Category Archives: Cumberland

Three Rush-Bearings (1906)

We heard about it first in Ambleside. We were in lodgings half-way up the hill that leads to the serene, forsaken Church of St. Anne. It was there that Faber, fresh from Oxford, had been curate, silently thinking the thoughts that were to send him into the Roman communion, and his young ghost, with the bowed head and the troubled eyes, was one of the friends we had made in the few rainy days of our sojourn. Another was Jock, a magnificent old collie, who accepted homage as his royal due, and would press his great head against the knee of the alien with confident expectation of a caress, lifting in recognition a long, comprehending look of amber eyes. Another friend—though our relations were sometimes strained—was Toby, a piebald pony of piquant disposition. He allowed us to sit in his pony-cart at picturesque spots and read the Lake Poets to him, and to tug him up the hills by his bridle, which he had expert ways of rubbing off, to the joy of passing coach-loads, when our attention was diverted to the landscape. Another was our kindly landlady. She came in with hot tea that Saturday afternoon to cheer up the adventurous member of the party, who had just returned half drowned from a long drive on coachtop for the sake of scenery absolutely blotted out by the downpour. There the “trippers” had sat for hours, huddled under trickling umbrellas, while the conscientious coachman put them off every now and then to clamber down wet banks and gaze at waterfalls, or halted for the due five minutes at a point where nothing was perceptible but the grey slant of the rain to assure them—and the spattered red guidebook confirmed his statement—that this was “the finest view in Westmoreland.” So when our landlady began to tell us of the ancient ceremony which the village was to observe that afternoon, the bedrenched one, hugging the bright dot of a fire, grimly implied that the customs and traditions of this sieve-skied island—in five weeks we had had only two rainless days—were nothing to her; but the tea, that moral beverage which enables the English to bear with their climate, wrought its usual reformation. Read more »

The Croglin Hall Vampire

The Fisher Family who had lived at Croglin Low Hall (once known as Croglin Grange) for many centuries. moved from the property into larger dwellings and put the property up to let. The following spring the grange was finally let to the Cranswells, 2 brothers and a sister, who soon integrated into the villiage,.

Croglin Low Hall

Croglin Low Hall

One summer evening as the sun set and the shadow of darkness began to take hold Miss Cranswell paused to look out of the window in the direction of the darkened churchyard at the bottom of their long lawn.

It seemed that in the shadows she could see two points of light moving above the gravestones coming closer to the wall that separated the churchyard from the Hall’s grounds.

With a deep feeling of unease, Miss Cranswell shut the window tight bolted the door and laid down in her bed to try and get some sleep.

Suddenly she was jolted awake by a low rustling from outside the window. She twisted in bed and sat bolt upright, outside the window burning like coals in the night were two points of light, which she now recognised as the demon eyes of some humanoid creature.

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