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The Green Chapel
A year and a day later, Gawain kept his word.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Deep mossy rock chasm in woodland
- Legend from
- Medieval poem; modern identification
- Tone
- Eerie
Gawain came here to bare his neck to the Green Knight's axe. Or so some scholars think.
Lud's Church is a mossy chasm in the woods near Gradbach, over 100 metres long and 18 metres deep, made by a landslip. Since the 1950s it has been proposed as the Green Chapel of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the place where Gawain goes to face the Green Knight's axe a year after beheading him. The poem's dialect points to this corner of the Midlands, and Wikipedia credits Ralph Elliott (1958) with the identification. Haden's bibliography notes earlier work by Colgrave (1938) and a rival candidate cave at Wetton Mill, so the claim remains an argument, not a fact.