mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Something stirred in the blackness, and then, to his intense horror, a hand emerged—a clean right hand in a neat cuff and coatsleeve, just in the attitude of a hand that means to shake yours. He wondered whether it would not be rude to let it alone. But, as he looked at it, it began to grow hairy and dirty and thin, and also to change its pose and stretch out as if to take hold of his leg. At that he dropped all thought of politeness, decided to run, screamed and woke himself up." - MR James, "A View From a Hill", from A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories (1925)
MR James understood that the path to our ancestral past lies through the eyes of the dead. A View From a Hill is a metaphor for our neverending excavation through the sensations of those who recorded them for posterity. A young archaeologist acquires a pair of binoculars - once the possessions of an occultist who died in mysterious circumstances on the ominously-named Gibbet Hill. When he looks at the English landscape through it, he sees through the lost years and into the past - a direct eyewitness experience of the lives and deaths of people centuries gone. Because the occultist filled the barrells of the binoculars with a clear fluid made from boiling the bones of men who'd been left hanging in the gibbet to "get pecked at by the birds" all those years ago - a sort of time-traversing potion concocted from the earth itself.
"In looking through the field-glasses, Fanshawe was “looking through dead men’s eyes”, and summoning violent pasts into visible being. Prospect was a form of retrospect; Baxter’s macabre optics revealed the skull beneath the skin of the English countryside." - Robert Macfarlane, The eeriness of the English countryside
But can we observe and remain safely distant and aloof from the perils of the degradations that have seeped into the soil? England is an ancient place - barely a square inch hasn't been steeped in blood at some point - be it ancient crime or rough justice, clattering medieval bloodbath, or prehistoric pagan ritual. And so more than Fanshawe's sight is transported back. When he ventures onto Gibbet Hill, part of his being is now on the hill upon which these nameless, forgotten bandits committed their crimes, those who ended up in the cage - or maybe this is evil that goes back further in time. But the gate has been opened. Once you understand the true depths of man's wilful embrace of death, the sheen of civilisation will remain forever tarnished.