Hidden portals are scattered throughout Horsingdon's occult topography; however, the folklore of the region also maintains that these secret gateways sometimes become more or less conspicuous on account of the spectral demeanour of the landscape they inhabit: the Hanging Tree on Horsingdon Hill being a case in point.
But if that lore teaches us anything, it is the need to countenance the value of such places with a degree of circumspection: whilst the opening of these portals is viewed by some as an opportunity to transform and revivify a fallen and unclean present through a radical and utopian re-instantiation of the past, it is crucially important to remember that such endeavours inevitably prove deadly: for their pursuit always involves the violent imposition of some imagined moral, cultural or ethnic purity, usually seen as necessary to and constitutive of that equally fictive and imagined past. The vengeful spectres of those hanged as witches on Horsingdon Hill offer an object lesson on this account: it is often the powerless and the marginal who pay the price for such ideals - yet always their memory returns in an act of rebounding violence to haunt and desecrate those visions of purity and order with their filthy and uncomfortable truths, returning the world to the disorderly, mongrel and hybrid condition which is its rightful estate.
Thus the tree in Boreham Park depicted above represents a point of division between our world and the many others which cojoin it; yet the realms and universes to which it offers ingress are not the delightful, enchanted and perfect kingdoms encountered in our more rapturous imaginings; rather, they constitute monstrous and entropic spheres of being as degenerate, twisted, crooked, and creaking as our own.
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