Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Marlow District ·
A Second Lamp at Marlow
A night shepherd on the Marlow fell reports a light moving along the drystone wall above the village, a lamp carried by someone walking at the pace of a man with a heavy load, and the light is still there when he looks again.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Arthur Penrose, shepherd
I have walked the Marlow fell with the flock for thirty-one years, and I have seen most of what the hill can show. The mist that comes down off the top in an hour and takes the whole valley. The stone sheep that look like sheep until you walk up to them. The old well at the foot of the scree, which does not freeze even in February. I am not a man who scares easily, and I want that written down before I say what I saw.
It was the second Sunday in March, a little after eleven at night. I had gone up to the high pen to check the ewes that were close to lambing, and I was coming back down by the old wall that runs from the sheepfold to the road. The moon was out behind thin cloud. I could see the wall clearly, the stones grey and wet, the gap where the fallen section had never been rebuilt.
There was a lamp on the wall.
Not a torch. Not a bicycle lamp. An old paraffin lantern, the kind my grandfather carried, the glass sooted at the top. It was moving along the top of the wall, slowly, from the direction of the road toward the sheepfold. And the walker carrying it was keeping the pace of a man with a heavy load on his back, a load that made every step deliberate and every pause longer than it needed to be.
I could not see the walker. I could see the lamp and the light it threw on the stones, and the shadow it made, which was a shadow of a person bent forward, one hand on the wall for balance. The shadow did not match the lamp. It was too large, and the head was too far forward, as though the figure was looking down at its own feet.
I called out. I said, *Hello there, who's that?* My voice carried oddly in the cold. The lamp stopped.
It hung in the air above the wall, very still. I could see the glass and the small flame inside it, steady as a candle in a church. Then it began to move again, in the same slow, heavy rhythm, toward the sheepfold, and I stood there in the field with my crook in my hand and watched it go.
Here is the part I am not sure of. When I looked back toward the road, another lamp was there. Further down the wall, past the gap, close to the lych-stile where the path goes into the village. A second light, identical to the first, hanging quite still at the height of a man's chest. It did not move. It was simply there, as if someone had set it down on the stones and then gone away and left it burning.
I walked toward it. I was perhaps forty yards off when the first lamp, up by the sheepfold, went out. Then the second one went out too. The moon came clear of the cloud for a moment, and there was nothing on the wall but the wet grey stone and the gap where the section had fallen.
The vicar, when I told him on the Monday, said there had been a lantern light on that wall for as long as anyone could remember, and that his predecessor had written about it in the parish magazine in the 1920s. The schoolteacher said I was tired. My wife said I should not go up the fell after dark when the ewes are close to lambing. None of them saw the lamps.
But when I went up to the sheepfold on the Wednesday, there were two sets of footprints in the wet ground by the gate. Both of them went up to the wall and then stopped. Neither of them came back down.