IT COSTS £3 to visit the gateway to hell. Midsummer and I’m somewhere on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, staring down the black gullet of a cave that forms part of Creswell Crags. My five-­year-­old son’s fingers are clammy, pressed against my palm.

The tour guide is talking about the cave network that runs deeply into the side of the gorge.

Behind her, the lake is so still that the surrounding trees are perfectly mirrored. The area surrounding Creswell Crags is otherwise banal – wide stretches of grass, picnic tables and winding walking paths. Further, there are farms, dirt roads and sheep that had not bothered to look up from grazing as we passed by in our hire car.

I try hard to keep my gaze on the guide, but it keeps being drawn back to the nearest cave mouth. There are several here, overlooking the lake. Mother Grundy’s Parlour, Robin Hood’s Cave, Pin Hole, Church Hole. I repeat the names to myself, looping them like the chorus of a song, embarrassed that my son is listening more patiently to the guide than I am.

WE’RE IN CRESWELL to see the anti-­witch marks. Known more formally as apotropaic marks, they are shapes, symbols and letters carved into caverns and stables and homes and churches. It is widely accepted that they were believed to protect against not only witches but anything supernatural and nefarious. The marks date most often from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, coinciding with the height of the witch-­hunts that saw thousands of people, mostly women, executed throughout Europe.

Apotropaic marks consist of curving lines known as daisy wheels and hexafoils. Their mechanism of protection works to trap demons in the stone by tricking them into following the lines, around and around, for eternity. Sometimes they are Marian symbols, made up of ‘M’ or ‘V’ or ‘A’, to invoke the Virgin Mary. Other apotropaic marks are even more basic. They can be in the form of a burn mark to prevent a fire taking hold. They can be found above the stall of a prized horse, in cellars, on lintels, mantels, doorways, windows.

Apotropaic marks are a sort of magic that lingers. Entwined so closely with domestic spaces, they are frequently overlooked.

Until recently, the marks choking the limestone walls of these caverns were thought to be nineteenth-­century graffiti. Perhaps the work of a young boy, sneaking into the caves on a cold and drizzly day, a lantern in one hand, something metal and sharp in the other.

In 2018, Hayley Clark and Ed Waters from Subterranea Britannica – a group dedicated to the investigation of underground places made and used by humans – were on a tour of the caves and recognised the markings as apotropaic. In fact, the dense web of them in the caves of Creswell Crags number in the thousands, the largest collection of its kind ever found in the United Kingdom.

The most densely covered cavern is the one I most urgently want to see. There is a theory that the people who left the marks here believed that this specific cavern was the literal route into hell – for what other threat would they have required so much protection against?

THE CAVES DELIGHT my little boy. They smell of damp animal hide and old, old stone. He’s wearing a bright-­yellow helmet. There is the dizzying possibility of bats. The cave walls are unsteady in the glow of half-­a-­dozen head torches as we move deeper in. We climb up steps towards the apotropaic marks. I hit my head. Even with my helmet on, my eyes water. The world shivers as though lit by firelight.

My vision clears and I see them.

‘There you are,’ I murmur. In the flickering light, they seem like things alive and animal, only ever to be understood in glimpses, and always from the outside.

An individual apotropaic mark doesn’t look like much. En masse, the effect is unnerving. It feels a little like being in a crowd of people all running from a threat while you stand still and watch.

The wall, these markings: close enough to touch. I am here, I think – and it feels like the last weary steps of a pilgrimage.

I have been drawn to these markings from the other side of the world. I first read about these caves back in 2019, while I was researching my novel, Salt and Skin, and working on my doctorate – both of which drew on the history of witches and the witch-­hunts in the UK. Lockdowns mean that I have not made it to the caves until 2023, well after the novel was published, but it almost renders the experience of being here, now, more precious. The markings have haunted me, have felt real in the precise, dreamlike and intensely private way that is, perhaps, specific to novelists.

In the caves the long dead feel close. They remain unknowable. What had they been so afraid of?

Standing in front of the limestone cave walls, I am convinced that reaching out and touching them will bring everything into startling focus. Perhaps I will glimpse what lingers in the gaps between what is known about these marks. Perhaps time is not made of fabric, but stone; chronology not rent but carved wide open – one ‘M’ or ‘V’ at a time.

My son gazes into the mouth of the next cavern – the one where the walls heave beneath thousands and thousands of apotropaic marks, layered over and over each other.

