrow Wood. In the 1970s a compulsory purchase order effectively placed the Wood under the jurisdiction of an arm of the British Armed Services (which Horsingdon conspiracy theorists, with typically paranoid aplomb, believe is probably mysterious and inscrutable 'Ministry').

Notably, the issuance of the purchase order coincided with rather hysterical claims being made in local newspapers - replicating a wider moral panic being perpetrated in the national tabloids - regarding a rising tide of witchcraft and satanism which was apparently sweeping the nation, with Farrow Wood being one of the focal points in the Horsingdon region where withcraft rituals and other 'satanic' activities were supposedly flourishing.

Whether the two instances are related remains open to speculation - but ever since that time Farrow Wood has been fenced off and closed to public access; in addition to which, nightly the tall floodlights shown in the above photo illuminate a clearing in the middle of the Wood where, according to the news reports of the 1970s, nameless occult rites regularly took place.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.167: Horsingdon Bunker

Following a narrow path through Horsingdon Woods to the base of Horsingdon Hill, one eventually encounters a squat concrete archway, overgrown with foliage, and housing a heavy steel door - to which a legal notice is posted, warning the reader against any attempt at gaining entry by order of Horsingdon Borough Council.

In recent years, a rich vein of folkore and legendry has been mined from this curious structure, especially regarding what lies within. A recurrent motive involves curious wayfarers who, on investigating the doorway, are surprised to encounter a shockingly discordant and cacophanous noise - as of great claws being raked across bare metal - emanating from the side of the portal opposite to the listeners: the sound of something monstrous soliciting egress from its underground prison, and seeking entrance into our world.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.166: Demonic Firmament

After a tumultuous thunderstorm at precisely 3am - the Witching Hour - this morning, the skies over Horsingdon have finally cleared; yet in its wake the grey shroud of cloud cover has left another mystery: photographed earlier this evening, the residuum of what appears to be an inverted pentagram sketched in smoke above the Horsingdon skyline.

A random arrangement of clouds, deceptively fashioned into an act of signification by the cognitive misfiring of our pattern-recognition systems and pareidolia? Contrails produced by Ministry aircraft as part of some great, conspiritorial ritual? Or perhaps something even worse: the portent of other horrors which will wrack the skies and landscape of Horsingdon - horrors conjectured by the unformed and immaterial geometries of a terrible symbology; horrors unimaginable, but yet to come.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.165: Haunted Skies

The swathe of ghostly grey cloud which continues to linger across the skies of Hauntingdon was briefly disturbed today by the appearance of what percipients claimed was an object of praeternatural provenance, sighted above the crown of Horsingdon Hill. The object was too distant to be identified, but at times it appeared to swell and contract, taking on a transluescent, spectral hue before vanishing in a sudden flash of light.

If Horsingdon's skies were not already haunted enough by their own history of inexplicable aerial phenomena, as the electrostatic build-up and ionization caused by current meteorological conditions grates against the membrane that separates worlds at its thinnest point, chances are those skies will become yet more haunted in the days ahead.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.164: Northwich Masonic Temple

Northwich Masonic Temple, over which James Boreham presided for the better part of the 1920s. The Temple began to acquire something of a sinister reputation during this period on account of the heterodox rites which Boreham supposedly performed in the building's extensive cellars - largely unbeknownst to the longer-standing and more respectable of the establishment's patrons. This eventually led to a sharp fall in membership, as well as threats of violence from the surrounding community in the wake of a series of mysterious disappearances (the responsibility for which was, unsurprsingly, laid at Boreham's door).

Today the Temple is no longer operational, and in an advanced state of disrepair. Despite its abandonment, over the decades there have been occasional reports of missing persons last seen in the vicinity of the building.

During his tour of the Horsingdon region in 1968, Roland Franklyn visited what was by then an uninhabited husk. During his lone, nighttime exploration of the Temple's cellars, Franklyn found evidence of recent ritual activities, as well as a preponderence of curious white spiders which had apparently infested the building. In one unpublished letter documenting his experiences in the Temple, he also admits to withdrawing rather unceremoniously from his search of the lower reaches of the structure after hearing a low throbbing noise emanating from further below - along with the disconcerting sound of something unfeasibly large and inhuman dragging itself in his direction from an adjoining corridor.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.163: Uncanny Signals, Alien Intelligences.

A vast new transmitter array, in the process of being built, claws its way skyward - shown here from Southcote Station facing towards Northwich Park Station; some distance away to its right, a smaller companion is just visible above the skyline.

A stream of uncanny signals, jagged static and unearthly white noise - contrivances of occulted telecomunications, which fuse cutting-edge digitech and quantum computing with the barely-understood hyperdimensional mechanics revealed by xeno-cryptolinguistic analysis of forbidden tomes of pre-human provenance - spews forth from these esoteric apparatus into the stratosphere and thence to the black gulfs beyond: messages - as unintelligible to the human mind as they are unutterable - cast into the outer voids for the scrutiny of the fathomless alien intelligences which lurk therein. And what fearful response, I wonder, might we one day expect in return?

