Moving slowly to Perilous Otter, the woman who wove the sky, and a misplaced freedom fighter

2 July 2026

Welcome to issue 38 of Tales from the Chase, a fortnightly publication exploring the landscapes, folklore, hidden histories and strange corners of Cranborne Chase. Including odd tales. Mildly strange goings-on. Definitely strange, occasionally amusing, and always assembled with care — delivered straight to your inbox every other Thursday. Was this email forwarded to you? You can sign up for free by clicking below!

welcome Back, strange companions

Summer has once again remembered how to be summer, but has also forgotten that this is not Texas. As I write, the Chase is once again shimmering under record-breaking temperatures, the chalk is dazzling and even the bees look mildly inconvenienced. By the time this reaches you, cooler days should have returned, and you'll no longer have to mop your brow between paragraphs.

This edition reports on a small gathering at the Horseshoe in Ebbesbourne Wake for an obscure board game and vague news about Owen who disappeared from the Star and Lantern.

Hubert has turned his attention to Ebbesbourne Wake, a parish with an oddly theatrical name and some dubious claims to fame.

Meanwhile, Isla tells the tale of the woman who wove the sky, proving once again that the landscape is held together by stories just as much as chalk and flint.

So pour yourself something agreeable, settle in somewhere comfortable, and off we go.

update on the owen incident

We have an update of sorts on what I now call "the Owen Incident" (as reported in the last issue of Tales from the Chase), in which Forgotten Footpath Society member Owen disappeared whilst visiting a notorious phase pub known as the Star and Lantern.

Although Owen subsequently returned, apparently unharmed and considerably more cheerful than someone who had briefly disappeared from reality had any right to be, my attempts to discover exactly what happened to him proved largely fruitless. I sought access to the FFS President's Restricted Files but was firmly rebuffed. I left Sylvia's house with only deep disappointment and a piece of violet seaglass that mysteriously appeared in my pocket and has the disconcerting habit of moving slowly westwards if placed on a flat surface.

Undeterred, I have continued my enquiries by employing a traditional and surprisingly effective research method: asking other members of the Society in pubs. This may not sound rigorous, but it has a surprisingly good track record.

At the sign of The Horseshoe

Last Friday I stopped in at The Horseshoe, the pub in Ebbesbourne Wake, and spotted FFS members Mad Geoff and Cedric occupying a table in the corner. They appeared to be engaged in a board game.

I say appeared because although the game involved a board, counters, and dice, it wasn't one I'd seen before, and a quick glance didn't really make me any the wiser about its objective. One square was labelled Regrettable Swan. Another simply said Tuesday.

I got myself a pint and took the opportunity to join them at their table.

Geoff was arguing that the rules clearly allowed him to move his counter through the clouds when the fireplace is clear.

"I don't think you're playing the same game as me," said Cedric.

"I am," said Geoff. "I'm just playing it more ambitiously."

Cedric turned to me and adjusted his perpetually fogged spectacles.

"Well, I'm interested in solving one, if that's what you mean. Do either of you know anything about what happened to Owen? Went to the Star and Lantern, disappeared, came back a week later?" I asked.

Geoff snorted.

"Should've been me. I've had loads of experiences. Can't send a novice on a job like that. Asking for trouble."

"What experiences?" I asked.

"Well, there was the time I met the mothy bloke in the mossy cloak. The one with the antlers. A lord of the twilight realm, no less. Talked for hours, we did. I followed him through that holloway near Lower Coombe and ended up somewhere with two moons. Made my fillings ache."

He took a sip of his pint. "Then there was the time I found the church that only existed while it was raining."

"That was a good one," Cedric admitted.

Geoff brightened.

"Thank you. I spent three hours talking to a vicar who'd been dead since 1694."

"He may not actually have been a vicar."

"He had a church."

"Only until the rain stopped."

Geoff waved this objection away. He raised a finger.

"And don't forget the market. The market under the hill. I got there through a gate near Compton Abbas. Perfectly ordinary gate. That market…it sold things nobody should have been selling."