The gateway to hell. I tug my son a few steps back. He stiffens, in the way of all young things drawn away from the dark or jagged or deep or fast. He leans against me, helmet bumping against my hipbone. ‘Mum,’ he says, and points at everything, at nothing in particular. He’s still watching for bats. There is green marker across his palm, pink polish on his fingernails. In the unsteady light, it all looks grey. 

He’s like a stone himself, solidly pressed against my side like this. I right his helmet. ‘Careful,’ I say. An invocation. Metal against stone.

I do understand. For what unifies humans more than the desire to preserve what we love?

WHEN I WAS eleven, I was given a book called Spells for Teenage Witches. I was still religious back then – attending services at the local church, part of the youth group there. The book was a novelty. Still, the ritual of the spells themselves felt familiar.

I was, after all, used to prayer. 

I took the book to school with me, folding down the corners of pages to mark the spells I wanted to try. It was an innocuous thing – bursting with positivity and offering remedies for issues such as dull hair and school bullies. It energised me, the materiality of the spells alongside a self-­deterministic element that I had not realised I’d been craving – something I’d never gotten from prayer. And I had prayed – in the way of countless other children, yearning for an end to the confusion and pain wrought by so many of the adults in my life. Their struggles and fury and misery had too frequently spilled over and become my own. It’s no wonder the spell book was appealing.

One day after school, I was at my friend’s place when her mother saw the book. Her whole body stiffened and, for the first time, I felt like a bad influence on someone’s child. ‘You shouldn’t be reading that,’ she told me. ‘It’s dark stuff. You shouldn’t be messing with it.’ She glanced at her daughter. Unspoken: You are not to touch that book.

I felt less certain about the book after that. Although I was beginning to be wary of adults, I still clung to the idea that they knew things I did not. Mostly, I felt caught between my desire to keep using the spell book and my terror that I would end up judged because of it. Fear won out, as it often does at that age.  

I also still viewed the world in dichotomous terms: a constant clash between the forces of good and evil. I may have begun to develop a wariness of adults, but I was warier still of darkness and hell.

Yet reading that spell book was the first time I’d ever felt empowered. The sense of self-­determinism that had been woven through it was impossible for me to let go of.

And I had been told that this was a dark and dangerous thing.

WEEKS AFTER SEEING the gateway to hell, I return to Orkney for the first time since 2017. Orkney, an archipelago off the north coast of mainland Scotland, has a long history of apotropaic marks. Salt and Skin had been inspired by my last visit, and by what I’d learnt of the witch trials that had brutally unfolded there. Now, I am back on the islands to give a talk. To revisit the sites that I’ve dreamt of over the last six years.

It is science week, and St Magnus Cathedral in the Orkney capital of Kirkwall has a giant sun installed at its centre. The sun changes colour, casting strange, ethereal light over the pews and columns. The Paplay Tomb, from the fourteenth century, is set into the stone wall along the southern aisle of the cathedral. The light of the science week sun does not reach it. I want to see the Witch’s Rose, an apotropaic mark carved above the tomb, but can’t spot it in the gloomy corner of the cathedral. My novel was inspired by this cathedral, and seeing the markings here feels like a vital sort of closure. Touching, breathing, seeing. Being present in a place that, for so long, I have only been able to inhabit through imagining.

Eventually I go in search of Fran, the custodian of St Magnus, to see if she might be able to help me find the Witch’s Rose. ‘Do you have your phone on you?’ she asks.

She walks with me back to the Paplay Tomb. She turns the phone torch on and holds it up at an angle to the wall. A pattern emerges from the stone like a ghost. The Witch’s Rose is smaller than the palm of my hand. It’s a hexafoil – curving lines inside a circle, making up the shape of a flower. In its lovely, symmetrical face is an echo of self-­determinism, of turning to the material world to protect what was loved from what was feared.

There are other signs of this desire for protection here, too. Sections of St Magnus Cathedral have been scraped away by the fingernails of pilgrims keen for absolution or healing. Those who believed in the power of swallowing down those flakes of holy stone. You can still see the marks on pillars and walls.

In the south transept, further along from the Paplay Tomb, there’s a hole high up in the wall, large enough for a person to clamber through. It’s a cell that opens out into the body of the kirk. It’s known as Marwick’s Hole, where those accused of witchcraft were incarcerated. The floor of the cell is shaped like the base of a champagne bottle, so that those imprisoned within could never be comfortable enough to rest. Perhaps they had yearned for the material things that had long kept them safe: stones, crucifixes, marks in stone, dead babies or animal skulls buried under the flagstones of their homes.

