LImeyards Stories

The Limeyards are a stunning area in the grounds of Calke Abbey (Calke) in South Derbyshire. Over several hundred years the land was quarried and the stone roasted in limekilns and an area that must have looked like a dusty nightmare landscape developed. Now it has been left and the wild has reclaimed the place to give a series of sunken arenas, woodland glades, dark reflective pools and others of clear, clear water

I am involved as a storyteller, looking at creating a set of activities that people can download and use to shape a wander through the Yards so that they can build new stories as they go....

To start us off, here are a couple of stories from a pilot project a year ago, more will follow...

Travelling in Time:

remembering what might have been….

Take away tall trees, small trees, and bushes and flowers

Take away woods and wildlife

Take away grass and leave only stone

Take away playing children

Take away people walking their dogs,

Take away birdsong

Take away peacefulness

Add horses and carts

         And thick grey smoke

Add boulders and rocks and crushing machines

         And fires and firewood and dust

Add hard working children

Add noises

Add loud bangs, crunching, neighs and clops and shouting

Add workers trudging through the tunnel

Add naughty children sliding in the snow

Add lanterns in the evening to light the way home

Dame Catherine Harpur’s School pupils

The Satyr’s stories:

Beginning

“I was born out of the need of old stone and tree roots for a voice.

I began as an idea, shaped by water running through stone in deep caves, gathering a body for myself out of long lost bones, out of stranded horns and hooves and left-over memories. My flesh is earth, my skin grass and bark, my blood the mineral rich, crystal-growing streams of limestone darkness

Now I am here, playing the music of the wind, listening to bluebells ring, and the slow singing of carp in the cold pools. I am the watcher in the woods, the touch of the breeze, the rustle in the undergrowth. I am the shadow that slips away.

Always here. Never seen.”

Gordon MacLellan 

The Satyr’s stories:

The Calling Song

With the fire of foxes, come

With the endurance of limestone, come

With the persistence of tree roots, come

With the passion of orchids, come

With the excitement of children, come

And where the cliff

Crumbles into the grass;

Past Gilbert’s stone

And Sir Henry’s Yards;

Past Engine and Portobello and

Sad Molly Wootton’s Hole;

Beyond Perch Pit and

Over the Limeyards Flats

By the cold, carp depths

Of Blackwater

We’ll watch the moon rise over Margaret’s Close

and gather the woodland on the dancing lawns at

Ridings Nook

Gordon MacLellan

PEACOCK PIT

A dream died at Engine Pit,

On a long slow day of misery.

A hoof slipped, scrabbled, caught

And slipped again, wheels sliding.

A hand reached, caught, pulled, and reached again

But the wagon tilted, toppled,

Its load shifting, pulling over,

 Pulling down and Peacock went

With it, desperate, into the

Cold water, deep water,

The delicate, tropical blue water

That claimed load and

Life and

Name