Ghost Lake Rising: Star Carr at Night

The blackness of a country lane is absolute

Photo by Yash Raut on Unsplash

For those who don’t know: Star Carr is an important archaeological site in North Yorkshire, UK. It is the site of mesolithic ritual, on the edge of a now extinct lake that we know as paleolake Flixton.

My connection to this place is through the eyes of someone who has lived on or around the lake site for my entire life. My childhoods were spent in the fields here, my adult life is spent driving round the edges of the lake; pottering through my small life with the wealth of the history of this place, a human history that goes back perhaps 15,000 years catching at my peripheral vision.

A great deal of time as a teenager living in the countryside is spent in the complete darkness of country lanes, walking between villages to visit this friend or that, to go from a village that is no more than a string of houses to a village that is big enough for shops and a village green and churches and pubs. Sometimes to be a rural teenager is the heady adventure of catching the bus ‘into town’ to the seafront at Scarborough to watch the boy racers slowly roll around marine drive, and drink Mad Dog 20/20 in a bus shelter. Sometimes a Saturday might be spent going to Scarborough to shop - though we had no money to buy anything and our parents still bought most of our clothes. We’d hang around the brand new McDonald’s sharing chips and be drawn to Top Shop and Chelsea Girl, the bright mesmerisation of cheap plastic jewellery, the multiple click of bangles. Sometimes the energy of being alive would be too much to cope with and you’d have to blow it out by taking a ride on the back of your brother’s dirt bike down the farm tracks, kicking up dust and causing farm labourers to look out from what they were doing to see what the commotion was. we’d ride through the old quarry. At this time they were making the quarry into a nature reserve by stripping from out all the natural nature, to re landscape and encourage the sort of nature you could label with pictures on a nice wooden board. I once found the fossilised tooth of some very old animal here, in the quarry and my dad in his zeal for removing the clutter that myself and my mother and brother and sister were so drawn to, threw it out with a box, one of many, of fossils that he took for beach pebbles. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought about that tooth.

I grew up on a street in a bunch of streets that had been a new builds in the sixties, plonked in the middle of fields that are now other houses. To get to my friends in the next village I would walk down a lane called Crab lane, so named because of the crab apple trees that had been growing on it for hundreds of years which were uprooted when they built more houses and replacement, aesthetically pleasing, trees planted in their place. This lane intersected a lane called Long lane, so named for its length. This lane met the next village. To walk it in the dark was a sensory experience. To move from the lights and sounds of your home - the kids bikes wheeling on gravel, the drift of the smell of dinners being cooked, the light of orange street lights - and into the sudden dark of the lane that got darker to black, so that without a torch - and I never took a torch - you were enveloped by the night completely. I found this to be a feeling of bliss. That now no one could see me. That now I did not have to guess or second guess what they saw when they looked at me; who I was through the eyes of another person, something I found exhausting as at this time I was still shape shifting into what I hoped were acceptable forms, in order to be accepted by human children. I was a human child myself, of course, but not one that other children liked very much, except a handful of people who were also oddities and who were worth making the long dark walk for. The walk took maybe thirty minutes, of which about twenty were in such total darkness. It was so dark you could not see the road. The stars though. To look up from a country lane at night is to see every star ever made. And on the horizon the blinking of village lights. In winter, when I was a child, I used to imagine the next village was Bethlehem and I was Mary on a Donkey heading to sanctuary, because I grew up in a household where bible stories were important.

To emerge then into the next village felt like a rebirth, magical, to be followed by such activities as buying 18 cigs for £5 from the machine in the pub foyer and walking around the village smoking. Happy days.

One friend lived in a farm so close to Star Carr that the farm was named for it. She could rarely get to meet us in the village because it wasn’t walkable, it was along a stretch of bypass that was extremely busy and had no paths. Even in the 90s, to set a child walking on a road like that seemed dangerous. There were buses, but they were expensive for the short distance and ran so irregularly that she would not have been able to get home, and no one I knew could afford to squander money on such a short journey.

I knew I could reach her farm if I crossed the railway line, and walked through the quarry and took the old chalk farm tracks that led up to and around the fields around star carr. But where as the route along the lane was a route with a road, and even in darkness the tarmac could be felt beneath the feet, the farm tracks were sometimes shallow, sometimes missing altogether and much more difficult to manage in the darkness. But deciding to surprise her I set out to walk the dark unknown path, creeping through the quarry and becoming utterly terrified that I was a lone girl in a quarry where we knew people came to inject heroin and have sex, probably.

I did find my way through the quarry and onto the farm tracks and found myself in a place of wide blackness, and the lights of the villages ringing the lake site and the sky like a swathe of magic: pin points and swirls of stars that I don’t have the words to describe, but can still remember so vividly. It was incredible. I felt the awe and smallness of my little life looking up at time itself. And then the feeling of prickling time running over my body as I looked towards the site of Star Carr, which I knew well, and knew well of its history. The next moment then became something strange, stranger than standing in the great blackness beneath a sky of stars. I saw a fire, a tepee of fire at the Star Carr site, burning bright and clear in the black of the night. And I saw a figure passed in front of the fire, and the figure appeared to be dancing. And I stopped still as a rock. And then I turned around and walked back home. I knew of the headdresses, and I knew of the rituals of Star Carr and I had felt, suddenly, the way that time is a membrane that can be poked and pulled and stretched, and I assumed that was what it was.

To re enter the 1960s box houses and the halogen lights and one or two kids still out on the bikes and one or two adults chatting over fences or walls was to return to a place in which what I saw could not have been what I thought it was that night - the ghost of the Star Carr folks brought back in the motes of time. It is so much more likely that the fire was at the farm behind the site, and that the dancers were farm workers burning rubbish, walking in front of the flames and the distance and the movement of the fire and my own imagination made them something else. But I have geld on to that moment of stars and fire my whole life.

When I think about my childhood of the dark spaces and stars I feel sad for those people who have never known that: the absolute dark of a country lane, the freeing feeling of being unobserved, unseen, free to exist in the blackness. I can’t help but feel the eradication of all dark by the power of human light isn’t always a good thing, that there should be places where we can’t quite see, places where we can’t always tell what is real and what is not. This is what to is to be human.

You can buy my nature-landscape memoir The Ghost Lake in paperback, hardback, ebook and audio from bookshops and online.

Caro Clarke

has an offer on at the minute where if you do buy a copy you can get free membership of her substack. Go check it out.

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