Truth Thomas under the hills
- cherylmurfin
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
By Cheryl Murfin
St. Cuthbert's rambles up, over, and through the Eildons, a cluster of three distinctive dome-shaped hills formed by volcanic activity around 350 million years ago, rising over the Scottish borderlands like sentinels.
Of course, like any good, large natural landmark, they feature in the region's folklore. My favorite story is that of Thomas the Rhymer. After hearing the story for the first time about five years ago, I crane my ears to listen to the wind every time I pass this way.
Here's the story, with apologies to the original teller for any misunderstandings or liberties.
If you stand at the foot of the Eildon Hills long enough, the wind starts to sound like someone is trying to tell you something. It slips along the heather, catches in the gorse, and hums down into the valley with a whisper that feels older than the stones. Locals will tell you that's just the weather talking. But in the Borders, where stories cling to the land like lichen, many still say it's Thomas the Rhymer.
Thomas wasn't a king or a warrior—he was a listener. A wanderer. A young man who spent more time watching clouds skid across the triple peaks of the Eildons than tending to whatever work his neighbors thought he should be tending.
One day, he sat beneath the Hawthorn Tree on the lower slopes, letting the sun warm his face. And that's when she arrived: the Queen of the Fairies.
She did not appear as you'd think a queen would—with rays of light and sparkly wings. Instead, she showed up on a silver-shoed white horse. Her gaze was deep and unsettling, a reflection of what she saw in Thomas and in all his possible futures. She called to him—no explanation, no promise—and Thomas went.
The queen led Thomas into one of the three Eildon hills. Not to it, but INto it—through a doorway that nobody else could see. Below the hill lay a world that looked nothing like the Scotland Thomas knew. It was a dream world he hoped would never end. Whether Thomas stays on the hill for seven days or seven years remains a point of debate today, but one thing everyone agrees on: Time bends differently when magic is involved.
But all dreams come to an end, and eventually, the Queen returned Thomas to the Hawthorn Tree. But she left him with two things: a gift and a burden. The gift was truth: Thomas couldn't tell a lie even if his life depended on it. The truth allowed him to see forward, and people came from far and wide to "True Thomas" what he saw in their futures. He told them the truth, straight up, no cushion.
Therein lay the burden. Thomas was unable to soften the blows or remain silent, hoping not to hurt or frighten a listener. After the Queen's blessing, Thomas could no longer offer a moment of kindness with a slight untruth.
As Thomas learned, truth is a lonely business.
Many years later, the Queen of the Fairies appeared again under the same Hawthorn Tree and beckoned to Thomas once more. And while Thomas was older and wiser, his curiosity had not wavered. So, in the sanity that is doing the same thing but expecting different results, he followed him inside the hill once more.
True Thomas, they say, was never seen again. BUT, if you and a handful of walking writers head into the Eildon Hills on a windy afternoon and sit quietly near a hawthorn, you may hear a bit of truth-telling coming from inside the hill—it might be a poem or it might be an honest and unguarded truth about yourself or another that no one's been brave enough to tell you.
So what does this lore have to do with a group of walking women, besides being an interesting cultural hit and proof that the Scots and the Irish live and breathe storytelling? A lot, actually. By day three on any walk, I am humbled by the level of vulnerability and truth-telling that arrive on the path—stories of terrible hurts, beautiful new beginnings, spiritual apathy tickled by metaphysical yearning.
Sometimes, in my regular life, I am not the best listener. I fill in people's words, jump ahead in their stories, and even though I try not to, I am sure sometimes judge. But these walks are an invitation for me to listen—listen deeply, concentrated, focused listening—to others. And to try to break my bad habit of injecting my conclusions or my own like experience into conversations.
Truly listening to another human being with full curiosity and without judgment, it turns out, is like being handed a rare and beautiful diamond. You hold it in your hand and wonder at what could make such a thing.
More importantly, in listening to my companion's stories, I began to hear important life truths I too often forget or ignore: Where you stand today is exactly where you are meant to stand; where you stood yesterday is what brought you here.
