Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl Part 1: The Magician, or, Sites Both Strange and Powerful

IT IS FINISHED
(It has barely begun)

This took longer than expected, in large part because once I'd actually drawn up a coherent plan it turned out that bits of this post will form substantial parts of the third, seventh, ninth and fifteenth instalments :) I'm hoping things will speed up with future posts, otherwise I might be writing this for about a decade, by which time I'll need to come back and re-edit it all to adapt to changes in the real world in that time. We'll see. 

If you're a confused recent reader, this is the first proper part of the series I originally discussed here, in which I convert my beloved home region of North West 'England' into a hex-based Mage: the Ascension setting which can operate along similar principles to the archetypal OSR 'hexcrawl': young mages can roam about in a dynamic and weird world full of factions and threats, causing problems and harvesting Quintessence to their hearts content, before eventually establishing and ruling over their own domains. 

Dove Cottage, Grasmere (see below). Brian Clift, CC 2.0

And in order to have Quintessence competition and control be a key part of the setting, we need to start by placing...

Major Nodes 

System of assignation

We're using the default option provided by the M20 corebook, where a Node provides "two points per week, per dot in the Trait – half of that in free Quintessence, the other half in Tass."

My approach to mapping this is therefore as follows:

1-2: Not worth mapping on the mageckrawl scale. They can be tracked down within a hex, being denser in places with high populations and strong vibes. This is the highest Node rating a starting PC should be allowed to buy.
3-4: Local sites of power and emotion, places with a meaningful story or a lot of emotions invested in them. Many well-travelled hexes will have one or two, but they are not as ubiquitous as 1-2 dot Nodes.

5: Places of some regional note, significant on a county scale. Likely exist in the ambit of a supernatural group and may well house a chantry or lair.
6: Places of region-wide note, certainly controlled by one or another group of supernaturals and turned to their ends, probably house a chantry.

7: Places important enough to feature in national histories or of great regional significance; begin to be important enough that control might be genuinely contested.
8: The most powerful Nodes appearing on this map, one or two carefully-chosen sites of obviously immense significance/power.
9-10: The heady heights of Stonehenge or Canterbury Cathedral; nowhere in the North West manages this

Resonance

I'm giving nodes resonance equal to their Node rating, and not using the distinction Book of Secrets makes between Resonance and Synergy. 'Vague descriptive terms for the sort of magick it supports' is about all I feel the need for.

Locating a node

A successful roll of Awareness against a difficulty of 10-Node value allows a Mage to sense a node when directly adjacent to it. One additional success is required if within its aura but out of sight of the node itself, and one more to locate it whilst within the hex but outside this aura. If a mage shares a Resonance with a node, the total of the mage's and the node's Resonance values are rolled as additional dice to this pool. If a mage has a Resonance broadly opposed to a Node's, the total of the two is subtracted from the pool.

Major Nodes and the Gauntlet: 

Nodes themselves generally have a Gauntlet rating of 3, of course, unless they're technocratic nodes. The hex around a Node of at least 5 dots has a Gauntlet rating of the average of the Node's gauntlet and its own. So for example, a rural area (gauntlet 6) instead has a Gauntlet of 5 (6+3=9, /2=4.5 round up) within the same hex as a Node. This isn't usually a huge change, but may become more significant when several major nodes are concentrated

The Old Straight Tracks

 

https://www.higgypop.com/ley-lines/

To an extent these are part of paradigm because people can and will argue they exist pretty much anywhere], but these are based on taking the 'average' of a lot of different sets so probably have pretty strong belief. A universally-acknowledged Ley would probably be a 7 or 8 dot example, but since those don't really exist very widely it seems appropriate to class any 'big' ones as a 6 and others as a 5 - they are very distinctly regional for the most part...

Zooming in on this, we find all the information we need to overlay it on our map, roughly sketch over and label our leys.

Counterclockwise from top: the British Latitudinal (Node 6), North West, Irish and North Wales  (Node 5) leys

Intersections are valuable insofar as they're a site where multiple nodes can be tapped at once, so the West of Stockport around the Pyramid and roundabout (hex 2241) and Hex 2447 (don't worry that the numbers aren't very visible here) where two intersections fall either side of the River Dane as it winds its way through the Pennines at the very edges of our area are particularly significant sites. See below for more info.

Ley nodes are by their very nature hard to control - their power can be drawn on by anybody along them, so it'll often be a race to 'speed-meditate' and drain them as soon as they charge up. (Characters meditating can reduce threshold successes by 1 to get their Quintessence one 'step' before others who started at the same time, otherwise it's who was going first for the duration of the first roll.)

• The Pyramid (hex 2241): This hulking modernist ziggurat began to be constructed in post-industrial Stockport in 1987, and has had a troubled ownership history. The developers went bust, it sat empty from completion in 1992 through to 1995, then the Co-Op bank set up there but a string of failed developments in the projected business park around it (originally intended to consist of yet more pyramids) from 1995-2005 led to rumours that it was cursed. Those rumours were revived after the Co-Op nearly went under in 2013 and the structure was bought by a Saudi investment firm in 2019 for redevelopment as offices. Then, in 2023, a plan went ahead to turn the entire thing into a Royal Nawaab south asian restaurant, which after a slightly delayed opening now seems to be operational.
  TRUTH: The Pyramid was a Syndicate enterprise designed to provide an optimal site from which to tap both intersecting nodes under the nearby motorway roundabout. It was an integral staging point in their terranorming, redevelopment and conquest project through Greater Manchester in the 1990s. The site's 'emptiness' from 1992-5 masked its use as a base for their first Construct in the area, which moved into the centre of the city once the tide started to turn in its favour. Financial ill-fortunes of the various mortal firms involved in the development, and the failure of the larger Pyramid construction project, were a result of Traditionalist pushback throughout the period, which largely fell apart by 2005. (The Co-Op's 2013 ill-fortunes were unrelated, largely a result of poor management and auditing on the mortal side of things). Since then, the site has continued to do its best to siphon all possible Primal Utility from both leys, and changes of management and purpose reflect Syndicate efforts to let the market find the most efficient structure for doing that.
  

  

  Photo by Dunk (cc by 2.0), who comments 'Egypt has the Great Pyramid of Giza, Manchester has the Great Pyramid of Stockport. But where is the Sphinx?' Depends on your preferred metaplot, Dunk, depends on your preferred metaplot (the official stance of the FRNWM is that we are ignoring all metaplot and doing our own thing)

  
  
  
  
  
• Two Points of the Dane (hex 2447): Surrounded by farms, dirt tracks, and green sloping fields ringed by rugged hills, this area of North Staffordshire seems pretty idyllic. It's also home to the intersections of the British Latitudinal Ley with the Irish and North Wales leys, around a kilometre apart across the swift, clear, shallow waters of the Dean. Why, then, is it not a site of major metaphysical contention? Because the Verbena of the nearby Peak District (centred around the North of Derbyshire) have sponsored a long-standing Sorcerous tradition arisen around the leys. The Merry Band of Bridestones, named for the nearby chambered cairn, is comprised of old farming families living approximately in the triangle of land between the nearby villages of Bosley, Timbersbrook and Rushton Spencer. Folk actually from the villages (pops. 406, <100, 485, are mistrusted as 'townsmen', apart from a few sympathizers who join the farmers in being able to trace their (highly putative) lineage back to the High Mythic Age. This is a place where the folkloresque becomes folk-horror; the Merry Band keep to an unEnlightened version of the bad old Verbena ways mixed with a strong rural English xenophobia, and their area of control is laced with unpleasant spirits and sorcerous traps ready to surprise any supernatural interloper. They allow access only to the Derbyshire Verbena and, grudgingly, other Verbena vouched for by them, and even this is fairly periodic. Practically, facing them down is probably not worth it for any of the major factions: the Technocracy would love to get at both leys, but practically speaking the Verbena in Derbyshire, Anglesea and Ireland, the Etherites in Flintshire and the Choristers in Ireland (on the regionally-relevant ones of whom more later) have it pretty locked-down. This is therefore a good 'edge' for our region of interest.
  The Merry Band will be further developed when we get on to Sorcerers in the region in a future post.
  
