Bier-Balk and Corpse-Gate

 One of the traditions during my countdown to Halloween is the reading of  Edith Nesbit's Man-Size in Marble, a ghost story set on Halloween night. Since I first read it in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories back in 2006 (I know, a long time ago), I have been fascinated by it. Now, I have at least four books with the story in it, most of them anthologies. And I have also been reading a good deal of critical analysis of the story. Recently, I watched its adaptation on BBC, stupidly retitled Woman of Stone, which was absolutely rubbish (no but seriously, it was bad and they just didn't get it). But I digress. From Man-Size in Marble, I also learned two terms that should be in the vocabulary of every fan of Halloween and Gothic horror: bier-balk and corpse-gate. A bier-balk or bierbalk is a path across a road to a church, sometimes across a field, taken by the funeral march. A corpse-gate, or lychgate (which is a way cooler and sinister sounding term) is the roof under which you put a corpse before the arrival of the clergyman. I often see lychgates near churches here in England. I will see them in a different light from now on, and will try to find bierbalks nearby too. And I hope one day to visit in a sort of Halloween pilgrimage the village of Brenzett, which inspired Edith Nesbit to write this most excellent ghost story and where the real ghostly statues are. Be that as it may, bier-balk and corpse-gate are your words of the day.

Brenzett (a ghostly pilgrimage)

As you probably know, if you read this blog for long enough, I love the stories of E. Nesbit, especially her ghost stories, and most of all Man-Size in Marble, one of the very first horror stories ever set on Halloween. It is the perfect scary story for the spooky season. Well, I discovered last year, during the official countdown to Halloween, that the village of Brenzett was not invented by Nesbit, but really exists, in Kent. So it's now on my list of places to visit in the UK. From the pictures Ihave seen, it looks beautifully eerie. I will blog again about the story in the following weeks (well of course), but until then, if some of my readers have visited Brenzett, or even live there (you never know), please let me know in the comments.