I was walking a ridge in the far eastern fells, long ago – out for the day, with only myself for company. Cloud base had dropped to around fifteen hundred feet, which meant I was passing in and out of a silvery mist with intermittent light rain. I'd disembarked from the lake steamer an hour or so earlier, and had another six miles or so of undulating hill country ahead, and only my legs to carry me.
There has always been a silent emptiness to those fells, a feeling of liminality where even the wind seems to hold its breath. The valleys are worked, and grazed but unobtrusively. There are wild deer, and dotted here and there on the fell-sides are romantic ruins, reminders of a fallen past – tumbled walls, moldering, moss grown barns. But it is an emptiness that invites connection rather than loneliness. Something comes to us more easily here.
After an hour or two of solitary walking, the attention changes. We become alert enough not to stumble, aware of the weather, its movement, its likely trend. We are aware of the line of the path and the feel of the ground beneath our boots, yet the mind is no longer occupied with the business of the everyday. Thoughts come and go neither resisted nor pursued. The rhythm of walking dissolves the hard edges between the outer and the inner landscape, which is perhaps why the hills have always attracted hermits, pilgrims and visionaries. Something in that measured movement allows another mode of seeing and being.
It was some way along the ridge I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, an attractive reedy tarn. By its shore stood a curious stone shelter, almost ornamental in appearance. And there was a man sitting beside it, perhaps another walker, resting. He seemed entirely at ease, contemplative as he gazed over the water, its surface gently rippled by raindrops and a faint breeze.
I remember no sense of surprise. Had I thought I was seeing something impossible I would surely have stopped. The scene possessed the same ordinariness as every other feature of the landscape. The reeds stirred. The shelter looked weathered, as though it had stood there for centuries. The man neither acknowledged me nor ignored me. He simply inhabited the space.
I remember thinking it would make a wonderful photograph, but I didn't want to disturb the man's quiet, so I carried on, storing away the memory, assuming I would return another day, perhaps in finer weather to get my photograph.
Was that thirty or forty years ago?
I've since walked that ridge at least half a dozen times, enough to know now there is no tarn. The maps confirm it. Modern satellite images confirm it. There was, and is, no tarn.
So the question remains: what did I see?
The rational mind approaches such puzzles with rational tools, and those tools inevitably begin by questioning the reality of experience itself. There is no evidence of it beyond my own memory. There is no photograph, no witness, no place on a map where I can point and say, "There, that's where I saw it."
The next rational step is to question the memory itself. Perhaps it was another ridge. Another walk. Perhaps I've unconsciously conflated two separate recollections. It is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Yet I know what I experienced.
From there, other possibilities emerge. Perhaps it arose from the imagination, though not in the ordinary sense of making something up. Many traditions speak of places that appear only in passing, landscapes glimpsed once and never again. Throughout the old Celtic world there are stories of the faery, or the Good People, and of places that seem briefly to overlap with our own before withdrawing. The faery, it's often said, are glimpsed only through the corner of the eye. Perhaps it is wise not to go looking.
There was nothing remarkable about the man himself. He wore ordinary modern clothes. Memory even supplies him with a rucksack, though that detail may have been embroidered over the years.
So was the tarn real? Or did something from the imaginal world briefly intrude? Was it an hallucination? And if so, does that entirely explain it? We tend to imagine there is a sharp boundary between imagination and reality, yet our inner lives rarely respect such tidy divisions.
In the end, there is no answer that carries any material weight. There is nothing to prove, and nothing much would change if proof were possible. A solitary walker, on a lonely ridge in poor weather, saw something that was later not there anymore. But, for a time, the mystery troubled me. I sought an explanation, and in the seeking realised I had diminished the experience itself. These days I still think about that tarn. I thought about it again when I walked the ridge recently. But now it seems less important that I solve the puzzle, than to simply remember it. And be comfortable in the remembering.
In this way we resist collapsing the tension of opposites: resist the urge to reduce experience into certainties, whether by dismissing such encounters as fantasy, or insisting upon them as supernatural fact. Some memories do not require explanation, only that we carry them. They remain alive precisely because they continue to inhabit that fertile ground between what we know and what we cannot explain.
The tarn has never returned. Yet, in another sense, it will always be there. And I think therein lies the only clue – that none of this means anything to anyone else.
We are increasingly uncomfortable with things that refuse any form of classification. They must either be debunked or believed in. One must either be rational or credulous. But perhaps these are not the only choices. Another possibility arises: to leave them exactly where they arise, neither peddled as supernatural, nor dismissed as an aberration. Better, I think, to allow them simply to remain what they are – an interruption, a slight unevenness in the regular weave of the world.
If I had got my photograph that day, all I would have had is a photograph. Had I returned years after to find the tarn still there, long marked on the map, it would just have been a reedy tarn I had once passed, and thought nothing of again. Or more likely, in its ordinariness, I would have forgotten it.