  

  

  Once again,https://www.higgypop.com/ley-lines/. The Bridestones site is just west of Timbersbrook along Dial Lane

  
  

Specific Sites

'We saw your old flames, and some were burning yet. 

It made us smile to see just how well-tended each was kept.

But other fires were burning too, and I saw the battlefields:

The dying Light Brigade stretched out upon the wheel.'

Josh Ritter, 'In the Dark', from The Animal Years

Next up, we have our location nodes. How many dots to assign to these depends on a few factors: age (A), state of preservation (P)[1], size/connectivity [2] (S), fame (F) and mythic/sacred status (M). My very rough method is to say that each can be rated 0-2 where 2 is exceptional, 1 is middling and 0 is limited or absent. I reserve the right to alter these deeply pseudomathsic results based on vibes. We're going for really major locations for now, the kind with some nationwide reach; we'll zoom in to major locations within counties later.
For each site I'll list node value, Resonance points equal to that node value for purposes of setting mood, and some local stories that could serve as Mythic Threads where applicable. If there needs to be a 'true' answer to anything about the site, I'll give mine. 
[1] state of preservation in its nodal state. For example, a nightclub that's closed and become a haute cuisine restaurant has 0. A nightclub that's closed and fallen into ruin might preserve some of its memories and grandeur, and have 1. A nightclub that became famous as a squat/underground rave site after officially closing, concatenating concentric bands of revelrous and rebellious essence, might have 2. If it were then bought and the tenants evicted only for the company to go bankrupt before redeveloping, back to 1... and so forth.
Ancient Sites
Loosely defining ancient as anything built before the end of the High Mythic Age (i.e. pre-1300 or so), or anything really important built 1300-1603[2]. Everything from castles to stone circles. Age 2 means it precedes the Romans; everything else on this list is Age 1, stuff younger than 1602 is Age 0.
The biggest issue with these is how many there are. I'll almost certainly turn up tonnes whilst looking at individual localities. For now, though, I'm looking at the big ones that tend to turn up on national or regional tourist maps. This produces a list of the following.

• Castlerigg Stone Circle, Cumbria (hex 0813) - A neolithic (and therefore relatively early) stone circle of even more mysterious provenance than most, with views over the heart of the Lake District. The site's pagan usage seems to be somewhat limited by the lack of any obvious astral alignments or archeological evidence of rituals, and perhaps by its location in the NW and up a hill. Even the most speculative of folkore blogs seem to have little to say. There's an ice-cream van that sells nearby to tourists, probably a cheap little project from some Syndicate middle-manager to devalue the place.
  A2 P1 S1 F2 M1 - Node 7. Resonances: Romantic 3, Sacred 1, Ambiguous 3

• Long Meg & Her Daughters, Cumbria (hex 1510) - England's third-largest henge, notable for the detachment of one 12-ft. decorated stone (Long Meg) from the rest. Quoting Wiki, 'Long Meg herself is a 12 ft (3.7 m) high monolith of red sandstone 80 ft (24 m), standing to the southwest of the circle. The stone is marked with examples of megalithic art including a cup and ring mark, a spiral, and rings of concentric circles. ... The composition and position of the stone is similar to that of the Altar Stone, at Stonehenge, and may be part of a similar tradition of using red sandstone to mark the solstice.' It may have been built on the site of several older monuments. Four of its stones are quartz, and appear to mark certain astral alignments. Purportedly, the entire circle was a coven of witches petrified either by god (for profaning a holy patch of ground by casting love-magick there or by dancing on the Sabbath) or by astrologer-scholar and real person Michael Scot (1175-1232; almost certainly a Hermetic, but likely would have been of the Order of Reason a century and a half later). Most famously, the stones cannot be counted to the same number twice - doing so may bring bad luck, release the witches, petrify you to join them, or simply be impossible. The site may also be the burial-site of a giant, and the stones may bleed if chipped. Attempts to move or damage the stones certainly bring down curses of dangerous weather and poor harvests upon local landowners with some regularity in the oral tradition,
  Wordsworth had this to say of the circle:
  

  A weight of Awe not easy to be bourne
  Fell suddenly upon my spirit, cast
  From the dread bosom of the unknown past,
  When first I saw that family forlorn
  

   A2 P1 S2 F2 M1 - Node 8, Resonances: Ominous 2, tricksterish 1, Awe-Inspiring 5.
  TRUTH: The 'witches' are in fact a circle of four ancient monument-building Magi, led by the archpriest Occoa (Meg) along with their cults. Deeply in love withy each other in a strange and ever-changing world, they used their lithocomputational Time magicks to foresee a future in which they could have full and rich lives together and then transport themselves into it, transmuting their forms into living rock machines which will open in the year 2040, or possibly sooner if the ritual "escape valve" built into the circle is activated (the double-counting is only part of this - the rest was lost with a circle of local sympathizers who died out c.800 BC). Scot temporarily depetrified them to hold discourse with them, but restored them after discovering their purpose. The circle are mutually deeply in love with each other to a point of slight codependence; they might ideologically align with the more human-supremacist parts of the Technocratic Union, having seen the hrror and instability of  a world ruled by the supernatural,  but their technologies will find more favour with the Etherites or even Verbena.

  

  www.friendsoflongmeg.com. Poe's Law is strongly in force when dealing with English amateur folkloristics...

