As I parked on a deserted stretch of cobblestones by the nearest warehouse, the radio presenter told me I was listening to the Fred Russell show. I eased the car backwards to make sure it wasn’t visible from Monks Cross, and was switching off the radio when I heard a caller describe the site as somewhere uptowners doss. I tramped to the junction, hoping to be met just by the sounds of the motorway – by no kind of presence.

The roar of traffic grew in my ears as I ventured under the ramp. Beyond the first of the wide square pillars I saw signs of the homeless, sleeping bags and huddled blankets, hidden from the road. All the makeshift beds were deserted, and nothing like a face had started to creep out of a bag in the shadow of a column before it was snatched back like a creature surprised in its lair. Regardless of the August sultriness, someone appeared to have set about building a fire beneath the motorway, and I couldn’t avoid noticing how much the wooden structure resembled an inverted cross.

I’d pieced together the history of the site from the occult atlas and a page for the town the junction served. It had originally been named for a stone cross, a monument erected at a crossroads to commemorate a monastery blessed by a mediaeval saint. According to legend, if only to that, the cross had repeatedly been found turned upside down despite its massiveness, on nights that bore a magical significance. Eventually it had been destroyed, perhaps by people who blamed the cross itself for its antics. Even the fragments were disposed of, and nobody had tried to reconstruct it or erect a substitute. By the time the motorway was built, the source of the name of the site was virtually forgotten. I’d found the mundane information on the local page, and the rest embedded in the occult map, which tagged the place with the name of a practitioner – Crux Inverso, which it translated as Upturned Cross.