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By walking the ancient landscape of Britain and following the wheel of the year, we can reconnect to our shared folklore, to the seasons and to nature. Let this hauntological gazetteer guide you through our enchanted places and strange seasonal rituals. SPRING- Watch the equinox sunrise light up the floating capstone of Pentre Ifan and connect with the Cailleach at the shrine of Tigh nam Bodach in the remote Highlands. SUMMER- Feel the resonance of ancient raves and rituals in the stone circles of southwest England’s Stanton Drew, Avebury and the Hurlers. AUTUMN- Bring in the harvest with the old gods at Coldrum Long Barrow, and brave the ghosts on misty Blakeney Point. WINTER- Make merry at the Chepstow wassail, and listen out for the sunken church bells of the lost medieval city of Dunwich. The first book by iconic zine creators and cultural phenomenon Weird Walk. This is a superbly designed guide to Britain’s strange and ancient places, to standing stones and pagan rituals, and to the process of re-enchantment via weird walking.

Text reproduced from https://www.weirdwalk.co.uk/ (accessed 04/03/24)

Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979)

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Fay Godwin
Top Withens by Ted Hughes

“Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding of Yorkshire on the 17th August 1930. Ted was a pupil at the Burnley Road School until he was seven, when his family moved to Mexborough, in South Yorkshire. As a child he spent many hours exploring the countryside around Mytholmroyd, often in the company of his older brother, Gerald, and these experiences and the influences of the landscape were to inform much of his later poetry.

In ‘The Rock’, an autobiographical piece about his early childhood, Hughes writes about Scout Rock, whose cliff face provided ‘both the curtain and back-drop to existence‘. The area continued to be a powerful source of inspiration in his poetry long after he had left Yorkshire. Hughes described the experience of looking out of the skylight window of his bedroom on 1 Aspinall Street onto the Zion Chapel. The Chapel is long gone, but Zion Terrace remains, its name a reminder of more God-fearing times.

In his classic and richly personal collection Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979), with photographs by Fay Godwin, Hughes suggests that the Calder Valley was originally the kingdom of Elmet, the last Celtic land to fall to the Anglo-Saxons. A second, revised edition was published as Elmet in 1994. 

Many of Hughes’s other poems also relate to the Calder Valley. ‘Six Young Men’, for example, was written at Hughes’s parents’ house at Heptonstall Slack in 1956. The poem describes a photograph belonging to Hughes’s father of six of his friends on an outing to Lumb Falls, taken just before the First World War.”

Text reproduced from https://www.theelmettrust.org/elmet-trust-ted-hughes/ (accessed 25/01/23). Images reproduced from Pinterest.

Seeing England

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In the seventeenth century antiquarianism was a well-respected profession and antiquarian works were in demand, particularly amongst the gentry, who were especially interested in establishing lineage and the descent of land tenure. Although intended primarily as a source of information about who owned what and where, they often contained fascinating descriptions of the English landscape. Charles Lancaster has examined the town and county surveys of this period and selected the most interesting examples to illustrate the variety and richness of these depictions. Organised by region, he has provided detailed introductions to each excerpt. Including such writers as John Stow, William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole, Daniel Defoe, Gilbert White and Celia Fiennes, this is a book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in both national and local history and to lovers of English scenery.

Text reproduced from https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Seeing_England/6E87AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 (accessed 14/01/24)

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Seeing_England/6E87AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

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In this journey across England’s most forbidding and mysterious terrain, William Atkins takes the reader from south to north, exploring moorland’s uniquely captivating position in our history, literature and psyche. Atkins’ journey is full of encounters, busy with the voices of the moors, past and present. He shows us that, while the fierce terrains we associate with Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles are very human landscapes, the moors remain daunting and defiant, standing steadfast against the passage of time.

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“Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking—about what is left of the past, about the temporality of what remains, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the practices that archaeologists follow to uncover them, is the essence of the archaeological imagination.”

In his book Shanks offers the following definition: “To recreate the world behind the ruins on the land, to reanimate the people behind the shard of antique pottery, a fragment of the past: this is the work of the archaeological imagination, a creative impulse and faculty at the heart of archaeology, but also embedded in many cultural dispositions, discourses and institutions commonly associated with modernity. The archaeological imagination is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes toward traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history.” pp.25

Text reproduced from https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Archaeological_Imagination/a6tJDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 (accessed 13/08/23)