The Witch’s Rose is a physical manifestation of a person’s desire for protection. The dungeon was perhaps once viewed in the same way – a just punishment for those who worshipped the devil, trapping them inside the stone walls of the cathedral in much the same way that dark spirits were thought to be trapped inside the curving patterns of a hexafoil. Still, for those incarcerated inside and for those who loved them, Marwick’s Hole was a manifestation of what happened when those protections failed.

I turn off the phone torch and the Witch’s Rose vanishes back into stone.

APOTROPAIC MAGIC IS tied up with the history of the early modern witch-­hunts, yet it tangles in places, and ruptures. Patterns and gaps from which we have inferred meaning. Apotropaic marks were made against witches, but they were also made by them. The meanings of the terms ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ are fluid and have shifted many times over the past 1,000 years. The witch trials across Scotland and England happened against the backdrop of the Reformation, which gathered steam throughout the sixteenth century, resulting in a top-­down shift away from the Catholic Church in favour of Protestantism (the Calvinist branch of which was particularly ­significant). Certayne sermons, or homelies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie, published in England in 1547, provides an example of the sort of antagonism being directed towards Catholic practices in the period preceding the most intense witch-­hunts. The preface of the text laments the damage wrought by ‘the false usurped power of the Bishop of Rome’ alongside the ‘ungodly doctrine of his adherents’. Many of the Catholic practices or ‘popish superstitions’ most ground in materiality – such as those related to relics and the use of holy sacraments – were particularly condemned by those in power and, during certain periods, outlawed and actively destroyed. A homily against idolatry rails against ‘beades’, incense, imagery of religious figures, and quite cuttingly notes the impossible number of relics in circulation: ‘one Saint had many heads, one in one place, and another in another place. Some had sixe armes, and xxvi fingers’ and, more bitingly still, that in the absence of a first-­degree relic, adherents to Catholicism ‘would offer you a horse bone, in stead of a virgins arme, or the taile of the Asse to bee kissed’.

Alongside this condemnation of materiality in religious practice, the nature of prayer itself changed. The Calvinists emphasised personal faith as a way of securing salvation, rather than the Catholic notion that the prayers and practices of the living could influence the salvation of the dead. God was now viewed as having predetermined who was destined for salvation and who was destined for purgatory and for hell. As historian Helen Frisby notes, praying for the dead was now considered pointless – and potentially blasphemous.

It is not hard to imagine the loss of these practices – their materiality, their pageantry and their individual determinism – being felt acutely. It is also not hard to imagine an element of the performative coming into play; churches pitted against each other, drawing crowds through their doors with promises of drama and bloodshed. It is not hard to imagine the way fear must have permeated. Fear of the dark forces preying on so many neighbours and friends; fear that the Church would be coming next for you or yours.

Perhaps the adoption of such fatalistic approaches to salvation led to a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty. How do you beg God for help when doing so is suddenly seen as sacrilegious – evidence that you do not have faith in His will? Perhaps apotropaic marks felt like a different sort of prayer.

An invocation. Metal against stone.

I DID NOT read my book of spells again, but I took from it the question of intent, and the way that material ritual could be co-­opted into something meaningful.

The question of intent plagues the research being undertaken into protective magic. For instance, does a particular double ‘V’ on a wall constitute a Marian symbol, carved with intent to protect? Or was it left by a long-­dead stonemason, determined to mark the work he’d done? Protective impulses; idleness; practicality. Intent is ephemeral, most often understood through the patterns of what can be gauged in the space around it. Patterns are powerful, and the intentions of the past are frequently inferred with relative confidence from the present. Still, so much remains unknown and will likely never be understood. 

As a teen, I no longer went to church, or prayed. Instead, I began writing snatches of song lyrics and poetry on desks, fences, in the margins of books. Carving them into the plaster of my bedroom wall. The same shapes, over and over. The materiality of the ritual soothed me. It reminded me of my discarded spell book. 

Nobody else knew why I spent so many years compulsively layering the world around me with fragments of other people’s songs. Nobody ever asked. If they had, I’m not sure how I would have answered. Not then.

Jeff Buckley, Oscar Wilde and Nirvana, over and over. Invocations, marking plaster and paper, for everything I didn’t yet have my own words for. 