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.162: Shadows Over Horsingdon (Redux)

As a pendulous layer of thick grey cloud - flecked with brief flashes of electrical discharge - continues to blanket the skies of the region, a transmitter array casts its own shadow over the streets and houses of Horsingdon. Today the airwaves are crawling with strange and unidentifiable signals, whilst local radio transmissions are subject to peculiar distortions on account of the anomalous atmospheric conditions - signs and portents of something terrible about to step over the horizon.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.161: Graveyard Statuary

St. Osmund's Church has now been completely boarded up - although disoncertingly a Black Bower has been erected within the bounds of its cemetary, where, it seems, an increasing number of graves have been disturbed on account of subsidence (at least that is the story spun by the Tory councillors responsible for of the supposed 'renovation' of the building and its grounds).

It is difficult to ignore an apparent synchrony between developments here and intimations of the recent re-occupation by persons unknown of the long-cursed Boreham House (which overlooks the churchyard from across the road) - and how this might relate to long-standing rumours of tunnels and crypts below the Church, supposedly pre-dating the Roman invasion of Britain, and which allegedly connect to various sub-basements beneath the Boreham abode.

In any case, graveyard statuary, now unwanted and displaced from their silent watch over the inhabitants of the burying ground, grieve still for the people of Horsingdon - perhaps in anticipation of some doom that slouches inexorably towards the borough.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.160: A Light at the End of the World

Boreham House under the grey pall of clouds which has covered the region for the entire day in the aftermath of political turmoil. For the most part, a period of meteorlogical calm, but cut through with flashes of actinic tension and uncertainty: an intimation of the discharge of lightning which threatens to tear asunder the atmospheric physics of the Horsingdon skyline; lightning in whose blurred, negative afterimage one is granted a brief and terriying glimpse of a world as we hope it never could be - but which we secretly fear is the way it truly is.

And in the darkness that grows in anticipation of this electrically-charged stormhead, a light appears - suddenly and unexpectedly - in the abandoned upper storey of Boreham House. Given the history of the place, such an event is replete with horrific expectation: at the very least, of a misshapen silhouette spied briefly before the lighted window, signalling the feared but long-expected return of something monstrous.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.159: Sticks (Redux)

It is not uncommon, during a casual stroll through Horsingdon Woods, to discover the remnants - or the beginnings - of some ritual edifice: sympathetic magic bound in stick, briar and stone, and intended to reshape the unseen topographies and the intangible, procrustean geometries which form both the metaphysical bedrock of the region, and the barrier separating this world from those chaotic, prenumbral realms which lurk beyond.

It is fortunate that ramblers typically encounter such artefacts after dawn and before twilight, for that is when they are at their safest; even then it is best not to interfere with them; better still to avoid such sites altogether - especially after dark, for then one risks confronting the authors of these structures or - worse still - whatever unnameable presences those architects of the unreal seek to draw forth from the formless dark.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.158: Towards the Light.

This stretch of the Ebury Way as it passes through Horsingdon is notorious for a luminescent phenomenon which has waylaid many travellers - and possibly claimed the lives and sanity of more than a few.

What one typically encounters is this: as the pathway along this stretch seems to break through the tunnel of trees, a brilliant luminescence like a dazzling burst of sunlight appears to fill the aperture. Locals often warn wayfarers not to go towards the light should this occur -  and on no account should they step over that blindingly luminous threshold: for its rays are of a deadly, sickening and irradiating light, beyond which can be heard a mindlessly throbbing hum, overlaid by a mad, incessent and atonal piping which traces its ineffable rhythm from neither this nor any other sane world or universe.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.157: Orbs

Above is a photo of the strange, orb-like manifestation - fuzzy and indeterminate, seemingly phasing intermittently in-and-out of the human perceptual spectrum - which appeared briefly over Horsingdon Woods after a particularly furious thunderstorm yesterday evening. A smaller, glowing orb can be seen in the lower left-hand corner of the image.

The violent reverberations of Horsingdon's meteorology have a habit of drawing forth inexplicable forces from those black, unfathomable abysses which claw mindlessly at the rim of our universe - lightless chasms harbouring things which hunger blindly for the life which lies within our world.

Inevitably, some horrendous local tragedy will have followed in the wake of this phenomenon.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.156: The Crooked Tree

On the lower slopes of Horsingdon Hill stands this lone remnant of a tree. In 1751, Abbie Carpender was hanged from it for the crime of witchcraft, and - as local legend has it - her body was buried in unhallowed ground at the foot of the tree. Not long after, the tree began to wither and die - on account, as some would have it, of feasting on the corrupt substance of Abbie Carpender's rotting and wretched corpse.

