Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings through the British Ritual Year

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The wheel turns and we find ourselves halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Signs of new life emerge, the earth awakens, a new issue of Weird Walk pokes through the fecund mulch… On stepping down into the sunken stone horseshoe of the well, the great age of the place is apparent. Water seeps across ancient flagstones that lead to an arched recess within the far wall. Here, a basin collects the water that bubbles from the underworld, while further recesses provide space for offerings or perhaps cups for those who would have drunk the iron-rich water, the mineral evident in a reddish build-up of sediment between the paving and the wall. In this book is a radical idea. By walking the ancient landscape of Britain, engaging with the traces of the deep past and following the wheel of the year as it turns, we can find a pathway that reconnects us to our shared folklore, to the seasons and to nature, setting a course towards optimism, re-enchantment and brighter futures.

Here was the land of Silbury Hill and Avebury stone circle, of Wayland the Smith and the great Uffington White Horse, whose annual scouring is a true pagan survival; here also was the land of the druids, the first farming communities, the last Saxon kings, and countless age-old folk tales. It was a potent path indeed, and the trip soon led to others.Hauntology OG, E.F. Benson’s wonderful, eerie tales often focus on resonances, with the spectral imprint of past events reemerging in the present. This collection features an account of the author’s supernatural experiences at his house in Rye. The revenant presence is described in terms familiar from Benson’s ‘spook stories’: ‘It was as if something out of the past, some condition of life long vanished, was leaking through into the present.’

Dartmoor is a weird place; temporal dislocation comes with the territory. Wayfinding is not easy among this gorse, these rambling tors and secluded brooks. And when an autumn mist descends, you can be transported: a bronze age farmer to your left, a medieval tin miner to your right, and up ahead the lord of the manor has antiquarian ambitions. He’s just repositioned those stones. The earth gnomes don’t approve.

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Hutton’s brilliant investigation into deity-like figures in Christian Europe shows us that these characters are much more complex than was once thought. The epilogue features the definitive account of the evolution of the Green Man. 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 Leyline is a quest and a rite of re-enchantment: by day seeking out connections in the landscape, and by night delighting in music and merriment, we embrace a collective endeavour in the time of the individual. The inn has its share of tales told around the fire, a favourite being “The Salted Corpse”. This yarn tells of a traveller staying overnight who opens up an intriguing chest in his room. To his horror, he finds himself gazing upon the face of a dead man. Suspecting murder, he rushes to the landlord, who casually informs him that “tis only father”, the old man having been salted down and stored until the trip can be made from the remote inn to Lydford for burial. Fenella operate in a shadowy, crepuscular world. The experimental ensemble led by Jane Weaver (and long term collaborators Raz Ullah and Pete Phillipson) return with hallucinogenic excursions into ambient textures and hypnagogic drones. Fenella make spirited melodic progressive pop music that pulsates with the same magnetism that fans of Jane Weaver’s own The Silver Globe and Modern Kosmology have come to expect and hold closely.

A lovely mix of early Autechre and classic Tangerine Dream… this is electronica as an enveloping tonal journey, chiming and pulsating with analogue life” Once passed around playgrounds as charmed objects, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks remain a potent way to while away the hours in a torchlit tent or moorland hostelry sans Wi-Fi. Obviously get the mid-eighties edition if you can. Tigh nam Bodach, from where the goddess Cailleach, her husband and their children watch over the land. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianRob Young’s peerless overview of Britain’s ‘visionary music’ explores a tangled web of folk connections, from song collectors and pastoral composers to acid folk eccentrics and electronic pioneers. All are united by the inspiration they draw from this haunted old place we call home. St Nicholas church, Trellech, where sculpted side panels of a 17th-century sundial bear witness to the village’s mysteries. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Visit Monmouthshire There’s no shortage of fun ways to spice up your daily walk. If you’re feeling yourself, you can do a model strut at the gym or go on a hot girl walk around town while blasting Drake. If you want to perk up your mood, you can zone out on a silly little walk, which is all about wandering aimlessly until you feel happier. You could even take your partner along for a hot couple walk when you want a little company. At this point, there’s a walking trend for every mood — so don’t be surprised that weird walks are now a thing. Running through modern Scottish and Irish mythology, the legend of the Cailleach may well have begun life in literature before tumbling into the world of folklore. The goddess is a shaper of mountains and wild places, a bringer of storms and winter. Although it is unclear how old the animistic practices associated with Tigh nam Bodach actually are (some say they were developed in the 18th or 19th centuries by shepherds), the place names in this landscape certainly suggest a venerable association with the goddess.

Elsewhere Stewart Lee finds his own connection with the landscape on a walk from Lamorna, uniting passions for visionary artists and prehistoric monuments and, in contrast to country acres parcelled away on grand estates, we take a look at the edgelands, those unloved, unruly spaces and the music that conjures them. A ruminative and rather beautiful thing. Boards Of Canada, Cluster and Craven Faults are among those whose influence can be felt throughout”AUTUMN Bring in the harvest with the old gods at Coldrum Long Barrow, and brave the ghosts on misty Blakeney Point SUMMER Feel the resonance of ancient raves and rituals in the stone circles of southwest England’s Stanton Drew, Avebury and the Hurlers, and follow the Morris sides around the pubs of Thaxted Just an absolute and total TOME, without which it is highly unlikely we would be typing these words you are reading. Top shelf material of the most sacred and venerated kind. He’s a dab hand at writing tunes too. Hail to the Arch Drood.