New Years Day in the Peak District
Yesterday I made my annual New Years Day trip to Lud’s Church, a dramatic natural rock formation high in the Staffordshire peak district. New Years Day holds special significance for this mystical and uncanny place, as that is the date upon which the Green Knight, the giant warrior of Arthurian legend issues his challenge at the court of Camelot and the date Sir Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel to answer it a year later.
Lud’s Church has long been identified as the inspiration for the Chapel, with the only surviving manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight being produced by monks at the nearby Dieulacres Abbey. Armed with a copy of JRR Tolkien’s modern English transcription/translation of the Gawain poem, I set out to match the place to the words of the medieval epic.
“Then he (Gawain) put spurs to Gringolet (his horse), and espying the track, thrust in along a bank by a thicket’s border, rode down the rough brae right to the valley; and then he gazed all about: a grim place he thought it, and saw no sign of shelter on any side at all”
“Only high hillsides sheer upon either hand, and notched knuckled crags with gnarled boulders; the very skies by the peaks were scraped, it appeared.”
“Then he halted and held in his horse for the time, and changed oft his front the Chapel to find. Such on no side he saw, as seemed to him strange, save a mound as it might be near the marge of a green, a worn barrow on a brae by the brink of a water”
“Beside falls in a flood that was flowing down; the burn bubbled therein, as if boiling it were”
“Then he went to the barrow and about it he walked, debating in his mind what might the thing be. It had a hole at the end and at either side, and with grass in green patches was grown all over”
“All hollow within: nought but an old cavern, or a cleft in an old crag; he could not it name aright. ‘Can this be the Chapel Green, O Lord?’ said the gentle knight. ‘Here the Devil might say, I ween, his matins about midnight!’”
“On my word,’ quoth Gawain, ‘’tis a wilderness here! This oratory looks evil. With herbs overgrown it fits well that fellow transformed into green to follow here his devotions in the Devil’s fashion.”
“This is a chapel of mischance, the church most accursed that ever I entered. Evil betide it!’ With high helm on his head, his lance in his hand, he roams up to the roof of that rough dwelling. Then he heard from the high hill, in a hard rock-wall beyond the stream on a steep, a sudden startling noise. How it clattered in the cliff, as if to cleave it asunder, as if one upon a grindstone were grinding a scythe!”
“And then he climbed past a crag, and (the Green Knight) came from a hole, hurtling out of a hid nook with a horrible weapon: a Danish axe newly dressed the dint to return, with cruel cutting-edge curved along the handle – filed on a whetstone, and four feet in width, ’twas no less – along its lace of luminous hue; and the great man in green still guised as before”
“’Gawain,’ said that green man, ‘may God keep thee! On my word, sir, I welcome thee with a will to my place, and thou hast timed thy travels as trusty man should, and thou hast forgot not the engagement agreed on between us”
