It was tremendously sad to learn of the passing of Nick Talbot, who died on 4th December at the desperately premature age of 37. Talbot had been the creative force behind the group Gravenhurst for 12 years, ever since their first LP Internal Travels, released in 2002. Indeed, Gravenhurst was, at various points, a veil for solo projects and performances. Talbot’s hushed voice, assured guitar fingerpicking and ear for affecting melody made the more intimate solo aspects of his work quietly compelling, drawing the listener into dark places and states of mind, but always tempered with compassion, pity and even empathetic identification. The more haunting and haunted aspects of the folk repertoire were an influence, as were the folk artists of the 60s and 70s. There are definite echoes of Nick Drake’s solid fingerstyle playing to the circling patterns of Circadian on the Ghost in Daylight album, for example, and his more dextrous accompaniments recall Bert Jansch and John Renbourne, in or out of Pentangle. There’s something of a folk air to the name, too. It’s an imaginary English place fashioned from a real village. Whilst Gravenhurst songs often have a contemporary urban setting, there’s always a hint of older patterns coming through the grubby surfaces, ancient and mysterious landscapes underlying the cracked concrete surfaces, thrice told tales recurring once more.


Gravenhurst could also create a driving sound as a trio or quartet, with the occasional guitar explosion providing the cathartic release of ecstatic noise. There was s subtle sound design applied to both the stark acoustic and fleshed out electric incarnations of Gravenhurst. Talbot had been inspired by the likes of Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation when he moved to Bristol in the 90s, drawn to the richness and depth of their drone-based sounds. Many of his own productions surround the songs with shimmering haloes of organ drone and flickering spectres of electro-acoustic sound. They can be heard to great effect on Fitzrovia, which is backed by the moaning ghosts and echoing rush of the forgotten histories and buried rivers (‘Wandle, Falcon, Effra, Ravensbourne’) the song summons up. This, together with a feel for dynamic pacing which gives some of the longer numbers a sense of narrative development, lends his music a certain cinematic air. There were the occasional instrumental pieces, too. This seemed to be a direction he was moving in on the last album, The Ghost in Daylight. Carousel and Islands are particular lovely ambient miniatures, the latter dedicated to the Broadcast singer Trish Keenan. I first saw Gravenhurst when they supported Broadcast back in 2006.


Lyrically, Talbot was always attracted to dark matter. A recurrent theme was the seed of violence inherent in humanity, ‘the velvet cell within men’. In an early song from Flashlight Seasons, I Turn My Face to the Forest Floor, he wrote ‘you’re only a stone’s throw from all the violence you buried years ago’. It’s a line which forms the basis for a significant portion of his future output. This violence exists on a personal level, but also expands outwards into society and into the political arena. It reflects the balance of power at all levels. So, in Black Holes in the Sand, he sings ‘I held the hand that threw the stone that killed the bird that woke the city’. A circle of culpability and indirect agency which insists on a moral dimension to the most seemingly inconsequential of actions. The Foundry on the 2012 album The Ghost in Daylight makes the connection between violent impulses on a personal level and the violence of fascism and other political doctrines of forceful control explicit. ‘A uniform changes something inside’ Talbot writes, ‘and you won’t know when evil comes, evil looks just like anyone’. Anyone is capable of it, ‘the man with the match could be anybody’. This concern with violence also manifests itself in one aspect of Talbot’s writing which I find troubling: his portraits of murderers and serial killers. The serial killer as a modern day mythological figure and recurrent motif of horror and detective fiction is a cultural phenomenon which I find particularly depressing. Talbot’s disturbingly allusive songs are generally indirect and focus on the inner state of the characters he creates. In some respects, they are contemporary manifestations of old, death-haunted folk songs. Although Talbot’s approach is the opposite to the extrovert melodrama of Nick Cave’s murder ballads – his songs hint at hidden stories rather than explicitly relating them in an unfolding narrative. It’s significant that the only time he does do this it turns out to be a cover version – Husker Du’s Diane.

These songs also intersect with another abiding thematic concern, the distance between people and the retreat into states of disconnection and isolated inner solitude. Another early song from Flashlight Seasons, The Ice Tree, sets the mood: ‘we try to connect with the people outside, they pass through our slumber like trains in the night’. A feeling of numbness and emotional damage blurs the psyches of Talbot’s subjects. They stumble through the world like bewildered ghosts. In She Dances, the dancer thinks ‘I need new clothes, new skin; a mind I can bear to live in’. Another character (in Animals) reflects upon the revellers of an English Saturday night and muses ‘I wish I could be like them and I try/but I find it more rewarding to walk along the river/picturing my body discarded in the water’. Clearly there’s a good deal of self-loathing going on here, which can develop into an unhealthy way of defining identity, of creating confining prisons for the soul. This is fully expressed in the short lyric of the lengthy Song From Under the Arches: ‘I’ve seen bad things in bad places/What did I learn?/Wallow in grime/Tonight we’ll drink the sewers dry/We can’t function outside of these dreams of suicide’. Relationships are also seen as traps, with romance a self-deluding compulsion which causes people to keep dancing around one another when any feeling has long since dissipated.


Talbot’s view of love may have been jaundiced, but he remained a romantic, albeit a dark-hued one. ‘The universal dance/The black romance’ as he puts it in Nicole is one whose steps he rehearsed over and again. He rakes over the cold ashes of love rather than stoking its initial heat, dwelling on the sadness of its diminishment and the bitterness of its betrayal. Again, a shrinking into the cold cage of the disconnected self is often the cause of death for romance. As he writes in The Ice Tree ‘I caress where my lover once lay by my side before I turned inwards and forced her to fly’.

Talbot was also a romantic in his use of romantic language and mysterious imagery drawn from the natural world. Pine forests, rivers and seas, snow, ice and fire, stars and moon are all used to evocative symbolic effect. These depict real, figurative and inner landscapes, the latter suggested by the title of the first Gravenhurst album, Inner Traveller. Natural landscapes are contrasted with decaying cityscapes, the expansiveness of the former serving to highlight the claustrophobic confinement of the latter. In Grand Union Canal, for example, he writes ‘while you are waiting for me by a copper blue sea/I am fading away in this room’. He conjures city atmospheres with a beautiful economy of effect worth of his literary hero Iain Sinclair. I particularly like ‘black spine Northern Line, feeds on money and time’ from Hourglass. It seems to paint the city itself as a predatory beast, a devouring underground serpent. Seasons and their atmospheres are also invoked, winter and autumn in particular. The winter chill is the natural mood for a Gravenhurst song, and we find it in the opening lines of The Foundry in which ‘two wolves chase a whitetail through the snow’, as well as in songs such as Fog Round the Figurehead (a marvellously imagistic title), Winter Moon and The Ice Tree. The idea of buried or sunken ruins, artefacts or histories is also one which fascinated Talbot. There are the ‘cities beneath the sea/in deserted towns and burial mounds’ and ‘buried in sand/an ancient talisman touched by a thousand hands’, as well as the ‘lost event(s) consigned to history’ in Fitzrovia, the secret stories of the city. These lost worlds or frozen landscapes equate with the subterranean caverns of the unconscious, the unexplored territories of the self.

It might sound as if the tenor of Talbot’s music is relentlessly and oppressively downbeat. Whilst it’s difficult to deny this charge given the evidence cited above, there are counterbalancing forces. They lyrical quality of the language raises the tone above turgid misery-mongering. The sheer beauty of much of the music and the light delicacy of Talbot’s voice (like a less wavering Robert Wyatt), which is shot through with compassion, sympathy and even pity, makes the subject matter easier to bear, and casts it in a different light. A commensurately harsh musical setting would indeed make it oppressive, the kind of thing which would only appeal to people who feel that music should be harrowing and extreme, an aural endurance test. And there are chinks of light which shine through, too. They are all the more pronounced and precious for their scarcity. Talbot rejected shallow triumphs, glittering prizes and facile, baseless positivism. What hope does emerge is hard-earned and thereby genuine and strong.


There is a non-denominational religious aspect to all of this; a yearning for an authentic way of being free of the traps of violence, false emotion and material desire. Something beyond ‘the emptiness of the prize’. He is seeking ‘the Ghost of St Paul, still missing’, as he put in the song on The Ghost in Daylight. Perhaps there are hints of it in older forms, in the mysterious folk rituals which he summons up so well in songs like Flowers in Her Hair. The unmasking of the Spring Queen, the metamorphosis of veneration into abomination, marks a passing of something from the world, a desacralisation. ‘And when the flowers died they saw through the disguise/and all the townsfolk circled her/with prayers and tar and feathers/and fire’. And later, in The Ghost of St Paul, ‘slowly the smell of her fades/as blossoms wither away’. The sense of the world as sacred, and of that sacredness as being essentially feminine, incarnated in the form of the Goddess, is supplanted by a worldview dominated by the male violence Talbot dissects. A violent power which itself dissects (and murders) anything threatening its authority or potency. The eponymous authority figures in Hollow Men ensure that the status quo is maintained, and that there can be no rebirth of the Goddess, of sacrosanct female power: ‘her name is known, her name is known,/cut her up, cut her out,/crush her before she finds it’.

Talbots landscapes are haunted by the hunted. From the whitetails chased by two black wolves in The Foundry through the ‘dog loose in the woods’ where there’s ‘a fox tied to a tree’ in Flowers In Her Hair to the knowledge that ‘they will come for me/with searchlights streaming through the cedar trees’ in Song Among the Pine. But there’s still a hint of something which was once there, and may one day be rediscovered and resurrected. The key line in Ghost of St Paul dedicates the song to those who refuse to give up hope, who continue the quest and resist the controls of those who would corral their spirit: ‘here’s to the brave/to all those resisting’.

Some of Talbot’s influences were revealed through his choices of covers. He went back to the roots of the expansive, noisy drift of fellow Bristolians Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation by taking the psych pop of The Kinks’ See My Friends and extending its two chord drone to the horizon. Husker Du have already been mentioned, but there is a general translation of the brutal realism and anti-romanticism of hardcore into a more melancholic English idiom. The cover of Fairport Convention’s Farewell, Farewell demonstrates a real affinity with Richard Thompson’s bleak but compassionate songwriting. The spectral winds ghosting around guitar and voice suggest final words of parting, perhaps delivered from somewhere beyond. It’s a truly haunting interpretation. A version of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren also captures the haunted, yearning quality of its briny drift with unadorned simplicity. Talbot also sang The Beatles’ Only A Northern Song on a Mojo collection of Yellow Submarine covers. It was a choice which indicated he might have shared George Harrison’s disdain for music biz practices. He also expressed a great admiration for Ian Curtis’ writing, his pared down but resonant phrasing.


Talbot was a writer as well as a musician, and literary influences show through in much of his work. Hollow Men alludes to TS Eliot, whose Waste Land also permeates Gravenhurst’s entropic landscapes. William Burroughs, an early inspiration, is acknowledged in the title of the LP The Western Lands. The cover itself has a rather bookish graphic design. Talbot also wrote for the online magazine The Quietus, and interviewed a number of writers for its pages. He was a keen student of philosophy, and his interview with John Gray makes fascinating and revealing reading. Gray opposed the rationalist/humanist fundamentalism of Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling in his books Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals. He offered a different interpretation of religion which acknowledges its value and usefulness as a mythological template for understanding the complexities of human behaviour and experience. In his introduction to the interview, Talbot indicates his sympathy for Gray’s views and his dislike for the wholesale attacks on religious belief launched by Dawkins and Grayling, whilst declaring his own atheist standpoint. He wrote ‘to the many atheists who found the Dawkins camp’s rabid proselytising not only smug but tinged with an oddly religious fervour, the prospect of an intellectual heavyweight tearing up the very foundations of the rationalist position was a beautiful thing’. It shines a further light on, and adds more complex shading to the yearning for the sacred, for deeper connection in the Gravenhurst lyrics.


Talbot’s interview with Alan Moore reveals further literary influences: both Moore himself and the London writings of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Talbot published a few issues of a comic called Ultraskull, written by himself and a small coterie of collaborators. Avowedly amateurish, thoroughly cynical and deliberately offensive, it was an uncensored outpouring which recast Gravenhurst preoccupations in the form of deep black humour. It was occasionally funny, frequently sick, sometimes both – a nihilistic blast. Talbot was a particular admirer of Sinclair’s language, viewing its concentrated folding of word pictures, allusions and metaphors as something to aspire to. The conversation with Moore also turns to HP Lovecraft, which points to another inspiration, a source for those subterranean cities and ‘black holes in the sand’. Talbot was a horror fan in general, and ghosts and spectres flit through his work over the years. The luminous string arrangement at the end of The Prize is provided by the Algernon Blackwood Memorial Ensemble.


In fact, The Prize is a grand song to go out on. If the sentiments of the lyric insist upon the emptiness of the prize, be that romantic fulfilment or the promises of shiny consumer enticements, the glorious coda offers something far more uplifting. The strings swell and pulsate, building and building until the voice of the guitar explodes into roaring harmony, elevating everything with an ecstatic chordal riff. It’s such a celebratory sound, not empty at all. Perhaps that the message left for us. Music is where we find direct connection. In a cold world, this is the warm, beating heart of it all. The real Prize. God bless and may you find peace.

It was on a sharp, blue-skied autumn day that I set out to hunt down the demons of Ashcombe. I’d seen pictures of the strange, distorted faces carved into the dark oak of 17th century bench ends in Todd Gray’s fine book on the subject, Devon’s Ancient Bench Ends. These were like nothing else I’d come across in my explorations of old Devon churches. They were emanations from the shadowy undergrowth of the rural imagination, monsters from the night side, the impenetrable gloom of the surrounding forest depths. They seemed to display no evident religious symbolism. Demons tended to be relegated to the exterior of churches, reminders of the evils from which the interior would provide sanctuary. But here they have invaded the space of the nave, settling themselves down right beside the congregation. This demanded closer inspection. But they proved frustratingly elusive. On my first visit I found the church locked, even though it was remote and unlikely to attract the attentions of all but the most dedicated and well-informed vandal. I returned on a Sunday, but discovered that services were few and far between, parcelled out between several other small churches in the parish. Perhaps this journey would prove more fruitful. There was a sense of anticipation in the air, a sense of immanence which augured well (or maybe ill).













The road to Ashcombe from Dawlish wound along the side of a valley, following the rippling contours of the gently folded hills. The hedgerows were rich with bright berries and late blooms. Bees sucked on pin-headed stamen clusters which looked like they were dipped in sugary sherbet. A fiery ball of robin’s pincushion tangled itself wirily around a pink-thorned rose bush, dewdrops caught in its threads and glinting with jewelled sunlight luminescence. A kestrel hovered over an open field, wings arched back in tense suspension, perfectly poised to plummet onto its pinpointed prey. Look out down below! Buzzards circle lazily on invisible currents, landing on bare, blasted branches and adding hunched, slightly sulky silhouettes to the tree’s skeletal outline. Raptor cries screech across the echoing valley. This is an edgeless landscape, defined by its curving horizons and sinuous roads. Woodland copses cresting undulant fields warp beneath contrasting cloud masses. Abstract compositions are drawn by tractors and harvesters, tramlines and long wavelengths etched through dry wheat. They are like energy patterns, circling in concentric ripples around the metal trees of pylons. Pylons, with their geometric grids, break up the non-linearity of the landscape. Only human constructs are linear here: Gates, greenhouses (there is a rose growing farm down by the river in the valley) and telegraph poles.


Arriving at the edge of the hamlet of Ashcombe, the prospect of the 12th century church tower, elevated by the rise of the slope on which it is planted, is framed by trees, chimneys and a telegraph pole. The pole sprouts a solid junction box and the brown ceramic discs of insulators, which are strung from the sky-raking wires like sleek mushroom caps. The Norman tower is ancient, but the telegraph technology it is juxtaposed with also looks outmoded, redolent of a redundant post-war moment. An old church filled with strange carvings and the crackling energies of 50s technology; this could be the setting for a Nigel Kneale TV drama in which the supernatural is confronted with the modern apparatus of scientific rationalism.


The church lies on the lower slopes of a steep hill which marks the southern end of the Haldon ridge. It’s a forested spine of land which extends a fair few miles, a rainshadow divider separating the Exe Valley from the Teign Valley and the rise of the moor beyond. Ashcombe is tucked into a fold in the lee of the range. It catches the sun on its path from the east, but the shadows can fall quickly and prematurely as the Haldons impose their looming gloom. It’s a short but sharply inclined trudge upwards from the trough of the bell-curve the road traces through the Ashcombe dell to the church’s hunched stone outline which broods above it. The graveyard is mounded up like the rounded back of a surfacing leviathan. Tilting crosses and gravestone arches stand out starkly against the sky, their dark contrast already beginning to dispel the brightness of the afternoon, to whisper intimations of a more chill atmosphere.











But there is brightness and life in the graveyard still. The efflorescing fruits of a tree produce vulgar, blushing pinks and glisteningly succulent oranges, nature’s vivid colour contrast to sombre grey stone. Violets cluster in the leaning shadow of granite slabs. Moss and lichen bloom across flat stone planes, forming their own expanding universes. Snails add their slimy script to etched lines, a spiral punctuation mark emphasising the letter or word where they take their fastened rest. Some find shelter in the sharp-angled armpit of a cross. Berries sprayed across a hardy shrub throw hard buttons of primary red against neutral granite, blood on fossilised bone.


The church is locked. Frustrated, I rattle the door a few times, as if this will do any good. I walk back down to the lychgate, its paint peeling in flakes of dark green, harmonising with the shedding of autumn tumbling all around it. Looking at the notices for hints as to when the next service might find it open and filled with sound and light. A postcard with faded felt-tip writing, half-hidden by other pinned pieces of paper, is just about legible. It tells me that there is a key held in the yellow cottage at the bottom of the hill for any who wish to explore the church. A large black dog greets me there, letting me know that somebody is in, whilst not exactly encouraging me to make myself known to them. The woman who answers is friendly and trusting, however, handing me the key without hesitation. She apologises for the state of the interior. Renovation work is being carried out, and she inhaled some dust when she was last in there. As a result, she has not been well enough to clear away the harvest festival decorations and offerings. I sympathise but wonder if I will be similarly infected. How old is this ‘dust’? From what part of the church has it been excavated or disturbed? But I have come this far. I must not falter in my resolve.


Disappointingly, the key is an ordinary front door variety rather than the large black iron affair I had hoped for. It fitted into a small yale lock inserted above the large hole which would have required an object ten times its size. The latch lifts with a pleasingly firm clack when I turn the circular iron door handle, however, and the heavy door creaks open. I walk through into the hushed interior, the outside world immediately receding, distanced by the airlock of the porch. The first thing I notice is the font, whose wooden cover is woven with strands of corn, grass and hedgerow berries. All are now withered and dessicated, their decorative arrangement falling into desuetude and disrepair. A heady scent of apples fills the church, overripe and on the verge of rotting fermentation. A neglected harvest offering left to mark the passing of autumn’s fecund riches and the advent of winter’s barren scarcity.








A green man with an amiable, placid face, broad and flat and topped with pointed porcine ears, looks out on the font from a capital atop a pillar at the back of the nave. Over the altar rail a golden foliate head peers down on the apples, grain and vegetables presented on the border of the sacred space of the sacristy. It is at the conjunction of roof joists painted a vibrant black, green, red and gold; a strange echo of Jamaican national colours in this rural English church. The joists also connect with what looks like a lion’s head wrapped in a turban. The Lion of Judah? More lions jut nobly from the arm rests of an oak throne beside the altar, the nub of their manes designed for a palm to rest at ease on, to stroke the woody nap of the tamed beasts’ head. On the back of the chair, two pot-bellied cherubs stand atop piles of rock or coal and bend beneath baskets of the same strapped to their backs. It’s a heavy load for such diminutive creatures to bear – child labour, essentially. A perky lectern eagle looks brightly out to the nave, its alert gaze surveying the three ranks of benches filling the space. It dates from the time of Elizabeth I and its noble, benevolent visage, beak crinkling into a knowing smile, bears the wisdom of the centuries, just as its back has borne the weight of the Word, the opened book.







The restoration and repair work being carried out in the church is made evident by the scaffolding at the back of the north aisle. The organ by the entrance in the north aisle is shrouded in a curtain of smoky plastic. The pipes are visible as spectral formations, seen as if through a billowing fog. I imagine the music they would make, muffled and diffuse, sounds drifting through from a dimly perceived distance. The window in the south transept has been boarded over, the direct southerly sun streaming around the edges in sharp-edged, haloing spears of light.





That same low, dazzling late Autumn light lends mocking haloes to the St Nectan demons. They rest on the bench ends like wicked Chads, or wedge themselves into the corner angles. With their lolling tongues, sharp-edged grins, curving tusks and pointed ears, they are like anti-cherubs, exuding abandoned glee at their own grotesque natures. One has serpentine wings, its flapping lips parted in a rubbery, toothless groan. Hooded, sunken eyes stare out with blank, pupil-less depth. Its neckline is a ragged gouge, as if the head had been crudely torn off by a savage force. A close cousin of this creature retains two teeth, protruding loosely and squarely from its upper lip (which looks as if it has the jellied consistency of a rock pool anemone), inverted echoes of the tombstones outside. If anything, the teeth make it look even worse than its gummy kin. A moaning spectre wraps its thin, vaporous face around the scrolled top of a bench end. It is impaled on the spearheads of Gothic arches. An arc of tongue darts out of the gaping, downturned mouth. It looks a little like the ghostly alien which made a regular appearance in the final end title of the original Star Trek series.





A squashed head seems to labouring under dense local gravity, and gurns around its two prominent teeth. A squirrel and a lizard nuzzle against it, whether familiars or tormentors it’s not wholly clear. Almond-eyed serpents spiral up the side of the bench, living, writhing vines. The distinction between human and animal becomes blurred with many of the figures here. There is a head which is part human, part…cat? It certainly has a cat’s alert, radar ears and long, flat nose. And its tongue hangs in the way that cat’s tongues do when they get distracted in the middle of a preen. But it also has wings scrolling back behind it (feathered or scaled rather than furred). Flying cats? It doesn’t bear thinking about. A head with two arms emerging from its base appears to be crawling, advancing with a crablike scuttle. The upper face is like a chitinous mask fixed above mouth and chin. It resembles a devolved form of humanity, or a Moreauvian experiment in vivisected hybridisation. Halfway to the crablike creatures of HG Wells’ terminal beach in The Time Machine, it is retreating back to the ocean. It also brings to mind the spider-head from John Carpenter’s version of The Thing.





A goofy, big-nosed simpleton looks up with dull, sleepy eyes sunken in lazy folds of flesh, its face pockmarked by woodworm. Its mouth hangs vacantly open in a buck-toothed, slack-jawed yokel half-smile, thick ox’s tongue rolled out beneath three slab-like pegs. Two peasants lean out from opposite sides of a bench end, their soft craniums moulded, squeezed and straightened into corner points. Their chins rest in cupped hands. One leers lasciviously, the other seems to be yawning, or perhaps he is boorishly bellowing some choice insult. Or maybe he just has really bad toothache, and is yelling in pain.




Two more corner figures come in the form of toothless angels (angels of the angles). They are round-cheeked and bullet-headed, celestial beings of a very Earthly cast, incarnations of ordinary local folk. Their faces are the theatrical happy/sad masks with the upward and downward curve of the mouth reflecting the comic and tragic poles of experience. The ‘sad’ angel’s eyes bug out with worry, and a night cap hints at early hours anxiety and circling, sleepless thoughts. The ‘happy’ angel looks at ease beneath relaxed, thickset brows. Its smile looks a little self-satisfied, a little self-satisfied, a little secretive, wolfish. A little….evil. Between the two angels rests a swinish demon, not showing the least concern at their proximity. Indeed, it is the angels which appear the more affected by its presence; the one fearfully so, the other sensing the possibilities an alliance might offer, the potential for power and personal worldly influence.



Another demon roosts nearby. This one is a creature of appetite, omnivorous and ravenous. It is bat-winged and tusked, with four-clawed hands ready to clutch at unwary prey. Its cross-eyed gaze by no means suggests limited vision and its tongue lolls out with panting hunger. In the far corner of the church, another serpent winds up the side of a bench-end, its pointed head nearly reaching the top. It is lightly dusted with plaster, a white powder like ash or the finest fall of snow (or some of that bee sherbet).


My first instinct is to wipe it clean. But no. On no account must I touch any of these creatures. What manner of dreadful curse might be unleashed I fear even to contemplate (perhaps the holder of the key might enlighten me). I’ve read my M.R.James. I know that the curious must be cautious, lest their studies uncover things best left to the darkness of ignorance. I have no wish to share the experiences of Archdeacon Haynes in The Stalls of Barchester. He feels the oaken carving of a cat on a choir stall come to life beneath his hand (‘I was startled by what seemed a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur, and a sudden movement, as if the creature were twisting round its head to bite me’), and that of a cowled, deathly monk changes so that ‘the wood seemed to become chilly and soft as if made of wet linen’. I have observed from a safe distance and made no contact whatsoever. I feel assured that no terrifying, malevolent spirits will be made manifest from the ancient wood, released to haunt and torment me like the unfortunate archdeacon. I leave the shadows of the church behind, along with whatever might inhabit them, the scent of autumn decay and damp, sifting plaster and walk out into the light, to the sound of birdsong in the graveyard.


I lock the door behind me. And that flicker of darkness flapping out from the tower? A trick of the light, an illusory spectre of the peripheral vision. The dry, snickering whisper in the air above my left shoulder? Nothing but a breath of wind through the leaves. I hasten my step and swiftly close the graveyard gate behind me, striding down the hill to return the key to its guardian in the cottage in the pit of the valley with a brisk word of thanks. And then I jump onto my bike and cycle out of Ashcombe with much haste before the light begins to fail. The demons recede behind me, remaining on their benches, locked into the time-polished wooden expressions and poses of the centuries. The chittering noises, the half-perceived feeling of shadowing presence, the sweet, rotting odour and the occasional brush of something flitting past – they are all in my head, I know. I must remain strong. I must.

PART ONE


The British Library exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination began, appropriately enough, with a descent. After a brief introductory film in which four explorers of diverse Gothic realms (Neil Gaiman, Sarah Waters, Ben Wheatley and Mark Daneilewski) outlined the shadowy territory we were about to stumble blindly into, we walked down a set of stairs and entered a gloomy, crypt-like space. The ‘rooms’ we passed through were separated by draped veils of funereal black which shivered in currents of a spectral wind with no evident point of origin (yes, it was the air conditioning, but let’s not break the mood here). Darkness prevailed. It was all is it should have been; as it was fated to have been.

Surrealist Gothic - Jan Svankmajer's The Castle of Otranto

The first room concerned itself almost exclusively with Horace Walpole, his antecedents, friends and those he went on to influence. He was portrayed as an origin figure for Gothic literature and its subsequent cultural offshoots. Most notably, this was due to his anonymous self-publication in 1764 of the novel The Castle of Otranto, which established many of the staples of Gothic fiction to come: the incursions of the supernatural, the medieval castle with its secret vaults, the revivification of buried histories and ancient curses, the menaced and imperilled heroine and the general air of barely suppressed hysteria. It may be a story seldom read today, but its influence can be felt through its still proliferating lineage. The Czech animator, filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer paid homage to it in his short 1979 condensation of the novel, which was shown in the upper entrance room. Period illustrations come to animated life as a book’s pages are riffled by an invisible hand. The framing device for the film has a historian and literary archaeologist claim to have discovered the real Castle of Otranto at Otrhany, near Nachod in the Czech Republic. It is this which Walpole used as the basis for his fictional locale, he claims. As well as suggesting a rediscovery of a half-forgotten text, it’s a clever way of having the Gothic world of imaginary derangement infect and invade what is presented as rational documentary realism. Svankmajer is a contemporary inheritor of the surrealist sensibility, and as such his co-option of the Castle of Otranto is an acknowledgement of the prominence of Walpole and the Gothic in general within the surrealist canon, its curated cabinet of curiosities. A 1765 edition of the novel was displayed in the exhibiton, with Walpole, safely assured of the novel’s success, identifying himself as the author. It now bears the subtitle ‘a Gothic story’. Thus the genre was coined.

The exhibition took care to point out Walpole’s own influences, making it evident that The Castle of Otranto didn’t appear magically formed from a pure and untrammelled imagination. Shakespeare’s ghosts and supernatural beings offer a clearly defined precedent (if such a description is apposite for such immaterial manifestations and half-glimpsed sprites). Walpole’s 1728 copy of The Merchant of Venice was included here, as was Henry Fuseli’s highly dramatic and very physical rendering of the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a 1796 engraving. A 1529 edition of Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur and a 1617 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene further outlined the appeal of antiquity and of a dream medievalism, a fantasy of the past replete with quests and allegorical stories, strange landscapes inhabited by demons and monsters waiting to devour souls which strayed from the righteous path.

Johann Muntz's print of Strawberry Hill

Walpole’s fashioning of his own private Gothic domain at Strawberry Hill on the winding banks of the Thames below Twickenham from 1747 onwards was an attempt at realising this fantasy world in solid, architectural form. He was thus the progenitor of Gothic revival architecture in addition to recasting it in a new literary form. Some of the original plans for the house’s elaborate Gothicisation were included, serving to emphasise its general air of studied artifice. It was pointed out the Walpole intended his home to be a showpiece from the outset, charging visitors for admission once it was completed. It was a series of theatrical sets which the imagination was prompted to fill with shadowy figures and strange happenings. The spirit of Strawberry Hill, the experience of inhabiting the living dream of a self-created Gothic fantasy, inspired the writing of The Castle of Otranto.

Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856)

Walpole initially published the novel anonymously, claiming that it was a translation made by one William Marshal of a work originally written by an Italian with the florid name of Onuphrio Muralto and printed in 1529. This may partly have been a device designed to shield him from any adverse reaction to the story’s sensational aspects. But once more, Walpole set the trend for the literary work as ‘discovered’ manuscript. Included here were two of the best known 18th century forgeries: James Macpherson’s ‘translation’ of Fingal, an early Gaelic epic by an ancient poet known as Ossian; and the ‘discovery’ of a number of manuscripts by 15th century Bristolian poet Thomas Rowley by the teenage would-be poet Thomas Chatterton, best known today as an exquisite corpse in Henry Wallis’ Pre-Raphaelite painting of 1856. Chatterton’s doctored manuscripts were on display, pasted into a large scrapbook. The crude attempts to make them appear timeworn and antiquated, with brown staining liberally splashed across the vellum he acquired from the attorney’s office in which he worked, now appear charmingly amateurish. That people were prepared to accept them as genuine is testament to the 18th century intoxication with antiquity, the intense desire to commune with voices from the past.

