“There are upward of ninety on the wold and I have surveyed sixty-one. Sixty of them are graves and the country walks over them to reach the water. The interesting question has never been what is in the ninety. It is why the dale can tell you, without consulting anybody, which one is the sixty-first.”
As the graziers of the High Wold tell it
The drove came up the middle wold in the grey of the morning, and a quarter of a mile short of the best grazing on the wold the lead man stopped at a stone, or a thorn, depending on who is telling it, and turned the flock. The road bent there, and the bend cost half an hour. It was older than anybody’s mending of the road. A stranger walking with the drove asked which mound it was, and nobody pointed. Four of the five barrows the dale leaves alone have a name and a story apiece: a battle, a drowning, a plague pit, a hunt that did not come back. This one had neither. It was only ever the bad barrow.
The dale knew it by the animals. Sheep put on it drifted off within the hour, quietly, however often they were put back. The crows came down on the turf a chain off and never on the mound. An antiquary called Strangeways surveyed sixty-one of the mounds over four seasons, said in print that nothing marked the five out, and was not believed. The dale had never needed him to tell it which was which.
Then the old men tell the three times. In two centuries a flock has been pastured on one of the five three times. Twice the parish book says nothing afterwards. The third time it says something about a shepherd, and does not say what became of him. An upland man will allow that the odds look fair, and add that he does not mean to be the fourth.
What is known
The High Wold, in the northern march, has upward of ninety barrows. Strangeways surveyed sixty-one and published in 4614 that nothing in size, shape or siting marks out the five the country avoids. Four are named: the Harrow, the Nine Ridges, the Tarn Mound and the Long Man. Of the four stories attached to them, the three that can be tested fail, and the parish book shows the flock turned before each story existed. The bad barrow has no account, only the practice. It and the Harrow are the two that no one the record remembers has opened. No bell is rung at any barrow.
The priory holds that the five are dangerous on evidence no one can now assess, and that the avoidance should go on. The wardens ask first whether the ground wants anything: a presence answers to offerings, a work does not, and nobody knows which the bad barrow is. It is one mound on one wold, and nothing like it troubles the settled shires.