YESTER CASTLE
The path to Yester is a journey into deep time, taken on this July day under a sky of hammered gold. The air is thick with the scent of meadowsweet and hot stone, and the sun, high and imperious, sends dapples dancing across the track. Above, in the canopy of the oaks and beeches, comes a sound that is the very essence of summer woodland: the wild, yaffling laughter of a Green Woodpecker. It is an old sound, a mad sound, a joy that spills and echoes through the leaves, stitching the bright day together.
To walk here is to read the landscape in its layers. The path dips and weaves, following the contours of forgotten field-systems, the ghosts of rig-and-furrow farming still visible in the earth's nap. Then, through a screen of shimmering green, the castle emerges. Not as a whole, but as a suggestion. A single, defiant wall of red sandstone, a molar of a ruin clenched against the sky. It is a place of haunting, not by spirits, but by history. You feel the weight of the centuries that have pressed down on this stone, the lives that have weathered it, the battles that have broken it.
But the true strangeness of Yester lies beneath. A flight of worn steps leads down from the light, into the earth, into the cool and the damp. This is the Goblin Ha', or Gifford's Hall, a place where language itself seems to decay. The name is a palimpsest: 'Goblin' a folk-memory of the otherworldly skill required for its construction, 'Ha'' a whisper of the Old English 'heall'. The air changes, growing heavy with the scent of wet rock and mycelium. The sun is a memory. Here, in this vaulted, man-made cavern, the world outside falls away. It is a space of legend, said to have been built by infernal pact. To stand in its centre is to feel the pressure of the hill, the immense tonnage of soil and story bearing down from above.
Climbing back into the brilliant, woodpecker-stitched daylight is a form of rebirth. The eyes, accustomed to the gloom, are dazzled by the sheer force of the sun on the grass. The world feels new-minted, the green of the leaves impossibly vivid. The laughter from the treetops seems to welcome you back from the underland, a reminder that even in a place so profoundly layered with the past, the present moment can insist on its own bright, fleeting, glorious reality.