The Crooked Tree stands near the crown of Burn Hill, and is sacred to the guardians of the Black Bowers. There is something intrinsically uncanny about sites such as this, delineating as they do zones of disjuncture: places where the world somehow becomes uncoupled from linear temporal trajectories, and from the hard physics which to all appearances fix and constrain the spatial coordinates it is able to occupy; locations one only ever seems to encounter amid the desolation of sombre grey skies.
When one delves into the history of these sites, ne discovers that a large number of tales telling of monstrous apparitions and incidences of bloody violence cluster around them - memorialising a past otherwise best forgotten. Indeed, in the folk traditions of Horsingdon, the ritualised spilling of blood is often necessary to effect a renewal and regeneration of the social order, such as it is; at locales such as these the act of bloodletting serves an entirely different purpose: to force open a little further, through the psychic trauma of blood spilt, those hidden doorways to the Outside which lie outside out physical perception.
Even today one might still encounter the aftermath of an act of blood sacrifice at the foot of the Crooked Tree: a wood pidgeon whose head has been shorn from its body, or a hare with its throat torn open. It is rumoured that worse, even more bloody sacrifice is made here on the night of certain festivals. On such nights, the people of Horsingdon ensure that their children are safely in bed, and thar the doors and windows to their homes are firmly bolted well before nightfall.
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