"What sort of things?"

"Lost chances. Shadows. Somebody's spare childhood. There was a woman selling thunderstorms out of a wicker basket."

"Ah yes, I remember, you bought something," said Cedric. "But it cost you your sense of direction."

"Only for twenty-one days, seven hours and eleven minutes. I know because that's exactly when it came back. I suddenly knew where I was going."

"What did you get for it?"

"A map that shows where strange things are going to happen."

"It does," Cedric nodded, "and it's very accurate. This is why he keeps turning up at anomalous events and has so many stories. He's not making them up. He genuinely has a map to the weird stuff. Some of us think it's not fair. He's banned from bringing it on FFS walks."

"Then there was the ferryman," Geoff continued, ignoring Cedric. "I crossed a river that wasn't on any map with a ferryman who charged me one memory."

"What memory?" I asked.

Geoff frowned. "Can't remember."

"Geoff reckons that all of this 'experience' qualifies him for destiny," said Cedric.

"It does qualify me for destiny."

"Sylvia says it qualifies you for supervision."

Geoff looked wounded.

"Well she says that about you too. Remember the Void incident? And the mushroom licking?"

Concerned that things were getting off track, I tried again.

"So, nobody knows where Owen went?"

Geoff shrugged. Cedric swirled the last of his pint.

"The Society knows more than it's saying."

"Meaning Sylvia?"

Cedric nodded.

"Meaning Sylvia. Meaning the committee. Meaning several people who become suddenly fascinated by the weather whenever anyone asks questions."

He lowered his voice slightly.

"Rosalind had a rough time afterwards. Now, the FFS has lost members before. They say you're allowed to lose one per outing, but not first walkers. You're supposed to look after them. You're not supposed to let them go wandering off through impossible walls. He was the first person ever lost on his first walk. Some people wanted someone to blame."

"And Rosalind?"

"The Land Beneath the Waves?"

"That's the one. Apparently her grandmother's sheep refuse to graze on a particular beach. Seems suspicious, possibly a good lead."

Geoff nodded. There was a long reflective silence. Then Geoff rolled a die, and moved his counter to a square marked Unexpected Badger.

"So what about Owen?" I asked. "Now he's back, what's he up to?" I'd tried to track him down myself, but without success.

"Most Society members go looking for odd places." said Cedric."Usually, we visit, we explore, we come home. But Owen's different. I think he's trying to stay there. He keeps finding doors, going through, and a week later he's back in the Chase looking annoyed about it."

I found myself turning the piece of seaglass over in my pocket.

Cedric noticed.

"Could I see that?"

I pulled it out and placed it on the board, on a square labelled Lost Property of the Moon.

We watched for a moment. It caught the light from the window and glowed faintly violet. Then it began a slow, deliberate slide across the board.

It crossed Unscheduled Moth and Minor Prophet, before stopping.

Cedric frowned.

The seaglass had come to rest on Ask the Horse.

Geoff nodded. "Good square. Horse usually knows."

I was tempted to pursue the significance of the horse, then Cedric smiled.

"You know," he said, "it's possible you've already got the restricted files. The information, at least."

He nodded at the seaglass.

"That could be a mnemonic anchor, a kind of memory object. Hold it while you're asleep and you'll dream someone else's memories. Maybe Owen's memories are in there. Have you tried sleeping with it?"

Before I could answer, he went on. "Then there's another possibility, we can test it now. Do you mind if I pick it up?"

"No, go ahead."

He turned it over several times in his hands, held it up to one fogged lens of his spectacles, weighed it in his palm. Then he gripped it with both hands and pulled.

There was a faint click. It separated neatly into two halves. Nestled inside was a USB-C connector.

We all stared at it.

Cedric put the two halves back on the board. "Looks like Sylvia may have simply put the Owen Files on a memory stick, and the seaglass isn't magical at all."

The two halves moved slowly to Perilous Otter, where they clicked together to become a seamless piece of seaglass once more.

