Can you hear the knights breathing? Invisible heritage and the magic of Alderley Edge

This chapter draws on ongoing research undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded Invisible Worlds project (2020–23) to discuss the distinctive qualities of Alderley Edge as a site of literary pilgrimage. A location rich in legend, Alderley Edge is a red sandstone escarpment above a network of mines, actively mined for copper between the Bronze Age and the nineteenth century. Since the early nineteenth century, the site has featured in literary publications retelling an account of a legend found in various forms across Europe: of the sleeping hero and his army of knights, located beneath the hill, to awaken at a time of national crisis. This narrative found further, and it seems renewed, popularity in the twentieth century in the novels of Alan Garner, whose work forms the primary cornerstone of both local and international understandings of the Edge and its legend, and through which much of the site’s significance has been popularly mediated. The narrative of Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen might be, and indeed has been, mapped by various readers – both academic and hobbyists – onto the Edge, and has inspired a wealth of contemporary oral folklore, much of which is indebted to Garner, although independent local responses to the legend have appeared in oral histories shared with the Invisible Worlds project, and the earlier Alderley Edge Landscape Project (completed 2006). Strikingly, a number of these draw on tropes found in modern fantasy beyond Garner, most notably C.S. Lewis, an allusion seemingly echoed in the built features of the Edge itself (a distinctive lamp post outside the Wizard pub, itself a name rich in legendary resonance). This chapter asks questions of belonging and placemaking: how literary form interacts with the ownership of legend and by extension of place, whether we are thinking about the author or his readers. It explores the vexed question of authenticity and knowledge making, and the complex relationship.