A winter’s day in a remote graveyard in Suffolk. On the north side of the church — the dark side, the cold side — we find a dense grove of old yew trees, and a hidden grave.
Matthew takes something out of the earth, an old bone. ‘A rabbit?’ I suggest. He shakes his head. It’s a human finger bone.
Respectfully we place the fragment back exactly where it was left and we return to south side church. The yews trees are visible behind us.
Fact and fiction: St Peter’s in Great Livermere. Montague Rhodes James called it the “remote and sleeping” village home
For we are in the churchyard of St Peter’s at Great Livermere, the village that England’s greatest ghost-story writer, Montague Rhodes James, called home, and where his father was rector. The Ash-Tree was one of James’s scariest stories. This is where he spent his childhood, along with a frightening witch named Mothersole.
We have just discovered the name of the grave under the yews. Mothersole.
Matthew, a Suffolk native, explained that the county was rich in haunted country house, frequently inhabited by same families over generations. A nearby church has bells which can be heard through the mist.
This landscape was what inspired James. He lived a quiet life, 1862-1936, as a Cambridge gentleman, reading medieval manuscripts and writing his chilling stories late at night.
The BBC has adapted The Mezzotint, one of M. R. James’s classic ghost stories. Pictured from the left are the cast of the BBC adaptation, with Rory Kinnear (playing Edward Williams), Nikesh Patel (Nisbet), and Robert Bathurst (Garwood)
Rory Kinnear stars in the BBC adaptation of James’s spooky tale – A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint – which will air on Christmas Eve
James claimed once that he had seen a ghost at Oldbroom Plantation. Photo courtesy Creative Commons. On the right is a photograph of James, who Christopher describes as ‘England’s greatest ghost-story writer’
Christopher wrote, “We ate lunch at Felixstowe Ferry (pictured), a fishing port where the River Deben curvates out into North Sea, creating treacherous sandbars across the mouth.
These stories often included academics such as James, who were often involved in the discovery of ancient artifacts or texts and then finding something horrible. James — whose story The Mezzotint has been adapted by the BBC and will be shown on Christmas Eve — would then read his tales to friends in his rooms in King’s College, Cambridge, by candlelight.
Great Livermere, a remote village in the middle of nowhere is our first stop on the M. R. James winter pilgrimage. The village is located on the border of the mysterious country known as the Brecklands. It’s a sparsely populated grassland, rich in trees and thickets. In his story A Vignette, James records the only time he saw a real ghost — ‘the eyes were large and open and fixed . . . a glamour of madness about it’ — on the edge of the woodland here called Oldbroom Plantation, which stands to this day.
From here it’s a rambling drive east across the county to the coast north of Felixstowe. James used the Bath Hotel as his home. The little fishing port Felixstowe Ferry is where you can have lunch. This is the point at which the River Deben curves into the North Sea and creates a dangerous sandbar that runs across the estuary.
Christopher makes his last stop in Aldeburgh. James was fondly attached to the Aldeburgh area, he says.
The centre of Aldeburgh. Christopher claims that James wrote the story A Warning to The Curious while he was in Aldeburgh.
Christopher stays in Bury St Edmunds’s The Angel Hotel (pictured).
Rooms at The Angel Hotel, pictured, start at £69 pp. Visit www.theangel.co.uk for more information
The river is full of small boats, with halyards clacking in the wind, and gulls waiting to strike.
This is the coastal landscape of one of James’s most terrifying tales, Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad, complete with golf course, just as he described it (he hated golf).
Take a walk along this atmospherically desolate coast, or inland over Falkenham Marshes, and you can understand James’s fascination.
Aldeburgh was James’s favorite place. His haunted imagination prompted him to create the story A Warning To The Curious. It featured the evil figure of William Ager.
It is believed that he lives in the north, in an isolated cottage situated on the heath.
Not all the great writers of the haunted and strange evoke specific locales, but when they do — Dickens’s Kentish marshes, Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor — the effect can be spine-tingling.
James’s Suffolk is just such a landscape, a perfect destination for exploring on a bleak winter’s day.
There is a ghost of the old Cambridge who wanders everywhere there’s an old farmhouse, dark forest, abandoned heathland, remote medieval church or old country home.
In Aldeburgh, Christopher stayed at the White Lion Hotel, pictured, where rooms cost from £78 pp