"Although," Cedric added, "most USB drives don't do that."

"Good point."

"On the other hand," said Geoff, "I've never owned a particularly expensive one. Amazing what they can do these days."

Later

I left shortly afterwards, the seaglass safe in my pocket. Once home, I separated the two halves again and connected the device to my laptop.

To my surprise, it behaved exactly like a USB drive. A new icon appeared on my desktop, a tiny graphic of a crescent moon that pulsed with a faint, violet light. It was labelled: FFS USB.

I hovered my cursor over the glowing icon, and suddenly hesitated. If this piece of glass could ignore the laws of physics on a pub table, what on earth was it going to do to my laptop? I found myself caught between two equally unsettling anxieties: the practical dread of malware infecting my system, and the more irrational fear of some sort of digital haunting.

Curiosity won out over caution. I clicked, to reveal a single folder called STAR AND LANTERN OWEN, containing thirty-one files. At that point, common sense suggested it was getting late and that I should leave the files until the following day.

Naturally, I immediately opened the first one.

What Owen had to say deserves an article of its own. Maybe next time.

The Woman Who Wove the Sky

Collected by Isla Cobb, folklorist

Assembled from three accounts gathered along the Ox Drove, no two of which agree on what to call her.

Long ago there lived a woman who patched the sky each night so that morning would have something whole to rise into.

She sat on Marleycombe Hill each dusk and gathered the frayed light of the departing day and spun it into thread, then rewove the worn places in the sky, mending what the sun had stretched and the storms had thinned. Her loom was wind and silence. Her shuttle was bone, smoothed by millennia of use.

Work too slowly, and dawn would break through before the cloth was ready, leaving clouds caught in the gaps. Work too fast, and the weave would draw tight, leaving the sun no room to climb.

Travellers on the Chase sometimes glimpsed her in the half-light, bent over a loom that gleamed with colours no one could name. They took her for a ghost, or a saint, or one of the older things that linger where the world is thin, and left bread, wool, and wildflowers for her. She never answered when spoken to. The offerings were always gone by morning.

One winter a shepherd found the loom standing alone. The cloth on it shimmered half-finished, deep blue threaded through with gold and the faintest line of rose.

The shepherd waited out the night. She did not return.

By morning the sky had torn. Long rents split the heavens. Dawn came ragged. For years the seasons turned beneath a wounded sky, Slowly, and without her, it learned to mend itself and the sky today is whole. It has simply never again been hers.

No one agreed on what had become of the Weaver. Some said she had pursued a fallen star out past Win Green and lost her way back. Others said that every thousand years she must sleep, and that she had lain down beneath the roots of the hills to dream and will wake again when the time is right. A few held that she had seen the rents in the sky widening and stepped through, disappearing into the heavens.

The old people say she will come back when the sky next begins to fray.

Meanwhile on Marleycombe Hill, on certain dusks, the wind moves through the grass as though something is passing through it that the grass alone can feel. Some say it is only ever the wind. Others say it is her, still walking the hill in the half-light, searching for a loom she can no longer find.

A parish by parish tour of the Chase

ebbesbourne wake

EBBESBOURNE WAKE

Ah, Ebbesbourne Wake. Roughly two hundred people live here. Depending on the season, sheep may outnumber them.And yet, irritatingly, it's rather interesting.

It is odd of name, short on excitement. Ebbesbourne Wake sounds as though something ought to have happened there. You might expect Wake to refer to a legendary funeral, or maybe a doomed uprising. Or perhaps an incident involving a bishop and a trebuchet.

Sadly it simply commemorates the medieval Wake family, who owned the manor and left behind very little except a place name that encourages speculation.

The first part is no less disappointing. Most interpretations suggest that Ebbesbourne means "Ebba's stream" or "Ebbel's stream", referring to some long-forgotten Saxon landowner whose principal qualification for immortality appears to have been living next to a brook.

So the grand, mysterious-sounding name would translate roughly as:

"The stream belonging to a chap called Ebba, later owned by another chap called Wake."

