David Paul Nixon: The Website

The Chamber

I have walked this path, without exaggeration, perhaps ten thousand times, perhaps even more. My wife and I, we would take our sheep dog Rex and walk the distance; come rain, or wind, or snow, or fog. I've always estimated the journey to be about five miles; taking us across the moor, through the woods, down into town and along the road back again.

These days I take the walk alone.

Have you ever seen Carn Euny? - An empty place. From a distance, over these vast moors, it seems like nothing but a collection of rock and stones. But as you close in upon it, you see them arranged in circles: the collective homes of an ancient settlement; all gathered around the mysterious Fugou, the purpose of which no one is quite sure. A deep tunnel leads to it; an underground chamber, the only light comes from a grill atop of the domed rock ceiling that was added by its excavators; it may have existed there once before, it may have not. As I have said, no one really knows.

There are many legends and tales a told about this small settlement, which has existed for over a thousand years, far longer than anywhere else upon this coast. These stories, in the most part, I have ignored, as it fuels the minds of new pagans, whose religion is nothing but a hodgepodge of assorted traditions and vagaries that seem only to fill an absence of belief in anything else.

But I can sympathise with those who have lost their faith. When the Fugou was first dug out, found buried within its walls was a twisted and brittle skeleton, the bones of an old crone, covered and buried with earth and sod by whom? By good Christians, those who thought their pagan acts so sinful that only the committing of their most brutal sin could cleanse the earth of its blasphemy.

One day in late autumn I lay in bed, riddled with fever. I was sweating through the sheets, groaning, and dreaming, and cursing. After caring for my foul person for days, my wife took restless Rex over the moor in such dreadful weather that I can only assume she sought to rid herself of my wretched disposition.

She did not return.

Maybe the next day (in my sickness I could not tell) I wrapped myself warm and braced myself to cross the moor against the fierce wind. I was desperate and delusional; imagining the most terrible of accidents had befallen my wife. I got barely a mile before I collapsed into the mud.

But I had taken the path worn well by hundreds of feet over hundreds of years and was discovered by another moorlander and brought in from the cold before pneumonia set in. This seemed as luck at the time.

I could do nothing but lay in bed while they, whoever they were, searched for my beloved. I understand it was days before they discovered her - curled up in a ball beneath the grill, in the chamber Fugou.

The doctors have said she died of heart failure, but what kind of condition would have her curled up in a place such as that? Her face was white; her skin was icily cold. Now she too is part of the legend, and lives on in fanciful tales, each told different, each a new variation on a truth that I shall never know.

I still walk the distance, now, all these years later. My health is not what is was; but I still take it upon myself to make the journey across those trodden paths, across the empty moors, into Carn Euny, into the chamber; and then back to my empty house, and my empty being.

And each time I go there, each time I stand beneath the grill in the chamber, I pray for the day I do not return home.

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