Why is it that a good walk and a good haunting so often go hand in (ethereal) hand?
THE STRETCH OF train line between Leeds and Manchester is more scenic than you might think. Moors and hills rise up between the mill-crowded valleys. Sudden wild vistas open around bends. Scattered sheets of lonely water catch the intermittent sun.
Presuming the Pennine murk isn’t down like curtains (or your train isn’t cancelled) take a look out of the eastward window as you pass Rochdale and Littleborough, and there’s a building there that will catch your eye, bone grey and stark against the green of the hills that rise beyond it. It must have been a home once, and a fine one. But though it’s not a ruin, it feels abandoned, exuding a kind of melancholy and desolation. Two events conspired to fire my curiosity more.
Firstly, on the very morning that I last passed it, I had interviewed Lolly Adefope, the young comedy actor who plays the sweetly innocent and very deceased Georgian gentlewoman Kitty, one of the ensemble of spooks who haunt Button Hall in the charming comedy Ghosts. Also in my post that day had been a copy of a whopping new tome titled Lancastrians: Mills, Mines and Minarets: A New History by Paul Salveson, in which my eyes fell upon this paragraph:
‘Just before you get to Rochdale, you glimpse Clegg Hall alongside the canal. This historic building is noted for its boggart… a very Lancastrian type of hobgoblin, a very truculent character not to be messed with.’
Apparently, a phantom child, murdered by a wicked uncle for his inheritance whilst his father was away fighting in 13th century France, has issued baleful warnings and moanings to all subsequent visitors and thus has become known as the Clegg Hall Boggart.
As well as organised haunted house tours, you can combine a decent walk with a visit to somewhere nicely creepy. Pluckley in Kent attracts that small but significant Venn diagram section of walkers who are both fans of eighties cosyfest The Darling Buds of May (filmed here) and connoisseurs of what is reputedly the most haunted village in England. It’s also pretty as a picture and good walking country.
In King’s Lynn you can take a self-guided walk among Norfolk’s most haunted buildings, including the house of the town exorcist and the place where a disembodied witch’s heart bounced its way to the river. You’d remember that, wouldn’t you?
You could head for the Ancient Ram Inn, Gloucestershire, Salmesbury Hall in Lancashire, or the aptly-named Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. All renowned for good walking nearby and apparently the possibility of the kind of ‘ra
