Knaresborough, North Yorkshire

The tour guide leads our class
past the skull-shaped pool:
a mineral soup that slowly drips
things into stone. Teddy bears,
strange fossils, hang from
the cave mouth like trolls
in sunlight, a string of ashy pearls,
their button eyes deathless
and milky grey. A small family
has brought another offering,
ready for hardened immortality.

Ursula Southeil, you were born here.
Your mother, teenager, terrified,
braced her back against the walls
like a petroglyph. Agatha, alone, anti-Mary,
her cries were smothered by thunder.
The whole night was lightning-lit,
Act 1, Scene 1; a desert place.
You arrived with a crash, crackling
with blood, the cold world curved
around your immaculate gravity.

We gather beneath a chandelier
of stalactites, are told you spent
your first two years here, a cub
curled in a double womb. Then, schism:
Church-separated, you were fostered
in the nearby village, and never saw
Agatha again. From strange soil
you grew stranger still, spine
a shepherd’s crook, nose a crag,
the whispers started with the winter chill.

When you married Toby Shipton,
they said he was bewitched.
It bothered you more than him:
he whistled, wound an arm
around your waist, made you
feel cave-safe. His death was a blade,
a blight. Tired of dragging your heart
behind you in a plague cart, you decided
to withdraw from human court.
The woods welcomed you,
ready for tending, wise woman.

You gathered hawthorn and wild garlic,
dried nettles with chapped hands,
savouring their bite, felt alive again.
Approached by the desperate, the unafraid;
you soothed before you became soothsayer.
Now the guide pauses with practised
theatricality. Of course, you are
most famous for your prophecies.
Your life a lesson in foreshadowing.
With murmurs of cows and bulls,
you predicted the Reformation,
the downfall of Anne Boleyn:
a sister similarly accused.

It was the High Bridge that haunted me.
You said that when it fell for a third time,
the world would end. Straddling the Ouse,
arches like panting mouths, it was Atlas,
carrying the weight of your words.
The tour finished with the news
that the bridge had already crumbled
twice. I had nightmares for weeks.
Dreamt myself into the cave corner
where you died, the perfect circle
of your life flickering behind my eyes.
My soles grew hot, I felt an umbilical
cord around my neck, my first period
brewing in my tiny womb like a storm.
I sensed our sacred inheritance.

Twenty years later, and sometimes,
in the quiet, I hear a creak, a crunch,
a groan of stones. Somewhere,
beside your bones, a bridge
is swaying, and I think:
it won’t be long now.

*