Ilkley Moor

Now, friends, if you've ever walked the high moorlands of West Yorkshire, you know that place has an ancient, sullen kind of mood to it.

Up on Ilkley Moor, the wind comes sweeping across the heather with a bite that cuts clean through wool, and the great gritstone boulders, weathered down by thousands of years of rain and frost, they stand like hunched old sentinels guarding secrets long forgotten by Christian folk.

When the heavy sea fog rolls in, turning the hills into a gray shifting soup where you can't see five yards in front of your own boots, that moor becomes a labyrinth where a man can lose his bearings, his sense of time, and very nearly his mind.

Now, back on the 1st of December in 1987, a man named Philip Spencer was heading up onto the moor in the early morning gray.

Oh, no.

He gave his statements, endured the endless rounds of skeptical questions, and then retreated back into a quiet, private life.

But if you talk to those who know the history of Ilkley Moor, they'll tell you that the Yorkshire heather has seen stranger things than men care to admit.

So when the winter fog rolls thick across the rocks and your compass needle starts to spin, you'd best keep your head down and stay to the marked path.

Some of them basically shoved me into the hedge and I ended up with my arm totally scratched.

And I'm just like, well, that wouldn't happen on Ilkley Moor.

I actually think cars are pretty dangerous and I actually don't think road running is that.

I get your point about it.

She's back.

Straight out of the folk song on Ilkley Moor, Bartat, our family vegetable patch really flourished the following year.

Ah.

Meaning that we effectively ended up eating our old neighbour.

More bedtime content, same great format, just more of it.

Early on a cold, foggy morning of the 1st of December 1987, a retired police officer set out to walk across Ilkley Moor, the great expanse of upland heath and rough grazing that rises above the town of Ilkley in West Yorkshire in the north of England.

He was going to visit relatives in a village on the far side of the moor.

He was a careful and methodical man, as you might expect of a former police officer, and he had prepared for the walking properly.

Ilkley Moor is a wild and lonely place, and in the fog of an early winter morning it is easy to lose your way among its heather and its scattered rocks.

So he brought a compass to keep his bearing in the mist.

And because he had heard the local stories of strange lights that were sometimes seen out on the moor, he thought he might catch something worth photographing, so he brought a camera.

Now, as you read normally, let's head back to Yorkshire in the UK and the story of the figure by the quarry.

Now, friends, if you've ever walked the high moorlands of West Yorkshire, you know that place has an ancient, sullen kind of mood to it.

Up on Ilkley Moor, the wind comes sweeping across the heather with a bite that cuts clean through wool.

And the great gritstone boulders, weathered down by thousands of years of rain and frost, they stand like hunched old sentinels guarding secrets long forgotten by Christian folk.

When the heavy sea fog rolls in, turning the hills into a gray shifting soup where you can't see five yards in front of your own boots, that moor becomes a labyrinth where a man can lose his bearings, his sense of time, and very nearly his mind.

Oh, no.

He gave his statements, endured the endless rounds of skeptical questions, and then retreated back into a quiet, private life.

But if you talk to those who know the history of Ilkley Moor, they'll tell you that the Yorkshire heather has seen stranger things than men care to admit.

So when the winter fog rolls thick across the rocks and your compass needle starts to spin, you'd best keep your head down and stay to the marked path.

He had moved from London to remote West Yorkshire with his wife and child in order to be closer to his wife's family following his retirement from the police force.

On the morning of December 1st, 1987, Spencer began walking across Ilkley Moor to visit his father-in-law in East Morton.

He had taken a camera with him as well as a compass in case there was fog.

Okay.

I had no idea that it was used also by the ancient Greeks and the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons.

There's a Bronze Age swastika stone on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire.

But in this particular period of German history, people were like, oh, yeah, swastikas, they're great.

Yeah, it had this real resurgence in the 19th century, kind of as a result of growing European interest in the ancient civilizations of the Near East and India.

Got here, parched, just drowned ourselves in the water from this.

Had something to eat and then decided to walk the full length of Ilkley Moor and we ended up near Doubler Stones.

We thought, we'll go to Doubler and back.

Jesus Christ, did we regret it.