A Guy Checks Out A Hidden Place In The Woods, Gets An Unexpected Outcome (48 pics)
One agnostic went on a journey that tested his beliefs. Or the lack of them. Recently, Gawan Mac Greigair has bought an Ordnance Survey (national mapping agency in the United Kingdom) hiking map, and found a place of worship symbol in the “middle of bloody nowhere.” Wondering what that particular one actually was, he decided to see for himself.
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“I’m always moved by old woodbanks, knowing that they’ve acted as boundaries for centuries, and this wood was bounded by one, topped with spaghetti beeches and hornbeams”
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“The first section of wood was dominated by hazel coppice, which I feel I don’t encounter very often. I always imagine hazel as a friendly tree, which is just as well in this very Poe fog”
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“I came to my first turn, I had to turn right, at a right angle, on reaching this flooded track”
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“But the experience of the woodland in this dense fog was a joy – the everyday took on an entirely different presence”
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“I came across a sudden steep hollow. It seemed unmarked by any horsehoe of close contour lines on the OS map, so this is when I first started to suspect that I’d lost my way”
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“By the hollow, this old tree was simultaneously living and dead – a termite metropolis nevertheless sprouting fresh young limbs”
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“I checked my map again. Three sides of a squarish rectangle was my route. Two right angled turns to the right. Just past the hollow a muddy but confident track went fogward at 90 degrees. This must be my second turn. I must be pretty close”
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“Two pairs of beeches waltzed with each other alongside the track, as two birches stood by, waiting for their chance to cut in”
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“Last year’s beech leaves were still clinging on to saplings in the understory, where the winter winds weren’t able to dislodge them. A strange bright confetti in the murk”
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“But this side of my square route was getting absurdly long, it didn’t make sense any more. This imperious beech appeared to give me directions, but I couldn’t interpret its gestures and I don’t speak beech”
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“Primroses cheered me on though, urging me not to panic. Thanks guys, you’re the best”
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“I decided to take the next obvious right and hope for the best. It took me through a recent coppice, where the felling had exposed another monumental beech (a very unusual standard tree in a coppice, where oak is much more usual”
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“I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for – a recognisable structure, a hollow overgrown by hornbeam? But suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up and I realized I was already looking at it”
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“Just the suggestion of a gable, an echo of a spire, materialising surely with each step forward”
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“It wasn’t the heap of stones I’d half expected, but a tiny, living church that seemed to transpirate from the wood that it was nested in”
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“I found it was open”
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“I find it hard to state this without hugging myself and clapping my hands in childish glee, but this church has no electricity and is still lit by working gas lamps”
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“The fog seemed to press its nose to the windows”
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“But it was held at bay by the colours inside”
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“I’m not a believer in heaven, but I appreciate the notion of places where other forms of reality become tangible, where past and present interlace”
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Credits: twitter.com
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Tags: hidden place, woods, church, journey
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