File: scene-typical-traditional(...).jpg (111 KB, 800x534) 111 KB Strange local practices Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:02:24 No.27303049 Archived▶>>27303082 >>27303132 >>27303775 I live in the english midlands which is basically lots of black rock craggy highlands and swamp/forested lowlands inbetween villages and towns that slowly spread due to constant housing developments. People consider it a problem in terms of local identity where villages spread and join like mould in a pitri dish and consume the wilderness to become essentially the doomsayers example of the beginnings of giant arcologies replacing a natural countryside environs. My town started as a few houses for quarry workers on a single road between two villages in the 1700's and by 1990 had only grown to maybe 300 homes. Then the housing estate building began and has never stopped and now there are thousands of homes and the redwood forest is all gone. Its the same for every village in our county. Where the distance between the last house in each village has gone from a few hours walk to a few minutes. Except one village. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:06:15 No.27303082▶>>27303122 >>27303132 File: whicker men.jpg (152 KB, 720x960) 152 KB >>27303049 (OP) This village is 4 roads with a school, decrepit manor house, a disused and empty church and a single bus stop not updated since the 1980's with maybe 40 houses. There are no modern amenities. No solar powered street lights, no green recycling wheelie bins. Not even bins for people to put their bags of dog shit when walking their pets. It still has a road without tarmac and around it is all empty fields with strange rusted old iron constructs that aren't buildings but closer to bridges you see meant to carry heavy loads across wide rivers but in the middle of a field no river has ever ran through. Every harvest festival time around September as summer ends and Autumn begins the town is dotted with whicker scarecrow like things acting out strange pagan acts. The children wear little animal outfits, things like goats and sheep and the men and women wear these old timey bee keeper masks like whicker spirals on pillow cases. Sometimes this tree by the schools yard carved into this totem poleish thing with an owl, badger and stag on it is painted orange by a man wearing a wreath of ivy and green face paint. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:11:04 No.27303122▶>>27303182 >>27303205 File: 2018-11-01-bonfire.jpg (478 KB, 860x573) 478 KB >>27303082 Nobody knows why. Nobody moves there, nobody has ever moved to a nearby village from there. It sounds like something that should happen on some backwoods island off the coast like in the Whicker Man or Lovecrafts Innsmouth but its just this strange island of isolation in the middle of this circuit of villages being brought together by housing developments that oddly avoid this place entirely. We are told never to go through after dark alone because of "rough'uns" and once driving slowly through on the way home from college in the autumn of 2009 with a tire fucked by a new speedbump on the winding roads close to my college town to curb boy racers crashing the shitmobiles their dads bought them i saw a bonfire built on one of those weird iron things and folk were dancing & screaming around it and when they saw my car stoned the fuck out of it as i sped past. I called the police but they assumed i was a dumb college kid who had a few too many cans and drove into a ditch or something. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:16:59 No.27303182▶>>27303239 File: 2010 flooding nightmares.jpg (326 KB, 1500x1000) 326 KB >>27303122 I assumed at the time they were just our version of hillbillies. Some insular village keeping up old habits lost to time and paranoid/rude at any "outsiders" like some tired cliche come to life. Arseholes who are fucking rude for no good reason but nothing beyond that right? Then in 2010 we got hit with a LOT of rain. Like a month of rain every day. Remember i mentioned we are an area of swampy areas? they describe that as "flood plains" during these building expansions and for good reason. I came out of College one day and my car was fucked. Entire gearbox blown out and was pissed. I joined way too many at the busstop. Turns out the the flooding had gone over the motorway and caused a pileup and the busses were multiple busses late. In a tv shirt, jeans and sneakers because i planned to drive home safe and dry i get pissier and pissier till i decide fuck it. I'm walking home. The quickest way was to follow the Motorway after the next village from the town my college was in. But there was a problem. The fooding had half of it in the fucking river. I had to make a detour