Walpole's Becket Reliquary

Walpole found fulfilment of this desire through his dedicated antiquarianism. He collected objects from centuries past, both in England and on his journeys through Europe, and filled up every niche and corner of Strawberry Hill with his diverse finds. A particularly beautiful 13th century enamelled reliquary chest dedicated to Thomas Becket was included in the exhibition, housed in a glass cabinet in the middle of the room which enhanced its sacrosanct air. This was an object to be circled and gazed at from all angles, but not touched. A certain distance was maintained, as it would have been for pilgrims centuries ago. It must have been thrilling for Walpole to be able to pick it up whenever the fancy took him, to open the small, hinged lid and peer reverently inside, imagining what it once contained. Alongside the reliquary was a book by his friend George Vertue, a catalogue of the antiquities he drew up whilst staying at Strawberry Hill, opened to show the page on which a colour study of the adjacent object was printed.

John Dee's 'shew stone'

Most intriguing, however, was another artefact which Walpole owned, one which, whilst looking fairly unprepossessing, was imbued with great power and mystery. This was John Dee’s spirit mirror. On loan from the British Museum, it is a smooth, flat disc of polished obsidian, darkly and depthlessly reflective. The accompanying tooled leather case bears a handwritten label by Walpole indicating the nature of its content. Walpole bought the mirror in 1777, and it was used by Dee in the late 16th century. But it originally found its way over to Europe from what is now Mexico, part of the plunder of the Conquistadors in the 1520s and 30s. Dee was obviously aware of its provenance as a mirror for divination and conjuration used by the Mexica priests. Dee himself was a magician, mathmetician, alchemist, cartographer and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, all disciplines which were regarded as part of an undivided body of knowledge. A fascinating character, he has proved irresistible to a number of writers and artists, and appears prominently in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence of novels, Alan Moore’s Promethea comics, Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee, Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana and Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window. Dee became acquainted with a young man called Edward Kelley, who claimed to commune with angels. Dee spent an increasing amount of his time attempting to make such a communication himself, with Kelley as intercessory bridge. The black reflecting mirror, or ‘shew stone’, was supposedly given to him by an angel and gave him access (via Kelley) to dimensions normally inaccessible to human vision. Whether or not you give any of this the slightest credence (and the question of whether the stone was ever in Dee’s possession is open to debate) there is a thrill in seeing this myth-infused occult object which such a fascinating historical figure firmly believed opened up higher planes of knowledge and existence, and allowed him to make contact with the beings who possessed and inhabited them.

Edward Young's Night Thoughts illustrated by William Blake

Walpole’s shared schooldays and later acquaintance with Thomas Gray also forges a connection between him and the so-called graveyard poets. This short-lived branch of English poetry, epitomised by Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742), gave expression to the morbid musings of young men who wandered around graveyards contemplating mortality, their own and others. The graveyard became the Gothic locus of a strange, inverted form of romanticism, pale, drawn and half in love with Death. The cold idyll of the graveyard, drained of bright colour save for the odd bunch of fading blooms and the red of the poisonous berries on the yew tree, would provide the trysting place for Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley. They would rendezvous by the grave of Mary’s mother in St Pancras churchyard. Neil Gaimain’s novel The Graveyard Book (which features later in the exhibition) also uses the graveyard as a romantic locale within the fenced and gated bounds of which the tale of a young boy’s growth to maturity takes place.

William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoaz

A 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake, who wrapped his angels, demons and tormented sleepers around a central pane containing the text. Pages of this book, which was only ever partially published, were on display here. It was a troubled commission, and only a fraction of the watercolours Blake produced as sketches for later engravings finished in final printed form. He retained many of the proofs which remained unused and began writing his own poem in the blank, squared-off spaces intended for Young’s words. The night journey undertaken by the figures he had drawn influenced the dark prophecies and troubled invective in Vala, or The Four Zoas, written shortly after the altercation with a soldier in the Sussex village of Felpham which had almost led to his trial for sedition. Never published in his lifetime, it was rediscovered in 1889, surfacing in a fin-de-siecle period the mood of which suited its intensely expressed visions of doom and apocalyptic fire. The pages exhibited here showed that the Gothic was capable of inspiring and encompassing extraordinary visionary height, and even more profound depths.

Fonthill Abbey - the ultimate Gothic folly

As the Gothic form developed, so it expanded to explore and colonise new areas, testing the boundaries of aesthetic, social and even physical tolerance by pursuing new extremes. There was an architectural model of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey on display which has long outlasted the extravagant fantasy for which it served as a template. Fonthill was designed to be the ultimate Gothic dwelling, leaving Strawberry Hill in its extensive shadow in terms of its scale and obsessive detail. It proved a hubristic structure, however, built without the accumulated knowledge of the medieval masons. The gargantuan spire, now a fairly obvious symbol of overweening male ego rather than a physical manifestation of heavenly aspiration, was from the beginning an unstable structure, which collapsed several times. Beckford eventually gave up on his expensive dream and built a structure which, perhaps in wry recognition of the true nature of Fonthill, resembled a folly; the tower which still raises its finger on the hills above Bath. Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786), a copy of which was on display in the exhibition, took the Gothic into the realms of the Arabian Nights fantasy. The ‘exoticism’ that this form afforded, its distance from the norms of Western civilisation and from familiar narratives and settings, allowed for new extremes of cruelty, violence and depravity. Naturally, the notoriety which ensued did nothing to harm the success of the book.


The exhibition notes made the observation that the levels of sex and violence in Gothic novels increased markedly in the wake of the French Revolution and the bloody Terror into which it descended in the 1790s. Matthew Lewis’ The Monk was the prime example offered here, which also throws in a good deal of anti-clericalism for good measure. The horrors of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation became another staple of Gothic fiction, memorably featuring in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (another subject of a Jan Svankmajer film). The figure of the depraved or pitiless monk, a terrifying cowled and faceless presence possessed of unassailable power and authority, took its place amongst the repertory of Gothic characters. The English Reformation cast a long shadow, and Catholic institutions and rituals could still be relied upon to elicit a shudder if cast in a suitably sinister light.


German Gothic novels, which drew on a rich heritage of folklore connected with mountains and dense forests, were renowned (or notorious) for being even more graphic than their English counterparts. They were briefly in fashion towards the end of the 18th century. In Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic literature, Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine is offered a list of seven novels to read after she has finished Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. Some are German, whilst others ape the Germanic style. They are all, however, perfectly ‘horrid’, she is assured. They have therefore come to be known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, and all turn out to have been real, published works. Austen evidently had in-depth knowledge of contemporary Gothic. Editions of these obscure works were laid open side-by-side in a central display cabinet so that we might glimpse something of their appalling nature. The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), subtitled A German Tale (as the former may as well have been too) were both by the English novelist Eliza Parsons. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath was another German tale written by an English writer, whilst Clermont (1798) was by the Irish writer Regina Maria Roche. The Midnight Bell (1798) by Dutch author Francis Latham not only claimed to be ‘A German Story’ in its subtitle, but also to be ‘Founded On Incidents in Real Life’. The final two novels were the genuine article, even if they claimed not to be. The Horrid Mysteries (1796), or ‘A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse’ was actually a translation of the novel Der Genius by Carl Grosse. The Necromancer or The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg sounds particularly intriguing (and particularly German). Disappointingly, the splendidly named Flammenberg turns out to be another pseudonym, a florid mask for more mundanely monickered Carl Friedrich Kahlert.

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

Henry Fuseli was Swiss rather than German, and a long-term resident of the British Isles. There remained something Germanic about the fantastical, grotesque nature of much of his work, however. In 1781 he painted The Nightmare, a print of which was exhibited here. It remains one of the definitive images of the Gothic imagination, and was hugely popular at the time, reproduced in many subsequent engravings. The demonic imp crouching on the chest of the uncomfortably sprawled, restlessly sleeping woman and the marble-eyed, phantom horse materialising from the shadows have been the subject of much pastiche and parody over the years. This powerfully physical representation of a dream state is viewed with disturbing objectivity from a viewpoint exterior to the dreamer, as if these were real demonic beings inducing night terrors in the unknowing sleeper. The sideways stare of the homunculus, meeting the gaze of the picture’s viewer, makes it feel as if we have come across a scene we should not have borne witness to. It is a tableau of temporary suspension, full of the potential for sudden and very rapid subsequent action. The poster for Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, his and writer Stephen Volk’s version of the events of that famously stormy night at the Villa Diodati (which we’ll come to in a moment), restages The Nightmare for a cinematic tableau.

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece illustration for an 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The Nightmare is a bridge into the Romantic era. The exhibition notes suggested that the Romantic artists largely diverged from Gothic themes. However, there were exceptions; manuscripts of Coleridge’s Christabel (a forerunner of Poe’s poetry) and Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite were included to show that they did sometimes descend into the shadows. And it was from the milieu of the Romantic movement that a work would emerge which would profoundly influence the direction which Gothic would take and form the ground from which new generic hybrids would sprout and flourish. Not the least of these would be science fiction, which Brian Aldiss defines, in Billion/Trillion Year Spree, as being ‘characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode’. The work in question is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Included here was an 1831 edition with illustrations by Theodor von Holst. His depiction of the monster bears a resemblance to William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea. The title page print depicts with stark simplicity the horror Frankenstein feels towards his creation, and his abandonment of the bewildered newborn man, who sprawls like a loose-limbed puppet in the laboratory.

Shelley’s revised manuscript for the 1831 edition was on display, handwritten on blue paper. Also present was a letter written by Lord Byron, protesting that no impropriety had taken place during that storm-wracked evening at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had played host to Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, his physician John Polidori and Clair Clairmont, his mistress of the moment. Given his reputation, and such protest was liable merely to stoke further salacious speculation, and he would probably have been better advised to hold his silence. That evening, Byron had been reading ghost stories aloud as the storm rumbled and flashed outside (and German ghost stories at that!) He also read lines from Coleridge’s Christabel, which sent the unhinged Shelley fleeing from the room with a wild shriek. The reading led on to the suggestion that everyone should write their own horror story to complement the fearsome atmosphere of the night beyond. This challenge, instantly mythologised by all parties present, resulted in the first outline of Frankenstein. Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), who had already lost a child of her own, and whose mother had died as a result of her own delivery into the world, came up with the idea of the blasphemous birth of a new, monstrous man through the generative, galvanic powers of science; powers which wholly excluded motherhood and female agency.


Frankenstein functions as a gateway into the world of modern Gothic, largely via the numerous cinematic variations which have evolved from the central idea. The clip of Bride of Frankenstein playing on a loop was really our first glimpse of Gothic as the major stylistic component of the horror genre as it developed in the twentieth century. Frankenstein’s creation evolved (or devolved) from the tormented haunter of the wilderness, the self-educated outsider abandoned by his father, into Boris Karloff’s innocent, shambling brute, both pitiful and terrifying. Frankenstein provides us with our first classic horror monster. The novel opens a nocturnal window onto the twentieth century, giving us a brief prospect of the encroaching shadows of Gothic horror whose tendrils would extend into every aspect of popular culture. There was a copy of the 1967 Brunswick LP An Evening With Boris Karloff and his Friends, contained soundtrack clips from the great Universal monster movies introduced by the now elderly actor. Also on display were some of Scott MacGregor’s set designs for the late Hammer film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). This served as a self-reflective and melancholic conclusion to the studio’s series of Frankenstein pictures, almost invariably starring Peter Cushing as a particularly amoral Doctor, which had been so central to their output. Along with the Dracula films, they were instrumental in building their reputation as purveyors of quality Gothic to the masses. MacGregor’s designs are sketches for a dream film which could no longer be realised with Hammer’s dwindling resources in the bleak years of the mid-70s. Interestingly, Frankenstein and his creation have been conspicuously absent from recent revivals and revisitations of the Gothic canon. The single shambling monster has been largely supplanted by hordes of shuffling, moaning zombies. Maybe it is time for the creature to rise from the slab once more.


Frankenstein was the progenitor of many literary forms and ideas. But it can also be seen as an endpoint in terms of ‘pure’ Gothic fiction, if indeed there is a beast of such pedigree. Its Romantic sensibility and use of landscapes giddy with sublime terror (alpine peaks and Arctic wildernesses) as exteriorised expressions of interior states mark it apart from the more generic Gothic novel. The spectres of 18th and early 19th century Gothic arose from the historical past (real or fabled). Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, is created through the application of scientific rationalism, Henry Frankenstein himself the modern Prometheus who fashion his own relentless Nemesis. And so, we leave the 18th and early 19th century Gothic rooms and pass through the doorway into the period which has surpassed them in terms of furnishing the modern imagination with its ‘classic’ Gothic props – the Victorian age. And naturally, the writer who ushers us into this fogbound, gaslit world is Charles Dickens.

PART TWO


Charles Dickens is the perfect figure to usher us into the Victorian world, and into the dark, narrow and crowded streets of the rapidly expanding, noisily industrial capital. A clip of the recent BBC adaptation of Bleak House, with Gillian Anderson as a ghostly Lady Dedlock, shows us the scene in which Jo the crossing sweeper takes her to the gates of the paupers’ cemetery. The bones lie on the surface in some parts, and Jo remarks of the man she is searching for (known only as ‘Nemo’ at this point) that ‘they put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to get it in. I could unkiver it, with my broom, if the gate was open’. He then excitedly points out a rat, which runs into the ground to feast. This depiction of the bodies of the dead protruding from their shallow graves, seen through the eyes of a streetchild for whom it is wholly unremarkable, is a grim Gothic touch which Dickens drew from factual observation. Victorian London was, for many, a Gothic city, but one marked by poverty and squalor rather than elegantly decaying castles and crypts. A staggered pile of booklets on display were a reminder of the part published format of the book, episodically issued in 1852. The public would devour the story in monthly instalments, eager to discover what happened next.

Woman in Black - Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House

Gothic had become a flavour or shade which could be added to the kind of multilayered work of which Dickens was a master. It might be associated with a a particular character, plot strand or setting. It was a transferable style which could be employed in a variety of contexts. Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories as well, including The Signalman, an enduring classic of the subgenre, and the collaborative collection The Haunted House, whose framing story (written by Dickens) introducing separate tales anticipates the Amicus portmanteau films of the 1960s and 70s. It was a form which would become increasingly popular as the Victorian period progressed. It was an era much preoccupied with mortality and the memorialisation of the dead. The great necropolises which were built on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding urban centres were themselves like miniature cities of the dead. They would prove ideal Gothic locations, particularly as the years added attractive layers of gentle ruination and ivy entanglement. For Dickens, the Gothic could also encompass an element of social comment or psychological portraiture. The graveyard in Bleak House is disturbing for its exposure of appalling poverty as much as the rat-gnawed bones of the dead. Lady Dedlock drifting blankly through Chesney Wold and Miss Havisham presiding over the cobweb-strewn Satis House in Great Expectations are both spectres prematurely haunting their decaying homes. They are portraits of mental and moral paralysis.


For Dickens, the true Gothic locale was not a remote, ruined abbey or centuries old castle but the dark alleys and dilapidated houses of London. Its gaslit Gothic atmosphere is perfectly captured in the engravings Gustav Doré produced for the book London, A Pilgrimage, a journalistic record of travels through the city which highlighted the huge gulf between the rich and poor. Plates depicting the rookery of Bluegate Fields, the night-time pavement sellers of Harrow Alley in Houndsditch, the ragged wraiths working in the Lambeth gasworks and the mazes of back to back terraces in the sooty shadow of arcing railway viaducts are densely shaded with an almost palpable darkness.


The Gothic followed in the wake of mass migrations from field to factory and relocated to the city. Urban Gothic was formed in the choking fogs of London; fogs like those described in the opening scenes of Bleak House, in which Dickens imagined the possibility of encountering ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The primeval swamp seeps through into the streets of the modern city. Urban Gothic bred its own monsters and mythologies which were promulgated in the rough pages of the Penny Dreadfuls and Penny Bloods. These episodic works featured sensational cover illustrations which dramatically depicted scenes of horror and bloodshed. Precursors of the EC comics of the 50s, their potential effect on the minds of the masses who read them occasionally troubled the moral guardians of Victoria’s realm. But they generally fell so far below the literary lighthouse beam that they escaped any real censure. The dreadfuls introduced the likes of Varney the Vampire, with his impulsive thirst for blood; Sweeney Todd, the demon barber and fresh meat merchant; and Spring Heeled Jack, a proto-supervillain who could effortlessly leap over the rooftops of London, and who gradually morphed into an enigmatic superhero in the Batman mould. A copy of The Mysteries of London by George WM Reynolds was also on display, explicitly inviting the reader imagine their city as a labyrinth of hidden terrors, lurking and ready to spring. The prolific Reynolds also wrote an early werewolf tale with his 1846-7 series Wagner the Were-Wolf. Some of Dave McKean’s original full-colour illustrations for the Batman story Arkham Asylum were displayed as an example of a modern version of the urban Gothic of the Penny Dreadfuls.

Harry Clarke's illustration for Poe's William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe was a central (perhaps THE central) figure in mid-19th century Gothic literature, and his morbid sensibility spread like an enervating virus, distilling fever dreams from the unconscious underworld of a motley spectrum of writers and artists, from French Decadents through Edwardian illustrators of children’s books to subversive Surrealists. One of Poe’s letters was on display, allowing us to inspect his neat handwriting and feel a sense of communion with the man who wrote it. Truth to tell, it doesn’t provide a very edifying portrait. Addressed to Fanny Osgood, one of a series of women with whom he became obsessed in his short lifetime, and whose patronage and hospitality he frequently called upon, its fulsome and fawning praise of her literary efforts is embarrassingly transparent in its bid for her favour. Poe’s influence on the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination is clearly visible in the illustrations from various editions of his work. On display here were Edmund Dulac’s plate for The Raven, Harry Clarke’s for William Wilson, Arthur Rackham’s for The Oval Portrait and John Buckland Wright’s woodcut for The Tell-Tale Heart. Presiding over this gloomy Poe corner was the magisterial voice of James Mason, narrating the expressionistic 1953 animated interpretation of The Tell-Tale Heart, with designs by Warner Bros. background artist Paul Julian, who would, appropriately enough, go on to work with Roger Corman. Mason explains his actions in a patient and scrupulously rational manner: ‘it was his eye, yes, that eye. His eye, staring, milky white film. The eye, everywhere in everything. Of course I had to get rid of the eye’.

Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for The Masque of the Red Death

Poe’s work certainly informed the Yellow Book Decadance of the fin de siecle period, the dying days of the Victorian period. A copy of the Yellow Book was on display here. And indeed its cover was an exquisite shade of yellow, an instantly distinctive object to be seen with tucked under your arm, connoting an all-embracing aesthetic worldview. One of Aubrey Beardsley’s Poe illustrations was also on display, a depiction of a scene from The Masque of the Red Death, full of leering, deformed grotesques and limp, opiated beauties. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was presented as the emblematic story from this movement, a self-reflexive myth for, and about, its participants. It’s a mythic encapsulation of the cost of the pursuit of excess and all-consuming sensual indulgence cast in Gothic form. The figurative is made manifest and hidden away in the attic. Wilde was the public spokesman for the Aesthetic movement (French-style Decadence in all but name). His elegant dandyism and elevation of the passing witticism into an exquisitely crafted artform promoted the idea of art as an all-encompassing worldview, affecting mannerisms and modes of dress as much as any actual creative artefact which might be produced in time remaining. This was a philosophy which would resonate throughout the 20th century, finding expression in the theatricality of latter day Goths as well as the self-reflective (or obsessed) art of the likes of Gilbert and George and a number of the YBAs. Indeed, there were some works by the Chapman Brothers later in the exhibition. Wilde’s own penchant for the Gothic, as well as his conflation of life and art, were displayed in the calling cards he had printed after he emerged from Reading Gaol. He cloaked himself in the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, adopted from Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilde thereby cast himself as the cursed exile who had made an ill-advised pact with the Devil and is now fated to tread a lonely, immortal path through the world.

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll...and Hyde

Another key work of the late Victorian period was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, originally published in 1886 as a Shilling Shocker (a complete work as opposed to the Penny Dreadful’s serialisations – hence the slightly inflated price and altered alliteration). Stevenson’s story is a subtly suggestive study of the duality inherent in the human psyche, its terrors remaining relatively subdued. It was the hugely successful theatrical production of 1887, written by JR Sullivan and starring Richard Mansfield in the twinned title role(s), which changed the tone of the story, and set the pattern for future adaptations. The bifurcation into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ selves, or rather selves which suppressed the desire for sensual pleasure and gave it full, destructive reign. Jekyll and Hyde became another myth of fin-de-siecle Decadence, a companion piece to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Richard Mansfield’s performance was particularly noted for its remarkable transformation scene, aided by theatrical lighting and make-up. A photograph displayed here gives us an idea of the thrills which the Victorian theatregoers would have experienced. Using the developing room magic or double exposure, we see the upright Dr Jekyll, face a saintly picture of benevolent intentions, transformed into the hunched, bestial figure of Hyde, hands clawed and poised to grab whatever they can grab a hold of. Hyde really does appear to be a shadow self in this photograph, a parthenogenetic homunculus tearing itself free from its noble progenitor.


The theatrical production of Jekyll and Hyde, which Stevenson professed to hate, was running at the time that the Jack the Ripper murders began to impinge on the public consciousness in 1888. The two became superimposed in the minds of many, Jack and Edward Hyde becoming mirrored selves. Theatrical fiction and factual speculation percolated together to form the beginnings of the potent myth which distilled the dark essence of late Victorian London. The city of terrible night, its narrow Whitechapel streets filled with the stench of poverty and despair. One of the most startling exhibits was a work of fiction purporting to be fact; another example of the fakery which seems to play such a prominent part in the history of Gothic (and which lives on in ‘found footage’ horror movies). A letter written in red ink boasting of murderous exploits and promising more horrors to come is signed Yours Truly Jack the Ripper (‘Don’t mind me giving the trade name’). Undoubtedly a hoax, it has nevertheless accumulated a certain amount of legendary cachet, being the first of a welter of such fevered missives, stoked by sensationalist newspaper reportage. Alan Moore, in his kaleidoscopic Ripper epic From Hell, has two journalists from the Daily Star compose the letter in a Wapping flat, giving the public a fiend whose luridly outlined exploits they can gorge themselves on (in the page of The Star, of course).


Robert Bloch’s story Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper draws on the letter’s signature, and imagines Jack as an immortal who surfaces in various eras to commit his ritualistic killings, which serve to keep him alive. The subsequent pairing in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology of Bloch’s A Toy for Juliette and Ellison’s own A Prowler In the City At the Edge of the World takes as its basis the way in which ‘Jack’ was transformed into an almost supernatural figure, an elusive trickster constantly eluding his pursuers with mocking ease. He was an inheritor of the powers of Spring Heeled Jack, and a precursor of the regrettable archetype of the superhuman serial killer in modern culture. Harlan Ellison reduces him to a pathetic puppet of greater, more debased forces at the end of his story, a conclusion which has considerable moral and allegorical force, and once more addresses the role of the media in creating and feeding an appetite for such atrocities.

Laird Cregar in the 1944 version of The Lodger

The Ripper murders, as filtered through Jekyll and Hyde and proto-tabloid journalism, gave rise to Belloc Lowndes’ 1911 novel The Lodger. The entrance of Ivor Novello’s titular character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 film version, face disguised beneath the mummifying wrap of a scarf , ragged wisps of illuminated fog dissipating behind him, is an electrifying expressionistic rendering of the mystery and fear fuelling the ever-expanding Ripper mythos. Actually, the 1944 version of The Lodger, with a mesmerising performance by Laird Cregar at its heart, better evokes the social gulfs within Victorian society which the Ripper murders so horrifically exposed. It’s also interesting to note the narrowing gap between literary source and cinematic adaptation. Only 38 years separate The Lodger from the Ripper murders and Richard Mansfield’s theatrical transformation into Hyde (and 32 from the 1920 John Barrymore film), the cinema from the music hall, the gas lamp from the electric light, the horse drawn Hackney cab from the motor car. They really do seem worlds apart.

First edition of Dracula in fin-de-siecle yellow book covers

The final work from the late Victorian period explored here is of such moment that it merited a whole room to itself. The visitor was obliged to make a detour from their natural winding progression through the exhibition’s dimly lit corridors, turning into this sealed off sepulchre which immediately felt like a sacred space. Indeed, so caught up was I in the cultural current leading me eagerly on from one thematic display to another that it wasn’t until I’d reached the end and exited into the light of the British Library’s lofty atrium that I paused and thought ‘hang on, there was something missing there’. Retracing my steps, I discovered the hidden sanctum which I’d initially passed by. The book in question is, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897. Its influence on the horror genre and on popular culture in general is pervasive and profound, and anything in this compacted space could offer a partial survey at best. The literary exhibits were particularly fascinating. There was a pleasing congruity to the inclusion of some of the books which Stoker consulted in the British Library whilst researching the background of his story. Perhaps some of them were even the same copies.

Of particular significance was a book written by William Wilkinson, Esq., ‘Late British Consul Resident at Bukarest’, which blended colonial memoir, history lesson and traveller’s tales, and was given the fustily prosaic title An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them. Stoker initially read this not at the British Library but in the subscription library in Whitby, the seaside town on the Yorkshire coast where he was staying for his summer holidays in 1890. The historical passages make reference to King Ladislas of Hungary forming an alliance with the Wallachian Voivode Dracula in 1444 to fight the Turks. It was in Whitby, therefore, that Stoker found the name for his vampire lord, although he would transform him from a prince (voivode) into a count. There was no such noble rank in Wallachia in the 15th century, but the baleful influence of Lord Byron together with the antics of his acolytes on the European continent had created an indelible impression. Vampires and Gothic villains in general had become strongly associated with dissipated Western European aristocrats.

The illustration included in the 1901 edition of Dracula

Stoker followed the established convention by ennobling his title character, even though he envisaged him as a stout military figure with a thick Central Eastern European moustache. This explicitly described appearance (roughly reproduced in the illustration in 1901 edition) would seldom be acknowledged in subsequent adaptations. Wilkinson also notes that Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. This could connote evil, although it could also use refer to the folk devil as a trickster figure. As such, it could be used in a complimentary sense as a badge of bravery or ingenuity in warfare or matters of state. Wallachia was also entirely separate from Transylvania, but such cavils are irrelevant. Dracula is not a historical novel, and the local colour and geographical detail Stoker derived from Wilkinson’s book and other accounts of the area provided a richly mysterious and haunted backdrop for Jonathan Harker’s arduous journey to Dracula’s castle and the final pursuit through the Transylvanian landscape. The mountainous and thickly forested world which he conjured up from his reading room travels was shrouded in fogs of superstition and venerable custom. Journeying there was akin to falling back in time to a pre-industrial era, leaving behind the nascent modernity of the late Victorian period in which electric lighting was already beginning to banish the shadows and returning to the Middle Ages. It was a reiteration of the Gothic’s abiding delight in resurrecting the spectres of primitive (and imaginary) histories which contrasted with the comforts of the present.

The demons of Lewtrenchard

Another book which Stoker consulted, Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and its People, contained fold-out maps (one of which was spread out here) which facilitated imaginary exploration, mental expeditions into the Carpathian Mountains via the Borgo Pass. Also on display was the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves, a collection of legend and lore which provided the inspiration for the wolves Dracula heralds as ‘the children of night’, and for his own transformation into a great hound which leaps onto the shore of Whitby from the deck of the wrecked Demeter. Baring-Gould was the parson of Lewtrenchard church, nestled in the shady valleys west of Dartmoor. In addition to collecting local folklore and folk music, he was a dedicated antiquarian, endeavouring to save the church furnishings and decorations of the Gothic period which other Victorian clergymen were busy discarding and destroying. His small church is a treasure house packed with objects rescued from diverse parts, restored and refitted. And hidden on the side of the pulpit facing the east wall are a pair of grinning demons carved from wood by the Pinwill sisters, Esther and Violet, in imitation of medieval originals. They would certainly not have looked out of place in Dracula’s castle.

More demons lodging in Lewtrenchard - call for the Rev. Sabine-Gould, demon hunter

Also included here was a manuscript Stoker wrote for a theatrical version of his novel. Scrappily assembled, with passages cut and pasted from the printed page, this was evidently dashed off with great haste. It was an exercise to establish theatrical copyright and prevent others from hijacking his ideas, distorting them and profiting from the thinly veiled results. Perhaps he had the success of JR Sullivan and Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde in mind. It also suggested that Stoker was highly conscious of the fact that Dracula was a work which had the potential for broad popular appeal. The script formed the basis for a theatrical reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897, staged concurrently with the novel’s publication. Present in the select audience was Henry Irving, the actor-manager for whom Stoker acted as personal assistant and factotum in all things. Irving was an imposing figure, an archetypally demanding and egotistic theatrical, and a dominant force in Stoker’s life, source of both reverence and fear. Some have claimed him as a model for Dracula. Its certainly likely that some of his characteristics found there way into the portrayal of the commanding count. His approval or even mild encouragement was vital for Stoker; but all he received after the show was brusque brush-off. The self-absorbed Irving had no time to dispense the words of praise he demanded and required for himself.


Projected onto the back room of the Dracula room were scenes from the finale of FW Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, expressionist shadows taking on a life of their own, extending grasping claws ahead of the rodent-toothed creature casting them. Stoker’s worries about the unauthorised appropriation of his material seems to have been justified, since the German company who produced the picture, Prana Films, had made no effort to seek approval for their adaptation. The widowed Florence Stoker’s attempts to gain recompense merely resulted in the company going bust. In order to discourage further such incidences, she managed to get a court order requiring all copies to be destroyed. Fortunately, this celluloid auto-da-fé wasn’t altogether thorough in its execution, and surviving prints resurfaced in later years. As a result, we can still enjoy what has become established as an enduring classic of German expressionism and cinematic Gothic. Stoker’s character and vampiric lore would soon spread with the exponential infectiousness of a blood-borne virus, putting it well beyond any possibility of containment.

The exhibits here briefly sampled the cultural shadow cast by Dracula over the long decades of the 20th century. His looming presence was in some ways a counter-reaction to the forces of modernism and rapid technological progress; a renewed example of the Gothic finding inspiration and escape in a time of social transformation through the resurrection of the past. The character as Stoker envisaged him was eager to embrace the possibilities afforded by new technologies and economic channels. That was the reason for his move to England. But this is one of a number of the novel’s aspects (including his Eastern European military bearing) which have been abandoned in successive cinematic incarnations. Christopher Lee’s repeated pleas to the Hammer hierarchy to return to the book as a direct source fell on deaf ears.