• Walls Castle, Ravenglass, Cumbria (hex 0319) - Known as either Glannoventa or Itunocelum in its day, actually a bath-house from the local roman fort (c.120-400 AD). Fort was a supply depot for much of the North-West, and known to have housed the auxiliaries of the First Cohort of the Aelia Classica, probably a marine unit protecting the triple-estuary of the Esk, Mite and Irt that passes through Ravenglass. Auxiliaries came from at least as far as Roman Syria, and at least some settled in the local area after their discharge and citizenship. It's unknown why the bathhouse is so well preserved, with walls high enough that antiquarians thought it a mediaeval castle... Eerie, no, how only the communal-water-immersion-house now survives of the connective-nexus triple-water site? There aren't many local myths about the site beyond the 'castle' claim, but one is that it's a secondary home of the Cumbrian Fairy King Eveling, often associated by modern amateur folklorists with the Welsh god Afallach, and his daughter Modron, often associated by the same with Morgan Le Fay. Modron was supposedly a water-spirit or sorceress who called up tides which consumed much of the local land whilst trying to hasten the return of a lover - a story also told in Cornwall - and had a child with Urien Rheged. More on all this here - Eveling's primary supposed fortress is a ways away at Mediobogdum/Hardknott, so we'll cover that in the next entry and simply note the connection for now.
  A1 P2 S2 F2 M0 - Node 7, Resonances: Fae 2, Watery 4, Defensive 1
  TRUTH: The site has become a Trod into Faerie (gauntlet is treated as 1 for accessing Faerie, 0 at spring tides). I'm not using conventional WoD changelings, because I think they're too on-the-nose metaphorical and I like my Fae to be A) spirits in Mage terms and B) a bit more like the ones from Changeling: the Lost, grand and strange and terrifying. Notes of Pratchett's elves, too. More on this in a later post. The Trod leads into the Court of Forlorn Hope. This is partially enabled by the fact that it's a site of powerful connectivity; any mage with Correspondence uses it as if they had one additional dot in it here, and the vulgarity is reduced by one step (Coincidental<Vulgar<Vulgar+witnesses)

• Hardknott Roman Fort, Hardknott Pass,  Cumbria (hex 0618)  - a vast hilltop fort situated in a commanding position at 800 ft. elevation, looking over the hill road of Hardknott Pass (tied steepest in the country). As noted above, believed to be the fairy rath of King Eveling. The old roman road along the pass doesn't intersect with the hillside road, which is an interesting detail we can draw on. We don't have a great many stories about Eveling, but they seem to suggest that the fort is a defensive structure whereas his 'public'-facing courts were held in Walls Castle. 
  A1 P0 S1 F2 M1 - Node 5, Resonances: Fae 3, Controlling 2. More significantly, the site has a very low Gauntlet - only 2 in the day, 1 at night - and the surrounding hex counts as Rural most of the time, Deep Wilderness when the high passes are closed during severe storms, so the overall Gauntlet rating is 4 at highest, and 3 during night-time and storms.
  TRUTH: Eveling bides in this high, inaccessible and low-gauntlet place most of the time, deigning to descend closer to humanity only to meet with mortals. When he goes down, he follows the path of the old Roman road, which cuts through Faerie as surely as it does through the material hills. Once a symbol of the powers of imperial modernity, it has been reclaimed by the otherworld, made into a symbol of a lost mythic past which also provides convenient safe transport. Once again, the castle is a trod into the Court of Forlorn Hope, leading right into Eveling's throne-room.

Hardknott/Mediobogdum - wildly beautiful and definitely otherworldly. The modern high pass in the background. Image https://brigantesnation.com/sites/brigantia/cumbria/hardnott-roman-fort

• Hadrian’s Wall, North Cumbria (amongst others) (hexes 0605, 0705, 0806, 0905, 1006, 1106, 1206, 1305, 1405, 1504, 1604, 1704, 1804 and then we stop caring) - you might have heard of this one. Big wall, Romans made it to keep the Picts out, symbol of their power delineating the civilized world from the barbarians etc. A shocking number of people think of it as the border with Scotland still, which it emphatically is not  at any point except very arguably on the Solway coast.

From wikimedia commons, by Nilfanion

         The wall has a modestly high rate of ghostly soldier/pict sightings but nothing specific that                     regularly reoccurs, and the other interesting mythic detail - the presence of Mithraite soldiers                 indicated by statuary - comes from the North-Eastern fort of Birdoswald. Still, it's symbolically             potent as a connection in the Romano-Anglic translatio imperia, delineating a particular                         ideologically constructed space.

         A1 P1 S2 F2 M1 - Node 7, Resonances: Dominating 4, Civilized 2, Wild 1

            TRUTH: There are definitely ghosts along the wall. It also has a fascinating duality: both liminal ( a literal roman limes or border, a built thing in ruins, a boundary marker that does not mark a boundary between two nations ruled by one state) and solid (a WALL! a DEFENCE! a BARRIER! a symbol of the power of the empire). As typical for a Node, it reduces the Gauntlet, but it also produces a barrier to spirits! No spirit or magickal effect can cross a standing section of Wall, unless it has a strong link to the Roman Empire. For Effects, this requires that the caster have a connected Legend, Past Life or Anachronism/Throwback merit/flaw.

• Lancaster Castle, Lancaster, Lancashire (hex 1326) - Property of the crown as Duke of Lancaster - locals still sing 'God save our Noble Duke' for the second line of the anthem. Former Roman fort. Though it's seen a few brief military actions in its history, Lancaster's significance has come primarily from its role as a prison (12th century-2011) assize and later crown court (to present) and place of execution (up to 1865). Just going to quote Wiki (citing John Champness' history of the castle) quickly: 'Lancaster has a reputation as the court that sentenced more people to death than any other in England. This is partly because until 1835 Lancaster Castle was the only Assize Court in the entire county and covered rapidly growing industrial centres including Manchester and Liverpool.' Cheery! It's noted for executing famed Protestant martyr George Marsh under the reign of Mary I, a string of Catholics under subsequent monarchs, and of course the famous Pendle Witches (also probably crypto-Catholics in retrospect) who are now the best known horror story of religious persecution in the place. The castle is reputed to be just so fucking haunted, and having known a few people who've worked as tour guides there I can safely say that the story that 'everyone who does the job has at least one personal spectral experience' is not entirely made up to bring in the punters. A clockmaker in the clock tower, a 'white lady', a Royalist soldier and the vague wailing presences of the Pendle Witches are some of the regulars. The town now celebrates and memorializes the Witches quite passionately, so I'd expect there to be some Verbena interest in that. 
  A1 P2 S1 F2 M1 - Node 7, Resonances: Justice (neutrally-valenced, as in the thing that exists not the ideal) 3, Regal 1, Haunted 3
  TRUTH: The castle is the centre of a thriving Necropolis (in Wraith terms) controlling most of Lancashire. At dusk, the Gauntlet falls to 2, and in full night to 1, specifically for purposes of access to the Low Umbra. As such, it takes only a minor effort for the spirits of the dead to pierce the Shroud. Former prisoners/guards who were resident in the prison wing until 2011 may have especially strange stories, or perhaps bear the marks of bargains with the dead.

• Furness Abbey, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (hex 824) - Big old 12th century Cistercian monastery with widespread landholdings (and investment in the mining that would later lead to Barrrow's industrialization) until the Reformation. It's now notably haunted - a monk that vanishes through walls and a young gentlewoman who pined away after the death of her lover (giving her name to a track within called 'my lady's walk') are two of the notables, alongside a headless monk killed by the Scots in 1316 who rides under one of the arches. There's also meant to be a tunnel to the nearby island castle of Piel as well as Dalton Castle, and these tunnels possibly conceal the holy grail and (somehow) the crown jewels John I lost in the Wash in East Anglia in 1216.
  There was apparently a brief phase of hosting traditional mystery plays in the ruins through the 50s and 60s, with a revival in the 80s - an interesting example of popular belief.
  A1 P1 S2 F2 M2 - Node 8, Resonances: Devout 3, lost 4, wealthy 1, haunted 1
  TRUTH: With the old Cistercian monastery, mystery-play tradition and a fairly high Catholic population in the area (as well as in the North-West in general) I decided Barrow-in-Furness would be a good place to set a small group of the Knights Templar. The images of ghostly monks passng through walls may well have been them entering their secret chantry, which is the rumoured 'secret tunnel' - hence the grail references! The crown jewels of King John are really there. Absolutely no idea how, but that's too good to pass up & fits nicely with the wildly incongrous literary references and displaced historical figures of our Ritterian influence. More on this when we get to talking about mage populations in a later instalment. The other ghosts are/were genuine; the Templars have exorcized many in the past, but are currently content to live amidst reminders of another fallen order. Also, the ghosts are valuable allies against the local Pipers (again, another instalment).
  

