Three years ago today my memory says… I ascended Eyam Moor up the slippery paths from Stokes Ford and Gotherage… The day was crisp and bright I recall, a chill wind breezed about Stanage Cairn but the weather was decidedly decent compared to the days of yore when people could easily succumb to the bitter cold and perish on this Peakland moor, trying to traverse the bleak wastes in sodden clothing…
This was the fate that brought about the demise of Stephen Broomhead.. ‘Dog Whipper of Eyam’… {appointed to clear the church of wild stray dogs every Sunday by cracking his parish issue ash and leather whip}.. for some reason he was crossing the moor when the weather ‘appen changed for the worst and hypothermia overtook him …the record of his death, penned in the Eyam church register states “overlaid in y snow upon Eyam Moor. 5th February 1748.”
I was half hoping to make contact with any residual memory left of him.. or of another victim of the frigid Eyam Moor, Elizabeth Trout.. she was also frozen {‘starved’} to death in an earlier winter… February 1692.
Nothing came forth..no confused shades were floating about the ether.. presumably due to the uncertainty of which part of the sprawling moor they were eventually found on….
I was often told by my old history teacher, (fancifully maybe).. that whenever you see a cairn of stones piled up in some wild remote landscape, this signified someone long ago died unexpectedly at that location… and Eyam Moor is littered with cairns ..piled alongside the deeply rutted popular track ways…as well as those trails forgotten in time.. turns out most of these ritualistic piles on the shelving slopes originated in the Bronze Age period…. with Wet Withins, a stone circle of some importance and incredible earth energies.. possibly being a Neolithic installation… archaically called Wet Withins (probably) due to its very soggy ground positioning in the centre of the moor… {the peat saturated by springs}.. and possible utilisation by shepherds as a pin fold… {they used to call their sheep ‘witherns’ apparently}? (so I was told)!
A Long Barrow burial mound for some forgotten Bronze Aged Chieftain was also raised close by to that ritual site and ‘ring cairns’ as well as two smaller, later stone circles are merged into the landscape now, strewn flat by stone robbers and smothered with densely tangled heather… an atmospheric walking area in the best of conditions.. Leam Hall at the bottom slopes of the moor once had a headless coachman and four phantom horses pull up outside it’s front door..much to the consternation of the domestic servants.. Eyam moor has been the domain of the dead for a long while and they may have been making a social call on the neighbors that time.. a hundred and seventy some years ago…
A sensitive Medium who was hosting an event with us at Eyam one summer night was surprised at the amount of ‘dark energy’ they were picking up on around here, specific to one area I will not name for we may thoroughly investigate sometime… and when he was kind enough to offer me a lift back home afterwards I directed his route around Leam Lane way…. and he was having veritable palpitations..
Enjoy Eyam moor.. no matter how lonely the landscape seems you probably won’t be alone…
Hubert Hobux 