Smoke and Mirrors (aka Crab and Bee aka) describe the town of Royston in 'The Pattern' thus:
'Royston is a place from which the power has been removed.A hollow left behind when the roof was pulled. There are many signs of the hooded crow but no hooded crows'.
Re-reading that section of The Pattern prompted a long belated trip to the town of Royston and a visit to the Royston Cave.
The Cave and Royston generally have been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. I've never properly been to Royston, only briefly passed through it or visited the Royston Heath as a child, memories of which are vague and involve Peter Powell kites, balsa wood gliders and my grandad. The town is only about 15 minutes away from Cambridge by train. I wasn't really sure why I'd never been.
The first notable point after leaving the station and heading in the direction of the town centre along The Old North Road was the small museum. The exhibits that seemed most significant were a taxidermy hooded crow and the model of the Priory Cinema. In fact, I can't swear it was a model, it may have just been a photograph. The memory of most of the exhibits in the museum faded soon after leaving, so it's likely I've misremembered.
The cinema opened in the early 1930s and featured typical brown brick of the time but with unusual octagonal features in the design. It was demolished in 2002 to make way for housing, but seems to remain as nearly as important in the memory of the town as the hooded crow.
The hooded crow was once a common visitor to Hertfordshire and in particular Royston, to the extent that it is often referred to a the 'Royston Crow'. The name was also given to local cavalier supporters who brawled with visiting Roundheads in the Cromwellian era. It has for years also been the name given to the local paper.
Old North Road/Kneesworth Street or Ermine Street, met the crossroads with the Icknield Way soon after. Both the Cave and the Royce Stone sit at the conjunction of the two ancient routes. I spotted The Cave Shop, which sits adjacent to the Cave entrance. But since our visit to the cave was not due for a couple of hours, we continued over the crossroads. I had intended to stop and investigate the Royce Stone, but the presence of an ogre-like man standing next to it like a guard dissuaded me. He had an energy drink in one hand and a fag in the other, and was and using the depression on the stone as an ashtray. The stone is said to be the original base of Roisia's Cross, named after the Lady Roisia who may have erected the cross or repaired an already existing one, at a time when the town had yet to be established in the 10th century. The town, which subsequently grew up around the crossroads, is said to be named after her. Roisia's Town was later truncated to Royston, the stone became the Royce Stone.
During a brief and incoherent wander through the town, in which we took in in the Priory Gardens and some side alleys off the main shopping street, we encountered more a modern but no less curious and completely unexplained stonework. Then we headed to Therfield Heath.
Therfield Heath is the place I knew as Royston Heath as a child. Now it is a nature reserve , a Special Site of Scientific Interest on part of a large chalk escarpment. No kite flying was evident. To the West, the nature reserve gave way to a golf course featuring prehistoric long barrows. Further in the distance I could clearly see the Sandy Heath Transmitter, looming up from the neighbouring county of Bedfordshire. The Icknield Way was signposted, cutting across the Health and heading south to Baldock and Letchworth, north-west, out of the town and passing through the Greenwich Meridian before bypassing Cambridge, on to Newmarket and beyond. As I sat taking in the view, among a profusion of wild flowers and bees, something flew over me. A hooded crow. Or was it? Crab and Bee say there are none and the Kent Ornithological Society say that the last sighting in Royston was in 1985. The image is still clear in my mind, but may well have been a projection of my geographic imagination brought about by the earlier visit to the museum and the still present spectre of the crow throughout the town.
Our appointment at the Cave meant we didn't have too long to linger. On the way back through the town, we diverted through Angel Pavement, a 60s pedestrian shopping precinct which both stood out and blended in with the older buildings in the town centre to form an atmosphere typical of London commuter belt Hertfordshire towns, including neighbours like Letchworth or Hoddesdon. Royston seemed unusually quiet. It was Saturday, early afternoon but felt more akin to a Wednesday morning such was the lack of people. Coming from Cambridge,where town on Saturday is best avoided due to the overwhelming volume of tourists and shoppers, this was a minor revelation.
