Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in The Marches ·
Why the Bracken Kneels
On one slope of the valley the bracken bends at dusk the way a bride kneels, whatever the wind is doing on the other side of the wall.
- status: folklore
We in the Marches are a folk of the high ground, and we do not trouble the low. The valleys belong to themselves after the light goes, and my grandfather taught me before I could write my own name that you don't whistle on the bracken path, you don't count sheep on the way down, and most of all you come off the fell before the bracken turns. It turns at dusk. That is the word we use, and no other will do. Not browns, not ripens, not dies for the year. Turns.
And when it turns, on one slope above every valley through the Marches, the bracken kneels. Not all of it. One slope, the north-facing one, the cold one, the one where the fog puddles first and drains last. At the hour when the light is leaving and the wind is done for the day, the bracken on that slope goes down the way a bride goes down at her wedding, bending from the stem, head to the north, shoulders low, holding. You can stand on the far side of the valley and watch the whole hillside take that posture at once, ten thousand stems, and there is no wind in it, and there never is. It is the only still hour we have, and the only hour our hills move.
The elders in the Marches do not agree on why, and that is how you know the tale is true, because the tales people invent have endings in them, and this one has never been given one. On the east side of the water they will tell you it kneels to something that passes over, going it must be presumed from one high ground to the other, something the dogs will not look at and the birds will not cross, and that the bracken pays it the courtesy our houses stopped paying a long time ago. On the west side they say the opposite, that it kneels to something that never passes at all, something that came up from under the slope once, a long time back, and never went down again, and the bracken leans toward it the way you lean toward a door where you have heard somebody weeping. The shepherds of the middle valleys say both those stories are told by people who have never had to bring a ewe down that slope in the dark, and will tell you instead what the shepherds know, which is that the sheep will feed under a kneeling slope all day and will not set foot on it after the light goes, no dog moving them being worth the whipping.
What is agreed, and what I will put my hand to, is the part of the tale that keeps us alive in our habits. Nothing on the kneeling slope has ever been cut after dusk and brought down to the fire. The one family that tried it, back in the year of the deep snows, had the bundle in their hall overnight and by morning the fern was upright again, dry as a bone, on the slope, in its place, and nothing in the house could say how the door came open in the night without the latch lifting, and they did not ask twice. We pay the slope the respect of leaving it alone, and it has never once come down to us. The bargain in the Marches has never needed stating. The bracken kneels, we look away, and neither party mentions it on the road.
There is one thing we tell children that I will pass on, because it is the only instruction in the story and all the rest is weather. When you see the slope kneel, and you will, every Marches walker does in the end, you take your hat off. You do not kneel with it, whatever else you hear about the old customs, because the kneel of the bracken is not ours to copy, and a kneeling man on a Marches path is a thing the valley families will not speak to after. Hat off, eyes level, and keep walking, and the bride on the hillside will have finished her courtesy before you're down to the ford, and will be standing again in the dark where nobody sees standing happen.
Who tells this tale today? The shepherds tell it on the headland at tupping time, to the young men new to the fells, before their first dark descent. The valley wives tell it at the threshing suppers, where the old rule about hat and looking level gets restated with the salt passed. And in the schoolhouse above Ashby parish the schoolmaster tells it every October to the children walking home late, and sends them off down the north slope road at exactly the hour he does, so that not one of them is on the high ground when the bracken turns.