“Everything else in this county sits still and waits for you to be foolish. The fog comes down the dale looking for you. I have kept a book of it for thirty years because it is the only thing here that has a route, and a thing with a route can be met.”
As Warden Margaret Culley’s book tells it
It comes up the dale against the wind. The drovers say that is the whole of the sign, and the only one a man can see at the time: the cold, the smell of nothing, the dogs going quiet instead of whining, all that is what people remember afterwards. When it is seen coming, every settlement in its road does the same four things within the hour. Everybody comes in. Every door is shut. Every bell is rung and kept ringing. Every lamp is lit, even lamps that light nothing, and left burning until it has gone.
Four people who were out in one came in, and the warden at Swaledale copied all four accounts down word for word and would not tidy them. The sound went first, they said, so completely that a man could not hear his own boots. It was very cold. They lost their way within a few steps of ground they knew, and they came out of it by sitting down and waiting, and not one of them could say afterwards why he had sat down. Two spoke of company: somebody near, who did not come nearer. One, who gave his account a month later and had told it in three public houses by then, saw a shape at a distance that did not resolve and did not move.
Nine people did not come in on those eleven nights. Six were found within the week, drowned or fallen, and their parishes entered them as accidents. Three were never found. The parishes wrote them down as lost. The warden wrote them down as not found, and wrote half a page on the difference.
What is known
The march distinguishes this fog absolutely from ordinary weather, which is far the greater killer: nine days in ten, fog in the march is cold air over warm ground. The tenth moves against the wind, the one sign that can be checked while it is happening. The warden’s book at Swaledale records eleven in thirty years, in her own dale only; the fen holms report more and the wood almost none. In nine of the eleven it came up the dale rather than down, in none did it cross a watershed, and in seven its course followed one of the fallow ways off the drove, which she notes proves nothing, since the fallow ways follow the dales.
None of the four who came in suffered injury, illness or any consequence afterwards. All four were carrying something blessed and mentioned it unasked, which proves little in a march where almost everybody does. Three fen holms say, in the same words and unprompted, that nothing in it is to be followed: not a light, not a voice, not a voice a man is certain he knows. The march agrees on what to do and on nothing else. The warden’s book was never written to say whether it is a haunt, a power of place, weather with a habit or several things confused together; it is kept here among the horrors because nobody has ever given it a shape.