Flights of Fantasy - The Pub Fantasy Smackdowns

Whispers of Stone - Part 1

Whispers of Stone

We didn't expect the legends of our forefathers to follow us west. But where there is man, there are stories: stories which contain grains of truth, misremembered hints of the past, dark legends and subtleties of multilayered belief. Yet where there is belief, a continuation of a legend is inevitable, particularly if the legend they're based upon is true.

For what are the old gods without belief? Mere whispers in the dark...

~

I grew up in the far southwest of Cornwall. Where patient granite and slate are pounded by waves, and gorse marches over land to the sea. There is a richness of life there; a passion, a determination as solid as the stone upon which it is set, and proud Cornish men and women stand firm at the end of the land with eyes that glow with the fires of sunset.

Kernow: a county where you either fished, farmed or hewed tin from the ground. My family were miners. It was an unforgiving calling, but the land itself was a harsh mistress despite her outer beauty. My brother and I followed in our father's footsteps, but we trod different rocks under our booted feet. As the steam engines in Cornwall began to fall silent, many of us sought adventure elsewhere. We were in demand, but the tin mined by our forefathers wasn't, so we Cornish miners spread around the world. My father, my Uncle Tom and other male members of the family had died in the Carne Galne collapse of 1910, and within a generation the price of tin had dropped through the floor leaving us without work, but unwilling to give up the pride of our trade. If pride were food we would have eaten like kings, but money and adventure shout louder than the graves of the past when you’re a young man, so we followed the promise of a far western sun.

I still remember Aunty Zena's face as she waved us goodbye from Hayle station, her arms around the shoulders of her remaining kin: a grandson, the last of the Jago line and with us, the last of the miners surviving in the family.

Even then she warned us of the pervading darkness, of the knockers and their capricious ways. We lived in the dark, and mined far below the surface of the earth. We had tunnelled so deep in places you could hear the roar of the waves above our heads as we followed the tin where it took us. Often it took us into danger.

The rocks of Cornwall were part of us, and yet the darkness held sway in the lore of the Cornish mining men. Knockers: a legend of dark spirits, whispers of madness from the deep pits, a superstition borne of misunderstanding and fear. You can never truly take the soil of Kernow from a Cornishman, or the spirit, and it's true now that at the bottom of any deep mine in the world you'll find a Cornish miner. But sometimes you'll find other things as well. When the lights are dimmed and the men fell quiet the subtle knocks of stone in the deep darkness, lights, whispers, flashes of movement, all are grist to the mill of superstition and belief.

The journey west was arduous back then, the seas were less than kind to us on our journey across the Atlantic, but we survived the sickness and bile of months of travel to make it to western shores. Once there, we were shipped west by the mining companies into the Rocky Mountains. The mining camp was basic, but we weren't there for comfort, we were there to make our fortunes so we could go back home again. Many Cornishmen had journeyed there and we found ourselves surrounded both by familiar accents and techniques, as well as folk from the far east and elsewhere. Curiously all of us seemed to have familiar superstitions, despite where we came from.

New world. Old gods. Ancient fears.

So much for modern Victorian thinking. There was a horseshoe nailed to the wooden pillar which marked the entrance to the gold mine, the iron worn shiny by continual touch and superstition. Gifts were left by the entrance, and a morsel of food was often left when we had our lunch. And all the while we carried on down into the darkness, following the lode deeper every day. It wasn't as deep as Carne Galne back home, but it was still dark as pitch without the Davy lamps. My mother had always said we carried the light of love with us wherever we went, but love didn't light shaft four very well when we were hewing out the rock for processing prior to being loaded onto the steam engine which connected to the processing works.

Shaft four. The beginning of our descent into madness, and the pervading darkness of legend.

End of Part 1