An Essex Tale

The Hooded Monk

By Christopher Mathews  

It’s not just me, other people have seen him too. A strange grey cloaked figure, translucent in brilliant sunshine and ghostly white by moonlight. People rarely see his face, which is almost always hooded, he looks through them, occupying the same space, but walking in another time. Reports go back hundreds of years recording these sightings. Being a scientist, I don’t hold with such nonsense. The inexplicable is often ascribed to magic or spirits, demons, or ghosts. Such explanations are the cheap stock in trade of lazy thinkers and the gullible. At least, that’s what I would have said until my own strange encounter.

Rayleigh is such an ordinary small town in Essex. But even the oldest among us know our town only through a brief sixty years or so of change. We only ever experience a fragment of time: the ‘now’ when our fleeting lives leave their small mark and are gone. We have very little sense of the great expanse of history, a history that goes back and back, beyond memory, beyond record, with only fragments left to us. The great Anglican martyrs, Thomas Causton and John Ardeley were burnt at the stake for their beliefs right here in our busy, ordinary High Street, right outside where Boots is now. Busy shoppers bustle past, oblivious of those momentous events. Some people claim you can still smell burning flesh on the anniversary of their martyrdom. What part had Holy Trinity Church, just yards away played in these great events, the truth is now lost in time. They say, “History is written by the winning side.” Perhaps the clergy stood looking on in self-righteous silence or holding the cloaks of those who stoked the blaze as the ignorant crowd gibbered and jeered at the spectacle. But towering over all is the great Rayleigh Mount itself. An unnatural mass dominating the summit of the town, like the bald head of some great giant asleep under the soil. It is said that ancient historic sites are saturated with the events of the past which seep into the earth, and on certain days percolates out through the pourers and fissures into the present. This must have been just such a day.

Most days I walk along the path that circles Rayleigh Mount. Its earthworks the only remnants of a Norman Motte and Bailey Castle. Long stripped of the timber structures that gave it power. Who knows what treasures of gold and silver lie conceals in its earthy depths, only seen by the badgers who burrow deep into the soil and back in time. They do not value such things. To me, it’s a peaceful refuge in a busy work schedule, half an hour spent in an island of nature, surrounded by a boiling sea of modernity. There’s always someone different to see; A group of small excitable children on a nature trail, herded like sheep by stressful teachers. An elderly couple with a picknick. Giggling teenagers taking the shortcut back to school, talking, not to each other but texting on their mobile. And once a nude sunbather. But this was winter, at dusk, just after the feeble sun had done its best to warm the earth. Everything was bathed in pale silvery moonlight. I had the whole place to myself, or so I thought.

At the base of the Mount, I saw a hooded figure on his knees in a posture of prayer. He seemed startled at my presence and on rising to his feet walked quickly and fitfully away, gripped by some awful fear, head darting from left to right as if terrified by unseen tormentors. What struck me was that the route he took did not exist, he did not follow the natural undulation of the ground or the well-worn gravel path but seemed to come by some unknown track through hedges and trees. His feet would sometimes shuffle through the soil as if wading through water, and other times as if walking three feet above the ground. I followed at a discrete distance. Climbing upwards he would occasionally stoop to go through some unseen doorway or stop to open a gate he alone could see. He appeared to be skirting around a wall that did not exist. It was as if his experience of the physical landscape was different from ours. This stirred some strange half remembered memory in me, and like a flash of insight I realised he was following the layout I had seen on a sketch of the castle. When he reached the summit of the Mount a ghastly, silent, anguished cry rang out from him. He was looking out over something I could not see. I came up the rough wooden steps quietly and cautiously when he turned and looked right into my face. A jolt the fear flooded me. He pointed a shaking finger and as if pleading said, ‘The whole town is ablaze; I see every hovel on fire with orange glowing embers. I, I see long lines of men carrying red torches in procession, leading prisoners away, and military columns ablaze with unnatural white lights approaching, marching in pairs. You! Have you come to torment me in this bleak region of Hades? Have I been cast into hell, has doomsday come at last? Or are you a guide sent from heaven above to rescue me…’ The rest was lost, he broke down in sobs and fell silent to his knees again lost in despair. At that moment it was if the thin membrane that separates the present from the past had been perforated. For a brief moment I gazed into his time, and he glimpsed into ours. Had he seen a vision of coming judgement or was it just the ribbon of car head and taillights leading up towards the town and the warm glow of house lights he described. For one brief moment I saw our world through his eyes.

Copyright Christopher Mathews