Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Higher Combe ·
The Hill That Moves Its Gate
The people of Higher Combe say the gate at the top of the valley road is moved a few yards up the hill each winter, and that the farm which owns the field beyond it loses one more acre to the slope every time.
- status: folklore
The gate at the top of the Higher Combe valley road stands between two stone posts, on the boundary of the old Penrose land, and for as long as anyone in the valley remembers it has been a little higher up the hill than it was the year before. The valley folk say the hill moves it. Every winter, when the frost has loosened the turf, the gate slides a yard or two up the slope toward the ridge, and the stone posts follow it, and the wall that runs down from them is left a little shorter on the valley side. In the spring the farmers come up with their tools and bring the posts back down to the old line. By the next winter the hill has moved them again.
The Penroses have farmed the land beyond the gate for seven generations. They say it is a matter of drainage, and of the slope being unstable on that side, and that the posts have been reset more than two hundred times in the last century. The council surveyors say the same thing, and have measured the gate's position each year on the Ordnance grid, and found that it has shifted up the hill by a little under four hundred yards since 1850.
The old folk do not argue with the surveyors. They only say the hill was not always there. Before the enclosure acts, they say, the boundary ran along the bottom of the valley, down by the stream, and the whole upper combe belonged to the common, where cattle grazed and children went to pick wild strawberries. The Penroses bought the common from the crown in the 1840s, and drew their fence along the valley's edge, and by the next generation the gate had begun to climb.
The story goes that old Josiah Penrose, who built the new wall, asked the hill for permission first. He stood at the top of the common one dawn and called up the slope, and asked whether the land would take his fence. The hill did not answer. But the next morning the gate was standing a yard further up than he had set it, and the stone posts were already sunk in the turf, and the wall was a little shorter than he had planned. Josiah laughed about it for the rest of his life. He said the hill had taken the fence, and given him back the sky.
Some say the hill is still asking. The children of Higher Combe say that if you stand at the gate on a still winter night, you can hear the slope creak as it shifts, a long slow sound like a door being pushed open from the other side, and that if you call out your name, the sound stops for a moment, and then starts again, a little higher up.
This story is told by Alice Penrose, the eighth of her line, who keeps the gate in good repair and has never once driven through it at night.