Mundane Magic Places
Melvin Burgess’s YA novel The Lost Witch starts with rain – ‘It was tipping it down’ – as the teenage protagonist Bea and her family drive home from a disastrous holiday in North Yorkshire. Nearing home, they are surprised to see a hunt chasing three hares across the hillside, and even more astounded when one of the hares, ‘as big as a small dog’, leaps through the car window and settles in terror on Bea’s lap. Another, ‘a great, gaunt beast with grey on its muzzle,’ looks her in the eye and reveals ‘worlds upon worlds within worlds.’
I was reminded of this fictional moment on a walk around South Leigh I took this week. It was the one bright day of half term and although I had some urgent work to do, I also needed fresh air. I stopped in at the pub for coffee and then followed my nose towards the church – a neat medieval building containing an unexpected but quite splendid Doom painting on the south wall. Fortified by caffeine and the sight of naked sinners being dragged into the mouth of a bored-looking dragon, I felt that this walk might be something special.
But it wasn’t until I cut back across a stubble-covered field on my way back to the village, after trekking along a series of muddy footpaths and a dull country lane, that magic was conjured. Three roe deer, startled by my clambering over a stile, chased each other towards the horizon. And then there was a hare, sitting upright in the centre of the field.* It waited for me to move. I stood still. It fell to four paws and ambled for a while. Hares aren’t uncommon in Oxfordshire, but I mostly encounter rabbits on my local walks. Rabbits scatter and bounce, flipping their tails into the air. Hares bound and leap, when they decide it is time to move. This one launched into a sudden race, disturbing two others that had been laying flat to the ground. The trio paused for a moment, grey-brown fur caught in the afternoon sunlight, then I lost sight of them.
I stayed with a friend in Somerset last week, and we took her dog out for a sodden walk before work. Rainwater gushed down steep narrow roads and cars splashed past us filled with children being taken to school. As we reached the top of a particularly muddy field, she stopped me. We were in danger of being washed away into the verge and there was nothing obvious to see. Even on a sunny day, there would be better points to stop and catch a view into the Cam Valley. But, she explained, this was her magic place. She’d seen hares here too. There had been moments of epiphany. In the spring, wildflowers transform this small plateau into something beautiful.
I like the idea of mundane magic. Elsewhere, I’ve written about books – like Burgess’s – that combine the ordinary and the extraordinary to tell wonderful stories of adolescent lives. I love everyday fictional worlds that reveal glimpses of the supernatural. I enjoy these books because they so often start with rain. In real life, I have my own magic places, unspectacular spots that nonetheless hold meaning and possibility. They are hard to describe, of course, because to others they are just fields, or a footbridge, or a bench on a golf course. But sometimes there are signs.
Magic places are surely portals of sorts. Find yours, check the signs. Tell me where they lead, what they signify, and what creatures guard them.
*If you look carefully at the first image in this post, you’ll see the hare and one of its mates.
