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Paul Screeton – Quicksilver heritage

'It was found that someone's aunt had one day been sitting in a train when she looked up and saw what was obviously a little gnome, sitting on the railway embankment, pulling a flower to pieces. He looked up, gave her a wry disinterested glance and returned to his flower.'- Betty Wood.

The road into Carlisle from the massive marshalling yard at Kingmoor is narrow, and while walking down it towards the overgrown tump by an old empty mansion house, I had to step on to the verge as a car approached. Continuing walking through the grass that sunny afternoon I stepped on to a stone.

I halted, looked down, and it glistened. It was quartz: it had been worked into a convex shape and was deeply embedded. I touched it for about half a minute and then walked a couple of paces. Then I saw something move a yard or so in front of me. The thing leapt like a frog and was frog-shaped, but about three feet high. It was brown but its form was hazy, difficult to describe, but the effect was not dissimilar to a television screen when the lines go crazy. I had the impression that what I had seen was an elemental and that I perceived it at the edge of my consciousness.

It was an earth gnome, described by Geoffrey Hodson as lanky, sometimes solitary, and disproportionate to our senses. He regarded them as relics of Lemurian days and possibly representations of such times.

In England they are always black or, as I saw, peat brown, but he, unlike me, found their atmosphere decidedly unpleasant. I never expected to see an elemental, though I was perfectly willing to believe in their existence. Two aspects of my experience are worthy of consideration, that is if my testimony is to be believed and that I did not have an hallucination. One is the fact that the experience took place on a ley; the second is the possibility that the quartz itself was instrumental somehow in bringing about the sighting, i.e. raising my consciousness while I touched it.