Vampire - Edvard Munch

The female vampire had already found its way into the broader European literary and artistic stream as a symbolic character. In Baudelaire’s poem The Vampire it stands as a very French metaphor for the destructive nature of love, and the fear of the devouring woman. It was also a stock pre-Freudian fever dream figure in Symbolist art, an image to set alongside the many personifications of Death in chill Nordic and Baltic landscapes. Edvard Munch’s Vampire, aka Love and Pain (1894), could almost be an illustration for Baudelaire’s bitterly misogynistic poem. Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire was a rather surprising inclusion in the exhibition, serving as a representation of these literary adoptions, and another version of the vampire as belle dame sans merci. Appropriately enough, it was written in 1897, the year of Dracula’s publication. He’s certainly not somebody you’d associate with such Decadent company. But then he’s a writer to whom many misconceptions have become attached over the years. The printed poem was accompanied by an illustration by Philip ‘son of Sir Edward’ Burne-Jones, an explicitly erotic tableau which bears some relation to Fuseli’s Nightmare. It was this image which gave birth to the poem in Kipling’s imagination, an example of visual art exerting a direct influence upon literature.


Edward Gorey’s Dracula toy theatre brought his mordant drawings to marvellous pop-up life, and demonstrated the broadening appeal of the whole mythos. The sets are actually models for the stage designs he produced for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. His lugubriously amusing figures prove eminently suitable to the novel’s characters and scenarios. A slight element of mockery is appropriate given their familiarity at this stage, but is obviated by the beauty and care with which they are drawn. And his Dracula has a moustache! A lovely artefact for Gothic children to exercise their morbid imaginations upon – the cardboard Lucy Westenra’s head can easily be stuck back on with sellotape.


It’s but a few short steps from here to Sesame Street’s delightfully numerate Count, the vegetarian vampire duck of Cosgrove-Hall’s Count Duckula and the vampire grandpas and uncles-next-door of The Munsters and Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga The latter features the wonderfully weird Uncle Festus Zlüdotny, whose spluttered speech-bubble utterances are rendered in the undecipherable symbols of a mysterious yet somehow inherently violent alphabet. A vampire slaying kit, with tools and substances covering most recommended means of undead extermination, was on display in its own standalone cabinet, its components housed in a neatly portable valise whose compartments concertinaed out with ingenious pragmatism. It had no apparent provenance, and its presence was therefore rather anomalous, but fun nevertheless.

Christopher Lee endures the Scars of Dracula

A design for Frank Langella’s Count in John Badham’s 1979 film of Dracula suggested future developments of the character, and of the vampire in general, as a romantic figure. The animalistic bloodsucking and viral furtherance of the undead plague were increasingly relegated to the background, incidental details eclipsed by the old fashioned seductions of the irresistible Heathcliff anti-hero. Alas, there was nothing here to match the display of Christopher Lee’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness costume in the BFI’s Gothic display a couple of years ago. Hammer was represented (and represented it simply HAD to be, of course) by more of Scott MacGregor’s set designs, this time for Scars of Dracula. Indisputably the nadir of Hammer’s Dracula cycle, and quite possibly of its Gothic output at large, the designs indicate just how far the studio (and director Roy Ward Baker) was prepared to go in its determination to keep up with contemporary trends and add new elements of explicit gore. In the bedroom set, a bloody corpse sprawls across the four-poster, severed body parts scattered to the side along with the saws and knives which have been used in this clumsy dissection. The echoes of the grim finale of Witchfinder General are all too evident. Perhaps thankfully, this scenario was never realised in the completed film. Christopher Lee’s Dracula merely leaps into the chamber and stabs Anoushka Hempel’s vampire seductress with a knife whose rubbery flexibility is all too plain. It’s a gratuitous scene which is as risible as it is illogical and inexplicable. MacGregor’s set for the castle roof is an atmospheric Gothic arena, a stage for dramatic confrontations. Sadly, the final realisation fell far short of his vision, the greatly reduced budgets of the 60s and 70s more than usually evident.

As with Frankenstein, Dracula made it through to the vinyl age too. Displayed here was the cover of the Studio2Stereo LP Dracula with Christopher Lee, a compilation of Hammer soundtracks. A real treat, this one, with James Bernard’s stirring score for the original Hammer Dracula set in context by Lee’s narration. It also features cues from Bernard’s score for She, as well as contemporary composer John McCabe’s music for the 1972 psycho-thriller Fear in the Night, Harry Robinson’s lushly romantic themes from The Vampire Lovers and extracts from David Whittaker’s score for the stylish Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, wittily scripted by the late Brian Clemens. The 70s provenance of the LP was clear from its use of a promo still from Dracula AD 1972 on the cover, Christopher Lee tucking into the jugular of poor old Caroline Munro.

Leaving the Dracula room, we also take our leave of the 19th century, and enter a new era in which the medium of cinema, with its large, darkened palaces, would prove a perfect site for the expansion of the shadow worlds of the Gothic. But those shadows often originated and drew their raw sustenance from the archetypal monsters, human and otherwise, which emerged from the gaslight illuminated fogs of the Victorian imagination.

A remarkable cover from a collection of Paul Robeson 78s which has just come into the Oxfam Music and Art shop where I work, vintage dust and all. Released in 1943, the illustration explicitly connects the struggle for civil rights in America with the fight against fascism in Europe. Robeson throws off his chains and plunges a dagger into the heart of the Nazi worm. Robeson sings the Spanish Republican (here refererred to as Loyalist) song The Four Insurgent Generals; Moorsoldaten (The Peat-Bog Soldiers), an anthem of the International Brigades originally written in 1933 by German dissidents in a concentration camp, and here arranged by sometime Brecht collaborator Hanns Eisler; the US song about union activist and martyr Joe Hill (sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock); two songs from Russian composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky's opera Quiet Flows the Don; The Purest Kind of Guy from No For An Answer, a musical about unemployed Greek workes by Marc Blitztein. Blitztein was a gay Jewish composer perhaps best known today for his 1937 pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, the chaotic Broadway production history of which was recently dramatised in Tim Robbins' film of that name. And Native Land by Jewish-Russian composer Isaak Dunayevsky, a favourite of Stalin's, apparently. He composed the soundtrack for Volga-Volga, a broad 1938 comedy rumoured to be Uncle Joe's favourite film. It was important at this time that Robeson performed songs by political dissidents, Jewish composers and gay writers (Blitztein made no secret about his sexuality). Robeson sings the Spanish, German and Russian songs both in English and the native language. The forthright cover image makes it clear that Columbia were wholly behind his selection. It would be unthinkable that they would release such a collection 10 years later, by which time McCarthyism was well under way and he was being investigated by the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) and was denied a passport to travel abroad to perform. It should also be said that he was still fulsome in his praise of Stalin at this point.
So, an absolutely fascinating piece of history.

It was a freezing January morning when I lifted my bike off the train at Tiverton Parkway station and wheeled it down the ramp into the carpark. The station is nowhere near Tiverton (it’s actually just outside Sampford Peverell), but it is near the Great Western canal which winds its way across mid-Devon from Tiverton in the West to Greenham and the River Tone in the East (it used to continue as far as Taunton). A telling proximity, given that the coming of the railways meant that the canal never extended its watery vein from Bristol to English Channel as originally planned. It was eastwards that I was bound, to the village of Holcombe Rogus just a short, winding turn of a country road from the Great Western’s terminal tunnel. I pedalled off, crunching the ice glazing puddles and sending the silhouettes of crows flapping into the sky from the skeletal branches of their winter roosts. The path alongside the canal immediately passes beneath a concrete road bridge carrying the busy A361 traffic. It’s a bleakly functional signifier of the decline of the railways, which is why you can no longer get anywhere in mid-Devon (Tiverton included) by train.




The canal is frozen over, lengths of anchored reed emerging from the pale blue plane of its surface and forming acutely angled peaks. The reflections of these sharply outlined reed strokes combine to create rectilinear groupings of wonky rhomboids. Nature’s formalist abstract compositions. I lose myself in their strangely perfect patterns for a while, but then an electric blue peripheral eyeflash and I immediately look up to see a kingfisher dart in a frictionless glide over the icy channel. I follow its flight in staggered cycle stints, from bullrush perches to branch overlooks to weir post plinths. In the colour drained winter landscape it is a tiny splash of vivid orange and blue life, a mesmerising will-o-the-wisp drawing me inexorably onward. At times it levitates into the air above unfrozen stretches of the canal, hovering blurrily before plummeting with mercurial suddenness into the icy waters. Its beauty is at times quite breathtaking, and I am entranced for a lengthier period than I had bargained for, or had factored into my admittedly extremely loose and largely notional schedule.




On the other side of the canal, I pass a perfect pastoral scene, sheep grazing beside an oak tree spreading bare branches before a small chapel in the middle of a field the size of a large garden. Had it been a burnished autumn day, it could have been a composition from a Samuel Palmer painting, the Darenth Valley superimposed over the rolling plains of mid-Devon. The building was Ayshford Chapel, dating from the 15th century and attached to the medieval seat of the Ayshford family, a manor which was recorded in the Domesday Book. 16th and 17th century monuments to successive generations of Ayshfords can be found in the church at Burlescombe nearby. From the latter part of the 17th century onward, manor house became farmhouse and, by the looks of it, remains so to this day. The location of a chapel in a farm field occupied by a placidly grazing flock of sheep suggests an obvious symbolism of the sort the more pious Pre-Raphaelites would have used unhesitatingly. It was also an incongruous and delightful sight to happen upon.





There were techno pastoral vistas to be viewed from the towpath, too, as the canal was paralleled by the striding giant frames of pylons. Crackling lines were held up by upraised, ceramic insulator-braceleted arms sloping from hunched, vorticist shoulders, strung in slackly undulant lines from one giant to the other. They crossed the canal and marched off over the gentle rise of the slope beyond, marking out distance with dwindling perspective as they approached the horizon. Blue reflections in half-frozen water contrasted with the quills of bulrushes on the bankside, coiled and pendant tubes of insulators the hollowed out forms of the erect, solid seed heads, chocolate brown and cigar-shaped. Passing under the power lines, I paused to tune into the harsh electron drone, the white heat overtone hum of modernity. I’m travelling back to the pre-modern age, alongside an early modern industrial transport network. I’ll soon arrive in a time when technologies of the electric (now digital) age, long since taken for granted, would have been considered miraculous, magical and quite possibly the work of the Devil.


The canal now ends just beyond the twin nooks of old limekilns, entering a dark, narrow tunnel of the sort to produce claustrophobic nightmares, or inspire a ghost story by LTC Rolt or Robert Aickman (both founders of the Inland Waterways Association in the post-war period). Pushing my bike up the slope to the bridge above, I travel the short distance along a contour winding country road to the village of Holcombe Rogus. The church is at the further end of the street which gently winds up between tidy cottages, raising its square, crenellated, copper weather vane-crested tower above them all. It is bordered by the imposing façade of Holcombe Court, a 16th century Tudor house built by Sir Roger Bluett, and inhabited by the Bluett family until they sold the estate in 1858. We will discover a good many Bluett’s inside the church, and will find the divisions so unequivocally demarcated by the manorial walls looming above the humbler dwellings of the villagers below will be replicated in its sanctified but far from unworldly space. The venerable Nikolaus Pevsner says of Holcombe Court that ‘its entrance front is the most spectacular example of the Tudor style in Devon’. The gates are connected to an intercom with attached number code pad, a clear signal for the uninvited to clear off. I take a quick photograph and then briskly retreat before the current incumbents release the hounds.




Walking up the path to the church, the present started to seem more attenuated, the sense of still suspension engendered by the clear winter chill intensifying the effect. The mud and lack of preservation gloss allowed for a true sense of the surroundings inhabited by our medieval forebears, much more so than many buildings which have been cleaned up, fenced around and littered with signage and presented to us as prime cuts of our heritage. A sturdily buttressed, roughly-bricked building bordered the narrow approach, lying long, heavy and squat. This was once the church house, the hall where the villagers would gather for meetings, church ales and seasonal revels. Festivities would no doubt spill out into the surrounding streets and even into the graveyard and the nave of the church, its public space. The high west wall of the graveyard is also the wall of the Tudor manor house, and its roofs and chimneys rise ostentatiously above its top edge. A door in the wall gave direct personal access to the churchyard for the Bluett family, a private passage and short processional leading to the south porch.


I enter the porch and turn the iron ring on the oak door upward. The latch inside lifts with a decisive thunk and I push the door open, the creek of iron hinges echoing around the still interior. There is always a slight thrill upon finding an old church open, and knowing that you will now be able to explore its layers of history, to become attuned to its hushed ambience and subtle resonances. These must be haunted spaces to inhabit at night, with only a flickering candle to hold back the murmuring darkness.




I wander along the aisles of the nave, head craned upward so that it’s a wonder I don’t run slam bang into a pillar or crack my shin on a bench end. It’s not long before I spot my first Green Man, carved on the capital of one of the 15th century stone columns. A two-faced head in peasant’s hood, its features an uncommon portrait of a common villager, folds itself around a corner. Its Janus gaze takes in the unscrolled landscape of historical time and untold visions of far futurity, finding no distinctions between them. The head’s dumbly gaping mouth spews forth plaited oak shoots decorated with acorn cups both empty and full, which garland the columnar circumference. This symbolic figure of the woodlands, emblem of vegetative renewal, has proliferated within the church, manifesting itself on the trunks of several columns.








One Green Man has leaflike ears and a mild porcine face, hawthorn-like branches and leaves issuing from its gullet. Another capital is carved with a fourfold Green Man, one face for each corner. Their varying moods and visages seem to reflect the shifting tempers of the seasons. One stares blankly with gummy vacancy, hardly there at all. Another looks ferociously out with sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed hunger. And another has a bovine mien, ears devilishly pointed but with the blunt, squared-off teeth of the herbivorous ruminant. A fourth face, thoughtful and human, a wreath of hair crowning the ridges of a bony forehead, looks down on the benches below, the eyes alert and intelligent. They are all tethered together by ropes of ivy which shoots forth from generative mouths, the sprouting language of the greenwood.





That other perennial inhabitants of medieval churches, the memento mori skull, is also present in bony profusion. Church’s are death-haunted spaces, full of memorials to those who have passed through and beyond. Here is Death etched in slate on the floor, ebony features smoothed by centuries of soles. He wears a wreath, the Emperor of his own domain, and one eye socket has a tiny grain of red lodged in it. He crowns one of the Bluett memorials, kingly pate bounded by a crown, although sans the crown of his teeth, his hollow gaze focussed on an unearthly distance beyond the heraldic eagle and squirrel perching on milky helmets before him. He is at the root of another Bluett tomb, cracked open like one of the squirrel’s nuts. And he is carried by the ghost effigies of the Bluett children like some dark-lit Hallow’s Eve punkie. He is everywhere, inescapable. You cannot evade him whichever route through the aisles you take.



Low winter light pours in through the windows at the east end of the church. It illuminates the marble globes fixed into smooth craters in the gray, lunar stone of the reredos, the screen behind the altar. It looks like they might long ago have worn the dishes of those craters through repeated rolling rotations. The red, black and grey patterning of the spheres resembles the plateaus, rifts, oceans, deserts and mountain ranges of planetary surfaces, the warmly reflective glow hinting at habitable worlds.




I ascend the narrow spiral of stairs which used to lead the dizzy climber to the rood screen dividing nave from chancel, secular from sacred, the public from the priesthood. It’s no longer there, the steps ending in empty space, a small rectangle of hardwood acting as a token barrier. The colourfully patterned organ pipes rise in swelling and ebbing graphs, physically charting the relative masses of sound, the volumes of air which will be displaced. I imagine a protean organ chord suddenly erupting from the arrayed pipes, tumbling me back down the stairs in a Peanuts roll. I could potentially jump from the narrow top stair on which I perch, feet placed toe to ankle in a sideways alignment, and land on the roof of the organ, sending up a thick billow of age-old dust like a volcanic ashcloud. But I suspect my dashing leap, Phantom of the Opera theatrics on a parochial scale, would result in my crashing straight through the ceiling leaving me trapped within the belly of the musical beast.






From the precarious vantage point of the top stair, you can get a close view of the stained glass angels in the upper tracery of the East window arches. Created in 1892, they are Arts and Crafts creatures. But they also look curiously like comic book characters from the 1970s, or golden haired rockers from an album cover by Jim Fitzpatrick. The Victorian artists may have left out extraneous detail which wouldn’t have been visible to the congregation below, but the resultant simplification of form apparent from closer quarters results in a surprising modernity. These are timeless angels. A thread of spidersilk spans one of the angelic panes, anchoring a spun which gently trembles with its seething black cargo. Soon the face of the angel will be occluded by a crawling arachnid shadow of tiny scuttling dots.


Another pane has a two-dimensional cookie-cutter strip in the form of a clover leaf intertwining with a triangle in a puzzling Escher embrace. The three lobes of the clover the leaf and the three points of the triangle are perhaps symbolic of the Trinity, a linking of the divine symmetry of nature with the ideal geometries born of the rational mind.






I turn to descend the spiralling stair once more. Halfway down, I pause to look through the diamond lozenges of the centuries old windows. They are frosted with a fine cracquelure of scratches, cracks and webs which seem to have fused the surface, all spotted and coloured with dots and blots of lichen and mold. The windows frame the gravestones, manor house wall, church house and trees, freezing them in a blue-green light. It resembles the gelid tint of the icebound canal. The world outside is lent the semblance of worn and abraded antiquity. It’s as if the speed of light has grown sluggish in its passage through this obscuring glass, and I am looking out at a scene from some indeterminate period of the past. Will I witness a stern figure in Puritan black walk determinedly up to the churchyard gate? Or church ale revellers in medieval tunics stumble out of the church house? I turn from such reveries and tread the last few downward steps to re-enter the main body of the church.



I cross to the North side of the chancel where a screen brought from St Peter’s in Tiverton in 1854 now encloses the Bluett family chapel. The screens proclaim this as a private space, the Bluetts exercising manorial rights even in death. It contains the elaborate tombs of two generations of the family. Richard Bluett and his Mary Chichester are dressed in sober black, their heads resting on the pleated plates of their capacious ruffs. Richard died in 1616, some years after Mary. His effigy rests on its side, propped up on an elbow, and looks down on the recumbent form of his wife below. His eyes are clear, and the brown-irised pupils shift their gaze sideways to focus upon her face. Mary’s eyes are turned upward, and are glazed with the sightless film of death, focussed on nothing visible in this world. Richard’s lips are full and ruddy, still flushed with life; Mary’s are thin, drawn and pale within her drained marble features. Two panels of text above the couple proclaim her virtues in gold lettering, declaring that ‘a modest matron here doth lye/A mirror of her kind’, being ‘Godly, chaste and hospitable’.





The subsequent generation, Sir John Bluett (d.1634) and Elizabeth Portman opt for more formal tomb attire and poses and restrict themselves to monochrome marble. He is encased in armour, with a frilly lace collar adding a courtly touch and making it clear that the protective plating is purely ceremonial. His face has suffered some minor damage over the years, however; and a crack across the bridge of the nose and from the mouth to the cheek (the latter appearing as if it has been partially disguised by the growth of a moustache) are suggestive of duelling scars or war wounds. Lady Elizabeth has on her finest dress, with expansively puffed out sleeves making the point that she doesn’t expect to be doing any practical work. They both stare blankly upward at the ceiling of their funerary fourposter, their heads resting on tasselled pillows of stone, hands pressed stiffly together and raised in permanent prayer. At their feet, loyal heraldic beasts keep eternal guard. Elizabeth has a small house dog curled up by her pointed slippers, ready to yap ferociously at any potential desecrators. Sir John has a bushy-tailed squirrel nibbling on a nut clutched in its tiny paws. It’s a creature which also perches atop the heraldic helm crowning the tomb. A perplexing and potentially comical choice. But perhaps the squirrel’s storing up of its nuts represents a pragmatic conflation of the worldly husbandry of wealth with the promise of spiritual fulfilment in the life hereafter. Heaven is a place where you have an endless supply of nuts. The squirrel is, of course, of the red variety, its transatlantic grey hoodlum brethren yet to have been introduced to take over the whole park bench feeding racket in the 20th century.




At the side of the cold stone bed, the Bluett children obediently line up in an orderly rank. They were all daughters (and thus none could inherit the estate) and they float spectrally in palled marble, gowns sweeping the floor. Some carry flowers, some have hands pressed in prayer, others carry skulls before them. These are the unlucky ones, these bony tokens memento mori of their own early passing, outlived by their parents. I briefly became fascinated by the views of a varying array of intricately twined topknots visible from behind, a rare insight into the details of period hairdressing.



Both pairs of Bluetts are overlooked by the vague presences of Putti, disembodied infant heads fluttering about with the aid of wings attached to their neck stumps. They look like they they’ve alighted for the briefest moment and, easily distracted, will flit off elsewhere at any instant. On my way out of the chapel, I notice a slab tombstone on the floor memorialising another Bluett along with his wife, Kerenhappuch. What a name! And she lived to the age of 94, dying in 1759. A fine innings, seeing out significant social and constitutional changes, and no doubt aided by the medical advances of the 18th century age of reason.


Adjoining the Bluett memorial chapel is the Bluett Pew, the living taking their place alongside the dead. It’s a clear statement of continued lineage, of power and wealth (and spiritual capital) inherited and maintained into the present generation and beyond. The tall screens boxing off seats reserved for the Bluetts and guests resemble the rood screen which divided the congregation in the nave from the sacred rituals performed by the priesthood in the sacristy. But here, the division is between titled landowner and commoner. Perhaps a better analogy, then, one devoid of sacred connotations, would be a private box at the theatre or opera. The screen, carved in the early 17th eentury Jacobean period, is topped by 15 oval medallions, each a small theatrical proscenium framing scenes from the early books of the Bible – the Pentateuch. The stars arcing across the borders suggest a bounding firmament containing this earthly stage with in its circling embrace. It’s rather like Shakespeare’s wooden O from the prologue of Henry V, both the Globe theatre and the world at large which it strives to represent on its stage.




The sequence of narrative tableaux within the medallions is full of vivid life. The carved figures are simplified, but are all the more potently present for it. Eve in particular, who features in three scenes (the temptation, the expulsion from Eden and the raising of the first children, Cain and Abel) is filled with primal power and spirit. She looks timeless, both ancient and new, not rooted in any particular style of the period in which she was fashioned. Suckling the younger child, Abel, she as the look of a mother Goddess figure, an icon of fertility rooted to the landscape in which she sits, and which she also blesses with her fecundity. She is haloed by dusty cobwebs, canopies gilded by silvery sunlight – Our Lady of the Spiders.


In the temptation scene, Eve reaches up to pick a second fruit to hand to Adam who stands on the other side of the dividing bole of the Tree of Knowledge. She faces us full on, a frontal boldness which makes her the focus of the composition, the active subject. The serpent is knotted in the crown of the tree above, its head hanging down like the questing tip of a parasitic vine. The whole, and Eve in particular, is reminiscent of Gauguin’s treatment of the same subject (in painting and woodcarving). The same direct, elemental quality he found in the art of the South Sea Islands is present here in an English village church. In the expulsion from Eden carving, the angel border guard hastens Adam and Eve on their way with what looks like a well-aimed Chaplinesque boot up the bare backside. Adam pushes Eve ahead of him with a shove to the head, a violent gesture which makes it clear who will bear the blame for this exile and fall. Or is he perhaps simply preventing her from looking back at the paradise garden which they are leaving behind forever.



Behind them, a palm tree raises a feathery headdress. Trees feature in a number of the carvings, partly as a means of dividing the scene into separate sections. The also act as central props to ensure structural stability. The various stylised specimens range from fluting, tapered columns to the arching trunk of the burning bush (coiled with ivy and tipped with deciduous leaves) and a smoothly-barked, bulbous-based baobab besides which Moses stands. His head is parallel with the top branches, as if he were a towering giant.



The knotted, worming line of the serpent recurs too. Snakes writhe away from the burning bush and drape themselves in the tree beneath which Adam and Eve raise their children (the lurking poison which will enter Cain’s heart). Moses sets up a copper effigy of a snake as a protective talisman for his people, the sight of which inures them to the deadly effect of the fiery serpents which God has set on them as a punishment for doubting him.





Some of the figures are wearing the clothing of Tudor times, an anachronism which serves to bring an immediacy to the stories being related. Adam is a gentleman farmer in early 17th eentury ruff and tunic, ploughing the fields whilst a stormy-faced Cain beats the oxen with a stick. The mysterious giant in the first medallion sports Tudor headgear with a feather rakishly attached. Balaam, meanwhile, has something of the look of a Turk about him, complete with broad, bushy moustache. Two later carvings, made in 1858 during a restoration, and depicting Israelite spies returning from Canaan with a huge bunch of grapes and the bearing of the Arc of the Covenant by armed guards, are more open to the possibilities and pleasures of historical fantasia.





There is much here of the violence and retribution spattering the Old Testament. Cain’s murder of Abel, the primal fratricide which introduces death and murder into the world, is shown in all its brutal, bludgeoning savagery. Balaam’s encounter with the warrior angel which bars his way is pregnant with suspended actions and imminent bloodshed. The angel draws its sword in readiness to kill the disobedient messenger, its scything wings emphasising its muscular power. Balaam in turn beats his donkey, who turns aside from the heavenly assassin to whose presence his master is blind, thus saving his ungrateful hide. Moses raises his dagger to slaughter his son, Isaac, in a sacrifice demanded by God. His killing arm is physically restrained by an angel which leans into the world from the starry border. Moses sits above a thicket of pikes, spears and halberds bristling beyond a battlefield tent. His arms are held up by his brother Aaron and companion Hur. As long as these arms remain upraised (in a gesture of prayer and praise), the battle will go in favour of the Israelites, and Joshua, their military chief, will defeat their enemy, the Amelekites, ‘with the edge of a sword’.



Another medallion depicts a giant figure (Goliath?) striding towards a richly garbed man with a wine jug at his belt leading an ox (a sacrificial offering, perhaps). The giant holds a sword on which a severed head is impaled like a cocktail nugget. His shield bearing arm is flung out behind him and would appear to have knocked a fool to the ground. This subservient figure tumbles in his wake, grovelling body hunched in a compact, serpentine squiggle. The snake this time takes human form.


The preponderance of scenes from the life of Moses can perhaps be seen as an illustration of the rectitude of authority and power. Those who oppose Moses oppose God, and they are punished accordingly. The assertion of the divine right of kings was still extant at the time the carvings were created. There was a related sense, propagated by those whom it served, that the social order was ordained by heavenly decree. The tableaux depicting Moses bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai and chastising the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf; of his remote direction of the course of a battle; and of his protection of his people through the creation of a magical talisman (the copper snake – an acceptable idol). All were illustrations of the rightness of authority, and the wisdom of following the appointed leader. These medallions face outwards from the seats of the Bluetts, the local face of authority and landowing power. They gave something of visual interest for the congregation of commoners to contemplate, to look up to. The establishment of authority and power is also evident in the scene in which Melchisedcck, a king and priest of Salem, pays due homage to Abraham in the victorious wake of a number of battles, and receives a grant of land in return.



Whatever political message or subliminal lessons might be encoded in the choice of biblical stories and their placement above an enclosure reserved fro the local landowning aristocracy, the carvings themselves are beautifully crafted, the figures full of life and character. I turn from my contemplation of them, neck a little sore from craning upwards, and head for the door. On my way out, I notice another stone-carved figure on a capital at the back of the nave. This one looks as though he might be a king, trimly bearded and crowned .Who could he be? Few of the Tudors sported beards, and he is certainly too gaunt to be the lustily full-faced Henry VIII. An earlier medieval monarch, perhaps. I also notice the Victorian stained glass in the rear window, which depicts the visitation of the three kings and the shepherds to the infant Christ in his stable crib. One of the shepherd’s, ostentatiously robed in purple fur, has bought his bagpipes along and is giving them a full, Dizzy-cheeked blast. I can’t help feeling this is a poor choice of instrument with which to lull a newborn baby.




I pick up the pen to sign the visitors’ book, and realise that my fingers are too frozen to grasp it firmly. The stone vault of the church is like one great refrigerator. I write my appreciative comments in a palsied script. Outside, the sunlight is approaching its golden hour glory, and I spend a few minutes wandering amongst the graves, their shadows sharp and clearcut. A couple of neat tussocks of moss top the flat plateau of one headstone, their green humps contrasting pleasingly with the smooth, granitic grey – a miniature moorland landscape. As the hedgerows and hilltop copses begin to make intricately brachiated silhouettes against the sky, I realise that it is time to move on. I pass by the church house, now casting its shadow over the muddy path to the church, and push off onto the country road which will lead me to the canal path, and thence once more to the age of future present.

PART ONE


The early days of March signal the first tenative stirrings of Spring, a turning time of the year when the bite of winter lingers but begins to cede its supremacy. It was a propitious moment to set off on a quest, a pilgrimage of sorts to discover the mysterious magic of pre-Reformation medieval and Tudor worlds as preserved in three local country churches. We would also be confronted with the jarring juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular, of heavenly and earthly power competing for attention. We would excavate stratified layers of history, occasionally catching a fading echo of some ancient archetypal myth figure, a fleeting peripheral flicker from the imagination of our pre-Christian forbears, still resonating in the carved stone arcades fashioned by medieval church masons. We would struggle up mighty slopes, bow our heads before driving hail and return through owl-haunted darkness. But with hope in our hearts and the shining white tower of the Haldon Belvedere to guide us, we would never give up.


First we needed fuel, however, and made our rendezvous in the warm and welcoming confines of Café 36 in St Thomas, west of the Exe and beyond the old city walls of Exeter. I, guiding vicar for the day, naturally drank tea. My friend and travelling companion David Chatton-Barker, instigator of the expedition under the aegis of the Folklore Tapes Tramping and Loring series of sonic investigations, washed down his bacon buttie with a cup of coffee. I regarded his hearty repast with a jealous eye. But I had forgotten my wallet, leaving with a paltry pocketful of change. A shorting of what is usually a reflex action upon leaving the flat, it was the first of a series of incidents which imposed an allegorical narrative upon the journey. I was the pilgrim travelling without means of support, trusting in the generosity of providence. We were both fools on bicycle steeds, venturing into the warren of Victorian terraced streets mazing their way to the village of Alphington. It was a bright morning thus far, and we set off at a relaxed and convivial pace. To the west, over the ridge of the Haldon Hills which were our destination, a solid wall of darkness divided the sky, its gloom-doomy front advancing with the steady pace of inexorable fate.


