KINGLEY VALE

 

 

A striking site reputed haunted as a result of 'battles long ago' is Kingley Vale, north-west of Chichester. Here a narrow coombe is filled from end to end by a magnificent grove of sombre yews, some exceedingly old, while above, on the crest of Bow Hill, stand four large Bronze Age barrows called either The Kings' Graves or The Devil's Humps.

 

These kings, so the tale goes, were leaders of a Viking warband wiped out by the men of Chichester - a battle between men from Chichester and marauding Danes is in fact recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 894.

 

The Vikings, or at any rate their leaders, are said to lie in the barrows, and the grove of yews to be descended from trees planted to mark the battlefield. Indeed, many versions of the story prefer to ignore the barrows on the hill, and say that the Danes lie where they fell, under the roots of the yews, and that their ferocious ghosts haunt the dark and silent wood.

 

Others, while agreeing that the wood is haunted, say that its ghosts are those of Druids, and that somewhere, amid all the yews, there stands a single sacrificial oak. And there are yet others who add that in the night the trees themselves can come alive, and move and change their shapes.

 

 

 

 

 

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