Angel Pavement featured a newly opened independent bookshop, the only one in Royston and something that is a rarity generally. We diverted in to have a look. They had what looked like an interesting topography section. But before I'd had a good look, I was distracted by a display of books in the centre of the shop being 'manned' by a posh sounding lady. The books were all by Jeffrey Archer and I realised that he had been invited to come and sign books to mark the opening of the shop. I remembered Archer coming to talk at an assembly at my school many years ago where he had made much of the virtues of honesty and hard work. I remember not being very convinced at the time. Subsequent events and revelations about Archer, which ended in his imprisonment for perjury, seemed to bear out my scepticism. We left the shop before he had a chance to arrive.
Archer was not from Royston, but is most usually associated with Grantchester, just on the edge of Cambridge, where he still lives with Mary Archer in the Old Vicarage. The TV programme Grantchester, set in a fictionalised version of the village sometime in the 1950s, has no connection to Archer, although central to the programme is criminal activity and a vicarage. The crimes in the TV series were usually murders, not perjury, lying or cheating. The day we arrived in Royston, Archer had chosen to come from Grantchester, the fictional vintage murder hotspot, to Royston, to open a bookshop.
Royston does have a more recent and much less sanitised, if less frequent, history of murder than the fictional 'Grantchester'. The non-fictional murder of Helen Bailey, a children's book author from Royston happened in 2016. Had she still been alive, she would have probably been a far more suitable candidate to open a bookshop in Royston. She was murdered by her fiance Ian Stewart, who hid her body and that of her dog in a septic tank at her house. It emerged the Stuart had in the past played bowls at the same club as my Dad. My Dad said he always thought there was something 'a bit odd' about him. Stewart was later also convicted of killing his previous wife back in 2010.
I was with these black thoughts and the image of the grinning face of Jeffrey Archer stubbornly refusing to shift from my minds eye, that we headed to the Cave. After a short wait loitering in the passage next door with others who had booked the tour, we were welcomed in by the guide. After a short decent we were in the chamber, which had been cut out of chalk and was festooned with carvings of unknown age and origin, as well as 17th century graffiti. The Cave was discovered in the 17th century when some works above accidently revealed the opening, but thought to date from at least the 1300's.
Several figures were depicted in the carvings. One was said to be by some St. Christopher, patron Saint of Travel,
probably the nearest thing the Christians can offer to a psychogeographic
figure. Others think the carving represents Hermes, The Greek God of travel and
messenger to the Gods. In modern times, that name is more associated with
disgruntled gig economy workers who throw parcels over fences to express
their distain at 21st Century labour market conditions.
Explanations and theories about who the figures in the carvings were supposed to be or what they represented are many and varied. The same is true of the cave itself. The guide explained that nothing had ever been proven, so people were free to believe in whichever theory they liked. There are various theories suggesting the cave may have been a prison, hermitage, hiding place for religious dissenters, site of pagan worship or possibly most popular, that it was connected to the Knights Templar. The guide clearly had met people with all sorts of theories and beliefs that visited, some more out-there than others. Midsummer day was only a few days before we visited, when the number of Earth Mystery types and dowsers visiting the caves increases. The Cave is thought to be at an intersection of the The Mary and Michael Ley Lines, which in turn are said to lead in different directions to nearby sites associated with the Templars, who some say were skilled at the art of dowsing.
Another feature of the cave was that it had apparently had a wooden platform on all sides, octagonal in shape. I was reminded of the octagonal features of the Priory Cinema and wondered if there was some sort of connection.
I can't say I felt anything unusual in the Cave, although it was without doubt an unusual and unique place. I did enjoy the much welcome cool air found underground, and the chamber provided a refuge from the heat we had escaped from outside. In a previous era it may have offered refuge from other uncomfortable or dangerous situations. But can't say I felt any weird energy or had any moments of revelation.
But when we emerged a man was standing in the alley outside. He had came out of the Cave before the tour had finished and looked a bit shaken. We enquired if he had felt claustrophobic. The chamber was fairly small, particularly when filled to capacity by hit people on the tour. He said no. He had though apparently felt some kind of bad energy present in The Cave, and had had to get out.