The hail hit as we approached the iron gates of Pincet Gardens, the words proudly wrought in black and gold Art Nouveau lettering. The gatehouse of these elegant Edwardian pleasure gardens, with their wisteria walk, rose beds and croquet lawn, provided sanctuary from the elements, as it once had for the groundsman, a figure from a publicly-spirited age long-dispensed with. The sheltering arch, and by symbolic extension of Victorian and Edwardian civic rectitude, allowed for the testing of sound levels and the consultation of maps. My Ordnance Survey map of Exeter and its surrounds dated from the inter-war period, the nerve network of local railway lines taking the place of the thick, wormy, blue arteries of motorways to come. It seemed appropriate that we should resort to such dated cartographic means to guide us. We were, in some ways, following in the footsteps or cycle tracks of inter-war British artists and writers like John Piper, Myfanwy Evans (later Piper) and Geoffrey Grigson, who had found inspiration from the medieval art they discovered in old country churches. Figures and faces carved in stone or from wood which appeared to them as immediate and modern as any of Picasso’s work derived from the art of ancient non-Western cultures.


Passing through the old village of Alphington, with its prospect over the city below, we left the boundaries of Exeter and turned onto an old country road which soon carried us over the Autobahn thrum of the A30. It was a crossing which felt significant, putting the functional roar of hurrying modernity behind us and leading us to older roads; lanes whose sparse usage allowed for ridges of hardy, tufted grass to draw a thick dividing line along their length, a rural version of the central reservation. In the village of Shillingford St George, we paused at a junction marked by an old stone cross, and crouched below the overarching beech tree, hunched against a fresh onslaught of hail. The small, frozen white pellets bombarded the moss landscape atop the flat plateaux of the cross’ arms like tiny meteorites crashing onto remote granite-bedded moorland. The right arm of the cross pointed to a lane which cut across the hillside, and we followed its transverse directions as if it were a signpost, which it may well have been. The dark mass of the hail cloud lumbered east over Exeter and the sky’s blue was all the more cerulean in contrast. There on the hill was the white tower, a radiant beacon capping the horizon of the Haldon Ridge rising above us. Haloed in a baroque nimbus of cumulus cloud, it drew us onward, a destination both symbolic and real. Once we reached this tower, the long, hard climb would be over and we could sail down the other side of the ridge to Ashton on the upper slopes of the Haldons.



As if to wake us from nebulous, cloudy dreaming and remind us that the tower was still some steep distance away, David’s faithful old steed Victor chose this moment to limp to a halt, its chain slipping off under the strain of steady ascent and firmly wedging itself between gear wheels. The venerable old bike was on its last legs, or spokes, and this was very likely to be one final, epic excursion before it was laid to rest. But it appeared as if the journey might prove too arduous for its aging frame after all. Desperate efforts to lever the chain out with a pitifully inadequate spanner were all in vain. It bent as if made from pliable plastic. Fingers were cut on gear teeth and blood mixed with oil, but even this sacrifice failed to release the chain. The shining tower was beginning to look like a taunting mirage, an elusive dream which would remain forever beyond our grasp. Even a sturdy old bronze key was unable to dislodge the stubborn links. Victor was mulish – he wasn’t going anywhere.


It was at this point that a Land Rover drove up and turned into the drive of the farmhouse outside of which the recalcitrant old bike was upended. David ran in to request aid and returned with a hefty steel spanner. Proper job! The chain was forced out and reset, the farmer profusely thanked, and we were on our way again. Victor was treated with the respect due to his frail seniority and led gently up any significant inclines, of which there were plenty to come. Reaching the end of the winding hillside lane, we arrived at a crossroads, a symbolic point which really marked the obstacle we had just overcome. The four-armed signpost pointed eastwards to Exeter, the direction in which we would have disconsolately limped had our serendipitous benefactor not happened along. But we now headed west, enjoying a brief descent, freewheeling and cheering, before the inevitable push to the heights of the neck-craning horizon.


Some distance up the hill, Victor now being pushed up the steadily increasing incline, we took a diversion to the north, following a short lane as it wound down into a sheltered dell. Here the red sandstone church of Dunchideock nestled, adjacent to the monkish quadrangle of a cluster of old farm buildings. We parked the bikes and prepared to walk through the small, unwalled graveyard to the church porch, eager to enter our first church of the day. It was at this point that David began patting pockets and rummaging through his bag with an escalating air of quiet desperation. The painful realisation dawned that his keys had been left lying in the road where Victor had experienced his breakdown. There was nothing for it but to go back and pick them up, hoping they would still be sprawling, keys akimbo, in the central spread, untwisted or flattened by the trundling passage of tractors. So it was downhill and up and turn south at the crossroads. And there they were. But a post van was rapidly approaching, filling up the lane with its purposeful progress and looking unlikely to take kindly to a cyclist dithering in its path. I swiftly stooped and snatched up the keys, pressing myself and my bike into the hedge to allow the envoy of the Royal Mail to pass. We would see him in the distance on several occasions during our journey, his van a small corpuscle pulsing along the hillside roads, a vital force yet, the lifeblood of the countryside. He was almost like a tutelary spirit, a background presence ready to intervene at opportune moments.



Another obstacle to the quest had been overcome. The third symbolic mishap, the loss of the key. Firstly, I had come out without any money, reminding us of the pilgrim’s need to rely on the generosity of the world and its inhabitants. Secondly, the venerable Victor had become lame, requiring stretches of the journey to be made on foot. This necessitated a slowing of the pace, a slight alteration of the schedule, and led to a more contemplative state of mind .The journey is a fundamental component of the quest, the time in which significant encounters take place and vital lessons are learned. This incident served to remind us of this, the meeting with the farmer being an example of the world providing in our time of need. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to reach your destination, you may find that in your speed to arrive you lose your sense of purpose. The loss of the keys made me retrace our path and notice the storm clouds sweeping over Exeter, slanted hail connecting cloud and earth like smudged pencil shading. The tower above was still illuminated, however, a castle in the clouds, and the hail passed us by. The keys, once retrieved, seemed to represent a symbolic blessing. The way is now open to you, they said.


I returned to Dunchideock church. A richly rolling nameplace, a pleasure to ennunciate. It’s name, in the old Celtic language, meant the wooded fort. The high places of the Haldon ridge had long been seen as an advantageous site to set up camp. They were now crowned by a white tower which had more recent and far-reaching military connotations, as we were about to discover. It set its gaze far eastwards, but also inward to the mysteries of the human heart.




I found David wandering around the graveyard, recording its atmospheres and ambient sounds. As often proves the case, the stone garden, planted with the dead, was full of life. Graveyards are often oases of nature, residual respect for sanctified resting places leaving them largely undisturbed. The flat granite and slate planes of gravestones also provide a highly amenable environment for hillocks of moss and the slow-spreading, symbiotic stains of lichens. If the dates on the graves have been erased by weather and time, they can be aged by the extent of the lichenous growth across their surface – the arcane science of lichenometry. There are some splendid specimens in the Dunchideock graveyard; efflorescent orange suns, pale green planetary discs and vermillion nebulae. Whole lichen universes expand across the grey stone, life blooming in a wholly different dimension, a long, slow, silent millennial explosion.




Mosses also thrive on the stone surfaces, finding root in the clefts formed by the stonemason’s chisel as he carved out memorial words. These are now traced in green lettering, a moist, green language. These growths also spread across the tomb flatlands, arms extending in ecstatic nebular outreach. Elsewhere, ivy eagerly grasps the corners of the tabletop tombs which invite convivial day of the dead feasting. They crawl onto their flat surfaces and crack open exit doors for their inhabitants whilst shielding their names with thickly twined knots of woody vine, allowing them the blessed relief of anonymity.


The north side of the graveyard was sparsely inhabited. The sun-warmed south side of the graveyard has always been considered more favoured ground. The shadowy north side is more sinister, more prone to intrusions from elsewhere – the Devil’s side. Those buried there might be considered unfit to keep company with the respectable southerners. Those whose lives had been tainted by scandal, who had committed crimes which had not been forgotten, or sorrowful suicides sufficiently beloved in the locality to be granted hallowed rest. Or, of course, those who were simply too poor to gain access to holier ground.




At the base of the stone arch framing one of the windows on the north side, the carved heads of a monk and nun looked out over the graveyard. Their faces were filled with grace and benediction, red lichen lending them a flush of rubicund life. They had the appearance of graveyard guardians, their calm, assured regard enough to stare down all but the most malevolent and powerful demons. To the north, the darkness was gathering itself together once more and advancing towards. The bright suncreated stark, Manichean contrasts between light and shadow. It was time to seek shelter – sanctuary if you will.


The interior of the church was neat and compact, a very tidy and well-ordered space. Not that there weren’t a few church spiders in residence, shading in the coiled curlicue at the tip of a crozier or lacing their webs through the wooden vines of the decorated rood screen. The red brick of the exterior was continued inside. Aisle columns were built from local red sandstone, chromatically consonant with the ruddy cast of the surrounding soil. The columns are rough and particulate, compacted amalgams of pebbly matter. It looks like the space around them could have been excavated from the Haldon hillside itself, leaving its bones exposed. That this is a sacralised quarry raised from its subterranean pit.




The rood screen separating nave from sacristy, the worldly and quotidian from the holy and eternal, looks Victorian. It’s a reflection of the 19th century desire to reach back to a pre-industrial past, retreating into a dream medievalism, conjuring up a simpler world which, of course, never really existed. It does in fact date from the 15th century, but was extensively restored by Herbert Read in 1893. Read had set up business in Exeter as a church conservator and craftsman in 1888, so this was a relatively early job for him. He also carved the wooden pulpit, its facets inhabited by fiercely bearded representations of the missionaries of the early church in Britain: St Columba, St Augustine, St Boniface and St Petrock. They are framed by trailing greenery in which birds alertly perch, plucking succulent grapes and snapping up climbing snails.


It’s hard not to notice the sizeable marble monument which takes up a large part of the north aisle wall. The wordy white tablet is capped with the black outline of an obelisk at the top of which a medallion-framed relief portrait of its subject is embedded, like an oversized pocket memento of a loved one. A war drum lies on the tomb, its beating silenced, a cessation akin in this case to the termination of the heart’s lifebeat. This is the memorial to Major General Stringer Lawrence, who died in 1775. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Father of the Indian Army’, he was the commander of the East India Company troops (a clear indication of the commercial imperatives behind Empire). His military exploits were instrumental in establishing the British presence in India – of building an Empire in the East. The language on the tomb is unabashed in its imperial pride, celebrating victory and conquest and proclaiming Stringer Lawrence as a saviour ‘born to command, to conquer, and to spare,/As mercy mild, yet terrible, as war’ in the words of Hannah More’s epitaph.


The memorial was funded by Sir Robert Palk, the Governor of Madras and at one time paymaster to the Indian Army. Stringer Lawrence lived with Palk for the last 6 years of his life in the nearby Haldon House. Hannah More writes ‘in vain this frail memorial friendship rears,/His dearest monument’s an army’s tears’. She could well have been referring to Palk, though. He clearly bore a great love for the old soldier. Not only did he name his son Lawrence, with the Major General acting as his godfather, but he raised a further, even grander monument in the form of the white tower on the hill. Few now recognise it as Lawrence Castle, but such was it designated, dedicated to Palk’s dear friend when the building was completed in 1788. It stands as much as a testament to one man’s love for another as it does to the Major General’s prowess in battle. With such knowledge, the tower becomes something else. A symbol of desolation, isolation, of unassuageable sorrow. Something has gone out of the world, something which you loved above all else, and it’s never coming back.

A small plaque on the south wall facing the Stringer Lawrence memorial bears much quieter and less triumphal witness to a parishioner who died on the fields of Flanders in the First World War. Similar records can be found in or near almost every parish church in the country. They particularise the terrible, blank magnitude of wartime mortality statistics, rooting them in specific place, in the family names engraved in the graveyard library. The gravestone chapters of lived local history, of generational lineage are brought to a sudden, violent halt. Unwritten pages are torn out of the book of life and cast to the wind.



The imperial atmosphere generated by Stringer Lawrence’s memorial seems to permeate the rest of the church. The 15th century roof bosses are arrayed in a brightly painted cavalcade of heads and masks, beasts and mythical creatures. A Turk with luxuriant black moustache focuses his bright, sharp gaze down on our craning heads. A crescent is affixed to the brow of his turbaned headdress. Adjacent to him is a lion’s head with a corona of gold mane. Its eyes are wild almonds and a sugary red tongue lolls pantingly out. It resembles stylised Chinese or Indian iconography more than the Christian artistic styles of Western Europe in the late medieval period. The colours are gaudy and gay, boldly carnivalesque, the roof a noisy parade of disparate, wildly contrasting participants. Here are three fish linked in a tail-biting Trinity circle, a plushly red triangular shield their sensual centre. A raw, phallic extrusion, seemingly emerging from the fish’s scales, tentatively probes this sacred ground. Around thethe fishes, golden fruits are slashed open to reveal scarlet flesh. The whole is an amalgam of Western animal symbolism and Indian Shiva lingam, a universal hymn to abundance and generation.




More symbolism comes in the traditional form of the Green Man. Or is it a foliate head? One such here seems to be a Green Man in profile (‘just carve my best side’), a branch emerging from the side of the mouth to wrap around its head in an oval foliate portrait frame. Its large, exaggeratedly upswerving nose gives it a jesterish look. The gold leaves could almost be bells on its softly pointed hat. The sky blue, red and gold colours make it a creature air, blood and sun as much as wood, leaf and earth. Another foliate face is the flowering bud at the heart of a spiral of light green vine and gold leaf. I am the true vine – a powerful symbol of the uncoiling spring of life’s seasonal cycle.



The circling vines are echoed in the whimple headdresses which frame the female heads which are present in some number. These are Hollywood Technicolor representations of medieval femininity. But given that they actually date from the late medieval period, the usual grumbles about authenticity are made redundant. This female presence in the church, and the rainbow rejection of grey sobriety the gay boss figures present in general, acts as a welcome counterbalance to the martial, male memorial, with its priapically erect obelisk reaching up to the roof (but not quite reaching its lofty heights).


This celebratory, polychromatic spirit even spreads to a memento mori skull at the base of a 1697 memorial to one Marthae Bryant. The bony visage is given an gleaming gold gilding, eye sockets glowing with corporeal redness, as if the fires of life were still burning somewhere within. The missing teeth in the jaw hinted at a verisimilitude reproduced with disturbing precision.


David had not been idle whilst I was on my key-retrieving side quest. He had discovered an old harmonium in a quiet corner of the Lady Chapel and had set to working its wooden pedals and filling the church with creaking, reedy chords and arpeggios – sounding out its sandstone corners and wooden arches and recording the results. The upper E note was fixed in permanent depression, as if someone had become addicted to its keening drone, lost in the expanding clouds of overtones. As David produced a few more chords in my presence, I could almost hear the faint ghost voices of Nico and Ivor Cutler (a very odd duet) drifting in from the aether beyond.



It was a hypnotic sound. But we couldn’t allow ourselves to drift too long into harmonium reverie. We still had to reach the heights of the white tower, Robert Palk’s shining declaration of pure love and heartbroken loss for his Major General. We emerged to blue skies, the dark sweep of the storm front menacing Exeter safely below us to the east. Onward and upward, we traversed the short lane dipping into the rounded cleft of the valley fold in which Dunchideock nestled and rejoined the road climbing steeply to the summit of the Haldon ridge. In deference to the venerable Victor, this was a walk and push stretch, companionable conversation interspersed with huffing and puffing and other assorted exhalations. Finally, we attained the summit, and were rewarded with stunning views across the Teign Valley to the tor-knubbed horizon of Dartmoor.



The road traced the spine of the ridge, and we followed its blessedly flat track until we reached our turning, the sign pointing to the downward slope leading to Doddiscombsleigh and Ashton. The white tower was immediately above us, pristinely outlined against luminous blue sky. A plane contrail etched its cloudy line across the outlines of winter branches. We debated about taking a short detour and exploring it, but decided that it would serve us better as a symbol, a tower of fable. The fact that it was now behind us indicated that we had reached the goal to which it had guided us, acting as an everpresent beacon. ‘To the tower and to the ravens’ as Sandy sang, although we had to make do with crows. We had made the ascent, and the route to Ashton was now open to a joyful freewheeling glide.



The valleys before us, with their folds and wooded slopes, curving streams and sheep-flocked fields, were enveloped in a dreamy afternoon haze softly obscure distances suggestive of nebulous Samuel Palmer Edens. We paused under the power lines strung between the grasping iron arms of pylons which strode in receding formation across the hillside, coniferous plantations magically parting to permit their progress. Their hum and crackle formed the droning ground over which birdsong, a crow of a cock and the passing sigh of a single car were laid – a rich rural mix. There was even a bit of stereo panning as a surge or stutter in the electron flow sent the electric drone pulsing behind us and then ahead before resuming its steady OHM drone. I felt like joining in, adding human overtone harmonies to the technological oscillations. This would sound great mixed with the harmonium respirations, I thought. A blend of exterior and exterior drone atmosphere, the electronic combined with the organic, wood with wire.


Passing beneath the pylon wires was like crossing some kind of threshold. Shortly thereafter, we entered an avenue of dark evergreen trees, and the Ashton sign appeared at the side of the road. The descent into the village was an exhilarating whoosh, the church tower suddenly appearing above thatched, whitewashed cottages. We parked our bikes at the foot of the church wall and climbed the steep, uneven steps which wound around to the lychgate rising greenly above us. We had arrived at Ashton, the main church on our itinerary. Our quest was reaching its fruition. It was time to pause for a well-earned sandwich in the porch, followed by a celebratory segment of Kendal Mint Cake. Hell, let’s make it two.

A bit of a Beatles bonanza in the Oxfam Music and Arts shop in Exeter yesterday, with 8 LPs spanning A Hard Days Night through to Abbey Road (1964-70) coming in. Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road were Japanese releases produced by the Toshiba company, two on red translucent vinyl (this in 1967 & 69!) Apparently they are particularly prized by audiophiles, being immaculately pressed. Researching them introduced me to an element of record collecting hitherto unknown by me: the 'obi strip'. These are the paper sashes which were wrapped around LPs in Japan. Their very disposability has now made them rare artifacts, and one of these records with its obi intact would be worth a considerable amount. Alas, there was no obi. The ruby vinyl looked splendid illuminated by the sunlight, however, making a particularly pleasing contrast with the crisp granny smith green of the Apple logo. The artists advertised on the inner sleeve of the Sgt Pepper album hint at why The Beatles caused so much excitement in Japan - they look very staid in comparison. Julian Cope's excellent survey Japrocksampler outlines the development of the Group Sounds craze which drew its inspiration from the fab four, and exploded in the wake of their tour of Japan in June 1966.



Abbey Road and Sgt Pepper have the price printed on the back cover, rather like a paperback book. Both would have set you back 2,000 Yen. The White Album had its Richard Hamilton poster and John Kelly photo portraits present. Interesting also to note the background collage on the inner gatefold flap of Beatles for Sale, presaging Peter Blake and Jann Haworth's more famous montage for the Sgt Pepper cover.

Sound recordist and musician Chris Watson was in conversation at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum with RSPB communications officer for the South West Tony Whitehead last night. Perhaps the differentiation between the two endeavours is a false one, however. In response to a question about the influence of his natural sound recordings on his music, Watson replied that he made no distinction between them. He has spoken before about the microphone being his instrument, and a highly versatile and adaptable one at that. Musicians and composers have long attempted to mimic or summon up the sounds of nature, from the shrill marsh bird cries of Japanese shakuhachi players through Beethoven’s programmatic traversal of the countryside in the Pastoral Symphony to Messiaen’s transliteration of avian song .Perhaps electronic musicians have come closest to evoking the complex and profoundly inhuman soundworld of melodic birdsong clusters, the seethe and chitter of insects and the compression and echoing boom of subaquatic depths. Watson mentioned his own indebtedness to Pierre Schaeffer and his musique concrete descendants. He fondly recalled his own early childhood recordings with a portable reel to reel tape machine given as a present by prescient parents. He fixed a microphone to the seed-strewn bird table in the garden, set the reels in motion and retreated inside to see what hungry visitors he might sonically capture with his new magnetic magic box. It was one of those moments, epiphanic in recollection, when a lifetime of vocational creativity is seeded. Bird seeded in this instance.

Watson, a son of the People’s Republic of Sheffield now resident in Newcastle, spent a decade of discovery and experiment in Cabaret Voltaire with Stephen Mallinder and Richard Kirk from 1971-1981, pre- to post-punk, only recording in the latter years of that fertile period. Working in his attic, a space which was half artist’s garrett, half mad scientist’s lab, the trio played freely with sound, seldom producing anything resembling conventional pop or rock. If they did, it was by accident and would be swiftly discarded. Watson built his own equipment, exhibiting an inventiveness and ingenuity, as well as a readiness to make lateral use of the materials to hand, which would stand him in good stead for the challenges of his future career. He laboured over cut-ups and tape loops, guided his oscillator through undulating frequencies and transformed his organ playing through heavy processing until it sounded less like its instrumental self, more like a generator of sound swarms. He was delighted with the development of synthesisers, and the way that ‘non-musicians’ like Brian Eno used them, and bought an EMS AKS in the latter half of the 70s. It was this which he used on the debut Cabaret Voltaire LP Mix-UP, released in 1979. Watson left the group in 1981, shortly after a visit to the Top of the Pops studios to witness another band performing. Horrified at a vision of what might be, he left to pursue other interests. He did briefly continue his tape and concrete explorations with The Hafler Trio, however, a proliferating project initiated and masterminded by Andrew M.McKenzie and only occasionally and incidentally attaining the status of an actual trio.


Watson joined Tyne Tees Television as a sound recordist and then returned to that epiphanic childhood moment and worked for the RSPB, recording the sounds of birds and their environments. As he pointed out in his discussion with Tony Whitehead, the production of RSPB films was an invaluable apprenticeship for him and many others who went on to make wildlife films for the BBC. Watson himself is now a highly esteemed wildlife recordist, and has worked on innumerable programmes, including the all-important Attenbouroughs. He mentioned what a privilege it was to work with Sir David, describing him as ‘the perfect travelling companion’. These programmes have given him the opportunity to immerse himself in a hugely diverse range of environments and build up a cumulative sound picture which effectively encompasses much of the globe.

The detail and texture of sound are very important to him, as is the way in which it is heard. He is mildly disdainful of the compression and diminution of sound transmitted through TV speakers or stereo headphones. He prefers installations in which surround sound set-ups can come nearer to approximating natural sound as it is perceived in situ. The upstairs gallery to the rear of the museum allowed for a wide speaker spectrum, with a bass cone in the middle emitting low frequency rumble. This was ideal for the subsonic sounds of elephants, a harrumph whose vibrations affected the diaphragm as much as the eardrum. Watson pointed out that the fundamental, the root note, was below the range of human perception, so what we were hearing were the harmonics arrayed above it. Close-up recordings of a cheetah purr were similarly deep and resonant, solid waves of physically palpable sound which weren’t so far off from Sunn ((o)) drone power chords. Watson spoke of the musicality of this sound, and of others. There is something very Cageian about his refusal to demarcate between music and the sounds of the natural world. Close listening reveals the musicality inherent in a whole spectrum of living sounds. He also emphasised the intelligence of various animals, exhibiting a respect for life and a scepticism about the primacy of humanity and its assumed position at the head of the great chain of being. Orcas and Vultures seemed to particularly draw his admiration.

We were treated to a dizzying panoply of natural sounds, from the tiniest shrimps to the mightiest whales. The blue whale recording was not his own, he confessed. It remains his holy grail, a more benign Ahab quest to capture an awe-inspiring call capable of sounding out hundreds of miles of subaquatic space. The whale call truly tested the capacity of the speakers, its submarine frequencies a bone-shuddering groan until pitch-shifted upwards into a more audible range. It still made the chants of Tibetan monks sound like soprano squeaks, though. Watson argues, naturally enough, for the sound picture of a natural environment being as important as the visual aspect. It can be more stimulating to the imagination, and create more of a sense of being vitally present. Sound recording can almost be akin to magic in the way that it transports us to worlds which would otherwise be wholly inaccessible to our senses. We shrink to earwig on insect kingdoms and grow invisible to listen to animals which would shy from the merest hint of human presence. One of Watson’s most remarkable recordings was made by attaching contact mics. to the inside of a zebra’s rib-cage, killed the previous night and already lion-chewed and stripped of its prime cuts. Watson had rehearsed such a set-up on a post-Christmas turkey carcass, rejected by his seasonally satiated family. He recorded the metallic skraw of starlings which soon descended to devour the flesh and pick the bird’s bones clean. The vultures had spotted the zebra’s corpse from way up high and surrounded it, checking out the locale. Watson observed them and noted that they were highly aware that there was something unusual about this piece of carrion, even though he had done his best to conceal his wires and mics. Again, he emphasised the wily intelligence of these wary creatures. It took them some five hours before they eventually set to, beginning their thorough clean-up operation. By this time the unfortunate zebra was engulfed in a dark nebula of flies. The recording floats on the swarming drone of their incessant zzzzzzhhhhhh. Watson suggested that vultures were exactly as you’d expect them to sound – like scimitar slashes of guitar feedback. He was right. It was a remarkable sound, intoxicating yet slightly nauseating at the same time. You could almost sense the overpowering stench of death in your nostrils, an understandable synaesthetic response. Watson took this recording on one of his school visits once, using it to begin his presentation. ‘This is the last sound you would hear before you died, if you were a zebra’, he told the assembly of rapt children. He wasn’t invited back, he ruefully noted. But the kids loved it.

Chris Watson and Tony Whitehead on the Exe Estuary

Other sounds were called for by Tony Whitehead and members of the audience, Watson suggesting that it was becoming like a request show. The brief grunt of a cod even received an encore. It sounded like the swinging doors in Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. There was a haddock chorus from a fjord near Bergen, the ambient hum of midshipman fish, the sonic attack of a pistol shrimp, made with its oversized claw, and the grate and scrape of grazing limpets, recorded at high tide in Batten Bay, Plymouth. The tuned percussion of a capercaillie recorded in Scotland apparently attracted the attentions of Bjork, who was so entranced by its inherent musical qualities that she got in touch with Watson and asked if she could use it in a piece of her own. She has since attended one of Watson’s sound recording workshops in Iceland. He joked that she was a useful contact given her facility with a four wheel drive in the remoter wilds of her native country.

Watson and Whitehead both have an abiding concern with the issue of noise pollution in the modern world and the psychological impact this has on people’s lives. Watson noted that the recordings of starlings he had made 30 years ago, in which they imitated the sounds they heard around them, would be wholly different today. It was a sound picture which acted as a memorial to a world whose sonic character has changed rapidly over the intervening period. He mentioned the activism of Gordon Hempton in America, an ‘acoustic ecologist’ who is attempting to create a notional sanctuary comprising one square inch of silence in Olympic National Park, Washington State. Watson played his recordings of Orcas in the waters beneath the North Polar ice, emphasising the extent to which they lived in a world of sound; practically in terms of their echo location clicks and socially in terms of their keening calls and cries. He then played a recording in which the combine grind of the approaching icebreaking ship Odin could be heard loudly approaching from some 100 miles in the distance distance. Such noise pollution must have a devastating effect on such aurally sensitive creatures, he pointed out. It has been suggested that loud sonar beacons placed in the oceans to guide submarines have resulted in the mass beachings of dolphins and whales, driven out of their usual territories by this invasive noise. Watson talked of the almost transcendental experience of standing outside Scott’s hut in the Antarctic and reflecting upon the fact that in this quietest of spots he was experiencing a soundworld unchanged since the ill-fated expedition some century before. It was an experience unthinkable in most other regions of the world.


Watson is concerned with the loss of the ability to really listen. He is disdainful of the blanket use of music in wildlife documentaries. Sound recordings would be much more involving for the viewer, who would then also become a more active listener. I wholeheartedly agree on this point. The use of sweeping string themes, combined with swooping helicopter or crane shots, amounts to a bullying emotional manipulation, akin to being grasped by the lapels, shaken up a bit and yelled at to ‘feel some awe and shed a tear at the spectacle of it all, goddamn you’. Music, humorous or sentimental, also encourages a relentless anthropomorphism which detracts from a true appreciation of the otherness of non-human species. His own observance of quietude included conducting the interview in his socks. As he explained in an interview in The Wire some years back, in which an interviewer made the same observation, he doesn’t ‘like clomping around’. Whitehead shares his interest in quietude. Quietness not as an absence of sound, as both were quick to point out. That would be a highly, well, disquieting experience, an indicator of the absence of life. But quietness in the sense of an environment in which the true spatial depth and density of sound can be appreciated, the individual elements differentiated and their variation over time appreciated. Whitehead has invited sound artists from around the world to send their recordings of quiet environments to him, and he has released some of them on his Very Quiet Records label. They range from the island of Jogashima in Japan to Jean-Baptiste Masson’s recordings of the South African bush at midnight, Kalmara Xinsekt’s night sounds in the Amazonian rainforests to Joe Stevens’ birping of spawning Dorset frogs. Together, they form an invaluable soundpicture of the quietude still to be found in the world.


Chris Watson was a hugely personable speaker, conveying his enthusiasm for sound with quiet authority. His memories and sound-illustrated anecdotes were ably facilitated by the informal and also highly informed Tony Whitehead. A marvellous evening, in the true sense of the word. Chris was here in conjunction with the sound installation currently running in the museum’s back entrance area. The sound picture here shifts from the coastal ebb and flow of the tide through the kelp beds of Maer Rocks, Exmouth, the song of cirl buntings, skylarks and greenfinches in the RSPB managed farmland atop Labrador Bay near Shaldon, Dartford warblers and tree pipits on the Aylesbeare pebblebeds and finally to the oak woodlands of Yarner Wood, dense with the calls of song thrushes, cuckoos, willow warblers, wrens, tawny owls and carrion crows. It’s a fine piece, a sonic journey which takes us seamlessly through four different environments. A little sound bleeding from the geology section below introduces a bit of ambient drone from time to time, but it’s not overly intrusive. Some might argue that it actually adds a further dimension to the experience, although I suspect Watson wouldn’t be amongst them. Natural sound is rich with its own musicality, he would point out, and needs no distracting attempts at enhancement. The sound picture will change with the seasons, offering us pictures for ears from 7 more sites, presumably including those deadly pistol shrimps from Plymouth. CRACK. So go along to the museum, stand by the balcony at the top of the stairs, close your eyes and conjure up your own pictures in sound. In this light filled interior atrium, you will soon be lost in your own interior world.

Stornoway’s Saturday evening appearance in the rear gallery of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter was a prelude to a summer spent performing in idiosyncratic locales and at events which studiously avoid the routine repertory of rock dives. They will be landing for a brief roost at the RSPB reserve in Minsmere, waking up in The Village for Festival No.6 at Portmeiron, offering their optimistically humanist worldview for critical scrutiny at the How Lights Get In festival of philosophy and music at Hay On Wye, and filling their faces at the Summer Pie Festival in Spain. Such an eclectic schedule betokens a determination to avoid the obvious or to travel the usual, well-mapped rock routes. This adventurousness is also reflected in their willingness to try out a variety of performance styles, adopting different approaches to familiar songs and adapting to the environment they find themselves in. We would discover this for ourselves later on. But first, there were two support acts who were hugely enjoyable in their own right.


