The Hermit of Ashton Heath

After Sunday service, groups lingered to speak about the rumours. Some had already been nonchalant as others questioned about it, failing to hide their eagerness. The experts led the way: a path through the farmer’s field, shortcuts created by broken fences, the disorder of bare trees. All this led to a three-foot-high wooden hut, dug out of the ground and roofed with flags, stones, and sack cloths. The hut was home to the Hermit of Ashton Heath.

Jonas John Kilshaw was born in 1848. He was 58 on the Sunday in question and had been living outside of a home for around 10 years. Normally, he’d wash in a ditch and cut his hair and beard with a pair of borrowed scissors.

Through spring and early summer, Jonas walked down south to earn a few bob by picking hops, steadily making his return on foot in autumn. This took him as far as Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, living there for months at a time. He was no stranger to their prisons. Through winter, with only cats for company, he would collect discarded tin cans and melt them into solder to sell. The discards of the locality were his raw material.

Despite his wanderings, it was in Ashton-in-Makerfield that he earned his mythical status as the Hermit. And on a late winter’s Sunday, hundreds had arrived to see him with their own eyes. Thankfully, at this point, old Jonas had mastered his act.

With the crowd slowly surrounding his hut, he’d look up through a slit, eyes shadowed by his cap. Once the crowd was sufficient, he could begin.

Jonas slunk up from his hut, shoulders slightly humped, making sure his face was obscured and his hands upturned. He slowly hobbled towards the closest audience member, letting his posture speak for itself. No doubt, this person would reach into their pocket and deposit something, however small, into his palm. Would they feel a pang of shame? After the morning of prayer and ceremony, after all the excitement of the walk, the rumours, the speculation — just a man and his ditch.

As coins were pressed into his palm, Jonas sprung from one person to the next, thrusting his steady hands as if they were cast in stone, balancing the growing pile of change as he chanted: “Copper up, copper up for Jonas the Gipsy King!”

An article from the Wigan Examiner describes Jonas as having “taken advantage of the crowd which had collected in the vicinity of his hut,” for he “begged alms from them.” It seems they too saw his act as a performance, an exploitative one. To the authorities, it was wrong to hold your poverty in your hands and present it to others. But he was given the title of hermit, and that comes with responsibilities.

A hermit is one who lives alone and apart from the rest of society, usually for religious reasons. I won’t dare to suppose Jonas’ motivations, but to leave behind your town must require something like faith, in oneself and in nature. And that’s what defines the hermit: letting go. To the people of Ashton, their fascination, their mythologising, were rooted in this letting go of normality. Jonas simply showed them what they wanted to see: his palms open to emptiness.

Prior to that Sunday, he had received warnings from the police. He ignored them; he claimed he didn’t care for all the authorities in the country. In that Sunday crowd, however, was a plainclothes police officer and Jonas was caught empty handed – there were a few shilling in his pocket – and taken into custody on a charge of begging. He was sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment and hard labour.

But what was the life he had removed himself from?

Ashton-in-Makerfield is a small market town in the Wigan Borough on the Lancashire coalfield. According to John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer, around 1870, half of Ashton’s property value was underground. From below Ashton, miners would extract coal for use across the country. It kept people warm, enabled nationwide travel, and sustained entire industries. It goes without saying that a miner’s wages did not reflect the toil of their work. The real promise in Ashton was buried underneath, and it was a small faction who took advantage of it.

Some of the collieries remained active up until the 1950s. After that, Ashton was left with the memories of its industry and buried wealth, waste and emptiness. By the 1970s, the district had one of the country’s highest proportions of derelict land, mainly piles of waste material called slag heaps. Decades on, these are mostly cleared.

What remains? Ashton Heath’s memories of industry are its paths leading to closure: concrete-floored clearings, rusted fences, ruined walls, piles of waste, metal bridges. Ashton’s Old English etymology, where the ash trees grow, was read like secret code for treasure, dug up and then taken away. The slag heaps stood next to the ash trees as symbols of what the locals got in return.

Growing up there, you can’t escape this pervading sense of closedness. Closed businesses, run-down schools, racism, and homophobia. An opening is an uncertainty. It’s scary. Meanwhile, emptiness, as Old Jonas worked out, is a reliable spectacle.

As he grew older, not only did the journeys down south grow more tiresome but winter became a burden. He turned to the slag heaps, often set on fire, for warmth. At age 70, his body was found in a tip at Park Lane Collieries. An inquest at the Robin Hood Hotel recorded a “death by misadventure,” a death by accident. The body was badly decomposed and appeared to have been there for days, reported The Wigan Examiner. It was likely he suffocated due to the sulphur fumes.

I wonder – as he knelt by that ditch one last time and splashed cold, mucky water onto his face, walked in late afternoon darkness to the light of the smouldering heap, and rested on his bed of waste – if he was aware what he offered to the locals in those empty hands. A rejection of the present. To spare yourself of normality is radical.

Ashton-in-Makerfield’s history is the scars on its landscape. Their healing has only been stunted by austerity measures and imbalances in funding between North and South. I suppose today’s hermit figures are those who pack up and leave Ashton’s closedness behind – the ones who inevitably return with open hands, gathering whatever alms they can.

Our modern hermits have forgotten the moral behind Old Jonas’ story. The crowds don’t want to see what you’ve gained after leaving the ash trees but what you become. And they know one thing: your return betrays your mission.

print illustrations by Samuel Jones