the boundary stone - 04/16/26

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Outside the parish of Eyam is a stone with six small holes in the top. It’s said that, there, on the hills that overlook the valley below, a quarantined village made careful trade with its neighbor, Stony Middleton, during a time when the Bubonic plague cast its long shadow over the region.

 

Charlotte and I had been driving around the Peak District for two days exploring its winding roads and riverside book shops, eating cherry tarts before parking her subcompact at a church, and walking past the scattering of memorial plaques mounted on houses. To the left of the footpath was a ruin of an old stone cottage, a pair of sheep, and a fallen oak tree.

 

That afternoon, we joked a lot and I playfully hopped over the boundary stone in a leapfrog gesture while imagining the invisible barrier between the segregated villages. Below, on the Middleton side, was a short and shrubby Hawthorne bush sticking out, alone, from the grazed grass.

 

We talked about the vinegar that would have filled the stone’s holes in order to cleanse purchasing coins for trade from the contact of disease. The stone was a tool and it became a meeting place between these disconnected villages, who, for better or worse, remained committed to each other’s survival.

On our way out, I crawled under an electric fence between the stone and the fallen oak, looking for a place to relieve myself after a day's worth of tea-drinking. When I resurfaced, I was surprised to find a pairing of sheep at my back. The same pair that had watched us from a distance across the field had come down the hill in tandem and quietly followed me under the fence.