"The Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him..."

  Ten minutes walk from Kentish Town, there are roads entirely unchaperoned by lamplight, and where there is light, there are hills, and green, and gates. I don't think of horror passing these overgrowths, I think of a kinder magic, less prevalent onscreen - something I'd hoped to see when Peter Jackson had filmed Lord of the Rings in fact, but those elves turned out more monochromatic, less folksy than I had hoped.

 

  These days, the supernatural born of the natural in British art is nearly always either twee or terrifying. In the real world however – even in NW3 – it seems easy to still encounter uncomplicated awe, a connection to something pagan but unthreatening. Suddenly on my walk, I thought of the chapter in The Wind In The Willows that could never be included in adaptation, in which Mole and Ratty encounter a vision of Pan.

 

 Here imagined by E. H. Shepard (source).

 

 I'd read that this god had a particular significance to closeted Edwardians, and wondered if the inclusion of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", as the chapter's called, was Kenneth Grahame subtly shipping his two protagonists. I resolved to see if I could find the Cosgrove Hall version when I got home: the company's original adaptation had omitted the chapter, but I remembered it getting a whole episode when they came to make the series. And I found it, and it's perfect, still one of the most startling episodes of children's television you can imagine, the answer to a prayer. All hail Pan.