  

  Elizabeth Cameron Mawson (1877)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Carlisle Castle, Carlisle, Cumbria (hex 1106) - Major defensive position against the Scots since Roman times, 'most frequently besieged place in the British Isles' selon English Heritage, and last English castle to be besieged. Former headquarters for two military regiments, the King's Own Royal Borderers and the Duke of Lancashire's. Its role in securing English dominion extended to being the prison for Mary, Queen of Scots during her long durance; other prisoners left elaborate carvings on the walls which can be seen to this day. The castle itself is from the late 11th century, though the modern structure's oldest parts date to the 12th - unless you believe the rumours that it was actually the site of Camelot, built by Arthur, though its claim to that title is one of the weaker ones. It's definitely linked to Arthuriana though by several stories that have Gawain passing through and dallying with the mistress of the keep. It's surprisingly under-haunted - the main famous story is one pallid woman who killed a soldier with fright in 1842, seven years after the discovery of a woman bricked up in a wall, to whom the tale was tied.
  A1 P2 S2 F2 M0 - Node 7, Resonances: Dominating 3, Embattled 4

• Beeston Castle, Beeston, Cheshire (hex 1448) - Set atop a steep 350-ft. crag in the mid-Cheshire range which has been inhabited and fortified at various points since the Neolithic, the curious 13th-century red sandstone castle is supposedly the site of some buried treasure of Richard II - and as historian of magic Francis Young notes in his Magic in Merlin's Realm, 'No medieval English monarch has been associated with the occult arts more than Richard II'. The treasure has never been found, despite many searches in the well where it was supposedly sunk which turned up underground passages but no hoard. Also worth noting that Ranulf of Chester, who built it in the 1220s, did so under the influence of architecture he'd seen in Syria whilst away on crusade. Oh, also there's a prophecy, recorded in the 16th century antiquarian John Leland, that the castle "yet though at this present time it be in meane estate,/With crackes and breaches much defac’ d, and foulie ruinate,/The day will come when it againe the head aloft shall heave,/If antient prophets I, my selfe a prophet, may believe." This seems to have been combined with a popular saying "that it should save all England on a day" to give Leland's authority to this salvific statement, as far as I can tell without doing actual primary-source research (which would be dangerously unFolkloresque).
  A1 P1 S1 F2 M1 - Node 6, Resonances: Mysterious 2, Impregnable 2, Prophesied 2
  TRUTH: The 'hidden treasure', supposedly “100,000 marks in gold coin and 100,000 marks in other precious objects” is in fact a metaphor for as store of the lore accumulated both from Ranulf's looting in the crusades and at Richard's court - geomantic, astrological, and especially alchemical - in the form of scrolls, grimoires, and a great many primers, concealed in sub-pockets of space folded away with Correspondence magicks (inspired by techniques of the Ahl-i-Batin) within the well's tunnels. It's essentially an arms cache for the Traditionalists who hid it, but their art and subtlety was such that their modern descendants lost track of it. Subsequent searches, even those by magi, have focussed on signs of traditional treasures - trying to detect gold and gems etc - and thus missed it. Leland's prophets and the locals were both getting at the knowledge that what is 'under' the castle might be world-shaping if found, but the world it is likely to shape is that of the Ascension Conflict. Oh, also, mediaeval legends that the treasure is guarded by bound demons and/or a curse of madness are entirely accurate. Subspace dungeon crawl anybody?
  

  

  David Cox (1849)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

[2] death of Elizabeth I, in whose reign the presence of Faerie and the occult still feels more ambivalent than it will once James I's era brings in increasing primitive accumulation, capitalist rationalism, Protestant ardour, and the resultant fervour against witches and 'superstitions'. Vibes drawn from Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm & Twilight of the Godlings; Alexandra Walsham, Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain; Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate, The Book of English Magick; and just generally having read a bit of other stuff about the periods in question. It does not constitute an academic thesis, as the inclusion of Carr-Gomm and Heygate's book should indicate to the ahem initiated.

Sites of Great Faith or Great Emotion

• Bridgewater Foundry, Patricroft, Greater Manchester (hex: 2040) - One of the first near-modern industrial factories, operative 1836-1940 producing machine tools and locomotives and then as the Patricroft Royal Ordinance Factory (ROF) until 1989. Significantly demolished in 2009, mostly replaced by business and technology locations, it still serves as a point of linkage between the seeping transportation-leys (more on the power of the canals and railways in a future post) of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, Bridgewater Canal and Manchester Ship Canal, and a cistern for the Entropic energy that still festers in their once-Dynamic confines. Installation of shiny new memorials to industrial history has done little to improve the situation, and the area is a persistent thorn in the technocratic side, one where 'progress' can seemingly lead only to decay. Note that Patricroft itself is just a normal, fairly boring suburb - this process is primarily confined to the transport routes themselves
  A1 P0 S2 F2 M0 - Node 5, Resonances: Decaying 5
  (A1 is a bit of a kludge - most of the things I've listed for this fall between the coming of Rome and the end of the High Mythic Age - but it has the advantage here that it inaugurated a dead age, which feels old. This is not an exact science and, once subsumed, the numbers mean nothing anyway. It also gets bonus Size due to its connectivity.)
• Hope Street, Liverpool (hex 1041) - This street stretches 800m or so between Liverpool Anglican Cathedral (a century old, the eighth largest  church in the world, fifth-largest on volume, and largest complete Anglican; notably featuring the Lady Chapel, a shrine to the Virgin Mary decorated with images of prominent and capable women across history) and the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King (a curious 60s modernist structure which I'm just going to have to show you).
  A0 P2 S2 F1 M2 - Node 7, Resonances: Hopeful 4, Modern 3
  TRUTH: Despite the street's name descending from a merchant who long predeceased both, it's proven an effective conceptual conduit for their shared modernizing approaches to faith - knitting the two together to produce a shared conduit of Faith-as-Hope. However, whilst the Chorister-led local Traditions have benefitted from this Node, its general Dynamism has also bled out into the general surrounding faithworld, producing an unusually high rate of religious Marauderdom in the city.
  