In this way, I walked with Thomas the Rhymer the entire way. Which makes sense time bends differently when magic is involved.
Writing from the road
Discovery
By Fiona:
Something lives at the heart of all things. Under the layers of earth, stone and sunlight what is breathing?
Armed only with curiosity Amy wandered barefoot through the deep green forest . Feet on leaves, vibrations of crunch met with occasional stabs of pain as she negotiated the pathway towards an ocean she could hear and not see. Blue eyes were drawn to a spiders web in the fork of a huge old tree adorned with creeping ivy that wound with abandon upward into the canopy on the forest.
The web jerked rhythmically. The child looked closer, peering through tangles of raspberry bush into the dark recesses of the place where two solid scarred branches met. As she drew closer the jerking grew frantic.
Dropping into stillness Amy sensed the feelings of fear and distress emanating from the web. She blinked.
Caught within the silky rainbow strands of the web was…. a tiny winged creature. At first her child’s heart knew it to be a fairy… however looking closer she saw the shimmering wings of an extraordinary butterfly with patterns of flowers printed on shining wings.
The child considered what was in front of her. Could this be a creature that painted colour and pattern into the seeds of flowers so they grew in just the right place in the forest?
Or perhaps it created the skins of mushrooms, or the shine in dragonflies wings? Whatever this creature did , the girl knew it did not belong in that web. Surely soon the spider that crafted this labyrinth would come looking…..and as Amy watched the spider appeared from under the buttery coloured bark edging closer. She made a decision.
As much as the web of life fed her instincts Amy knew she could not leave this situation to play itself out.
She had always used her voice to calm and heal, opening her mouth silvery sounds poured through the air, trickling through branches and meeting dappled sunlight in explosions of colour. The spider stopped mid movement and drew back butter coloured legs into the crevice it had come from, and Amy slowly moved forward still singing, to place her hands gently around trapped creature.
Looking closer she gasped. A creation creature. Her own small wings trembled with joy as she tenderly placed the tiny creature on the top of a striated green leaf at the place where sunbeams played. Turning, she skipped back to her own hollow in the deep glades of the forest, full to bursting with news of the treasure her green home had shown her this day.
Writing from the road
The Bunny Who Could Fly
By Barbara Lyghtel Rohrer
In many ways, he was like any little brown bunny who munched the grass in my yard in the hours of twilight. But this bunny had ears a bit longer than most of his kind. And that made all the difference. When the wind was just right, he’d sit up, raise his ears, and suddenly was air borne. I would say it was magic, but I think it was just physics, which I cannot explain, but I know it is logical and predictable, even if there is much we have yet to understand.
Whatever the reason, the bunny flew. Not a lot. And not very high. But still, he was able to fulfill a childhood fantasy of mine –– how I longed to fly.
When my brother joined the air corps of the U.S. Army in 1965, he signed on to learn to fly helicopters. That was a straight ticket to Vietnam in those years, and that is where he wound up in ’67-’68, the height of the war.
I too then wanted to learn to fly. I idolized him that much. Mom checked out membership with the Junior Civil Air Patrol for me. I don’t know what that would have meant, or what I would have been doing. And I would never learn since the meetings were at the regional airport in the evening across the Ohio River from where we lived. Mom didn’t drive then and that was something Dad was not going to take me to.
“I don’t know how you would get there,” said Mom. I didn’t either. It was simply understood that Dad driving me was not an option.
So I spent that year John was in Vietnam writing him letters and going to Mass and Communion every day. I had made a bargain with God. If I went to Mass and Communion every day, God would bring my brother home safely. I kept my end of the bargain and God kept his –– his, that is the pronoun I would have used them.
And, no, I never did learn to fly. Although John continued to fly with the Kentucky Guard until his retirement in the late ‘90s.
And now I have this bunny who flies. Telling me what?
I haven’t thought of my own desire to fly for ages. And then this bunny appeared last night. Soft Vulnerable. And strong enough to accept the gift he was given. No doubts. He just flew. As if it was that easy. As if.
It is.