The Folksworth Walk 20 April 2023: questioning the origins of civilisation

Photos by Chris Wilson and Tony Attwood

Text by Sir Hardly Anyone

This is a walk from which images will stay forever in my mind.   I mean, what are we to make of this work of art pictured left?   Indeed what are we to call it, if we are to call it anything at all?

I mean, Folksworth was listed as Folchesworde in the Domesday Book so it has been around for a jolly long time.  Is this heart a symbol of its longishness?

And ggain what are we to make of this cabin type structure bearing the word “Footpath” with an arrow.  Is it a refuge, or a habitation, or a memory of a race of carvers who were walking to the ancient village of Foote Pah, as again noted in the Domesday book (although some say that is quilling error)? Or what should we make of the gentleman on the left whose shirt appears to match the design of the wagon?  Or indeed the sign concerning Equus africanus asinus or donkey if you prefer.   Was this left as a note for future generations, in the era before dogs existed?  A sort of warning of what was to come?

Now we do know that Folksworth was a strange and unusual land in these  days although the Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place save that it records there were 22 households at Folksworth.

However, this is indeed a strangely strange and also mysterious land from days of yore where the Ancients left odd pathways allegedly to aid the landing of spaceships from alien worlds whose crew planted the seeds of what it was hoped might be intelligent life later (although clearly a project that failed if one looks at the state of the world around us).

From whence did these symbolic structures come, and indeed what do they symbolise if not the very essence of pre-humanity? And then we have the clock tower – built on a stable block.   Clearly the aliens who inhabited this part of the planet had bred horses that could read the time.  Given that a substantial number of employees with whom I have dealt across the years have failed to master this art (at least in terms of when work starts and finishes) they were indeed a superior race, and one of which we should learn much more, I believe.

For what would we do in our sorry state of now-ness if these beings with their intelligent horses returned?

But herein there was much beauty too, all clearly built by the race that long preceded humankind and yet from which we have inherited so much in terms of what we appreciate in the art and the design of the landscape.

And oh how the Domesday Book writers were craftily misled by these early invaders of Cambridgeshire, who jokingly convinced the tax collectors that there were only eight ploughlands at Folksworth in 1086.

Then in addition to the arable land, there were told there was 20 acres of meadows and 369 acres of woodland at Folksworth.  And yet amidst this all no mention can be found at all of the builders’ spaceships!!!

How, forsooth, could this not be?  How could the historians be so blind as to not see what there was to see which could be seen by others who foresaw what there was to be seen even though they were not anywhere near the sea.

For here indeed there is a land of beauty and colour, mixed with the quaint traces of ancient signage, a remnant of a kingdom long since gone – a kingdom that has remained undescribed until the brave Ramblers of Peterborough have ventured forth, to record what was left of the ancient alien civilisation that was once before.

Whence went these ancients?   Some suggest they returned to the skies back to the planets from which they came, while others suggest Rutland.   We shall of course never know.