  

  Chowells, wikimedia commons

  
  
• Liverpool Docks (hexes 940 and 1041) - Heart of the city, catapulting it from silty insignificance in 1700 to the UK's 4th-largest city. 7.5 miles of Mersey riverbank. Many of the older ones are now closed, filled in, covered over with fancy hotels, music venues, eateries etc., but it's still a working dock, the UK's fourth largest. As 'Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City', it was a UNESCO world heritage site until it became the third ever to be struck off the list in the face of a wave of new development leading to "irreversible loss of attributes conveying the outstanding universal value of the property". Probably what it's best known for though is having been the heart of the UK slave trade from 1750 through abolition, thanks to a favourable position for access to the Americas and the tax haven of the Isle of Man, as well as strong trading connections with Africans engaged in slave supply from West Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra. The Docks now house the International Slavery Museum. Despite this, the docks themselves are minimally haunted - probably the constant redevelopments have altered the energy enough for Technocratic agents to keep their past victims out. Indeed, not a lot of folklore in general; but still, as a place of great transformation and novelty with a strong emotional import to many locals, the docks retain Node status.
  A0 P1 S2 F2 M0 - Node 5, Resonances: Modern 4, Controlling 1
• Anfield Stadium (hex 1041)- A football stadium, you ask (if you aren't from the UK) - really? Of course they matter a lot to people, but to the point of being one of the metaphysical lynchpins of an area? Speaking as a UK inhabitant who's not that interested in the game: yes. Quoting journalist Colin Irwin's In Search of Albion: "Being at Anfield reinvigorates a favourite long-held theory of mine that football songs are the one true living organic expression of the folk tradition." Or from this article on the tangible 'atmosphere' of the place: “'Anfield is not normal ... I’m not quite sure everyone appreciates how powerful Anfield is' ... 'The atmosphere is unbelievable. There’s nothing better that you can do than play at Anfield against Liverpool'." It's not every game, as the article goes on to note, but when it's a big one the emotion of the fans roars up through the space. And why wouldn't it? From the 'you'll never walk alone' above the gates to the memorial to the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster that looms so large in the club's history, the whole place is a living history. 
  A0 P1 S1 F2 M2 - Node 6, Resonances: Victorious 5, Electric 1
• The Cavern Club, Liverpool (hex 1041) - The 'Birthplace of the Beatles' and heart of British beat music through the 50s-60s, closed and reopened several times before stabilizing from 1991. Tribute clubs stand across five continents. Touts itself as 'the most famous club in the world', receiving over 150 requests to play each week. Now over 60 years old, and still bringing in new musical acts.
  A0 P1 S1 F2 M1 - Node 5, Resonances: 'Beatleish' 4, Vibrant 1
  
• St. Peter's Square (hex 2139) - Site of various monuments around themes of peace and liberation through its last century, St. Peter's field currently contains the Manchester cenotaph and a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst commemorating the granting of women's suffrage. Around it stand various important public buildings: the luxurious Midland Hotel, an extension of the town hall and the Central Library (Second-largest lending library in the country! Over 56 miles of shelving! 30 incunabula! Underground archives! If you need to track down mysterious info, this really should be the place to do it). (There are also several office blocks). Not memorialized is the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, where the British Army sent yeoman cavalry and hussars in to what was then St. Peter's Field to crush a peaceful Radical meeting calling for universal male suffrage, leaving 18 dead, five imprisoned and hundreds injured. Still, the radical working-class spirit of Manchester the city continues to pool here, ready to be tapped by those who remember. (The field was named originally after St. Peter's Church, demolished in 1907, but this is not the only reason it's sacred.)
  A0 P0 S1 F2 M1 - Node 4 for now, but rose to 5 c.2017-18 during the peak of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party leadership as the British social democratic movement regained some of its former glory. Maybe it will again, some day. Resonance: progressive 3, Corporate 1 (progressive in the making-progress-towards-something-better sense, not necessarily the modern usage as a political descriptor for anybody left of the 2010s Tories)
  TRUTH: The technocratic redevelopment and conquest of Manchester which went into full swing in the late 1990s was really sealed in 2009-10, when the Library - the last Tradition stronghold in the city, tapping the St Peter's Square/Field node, was found to be dangerous due to asbestos and structural issues, closed and fully refitted. Accepting that they couldn't resist pressure from Sleeper authorities, remaining Traditionalists saved what they could and gracefully departed rather than force a confrontation. The books inside were taken to the Winsford Rock Salt Mine and Greater Manchester Record Office for storage, where any primers were removed and archived securely in the Manchester construct whilst other books of power were tagged with trackers and placed under close observation as lures. The building was remodelled extensively to remove various hidden passages and then reopened in 2014, at around the same time as several new office blocks popped up around the square to seal control of the Node. Many strange and esoteric books are still within... but now, anybody who accesses them will be carefully observed.
• Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Cumbria (hex 0915) - A 17th-century pub turned, well, cottage, famous as the home of the Wordsworths 1799-1808 in which William did much of the composing that would make him a Lake Poet and the Lake District a landscape (and Reality Zone) irrevocably infused with the lens of Romanticism. If you wanted to shift that RZ, this would be the place to start. 
  A0 P2 S1 F2 M1 - Node 6 Resonances: Romantic (in the always-has-a-capital-R sense) 5, Wild 1
  Note: it gets +1 Size because it's at the heart of a much larger vision of the Lakes and the Romantic movement in Britain. 

Technocratic Sites

Most of these are using slightly different measures of power to the method listed above, based on their outputs of power or organizational complexity on a grander scale.

• Manchester University (hex 2240): One of the nine red-brick unis, the 24 Russell Group research-focussed unis, 3rd-largest uni in the UK, and... look, just read the Academic Profile section on wiki. A lynchpin of technocratic reality (by contrast with the more Hollower-friendly MMU), the Shanghai Ranking of universities places its best subjects as, in order: Business Admin, Geography, Physics, Sociology, Dentistry, Textiles, Metallurgical Engineering, and Biotech. It does however have a rebellious streak - recently expressed in site-wide riots that rocked the place in response to poor COVID policy and rent hikes in 2020 and 2023. 
  A0 P1 S2 F1 M1 -  Node 5, Resonance: Transformative 3, Rebellious 2.
  Critically for its Nodal status, has been the home of a couple of fairly transformational scientific breakthroughs which are not solely important to the Technocrats, notably:
• Geiger-Marsden Experiment, Manchester - in 1906-13, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, scientists at the university of Manchester, disproved the previous plum pudding model of the atom in the so-called 'Rutherford Scattering Experiments' (named after their academic director and a significant author on them, Ernest Rutherford, who would later be made Baron Rutherford of Nelson for his experimental work and have an element named after him). The experiments would lay the groundwork for the Bohr model of the atom to develop, and thenceforth for the nuclear century.
• The Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program computer, a replica of which is still on display in the uni-operated Museum of Science and Industry. (More retro Virtual Adepts would likely love to get their hands on it). The university also bought the first commercially-produced computer, developed the first transistor computer, and of course the Atlas, probably the most powerful computer in the world from 1962-3. And more! There's a whole wikipedia page just about the computers, which is not necessarily a measure of significance but in this case is. Oh and for the aforementioned Virtual Adepts, Alan Turing was a reader in mathematics here from 1948 until his suicide in 1954.
• In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov discovered graphene there, which would spread across technology through the 2010s.
• Sellafield/Windscale, Cumbria (hex 0217) - formerly the first nuclear plant in the country, Europe's largest and most multi-purpose nuclear site is now mostly used for decommissioning. As far down as North Lancashire, jokes about mutations when the wind blows the wrong way can be heard - not totally surprising, given a history of fires leading to leukaemia 'outbreaks' and plutonium found in children's teeth. It's also the site of one of six National Nuclear Laboratories, which focusses on nuclear safety.
  Node 6, Resonance: Polluting 4, Calamitous 2
  TRUTH: The secrecy and security of the site is renowned, a result of a high Technocratic presence dedicated to containing regular emergences of Low Umbral entities. Ghosts from the '56 fire have mostly been cleared out, but the radiation demons keep popping up. Meanwhile, Iteration X scientists continue to work on turning depleted nuclear Tass into fresh, usable Quintessence, and the site is home to a vast stockpile only a small portion of which can currently be efficiently be converted.

