Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Mill Race at Wakeham Asks Its Due
The people of Wakeham say the old mill race takes one thing from every household each spring, and that a family which refuses to give it will find the race running backward by the autumn.
- status: folklore
Every spring, when the snow has gone off the Wakeham fell and the mill race runs loud and brown under the stone bridge, the older people in the village leave something on the parapet. A bread roll. A pair of gloves. A child's first tooth wrapped in a scrap of paper. Nobody collects these things. They are simply gone by the next morning, carried off by the water, and the village says that is the point.
The custom is called the Asking. It is folklore, the schoolmaster says, of the most ordinary kind: a rite of thanks for the mill's wheel, which has not turned in a century, and for the race that still drives the old sluice gate below the village. But the people who leave the gifts do not describe it that way. They say the race asks for its due. They say that it has always asked, since the first dam was built, and that a family which has ever refused the Asking will find the race running the wrong way by autumn, back up the valley toward the fell, carrying the lower meadow with it.
There are stories about this. The Moss family, who lived at the top of the mill lane in the last century, refused to leave anything on the parapet after their son drowned in the race in 1887. They said the water had had enough. By the next autumn the lower meadow had been swept three hundred yards up the slope, the hay was lost, and their cow had walked into the race and not walked out. The Mosses left the village the following spring. The race ran true again.
A later story, which the older folk do not always tell, concerns a family who did leave the Asking, and whose child was taken not by the water but by the quiet that came after. The race stopped running for an hour one April evening, the story goes, and in that hour a girl walked across the stone bridge and down toward the sluice and was never seen again. The race started up at dusk and the bridge was empty. The girl's mother left a little cup on the parapet every year afterward, and every year it was gone by morning.
The schoolmaster says the tale is not canon in any sense that matters to the county. The surveyors have measured the race. It runs at a fixed rate, depending on the snowmelt and the sluice. It has never once been recorded running backward.
Still, on the first warm evening of each spring the bridge is busy. People come down from the terraces with bread, gloves, small things wrapped in paper. They lean over the parapet and say a few words, quietly, to the water, and they go back up the lane without looking round. The race sings on below them, loud and brown. And if you stand on the bridge long enough at dusk you can sometimes hear, under the sound of the water, a second voice, very patient, saying thank you.
This legend is told by Margaret Dunn, who has kept the bridge at Wakeham for fifty years and has never once left anything on the parapet herself.