Cave Mouth were all about raw but controlled and corralled power. A classic rock trio, they pursued a propulsive Nuggets garage or early Velvets trajectory with pounding drums, ferociously thrashed electro-acoustic guitar and lithely stalking bass. There was something of the Buzzcocks to the no-nonsense, concise blend of pop nous with frayed punk edges, a mood compounded by the lead singer’s loose, broad-striped jumper and the sharp harmonies introduced in chorused chants. They filled the gallery with an infectious noise seldom heard rebounding around its generally hushed and contemplative space. The paintings in the current exhibition, taken from the museum’s fine art collection and focussing on local subject matter, had been removed for the duration. Necessary, but a shame in some ways. It would have been amusing to see the fixed oil gazes of bygone Devon worthies watching with impassive curiosity as these punk sons and daughters of the city performed before them.


Nuala Honan and Kit Hawes played Appalachian music via Bristol, from mountain country to harbourside city. They acknowledged the influence of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and indeed played one of their songs, Red Clay Halo. They certainly shared something of that musical duo’s adept way of honouring the tradition whilst updating and adding to it. Familiar classics such as Make Me A Pallet on Your Floor, also sung by Gillian Welch (and Sandy Denny in her early folk club days) and a number recorded by Doc Watson, I Miss the Mississippi and You, sat comfortably alongside Nuala’s own highly personal songs. Her voice perfectly captured that country catch in the throat which tugs so insistently at the heart. Kit Hawes’ deft and nimble guitar picking was technically highly impressive, but also deeply expressive, never straying into empty showmanship. Again, David Rawlings work with Gillian Welch was a touchstone here. Nuala was the vocal focal point, but Kit put on his best Hank Williams tones for a few responsive lines in one song, and added harmonising shades in others. They made a fine duo, complimenting and reinforcing one another’s voices in a manner which implied familiarity and ease with their respective musical personalities.


Stornoway prepared the audience for the ornithological tenor of their performance with mixes of bird-themed songs playing in the background during the intervals. We had Fly Like An Eagle by the Steve Miller Band, Night Bird Flying by Jimi Hendrix, Albatross by Fleetwood Mac, Nightingale by Laura Veirs and And Your Bird Can Sing by the Beatles, along with many more. No Hawk by Broadcast or The Owl Service by Pram, but you can’t have everything. Lead singer Brian Briggs studied zoology at Oxford and later gained a doctorate in ornithology, and is an enthusiastic and evangelical birdwatcher. He wrote a piece in the current RSPB magazine about the band’s Highlands, Islands and Ireland tour, which included a visit to the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He talks with infectious excitement about seeing golden eagles, black guillemots, gannets and a great skua, as well as a large shoal of dolphins, the ‘blue men’ of the Minch sea road which I had just read about in Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways. He finds a sense of the sacred in the natural world, as expressed in his observation that ‘it was a gift to be visited by animals as beautiful and mysterious as these’. He also refers in the article to the band’s ‘bird-inspired pop’. This inspiration is certainly foregrounded in the title of their latest album, Bonxie, a Shetland nickname for the great skua. It is indeed a sizeable seabird, as I was able to discover for myself by investigating the museum’s bird cabinet, which stretches from floor to ceiling.


The album’s songs are interspersed with recorded bird song, sounds which sometimes continue into the tracks themselves, inflecting their mood and musical mode. The band attempted to reproduce and expand upon this avian collaboration during their performance. This was partly in response to the current sound installation by Chris Watson playing in the rear entrance lobby of the museum (although switched off this evening). Watson, himself a musician as well as a highly and much sought-after sound recordist (two roles he would make no distinction between) has been creating sonic pictures of local environments and blending them together into small symphonies of the natural world, evoking the ever-changing spirit of the turning seasons. In a recent talk, he spoke of the inherent musicality of many sounds produced by living creatures, as well as their astonishing range and variety. Stornoway intended to explore that musicality further in the hope that it might entrance the audience, drawing them into rich non-human soundworlds. They had invited people to send in their own bird recordings, and had also been given the use of one made by Watson himself – a nightjar’s eerie call captured during a Dorset heathland evening. So we were treated to the lonesome cry of the loon, the resonant booming of the bittern, the bickering of little auks and the joyful fluting of the nightingale. An inattentive Saturday night crowd, intent on partying with Stornoway as background and largely incidental entertainment, paid little heed however. The birdsong was not receieved with the rapt fascination which the band and Brian Briggs in particular might have hoped for. As the Strongbow and Heineken cans were loudly popped and conversations loudly continued, Briggs was prompted to ask ‘is anybody into this?’ A few half-hearted affirmations were voiced, but the general hubbub suggested otherwise. I suspect this aspect of the evening was severely curtailed, as were Briggs’ promised insights into his own reactions to the museum and its exhibits. The musicality and awe-inspiring sonic range to be found in the conference of birds fell on this occasion on deaf ears and dulled minds.


In the case of the keening squawk of the red grouse, the recording led directly into the song Lost Youth, establishing its emotional key. The wistful note which the song strikes, whilst balanced with a more customarily euphoric exhilaration, is at variance with the generally upbeat nature of Stornoway’s music, its determinedly optimistic worldview. We are lost, the chorus repeats. But its is a glorious lostness, a surrender to the tidal currents which sweep us through life. It was noticeable tonight that the old songs which received the most enthusiastic whooping reception were those whose big and open-hearted romanticism was expressed in the most direct and uncomplicated terms. Zorbing and I Saw You Blink are naively flushed with the first feeling of love, the heady rush of inchoate emotions when all is intoxicatingly new and the world is a sudden explosion of possibility and delight.


It’s difficult to write open, optimistic songs which don’t spill over into hymnal rhapsody or sentimental blather. Easier perhaps to write introverted songs of angst, misery and suffering dwelled upon and picked apart. Zorbing, Stornoway’s greatest hit, with which they finished their set, was greeted with a rapturous waving of hands, fists punching the air, as if the room had suddenly become a revivalist meeting house. For me, it crosses a border, positivity becoming eager puppyish bounciness. Charming in puppies, not so much in mature human beings. The emotional simile ‘I feel like I just started uni’ is particularly irritating, and liable to immediately alienate a good many listeners. I find the visual metaphor of couples rolling through the world in zorbing balls an unappealing one, more indicative of smug self-absobtion and a disconnection from the wider world than of mutually supportive love. This was a song from the very early days of their career, however (and perhaps one which they will feel increasingly burdened by as time progresses). The clutching, swaying motions which several couples indulged in for this and I Saw You Blink, as if this were the first dance at their wedding, suggested that others felt less curmudgeonly towards them than I.


To my mind, Stornoway’s songs work best when symbolically allied with the natural landscapes with which they are evidently intimately familiar. Sing With Our Senses is an almost pantheistic hymn to getting out into the wilds, finding one’s soul through a vital connection with the natural environment. ‘This is the world we belong to’ sang Briggs with real conviction. Battery Humans, sung in the encore, is a rallying cry calling on us to tear ourselves away from our screen-absorbed daze and explore the bright day beyond, thereby discovering a more fundamental level of being. Stornoway’s songs are full of mountains, shores and valleys, rivers, forests and skies. In some ways they remind me of the music of Laura Veirs (one of the artists played during the intervals), whose lyrics are also full of landscape imagery and metaphor, reflecting her geological studies. The song Between the Saltmarsh and the Sea, with which they opened their set, uses the interconnected environments as a metaphorical landscape of the heart, with its tidal ebb and flow, its transformation from ecstatic engulfment to parched aridity. The very specificity of the terminology here suggests a detailed knowledge of the natural world and a concurrent clarity in its use for literary purposes.


The exhilaration of flight is a recurrent theme in Stornoway’s songs, present in their emotional affect even when not directly in the lyrics. Zorbing contains the lines ‘send my body out to work, but leave my senses in orbit over South-East London’. There is a more general feeling of soaring over broad landscapes, viewing tree, mountain and ocean from above. These are dream songs, uplifting in an almost literal sense. One of keyboard and strings player Jonathan Ouin’s songs, Man on Wire, expresses this in terms of high wire walking between towering buildings. Inspired by Philippe Petit’s twin towers wire walk and the film made about it, it also reminded me of Catherine Yass’ film High Wire, included in the recent Walk On exhibition in Plymouth. This used a POV camera attached to wire-walker Didier Pasquette’s head, recording his passage as he trod an airy path between the high-rise roofs of the now-demolished Red Road estate in Glasgow.

Given this preoccupation with flight and spiritual elevation, it’s appropriate that the video to the new single Get Low (named with an irony no doubt consciously applied) should find them racing along an old runway in a jeep, following the streamlined flightpath of a squadron of greylag geese, looking for all the world as if they might take off with them when they finally ascend to the blue beyond. The chorus encourages us to ‘keep dreaming’, spelling out the subtext to much of Stornoway’s output. Uncertainty and fear do enter their orbit, but always with the prayerful insistence that they can be dispelled by the light. The lovely, lyrical ballad The Road You Didn’t Take once more leads us through wild, romantic terrain, analogous to the topography traced by the trails of a human life, and the proliferating paths of possibility stretching out before its ongoing progress. The chorus sings, with a rousing folk-inflected melodicism you can imagine being belted out by Ewan MacColl, of roads untaken, glancingly glimpsed in the peripheral vision. But the wonder of new territories to explore which the verses evoke refutes any retreat or backtracking into regretfulness or maudlin reflection. Keep on walking, the songs says. There’s so much more to discover, and there always will be.


In Fuel Up, another old song sung tonight, the disillusionment attendant upon growing up, poetically encompassed in the decade-skipping jumpcuts of a long car journey, is countered with a chorus which once again rejects the mire of maudlin introspection, the chorus issuing the command ‘so fuel up your mind and fire up your heart and drive on/and when your days are darker, put your foot down harder, drive on’. A new song, We Were Giants, offers a slight repudiation of such a gas-guzzling, petrol-headed metaphor from a band who are highly environmentally aware. It seems to look back with past historical tense at a post-disaster world in which the cars are now rusted wrecks. Whether the disaster is personal or on a universal scale is left tantalisingly vague, open to the interpretation of the individual listener and their judgement of its level of literalness. But even a Stornoway song which flirts with the apocalypse is still strongly seeded with optimism, a love for the natural world and a faith (an appropriately religious term) in its abiding strength.


Stornoway are often cast as an indie-folk band, a catch-all categorisation which may be influenced as much by their choice of name as their music. If they are folk (and it takes more than acoustic instruments to earn your folk spurs), then they appear to me to veer more towards the world of female singer-songwriters such as the aforementioned Laura Veirs. The wryly self-conscious Love Song of the Beta Male from the new album certainly rejects, in a humorous manner, the macho values of the rock world, indie or otherwise. Full strength folk elements definitely emerged this evening, though. A female fiddler joined the band for several songs. She was hardly playing jigs and reels, but the sound added a folkish tinge nevertheless, and the sight of a fiddle being bowed has undeniable folk associations. On the record, the subtly affecting string arrangements for We Were Giants stir memories of Robert Kirby’s setting for Nick Drake on Five Leaves Left. The sounds of accordions also drifted across the room at various points, and Brian Briggs even fixed a harmonica holder around his neck for a spot of Bob-like mouth organ wheezing during one song.


The band fully embraced the folk ethos when they unplugged their instruments and steeped back from the mic, gathering together in a close harmony huddle. At this point, it was as if the RAMM gallery had been transformed into a folk club. The lessening of volume forced the audience to focus, to actively listen or not hear at all. It was a bold decision to play the new single Get Low in this low-key style, reconfiguring it for the imaginary folk club. It was Josephine, another song from the new album, which really worked like a dream in this context, however. It’s a song which sees them taking a turn towards psych-folk with its abstracted, slightly mystical air and fairy tale imagery of towers and stairways evoking a mythic moment. In concert, the electrifying four part harmonies produced as the band locked into intimate vocal communion summoned the hallowed spirit of the Watersons, leavened with the sweet sublimity of the Fleet Foxes.


When they returned for an encore, they reverted to this mode once more. Briggs went the full folkie by singing an a cappella version of November Song (a conscious echo of Robin Williamson’s Incredible String Band October Song?). This skeletal interpretation beautifully brought out its emotional fragility and haunted nocturnal atmospheres. It’s a dark night of the soul song, but the Stornoway spirit comes through in the chorus, which holds out the promise of dawn’s light breaking and lifting the shadows: ‘No I won’t be afraid of the darkness a-coming/While I know a love that is as sure as the morning’. Finally, Briggs armed himself with a banjo and the band belted out a breezy version of Battery Humans, inviting us to break from the hypnotised thrall of our screen fixated lives and venture out into the great wild beyond, wonders to behold. It was an uplifting sermon to leave us with, sending us off with spirits soaring, brimful of that stirring Stornoway Soul. Keep Dreaming.

This is the unedited version of an essay which appeared in abbreviated form in the excellent Folklore TapesCalendar Customs II Box Set.



May Day is one of the turning points of the year, the moment when the transformations of the seasons’ cycles are ritually observed and celebrated. The Eve of May displays an obverse face to Halloween’s soot-blackened mask, fixed on the diametrically opposite arc of the slowly-spinning annular globe. Both have origins in the Celtic pastoral (or livestock farming) year and the solar festivals which lent it formal division. Samhain marked its end (and the end of the year as a whole) on the last day of October; Beltane its new May beginning. Samhain heralded the months of darkness, Beltane opened the door to summer. Fires were lit on both occasions, to invoke the sun and anticipate or celebrate its return. After Samhain, the fires would retreat inside, much diminished, to be tended in the hearth. Beltane saw them coming outdoors again, stoked into blazing conflagrations to reflect the solar rising. Samhain saw cattle being led into winter shelter. Beltane was the time for them to be led back out to pasture. On both occasions, they would be driven through twin bonfires. This fiery passage offered protection against the supernatural forces whose power surged at these interzonal periods, when corporeal and spirit worlds were in close proximity, like the Earth and Moon at perigee.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, from Arthur Rackham's illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatises this interpenetration of parallel worlds, blending fantasies of antiquity and British otherworld folklore with the formal dance of Tudor pageantry. At the same time, it allegorises the confusing intoxication of love and desire, the awakening of which is another key element of May Day revels. Whilst the title would seem to fix the date, there are various references to May Day which suggest that the play’s nocturnal entanglements take place on May Eve, and that May Day ritual, revel and romance is on everybody’s mind. Lysander speaks of ‘the wood, a league without the town – where I did meet once with Helena to do observance to a morn of May’. The enraged Hermia spits out ‘How am I, thou painted maypole? Speak! I am not so low but that my nails can reach unto thine eyes’. And Theseus speculates ‘no doubt they rose up early to observe the rite of May’. The interaction of human and faerie worlds, with the appearance of Shakespeare’s versions of Puck (also referred to as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin) and the King and Queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, certainly points to May Eve as the more appropriate frame for the night’s dramas. This unanchored calendrical vagueness creates a moondappled superimposition of festive periods which blurs and transcends the rigidly linear grid of time; a grid which is dissolved and dispersed like drifting fog in the eternal lands of dream.

Arthur Rackham illustration for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Human beings also sought immunisation from devilry or the wicked caprices of the fairy folk by jumping through the sacred flames they had driven their cattle between. The pungent woodsmoke purged them of whatever pheremones attracted the attentions of hungry spirit world denizens. Sacrifices of cattle or sheep considered less prime stock would be offered as propitiation. The word Beltane comprises two separate elements forged into one festive name. Bel means shining or lucky, and tane fire. So, Beltane offered the talismanic blessing of fire and the promise of the sun’s renewed beneficence, the return of the light.

Superstitions surrounding May Eve, May Day and the ensuing days at the start of the month persisted well into the medieval period, and even into the post-Reformation era. Fairies might steal or sour milk, or witches spell maleficent harm on the herd. In Northern Europe, May Eve was Walpurgisnacht, the Eve of the sanctified Saxon abbess Walpurga. It was a night when witches were thought to swarm in the skies, flying across the fields and heading to the high places such as the Brocken peak in the Harz Mountains for their Sabbat communion with the Devil, and creating opportunistic mischief and malevolent damage in their wake. Something of the dread attending this night on the continent was translated into the British idiom. The belief The beginning of May was associated with bad luck, and it was considered an unwise act of generosity to pass on fire from the home hearth on May Eve or May Day. The fire was analogous to the kindly donor’s spirit, and could be used to gain mastery over it. Thus, anyone requesting a flame to spark their own fire on or around the first of May might find themselves accused of intent towards witchery. Better to remain shivering by the cold grate than arouse such suspicions. Hares caught in pasture fields on May Day, darting between the hooves of the cattle, would be hunted and killed. They might be witches in transmuted form (werehares?), milksnatchers or livestock blighters. Rowan or elder boughs would offer some protection against supernatural forces, and fairies could be charmed or at least distracted for a vital moment by tying colourful ribbons to hawthorn branches.

Walpurgisnacht flight from Danish director Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Haxan:Witchcraft Through the Ages

Echoes of Beltane fire rituals can be detected in various May Day games and customs. The sun’s radiance is condensed in the spirit-raising glow of yellow primroses and marsh marigolds (‘the herb of Beltane’) woven into garlands to be hung about the village or town. In parts of Scotland, bannock cakes were cooked in May Day fires, buns with knob-knuckled crowns like a boulder-strewn moorland landscape. One of the cakes would be divided and a piece smudged with charcoal from the fire. The unfortunate who drew this tainted treat from basket or bonnet would be execrated as the ‘carline’ or scapegoat for the following year, spurned and made mock of. A distant memory of human sacrifice on the bone-fire? Probably not. There’s no evidence for such specific seasonal practices beyond Roman anti-Celtic propaganda. It could be a deeply uncomfortable social and psychological experience for the victim, nevertheless, a form of licensed bullying which united the rest of the community. At some point a presumably intoxicated individual noticed, as he bounded after it, how well his fumbled cake bounced down a hillside, and the tradition of bannock rolling was born; a pointless, vaguely idiotic pastime devoid of any symbolic, sacred or ritualistic import which was largely an excuse to pelt down a grassy slope. Like many pointless, vaguely idiotic pastimes it was, and still is hugely enjoyable.


May Day festivities are above all about getting out of doors and inhaling the first breath of summer; throwing the early morning windows wide and heading for the woodlands and meadows with a light skip in the step. The opening lines of many a folk song attest to this spirit: ‘O as I rose up one May morning/One May morning so early (Seventeen Come Sunday); ‘One morning in the month of May/As from my cot I strayed/Just at the dawning of the day’ (The Spotted Cow); ‘As I walked out one midsummer’s morning/To a-view the fields and to take the air’ (Banks of Sweet Primroses); When I was a-walking one morning in May/To hear the birds whistle and nightingales play (Green Bushes); ‘Now it was on a summer’s day in the merry month of May/I was strolling around my grandfather’s farm’ (The Ball of Yarn). Etc. etc.


These opening lines are usually followed by an encounter with a charming maid, or by the lament of a maid waylaid by a charming rogue – essentially two conflicting perspectives on the same subject, conquest and defeat. For May was a time when the sap was rising and the first steps of the summer courtship dances were tripped. The comic romantic complications of A Midsummer Night’s Dream make formal play with such lusty woodland assignations. May folk songs are full of bawdy, nudge nudge innuendos and euphemisms, designed to raise gusts of knowingly ribald if not outright filthy laughter down at the local village inn. Analogies are drawn between seasonal farming labours and the fulfilment of desire, connecting the natural cycles of the year with those of the human heart. So Cupid the Pretty Ploughboy is observed by an enamoured maid ‘ploughing his furrow deep and low/Breaking the clods to pieces, some barley for to sow’; the search for a ‘charming maid’s’ Spotted Cow provides an excuse for a day of sport and play ‘down in yonder bourne’, a pleasurable encounter with the promise of further hunts for the straying and in all-probability non-existant creature heralded by the coded cry ‘ye gentle swain I’ve lost my spotted cow’; The Ball of Yarn plays lascivious metaphorical variations on the farmboy’s desire to wind up a country maid’s ‘little ball of yarn’. The Sussex-dwelling Copper Family song Pleasant Month of May (collected in Bob Copper’s book A Song for Every Season) depicts the sweaty labour of haymaking before the arrival of a travelling piper at sundown and the commencement of festive merriment. The final verse conjures images of bucolic bliss and pastoral amours inseparable from the lay of the land and its tending:
‘We called for a dance and we tripp-ed it along,/We danced all round the haycocks till the rising of the sun./When the sun did shine such a glorious light and the harmless birds did sing,/Each lad took his lass in his hand and went back to his haymaking’.


Sometimes traditional May songs are simply evocations of the early summer ambience, with no double-meanings attached. Such is By the Green Grove, another Copper song, which is a simple and affecting paean to the heartswelling beauty of birdsong in the Sussex countryside. ‘No music, no songster can with them compare’. There are darker presentiments of harvests to come to be found in the memoirs of Bob Copper, too. In his reminiscences of May haymaking, he recalls that ‘the quiet of the field would by invaded by a gang of six or eight men arriving carrying their scythes across their shoulders’. The shadow of the reaper is present even in the merry morning of May, the time of renewal and rebirth. Et in Arcadia ego.


The license associated with May Day inevitably roused the ire of Protestant critics, constant complaint against the state of things inherent in their very name. The Puritan John Stubbes is highly amusing to read for the intense passages of fevered ranting his broiling indignation stews. With variable statistics plucked from the overheated undercroft of his brain, he rages in his 1583 screed The Anatomie of Abuses that ‘I have heard it credibly reported…by men of great gravity, credit, and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids, going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them return home undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth’. He would no doubt also have disapproved of the vanity of a later tradition, that of bathing the face in May morning dew to lend the complexion a magical glow for the rest of the month and banish troublesome freckles. Samuel Pepys records in his diary that his wife indulged in this hopeful custom, and he rather touchingly worries about her safety being abroad in the early hours.

Bringing in the May to the streets of Padstow

The custom most widely associated with May Day was the bringing in of the May. Boughs of blossoming hawthorn would be cut down and brought back from meadow’s edge and woodland and strewn or hung about town or village, some woven into garlands, others left as they were found. The spiritually refreshing experience of going out into the fields and communing with the natural world in the renewal of its blossoming and unfurling was an integral and profound part of this seasonal ritual. Hawthorn was generally favoured, but there were regional variations. The Cornish tended towards sycamore, whilst the Welsh often opted for birch. Whatever the arboreal species, however, it was given the designation ‘May’. The Elizabethan tailor turned writer John Stow describes the bringing in of the May with beautiful simplicity and clarity in his 1598 book Survey of London: ‘On May Day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the greenwoods, there to rejoice their spirit with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of the birds’. Bringing in the May, or going-a-maying, was a way of connecting the settled, built environment or human habitation with the cyclical patterns of growth beyond its bounds. Wild nature in all its bounteous flowering was brought into the heart of the ordered domain of civilisation where it had been tamed or banished altogether. Something of the spirit felt by those who had gone out into the fields on a May morning was thereby given emblematic form. Some kind of symbolic exchange was effected. Man ventured out into Nature, and Nature entered into the habitations of Man.

The Padstow maypole

Maypoles were also erected in villages, towns and cities. Young trees were cut down from neighbouring woodlands (not always with the permission of the landowner) and hauled by teams of men and oxen into the appointed green or square where they were heaved up and made fast. The towering wooden columns would be painted with colourful stripes or other patterns and hung about with ribbons, boughs and garlands. It became the focal point for local festivities, for dancing, whether in a wheeling, handlocked circle or in more abandoned, weaving approaches and evasions. A maypole could remain in place for many years until it began to rot away at its base and require replacement. Sometimes it would crash to the ground before such removals were effected. There were maypoles of great longevity and renown in London. In the early 17th century, an immense one stood for a good few years at Cornhill in front of the church of St Andrew, whose spire it exceeded in height. The church became known as St Andrew Undershaft as a result. Another stood in The Strand in Elizabethan times before being felled in 1644, the victim of a Puritan ban on maypoles instigated in that year. A giant 134 foot pole was resurrected on the same spot in 1661, the Royal Crest at its tip marking it as a prominent celebratory symbol of the Restoration. It stood on the site of St Mary le-Bow into the early years of the 18th century. A substitute pole, taken down in 1718, was purchased by Sir Isaac Newton. He used it to prop up the great 123 foot telescope which had been installed in Wanstead Park in Essex the previous year. A perfect amalgam of folkloric traditions, possibly reaching back into the ancient past, and the new science, with its distant optic gaze focussed on the future. Nigel Kneale would have made something out of such a richly symbolic conjunction. It reminds me of his placement of a radio telescope besides a stone circle in his 1979 Quatermass series.

Jo and the Doctor join in the Maypole revels at the end of the 1971 Doctor Who serial The Daemons. Yates and the Brigadier retire for a pint

The reliably rancorous Philip Stubbes looked upon such practises with seething horror, of course, voiced in his unceasingly virulent strain of invective. ‘They go some into the woods and groves, some to another, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing with them birch boughs, and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendant and lord over their pastimes and sports: namely, Satan Prince of Hell. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is the may-pole, which they bring home with great veneration…twenty, or forty yoke of oxen…draw home this may-pole (this stinking idol rather)’. Stubbes describes how, once the villagers or townspeople have reared up and decorated the pole, ‘then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did, at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself’. Escalating his hyperbolic disgust to a climactic pitch, he damns the May merrymakers utterly: ‘Assuredly, I think neither Jews nor Turks, Saracens, nor Pagans, nor any other people how wicked, or barbarous soever, have ever used such devilish exercises as these: nay, they would have been ashamed once to have named them, much less to have used them’.


The May Day revels of late medieval and Tudor England which Stubbes so vocally despised incorporated all manner of May games. Morris dancing (‘the devil’s dance withal’ – Stubbes) featured frequently during its 16th century craze and for a period thereafter, and there might be pipers and harpers, drummers and fools to fuel the festivities with music, capers and general jollity. Mummers plays were sometimes staged, the performers disguised, which gave them a certain license to mock the high and mighty. Parades were peopled by stock figures of British folklore, religious devotion and popular legend: George and the Dragon, regional saints, Jack-in-the-Greens, Giants, Devils and St Michael, also with dragon in tow (the Devil in final Revelation battle form, ready for the slaying). Robin Hood and his greenwood band of righteous outsiders were particularly popular, and would often go around from door to door raising money (not necessarily for the Parish poor, either). Plays relating the familiar tales of daring feats and defiant gestures became widespread in the later medieval period. The first recorded example took place in Exeter in 1427, but they became and integral part of Tudor May Day celebrations in the years leading up to the cultural and historical earthquake of the Reformation. Maid Marian was a relatively late addition to the canon, appearing in the 15th century, possibly imported from French Romances and ballads such as Adam de la Halle’s late 13th century musical play Jeu de Robin et Marion (recorded in the 1970s by David Munrow and his Early Music Consort). Robin has been interpreted at various times as a spirit of the greenwood, a green or wild man figure symbolic of vegetal death and resurrection, a seasonal king whose sacrifice would ensure the return of the sun and the fertility of the crops (a favoured theme of JG Frazier put forward in The Golden Bough, his capacious survey of comparitive myth and religion), the high priest of a coven or a historically-based, rebellious anti-hero fighting the power. Marian and Robin are also sometimes seen as the Queen and King of May; Marian the embodiment of Spring, a Persephone or Flora figure, Robin her knightly green consort. Like all figures who slip out of the mundane world and into the mutable realm of myth he was, in other words, all things to all men.


Robin and Marian’s assumption of the roles of King and Queen are indicative of a more general play with inversion and transformation within the context of May Games. In a variation of the Christmas tradition of electing Lords of Misrule, mock-kings or lords were often crowned or ennobled for the day and presided over the celebrations. In the Scottish districts of Borthwick, Haddington, Peebles and Linlithgow an Abbot of Unreason was ordinated to give his anti-clerical blessing to the wild indulgences of the day. There was a strong element of mischief making, and echo of the licensed knavery of Hallow’s Eve, and of the Puckish trickery of fairy world denizens so active at these intersticial times. Guisers, cocky chancers (latterly geezers) in disguise, prowled the streets planning and enacting pranks on the suspecting victim who, on this day, was powerless to seek recourse. The 19th century Lancastrian radical Samuel Bamford recalls the occurrence of ‘mischeif-neet’ on May 1st in Early Days, his 1849 memoir of his early life in Middleton, Manchester and Salford. Tokens from the fields would be left by young men on the doorsteps of neighbours (mainly female) as symbolic assessments of character, whether cruel and spiteful or complimentary and amorous: ‘a gorse bush indicated a woman notoriously immodest; and a holly bush, one loved in secret; a tup’s horn intimated that man or woman was faithless to marriage; a branch of sapling, truth in love; and a sprig of birch, a pretty girl’. A similarly laddish blend of horniness and spite was enacted across the country in the Cambridge fenlands. Here, sloe blossom was for the favoured and blackthorn for those considered loose, elder for those judged insufficiently well turned out and nettles for those the boys thought had a sharp tongue (no doubt directed at their clumsy advances).


Masks and costumes provided the opportunity for the wearer to get away with all manner of mischief, taking on new identities which allowed for a distancing from the everyday social self. Transvestism was rife, men seizing the chance to put on dresses and wigs and paint their bearded faces. There were Morris ‘Mollies’, and May Marians in Robin Hood plays generally embodied by men in drag presenting their exaggerated, grotesque versions of femininity. Taking hybrid human and animal form was also prevalent on this day of transformations. Stag, bull or ram horns or heads might be borne. But such cross-species mummery and guising was most widely manifested in the migration of the hobby horse across the country. It was a costume which came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from draped frames which entirely enveloped the human occupant to ‘Hooden Horses’ from which the upper torso of the ‘rider’ emerged, to poles with clacking heads (and in some cases stripped and garlanded horse skulls) affixed to their upheld tips.


