Ghosts at Great Livermere

A story of a Suffolk rectory

M R James' tale 'The Ash Tree' tells the story of Sir Richard Fell who inherits Castringham hall.  The hall and the Fell family are cast with a curse placed upon them by an old Woman who was thereafter condemned for witchcraft during the the era of the East-Anglian witchcraft trials; the focus of the drama being centred upon a solitary Ash tree below a bedroom window of the hall. 

The Ash Tree appeared in the collection Ghost stories of an Antiquary and at it's core, he used his childhood home as an inspiration; James was often to revert back to the Suffolk landscape as a resource in his unsettling ghost stories. Castringham, outside of it's fictional name is actually the rectory of Great Livermere in Suffolk.  James grew-up here, aside from being away with his schooling, his father was rector for the parish.  James did have a paranormal encounter at the Livermere rectory in his youth; something uncomfortably disturbing and not quite tangible.  He had gazed down from a bedroom window to a tree below, and saw something undefined, a form; this entity moved briskly away and disappeared from view.  The experience evidently resonated with James for him to later draw inspiration from it in his later writing.  The ghost writing of M R James is itself similar to that very experience he encountered; the unseen and the not quite tangible.

Thingoe Hill. 

All towns had their places of execution and public speculation, Bury St Edmunds had Thingoe hill.  Just a mile or so to the North/West of the town, it saw the burning of protestant martyrs and also the hanging of alleged witches throughout the 1600s.  The site now is obsured by the railway and latterly, housing and a bypass road.  The famous East-Anglian witchcraft trials of this time would have been in the conscience of M R James when he wrote the Ash Tree in 1904.  The self-declared 'Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins reigned a fear across East Anglia from  his home-place in Essex to the far North Norfolk coast; Bury St Edmunds and it's Assizes court sits comfortably in the midst of this landscape of terror.  Thingoe hill is only a handful of miles from the rectory at Great Livermere. 

St Peter's church, Great Livermere.

St Peter's church at Great Livermere; a timeless deathly quiet landscape that wears it's history as if in another realm.

M R James was an academic Medievalist.  Although he is remembered for his ghost story collections, these writings were mere folly compared with his real life work.  James had a brilliant career, becoming provost of his college (Kings, Cambridge) and latterly provost at Eton.  His fascination with antiquities is evident within his ghost stories; often a similar figure to himself is caught in the supernatural through archaeological or antiquarian explorations.  James was not the only Antiquarian to have been borne of the rectory at Great Livermere, another son of a Livermere rector in the 1700s (Thomas Martin) developed a love of past antiquities whilst growing up there.  A practicing Lawyer and known to be drunk by breakfast, he died in poverty having sold his collections.  Thomas Martin had been a member of the Spalding gentleman's Society and admitted to the Society of Antiquities.  Even further retreated in time was the Kings Falconer (William Sakings) who also derived from Great Livermere.  Sakings served to both Charles I & II and King James; it is easy to understand how influential the history of a small East-Anglian village could inspire a mind like that M R James.

William Sakings, the Kings Falconer.

I lived in Bury St Edmunds for two years and would walk miles upon miles into the Suffolk landscape.  Great Livermere is remembered to me as being somewhere halted in time, a place captured in an aspic of the Medieval.  Livermere is a haunted place be it real or in the psychological quiet drama of it's geographical landscape of vast horizons, broad lakes, crumbling old towers, crows squarking in the distances and the weight of those long dead inhabitants feeling very much present in a clouded reality. 

Memorial to M R James.

Monty Lowe © October 2018
contact: michaeliainlowe@gmail.com

Next blog post:

The Dinham Pommel; all that glitters is Anglo-Saxon.