Heart of Darkness

As even a cursory glance at the news informs you, the world can be a dark and unpleasant place. Innumerable horrors and degradations are inflicted upon people worldwide, grotesque acts committed as a matter of course. We tut, express disapproval, and go about our days.

Set against the global backdrop of general nastiness, it can be easy to overlook acts closer to home. Take, for example, the disturbing case of a bird sanctuary just up the road from where your correspondent types this. This place, manned and run by volunteers takes in injured birds and nurses them back to health. Harmless enough, who could possibly object to that?

Well, someone in Mawdesley does, as a sequence of attacks by night on the place have left hundreds of birds killed and maimed, bones broken, attacked by dogs. It’s the sort of action which causes as much confusion as it does distaste. Why on earth would you want to? The sane response is bafflement.

This sort of petty, small-village malice is a world away from war crimes, of course. But it’s a reminder that dark currents run in even the sleepiest locations (and they don’t come much sleepier than Mawdesley), it’s the sort of thing which would have fitted right in to the seventies tradition of British rural horror, think Straw Dogs or the Wicker Man, it plays up to the metropolitan conviction that the countryside is an inbred hell of weirdoes. The Heart of Darkness in rural Lancashire.