Do giants lie beneath our hills?

Just a thought for Halloween

What is that on the edge of the hill, down below the rounded, tree-less brow, stark against the green and the heather? There! Two stones, like giant’s teeth; as if ‘he’ is there just beneath the surface, his face puckered black leather, his eyes open and blind with mud, his huge nostrils clagged, his mouth agape, and those two white stones, his dog teeth, biting up to the sky.

Was he buried kindly, the hill piled over him by a last remaining child of his kind?

Or was he dragged down and butchered by a swarm of giant-hating, giant-fearing men and women who then, believing his decay would poison the air and the streams, buried him in the hard ground beneath this hill.

Perhaps it wasn’t either of those.

Perhaps he just  grew old and tired and laid  himself down to sleep. Then , as the long years passed, the hill, foot by hand, by leg, by chest slowly swallowed him into itself.

Perhaps one day, on a day like this All Hallow’s Eve, the hills will tear themselves open and all those creatures lost in the half dark of our knowledge and learning will come rumbling and tumbling back into the world: witch and giant, hob and goblin, talking hares and fishtailed men from the rocky shore and they’ll dance the twilight to the tunes of our fear and our delight.

And a good night will follow the hallowed eve.