By The Lost Dutchman
Eve didn't feel at ease about it. She knew me well enough to know I prefer the most unlikely places, but this time the prospect of a possibly very primitive and hostile camp site "at the end of the world" filled her with an undefinable aversion. However, I was rejoicing in the idea of spending our holidays in a completely untouched spot, some new Garden of Eden.
We had taken a plane via Athens, took a ship to Volos and kept our fingers crossed. The boat was crammed with Greeks and we noticed few tourists on board, but as far as I was concerned, that didn't matter.
At S., the only town on the island with the same name, we found out that one of the two camp sites had been closed to the public.The other was twenty miles out of town. That much we got from a smelly local, sitting behind the empty desk of the Tourist Bureau.
"Camping P. is very quiet," the clerk assured us... and so was the town, as a little walk showed us.
An almost empty bus with a shaky driver took us to the camp site, situated near a small hamlet. The site, close to the sea, was covered with cypresses and pine trees. It looked like a large forest in which a few tents were slumbering in the sun.
Full story:
The Camp Site at the End of the World
Author of books on ancient civilizations and supernatural folklore
The Green Children of Woolpit
The story of the Green Children of Woolpit reads rather like a typical English fairytale, but are there any elements of truth mixed in with the mythology and folk beliefs of fairies and the afterlife?
During the troubled reign of king Stephen of England (1135-1154), there was a strange occurrence in the village of Woolpit, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. At harvest time, while the reapers were working in the fields, two young children emerged from deep ditches excavated to trap wolves, known as wolf pits (hence the name of the village). The children, a boy and a girl, had skin tinged with a green hue, and wore clothes of a strange colour, made from unfamiliar materials. They wandered around bewildered for a few minutes, before the reapers took them to the village.
Because no-one could understand the language the children spoke they were taken to the house of local landowner Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes. Here they broke into tears and refused to eat the bread and other food that was brought to them.
For days the children ate nothing until the villagers brought them recently harvested beans, with their stalks still attached. It was said that the children survived on this food for many months until they acquired a taste for bread.
As time passed the boy, who appeared to be the younger of the two, became depressed, sickened and died, but the girl adjusted to her new life, and was baptized. Her skin gradually lost its original green colour and she became a healthy young woman. She learned the English language and afterwards married a man at King’s Lynn, in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, apparently becoming ‘rather loose and wanton in her conduct’. Some sources claim that she took the name ‘Agnes Barre’ and the man she married was a senior ambassador of Henry II.
It is also said that the current Earl Ferrers is descended from the strange girl through intermarriage. What evidence this is based on is unclear, as the only traceable senior ambassador with this name at the time is Richard Barre, chancellor to Henry II, archdeacon of Ely and a royal justice in the late 12th century. After 1202, Richard retired to become an Austin canon at Leicester, so it is seems unlikely that he was the husband of ‘Agnes’.
Read More:
Mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit by Brian Haughton | Brian Haughton's Blog
