part0026

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936), scholar, antiquarian, and provost of Eton College, is widely recognised as the author of some of the finest ghost stories in English. His work is often concerned with mysteries from the past which intrude, sometimes brutally, into the present. In ‘The Ash-Tree’ (1904), for example—his most famous arboreal tale—two unexplained deaths fifty years apart in a Suffolk country house are found to be the result of witch trials in the late seventeenth century. As a witch is prepared for execution in 1690, she declares in a “poysonous rage” that “There will be guests at the hall”. What these ominous but seemingly nonsensical last words portend finally becomes clear when a nest of monstrous creatures is discovered in a hollow ash growing close by the house. James here touches on a longstanding imaginative sense that as trees root down into the earth, they connect with the secrets of the past and so contain the key to other worlds.

‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ is one of James’s later stories, first published in The Eton College Chronicle , the school’s magazine, in 1924. It contains many of James’s signature elements, beginning in a country-house library where the discovery of a fragment of verse leads to a terrifying experience in the grounds. At times the narrative is complex as James weaves together voices and reaches into the deep history of the estate. At the story’s centre is Betton Wood, a fictional location in the south of England. As it happens, there is a wood of this name in Shropshire, but the connection appears to be coincidental. Like ‘The Ash-Tree’, ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ is a tale of how a tree or wood can come to harbour supernatural entities or energies. As the story excavates the past of Betton Wood, James illustrates how economic questions of landownership might become part of the spirit of the land.