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VILLAGE FOLKLORE?
Brooke
When I was little (5 or 6, I suppose, so we're looking at the late 70's/early 80's) we lived in a small village in East Yorkshire (my parents are still there). There wasn't much housing development at that time, so consequently all my mates were local lads, most of them older than me.
Being the little girl of the gang, you can imagine the stick I used to get. Any practical jokes tended to be played on me, and they delighted in scaring the crap out of me by pretending to be ghosts and chasing me. You know, the usual stupid things that boys do (some things never change!). Anyway, our usual "hang out" was what we simply called "the conker tree". This was indeed a conker tree set in a small clearing in a marshy field behind Graysgarth House, a mansion type place built in the early 1800's.
I vividly remember it being said that the conker tree spot was haunted by two ghosts (skeletons, to be precise). The story was that these two were buried underneath the tree in the very distant past and would come back at Halloween (of course!) every year. Even the lads were convinced of this, though who told us it was haunted we never knew. It was just one of those things that you KNOW, probably without anyone having to tell you. Or the boys might've just been taking the piss - it's certainly a possibility.
When my little sis and brother came along, we still used to play down there and a new load of kids were being scared witless by the conker tree ghosts. I don't recall anything actually happening (apparitions or anything, I mean), but there was certainly an atmosphere. We all loved feeling spooked - still do - and relished the thought of these skellies turning up one day.
It's probably this love of old bones and stuff that led me into archaeology at about the age of 13. I got really into it, and ended up studying it at Nottingham Uni. I specialised in prehistory, and when it came to doing my dissertation the obvious choice for me was to concentrate on the Bronze and Iron Age in Holderness (where our village is). I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and came back up here a lot to trawl the Sites and Monuments Records and the dusty back rooms of Hull's archaeology museum.
So, here we come to the weird bit. Scouring a battered copy of Loughlin and Miller's Archaeological Sites of Humberside, I came across an entry under the heading of our village. Glancing through it, I saw the words "gold rings" and "Graysgarth". To cut a long story short, it turns out that when the labourers were digging the foundations of the house, they uncovered two skeletons buried next to each other, both with gold jewellery. This is in the early 19th century! When I checked the O.S. reference, it was on practically the same site as, yes, you guessed it, "our" conker tree......
I've thought about this a fair bit. Is it a bit of village gossip passed down through umpteen generations? Or could it be something a bit more Fortean - some sort of collective memory of a prehistoric burial (I don't think it could be any later than the Iron Age, though I could be wrong!)? Any ideas would be welcomed.
PS That field was sold a few years ago to some housing developers who bulldozed it and stuck a load of "executive properties" on it. The tree's still there though - wonder if those executives have had any spooky goings on in their new homes? Hmmmmm....
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