The most renowned hobby horse (or Obby Oss as it is idiomatically known) is undoubtedly the one which is led out of its paddock in the back of the Golden Lion inn and onto the streets of Padstow every year. It comprises a large hoop tightly covered with shiny black oilkskin which drapes around in a loose circling skirt. The disc is like a black anti-sun, glistening with photo-negative inversion; or an occult moon, a remnant of the dark days goaded through the summer-garlanded streets one more time before being shut away for the year. Stylised features on the flat plane of its broad face (intriguingly reminiscent of the designs found on traditional African ceremonial masks) heighten its disconcertingly alien quality. It is more like the product of a sleek biomechanical future than a horse, a 1970s Dr Who monster in swaying, revolving motion. It is guided, led and driven by ‘Teasers’ who try to keep its attention by drawing it into a ducking and swirling dance. The unpredictability of its movements might find it suddenly swivelling to turn its blank-eyed disc-visage on nervous onlooker, however, throwing back a distorted shadow reflection, seen as through a glass darkly. Its inky depths are akin to the Elizabethan alchemist and occult philosopher Dr Dee’s obsidian shewstone, the spirit mirror whose polished black surface he tried to see through to communicate with angels (or demons?) in another dimension. Who knows what one might see if one gazes too long into the depthless yet potentially bottomless void of the Oss’s ‘face’, especially with the intoxicating effect of the freely-flowing ale and the pounding beats and hypnotically repeated refrains of the Padstow Obby Oss song deranging the senses. But it passes swiftly on before anyone can get truly lost. The black, flashing form glints against the blue (with any luck) of the sky and the white and red of the Padstonians’ costumes.



The ceremony and its preparations were captured by folklorist and recorder Alan Lomax and cameraman George Pickow in their 1953 film Oss Oss Wee Oss (the cajoling cry of the onlooking townsfolk), included on the BFI collection of folkloric footage Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow. They preface their dramatised document with the assertion that ‘this strange dance is a modern remnant of an ancient springtime rite in which primitive man rejoiced in the renewed fertility of the land’, adopting the romantic fancies of the mid-century which actively sought to unearth ancient Pagan roots in any and all seasonal observances. Traditions are open to, and indeed require re-interpretation, remodelling and above all reinvigoration, otherwise they eventually ossify (if you’ll pardon the pun in this instance) and crumble into dust, to be blown away by the forgetful winds of the progressing years. So let’s join Lomax and Pickow in this fulfilling fancy, so long as we don’t mistake supposition for historical fact – no matter how intuitively ‘right’ it feels.

Helston May Morris dancers

You’ll also come across The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day in the BFI collection, Richard Philpott’s impressionistic record of another famous Cornish May Day festival, the Helston Furry Dance. Furry here could be a corruption of the Cornish feur, meaning holy day. The Floral Dance could be in honour of Flora, the Roman Goddess of flowers, or her local equivalent. The town is certainly resplendently decked out with green boughs and flowered garlands, and the Helston Town Band heroically plays the Floral Dance throughout the day as an accompaniment to a rather sedate series of parading, genteely pirhouetting dances which wend their way through the narrow nexus of the town centre’s winding streets. Philpott’s 1989 film (which feels more like it was made in the 70s) uses cross-editing, montage and intercut woodcuts and silhouettes of labyrinths, dragons and maypoles in an attempt to convey a sense of continuity with older traditions, sacred processions and universal archetypes. Like Lomax and Pickow, he claims the Furry Dance for ‘an ancient pre-Christian spring ritual’. Or perhaps he is simply trying to exorcise the twinkling spectre of Terry Wogan and his dispiritingly popular 1978 version.

George Cruickshank's cartoon of a London May Day parade

The Milkmaid's Parade

EP Thompson, in his classic 1963 history The Making of the English Working Class, notes that the rapidly expanding urbanisation brought about by the industrial revolution did not mean the dying out of old seasonal rituals and customs. Just as new towns grew over old rural settlements and villages were absorbed by the spreading boundaries of cities to become suburbs, so there was a continuity of celebratory tradition. May rituals brought the rhythms of the now-distanced natural world into the smog-darkened centres of the industrialised cities. In London, urban milkmaids who delivered supplies of the whitestuff danced through the streets, initially with a milk pail balanced on their head like an inverted metal bonnet. This basic set-up was steadily elaborated over the seasons, an element of competition undoubtedly coming into play. In the end, piled helmets of polished silver were precariously balanced on platters garlanded with flowers, the whole ensemble thrillingly threatening to tumble to the pavement in a clattering disaster if perfect deportment was not maintained. It was a celebration of the first significant milk yield, and a reminder that even in the crawling heart of the metropolis, from which nature was increasingly smoke-blotted and walled out, people were still reliant on the turning seasons and the bounty they produced. To such an end, garlands were thrown into the Thames to acknowledge the watery conduit along which this bounty was carried into the city.


As if to mock the new-found ostentation of the milkmaids, ‘bunters’ dressed in rags would follow in their wake, parodying a now-established tradition. These women were of a lesser social standing, rag pickers or, as some whispered, ladies of ill repute. Class distinctions and their attendant snobberies infected even these celebratory occasions, noticeably more so once they had migrated to the city. What would once have been inter-village rivalries were now concentrated into more condensed and divisive centres of population. Sweeps also joined in the parades, whose money-raising opportunities were invaluable to them at this time. Whilst everyone else was greeting the lengthening days and warming sun with joy in their hearts, the sweeps were fretting at the upcoming loss of trade as hearth fires were gradually extinguished. Their presence became more and more prominent, and they introduced the startling figure of the Jack-in-the-Green to proceedings. Again, this was a prideful and competitive elaboration of initially simple leaf and blossom garlanded bonnets. As if the Jacks were undergoing a gradual vegetal growth, they got annually more expansive. Eventually, the sweep disappeared beneath a huge conical frame covered in greenery and flowers, and giant Jack was seen to walk with a swaying gait through the streets of London, guided by his ‘bogies’. These attendants were often the children whose chimney crawling labours were ended by progressive legislation in the late 19th century.


May Day traditions have always been subject to appropriations, revivals and revisionism. Many of the customs we associate with it are largely Victorian fabrications, attempts to escape from the pressures and inequities of industry and empire into a Merrie England fantasy of a simple, gilded past when everyone knew their place and all was pageantry, chivalry and happily purposeful agricultural labour. The term merry England was popularised in the early nineteenth century by the essayist William Hazlitt (who referred to its ‘rustic gambols’) and in particular by Walter Scott, whose 1808 poem Marmion referred to a time when ‘England was merry England’. Scott’s immense popularity in the 19th century did much to fuel the Victorian passion for medieval revivalism. Victorian worthies refashioned the old May Day rites, flensing them of their carnality and wild, celebratory communal spirit and reducing them to children’s games and carefully staged worker’s pastimes. They bequeathed us the much-diminished maypole with its trailing, coloured ribbons grasped by glumly skipping boys and girls, and the election of young May Queens for the year, condemned to sit shivering on floats for an interminable duration. Their resurrection of Morris Dancing, which had long since fallen out of fashion, was a singularly pallid ghost of its formerly rambunctious self. Even our old friend Philip Stubbes would have found it hard to work up a head of indignation over their polite village fete prancing.



The manufacturing and manipulation of a dream of England’s glory was not new, however. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had participated in May Games which evoked visions of a medieval golden age. Elizabeth attended formal May celebrations at Greenwich Palace in 1558, the first year of her reign, and witnessed a pageant whose no doubt trembling and fearful cast included Morris Dancers, St George and the Dragon, a giant, drummers, the ‘nine worthies of Christendom’, Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck. John Stow, in his A Survey of London, is one of several writers who record Henry VIII’s May Daying outing (on this occasion setting out from Greenwich Palace) with Catherine of Aragon to the woods on Shooters Hill. Here they picnicked beneath the trees and were entertained by their host, Robyn Hood, with displays of archery. Both monarchs made conscious use of the popular May Day customs, associating themselves with the golden age neverland such pageantry summoned up. In a sense they became magical king and queen of May, roles as chimerical as the mock monarchs they displaced with self-mythologised projections of the authentic article. Alan Moore recognises this Tudor version of Merrie England dreaming as a Disney construct in The Unearthing, his psychogeographical Shooters Hill reverie of history, myth and place and their interaction with an individual human consciousness, spiralling outward from an intimate portrait of his friend Steve Moore, the late comic strip writer. He writes ‘out a-maying with one of his Catherines, Henry VIII attends a Robin Hood fair, Shooters Hill as Medieval theme park, and meets players dressed as Robin, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Bashful, Goofy’.

Thankful Sturdee's 1906 photograph of Fowler's Deptford Troop with attendant Jack-in-the-Green

Traditions have been re-invented for the modern age too, with the resurgence of a composite Paganism patched together in the latter half of the twentieth century playing a vital role. The London Jack-in-the-Green walks again, bringing a shimmying rustle of spring greenery and floral colourflash to the grey steel and glass canyons of the city. Its rebirth came about through the discovery of a 1906 photo of the old Jack by Thankful Sturdee (a strong and blessed name if ever there was one), its faded black and white image brought to vibrantly technicolored life. The milkmaids balance their silverware again, and the sweeps have returned to Rochester with a 7 foot Jack in tow. Beltane is now marked in the city, too, with a Pagan Pride parade making its way through Bloomsbury, an aptly named district to beat the bounds of. The spirit of Virginia Woolf looks down on them with amused benediction, I’m sure. Her final novel, Between the Acts, is all about the staging of a village pageant of British history and culture, and the continuity, renewal and convergence between the universal and the individual which it represents. Woolf’s story is partly about how there is no real distinction between the pageant and the incidental activities and incidents which take place around it – between the acts or during them. It’s all part of the great human parade. Issues of ‘authenticity’ or authorship seem beside the point in the light of this great communal connection, the sense of history’s vast acreage encompassed within an afternoon, or a flickering instant of flashing consciousness. The Pagan parade, with its inventive costumes and joyful sense of celebration, partakes of this spirit.


May Day rituals have repeatedly been the object of suppression and political appropriation over the centuries. A 1555 Act in Scotland banned the appointment of mock bishops and the participation in May Games. A political act which perhaps betokened a fear of mocking satire undermining authority. May Games were also banned in Kent in the wake of the 1554 rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose ragtag Kentish troops had reached as far as Southwark. The Puritans banned maypoles and the revels which took place around them, and their erection became an act of anti-Parliamentarian defiance. The restored Stuart monarchy lost no time in allying themselves to a renewal of the May Games, as we have seen from the royal crowning of the Strand maypole. May revels were even shifted to the end of the month to mark Charles II’s birthday on the 29th May, which was conveniently also the day on which he rode into London in 1660, restoring monarchical rule to the land. Oak boughs replaced May blossom as the dominant symbol of the day, memorialising the instantly storied occasion on which the king had hidden in an oak tree to evade Parliamentarian troops. It was a calculated act of propagandistic self-mythologisation, an equation of the king with the national tree, and with the renewal and rebirth of the spirit of the greenwood (although if JG Frazer’s theories are to be given credence, this could of course be an unfortunate analogy). Royal Oak Day became an officially decreed holiday for a while, although observance of it rapidly tailed off as the Stuart monarchs squandered the public’s affections. There are echoes of it still in Oak Apple Day in Wiltshire and Garland Day in Castleton, and indeed in the Bank Holiday which comes towards the end of May.

May Blossom and Oak Leaf - Opposing symbols at the poles of the month

This is at the other end of the month from May Day Bank Holiday, and if the link with Charles II and the restored monarchy is granted, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. With elections of mock monarchs, bishops of unreason and the welcoming of Robin Hood to preside over the festivities, May Day always had a strongly anti-authoritarian side. This was why the authorities felt the need periodically to exert their control over it. In 1890, the International Socialist movement (the Second International) chose May Day as the occasion for an international strike in support of the struggle in America to establish an 8 hour working day. It was subsequently formally declared as International Workers Day, an annual celebration of solidarity and united purpose. The romantic Merrie England associations of English utopian socialists in the William Morris, Arts and Crafts mould can be seen in Walter Crane’s poster The Worker’s May-Pole, his ‘offering for May-Day 1894’. The may-pole is given female embodiment, arms held out like spreading branches, a circling garland of flowers below. She loosely bears a ribbon in the open palms of her hands as if it had been draped across her statuesque form by one of the surrounding celebrants. On it is blazoned the ideological trinity Socialization, Solidarity, Humanity. The ribbons extending from the may-pole Goddess’ dress are grasped by happy and healthy Arts and Crafts peasants who dance around this figure of bounty and utopian promise. The ribbons are also imprinted with slogans and ideals such as ‘Eight Hours’, ‘Leisure for All’, ‘Abolition of Privilege’, ‘The Land for the People’, and ‘No Starving Children in the Board Schools’ (echoes of Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall). Further banners held aloft in the background read ‘The Hope of Labour is the Welfare of the World’ and ‘Neither Riches nor Poverty’. The next year, Crane produced A Garland for May Day 1895, held up by a bare-footed Arts and Crafts Goddess, and would about with further slogans, including one which reads ‘The Land for the People – Merrie England’.

Walter Crane's Workers' Maypole

This politicisation of May Day has proved a recurrent irritant over the years. During the Cold War, the International Workers Day descended into a grim opportunity for the Soviet Union and its cowed Eastern Bloc dominions to roll out their latest armaments for a rumbling, earthshaking parade, missiles and tank snouts cocked at the sky like half-erected maypoles. Robin Hood and his merry greenwood band were replaced by Khruschev and his Red iron generals. In Britain, the Conservatives are always grumbling about May Day, latterday Stubbeses whose focus has shifted from moral indignation to the raising of the shibboleths of a quiescent socialism which still rankles with them even as it fades into a historical memory. Proposals to impose a Margaret Thatcher Day on the late August Bank Holiday proved as divisive as the Royal Oak Day celebrating the Restoration soon became.


May Day is ours, even as seasonal patterns and political power bases shift around us. It is to be decorated with boughs and garlands not flags of allegiance; an anticipation of haymaking not a commemoration of Thatcher; a day for dancing around the maypole, nor for marching in ranks behind sky-pointing missiles; rejoicing in the restoration of the sun, not of the monarchy. So let us all come together in merrie communion, feast, drink and dance, and sing the old Padstow song once more:
Unite and unite and let us all unite,
For summer is a-come unto day
And whither we are going we will all unite,
In the merry morning of May.












Bibliography:

Clifford, Sue & King, Angela (eds.) England in Particular
Steve Roud – The English Year; A Month-by-Month Guide to The Nation’s Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night
Nick Groom – The Seasons
Sara Hannant – Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year
Roland Hutton - Pagan Britain
Roland Hutton – The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain
Roland Hutton – The Rise and Fall of Merrie England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700
Asa Briggs – A Social History of England
E.P.Thompson – The Making of the English Working Classes
Rodney Castleden – The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts
Iain Sinclair (ed.) – London: City of Disappearances (inc.Alan Moore – Unearthing)
Steve Roud & Julia Bishop (eds) – The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
Alexandra Harris – Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (14th Edition)
Bob Copper – A Song for Every Season
William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
BFI DVD – Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow

PART TWO


The white-washed porch was edged with stone benches, so we were able to perch and munch. The entrance arch framed a pastoral view worthy once more of Samuel Palmer, rounded hills rising to an arcing, cloud-grazed ridge with a cluster of sheep positioned with picturesque precision to provide horizon cut-outs. Bird song suffused the spring air, a complex foreground sound mesh against which the background blether of sheep added a less sonorous ground. On the moss-blanketed mound stretching out before the headboard of a gravestone, a small violet was illuminated in a beam of sunlight, a vivid pulse of life in this tree-shaded corner.


The porch itself showed traces of previous occupancy by martins, swifts or swallows, ghosts of their darting silhouettes flitting and weaving flight paths across the peripheries of inner vision. Above us, a monster of a spider lurked in the shadows of the eaves, tense with potential lightning-swift energy. Its unfazed quiescence was made possible by the migration of the swallows at summer’s end. It would no doubt be more circumspect upon their return, retreating to the darker recesses, scuttling with irritation and muttering through their mandibles. We posed no such threat as we ruminated upon our sandwiches, however.

Oak door bullet hole bleeding light

From our stone picnic bench, a granite shelf which must have given hard repose to countless bottoms over the centuries, we were able to inspect the large 15th century oak door, studded with a regular, rusted constellation of diamond-headed iron nails. The field-pattern of nails was disrupted by several neat, round holes, through which we could peer into the interior. Local legend has it that these are bullet holes dating from the Civil War. General Fairfax had led the New Model Army out of Ottery St Mary towards the beginning of 1646, marching them up the Haldon ridge and capturing the manor of Ashton. It was a commanding outpost from which to survey the terrain to the west, a last stubborn stronghold of Royalist power. Descending into the Teign Valley and onward across North Devon and into Cornwall, he would pursue those remaining loyal to the king with fierce determination, bringing the war to its conclusion and clearing the way for the parliamentary interregnum. Peering through from some angles, these tiny portholes circle fragments of stained glass. The bullet holes bleed coloured light.


The door into the south porch is imposing and invites a firm knock upon its solid oak face with the hefty iron ring which serves as its handle. Eerily, upon listening back to his recordings at a later date, David discovered a loud series of phantom knocks and thuds imposing themselves over our rambling lunchtime conversation. A disembodied attempt to drown out our discourse? Everyone’s a critic, even in the spirit world. The modern entrance to the church was around the corner, anyway, so we were denied the pleasure of heaving the mighty portal open with what I imagine would be a long, rustily antique groan, a sound pregnant with thrilling anticipation.




We entered instead through a more modest door in the western tower, equipped with an electronic release system which rejected the charms of antiquity in favour of the security of modern technology. Inside, a circular frame of flattened iron hung above our heads, a trailing chain snaking down from it, ready to rattle with a gothic clatter of shivering links. Presumably designed to corral the bellropes, its rusting, skeletal form nevertheless carried the dark charge of some Piranesian dungeon, particularly as our eyes were still adjusting to the dim light of the church interior. With a pleasing touch of Magritte-like surrealism, there was also a battered old street lantern in the tower entrance – the light of the world brought inside, weathered and extinguished. Where once hissing gas might have ignited into flickering illumination behind smoke-smudged glass, a small cluster of spent night lights was now clustered around the serpent-headed form of a desk lamp. The lantern added to the sense of the tower as a transitional space, a gatehouse which ushered us into the nave and the church proper.






The first object which drew our attention was the font, a solid octagonal block of Beer stone carved with heraldic symbols, the fortunes and privileges of high birth openly acknowledged. Levering up the hefty wooden cover, we noticed sturdy iron brackets sunk into the stone rim. These were witch locks, designed to protect the blessed water in the lead-lined font bowl from theft for use in charms, potions or for darker ritual purposes. Purposes which may well have existed only in the fearful and superstitious minds of villagers and ecclesiastical officials. Witch locks on fonts were ubiquitous in the pre-Reformation era. But their removal was specifically stipulated during the reign of Edward VI, the period when the Reformation’s revolutionary programme of cultural transformation was most vigorously pursued. That dictate was ignored in Ashton, however. Whether this indicates a particular fear of witchcraft being practised in this densely forested area is a matter of speculation and twilight fancy.




From the back of the nave we gained a broad prospect of the church interior. The eye was immediately drawn to the wooden screen which spanned the breadth of the building, an elaborately carved and colourfully painted barrier spreading from wall to wall. This was the rood screen, and unlike the one in Dunchideock, it was palpably redolent of the pre-Reformation era. The word rood, with its roots in old English, means crucifix, the representation of Christ on the cross. The rood screen was the base for the prominent roods which would have been a feature in almost all churches, drawing the upward gaze of the congregation, an object of power to concentrate the mind and focus the spirit whilst the mysteries of the sacramental rites were enacted behind the screen. They were a prime target for iconoclasm and were, without exception, consigned to the bonfires of the Reformation. A modern rood does surmount the screen, however, giving us some idea of how it might once have struck those entering the church. This one was carved by Herbert Read’s Exeter firm in 1915 and presented in painfully fresh memory of the death of one William Woodfall Melville, a barrister-at-law, on the fields of Flanders in May of that year. It really testifies to all local men who died in the war, however, irrespective of their social standing.


We approach the screen and squat down to inspect the paintings on the panels at its base, framed with gothic tracery in red, green and gold. The light is not good. Another storm is passing overhead and the skies have darkened dramatically outside. Our attempts to locate a light switch only succeeded in activating the dim, orange glow of some antique heaters. The saints and church fathers who line up before us are thus a little shadowy, perceived through the dark glass of time. At some point during our intense, closely peering scrutiny, however, the storm passes, sunlight streams through the windows and the saints come to illuminated life. Some of the blessed company gathered here are familiar, others are far more obscure, occupying seldom explored regions of the sanctified territories.

St George, with neighbour Mary Magdalene

St Michael the Archangel

St Michael slays the 'dragon' (as it looks up at him with eager, puppyish eyes

The dragon-killers are both present, thrusting their spears downward into the roaring maws of the devilish beasts at their feet. St George in his glinting armour, forged and hammered according to the latest 15th century fashions, is shining, immaculately dandified knighthood personified, striking the perfect action pose. St Michael, his feathered limbs giving him a hybrid avian appearance (the celestial birdman) is the archangel who leads the forces of God against Satanic armies in the final battle. He replicates St George’s pinioning downward death strike, silencing the silvered insinuations of Satan’s serpentine tongue for once and all. Scholars versed in the finer details of the medieval bestiary may question why this dragon of Revelation has but two limbs, however. They might point out that this would classify it as a wyvern rather than a dragon. They might very well be correct. St Michael has slain the wrong beast, and Satan has flown free, long, demonically triumphant laughter receding in his wake. A lesson in the value of in-depth and precisely defined knowledge.

St Mark

St Mark's homonculus

St John's poison serpent

Other wild beasts rest at the feet of saints, docile and tamed. The evangelist St Mark has what must be his customary symbolic representation, the lion, at his side. However, it has the semblance of a squat, impish demon, reminiscent of the puggish homunculus in Henri Fuseli’s classic Gothic painting The Nightmare. Its mane of spiky, Bart Simpson hair gives it a punk urchin look – a street demon. It’s as if its head, crowned with a flickering beacon of fire, offers a mocking preview of the torments of hell to which it will gleefully drag the souls of the damned. St John is often represented holding a chalice from which a serpent is uncoiling, like a wisping trail of foul vapour. This is a depiction of a legend in which he is handed a poisoned cup of wine, his blessing causing the deadly venom to be transformed into a snake which immediately wavers away. The wee black beastie here looks rather sweet, a mini, coal-dusted dragon which St John seems to be stroking as if it were a pet he carried around in its own goblet nest.

St Anthony (left), with St Ursula, St Leodegar and St Apollonia

St Anthony is accompanied by his faithful pig, a bristling, tusked boar of the kind which might have been found roaming wild in the forests of the Haldons. Anthony was one of the first of the desert fathers, ascetic Anchorite monks who turned their backs on civilisation and lit out for the wilderness. Anthony’s temptations and torments at the hands, claws and beaks of a menagerie of fantastic, demonic creatures form the basis of a number of feverishly imagined works of art created over the centuries. These range from the symbolic embodiment by Flemish and German artists such as Bosch and Grűnewald of the anguish piercing their plague-ridden times, to the violent unconscious dream scenes of the surrealists, who found such subject matter irresistible. Max Ernst graphically tore the agonised holy man apart, whilst Dali confronted him with a parade of temptations mounted on the backs of elephants teetering on absurdly spindly, telescopically jointed insect legs. St Anthony’s original encounter with his porcine companion was less then friendly. The Devil descended upon his desert cave in aggressively swinish form. But Anthony withstood its Satanic assault, using his sanctified powers, honed through years of ascetic contemplation and self-denial, to purge the creature of its unholy infestation and leave it innocent and untainted once more. The Anthonine order was subsequently associated with pigs from its inception. St Anthony himself is the patron saint of pigs and pig farmers.


The Holy Mother is here, curvaceous and sensual, with full red lips and a satisfied, even satiated look upon her face. She has long, luscious tresses of golden hair, circled with the crown which declares her Queen of Heaven. She is very much the Goddess figure, bringer of fertility and fortune. A plump, happy Jesus sits sprightly upon her knee, a big baby and growing bigger by the minute. In this painting, the source of his strength and spiritual insight seems evident, the roots of Christianity in pre-monotheistic traditions, the female divine, made manifest.

From left: St Leonard, A Sibyl (female prophet), St Stepen, St Sidwell

A good number of the figures here achieved sanctification through martyrdom. This is sometimes symbolised by the bearing of a palm frond, held aloft like an absurdly ostentatious quill pen. Such is the case here with St Stephen, often considered to be the first Christian martyr. He was condemned by the Jewish authorities in c.34AD for blaspheming - loudly, repeatedly and unrepentantly. The sentence, death by stoning, was carried out with immediate effect, Stephen carrying on with his tirade until he was bloodied and bruised into silence. The three stones he carries, as neatly rounded as cannon or dough balls, are presented as a polite illustration of the means of his execution. These rocks were used to shatter my skull, he seems to be saying, but look, I’m alright now. They never even grazed my spirit.

Many screen saints (the precursors of screen icons to come) proudly bear the instruments of their martyrdom, often presented with an exaggeration intended to foreground their suffering and emphasise its magnitude. They revel in a strange form of stoic heroism based on passive endurance and a refusal to recant the tenets of faith in the face of excruciation and death. The uniform serenity of their expressions and the contemptuous ease with which they hold up their weighty weapons and implements of torture indicates their triumph over their brief earthly agonies, their enjoyment of bliss in the eternal lands. Having endured terrible pain, they are now stronger than ever.

The seemingly morbid preoccupation with the details of torture and death offered (and still does offer) symbolic hope for those suffering lesser pain, fear or anxiety on the earthly plane. The legends of the saints, repeated with storytelling relish until miracles escalated and baroque embellishments flourished, were exemplary tales of people from backgrounds both ordinary and privileged whose piety and suffering had elevated them beyond the mundane world into the realm of the mythic. Like bodhisattvas, their compassion for the suffering of others led them to act as intercessory figures between earth and heaven, the human and divine worlds. A sympathetic magic is at work here – sympathetic in all senses of the word. The means of martyrdom provides a direct line of connection with related pain or misfortune via a system of patronage which became increasingly formalised and codified over the centuries. You would pray to a certain saint for relief, knowing that they had gone through far worse than you and emerged as creatures of immortal power. They would have both personal knowledge and understanding of your suffering and the means to diminish or dispel it. Through and associative logic which seems grimly ironic or ghoulishly funny to the modern sensibility, the martyred saint could be appealed to for prosperity or good fortune in a particular endeavour or livelihood related to the means of martyrdom.

St Blaise

Here we have St Blaise holding the iron comb with which she was raked before being beheaded. As a result, she became the patron saint of wool combers. St Lawrence of Rome wryly displays a toasting fork, as if he’s just about to demonstrate a recipe. He was tortured on a gridiron heated from below by a blazing bed of coals, and is thus the patron saint of cooks, chefs and coal miners. He is also reported to have uttered a quip in the midst of his sizzling agonies; something along the lines of ‘I’m done on this side – you can turn me over’ (wasn’t this included in a Dave Allen sketch?) Such coolness in the face of searing heat added comedians to his portfolio of saintly patronage. Fools or jesters might pray to him for a good reception at court, or latterly, stand-up comedians for courage to face a tough crowd.

St Apollonia, with St Leodegar to her left (he merely had his tongue cut out and his eyes gouged from their sockets)

St Apollonia of Alexandria had her teeth smashed or pulled out before she leapt into the fire which had been prepared for her immolation. She grasps a pair of pliers hugely outsized for tooth extraction. A molar which could have been wrenched from the gums of a giant is pinched in its jaws. Apollonia presents it with a slightly sardonic air, as if mocking those who tried to break her. There you go, have that one. The tooth is triumphantly held up as if it were a trophy, a suitably solid symbol of physical suffering transcended by the power of eternal spirit. Apollonia’s image is particularly prevalent in Devon. There was evidently something about her story which struck a chord with the rural populace. She is, of course, the patron saint of dentists, and the person to pray to if you have a toothache.

St Catherine of Alexandria

St Catherine of Alexandria is a 4th century virgin martyr (a bride of Christ) who is famously associated with the device upon which she was to be tortured – a spiked wheel across which victims’ bodies were laid, their limbs, splayed out across the interstices, smashed and broken by hammer blows. The Catherine’s Wheel is a spinning firework, its spitting jets of flame approximating to the barbs on the wheel’s rim. It also transforms the wheel into a solar symbol, throwing off burning flares, lending Catherine the aspect of a sun deity. The wheel is not represented in the Ashton icon of Catherine. Instead she leans on a hefty sword with a curved cleaver of a blade. Evidently concerned with accuracy and fidelity to the letter of the lore, the Ashton artist has decided to depict the actual instrument of Catherine’s martyrdom. When she was placed upon the wheel, it miraculously shattered, injuring several of the gawping bystanders who lusted after vicarious thrills. And so she was simply and swiftly beheaded. As, presumable, was the wheelmaker.

St Ursula, with St Anthony (and pig) to her left

St Ursula, another 4th century virgin martyr hymned by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, grasps one of the arrows with which she was shot. She had set out on a pilgrimage to Rome prior to her dynastic marriage to Conan Meriadoc of Armorica. A largely forgotten figure in his own right, his names resonate in modern ears through their union of the barbaric and mythologically syncreticj fantasy worlds of Robert E Howard and JRR Tolkien. Ursula’s myth partakes of the exaggerations of the Celtic tall tale telling tradition, in which superhuman feats and grandness of scale were used to induce wide-eyed wonderment, a sense that the known, everyday world could unfold and expand to encompass the extraordinary, the plane of the heroic on which everything was bigger, bolder and more emphatic. So, Ursula was accompanied by 11,000 virgin handmaidens, the storyteller relates. The party was ambushed by Hunnish tribes in the territories of Germania and every single one of the handmaidens was beheaded. Ursula was spared this fate, her execution prosecuted by the arrows of German archers. Archers with long, long bows if the size of the arrows presented here were to be taken literally. But as we should now realise, we are in the realm of myth and symbolism, and literalism offers a misguided pespective on the matter (or the arrow) in hand. Needless to say, Ursula is the patron saint of arches, and of fletchers.

St Sidwell

Ursula’s father was King Dionotus of Dumnonia, the Celtic kingdom of the South West inhabited by the Dumnonii tribe. The Roman name for Exeter was Isca Dumnoniorum, the river of the Dumnonians (in other words, the Exe). So whilst she is generally associated with Northern Europe, and Germany in particular (the grand church of St Ursula is located in Cologne), she is in fact a local figure. Other neighbourhood saints are also gathered here, a martyrs reunion. It was easier to identify with a holy figure whose story was rooted in the local landscape. Particularly notable is the 8th century saint Sidwell, who stands with her scythe planted at her side, its blade arcing out like a battle pennant. St Sidwell gave her name to an area just beyond the East gate of the old city wall of Exeter. She was the daughter of a Welsh lord, Perphir from Penychen, and is also known by the variously translated names of Sativola, Sadfyl and Sidwella. Not specifically a Christian martyr, she fell foul of the jealousies of a wicked stepmother in classic fairytale fashion. This stepmother, Freda, paid a reaper three gold coins to murder Sidwella out in the fields. Sidwella was remowned for her generosity and kindness of spirit, and her resultant popularity inflamed Freda’s jealousy until it was a burning rash of raw hatred. She played on Sidwella’s generosity, inveigling her into taking the reaper’s lunch out to him in the fields. Here, her head was harvested with a swish of the keen-edged blade. For a symbolically significant three nights, a shaft of moonlight spotlit the site of the murder, where body and head lay amongst the cornrows. On the fourth night, the body arose, picked up its head and carried it to the place where it wished to be buried; the site upon which St Sidwell’s church was built. Where the severed head had thudded to the ground, the fresh waters of a spring bubbled up.