• Affiliated with Manchester uni, based in East Cheshire, Joddrell Bank Observatory (hex 2045) is a great set of radio telescopes (including the world's third-largest steerable radio telescope, the Lovell Telescope) which'll be well-known to anybody who's watched UK documentaries about space. Important in the history of space research, the base of the UK's MERLIN radio interferometer network used for astrometric measurements, and a World Heritage Site for its beauty. 
  A0 P2 S2 F1 M1 - Node 6, Resonance: Astronomic 5, Connected 1
  TRUTH: Though no longer the most critical site for Deep Umbra monitoring, Joddrell is still useful to the Void Engineers' efforts to intercept emergent threats near Britain. Combined efforts with the Syndicate at the gift shop and energetic harvesting from distant stars make it a useful if minor source of Quintessence. Still, it's a bit of a relegation post for the ambitious - or a dream come true for somebody whose Enlightenment hasn't suddenly made them want to fistfight squid-gods from Dimension Z. Most Enlightened staff are quite comfortable, some are a little melancholic, and just a couple are potentially dangerous
  
  

  

  Pete Birkinshaw, CC 2.0

  
  
• Heysham Nuclear Power Plants (hex - Exceeded in capacity only by Sizewell, Drax and Hinkley Point, Heysham is one of the UK's largest functioning power stations. It's been a massive boon to the local community, protecting Heysham from the full entropic brunt of the Sands reality zone (on which more in a future installment). It doesn't have many distinct features, apart from the fact that its output of warm water into the nearby sea has led to the famous Morecambe/Heysham shrimp being especially large and succulent around Heysham. If collected in large numbers, said shrimp may qualify for a single point of Tass per week from the power station. The Progenitors deny all involvement.
  As you'd expect, the plant is heavily guarded and has a lot of failsafe mechanisms. The Technocracy's risk assessments don't suggest any supernatural faciton in the area is liable to attempt to induce a power plant accident, so they don't currently have any operatives on watch, but if mortal security should be breached then a response unit can be scrambled at high speed.
  Node 7. Resonance: Secure 3, Vitalizing 3, Immense 1. All Quintessence generated alongside the ordinary energy output is currently piped out to the Technocracy's North-West Construct in Manchester or to the bases of regional operatives, secret wires laid along with power cables serving as the focus for a massive Prime effect. Anybody who attempts to interfere with this process and tap into the Quintessence can expect the technocratic response to start at 'It-X security team backed up by counterterror police' and go from there.
• Morecambe Bay Gas Fields - A collection of gas fields out in the sea some way off the Bay. At some point, I'll map them on properly, but for now:
  

  

  Offshore magazine

  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  According to their current operators, Spirit Energy, the fields met 20% of UK domestic demand at their peak, and continue to this day (though they're due to be phased out by 2030). The gas is processed in a hub in Barrow-in-Furness. 
  

  Node 7. Resonance: Polluting 2, Ancient 2, Watery 1, Fiery 2
  TRUTH: Being out in the sea between a primordial-technocratic and a natural-wyld reality zone, performing a profoundly corruptive action by stealing the broken remnants of ancient dead life, and a long way from the grounding reality of land, strange phantasms, ghosts and monsters have long beset the rigs on quiet dark nights, haunting the margins of vision, drawing workers to tell tall tales of strangeness. The Technocracy has several times had to defend the platforms from more serious incursions, and are pulling back as a result.
• Garston Solvent Recovery Plant, Liverpool (Hex 1142): Run by the multinational Veolia, this significant processing plant has caued some fear amongst locals of a massive chemical explosion following a 2024 expansion to process 86,000 tonnes of waste per year. Waste materials are reprocessed for reuse or turned into fuel, with the stated intent of increasing sustainability.
  Node 6. Resonance: Ominous 2, Vitriolic 2, Transformative 2
  TRUTH: Created by French Imperial decree as a water-supply company, the modern environmental branch of Veolia is strongly influenced by Etherite philosophies of wonder and transformation, and many of the reprocessed solvwent-fuels are being put towards some rather... strange purposes. Fears of an explosion may not be unfounded...

• First Street Hub, Manchester (hex 2139): Whilst not yet complete, this towering 12000m2 government building will soon form the base for 2600 of the UK civil service, transferred to the North as part of efforts by central government to distribute powers. TRUTH: It is, of course, built to tap the Primally constructed Node 9 (resonance: modernized 5, renewed 3, orderly 1) that is the redeveloped centre of Manchester. Planned to open later this year (2025,) the Hub will be the capstone of Technocratic control through Manchester, fuelling still-more-ambitious projects in the years to come. Heavily financed by the Syndicate responsible for the Mancunian redevelopments, much of its power will actually be in the hands of the relatively small New World Order and Iteration X presence in the city, as part of a long-term plan to make it a more balanced Construct and strengthen Technocratic co-operation in the face of an unruly North. 
  

  

  https://www.firststreetmanchester.com/news/govt-signs-for-130000-sq-ft-civil-service-hub-at-first-street/

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Ninefold House, South Manchester (hex 2139): Here's a genuine mystery for you. When I was researching this project, I googled the biggest businesses in the North-West. At one point, I got a top-9 list of the most valuable; all investment firms I'd never heard of, had no info online apart from obfuscatory Companies House listings, and were all based out of one small suburban house in Higher Blackley, Manchester. I now can't relocate any of this information, but I swear I didn't dream it. I swear. 
  Node 8. Resonance: Boring 5, Subversive 1, Hostile 1, Profitable 1
  TRUTH: 'The Ninefold House' is the slightly edgy name given by a group of Syndicate Financiers from the Entrepreneurship Division to an innovative project to 'let the Free Market handle the RDs'; each of the companies was given a similar, substantial startup capital to invest as they liked, with the proviso that their success or failure will be assessed not on their profit margin (not primarily, anyway) but their ability to undermine one of the nine traditions across the Manchester Construct's territory (this being the North of England and Wales). Given the virtual absence of Euthanatoi, Dreamspeakers and Akhasics from this region, the companies devoted to them mostly prioritize undermining groups that might share their paradigms or branching out to deal with other RDs; the rest each pursue their own strategy against their chosen target, the ambitious young Syndics at their heads cheerfully competing to find the most effective method. More on this when we get to talking about the North-West's mages. 
  The house itself is just a safe registered address, set up as a place for paperwork to be processed before going to the participants so that if anybody tries to strike back against their efforts they won't get anything too valuable. However, it's also the centre of the collective Primal Enterprise, and the staff who work there, expendable as they are, are pretty critical intermediaries in the overall project. The various bits of paperwork and sometimes deniable cash that get funneled via here, and the accounts kept here, form the Quintessence and Tass. As such, the house has some protection: local police know to respond quickly to any calls from here, the operatives carry covert arms and the site has subtle anti-observation architecture and countermeasures that give it Cloaking 3

Although it does have a lot of finance being poured into it at the moment, the NW doesn't host many major organizational hubs or suchlike, so this list is pretty short. None of the UK's biggest companies, the sort of thing that might be a Primal Enterprise at any scale, get much north of Gloucester with their HQs. We have one company in the FTSE 100 - United Utilities, the local water (and formerly energy) monopoly, and frankly whilst I'm sure the Techs are interested in making sure the infrastructure runs smoothly I'm not sure they're getting that much out of it. Let's say it's a Node 7 Primal Enterprise, with the FTSE 250 consituents being at 6 and the small-cap ones being at 5. That gives us 60ish nodes at 5-7, apparently, ready to be tapped by Primal Utility types.