THERE ARE PATTERNS, but few definitives when you look back at the history of witchcraft and the witch trials across the UK. It skews towards women, but men were also accused. It skews towards the poor and illiterate, but the educated and wealthy were also accused. Some witches cultivated a reputation for magic wielding as a means to make a living. Others would not have known that rumours were circulating until the day they were hauled away by the authorities for questioning. Witches helped their communities; witches preyed on their communities. Witches ate babies and sacrificed them to the devil; witches brought babies safely into the world and eased them when they were ill. What remains largely steady is the physicality of the acts witches were so often accused of, a way of recasting desire – for survival, sustenance, protection – into material reality. Exploring the folk-­healing aspects of witchcraft in Scotland, Joyce Miller notes the frequent use of water, metal, animals, shoes, clothing, herbs, salt, eggs, wood and thread.

Essayist Kathryn Nuernberger reflects that the history of witches is a history of need. In 1634, Orcadian Jonet Reid was accused of drying corn for the devil. In the trial records compiled in 1837 by James Maitland, this act was described as being ‘done by your witchcraft and devilry and this you offered in and sacrificed to the devil your master’ – an accusation that speaks of desperation and scarcity. For all its murkiness, its mosaic of exceptions and deviations, it’s staggering how often the history of the witch trials intersects with poverty, illness, injury and hunger. Unfair hands dealt without discernible cause or meaning. The dangers and darkness of the world attributed to dark spirits and spells and demons. Solved with water, stone, earth. The yearning to find a way of protecting what we most love from what we most fear.

Magical thinking – the assumption of causation between events without any plausible proof – is a bringing together of the ephemeral and material, or even a tangling of the mundane and the divine, grasping for what is most closely at hand to perhaps bring about the miraculous. In The Year of Magical Thinking,Joan Didion wrote about the death of her husband and the disconnect between what she knew (that her husband would not be back) and what she felt (that he would, for instance, still require his shoes). If you make the bed, the person will come home. If you scrape that apotropaic mark into a limestone wall, the devil will remain in hell. You pray for recovery and are well again. You see a woman mutter near your field and then your best cow dies. Our ability to connect two disparate things remains infinite. We want, so badly, to believe we have the potential to preserve all that we love. We view the world through the prism of our own belief system – othering what does not fit, and then attributing to it the characteristics of the implausible or the fantastical.

Still in the gaps; still unspoken. Metal against stone; prayers and rosary beads. Song lyrics written over and over. The material and the ephemeral: turning to one in order to resolve the other. I wonder what really separates the sort of magic that could get you executed from the sort that was meant to keep you safe.

PERHAPS THE SAME impulse that had people eating flakes of sandstone or carving the shape of a ‘V’ into limestone caves is what has me walking out the front doors of St Magnus and taking an uphill route to a small stretch of grass on Clay Loan that is known as Gallow Ha. This is the place where those convicted of witchcraft were executed in Orkney. Dragged from Marwick’s Hole to the dock and then made to walk up the hill to the execution site. They were hanged there, bodies then cut down and burnt to prevent them rising from the grave. The exact number of accusations and executions remain unknown.

There is now a memorial at Gallow Ha, in the shape of a sundial, to those accused. It was not there the first time I visited in 2017 in the months before I became pregnant with my son. The patch of grass was unremarkable, in the middle of a bustling suburban street. People unloading Tesco bags from the backs of their cars, children riding bikes, dogs straining on leads. The memorial is something material, saying without words that they were here.

There is something vital about the materiality of stone. Marked with Marian symbols; eaten; fashioned into a sundial.

They were here.

It’s less than half a mile from St Magnus to Gallow Ha, depending on whether you take the shorter route up Buttquoy Crescent or the main roads of Palace and Victoria.

A walk that would have felt too long, too short. I’ve never been so aware of the burn in my calf muscles, the feel of my lungs. Each breath. Over and over again. I imagine limestone caked under my fingernails. Down my throat.

WE STILL SEEK comfort by falling back to the familiar, habits bound up in faith, religion, superstition, magical thinking and a yearning to preserve what we love.

There is something compelling about the physicality of apotropaic marks. Something of the awareness that people have been here that breaks down chronology and defies temporality – taking us beyond ourselves and into a place that is both material and wordless. 

Stepping into the dark of the crags and peering into the gateway to hell shifted something inside me. So, too, did the moment when I took my son’s hand and we stepped back outside into the pearly light of the afternoon. Fresh air, still water, green leaves.

With no known written records to give them a precise context, the meaning of the particular marks in the gateway to hell is likely to remain unknown. Still, they are not so different from holding keys like a weapon across a dark car park. They are not so different from rosary beads, or lyrics written over and over on bedroom walls and scrawled into the margins of books. The compulsion to press my fingers to old cave walls. To feel the places where others had once been, the sites of their longing and fears.

An invocation. Metal against stone.

They were here.

Image of Creswell Crags courtesy of Wikipedia Commons