A Cold Knight in Croxden

My glacial encounter with a ghostly Norman overlord in darkest Staffordshire.

What with it being Hallowe’en and all that, here’s a poem about any icy encounter I had with a long-dead Norman knight at Croxden in Staffordshire in about 2016 — or at least that’s what it felt like at the time. Croxden, close to the town of Uttoxeter, is a sleepy hamlet otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that it’s home to the ruins of a small Cistercian Abbey dissolved in 1538 and now part of a farm. It’s one of those somewhat hidden and tragic but deeply romantic corners of England that are easily overlooked but overpoweringly atmospheric when you accidentally stumble on them, as I first would have done as a child on my bicycle some time before 1980. Anyway, in November 2017 I found myself back in Uttoxeter having arranged to meet my brother Bill nearby for curry and a couple of pints of Bass and, with a couple of hours to kill before our encounter, decided to drive out to Croxden to visit the Abbey where we had spent many dreamy hours. The site is now approached by a country lane that divides the site in two with the well-preserved monks' living quarters on your left (if driving out from the town) and the much sparser ruins of the Abbey church on your right. Now exposed to the elements in what remains of the apse are several anthropomorphic stone tombs (once home to abbots and members of the local Norman warrior clan who were the Abbey's benefactors), which on that clear evening in late November, were filled with brackish water that had begun to freeze hard. As I sat myself down at the base of one of the graves to peer poetically into its cold depths, it occurred to me to press down gently on the ice to test its thickness. At that point a dark block of frozen water in the shape of a man reared up from the tomb and towered above me before smashing into smithereens as I let out a terrified scream — much to the amusement of a farmworker (the “Saxon” in my poem) who was watching my antics from an adjacent field. I mentioned my experience to Bill, and over several pints of Bass, it became clear that I had had an encounter of sorts, if not with an actual Norman knight, then in some way with an elemental spirit from Staffordshire’s past, whom we decided to call Bertram…  

A Cold Knight in Croxden

(i)

A ruin now, after The Dissolution,

Croxden became a farm.

A lane bisects it, the once great

Abbey in the Vale of Saint Mary.

On a winter’s evening, when the Moon,

dressed in polished pewter,

had cast off her cloud-trimmed cotehardie,

an exposed sarcophagus

in the outline of a man

brimmed with storm water and leaves.

As ice thickened on the tomb’s pond,

I pressed gently to break its seal

with a sound that I imagined

was the sigh penitent souls make

in the moment of life’s expiry.

ii)

Abruptly, an effigy,

with eyes bluish-grey like moths,

or hairstreaks from a gorse heath of memory,

tipped up from the grave to greet me.

Je suis Bertram de Croxden!

exclaimed the frozen castellan,

perhaps just a little frostily,

then smashed into smithereens.

A Saxon on his JCB

excavator, built up the road near Uttoxeter,

dug drains among the cow shits

listlessly, in absolutely no hurry,

when I plunged in black-blue water

through the door sunken in history

to chase the Norman lord down the hatch. 

A version of this poem called Winter Epiphany of the Staffordshire Saints was published in PNReview. The sarcophagi in this photo are at Bakewell Church in Derbyshire and the ghostly figure in the picture is me :-)