Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Whinmoor ·
The Lamp Post With No Wick
On a moor road, one lamp lights itself before any walker reaches it and burns without oil, and what it lights for is the whole of the tale.
- status: rumor
The moor road out of Whinmoor runs eleven honest miles and then meets the coast way, and at no point along it is there a lamp. That much used to be said as fact, and the older version of the legend depends on it absolutely: there was a lamp, one, a single iron post a half-mile past the second cattle grid, standing in the heather with no cable and no head worth mentioning, and nobody could name who put the post up or who was responsible for taking it down, and the county swore on its maps it had never been theirs.
The burn is the part that set the story. The lamp lit. Farmers coming up the road at the low hours said it burned steady, white, a little taller than the beam of a torch, and always before any walker reached it — you would come over the cattle grid and there would be the light burning ahead, and you would close on it, and it kept its lead, mile for mile, the way a kept moon keeps. Nobody, in any telling, ever got close enough to see the head of it. And lamplighters' families in Whinmoor added the detail that made the legend theirs: the post had no wick and never wanted oil. What burned on it burned without fuel, and what it lit for was a question nobody answered twice the same.
The old tellings give it a purpose with no story attached, which is the correct way to give it, because a purpose without a story is what a rumour looks like when the story has been frightened out of it. Three purposes survive in the versions I heard at the grid. It lit for walkers, so that nobody needing to be walked would be missed on that road; and there is the Whinmoor register of the vanished, kept in the vestry, with its unbroke line of names down to 1919, the year after which the road no longer gave up anyone, and the parish stopped fearing the road and started watching the lamp. Or it lit for funeral collections, a light to steer the bier by on the nights the moor did what the moor does to pairs of lanterns. Or — the youngest version, the quarrymen's — it was lit for one man on one specific night, and has never understood that the night is over, and every hour it burns he is looked for along that road, arriving slowly, out of courtesy being given the distance.
The post is gone. This is the new fact, and it is why the story is told now in the tense it is told in. A fencing crew out of Kessin Reach pulled it up in March two years back, on the grounds of a county order nobody has ever produced; the crew, by its own roster, was four men and a wagon, and the men all signed the same confession at the yard: four of them took the post down and none of them remembers doing it, and the wagon came back lighter by one post and heavier, their word, by a night. The yard seems to have decided against asking further. Gorse has taken the socket in the two years since, and there is no scar on the heather worth a photograph, and children grazing the moor with the flock cannot find the place of it even when the older ones stand over the ground and point.
But the light, they will tell you, did not agree to be taken down.
It still comes on, the shepherds say, to its own weather, on the wet nights after the third dry week — the old burning schedule the parish noted in the vestry book and never once explained. It burns at its distance, ahead of whatever is walking that road, and it has a new manner now that the post is gone: it does not stay at the grid. It has been met, in the two years since, further up the road than the grid, and once, by the keeper of the coast way, at the junction itself, standing in precisely the spot where a lamp would be wanted if the road were ever to have one, and burning with its same fuelless steadiness, and keeping its same lead, mile for mile, against whoever is coming up it in the dark.
Who tells it today: the shepherds at the second grid, who walk the road out of Wethersfield way and see it burning ahead of them and are not troubled by it; the vestry, which keeps the register and its unbroke line and will show you the page to the minute of closing; the school children of Whinmoor, who have the schedule of it by heart and bet sweets on the wet nights; and the fencing crew out of Kessin Reach, all four of whom will tell you the same thing in the same words, though each believes he is telling you something the other three do not know: that whatever the light lights for now, it lights it without the post, and the road, so far, has not once failed to be walked all the way home.