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Odd. l’ve been to Walsingham three or four times, both by car and on my bicycle via the excellent Wells and Walsingham Light Railway. I’ve never had any vibe from the place other than quaint and charming. Try the Caley’s Marching Chocolate!

maximus otter

That's easy for you to say when you always carry a hunting rifle around with you. Keeps the local cannibals in check.
 
I’ve never had any vibe from the place other than quaint and charming. Try the Caley’s Marching Chocolate!

I hope top go next year and will certainly attempt to try the chocolate! Edit to add: it's Fair Trade too!

The place looks lovely to my eyes and I'm expecting to explore as well as do the pilgrimage stuff.

I'm planning to do both the Catholic AND the Anglican versions. in a two birds with one belt and braces effort :)

I can't see the place is overtly "Christian" rather than heritaage although I imagine the shrines are?

PeteS and Lockers - could it be a non visible christian vibe happening that gave you the weird stuff? I'm not sure I know what I'd be looking for, just wondering :)
 
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I can't just now recall where, and in what context, but I've recently heard Mark Gattis tell a story of a trip to (I think) Bamburgh. It was somewhere he had looked forward to visiting, but as soon as he arrived a sense of unease descended upon him - becoming so pervasive that he had to leave.

I think it was Berwick Upon Tweed and the context was a youtube video where he was being interviewed with Jeremy Dyson about Robert Aickman weirdness in small towns.
 
I hope top go next year and will certainly attempt to try the chocolate! Edit to add: it's Fair Trade too!

The place looks lovely to my eyes and I'm expecting to explore as well as do the pilgrimage stuff.

I'm planning to do both the Catholic AND the Anglican versions. in a two birds with one belt and braces effort :)

I can't see the place is overtly "Christian" rather than heritaage although I imagine the shrines are?

PeteS and Lockers - could it be a non visible christian vibe happening that gave you the weird stuff? I'm not sure I know what I'd be looking for, just wondering :)

Just be careful that you're not mistaken for a GRU agent.
 
I think it was Berwick Upon Tweed and the context was a youtube video where he was being interviewed with Jeremy Dyson about Robert Aickman weirdness in small towns.

I tracked it down today. The instance I was thinking of was related by Gatiss in Jeremy Dyson's BBC Radio programme, The Unsettled Dust - The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman (the second time I've mentioned that broadcast in less than a week, I think). I listened to it again this afternoon, and in this case at least the place was actually Alnmouth.
 
Yes, I must have got it mixed up with the time I went to Berwick.

Funny - had the same effect on me earlier this year. I put it down to the fact that for a town with such incredible history it was just.... quite sad, really...
 
which place Mrs Migs? Alnmouth, Berwick, walsingham or Bamburgh? :)
Berwick.... I loved Bamburgh, and haven’t done the others, yet... though Walsingham is high on my “to do” list.
Berwick was somewhere I’d always wanted to visit because of the history, but it was just quite down at heel... didn’t seem that the powers that be had any real interest in promoting it as a historic place. I didn’t have any sense of oppressiveness or anything... that only happened to me the first time I went to Avebury, where I had the strongest sense of someone right in my face saying “leave!” Quite impressive since I’m usually sensitive as a house brick.
 
This is Escomb in County Durham. I grew up quite close to this place but never visited - it was just a bit out of the way to justify going there.
Escomb..jpg

In my early twenties, a friend had just bought his first car so one summer's evening we set out for a spin in the country. We saw the sign for the Anglo-Saxon Church at Escomb - 1 mile, so we thought it would be fun to have a look. The church is situated on the wooded roundabout near the top of the image.
When we approached the roundabout, my friend slowed down to see if there was anywhere to park. That's when we noticed that everyone who lived in the houses to the North of the church had come to their front doors and was watching us. Twice we went round the roundabout and they just stood there, watching in silence. We left and I have never felt like going back.

Maybe they were having trouble with boy-racers or other rural louts, I don't know. Their 'Wickerman' shit really did the trick though.
 
I did some archaeology at Escomb. Beautiful anglo saxon church set against brutalist modern houses :( It's those house your people came out of!!!

It's well tucked away isn't it? one road in and out....
 
Berwick.... I loved Bamburgh, and haven’t done the others, yet... though Walsingham is high on my “to do” list.
Berwick was somewhere I’d always wanted to visit because of the history, but it was just quite down at heel... didn’t seem that the powers that be had any real interest in promoting it as a historic place. I didn’t have any sense of oppressiveness or anything... that only happened to me the first time I went to Avebury, where I had the strongest sense of someone right in my face saying “leave!” Quite impressive since I’m usually sensitive as a house brick.

Interesting I love Avebury and the surrounding area, have watched the rising of the sun at the summer solstice. Walked there along the avenue. But It wasn't far from there that I saw my one-and-only 'ghost' or timeslip - I've mentioned it somewhere here already. West Kennet long barrow is amazing and Silbury hill totally puzzling.

I think the rising of the sun glorifies my God as well - after all, He made it.
 
I didn't mean to imply that, I didn't have independence in mind when I typed it out. I was referring to nationalism in general increasing everywhere and being 'legitamised'.
I was told; 'Patriotism' is loving your country and 'nationalism' is believing your country is better than everyone else's. The latter is that stage in group interactions where the 'outgroup' is defined as inferior to the 'ingroup' and the next stage is to view the 'outgroup' as an existential threat to the 'ingroup' and so must be exterminated. Nationalism = not a good thing.
 
I was told; 'Patriotism' is loving your country and 'nationalism' is believing your country is better than everyone else's. The latter is that stage in group interactions where the 'outgroup' is defined as inferior to the 'ingroup' and the next stage is to view the 'outgroup' as an existential threat to the 'ingroup' and so must be exterminated. Nationalism = not a good thing.


