Namaste, or: What Keeps Coming Back (in a Slightly Worse Mood) (Part 1)

We were almost at the top when we heard it. Not music exactly, more a pressure system. A low drone with delusions of grandeur, stretching itself between notes like a cat claiming the entire sofa. Sometimes it slid into a whoop (the sonic equivalent of someone waving from across a car park), sometimes it collapsed back into a single breath held too long, as if the air itself had become mildly trapped in a waiting room. It didn’t guide us upward so much as pre-empt us, which is the Tor’s favourite trick. 

The Tor doesn’t wait for you. It gets there first. You don’t so much visit it as walk into an already-busy comment thread. Everything you know about it, pilgrimages, myths, poems half-remembered from school, album covers, the vague sense that if you stand in the right place you might become briefly meaningful, arrives ahead of you and starts loitering. By the time you reach the top you’re already late, and not in a charming way. Late like you’ve missed the beginning of a meeting and everyone has decided you’re “just catching up,” which is an excellent way to be made responsible for a situation you didn’t create. The Tor is an archive pretending to be a view. 

Beneath the tower he stood, thin as an exclamation mark, and standing on a box (which didn’t help). He was dressed in a way that suggested not choice but accumulation. Nothing cancelled anything else out. A crucifix glinted against a black T-shirt marked with Baphomet. Pink camouflage shorts (a small triumph of contradiction). A Native American-style feather headdress reached to his calves; likely an embarrassed peacock that has lost the will to participate. A wedjat eye catching the light when he turned his head, as if to reassure the universe that symbolism was present and accounted for. And the sound. The sound never quite stopped. When it did, it was only to begin again somewhere else, as if it had learnt circular breathing and decided linear time was an optional extra. This is, broadly, how the past works now: not linearly, but all at once. 

He greeted us cheerfully, ‘Namaste’, (if I had a bingo card, I would have shouted ‘House!’) as if we were guests and this was his threshold. The word was lost in the tor; a lid placed on a box before anyone could ask what was inside. I felt my jaw tighten: the reflexive response to something that wants to be laughed at but knows laughter would miss the point, and also that the point, if there was one, has already dissolved into atmosphere. “Namaste” is a wonderful word for this kind of moment. It arrives smiling, it performs warmth, it leaves no fingerprints. It’s a greeting that doubles as a pre-emptive non-disclosure agreement.

The Tor is haunted, but not in the old way. Nothing rattles chains or moans obligingly into the mist. Instead it hums with unresolved questions. Did those feet, did that Lamb, did any of it happen here? The questions survive, but only as shapes. They drift through guidebooks, plaques, jokes overheard halfway up the path, the kind of local lore delivered with the confidence of something learned recently and online. History as a hyperlink: click, scroll, move on. I remembered Blake, as everyone does, though remembering Blake now feels like remembering a chorus rather than a song. And did those feet… The line hangs there, permanently interrogative, permanently defanged. It’s a question that has learned not to insist. 

When you say it here, among snack wrappers and camera phones, it sounds less like prophecy than branding. The Tor is one of those places where the past keeps showing up wearing an ID badge. There’s a particular kind of modern haunting that isn’t spooky so much as administrative. It’s the feeling that something should have resolved by now, and hasn’t, and nobody is admitting it because that would require paperwork. The Tor is full of that.

The ghosts here don’t whisper.

They just keep opening tabs.