In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.
Rather than a trigger from far away, this was brought by an actual revisit, though the air smelled much the same. The stone stile, like two gravestones wrenched out from the nearby churchyard and put one on top the other, leads into a lane of about 1/4 mile, where it ends in another stile much the same. At the other end was, and is, pretty much opposite, a 16th century farmhouse set facing a tussocky and brackeny common. Listening recently to Alasdair Roberts' version of Long Lankin it was this house I saw.
At this end of the lane, though, there is no farmhouse; and what was once the end of the city, as I remember it, now has added on a small 'development' - a part of which I have glued, slightly out of its true place, but not much, to the side. These are cream cubes, rather than Orwell's red.
The lane itself, though, with its bare bramble stems, is still a passage out of all time, strangely silent on a wintery afternoon, leading to the manor and the false nurse. Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned, and leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in. Oh, the doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned, save one little window where Long Lankin crept in.
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