The Hidden Folk

It stood defiantly on Emley Moor, a permanent 'up yours' to the smouldering murk of Huddersfield down in the valley below. Twelve hundred and thirty five feet of tubular steel mast supported by heavy guy ropes, pointing accusingly at the heavens in the ominous fading Winter light. A Skylon of a transmitter piercing the cold grey palette of an iced and wind-lashed landscape. It was 19th March 1969 and a cold unease suddenly enveloped me.

I stopped the car, as I sometimes did on my journey home, to marvel at the tallest man made structure in Europe fronting a gloriously uninterrupted view across to the Pennines. I had recently captured the imaginations of my class of eleven year olds with a project on the volcanic wonders of Iceland, a land where folklore flirts with reality and myth. A land where your house can be destroyed by something you can't see, where the wind can knock you off your feet, where ice and snow lingered well into borrowed time, where hot springs and glaciers talk. The land of the hidden folk.

We had marvelled at the serious respect awarded by Icelanders to their elves and trolls, diverting roads and tunnels around their known habitats. These mysterious beings, the guardians of the terrain and invisible to most, very occasionally revealed themselves to those with a keen eye. I was sure that I had just seen something move with an unexpected suddenness up in the gloom amongst the heavy steel cables and I wound down my window for condensation free witness. There was a palpable tension in the air. Something  was very wrong.

This huge step ladder to heaven of a transmitter towered above a small community of scattered moorland cottages, clustered protectively around their smoke-black chapel. Forearm thick cables loomed across rooftops to distant secure concrete mountings, like a giant Maypole. Through the dull Winter gloom I could hear strange cracking noises from up in the wuthering heights, followed seconds later by muffled thumps and I knew immediately that the hidden folk were at work. The elements here were extreme; where winds could knock you off your feet, where your house could be destroyed by unseen forces, where ice and snow lingered well into borrowed time and where cold Springs dawdled into tepid Summers. Nature and man were at loggerheads and the guardians were upset. There would only ever be one outcome.

I was overcome by a sense of foreboding, a sense that powerful forces were at work, that the hidden folk were taking matters into their own hands. Such tensions could not be permitted. Man made structures could only exist amongst the hidden folk with permission and no such permission had been requested or granted. Liberties had been taken without consultation.

I wound up my window and fled the scene as quickly as my little Standard Ten would allow, hurtling across the ice gripped moor and down into less challenging terrain. That evening, in the safety and comfort of home I slumped into an armchair and switched on the evening news, my mind buzzing with thoughts of the unbearable tensions I had just experienced up on the moor. The hidden folk would never allow such imbalance in nature and Icelandic folklore tells us that they waste no time in re-establishing peace and harmony.

The screen flickered into life and there stood a grim faced, wind-whipped reporter looking like a forlorn Arctic explorer, shivering to camera. Beside him was a large sign warning of the dangers of falling ice and behind him the smoke-black Wesleyan chapel on Emley Moor, or at least what was left of it. Forearm thick steel cables slithered, anaconda like, across the ice covered terrain before coiling themselves around the tiny chapel and crushing the life out of it. The explorer told of witnesses seeing huge ice chunks falling from the cables and thumping into the ground below. Speculation was rife as to why the cables had given way, bringing the tallest man made structure in Europe crashing dramatically to the ground. The forlorn explorer passed us back to the studio where a hastily assembled posse of experts began to speak at length of cable stress testing and wind speed resistances. I smiled to myself and switched off the set. They could speculate all they wanted, but I and thirty five eleven year olds down in Huddersfield knew exactly what had happened...and why!