Natural Wonders

• Alderly Edge, Cheshire (hex 2143) - Probably one of the most mythologized places in the North West even before Alan Garner wrote his famous Weirdstone of Brisingamen books, the sandstone ridge of Alderly Edge certainly is now. It has devil-sightings! It has a sleeping wizard! It has King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, also sleeping! Maybe? Or some different knights - versions vary. The idea of wizards and knights lurking in its caves might have something to do with the extensive copper mines in the area, which can be traced back at least to the Roman period and possibly earlier. Some strange axehead-shaped gold bars were dug up in the 90s. 
  Technically Alderly Edge is the affluent little Cheshire village nearby and The Edge is the name of the Ridge.
  A2 P1 S1 F1 M2 - Node 7, Resonance: Comfortable 2, Buried 3, Arthurian 2
  TRUTH: The 15th century owner of most of the land around Alderly Edge was real person and secret Solificatus, Sir Edmund 'the Alchemist' de Trafford, a powerful and influential man (son-in-law of the Sheriff of Lancashire, from whom he acquired the estates) who in 1446 received a royal license to practice alchemy without molestation along with his assistant and father of his daughter in law, Sir John Assheton. Thus far thus real, Solificatus bit aside. Now - Edmund and John built an extensive network of secret passages which could be traversed at magickal speeds to link many sites of power on his estates, including an old Roman shrine deep in the old and then-unused copper mines. In 1457 or 8, aged around 82 and immortalized by his own power, Edmund retreated from the world into these linked spaces and the Chantry that lay at the heart of them, only occasionally emerging to transform the minds of promising passers-by (the visions of sleeping knights might be best thought of as 'hallucinatory re-enchantment'), or to guide and/or force various mining operations away from anything that would interfere with his own work. The old wizard-alchemist has now mostly withdrawn into the umbra, wandering the shade realms of mind, spirit and matter in search of an inner transmutation, and his passages are comparatively under-guarded - though still heavily warded. One who seeks might find his laboratory, and even track him to his otherworldly home, but they will find that though wise the wizard has little interest in matter except as a shell to be broken. Still, he might get on well with the more hippy side of the modern folklore scene, having pretty thoroughly overcome the ideological constraints of his time of birth.
  Assheton, meanwhile, focussed much more on his duty of transmuting base metals to precious for Henry VI, but as he never had much more than a minor sorcerous potency he failed in this duty for several years before dying in 1460. Via the aforementioned marriage of their children, de Assheton's notebooks ended up in the De Trafford family, and today sit somewhere in the attic of a country home owned by the De Trafford baronets, long a banking and business dynasty.
• Cross Fell, Cumbria (pretty much dead centre of 1710, 1711, 1811. Can't win 'em all when setting up one of these grids) - The highest bit of England and of the Pennines outside the Lake District is, uh, also in the same county as the Lake District. Legendary as 'Fiend's Fell', an old haunt of evil spirits, banished by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the early 7th century. Or were they? A fierce, shrieking wind, the Helm Wind (apparently the only named wind in the UK? I have not checked this) accompanied by great dark clouds still periodically rushes down the Eden Valley below with enough force to rip trees out of the ground, and has been associated with the ghost of one Peg Sneddle. Sneddle may be a Cromwellian gentlewoman, Elizabeth Sledall, one of the Machells of nearby Crackenthorpe hall, or as local folklore has it a much older sorceress trapped under a stone in the river Eden nearby for 999 years as of 1861 when one folkloric account was written. Both ghosts may also be separate, perhaps very distant relatives. At any rate, she is consistently said to haunt the Machell family, auguring their deaths (presumably this became harder after finances forced the family to sell the hall in 1927), to ride about in a carriage with amber-coloured lights, and to call or calm the Helm Wind according to her mood.
  Through an 800 ft. pass below the hill runs an old 'corpse road' which'd have been used of old to take babies from outlying villages to baptism and corpses to sanctified ground in the little village of Kirkland, as well as servicing the hillside lead mines. Supposedly, the peak offers views to both Northern coasts and down to the peaks of Wales on a good day.
  A2 P2 S2 F1 M1 - Node 8, Resonance: Angry 4, Sacred 1, Haunted 3
  TRUTH: Elizabeth Sledall is a wraith, an Oracle who mostly lingers in the Shadowlands in this particularly Tempestuous part of the world thanks to her ongoing fetter to Crackenthorpe Hall itself. Peg Sneddle, on the other hand, is the particularly nasty spectre of a former witch, who lingers on out of spite after being hanged for maleficia by a Machell long before the witch trials ('999 years' is serving much the same function as 'ten thousand' in Chinese folklore - it just indicates 'a long time'. She died some time between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.) She then began a campaign of supernatural vengeance against the family, falling into Oblivion very quickly. Shortly after she caused Elizabeth's death, a priest found Peg's body and reburied it under the stone in the river to bind her; she can now only emerge around the time of her trial and execution, in September.
  The Helm Wind, meanwhile, is a powerful and self-aware elemental which still remembers the old days before the 9th century Norse settlement in the Eden Valley, when the Brythonic people of the area worshipped it as a divine spirit. The reason its full daemoniacal wrath abated somewhat on the arrival of the Christians is in fact nothing to do with Saint Augustine (though a local bishop with too little True Faith for the task did once try to appease it by setting up a cross on 'Fiend's Fell'), and everything to do with the fact that the faith that displaced it was early Norse paganism, not Christianity. These days, it's still terrifying and testy, but less motivated by vengeance than resigned bitterness. It can still be vicious when aroused to wrath thouhg, though, and Peg Sneddle in particular is good at metaphorically getting it fighting drunk. Meanwhile, given their pagan predilections the local Verbenae have to be quite careful how they approach it
  

  

  William James Palmer (1882), via wikimedia commons

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Scafell Pike Peak, Cumbria (hex 0817) - the whole Scafell Massif is one massive node, channelling primordial energies from the deepest lake in England, Wastwater, up to Scafell Pike, the highest mountain. Critical sites of early romanticism (Coleridge very nearly died there, and exulted in the experience) and the accompanying mountaineering tradition, they're now a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the presence of rare lichens and other wildlife. Here's a quote from A. Wainwright, the great mountaineer, that I just had to include:
  “A man may stand on the lofty ridge of Mickledore [between Sca Fell and Scafell Pike], or in the green hollow beneath the precipice amidst the littered debris and boulders fallen from it, and witness the sublime architecture of buttresses and pinnacles soaring into the sky, silhouetted against racing clouds or, often, tormented by writhing mists, and, as in a great cathedral, lose all his conceit. It does a man good to realise his own insignificance in the general scheme of things, and that is his experience here.” 
  Wastwater, meanwhile, has gnomes - garden gnomes, to be clear - that lure divers to their deaths. This is perfect and wonderful, I can't improve on it.
  A2 P1 S2 F2 M1 - Node 8, Resonance: Sublime 5, Contrasting 3

Wikipedia 

            TRUTH: The SSSI designation fronts for a Progenitor-sponsored project to try to capture at                     least some of the region's abundant Quintessence.