St Urith redecapitated, along with St Lawrence and St Sebastian

It’s a legend which combines the Celtic cult of the head, believed to be the repository of human spirit and power, and the reverence granted to springs and the holy wells built around them. Ingmar Bergman’s filming of a variant of this mythic pattern in The Virgin Spring bears witness to its widespread dispersal across Northern Europe. There are numerous incarnations of the beheaded Celtic saint who is associated with wells or miraculous springs across the South West. Another figure very similar to St Sidwell can be found a little further to the south in the screen’s saintly cast list, also stood in a relaxed pose with scythe planted upright by her side. The panel on which her head was painted has been removed at some point in time, perhaps during the Reformation. She has been twice decapitated. She is, in all likelihood (unless Sidwella has been doubled), St Urith, Iweryddd or Erth along other linguistic pathways. She was the victim of another wicked stepmother, a character whose malign depiction might represent a repudiation of any residual remnants of female-centred culture and spiritual authority. Her story is very similar to Sidwella’s in its essentials, one interesting difference being that she is decapitated by female haymakers. Where the drops of blood splashed down from her severed head, the tiny flowers of scarlet pimpernels bloomed. The blood is the life, the fertilising water bringing fecundity and a prosperous harvest. There is an obvious connection between these saints and the old harvest myths of seasonal death and rebirth, of reaping, gathering and sowing. Urith’s divine ancestors are Persephone, Isis and Aqhat, Blodeuwedd and Baal. She represents the continuity between the regional observance of Christianity and the cultures and observances which preceded it, the undammed subterranean stream of undifferentiated myth and story. And she is one amongst many.

The Ashton screen is notable for the high proportion of female saints and sibyls in its static parade. This reflected a real need for a feminine facet to be incorporated into a patriarchal monotheistic religion. The aspect of the female divine, the Goddess of birth, renewal and abiding endurance and strength (as well as destruction and division) could not be suppressed and emerged in these coded incarnations. It might seem that the emphasis on suffering and torturous death presents a wholly negative image of femininity. But the visual representation of the women here is strong and calmly self-possessed. They have transcended suffering and proven more powerful and enduring than their brutish tormentors, who sought to wither their spirit and eradicate their affective presence in the world forever. As they still do.

St Sebastian

One of the martyr saints most frequently represented in Western art is Saint Sebastian. He is here, towards the southern end of the screen. Unlike his neighbouring saints, he is painted in the midst of his martyrdom. He has always been the object of a certain masochistic sensuality, his arrow-pierced body a focus for sublimated desire, gay or otherwise. It’s a pictorial tradition which Derek Jarman adapted as the basis for his debut feature film Sebastiane (1976). The Ashton artist has taken care to clearly trace plumes of blood spuming from the six wounds created by the arrows embedded in the saint’s torso. Sebastian’s body is set in a relaxed, almost languorous pose, however, stretching sensually rather than knotting in twisted agony. Perhaps his face is transfigured with ecstasies of pain alchemised into transports of joy. We will never know, since the panel on which his head was painted has been removed. It’s not clear whether this decapitation was carried out during the long century of the Reformation or was merely due to subsequent deterioration.

Scarred Sibyl, prophetic vision unimpaired

Scarred St Helena

Many other saints have suffered much more evident damage from the chisels and knives of Reformation iconoclasts, however; secondary violence visited upon them to supplement the suffering of their original martyrdom. The paint could easily have been scraped off, as it was in many churches throughout the country. Or the screen could simply have been torn down and burned. Instead, the zealous vandals, intent on propagandising for the new creed, left the bodies of the saints unmolested. They concentrated their attacks on the faces. Eyes were gouged out, mouths slashed and scored. It was a very deliberate attempt to rob the images of their artistic impact, their ability to communicate with the supplicants who gazed at them. The calm regard of the saints established a direct connection with the viewer, a sense of personal communion with an embodied incarnation imbued with supernatural power. This was anathema to church reformers, an example of arrant popery and Catholic idol worship. The scarring of the face, blinding and making dumb the tutelary saints, destroys the ability to communicate. At the same time, it leaves the body present as a disfigured reminder of what has been roughly cast aside. The blind icons carry with them and implicit threat of violence towards those resisting the new order, to any who might think they can perpetuate old observances.

Scarred St Catherine

Scarred St Sidwell

Scarred St Leonard

Scarred St Blaise

Scarred St Thomas of Canterbury

The seismic shock and massive ideological disruption of the Reformation can be seen and almost physically felt with powerful, hair-raising immediacy in the knife scars and chiselled pits mapping the faces. The intense, violent emotions of the times are still palpable in these savage marks. You can almost hear the curses and effortful grunts of the iconoclasts, the jarring scrape and stabbing knocks of tools on wood, their constructive use turned to destructive ends. A faint resonance of the violent acts of centuries long passed still hums in the still spaces of the church around the rood screen. St Catherine has been given an eye patch, a panel covering her lost orb; St Sidwell’s face is terribly pockmarked, as if eaten away by plague; St Leonard’s mouth has been drilled through, leaving him with a darkened ‘o’, a pursed moue of permanent startlement; his ear has been torn off too, so that he might not hear the pleas of his supplicants; St Blaise has been similarly assailed, and looks like he is whistling or singing an aria; St Thomas of Canterbury has suffered the most terrible damage, perhaps on account of the mitre he wears and the archbishop’s cross he grips. A figure of authority to vent your rage upon. His nose and lower jaw have been sheared off, and together with his hollowed out eyes leave him with a porcine profile. He resembles some of the sketches the artist Henry Tonks made of First World War soldiers who had received terrible facial injuries at the front and had been sent to hospital for corrective surgery.

The tracks of Mary's tears

Milk-eyed angel - Gabriel

Even Mary has not been spared. Her image on the rear, parclose side of the screen has had its eyes scratched out, as if she too had joined the ranks of the martyrs. A downward score of the knife has drawn the tracks of a tear. The annunciatory angel Gabriel’s pitted sockets have been filled in with white wax, making her eyes look as if they have nictating, cat-like lids. Two tonsured heads, reputedly portraits of monks who had been murdered nearby, were similarly disfigured. One has his eyes starred, lines radiating outwards. They seem to make manifest an expanded vision in a dimension invisible to the naked eye, like the trails of subatomic particles photographed in a cloud chamber; a penetrating higher perception reaching beyond ordinary sight. The Reformation iconoclast slasher has inadvertently lent this particular figure a coruscating aura of extra-sensor power. There are lighthouse beams of vision which could fill the soul with intense, ecstatic illumination or scour it with pitiless, actinic glare.

Star Eyes

Visionary sight

We rise up from our kneeling scrutiny of the panel painted saints and find ourselves confronted with the imposingly massive bible whose blocky weight is borne by the woodcarved wings of an eagle lectern. The eagle’s folkloric powers include the ability to gaze unblinkingly into the blazing light of the sun. It thus became a symbolic conduit of divine wisdom and illumination and was chosen in the medieval period a the ideal beast to bear the weight of the Word and act as intercessor between celestial and earthly regions. The open pages are covered with a small square of aged patterned cloth in silk brocade, its colours faded but still rather beautiful. We lift and gently fold it to see what passage it conceals. The last reading appears to have been from the Book of Ezdras, an esoteric and apocryphal backwater of the bible. Certainly not one familiar to me. Much of the page is taken up with recitations of names, which are filled with potent, poetic richness and round syllabic rhythm. Nebucodonosor, Rathmus and Semallius the scribe, King Artaxerxes and Tebelius, Mithridates and Beeltethmus the storyteller. I feel compelled to read them aloud, and the unfamiliar syllables, no doubt horribly mangled and mispronounced, sound like a summoning. I wonder what strange services are held here, what strange form of religion might have evolved in this remote church in which the pre-Reformation centuries still seem co-existent with the present.



Having bookmarked the page with the only thing which came to hand, a Kendal mintcake wrapper, we essay a bit of bibliomancy, closing our eyes and flicking through the pages before stabbing at a passage with a decisive forefinger. We are not disappointed with the resultant readings. They are both proper Old Testament, full of violent portent and bloody retribution. Mine, from the Wisdom of Solomon, speaks of ‘a terrible sound of stones cast down, or a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains. These things made them to swoon for fear’. David’s prophetically pronounced ‘behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion and lift up himself as a young lion. He shall not lie down until he eats of the prey and drinks the blood of the slain’. We quietly return the pages to their original passage and respectfully smooth the cloth back over the powerful words. The eagle looks with a stern and piercingly sharp-beaked regard over the nave, its rigidly fixed, concentrated stare admonishing us for ever taking such matters lightly.

The final episode will be coming soon...

The first Calendar Customs collection from the Folklore Tapes folks focussed on Halloween. It sought to unearth the layers of tradition and vernacular observance which have been largely displaced by the gothic horror pageantry which now characterises All Hallow’s Eve. For the second volume, they have spun the seasonal and calendrical globe to its obverse face, the light rather than the shadow side, and celebrate May and its merrie rites. Halloween, or Samhain in the old Celtic calendar, marked the setting of the sun, the diminishment of its fires as winter’s dark set in. May Day rejoices in its resurgence, the rebirth of the light which heralds summer’s suffusing warmth and easeful languor.


As with the first release, the music creates sound pictures of specific festivities or rituals, or more general springtime atmospheres. Appropriately enough, given the invocations of ancient traditions contained within, it is presented in a format which is, by the modern measure of accelerated time, an ancient relic in itself – the cassette tape. It is packaged with the care and imaginative use of graphic design which Folklore Tapes pride themselves in providing. The inscribed cover is a mutable symbol which could be interpreted in any number of ways: the top of a maypole; an British dreamcatcher; a diagrammatic, time-lapsed aerial view of the weaving dance around a maypole; a handmirror reflecting the fresh vitality of youthful blossoming; or an abstracted focal lens fixing the season’s vigorous moment of awakening. Or all of the above. Both the cassette and the box in which it is housed come in a light shade of pink, the colour with which the edges of some May blossoms are blushed. A small length of maypole ribbon is included, a gift whose handling summons something of the spirit of bright revelry which is the abiding mood of Mayday. Mine is a lovely emerald green, the proliferating colour of spring’s explosion of thrusting, unfurling growth. A small, photocopied booklet offers notes setting each track in context, giving clues as to the soundworld the artist has created. Its rough, handmade quality adds to the impression that the box set is a personal gift, an artefact which has been put together with minimal resources and a deliberate rejection of digital sophistication, but which as a result has a real, individual touch bearing the authentic imprint of the artists involved. Oh, there’s also an essay on May customs and cultural history by some bloke called Jez Winship. It’s alright, but he does go on a bit. He gets his Shakespeare wrong too. It should be ‘How am I, thou painted maypole?’, not ‘though painted maypole?’. Honestly! I suppose he’s only human, though.


The tape (or, more likely, the accompanying digital download) begins with the comfortingly familiar chimes of a domestic clock, with its household echo of Big Ben’s city tolling translated from the big smoke to a country cottage. Its clockwork carillon calls out from the mantelpiece to rouse the sleepy to wakefulness in the middle of the night, to begin the day long May celebrations at midnight. Time to venture out into the woods and fetch in the branches of may. Carl Turney and Brian Campbell, usually operating behind the surgical masks of Clinic, here set up their Lost Tapes Record Club to present this manufactured anthropological field recording, Alan Lomaxes of inner space. Tramping bass and processional percussion combine with reverse tape night calls and splashy harpsichord dabs, the latter adding a 60s psychedelic touch. The processing and electronic backdrop lend a bleary-eyed haziness to the sound, a dreamers’ parade. The second section of this three part piece (a mini prog concept trilogy) introduces the dawn birdsong chorus, and a sense of calmness and peace pervades. Soft variations on the old medieval round Summer Is Icumen In are played in fluting tones which sound at times like the exhalations of a mellotron, with its slight, breathy delay. Counterpoint voices emulate the intertwining calls of the birds as human and avian worlds combine, the birdsong recordings continuing to burble away in the background. It summons the spirit of a Vaughan Williams or Delius idyll, paradise gardens or larks ascending. With the day blooming into post-dawn life and light, the May rituals come into their full flowering. The third part of the piece brings in the springy, lo-fi thumps of tambour and marching drum. Electronic sounds spiral and wiz over the elemental rhythm, darting and bounding like fizzing will-o-the-wisps caroming in Brownian motion around the May paraders. It’s the background buzz of nature’s busy noise, the humming drone and dense sonic weave of summer after winter’s silence, order and pattern emerging from apparent chaos. Human voices join in the chorus, in their own simple, limited fashion.

The Blue Funz offer a two part piece evoking Beltane rituals on the Isle of Mull; Need-Fire and Milking Cows Through Cake we are bluntly informed, without any further explanation forthcoming. The sound picture gives us a fairly clear idea as to what is going on, however. We begin with the crackle of fire, like cellophane sweet wrappers being crinkled and rustled. Cow bells clank and jangle, carrying an eerie echo, as if heard through mist. A gentler, lulling female voice sings a soothing, slightly distracted melody in the background, leading the bovine herd onward. Glinting thumb piano or celeste plinks add to the aura of magical suspension. May Eve is a time for lighting bonfires, like All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, its shadowy counterpart. The veil between worlds grows thin during these temporal interstices, and protective measures must be taken against maleficent incursions from elsewhere. Thus, cattle are driven through the purifying gates of twinned bonfires as they are led out to pasture. The Need (or Neid) fire is lit from and ember nurtured from the previous year’s fire. A slightly sinister chant is introduced, hinting at spirit worlds a dream or errant fancy away from our fleeting perceptions. A bowed instrument like a sarangi sounds scraped, overtone burnished notes like the clarion calls of an otherworldly horn. But where do they come from, and whence do they lead us?

The second section shifts to an interior resonance, bringing us into the cowshed. The sounds of cows lowing, and the pizzling squish of milking, accompanied by pumping, machine-like percussion, gives us a clear picture of what is going on. Choral synth sighs lightly float around the space, producing an ambience of placid bovine contentment. Tinkling notes could be the splash of milk into containing vats (whether through holed cakes or not) or a continuation of the magical tingle felt outside. Apparently there is only one dairy herd on the Isle of Mull. The unpasteurised cheese produced from the happy cows is reputedly exquisite.


Arianne Churchman’s Minehead Hobby Horse builds a sound picture of a North Devon tradition which has become rather overshadowed by the renown of the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss a little further west along the coastline. It begins with the sound of a spectral, radiophonic sea (like the sound the BBC’s electronic workshop produced for Samuel Beckett’s Embers). A finger tapping drum rhythm beats out a procession. Processional drums are a recurrent motif running through this Calendar Customs release, along with the sound of birdsong. A reedy accordion wheezes into life, building up the bare bones of a folk tune; a sketch for a song we already know, even if we’ve never heard it before. A wooden clacking and clopping is a reproduction (or perhaps an actual recording) of the erratic, circling progress of the horse and its snapping, toothless jaws. Shouts of ‘hooray’ come from the horse’s milling entourage of outriders. The piece pauses halfway through, accordion set down for a moment, to allow for a count-up (‘one-hooray, two-hooray’ etc). It’s almost like a belated intro. We can imagine leaping morris dancers or some special and jealously guarded Minehead hobby horse moves coinciding with each celebratory cry.

Rob St John’s Bringing in the May returns us to the Delius idyll, spring as a blessed time of re-awakening. A slow showering of piano notes could be the aural depiction of May blossom slowly drifting to the ground, or shivering in a gentle breeze. Sweetly bowed overtone notes in the background create the impression of refracted light glinting through branches. What sounds like a viola adds limning colour to the piano. The circling, downward spiralling arpeggios are like the peals of distant bells. A piping flute, wavering like a whistling kettle, brings in a slightly off-kilter element. The flute is another characteristic sound threading through this compilation. It is the traditional instrument for evoking pastoral moods and the melodic outpourings of songbirds. Its recurrence in this context underlines the central principle behind May Day celebrations, that of going out into the fields and woodlands and renewing a direct sense of connection with the natural world. Let’s all sing like the birds. Rob St John’s repeated piano figure could also be a Messiaen-like imitation of birdsong. Towards the end it shifts up a couple of octaves, a raising of the spirits as our May communion fills us with a feeling of lightness and joy.

Ian Humberstone’s The Hunting of the Earl of Rone is a soundpicture of a particular May tradition carried out in Combe Martin on the North Devon coast, an observance which blends seasonal ritual with local historical pageantry. We hear a hubbub of festive voices and a braying horn calling the gathered hordes together to set off on the hunt. A hunt for human prey in this instance – shades of the Hounds of Zaroff. We are led on once more by processional drums, and the swaying tune of an accordion (an easily portable backpack of an instrument). A flanged electric guitar takes up the melody, ramping the folk up into psych territory. Pattering percussion produces the impression of a slightly chaotic pursuit. I don’t give much for the Earl’s chances.

Mary and David’s (that's David Chatton Barker, I presume) Wish Before Sunrise concerns the tradition of bathing the face in May dew, the belief being that it would lend the complexion a pearlescent glow for the rest of the month. Mary and David use small sounds to create an atmospheric evocation of this observance. It begins with tambourine and drum – the drum once more suggesting a procession going out into the fields. Recorder pipes away, leading us on a merry morning dance. Sprayed zither chords sprinkle us with cold droplets of dew, and the metallic bowing of strings (or of a cymbal’s edge?) suggest hands dipped in cold water, scooping up a cold palmful of May moisture to lave the face. The gleaming plink of plucked strings could be spilt drops splashing back down. Crystalline chime shimmer catches the diamond glint of light on dewdrops. The susurration of whispering voices invoke personal prayers to nature spirits. They are followed by bright, scintillating sounds, glissando glimmer and pulsating oscillations. The bright gleam of singing wineglasses or Tibetan bowls and the warm radiance of a resounding gong. All of which create the impression of a complexion brightening into a healthy, translucent glow.


Rite of the Maypole: An Unruly Procession is the latest concrete sound collage by Children of Alice, the post-Broadcast trio featuring James Cargill and ex-bandmate Roj Stevens alongside Julian House, Broadcast’s graphic designer, collaborator under his Focus Group guise and co-founder of the Ghost Box label. Children of Alice very much continue the experiments first formulated on the Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP. Rapid transitions and cinematic jump cuts create a kaleidoscopic sound collage akin to the fractured form of an experimental film. You can imagine the visual analogue to the sounds, with superimpositions and sudden edits, animated interjections and scratched frames, solarised footage and saturated colours producing an effect of heightened reality. The approach is not far removed from that taken by Richard Philpott in his 1989 film The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day, included on the BFI Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow DVD of folkloric films. Philpott attempted to use film’s ability to collapse time to create connections between the modern-day celebrations in Helston, Cornwall and a more ancient worldview and symbolism. Images of the labyrinth are flashed up to forge a subconscious link with the dancers as they spiral through the narrow streets of the town.


Children of Alice’s procession is unruly partly in its similar disregard for temporal convention, its disregard for direct continuity and fascination with the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements. These create subconscious connections which subtly rewire the brain – truly psychedelic music. It begins with drums, tambourines and birdsong again. These are soon processed into fluid, psyched-out patterns, however. Bells toll, but odd reverb is applied so that their attack is blunted, their directional provenance rendered oblique and nebulous. This is music which attempts to blur the rigid framework not just of time but also of space. Birdsongs are concreted, which doesn’t make them strange as much as emphasise and work with their inherent strangeness. Birdsong is best approximated through electronic means, since their soundworld often feels closely analogous to electronic music (just listen to the remarkable call of a bird of paradise). It’s no surprise that imitative birds such as starlings have found it so easy to add the sounds of mobile phones and car alarms to their repertoire.

The interjection of a laughing female voice hints at the licentious aspect of May Day revels, the lustiness which so vexed Puritan critics in the 16th and 17th centuries. The voice forms a direct connection with the birdsong which has preceded it, calls which are a mix of territorial assertion and mating cry. The ‘unruliness’ of May license brings the human world closer to that of nature, to the seasonal awakening it feels instinctively drawn towards. An opening door and the jingle of keys seems to indicate a passage into another time and place, another scene. A wavering oscillation sounds a vaguely futuristic alarm call, which could also be heard as the whooping and stridulation of frogs and insects. A trundling, springing rhythm creates a slightly comical, cartoonish sense of movement through a boggy landscape, with bubbling and burbling sounds suggesting a squelchy passage. The revving of a motorbike engine acts as punctuation, and perhaps also references The Owl Service. Its title music also used a mixture of instrumental and concrète sound and employed startling collisions of sonic materials – including a motorbike engine.

Children of Alice seem to incorporate, knowingly or not, all the elements of the Calendar Customs May compilation. Next in this extraordinarily condensed, multilayered work we hear piping sounds, the pastoral flute once more. It is subject to reverse masking and other manipulations, but it still bears its established associations. Two step drum beats once more mark out a procession, and the combination with the drawn-out, curving cries of electronic estuary birds (more meetings of human and avian worlds) suggests that we may be in the midst of the ‘Obby ‘Oss celebrations in Padstow, our senses synaesthetised by a combination of ale, crowd psychology, sunshine and repetitive music. An echoed cluster of xylophone notes perhaps marks a brief, refreshing shower, as well as providing another moment of transition. Glassy sounds resemble those produced by Les Sculptures Sonores for the 70s BBC children’s programme Picture Box. More childhood memories are stirred as a cheerfully creaking, ratcheting duo bring to mind the Froglets from The Clangers. Another jump cut and we are in the middle of a village festival, bass and drum patterns reminiscent of those found on Broadcast’s Tender Buttons LP creating an impression of bustling crowds. Car sirens, bikes and shouting voices bring us into the soundworld of the public information film – time for the Advisory Circle to intervene with an admonitory message, perhaps. There is another switch to an interior resonance, and the chaos dies down. What sounds like an amplified autoharp (of the kind Trish Keenan used to play during Broadcast gigs) is slowly strummed. Its upward glissando conjures warming flames in the fireplace of a village inn. A slowly tapped drum relaxes the rhythms of the day, winding down as evening progresses. And so to bed.

Sam McLoughlin’s I Want to Sing Like the Birds Sing, Not Worrying About Who Hears or What They Think is as good as its wordy wish. It begins with a shimmering, celestial synth drone, the clear air of a crisply blue-skied morning. Harmonium and pattered finger drums add their more earthbound voices before birdsong recordings are once more introduced. Sam then begins his duet, piping with untutored instinctiveness on a wooden flute. The sound becomes denser as more flutes are layered on top, until a joyfully cacophonous chorus has filled the spectrum. Chinking mug percussion is added, lending further urgency to this frenzied attempt at transformation, to enter a birdlike state of unconscious grace – to become the song. The drone drops out at some point, the early morning shimmer clarifying into day as the dawn chorus amasses more and more voices. The piping ceases to allow space for a firmly plucked zither arpeggio. It’s like a free jazz big band dropping out to make way for a featured soloist. John Coltrane’s Ascension, for example. The celestial drone returns and the manic piping builds up mass and momentum once more, swanee whistles adding a particularly antic note (free jazz swanee whistle, now there’s a thought). The recordings of birdsong carry on underneath, like a play along tutor. This is how it should be done. It sounds a hell of a lot of fun. Do try this at home.


Malcolm Benzie rounds things off in low-key fashion with Hawthorne. Birdsong recordings play in the background one more time (this not surprising for someone who plays in a band called Eagleowl). A low-fi drum machine sets up a relaxed rhythm over which bass and guitar gently sway. Benzie’s vocals, easing back in the mix, are pleasingly mellifluous, with a light Scottish inflection. The repeated refrain offers a descriptive paean to the hawthorn bloom, sung as if addressed to the flowering bushes themselves as the may is gathered in. It’s a morning song, soft and blurry with waking. A hymn of sorts. It all ends with the birds, a final fluted note pitch-shifted down until the sound is switched off. It’s a perfect way to end, to disperse the conference of birds and bid farewell to Merry May. But what a fine survey it has proved to be. What calendrical quadrant will the Folklore Tapes family alight on next, I wonder? What further curious customs and arcane observances will they uncover? We will have to wait and see.

PART THREE



Walking towards the Jacobean pulpit at the south end of the rood screen, we paused to look down at two memorial stones embedded in the aisle, its darkly grey, granite surface worn smooth by centuries of shuffling feet, some soled in patent leather, some bare and roughly calloused. Under us lay whatever remained of Peter Bauwlen and Hugo Cadbury, who died in 1653 and 1658 respectively. The hard surface was inscribed with crudely chiselled, tersely rigid letters, curves and cursives kept to a minimum. Some of the symbols looked almost runic in their stark, sticklike linearity, particulary on the Bauwlen stone, around which they created a decorative border, the centre left a stony void. A number of small letters were interposed between larger ones on the Cadbury stone, mistakes corrected as the stonemason spelled his way around the border, no doubt cursing his negligence. The ultimate effect was highly striking, however, even if amateurish in its artisanship. They both looked a good deal older than the carved dates indicated.



The Jacobean pulpit itself was a solid, boxlike affair with straight-panelled sides. They might have gone on to form an octagonal pen if the structure weren’t neatly constructed to fit into a nook in the wall. It would have looked rather like an oversized music-box, in fact. There was a sounding board on top, a flat, protruding ledge from which the preacher’s voice was intended to bounce, disseminating outwards to reverberate in the ears of the congregation. This emphasis on clarity and projection indicated the increased importance granted to the word and to the sermonising of the local minister in the post-Reformation world. The pulpit had moved out from the sacristy and the minister (priest no more, in name at least) now conducted the service from in front of the screen. The division between priesthood and laity was supposedly narrowed, the minister leading his flock directly, on a much more personal level. The sermon was a central part of the new service, an address during which the vicar could, if he was a skilled speaker, inspire and make intimate spiritual and social connection with the faces looking towards his corner speaker’s box. An iron bracket extended forward from the pulpit’s lip, the ledge on which the passionate preacher might lean to emphasise a point, adopt a pose of casual intimacy or get closer to his audience. The bracket would have held an hour glass, just to remind him not to get too carried away with the message. It was also a standard memento mori symbol. Make your point, for we none of us have too long in this place.






Behind the pulpit, a narrow arched entrance in the wall opened upon a set of steps, ascending in a steep spiral within a constricted, whitewashed well. We carefully crawled up this chalky, snail-like chamber, feet planted sidewise on the narrow precipices of the stone stairs. They soon unwound onto the top of the rood screen, stone turning into wood. Before the Reformation, there would have been a loft built on top of the screen in which lights could be lit and incense censers swung, and from which the choir could sing and decorations could be hung. It was another level of the medieval church’s multi-platform, multi-coloured, multi-sensory theatre. Now it was a creaking, dust-carpeted expanse of bare wooden boards which looked and sounded none too safe. An old loudspeaker with brown woven grill was placed aslant in the middle, a brown wire snaking across the length of the screentop from its blocky hardwood cabinet – a lengthy rat’s tail. This was the kind of hardy megalith which used to get heaved out for village fetes in the 1950s. Its top was a plateau strewn with an accumulated tilth of droppings (church mice presumably) and dead flies. A message was scrawled in fading biro on a piece of paper loosely attached with yellowed sellotape. It requested that the speaker not be moved from its current position. It looked like that instruction had been followed for a good many decades.














Treading creakily and cautiously along this wooden parapet, we peered down into the rear part of the church, the sacred chambers behind the screens. On the north wall of what appeared to be a largely empty chapel we could see shapes painted in a dull red tone, all gathered around the central divisions of a crucifix. The rood crucifix atop the screen also loomed large above us, its transverse beam cutting across the line of the sloping roof joists a few feet overhead. The Marys stood to either side, adding a female symmetry to the scene. From the rear, their wooden haloes looked like the discs of caps or berets, attached at a chic, acutely angled slant. We edged towards a precipice overlooking the aisles, like guards on a defensive gatepost dividing the sacred city of the chosen ones from the secular lands beyond. From up here, we could get a close look at the wooden statues. Something strange immediately caught our attention. Pendant from a loop of cord hung onto a nailhead in the centre of Christ’s pierced hand was a sharp, white shard. On closer inspection, it proved to be what we had suspected – yes, a sliver of bone, long and tapered, like a canine tooth, roots and all. Who had climbed up here to hang it from Christ’s wounded hand? And what was the nature of their offering? A charm to cure some debilitating illness? Or a token to commemorate the centenary of the Great War, strung from a statue itself erected in the war years in remembrance of one fallen on the fields of Flanders. It swayed gently in the currents of air playing around the church rafters, as if the hand to which it was attached was faintly stirring with vestigial spasms of reflexive muscular movement. Whatever its provenance, it possessed an eerie and slightly disconcerting power. We decided to descend, taking special care not to tumble down the steep, narrow-stepped stairs and barrel out in front of the trinity of decapitated saints.








Back on ground level, and on solid flagstones covering the memorialised dead, we walked to the screen doors which led to the wall painting we had glimpsed from above. A wooden latch on the back swivelled upward, as it must have done countless times over the centuries. The doors seemed reluctant to open for us, however. I in turn was reluctant to apply too much pressure, fearful lest the carved and painted medieval wood should crack and splinter at my blundering touch. But a slight shoulder budge proved sufficient. We walked through, crossing the border into the sacred, and were rewarded by the incredible panel paintings on the rear of the rood screen – a surface known as the parclose screen. These were granted a larger area than the rood saints, less compressed by Gothic arches and decorative traceries. There was some Reformation damage, mainly to the eyes (strike out the gaze! Destroy the vision!). But otherwise, they were remarkably intact. The large panels told the story of the incarnation, with annunciatory angels, heralding prophets and an apocryphal guest star role for Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, who also becomes pregnant, though previously barren. Mary herself is seen kneeling piously at a lectern with bible or prayerbook open before her, and later sitting beside Elizabeth, both contentedly cupping their hands around each other’s full-wombed bulges.