and guess where? >> vinyl 01/10/21(Sun)16:19:40 No.27303205▶ >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:23:07 No.27303239▶>>27303291 File: istockphoto-596082148-612x612.jpg (39 KB, 612x442) 39 KB >>27303182 By the time i got there my sneakers were full of water, my clothes were soaked thanks to assholes who DO speed up when passing you to splash you and i was nackered after walking 15 miles in a downpour in soaked clothes. So the next bustop i see i take a break right? well there was a bus stop in creepytown and i chose to stop there. Bad idea. It was basically this upside down L. a hard right angle of metal frame and ancient plastic "windows" all fogged up with grime and weathering. There was a small bench at some point long ripped away. So i'm standing there cold, angry and wanting to crash as my sneaker i would learn has giant £2 sized raw blistered on both heels and i still had 6 miles to go. I didn't want to be there but it wasn't dark yet and it wasn't quite the time of year for the summerisle rejects so who cares right? Then a bus rounded the corner. i guess in the hour or so it took to get there the busses caught up. I stood forwards with my student pass and waved the driver down. He shook his head at my and kept going. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:29:57 No.27303291▶>>27303332 File: 643460aeb9c2d8b44e1510ba4(...).jpg (38 KB, 320x428) 38 KB >>27303239 After muttering "for fucksake" i did all i could do. I started walking after it in the direction home. It was dark all day but the sun was coming down at this point. I was cold, angrier and just wanting to collapse on my bed so i get to trudging. As i'm walking along i notice that every house has a curtain pulled slightly aside. You can't see them clearly but every house has someone watching me in it. Nosy bastards right? thats what i was thinking. But a couple of houses has some dudes coming out. Starring at me and saying things like "move on now. You aren't meant to be here." which just had me annoying. It was a fucking public footpath on the road it wasn't private property who the fuck were these assholes to say that? probably the same fucks that threw stones at my now dead car. I'm leaving the village since its only a few roads across and the one road to get out is about half a mile of swamp. The ditches have burst and theres mud, horse shit and straw everywhere. Fuck this i'm cutting across the field closest to the main road i can follow almost all the way to my house. One of the ones with the iron "bridges" in. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:34:58 No.27303332▶>>27303372 File: View_over_Muddy_Fields_-_(...).jpg (77 KB, 640x480) 77 KB >>27303291 Trying not to get suckered down into the mud and glad its not horseshit i slowly trudge through the field towards one of these things assuming its some form of platform and i get a bit of a break crossing this large field thats almost as big as the town. At this point i am getting a bit freaked out since 3 of the good old boys have been following me now and my mp3 player is dead so i can't put on music. I'm not some asshole in a creepypasta here i'm tied, wet and angry and wondering if some fucking assholes are about to start and fight and what do i do. But when i get near the iron thing they start to back off. They make these wierd hang gestures and mutter and turn back yelling "We aint come to the end of our time yet, fuck off townie!" and crisis averted. But i get a good look at this shit which clearly isn't a bridge. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:40:55 No.27303372▶>>27303436 File: english newts.jpg (146 KB, 480x326) 146 KB >>27303332 First off i think its some strange kind of cattlegrid, the thing farmers put at open gates for cars to pass without cows being able to walk out. But its not. Its some kind of drain. The ironwork around it is about 2 meters high bolted and thick as gerders but looks like some blend of stonehenge and student art project and is featureless rusted iron bar one painted on white lizard. I notice movement around me and the whole thing is swarming with lizards. Now this is the english midlands. Maybe you saw a newt as a kid back when things were cleaner and more wild once in a blue moon but 2010 outside a nature preserve? never. And not hundreds of all shapes and sizes. It was like the giant thing was access to some roiling pit of lizards. Clearly signed as being of some purpose related to them. Why? what made those guys back off from it? Afraid of getting a lizard up my leg i continued on weirded out and made it to the road and limped home. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)16:48:06 No.27303436▶ File: 5507.jpg (23 KB, 426x282) 23 KB >>27303372 i get home, collapse in bed and fall ill with a cold for a week but thats it. No "who was phone??" moment here. Real Life is not that interesting i guess. But it stuck with me. Why a lizard hole? what do the bonfires there do? is it a pagan thing? or some specific thing to this village? where the fuck did all the lizards come from? is it never built around because of them? what about the iron constructs? and why are the people such rude dickheads? I've googled it but never come up with anything and the old folks in town still knocking around i know who might know anything are all old and senile and i doubt many below the age of 40 in my village were born within 100 miles let alone this country anymore so it remains a mystery to me but a strangely captivating one. One day all the villages around it will be one whole. No space between them. Modernity from end to end in one big concrete loop. But this remains. Defiant to the march of time and infrastructure. How and why who knows? But as far as i can tell they were here before any of these villages and not for anything like a quarry or trade route. Not even farming. They were. They are and they will be but only they know why. Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:04:24 No.27303557▶ >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:08:14 No.27303590▶>>27303824 File: slow-worm-tongue-sticking(...).jpg (58 KB, 753x435) 58 KB >England has lizards? >Google: the most unique lizard in the UK is the legless "slow worm" which is not a snake at all. Man. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:10:54 No.27303609▶ File: 1_DwgGGh0ocURslWZmp8l1GA.jpg (1.99 MB, 3600x2456) 1.99 MB >Not keeping the true gods close to home >Not keeping the thread after the Romans tried to stamp it out >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:30:25 No.27303775▶>>27303839 >>27303957 >>27303049 (OP) I lived in a one road one pub no shop village in Hertfordshire as a child. Harvest and solstices were marked with festivals and rituals. There was and active coven in the woods and you'd go see an old woman in the village if you were ill before you went to a doctor. Wasn't that freaky at the time, just a lovely community. In retrospect the strangest tradition we had was bleeding the corn, it wasn't actually corn it was wheat. We'd make corndollies out of the last bit of the harvested wheat, on the second harvest. The children of the village (there were only about 6 of us) would cut their hand and give some of their blood to keep the wheat alive all winter and to say thank you for the harvest. There'd be a bit of a contest of who's was best and it was made quite fun. You'd keep the corndolly in your house and chat to it and keep it warm and safe all winter. When planting season came, which was early in the year everyone would have a little party, wish the corndollies well and walk them back to the field. They would get buried there back where they were harvested from. The wheat was then thought to have a bit of the children's personality in it when it grew. Part of me regrets moving to the city when I became an adult. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:32:25 No.27303797▶ File: hrvest-4-1.png (281 KB, 357x268) 281 KB AN EFFIGY TO TAKE YOUR PLACE >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:34:52 No.27303824▶ >>27303590 Slow worms are great. Had good fun catching the as a youth. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:36:42 No.27303839▶>>27303870 >>27303887 >>27303957 File: IMG_3081.jpg (76 KB, 800x742) 76 KB >>27303775 Uh, who didn't bleed into a corn dolly as a kid? Thats as English as placing a dead rabbit outside your back door for dead family when the corpsewalk night happens on May 13th. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:40:59 No.27303870▶ >>27303839 Glad it's not just me, seemed weirder writing it down than I remembered it being. As for dead animals one of the old boys had a dead barn own hammered to the door of one of his outbuildings. Wings outstretched just nailed up. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:44:31 No.27303902▶ >>27303887 the original english day of the dead before the 8th century pope had it mixed up with those filthy irish drunkards samhain. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)17:55:50 No.27304012▶ I think the midlands need manufacturing back in a big way. >> Anonymous 01/10/21(Sun)18:12:45 No.27304160▶ File: Chained_Oak_-_geograph.or(...).jpg (161 KB, 640x437) 161 KB At a nearby manor house thats turned into a theme park theres a big tree that the former lord was told was cursed. Every branch that fell would be a family members life so he chained the tree together. They made a horror dark ride about it. A storm knocked a bunch off and there were several heart attacks in the family.