Have you looked at civic nationalism - the scottish model?

Have I, for example, struck you as a racist who thinks in this way?
 
I can't just now recall where, and in what context, but I've recently heard Mark Gattis tell a story of a trip to (I think) Bamburgh. It was somewhere he had looked forward to visiting, but as soon as he arrived a sense of unease descended upon him - becoming so pervasive that he had to leave.

I am used to travelling for work and pleasure and generally don't have any negative side effects with new places. However, on occasion, it has happened, and I recognise that sense of growing but inexplicable unease - but I wonder if this is sometimes a side effect of a natural mechanism. I wonder if when we enter an unfamiliar space there is a part of our brain that recalibrates to the new environment - a sort of unconscious remapping - and that if something unpredicted, odd, or just a bit out of the ordinary occurs during this process it irrevocably knocks our sense of our place within the immediate environmental context (and it would not have to be anything spectacularly weird - possibly the more subtle, the more powerful, because our conscious mind is not left with anything obvious to latch on to).

I should add that I don’t propose that this would be a blanket explanation for every incidence of environmental unease – but that it might explain something I’ve come to think of as ‘travellers angst’.
Like you, I think that unease or angst about a place can be based on something noticed below the level of full consciousness. I also think it may be analogous to that unease or angst we can feel in the presence of a particular person, the kind of 'gut feeling' that warns you to stay away from that person because something about them seems 'off', even when you can't consciously account for the feeling.
 
It might not be the town itself; it might be what the army calls “atmospherics”, i.e. the brain subliminally picking up indicators of abnormality such as no women or children on the streets, shuttered shops, extra police on duty or temporary traffic signs rerouting vehicles around an area.

maximus otter
 
It might not be the town itself; it might be what the army calls “atmospherics”, i.e. the brain subliminally picking up indicators of abnormality such as no women or children on the streets, shuttered shops, extra police on duty or temporary traffic signs rerouting vehicles around an area.

this! I defintely get this.

I wonder what the equivalent set of alerts is in country areas? I'm offering gamekeepers gibbets, humanoid acarecrowws, dogs howling...

and also human gibbets!

What is the difference between gibbets and gallows? is it that one is a display rack and the other is a killing machine?
 
Berwick.... I loved Bamburgh, and haven’t done the others, yet... though Walsingham is high on my “to do” list.
Berwick was somewhere I’d always wanted to visit because of the history, but it was just quite down at heel... didn’t seem that the powers that be had any real interest in promoting it as a historic place. I didn’t have any sense of oppressiveness or anything... that only happened to me the first time I went to Avebury, where I had the strongest sense of someone right in my face saying “leave!” Quite impressive since I’m usually sensitive as a house brick.

We used to have regular family jaunts up to Northumberland. Ford Anglia. Vauxhaull Viva. One of which you had to push half the way there. But what struck me most about going through the countryside was the local farmer practice of crucifying crows to the fences as a warning to the rest I suppose.
 
I lived in a small Scottish village on the east coast for two years in the early 1970s. I've lived in many places as a forces brat incomer, and there was always some problems, but in this respect this small Scottish village was the best posting of many, by far. I don't recall being victimised, bullied or persecuted in any way. Sure I was English, but no-one seemed to hold it against me, although being a Leeds United fan was a source of some amusement to Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen fans alike.
In the 70s, Leeds Utd seemed to be every Scot's favourite English team due to Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer, Eddie Gray, Frank Gray, David Harvey, Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen.
 
In the 70s, Leeds Utd seemed to be every Scot's favourite English team due to Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer, Eddie Gray, Frank Gray, David Harvey, Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen.
Heh. Honestly, I chose Leeds as everyone HAD to support a team and it seemed like a nice non-contentious choice. I've never really liked football...
 
On the way to my mom's, there's a turnoff for "Dollville." I've never taken it, but I imagine it's a dilapidated place, little more than a wide spot in the road. In my imagination, I see myself driving slowly down the deserted main street, feeling tiny pairs of glassy eyes following me from behind dusty lace curtains . . .
 
Wychnor in Staffordshire is inbetween Burton on Trent and Lichfield and is a suitably Fortean type of place as any IMO .. I spent most of my teenage years there, the name translates as 'valley (or 'vale') of the witches' .. originally called Hwickinore, Roman encampments are also recorded, the hamlet was later ruled over by Phillip de Somerville who lived at Wychnor hall and also started the tradition of the gifting of a flitch of bacon to any couple who could not argue for a year and a day.
 
Wychnor in Staffordshire is inbetween Burton on Trent and Lichfield and is a suitably Fortean type of place as any IMO .. I spent most of my teenage years there, the name translates as 'valley (or 'vale') of the witches' .. originally called Hwickinore, Roman encampments are also recorded, the hamlet was later ruled over by Phillip de Somerville who lived at Wychnor hall and also started the tradition of the gifting of a flitch of bacon to any couple who could not argue for a year and a day.
Sounds like an interesting place! And I want to thank you for giving me the occasion to look up the meaning of the word "flitch", a word I never came across before.

As to the couple winning the bacon, somehow I can't help but imagine that it was that very last day that was the most difficult once they'd already made it through the whole year!
 
Sounds like an interesting place! And I want to thank you for giving me the occasion to look up the meaning of the word "flitch", a word I never came across before.

As to the couple winning the bacon, somehow I can't help but imagine that it was that very last day that was the most difficult once they'd already made it through the whole year!
Apparently these couples had to have neighbours willing to back up that they hadn't been shouting at each other! ..
 
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