Some places are magical. Sometimes it is because of their place in history. Sometimes because of their place in pre-history. Sometimes just because, as Chinese geomancers strove to understand. And sometimes these all combine, and continue to generate moments of profound and durable magic.
Kirkdale in North Yorkshire qualifies on all counts. It is best known for St Gregory’s Minster, an pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon church which has stood at Kirkdale’s entrance for well over a thousand years. On a bad day the North York Moors can still snuff you out quite easily. St Gregory’s then, is a place to beg for protection before beginning the journey, or an altar before which you can give thanks for having made it through.
The church is a regular feature of ‘best English churches’ lists, usually for its antiquity alone. Above its doorway there is the remains of a sundial recording the church’s rebuilding during the reign of Tostig (1055-1065 - killed at Battle of Stamford Bridge).
But Gregory’s Minster is only part of the magic. The pathway leading from the church to the Moors is itself magical for its beauty, its unfolding drama, and the wildlife which makes its home there. One winter’s day I was running the route, and coming over the brow of a hill, there, not 15 yards from me, was a large antlered stag. If you are me, an encounter like this leads you straight to St Eustace, and to Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker. The stag, so much bigger and more powerful than you might expect, watched me carefully for maybe a long 10 seconds, and then disappeared back into the forest.
Another time, with the path edging some dark woods, and I looked up into the gloom to see an absolutely enormous bird cruising in the upper strata, circling what seemed a raft-like nest. This was an eagle owl, which can stretch its wings to more than 6ft.
But when the truly remarkable hit, it was a blazing midsummer’s day, and we were walking the dry riverbed - the river from the moors disappears underground seasonally. We were taking the riverbed as a short cut from the Minster to the caves at the head of the dale. These are famous for having given up fossils which showed ur-geologist and paleontolgist William Buckland that they had been occupied in the distant past by hyenas (or in another version, sabre-toothed tigers). This discovery, in 1820, washed away enthusiasm for dating events relative to the Biblical flood, and his account was one of the founding texts of paleontology.
You can climb into the caves themselves, at some peril, so they are worth a visit.
When you walk on a dry riverbed, you have to watch your step. As my eyes were casting around for good footing, they lit on a singular stone. I stopped and picked it up without any specific thought or intention, and quite probably - I don’t remember - a couple of its neighbours as well.
As I walked along, it felt comfortable in my hand: an unusually heavy black stone, mostly smooth but with some dramatic pocks and breaks. As I held it, my thumb moved to a small smooth depression which I now realized was dead black, but gleaming. So I didn’t throw it back, but just kept it in my hand or in my pocket as we made our way to the cave.
Back home, I looked at it more closely. Although black, it was far too heavy to be jet; and it was far too hard to be coal, even anthracite. It plainly wasn’t any kind of sandstone or mudstone, and it didn’t look igneous, and all along there was this strange inexplicable gleam. So I kept it on my desk without much thought. When I was clearing out Hunters Hall, this stone was one of the few things I kept hold of, personally keeping it in my hand-luggage.
Let’s take a look at it, because this is the remarkable thing. This photo shows something of its gleam, but washes out its dead-black colouring.
After some research, I realized what it was - it quite unmistakeably a meteorite. More specifically, it is a chondrite. Have a look at another chondrite, photographed far better than I am capable of, showing the dead-black colouring, the gleam, the odd pockmarks etc:
The thing about chondrites is not just that they are meteorites, plunging from heaven to earth and ending up in my pocket, but that they are dizzyingly ancient.
Chondrites are among the most ancient things in our solar system. Here’s Wikipedia: ‘Chondrites were formed by the accretion of particles of dust and grit present in the primitive Solar System which gave rise to asteroids over 4.54 billion years ago. These asteroid parent bodies of chondrites are (or were) small to medium-sized asteroids that were never part of any body large enough to undergo melting and planetary differentiation.’
I’m not sure what type of chondrite it is, but its plainly not an ‘ordinary’ or even a ‘carboniferous’ chondrite. Rather, if anything it looks like an ‘enstatite chrondrite’ - but these are so rare it seems unlikely.
But its unimaginable age, sitting on the desk by me as I write this, is stunning, breath-taking. This rock which found its way to me, is older than the hills, older than the rivers which are older than the hills, older than even the most basic hint of life, almost older than the earth itself. It is older than the oldest rocks ever found on earth (zircon in Australia) by around a billion years. If the earth actually existed when this rock formed, it was in its ‘Hadean eon’, mainly molten, waiting to be hit by a rock big enough to break off the moon.
Quite possibly, it is the oldest thing known to man that exists on this planet. Quite possibly, it is literally the oldest thing.
Imagine that.
Now imagine not having to imagine that, but holding it in your hand. I am doing that right now.
To say it is humbling would be true and false. To say I am proud of it is true and false. Its age is so vast it is mind-numbing, it reduces me, my time, our time, to nothing, to dust.
Ted Hughes came close to what I feel, in ‘Still Life’ from his Wodwo collection:
He writes of a moorland stone which ‘gleams exultation blacky’:
“Wakeful and missing little and landmarking
The fly-like dance of the planets,
The landscape moving in sleep,
It expects to be in at the finish. “
That’s the sort of concept of time we have here. It expects to be in at the finish, long after humanity has gone, when in 5bn years the sun expands to a planet-gobbling red giant, I expect this chondrite will still be around.
Like the Ring found its way to Smeagol or Gollum, this has so casually found its way to me. What are the chances? I think of this stone circling between Jupiter and Mars for ever, before finally being gripped by just enough gravity to fall someone over the North York Moors, or whatever they were then, and being taken by the river, or whatever it was then. I think of the bright streak in the sky, watched by someone, if there was anyone to watch, or more likely by no-one.
And then one day I’m casually walking with my daughter and her boyfriend on the riverbed, and there we are.
Why me? What do I do with it? At the moment I choose to carry it with me, because it is a thing of beauty. I could sell it - there’s a market for meteorites, and if it’s an enstatite chondrite, who knows what it might fetch. But that would feel sacrilegious, a low refusal of mystery, of fate, of the remarkable. I could fashion it a nice wood mount, a glass display cage. But what am I caging and displaying? Again, it seems unwarranted pride - another type of sacrilege.
The best I can say is that it abides. It will stay with me, and my family, until it doesn’t. After 4.5 billion years, it doesn’t feel stupid to believe it has a fate of its own. My life, my family’s life, is not even a blink. It’ll be there at the finish.