English place names are rather like that when you look beyond the poetry. More boring than you first thought.

The river Ebble that flows through the parish is, of course, its own thing. It's a delightful chalk stream of exceptional beauty, ecological importance and considerable antiquity.

Its waters are crystal clear, its valley enchanting. Its local deity, also known as Ebble, is wise, gracious and possessed of infinite patience.

She disputes vehemently that the name of the river, or the parish, has anything to do with a long-forgotten Saxon.

So here is her version. She was here for millennia before the first settlers arrived, and when they came they worshipped her. They started naming children after her, Ebb, Ebba, Ebble. Only centuries later did historians and etymologists arrive, misinterpret the documentary evidence and confidently assume that one of these humans was the origin of the name. They were not. She is.

I leave it to the reader to decide which version they prefer, although I personally have elected to agree with the goddess.

Experience has shown this to be the safer course.

If you disagree, do so from at least fifty yards away from the river.

Most notable for: A will

Ebbesbourne Wake first appears in the written record over a thousand years ago because a wealthy Anglo-Saxon woman called Wynflæd left "the farm at Ebbesbourne" to her daughter in her will.

This is one of the oldest surviving wills in England. Many places become famous for things like battles, miracles or royal associations. Ebbesbourne Wake achieved distinction for competent paperwork. I say distinction but, more accurately, almost nobody has ever exclaimed, "We simply must visit the village named in that Anglo-Saxon will."

Also notable

The curious case of Hereward the Wake. It's an easy, if lazy, leap to link the parish to the most famous English "Wake", Hereward.

Hereward the Wake, also known as Hereward the Outlaw, or the Exile, was an eleventh-century rebel who spent much of his career fighting against the Norman Conquest. While the rest of England was busy being conquered, Hereward was having none of it. History remembers him as a freedom fighter. The Normans probably used different language.

There is one small problem with the link to Ebbesbourne Wake. Hereward belongs to the marshes of Ely and the Fenlands, over 200 miles away, where he led rebellious Saxons hiding out in the reeds while the increasingly irritated Normans wondered why conquering England had suddenly become so difficult.

Despite the geographical difficulties, some say that the Wake family, who held the manor in Ebbesbourne Wake, claimed him as their own after they also acquired his lands in Lincolnshire.

Were the local Wakes related to Hereward? Unlikely. Did he ever visit the Chase? Also unlikely. Did the Wakes decide that claiming kinship with England's most celebrated Saxon resistance leader was an excellent way of burnishing both their reputation and their title to his former lands? Seems exactly like something a medieval noble family would do.

The Horseshoe, the village pub, fulfils its duties admirably.

Walkers descend from the downs convinced they've earned a pint. Cyclists arrive looking hungry, thirsty, and resentful of hills. Locals gather to exchange information, misinformation and rumours. All most enjoyable.

For a place with barely two hundred inhabitants, the pub punches above its weight.

Fifield Bavant, a hamlet just east of the village, was once an independent parish. It now forms part of the sprawling Ebbesbourne Wake empire.

Barely twenty people live there, but it still has a church, a manor, and a history stretching back to Domesday.

Earthworks suggest a much larger medieval settlement once existed before plague, economics or simple bad luck persuaded most of it to leave. You half expect the rest of the village to reappear if viewed from the correct angle on the correct day when the wind is blowing in the right direction.

Leaving

As you leave, look behind you as you go, just once, towards Fifield Bavant. If the light is correct and the wind has nothing better to do, you may briefly see the rest of the village standing where it used to be. Maybe there will be ghostly figures in the fields, outside the houses.

Don't wave. It only encourages them.

And should you feel the sudden, irrational urge to write something cutting about the local chalk stream, do it from a respectful distance. She has an excellent memory, an abundance of spare time and an unfortunate tendency to regard dreams as perfectly acceptable venues for continued discussion.

NEXT TIME: EDMONDSHAM

Prepare to be underwhelmed.

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