We had a brief look in the Royston Cave Shop next door. It was full of the sort of paraphernalia to be found in New Age type shops of the sort that I imagine proliferate in Glastonbury. I had a look at the books, some of which were concerned with the Cave and the Knights Templar. Others were not Royston centric, but included quite a bit of Erich Von Daniken inspired ancient aliens type volumes as well as the typical new age sort of stuff. After leaving the Cave Shop we crossed the road and passed above the original entrance to the cave, marked by a sort of manhole cover immediately outside of Bet Fred, where two punters had come out for a fag break.The contrast between the scenes above and below ground were stark. Back on the surface, the intrigue of the Cave was quickly replaced by the dull and ordinary scene of a betting shop exterior. The boundary between old and new Royston was a thin one, between the road surface and the chamber of the Cave
One thing I didn't see in the Cave Shop shop or hear anything about on the tour was the assertion that Royston sits at the heart of the 13th sign of the British Zodiac. I stumbled across a short paper explaining this on the internet after I got home. First I was stuck by the impressive green and purple cartographic image, which had at its centre High Cross, where Watling Street and Fosse Way intersect near Leicester. Royston is depicted directly South East, apparently at the heart of Ophiuchus, the constellation marking the 13th Sign. The sign apparently 'signifies a new cycle of time and initiation at a higher evolutionary level than before'. The paper manages to bring together the Round Table, King Arthur and the Grail, The Knights Templar, the aforementioned Michael and Mary Ley Lines and Roisia's Cross, with the Royston Cave at the centre of all this. It goes on to suggest that Royston was the place of origin for the Hot Cross bun custom and ties this back to St. George, The Red Cross (Roisias Cross) and the Cave as a place of rebirth.
I first assumed the paper had been deposited online as a prank and assumed it was something that had been written in the spirit of the London Psychogeographical Association, Luther Blissett or the Church of The Subgenius. But a further look at the Francis Bacon Research Institute website made me doubt my initial assumptions and it seemed to be an entirely serious organisation. I was though still sceptical about the hot cross buns and it turned out rightly so as they were invented by Brother Thomas Rocliffe in St Albans Abbey, at least according to other bits of the internet. St Albans is still in Hertfordshire and not that far away from Royston, so I guess they were not too far off the mark. Although St Alban's appears peripheral to the 13th sign of the zodiac at best.
Before we departed the crossroads, I noticed that there was now no ogre guarding the Royce Stone, so I went for closer look. It was set on a fairly recent looking stone platform, with an engraving encircling it that gave a brief explanation of the object. That it was situated in an otherwise unremarkable setting, a street science typical of any nearby Hertfordshire commuter town, enhanced the significance of the object. The stone, which if the stories of Roisia's Cross are true, predates the town and was a catalyst for its development around the crossroads at the intersection of ancient tracks, (possibly) the Ley Lines and to the West the Greenwich Meridian.
Adding a further layer of intrigue was the appearance of 'Nigel' on a bin next to the stone. The tag is (as far as I know) native to Cambridge. Nigel's appearance in Royston mirrored Archers and our own. A day away in the peripheral zone of Royston, an escape to a sort of non-place away where one could dissapear temporarily. It was clearer now why Smoke and Mirrors described the town as having had the power removed. The townscape surrounding the cave felt like a place that was less alive than it might once have been. A place where much passes through but little stays. I had read that the original Meridian Marker in the west of the town had been stolen in 2007 and had to be replaced. The nearby Meridian school closed down following conversion into an academy and subsequent merger with two other schools. The town appeared to be in a state of downsizing to the point of being somewhere mostly used just to pass through, as it was before it properly existed. I surmised that the departure of the Royston Crow in 1985 had probably heralded a reversion whereby the town became peripheral in every sense to the crossroads at its centre. The cross roads once again becoming became the only focal point, a place of passing through, channelling travellers in and out without encouraging them to stop. Ironically, the resulting subdued atmosphere of the town was something I had enjoyed, it had made a nice change. We had come with the purpose of not just passing through, which felt like a disruption of what the town really wanted us to do. Although we did not feel unwelcome, but not really welcome. Just left alone. A day in the town was like the equivalent of a lengthy sit on a park bench in the middle of a long walk. A welcome and peaceful respite from the horrors of the modern world in a place neither salubrious or horrific, but one semi-sonambulant. Somewhere in between things.
Footnote:
The Royston Cave website contains much information about the Cave and the various theories connected to it.
https://www.roystoncave.co.uk/
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