There’s something special about Hood Hill, I tell my son Lochy as we begin climbing. It’s not just the pleasing symmetry, pointy summit and epic view. Not just that it has intriguing medieval earthworks and weird erratic boulders dumped long ago by wandering glaciers.
It’s more that this hill, and the moor-edge landscape it is part of – including Whitestone Cliff, Lake Gormire, Roulston Scar, various caves, a gap known as the Devil’s Stride and the more recent Kilburn White Horse – seem to spawn stories. We’ve come today on the trail of one recorded by the folklorist Thomas Gill in 1852.
Of a particularly distinctive rock that sits on the Hood Hill summit ridge, known as the Altar Stone, Gill’s local informants told him that it had started out at Roulston, where druids once used it for sacred and grisly rituals. When early Christian missionaries arrived, the story goes, Satan himself showed up, so rageful that when he landed on the stone, his foot seared into it. When he leapt away, the stone went with him, before falling to its modern-day location on Hood Hill.
This story predates the excavation of a huge iron age fortification at Roulston by at least a century, so it’s tempting to imagine that it represents strands of folk memory from pre‑Roman Britain, when this was the territory of the Brigantes, who would indeed have had druids.
But it doesn’t end there. Visit the Altar Stone now and you’ll find nothing but fragments in a deep crater where, on the evening of 21 September 1954, an RAF Sabre F Mk4 plummeted vertically from a clear sky to make a direct hit in which plane, pilot and stone were obliterated. Lochy, ambivalent about my prehistory obsession, is suddenly animated, and speculates enthusiastically on the cause of the crash: “The Sabres were among the first turbojet planes, so there was plenty wrong with them. Bird strikes usually meant game over.”
Like the Brigantes, like the Romans, the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and the British empire, the Sabre jets have had their time here, but somehow the strange magnetism of Hood Hill has gathered them all in, layering them into a story that is as much a part of this riddled summit as its geology.
