📜 A Note from Miss Gussie Penfold, Keeper of Unwise Lore 📜

My dear neighbours and fellow denizens of the Little Country,
It is with a certain amount of reservation — and, I confess, three swift gins — that I share this fragmentary remnant of our curious oral history.

"The Lay of Old Barleypole" is an ancient, oft-recited piece, reserved for peculiar evenings when the mist hangs low, the church clock forgets itself, and strange lights flit in the high fields. It surfaces at The Knotted Stoat, usually around last orders, muttered by weathered men with unblinking eyes, and women who know better than to linger by the woods.

None dare write it down in full.
Not for fear of libel — heaven knows there’s enough of that in the Parish — but because, as tradition holds, things tend to happen when it’s transcribed.

The verses shift, you see.
New stanzas appear where none were before. Names get added.
Your name.
I have seen it.

So here is but a taste, passed through a trembling hand and typed in haste, for those of stout heart and sensible footwear. I advise you not to repeat it aloud near open windows, hollow trees, or cats with oddly human faces.

Should you wish to hear it in full… you’ll find no book.
But if you wait 'til closing time on a fog-wrung night… listen.
It will find you.

Yours,
Miss Gussie Penfold
The Old Library, behind the Stuffed Otter
Purveyor of Mildly Unsafe Knowledge

"The Lay of Old Barleypole

In Barleypole, where mists do creep,
And tattered wicks their vigils keep,
There lies a lane none dares to chart,
For fear it whispers back their heart.

Yon elder hedge, with bristled brow,
It doth remember then and now,
And through its knotty, gnarled embrace,
A hundred watching faces trace.

I knew a man, or so I’m told,
Whose bones grew thick, whose hair grew cold,
He drank the sap of nightshade vine,
And spoke in tongues not wholly thine.

The mill-wheel turns, but makes no sound,
Its paddles beat the hollow ground,
Where once the church-bell used to peal,
Now tolls the root, the worm, the weal.

And there beneath the hollow tree,
A hollow face did stare at me,
With eyes like ponds, and teeth of chalk,
It bade me "Stay," but bade me "Walk."

Old Elsie Morn, with spindle thin,
Did scratch strange runes upon her skin,
She claimed the crows had taught her verse,
To make the sick grow rather worse.

A moon of fat and jaundiced hue,
Did birth itself the other yew,
And from its bough there hung a thing,
That once had tried, and failed, to sing.

I met a child with elder’s hand,
Who mapped the fault-lines of the land,
He claimed the hills did rise and fall,
By whim of beasts beneath us all.

At Buttercross, when sun is low,
A bell unseen begins to blow,
And cobbles thrum with ghostly tread,
Of those who left, but are not dead.

The final ale, the final word,
Is never spoke, but only heard,
For silence speaks, when last light dies,
And barmaids serve with hollow eyes.

(continues...)"