Yet despite such depredations the Crooked Tree continues, to this day, to look askance towards the the vast desolation of the Horsingdon firmament, as both defiant testimony and memorial to the marginalised and the disenfranchised of the district: those whose lives were hidden, or obscured, or forcibly snuffed out - and about which the dismal emptiness of space will forever preserve its impassive and indifferent silence.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.155: Ghost Tower Signals

This transmitter sits within a perimiter of iron fencing not far from where the Ebury Way passes the foot of Horsingdon Hill. Erected by the Ministry at some point in the early 1970s, over the years the structure has acquired the nickname of 'The Ghost Tower' on account of the pale, spectral figures sometimes spied at twilight dancing widdershins around the it

Reports of these ghostly phenonenon seem to coincide not only with disruptive bursts of static and white noise which sometimes interrupt local radio and television signals (much to the annoyance of local residents), but also with statistically-significant spikes in both the suicide rate and admissions to psychiatric institutions amongst the nearby population.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.154: Three Sisters

On the lower slopes of Horsingdon Hill sit the Three Sisters: a triumvirate of three small neolithic barrows, access to which has been restricted by order of Horsingdon Borough Council. Indeed, it seems that the local populace have always avoided the site on account of the area subsisting under a curse: a common belief being that the mounds mark the graves of three sisters who also happened to be witches. In any case, the fearful reputation surrounding the barrows has meant such that they have lain undisturbed for at least two hundred years; no official investigation of their contents was undertaken until the 1960s, when a team of archaeologists from the then-Northwich Park Polytechnic obtained permission to excavate the mounds.

Three days after the dig began, two of the team had died under highly mysterious circumstances, the excavation was abandoned, and the barrows were sealed. Soon after Horsingdon Bourough Council passed a by-law forbidding acces to the site, subsequently erecting a perimiter of
wire fencing around the area.

During his time in Horsingdon, Roland Franklyn claims to have visited the barrows late one night with a view to discovering what exactly was interred within, subsequently fleeing the vicinity on witnessing pale, faceless things crawling over the mounds; even today rumours persist of hooded figures gathering at the barrows on certain auspicious nights, enacting strange rites about these squat, archaic tumuli, and intoning incantations to whatever lurks within in a language not of this world.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.153: A Light in the Sky

A pulsing white light manifested in the skies above the furthest edges of Trentford's suburbs - not far from Croxley Moor or the nearby government facility - early last night. Needless to say, a mysterious and unexpected disappearance - of someone last seen walking across the moor during the early evening - was reported in the local newspaper this morning. 

In Horsingdon and its surrounding environs, instances such as these are now anticipated as a matter of course: especially in the aftermath of some seemingly-praeternatural event - in response to which locals will wholheartedly support the claims of local authorities that they intend to pursue every possible avenue of investigation in resolving these missing-person cases. 

But nobody really believes it. 

Those taken or consumed by the mysteries of Horsingdon rarely find themselves returned safely to hearth and kin: for it is a truth universally acknowledged by residents of the region that such unfortunates are lost forever - cast adrift eternally within those nameless zones and indeciphersble topographies which perpetually gnaw and grind against the ever-thinning edges of that which we mistake for the totality of the real.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.152: A Path Through the Woods

The collapsed remnant of a Black Bower blocks a path through Horsingdon Woods which leads to the crest of Horsingdon Hill, passing various sites of significance in the history of the Horsingdon Coven as it winds its way to the hilltop. Locals rarely tread such paths, and warn those they consider to be 'outsiders' of making use of them - especially after dusk.

As it's curious folklore has filtered out into a wider world of cosmopolitan modernity, Horsingdon Hill and its surrounding woodland have become something of a weekend attraction for a particular kind of Londoner - one seeking an experience of some kind of 'authentic' (but entirely imagined) folksy ruralism (but without needing to travel outside the M25): usual middle-class professionals who work in the city, only ever eating locally-sourced organic food, and whose flirtation with New Age ideals is passed off as a profound committment to an 'alternative' spiritual path (and never, of course, as the base consumption of yet another form of commodified cultural capital that it really is).

Needless to say, the gleefully-upbeat perspectives of these casual mystical sightseers rarely survive an unwanted rendezvous with those guardians of the Black Bowers who are sometimes encountered in the vicinity of Horsingdon Hill: ragged wanderers whose fearful committment to Those Who Wait havs enlightened them to the actual, spiritually-desolate nature of reality - an enlightenment they forcefully dispense upon others, whether it has been solicited or not. Thus, in the nearby Witch Elm Public House, one will sometimes hear a whispered tale of hapless tourists who, ignoring the warnings proferred, have followed these forbidden paths through the woods to an unusual - and often grotesque (but justly-deserved) - doom.