The Pilgrimage of Piltdown Man

“Once upon a time…there was the Weald. Much of the Weald was smoke and flame – a place of blast furnaces and molten iron – and the mine pits; still, deep, dark cooling pools, from which would come the hiss of steam when white hot iron was plunged in.

And scattered throughout the Wealden forest there were those charcoal burners’ enclosures – the hut and the kiln, the piles of cut limbs and branches, and the solitary, wrinkled charcoal burner.

And when the charcoal burner died, as often as not his body rotted away in solitude and there was no-one to miss him, as the forest retook the enclosure – and the hut and the kiln subsided back into the ground. Sometimes bits of body were collected – no-one knew by whom.

Someone dark. Someone with a book. Bits of body were fixed together – bits of this, that and the other. Higgledy piggledy wiggledy. A brain animated by a spark of fire from a bloomer – an ancient blast furnace; a clay chimney – or fluxed into awareness and motion by an organism usually associated with rot and decay – the body jerked into some sort of life...”

Here begins the story of Link, a cryptid, a knitted-together Piltdown Man, whose pilgrimage takes him up the South Downs, staggering along the A27 and the M27, through Southampton, through Amesbury, past Porton Down, to Glastonbury, Dartmoor, the west of Cornwall and Brittany.

Mike O’Leary has been a professional storyteller for 25 years and his post-fairy tale vividly knits together the knuckers, hags, wisht hounds and dragons of folklore with more contemporary concerns of roadkill, hitch-hiking, migration and abuse. The result is a very adult story that investigates the whole idea of story in our lives and in our search for meaning.