Tall Tales and Storied Steps: A Story Walk

It is the middle of September, which means that we have just marked this year’s Heritage Open Days at Saint John the Baptist Old Malden, and the church has opened its doors to visitors (as it does every year). The Heritage Open Days at St John’s follows a similar pattern every year with displays about the history of the church (it goes back to Saxon times) and the locality (Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace stood in parkland a couple of miles away), talks about local history or the environment, music (this year provided by the Maeldune (Early Music) Consort), and plenty of tea and cake - well, it is the Church of England.

After a gap of a few years, part of this year’s offering was a story walk, which I led. The original suggestion was that I should tell the story of the history of the church building, but I was keen to do something with story that would appeal to all ages (and, after all, there were plenty of displays in the church about its history). The compromise, then, was that I would weave aspects of the history of the parish into fanciful tales set in and around the church (and its surrounding area).

There is a lot of debate in the storytelling world about the cultural appropriation of narratives that are from traditions other than our own. It is a sensitive area, but I like Ruth Stotter’s writing on this subject. She says that we should ‘acknowledge and use the best story sources we can find, select tales to tell with sensitivity, treat the story and the people who created and told and/or tell the story with respect, and select stories appropriate for our style of telling and our audiences.’ It was in that spirit that I planned the story walk drawing on a range of folklore. The tales that I adapted to the setting, then, included stories from both the Jewish and Muslim traditions, as well as tales traditionally associated with Kent (my home county) rather than Surrey (on the borderlands of which, the church stands) plus a story from a collection of Norwegian folk tales. Part of respecting the stories’ origins was, in performance, to acknowledge that the amazing events that I was narrating (strangely enough) were not originally located around a small church on the edge of south London but, rather, were drawn from around the world. I also produced a document where the story origins were listed (if you want to see which stories I told, and from where they originated, click HERE).

Adapting the tales to the building and the locality seemed to work. The Hogsmill River (that runs at the bottom of the hill on which the church stands) became the ditch in which a dragon had slept; the 1585 petition to Elizabeth I from the parishioners of St John's, pleading for money to repair the building, became an occasion of clerical duplicitousness and regal wisdom; the trees surrounding the church hosted the trickster Robin Goodfellow; the Manor House (adjacent to the church) was the dwelling of a lord of the manor in need of a lesson on not judging people by appearances; and the 1611 offertory plate became the means of explaining to a baker the appropriate payment for the smell of his baked goods.

Woven through these tails were nuggets about the church and its history: the origins of the parish name (Maeldune – the sign on the hill); the development of the church building over the centuries; the presence of a stream running under the building; the history of the Manor House; and some basic facts about the church’s ring of bells. 

Twenty people of all ages came on the walk, and it was a delight to share tales with a group that appeared genuinely interested in the history at the same time as showing a ready willingness to suspend disbelief.

Reference:

Stotter, R. (2002) More about story: writings on stories and storytelling 1995-2001. Stinson Bach CA: Speaking out press, p59