Godshill. Ghosts of the Isle of Wight, with Margo Williams.
All Saints on God's Hill.
THE FAMOUS Isle of Wight village of Godshill is mysterious and picturesque. The village sits at the heart of the island, its pretty cottages and gardens captivate the imagination of all who visit; with olde worlde charm and legendary tales of fairies and miraculous moving stones.
In the parish church of All Saints visitors and residents alike have seen a misted figure drift across the nave and vanish through the wall.
Some Godshill residents say it is the stumbling ghost of unlucky Sir Richard Worsley whose restless soul seeks the memorial his wife should have given him, but neglected so to do.
All Saints church stands perched on the summit of a small hill rising from the centre of the village. Clustered round it are some of the parish’s oldest buildings which in ensemble create a picture postcard scene of Isle of Wight perfection.
Godshill and the Lightning Problem
The church dates to Norman times when it was owned by the monastery of Lyre in France, though all that remains of this original is a single stone capital to mark their conquest of the island and the arrival of Norman monks in Godshill parish.
Local historians say the church stands upon the site of a religious shrine from the island’s prehistoric period though all trace of that is lost, apart from a curious old legend.
Until technology intervened and a rod was inserted, lightning strikes were a constant danger, for all too often they split the sky and then the tower causing the structure to crash to the ground; and many parishioners wondered why God wanted to destroy the church?
For God Himself arranged for its foundations to be placed there.
A fact long commemorated in the tale of All Saints’ miraculous moving stones Mythbusters investigating the miracle attempt to reconstruct what happened. The event is not in dispute, only the date when it took place.
A New Church for Godshill
One version of the legend dates Godshill’s miracle to the 700s in the aftermath of Caedwalla and Wilfrid’s mission when three quarters of the island’s inhabitants were m.rdered.
The dispute focuses on logistics: local engineers of scientific inclination wonder if there were enough people left alive to undertake the big project but concede God probably needed a positive story at that time to offset the sacrifice of so many community members.
Folklorists therefore suggest the miracle happened later, when logistics were more helpful. This version is as follows:
Long, long ago so local legend told, when the villagers planned to build a new church they chose a site a mile to the south, in respect of fairies said to reside within the hill. The workers paced and prodded, measured and staked; piled the stone ready, set out the materials and went to bed.
When they awoke next morning the stone was gone, spades and picks too.
The workers were baffled by the absence of it all. They searched and searched but nothing could be found.
At long last someone roused the French monks newly arrived from the continent, to ask if they had seen anything. ‘Ze eel, ze eel!’ came the reply from their clustered tents.
The Godshill Miracle
The villagers wondered how something so small and slippery could move such heavy stones. But they splashed in and around the stream until the village idiot yelled: ‘Go and search yon hill! You fools!’
Lo and behold on the hilltop there were the tools and materials.
So after lunch the workers carried it all back to the original site and laid out ready for next day. And next day the stone was gone, so too the spades and all the rest.
When someone suggested looking again on the hilltop the workers said ‘No way!’ but lo and behold way there it all was again: stone and spades, everything, all laid out ready.
Among the workers there was much complaint during that long hot day as they laboured down the hill carrying the stones and spades, and many wondered why the monks were too tired to lend a hand.
They all lay fast asleep in their tents, chanting silent; only sounds of snoring all day long.
By the third night the workers were exhausted, and not one sod turned on the church site to the south of the fairy hill. That night they planned to stay awake and catch the mysterious stone-remover; but being so tired they all fell asleep.
And lo and behold next morning the stone was back on the hilltop.
‘I think God wants his church on de fairy hill,’ was the conclusion reached among the villagers. ‘Would ye not agree Father Camembert?’
But Father Camembert and his monks were all fast asleep.
‘It must have been the fairies,’ said the workers to one another; and thus the legend holds.
The Ghost of All Saints Church
However, in modern times visitors to All Saints church on the hill are informed that God himself moved the stones because no one yet has observed a live fairy. Occasionally a misted figure is spotted inside Godshill parish church, too big to be a fairy. Most who have seen the figure believe it to be a ghost.
And so he was.