• Gaping Gill, That Bit of Yorkshire Wot We Annexed (hex 1924) - This 98-m cave was Britain's deepest known til 1999. This succession of 99 to 98 is surely of great numerological significant to your sacred geometers. It has several entrances, and the stream that flows down into it eventually emerges near another cave. The first explorations were in the mid-late 19th century, and there's a depressing lack of folklore from before that.
  A2 P2 S1 F1 M0 - Node 6  Resonance: Concealed 2, catabatic 3, watery 1

• Pendle Hill (hexes 2031, 2130, 2131) - Famously the site of the trial of the Pendle Witches, this great dark looming hill of Pendle Grit sandstone is more than this by far. Its presence as the Northmost extent of the tunnels of the Pennine Labyrinth (see next post) has led both to those witch-trials and to a history of devil-sightings, including those underpinning the Devil's Footprints on the Southern flank near the village of Sabden. It also has a reputation for haunting which, contra wikipedia, far predates the visit from Most Haunted in 2004 (largely a product of non-undead spirits set loose by Nephandic activity), and it feels spooky. That said, it's not all metaphysical entropy - George Fox was inspired to start the Quakers by a divine vision here, and it's something of a sacred site to modern witches for obvious reasons. It's a big place, and not wholly under Fallen control.
  Note that unlike the other hills here, Pendle's power isn't concentrated around its peak, hence taking up three hexes
  A2 P2 S1 F2 M1 - Node 8, Resonance: Ominous 5, Lonely 1, Devilish 2

Legends: Living Nodes

Legend 5 is probably the only number we're concerned about for this post, which is for 'universally popular legend[s]' like Arthur and Cinderella. The only ones of these likely to have much relevance in the North West are Arthur, maybe Lancelot (supposedly brought up by the nymph Vivian in now-drained Martin Mere) depending on if you think he's a 4 or 5, Old Nick (who of course gets everywhere in the UK and is a form of a much more widespread trickster-Satan) and Thor in the Wirral. By convenient virtue of these being omni-legends, I probably don't need to explain them too much...

The Most Powerful Sites:

Node 9

First Street Hub - controlled by the Technocracy as a whole

Node 8 

Scafell Pike peak - controlled by the Verbenae, contested by the Progenitors

Furness Abbey - controlled by the Templars, contested by the Pipers

Long Meg and Her Daughters stone circle - controlled by the Verbenae

Pendle Hill - contested by the Nephandi and Verbenae
The Ninefold House -controlled by the Syndicate

Nodes 7+6
The Pyramid, Stockport - Controlled by the Syndicate
3*Node 6 
Heaton - Contested

Hex 1041 in Liverpool also needs to be noted, containing as it does a 7, 6 and two 5s (Hope Street, Anfield, the Docks and the Cavern Club). I was already pretty sure I wanted a Traditions base fronted by the Chorus, Ecstatics and to a lesser extent Etherites in this section, and this is only underlining that commitment, but the Docks and Anfield in particular are likely being contested by the Syndicate (operating out of Manchester).

Thus, we get a map that looks (with those major points getting purple circles) something like this:

And here's a link to the full map thus far, keyed with quick info on all of those locations. Doubtless to be updated further later, and eventually made pretty. 

Thanks for reading, and I hope to be posting another of these in less than seven months! Any comments, critiques, things I've missed etc. - do post them in the comment section! Next time: the North West's otherworlds and Horizon Realms.

- Jago

'Bibliography'

I cannot emphasize enough that this blog post is not in any way historical research, or even folkloristics. It's a melange of stuff I liked, and therefore I'm not going to cite it academically - that'd get dangerously close to engaging the skepticism centres, which'd kill the wonder I'm trying to channel. Still, I want to credit the following sources which I have shamelessly stolen from (in addition to those mentioned in the original post):

https://brigantesnation.com/sites/brigantia/cumbria/hardnott-roman-fort 

https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/tag/eveling/

https://www.whitehavennews.co.uk/news/17165137.on-the-hunt-of-fairies-lesley-park-on-cumbrias-rich-fairy-folklore/

https://really-haunted.com/places/lancaster-castle/

https://web.archive.org/web/20130718035624/http://www.barrowbc.gov.uk/pdf/Barrow_OG-web.pdf

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carlisle-castle/things-to-do/#section1

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carlisle-castle/things-to-do/#section1

Leagues of Cthulhu's guide to Cumbria

In Search of Albion 

https://liverpoolcathedral.org.uk/about-us/our-history/

https://www.embarktravel.co.uk/post/the-myth-and-magic-behind-the-mountain-pendle-hill

https://map.whoownsengland.org

https://www.spirit-energy.com/our-operations/uk/producing-fields/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/manchesters-first-street-hub-reaches-completion-milestone

https://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/west-wall-traverse-scafell/

https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ravon/2012-n61-ravon0834/1018600ar/

https://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/green-crag-harter-fell-hard-knott/

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/business-news/top-200-north-west-businesses-11897008

https://skwawkbox.org/2024/02/05/garston-residents-launch-fight-against-time-bomb-that-threatens-whole-of-south-liverpool/

https://www.veolia.co.uk/garston

https://iberianature.com/britainnature/taking-the-corpse-road/

https://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/legends/the-wizard-of-alderley-edge/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/darkhistoryfolklore/posts/4068684860087208/

https://occult-world.com/crackenthorpe/

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_Machells_of_Crackenthorpe

https://thelocalmythstorian.com/industrial-magic

https://gw.geneanet.org/lard?lang=en&n=de+trafford&p=edmund

Ritteriography

I think there are cases where using songs in the body of the text of a post makes a lot of sense, and for the most part this hasn't been one. I expect there'll be more in posts that focus on fewer sites and on characters; we'll see. At any rate though, I have been listening to the amount of Josh Ritter you'd expect whilst writing this, and if you're familiar you might see ideas from the following emerging in various places throughout, as well as just the general grimy-yet-spiritual tone that I hope has come across. 

• Thin Blue Flame
• Where the Night Goes
• The Curse 
• Strong Swimmer
• Whatever Burns Will Burn
• Leaves and Kings
• Beautiful Night
• Hotel Song
• Morning is a Long Way Down
• Horrible Qualities
• Monster Ballads
• Me & Jiggs 
• Golden Age of Radio

And from some other artists:

• Brown Bird, Rat Tail File
• Brown Bird, Bilgewater
• Leonard Cohen, Anthem
• Mumford and Sons, Babel   
• various choirs, Be Still, For the Presence of the Lord
• Grace Petrie, The Losing Side