For a moment on a sunny afternoon’s visit he was part-visible to me near the pulpit. I had paper and pencil ready to note his opinion on the challenges of temptation in the community.
“...I was a preacher here in this church many years ago,” he said as I sat in the front pew to listen. “So long ago I cannot remember. The ladies wore bonnets trimmed with flowers and feathers. I often thought how like a flower garden the church looked as I preached from the pulpit.
I talked about the Commandments, yet I was the one who broke so many. Adultery was commonplace in my life. Many a young woman fell for my looks and charm. Stealing was another of my sins. Money from the poor box and from parishioners whose homes I visited if they were sick. I was not afraid to bear false witness either, giving false evidence at the trial of a man whom I envied. He had a beautiful wife."
The ghost sighed, thinly.
"When I died I realized what a hypocritical life I had led. I have had to remain here listening to sermons by vicars who came after me, and watch visitors wandering around. You have come, creating a silver path which I will take and hope it leads me to Heaven. My name? Look on the board, it will light up.”
The ghost drifted on through the wooden pews toward a picture on the wall. Inside its wooden frame was a long list of vicars of All Saints, names and dates; and as promised, momentarily an unearthly light appeared as a ghostly hand traced a line illuminating which of them was this wolf in shepherd’s clothing.
Then he vanished, headed for Heaven to meet his maker, or so he hoped.
God in His Heaven
Does such a being truly exist? No one rightly knows how those stones were replaced each night up on Godshill hill, and these days few people think God was directly responsible in a hands-on way.
God does not do that sort of thing, not least that anyone lately has noticed, which is why science now is keen to find the truth and do away with the ‘God’ in Godshill idea altogether.
What need have we of that delusion? Scientists in the village suggests that their neighbours’ need for religion is but an infantile wish for an invisible friend in what is only a cold lifeless universe.
Such things are safer now to say for the Inquisition’s braziers are cold, the tools of tort.re are but exhibits in museums, and science is free of fear to seek a ‘Theory-of-Everything’ to replace ‘God the Everything’.
The existence of life in Godshill, as elsewhere on this planet, is said to be the result of an amazing, extraordinarily lucky coincidence.
Though it still is anyone’s guess as to how life appeared from the ‘primordial soup’, as those ingredients available on early earth are described; what the components were and what catalyst triggered the first replicating cells.
Somehow life began, the odds being improbable but not impossible.
‘Who created the Creator?’ is the rhetorical riddle posed by those in the village who say God hasn’t left All Saints church building, he was never there at all.
The odds that such a being exists, some form of ‘super intelligence’, are not just improbable, they say, but impossibly improbable.
The Impossible Takes a Little Time
Some things probably are impossibly improbable: the magic self-moving stones of Godshill’s new church for example.
And yet if science tells us that most of the universe is invisible and infinite ‘dumb’ universes are constantly popping into and out of life, as and when required; it is difficult to rule anything in or out of the realms of possibility whether probable or not.
It is fair to ask if a similarly improbable, though not impossible, catalyst triggered other forms of existence in all that, to us at least, invisible space.
Or must the villagers of Godshill assume that the universe had to wait 13.8 billion years before conscious intelligence in the form of humans appeared and took its place on Sunday in the pews of All Saints church, decorated with flowers and feathers to please its resident cleric?
Can such a being as ‘God’ exist?
It is evident that from ‘chaos’, as we begin to understand it, strange and unexpected things do happen: energy and elements in seemingly random combination do in certain circumstances self-organize into extraordinarily complex arrangement.
In the language of science there now are mathematical models that prove neural-like networks can form in and beyond those mysterious levels of existence discovered after the atom was split.
From chaos, consciousness can come into being; fortuitously or not.
Intelligence may not necessarily need flesh and blood as we know it, to function. The existence of some form of supernatural intelligence is not improbably impossible but possible and probable; though whether he, she or they can move big stones over fields and uphill without some help, remains to be seen.
Thank you for your company on this short tour of Isle of Wight mysteries and haunting. If you would like to know more about Margo Williams' investigations in Godshill and other matters of Heaven and Hell, read this book. Now available from Amazon.