The figures are dressed in the fashions of the 15th or early 16th centuries, floppy, trailing caps and capacious tunics, belted and rippled with folds. Such extravagant us of fine cloth was a deliberately ostentatious indicator of wealth and status. The hands are set in varied and highly expressive gestures. These are storyteller’s hands, bringing the words of the miraculous tale to life. The contemporaneity of the panel figures made the story more immediate to the congregation; or at least to the few who were privileged to pass into this privileged space. Perhaps the finery they sport was intended to reflect the rich raiment of those who were allowed to cross the sacred border. This was once the Chudleigh chapel, so you would have to have been of a certain standing. The paintings strongly resemble comic book panels – the panels in this instance being wood rather than pulpy paper. Instead of speech bubbles, the characters bear unfurling scrolls and pennants on which the holy words are inscribed in a gothic script. The star-eyed figure who might be a portrait of a murdered monk lightly grasps a forked ribbon-end between fingertips and thumb. It flutters up and around him, s if possessed of a living agency, an innate impulse to reveal the Word which defines it. ‘Omnes resurgent in novissima tuba’, it proclaims. ‘All will rise up at the last trumpet’. The mild monk points to the paper weakly clutched in his right hand, as if to draw attention to his own eventual resurrection, to reassure himself of his place in Eternity.



Turning from this narrative sequence of panels, we look at the outlined remains of the 15th century wall painting. This is more condensed, all the symbolic information packed into the space surrounding the cross. The abstracted objects associated with the passion, which are often found carved on medieval bench ends or etched into stained glass, float around the central symbol of Christian faith like electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. Of the original palette, only the umbrous red now survives. It was revealed when the Chudleigh memorial was removed from what was then the family chapel into the aisle. It’s a dim reminder that the whole church would once have saturated the eye with chromatic brilliance. All walls and surfaces would have been decorated, painted with patterns and biblical scenes, illuminated by light spectrally tinted from its passage through coloured glass.








We step through into the sacristy, and are penned in by wooden walls. Victorian angels look down on us from the corners of more wooden screens around the altar. They are gilded with light shafting through the clear, diamond paned arch of the south window, haloed by the blue and vermillion hemispheres of stained glass roundels behind the altar. Positioned halfway between the ground and the roof, they give the enclosed space a feeling of elevation, of being apart from material reality but not yet ascending to the celestial plane. An inbetween space, a hallway connecting separate states, body and spirit.




We leave the sacristy and the old chapel, pushing open the creaking oak doors, temporarily parting Mary from the Angel Gabriel. Taking a few steps up the northern aisle to the west end of the church, we pause to contemplate the Chudleigh memorial, whose removal had revealed the ruddy crucifixion. A large wooden board painted in funereal black with lettering shining out from the shadowy background, it is crowned with the family crest, flanked on either side by wild men. These are folkloric figures of the wildwood, tousle-headed and bushy-bearded, their modesty (or the modesty of the onlooker) sparsely preserved by shorts woven from branches and leaves. They carry gnarled clubs with them, which suggest a lineage deriving from Hercules, and also an affinity with the less modest Cerne Abbas giant, the priapic chalk hill figure in Dorset. They are free spirits, bound by the laws of the natural world with which they are inextricably enjoined, but not by the rules and conventions of human civilisation. In some ways, they are mythic progenitors of Rousseau’s noble savage, the outsider uncorrupted by the taint and compromise of society. Reversing the fall, they return to the garden, now overgrown to become forest. Some parallels might by drawn with the encampment of travellers currently residing in the Haldon forest.


Towards the bottom of the board, we find some of the traditional memento mori symbols, reminders of mortality and prompts to use our short earthly span to its fullest effect. A pair of scythes is crossed, the blades facing outwards as if they had been leaned carefully against a wall, their work done. Even the Reaper has to rest from time to time. On the opposite side to the scythes is an hourglass, pictorially rhyming with the timer which would have nestled in the iron bracket holder on the pulpit. Perhaps the congregation, watching the level of sand diminish with agonising slowness from the upper chamber, fell to contemplating their own inevitable end. At the base of the board, buried beneath the writing, is a skull, square-jawed and blockheaded, and with a few teeth missing – a distinctive detail which suggests specific portraiture. It is painted gold, a gilded death’s head which acts as a gatekeeper, a guide to the golden fields of eternal life.


The memorial is for George Chudleigh and his wife, Lady Mary Chudleigh. Both had significant connections with the Civil War. Mary’s father was Sir William Strode, a prominent figure in the opposition to King Charles. Sir William was at the heart of the parliamentary melee of 1629. The speaker was held down after refusing to read a resolution against the arbitrary imposition of warmongering taxation, and the rebel members ignored an order to leave the chamber. As a result, Sir William was sent to the Tower and imprisoned in various locations for the next 11 years, an absolutist period during which parliament was never assembled. His incarceration didn’t diminish his determination to stand up to the king. In 1642, he was one of the Five Members of parliament whose impeachment under accusation of high treason set the accelerating progress towards civil war in motion. When the king himself entered the chamber to make the arrests, only to discover the offending parties had absconded, forewarned and sheltered in the labyrinth of London, he realised that he was no longer in control in the capital. He left for Oxford soon afterwards, there to form his loyalist splinter parliament. Sir William Strode died in 1645 and was given a public, formal burial in Westminster Abbey. In the vindictive retributions following on from the Restoration in 1660, his body was exhumed, his monument now residing in St Mary’s Church, Plympton.


Sir George Chudleigh was directly involved in the progress of the Civil War in the local area. He was initially a Parliamentarian, a general in Cromwell’s army. However, his son James, also in the Parliamentarian army, was captured by Royalist forces in the early stages of the war. A man whose pragmatic realism outweighed any ideological principles, he immediately switched sides. It was a change of heart which he communicated with sufficient conviction to receive a commission as a colonel in the king’s army. Sporting a turned coat was eminently preferable to a sword in the guts, even if the colours didn’t quite suit. He was duly accused of treason by Cromwellian generals; a traitor, but a live traitor rather than a loyal dead man. His father, deciding that blood and family honour were more important than political allegiances, resigned his commission and joined James on the other side. It didn’t do either of them much good. James was killed in 1643. In 1645, General Fairfax led the New Model Army into the south west, occupying Topsham and lodging in Ottery St Mary for the bitter winter. When they pushed west again in early 1646 to pursue Royalist forces, they took over the manor of Ashton, a tactically commanding high spot on the Haldon ridge from which to prepare for a sweep down into the Teign Valley and north west to Torrington. It was here that a decisive battle would be fought, the pronounced victory for the Parliamentarians bringing the war in the south west, and in the country at large, towards its conclusion.

General Fairfax

It was a time for George Chudleigh to make himself scarce. The supposed bullet holes in the south porch door would have been created at this time, if at any. Truth to tell, they look a little too neat to have been made by the explosive impact of a musket ball, a burning pellet of iron liable to violently splinter bone or wood. But peering through the holes from the inside to the light on the hills beyond, I feel inclined towards the vagueness of romantic legend and local lore rather than the rigour of rational, reasoning. This felt like a place and a moment for imaginative fancy, not empirical deduction. That could come later.



It’s interesting to speculate what tensions might have arisen within the Chudleigh household. Lady Mary was the daughter of a notable Parliamentary hero, after all. The national divisions and local conflicts created by the Civil war may very well have been reproduced on a domestic scale within the marriage, voices raised in anger and argument within the Place Barton manor house down the hill from the church. Whatever dramas may have been played out in the home, however, Lady Mary performed her duty in perpetuating the Chudleigh lineage with heroic dedication and thoroughness, also managing an admirable symmetry and balance in her production of offspring. She had 9 sons and 9 daughters, as her memorial inscription proudly pronounces.


I wonder what a later Lady Mary to marry into the Chudleigh family might have made of this no doubt exhausting childbearing feat. This Mary Chudleigh was born in 1856, during the latter years of the interregnum, but was really a child of the Restoration. She consorted with various poets of the period, and wrote poetry and essays herself. Some of her writing has led to her being claimed as a proto-feminist. But as Angela Williams points out in her insightful piece on the Literary Places blog, it is important to bear in mind the conventions of the time, both literary and social. Witty dispute was fashionable within certain circles, and license could be taken in the knowledge that this was intellectual sport, not the kind of agitation for radical change which had been voiced across the land in the preceding decades. Nevertheless, there is a strong-willed and amusingly sardonic advocacy of female independence of mind in Lady Mary’s poetic dialogue of 1701, written as a terse rejoinder to a wedding sermon intoned by one John Spring in 1699 in which he declared that a woman should naturally be subject to their husband’s wishes within a marriage. It bears the thoroughgoing if somewhat unwieldy title ‘The Ladies Defence: or the Bride-Woman’s Counsellor Answered: A Poem In A Dialogue between Sir John Brute, Sir William Loevall, Melissa and a Parson’. Lady Mary, who died in 1710, doesn’t have a memorial in the church. David had brought along a copy of her best known poem, To the Ladies, however, and stood before the Chudleigh memorial to read it out. Her words rang round the spaces of the church, given substance by David’s soft Mancunian tones, and formed their own epigrammatic tribute:

Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
Which nothing, nothing can divide:
When she the word obey has said,
And man by law supreme has made,
Then all that’s kind is laid aside,
And nothing left but state and pride:
Fierce as an Eastern prince he grows,
And all his innate rigour shows:
Then but to look, to laugh, or speak,
Will the nuptial contract break.
Like mutes she signs alone must make,
And never any freedom take:
But still be governed by a nod,
And fear her husband as a God:
Him still must serve, him still obey,
And nothing act, and nothing say,
But what her haughty lord thinks fit,
Who with the power, has all the wit.
Then shun, oh! shun that wretched state,
And all the fawning flatt’rers hate:
Value your selves, and men despise,
You must be proud, if you’ll be wise.



Having invoked the bright spirit of this singular member of the Chudleigh clan, it seemed an appropriate moment to take our leave of the aisles of Ashton. The sun was shining through the clear glass of the southern window, illuminating the medieval panels in the north. They glowed dully through the fogging grime of the ages, the trees in the graveyard beyond looking like further diamond framed outline etchings of green tracery. The light suggested that this would be an appropriate time to take a circuit of the church exterior, wandering amongst the graves.




The graveyard was in fact quite a compact acreage. On the north side, it accommodated itself to the slope of the hillside, whose steep declension we would soon be merrily sailing down. The stones on this side of the church were noticeably more wreathed and crowned by ivy, skirted by brambles, bracken and thickly clumped grass. This was, after all, the Devil’s side, the poor end and, more practically, the area in the shadow of the church’s stone mass. It was slightly more expansive than might be expected for such an undesirable post-mortem residential district. This was due to an extension of the boundaries effected in 1907. The lower part might therefore be thought of as the suburbs of the dead.



Amongst Celtic crosses, gothic arches and stone beds in the original neighbourhood, our eyes were drawn to a small, black iron cross of a Germanic cast. A central disc was bordered by arms and a crown which could have served as axe heads with a little sharpening. The name on the circle was Ada Alford, a monciker suited for a songbird of the Edwardian music halls. The dates weren’t included. They were obscured b springy tufts of grass at the base of the cross. I carefully parted them and peered closely to uncover evidence of Ada’s time on Earth, the period in which she lived. For a moment I read the inscription as stating that she’d died at 12 years of age, and a lump rose in my throat. Then the one resolved in my failing eyesight into a 4. Still not a full span, but at least she must have enjoyed something of the world. So Ada, with your humble iron cross in the shadow of the north side and of grander memorials, I hope your life afforded you pleasure and a measure of contentment.









Circling back to the south side, we walked into sunlight once more. David found a lichen covered twig and used it as a beater for the triangle he’d brought along, testing out the resonances of stone recesses and corner nooks. We knelt down to inspect lichen universes sprayed across the flat planes of gravestones, blossoming in orange, lime and purple globular clusters and nebulae. There were also wavy, intersecting kelp fronds of deep green moss and anemone-like fans and rosettes of lichen which were suggestive of undersea worlds, mites and ants transformed into crabs, shrimp and other scuttling and paddling crustaceans. We speculated on the linguistic connections between lichen and the word lych (as in lychgate), derived from the old English for the dead, lic. Lych ways, or corpse roads, such as the one leading across Dartmoor from Lydford to Postbridge, were the paths of the dead, routes along which bodies would be borne for burial. They were generally winding, avoiding a straight, linear route in order to confuse spirits who might be tempted to return and haunt the living. Lich was also a word coined by 20th century writers of the weird such as HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith to refer to revenant corpses, often reanimated by magical means. The green-painted slopes of the lychgate roof were clustered with copses of tiny moss forests, a miniature landscape model of the wooded hills beyond the churchyard and village. Beneath, billowing hammocks of spiderweb spread their complex cat’s cradles across the eaves. They catch the low-angled rays of the late afternoon sun, the spidersilk glinting and shimmering.






We passed beneath them and descend the zigzagging stair, untethering our bikes from the noticeboard at the bottom. And off we went, sailing down the western slopes of the Haldons, past the big old medieval barn, now renovated and turned into something modern and fancy, a place for conferences and retreats rather than cattle and sheep. We also whooshed past the entrance to Place Barton, the former residence of the Chudleighs. Near the bottom of the hill, we paused at Lower Ashton. Essentially a pub and a post office and store, it was a reductio ad absurdum of a village, condensed into its essential form. David popped into the village store to replenish his supplies and pass the time of day, and then we pushed off, forgoing the temptations of the pleasant-looking inn. We crossed the river Teign via a medieval packhorse bridge, bracketed, angular nooks placed along its span to retreat into should a haywagon happen to be trailing over. They also provide excellent vantage points from which which to spot river birds. Some weeks later, I watched a young dipper bobbing about on a rock, making its first attempts at fishing solo. It seemed to be doing quite well, a promising start to its dipping life.





On the other side of the bridge, we immediately turned right onto a road which paralleled the course of the Teign, running upstream through the valley. It wasn’t a particularly busy road, but after the sleepy country lanes we’d been traversing, it seemed like a return to the busy rush of the modern world. It was only a mile or so before we found ourselves turning towards Doddiscombsleigh, however, retreating once more to the quiet old roads meandering their slow way around the folds of the hillsides. A clear moon, waxing towards fullness, now hovered pendulously over the treelined brow of Scanniclift Copse, rising above the Teign, which we had once more crossed (along with the derailed course of the old railway line). We were entering a magic lunar valley, our approach heralded by the coarse, rasping fanfares of rooks. Up and down the road undulated, with the moon a watchful orb above us, measuring our unhasty but steady progress. By the time we reached the village of Doddiscombsleigh, the light was failing, dusk beginning to extend its crepuscular tendrils. We made our way directly to the church, resisting the temptations of the Nobody Inn for now.





We approached the church up a narrow gravel path and walked through the unwalled graveyard. Heading into the porch and opening the door (which was of fairly modern vintage), the first thing we saw, facing us in the northern aisle window, was the figure of St Christopher, etched and outlined in stained glass. St Christopher was an icon imbued with great power for the medieval Christian. Not only was he the patron saint of travellers, looking after the weary wanderer, but a glimpse of his image would provide protection against death for the remainder of that day. Small wonder that representations of St Christopher were often placed opposite the entrance door in medieval churches, making this the first thing the congregation would see as they filed in. Here he was a bearded giant, the infant Christ like a tiny bird on his shoulder. His staff was a thick tree trunk, budding and shooting into life at the top. He looked like another version of the wild men we had seen on the Chudleigh memorial.




More sprouting greenery was to be found on a foliate head looking down from a capital on the westernmost column of the south aisle. A fascinating account by a local doctor outlined the possible symbolism and folkloric significance of this singular carving. It had a noticeable harelip, thought to be one of the Devil’s characteristics in a fearful, superstitious time when difference was demonised (and have things really changed so much?) The elongated leaves, with their serrated edges, are devil’s bit scabious. Together with its placement in the shadows furthest from the altar at the eastern end of the church (the side of solar rising) and the pointed, vulpine ears, this suggests that the carved foliate head is a representation of green-ish man or wildwood spirit as Devil. The Pagan figure demonised in this instance, rather than displaying a sense of continuity with the Christian symbolism of death and rebirth.




Another green man at the eastern end of the northern aisle balances out this figure, creating a pleasing sense of symmetry. It’s in the more traditional style, branches and leaves bursting out of the mouth as if from the stump of a felled tree – coppiced human heads. Green men have many moods, as if they metamorphose with the seasons; placidly grazing in bountiful springtime, ferociously predatory during winter scarcity. The specimen here tended more towards the latter end of the spectrum. There’s something feline about it too. A green man combined with one of the black cats of the moor. It also has a roguish Kirk Douglas dimple in its chin.

Baptism

Extreme Unction

Penitence

Edging to the side of this figure, we began to inspect the magnificent medieval stained glass which filled the arched windows of the north aisle and culminated in the thematic kaleidoscope of the seven sacraments window at the eastern end. These windows miraculously survived the shattering stones of the Reformation vandals. People need little license to indulge in the destructive pleasure of smashing glass, so it’s remarkable that they’ve survived intact into the present. Some suggest it’s because Doddiscombsleigh, tucked into the valley folds beneath the Haldon ridge, was so difficult to find that the agents of the reformed church and the later Puritan iconoclasts passed it by. The sacraments orbit the central figure of Christ, a Victorian stand-in for the absent medieval incarnation. He is the Son as sun, drawing all together throughout life’s progress, sacralising its stages of physical, social and spiritual development. Each moment is linked to his stellar body by scarlet streamers of blood which radiate from the five Passion wounds (hands, feet and heart); blood as light and lifeforce. Five lifelines for seven sacraments. The sacraments depicted cover birth (baptism), confirmation (the induction into the body of the church), the Eucharist (the ingestion of Christ’s body), penitence (forgiveness – the confession and absolution of sin), marriage (the union of man and woman and ensuing issue blessed by God), ordination (the continuation of the priestly line), and extreme unction (the last rites ushering the dying from life). The latter was placed immediately below the baptismal scene, the tracking gaze providing a cinematic dissolve from birth to death, the cry as air is first drawn into the lungs to the sigh as it is exhaled for the last time. It’s a juxtaposition carrying its own memento mori message as much as the laurel wreathed, toothless skull at the base of the 1697 memorial to John Babb.











The medieval faces are full of character, imbued with individual life by idiosyncratic details, the variations from the accepted ideal which make them feel real. A penitent’s overbite, the sharply carnivorous set of teeth bared by a priest or the snub nose of a woman keeping vigil by the side of the death bed (the same woman in the marriage panel watching over her dying husband?). Details catch our eye and draw us in for a closer look. The spreading fan of overlaid hands resting on the head of a baby as it is held over the baptismal font; the confirmation-bestowing priest holding a child which looks like a tiny, fragile doll, his fingers pincering its head as if about to snap off part of a gingerbread man. The hands of the couple being married are held together in a wavering grasp suggestive of anemones locking tentacles. I become particularly fascinated by the fashions of the time: the money purse hanging from the belt, the severely fringed hairstyles and, particularly, the shoes, which are rounded and highly practical, not in the least like the absurdly pointed and curled footwear of popular medieval imagery (although there is a more pointy pair elsewhere).





The window was restored in 1762, and one of the glaziers was so proud of his work that he inscribed his name in a pane of blue glass just above the bed of the dying man in the extreme unction scene. P Cole done this window March 1762 whom god preserve amen. The shaky scrawl could have been scratched out by the spidercrawl of one of the charcoal arachnid scribbles outlined against the coloured glass like more fine leaded work. No matter how closely I peered, I was unable to locate Cole’s inscription on this visit. It was only on a return journey some months later that I found this artistic signature on its cerulean shard, part expression of creative ownership, part selfless dedication to God.






We haven’t come at the best time to see them in all their illuminated glory. Their colours don’t pulse with the refracted radiance of the sunlight. But we can get some impression, and peer really closely at the details within individual panes: the watery bubbles, relics of the molten state; the finely drawn black lines of curling hair and folded fabric; and the patterning used in the background, some of which looks startlingly modern in its symmetrical rigour and the care with which colours are contrasted and composed. Stars and diamonds add stylised decorative elements. Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian would have approved and possibly drawn a few lessons. Modernity lurks luminous in the ancient artisanal crafts – the shock of the old.









The colours of the robes in which the saints of England, Scotland and Ireland (at this time still entirely separate nations) are wrapped are particulary beautiful. Andrew’s blue and St Patricks green and red. St George remains pasty and translucent, however, a true English saint, his armour waiting for the sun to make it gleam. Even the cross in his armoured breastplate lacks its customary scarlet. He thrusts his spear down into the maw of a dragon’s head which is similarly pallid, a white cave worm. The dragon is no mythically earthshaking mountain horde beast, more the size of a small alligator. St George’s attack seems almost bullying, just another royal hunt. His spear rips out of the side of the unfortunate beast’s head, its diamond head tip forming an extra ear. The heads of St Peter and St Michael are encased in bubbles which look like the sleek art deco dreams of belljar space helmets. They are von Daniken astronauts, medieval archangels and church fathers on the moon. St Christopher as patron saint of astral travellers. The representation of the Trinity as three crowned kings with suitable regal beards looks like something the saints might encounter on their space travels. They form a coagulated mass, a tripartite being, coronets fused to their heads. Their faces are pustulent with bubbling glass, and they are coloured a forthright shade of yellow. The lumpy custard kings, English mustard gods offering us benediction with upraised index and middle finger (except for the Holy Spirit which, being incorporeal, has no hands).













St Michael is depicted in his end of times role as weigher of souls, his feathered limbs particularly apparent. He holds a large set of scales in one great bowl of which a tiny human figure anxiously crouches. But what’s this? A devil of the classic pointy-eared, fork-tailed variety is reaching up to pull on the scales, tipping the balance in its favour to it can claim this human soul for its master in Hell. Let’s hope St Michael notices its impish intervention. Next to him, St Peter holds a huge key to a door which, if commensurate in size, must be of a truly vast expanse. Its handle end creates what looks like a decorative aperture in his stomach; the hole for a wind-up key, St Peter as clockwork simulacrum. His hair is particularly finely rendered. St Paul leans on the sword with which he was martyred and holds his head as if despairing at the state of all around him. We imagine him muttering a vexed ‘oy’. The hand is probably supposed to be shielding Paul’s eyes against the blinding Damascene vision of the resurrected Christ. It’s difficult not to impose a more comical interpretation, however. St John the Evangelist holds another chalice from which a serpent is uncoiling itself, which we can compare to the one we saw in Ashton. This glass monster, tiny though it might be, is a lot fiercer than the adorable black beastie on the Ashton rood screen. It has a golden head and wings (a miniature Quetzelcoatl), and a stringy tongue furling outwards from its open mouth produces an almost audible hiss of outrage. St John himself has a fine thatch of curly russet-coloured hair, sweeping back in a romantic Algernon Swinburne or Thomas Chatterton tangle. St James the Greater, the patron saint of pilgrims, makes his eternal way with the aid of a stout golden staff. His broad, floppy hat is designed to shade his face from the sun, which the burning corona of his halo resembles. A shell pinned to the folded back brim of the hat makes reference to the Santiago pilgrim route. Did any of the Doddiscombleigh congregation make that lengthy penitential peregrination, I wonder? Mary is here too, her robe an exquisite brocaded blue. She appears withdrawn, caught in an intensely inward moment. She doesn’t look like a figure who would reach out to those devoted to the Marian cult.










The symbolic embodiments of the four evangelists are here, too. The angel of St Matthew, looking rather stern and sulky; the winged lion of St Mark with its lobate tongue lolling out; the ox of St Luke, also with wings; and the more aerodynamically convincing eagle of St John. The angel has been bifurcated by black leaded lightning, the eagle’s glorious plumage is speckled by sooty deposits, and the ox has the cracked charcoal star of a dead spider above its folded wing. Droplets of thick glass beneath have a deep subaqua glow, pearlescent greens and turquoises giving the impression that we are looking through a porthole into oceanic waters. Another quirky creature can be found in the heraldic form of a two-headed black bird. It looks like a mutant cormorant, a friendly companion, possibly possessing the power of speech. Some of our Ashton saints return in the upper panels, too, still bearing their implements of torture. Here is laughing St Lawrence with his gridiron, St Stephen with his stones and St Blaise with his combing iron. The red, blue and green backdrops look like theatrical curtains for their restaged dramas.





The Victorian glass in the east window is inevitably overshadowed by the stunning medieval glass, but it is splendid in its own right. It depicts the angel in Christ’s tomb revealing his resurrection to the women who have come to attend to the body. The faces look very contemporary, and the angel could be one of Hitchcock’s cool blondes. There’s something of Grace Kelly in it. It’s arm is raised heavenward with a casual, matter of fact insouciance. The walls of the cave are layered in strata of purple and vermillion, and the ground beneath the women’s feet is carpeted with vividly rendered daisies, cornflowers, marigolds and irises. Colourful life blossoming in darkness, in the shadow of the tomb.




Doddiscombleigh also offered some fine carved medieval bench ends, including one featuring a cocky lad, a local bravo, perhaps. He is quite the peacock with his patterned cap, buttoned up shirt and broadly frilled collar. His shoulders are set at a swaggering angle, mouth curled in a 15th century Elvis sneer. Well uh-huh. He was centred in a circular frame, as if this were a magnified medallion. Some things never change. There’s something very photographic about this portrait, the carver producing a naturalistic pose which feels like a moment of passing life captured and preserved. There was also a shield bearing a heart pierced through by two crossed spearheads. This is one of the symbols of the Passion, a fuller selection of which we had seen in the medieval wall painting in Ashton. Passion symbols in the form of a pierced foot, hand and heart also featured in a small, much begrimed panel of stained glass in the upper section of one of the windows. Another carved wooden eagle looked beakily across at us from the lectern near the altar at the eastern end, watching our investigations with a warily assessing eye.



We left the church interior and walked out into the gathering gloom of dusk. House sparrows were noisily gathering in the ivy thickets entwining an old telegraph pole in the far corner of the graveyard (the local exchange for the underworld). It looked and sounded like the dead tree bole had come to life again, sprouting an odd blend of vine, twig and coloured wiring. The sparrow’s roosting told us that it is high time we repaired to the Nobody Inn. In the cosy nooks of this centuries old hostelry, we partook of the local ale and were regaled with the fascinating tales of its history – of the provenance of its remarkable selection of whiskies in the wartime posting of the landlord to the naval bases in the Scottish highlands.



It would have been all too easy to settle down for the night before the fireplace. But we still had to make our way back over the Haldons and down into Exeter. So off we set into the rainy night, fuelled by good ale and the residual warmth of the inn’s fire, aglow with the knowledge of a quest fulfilled. The clouds soon parted and our path was lit with soft moonlight, the woods around us haunted with owls and the furtive rustlings of night creatures. As we passed beneath the pylon lines, a crackling electric border of sorts, we looked up and saw mighty Orion glinting coldly in the dark distance. He continued the hill-spanning stride of the iron pylon giants upwards into stellar regions. Soon after, we crested the ridge of the Haldons, passing the white tower (its radiance now occluded) and looked down onto the bleared lights of Exeter way down below. We were leaving the timeless realm of the mythic and descending into the modern world once more. The Ashton Ascension was complete, it was time to return, our spirits refreshed and happy.

Begin your Ascension here:
PART ONE

And continue here:
PART TWO

Here's the full version of an introduction I gave to a screening of The Damned as part of a 12 Hour science fiction film festival at the Bike Shed Theatre for Phonic fm. I had to cut it drastically to fit it into the alloted 10 minute time slot, but still went hopelessly beyond the limit set. Sorry. Concision is an art I have yet to master.


My choice of film is The Damned, a 1963 film directed by Joseph Losey and produced by the Hammer film studios. I’ve chosen it partly because of its relative obscurity, which hopefully means I’m introducing you to something entirely new. It’s not very well known even within the Hammer film canon, and the studio found it difficult to distribute at the time. It was actually made and ready for release in 1961, but didn’t find its way into the cinemas until 1963, truncated and squashed into the lower half of a double bill, coupled with Maniac, one of Hammer’s post-Psycho thrillers. This delay and the wariness of exhibitors was in large part due to confusion over exactly what kind of film this was, and how it could best be marketed. Is it a science fiction film or is it a ‘youth gone wild’ rock n roll movie? Is it an exploitation quickie or a European arthouse meditation in the mould of the Antonioni and Bergman films then making such an impact on the continent. It’s interesting that its release coincided with the completion of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly trilogy and Antonioni’s trilogy of films with Monica Vitti, both of which deal with similar themes of existential angst and disorientation in the shadow of the bomb and the Freudian tangle of human relations. The use of bleak, empty coastal landscapes in L’Aventurra and Through A Glass Darkly provides a strong continuity of mood with The Damned and they even share a symbolic use of helicopters.


But The Damned is also very much a genre film, a Hammer film. James Carreras, one of the pater familiases of the Hammer family business, would have been horrified at the idea that he had sanctioned the making of an art movie. The Damned is an anomaly in the Hammer filmography, an experiment which was considered an unqualified failure by the studio, and one never to be repeated. Looking back some years later, James Carreras summed up the reasons for this in a mildly expressed assessment which nevertheless encapsulated the company’s unswerving, hardline commercial priorities. ‘It’s not our cup of tea at all. Losey is a very eminent director and he has a great following among critics, and the film, I’m sure, was a good film. But unfortunately, you know, we can only judge it on results. Did it get its money back? And the answer is no, it didn’t’.

Joan leads the bikers through Weymouth

The very ambiguity about the nature of the film and the porous nature of its generic boundaries, which made it so difficult to place, created confusion amongst critics and put cinemagoers off, are the very things which make it such a fascinating watch in retrospect. It might challenge perceived notions of what constitutes science fiction, but science fiction it most certainly is. But it is a lot more besides. I also chose this film because of its reflection of contemporary fears and anxieties. There was moral panic over youth gang violence. This was sometime after the Teddy Boy scares and the trashing of cinemas showing Rock Around the Clock and just before clashes between mods and rockers on the beaches of Clacton and Margate in 1964. But the press-fuelled alarm was still present, waiting for the next incident to lend it form. There was also a sense of national disorientation in the receding wake of the ebb of empire. The complex psychology of the film expresses the confused stupor of a country no longer certain of its place in the world, and failing to come to terms with its vastly diminished influence. The hugely emblematic humiliation of the Suez Crisis had unfolded five years before the film was made. It had made it painfully clear to the British establishment that America was now the dominant force in the politics of the Western world. This dominance was also extending to the cultural sphere. The newly affluent youth were turning to American popular culture to forge their identity, which was increasingly at odds with the old establishment values of the British Empire and even of the post-war spirit of welfare state collectivism. This was the beginning of the consumer age, of a new form of status anxiety.

The sound of invisible death - the click and crackle of the geiger counter

There is also the pervasive sense of unease generated by the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This is where the science fiction element really comes into its own. Nuclear radiation had been a central staple of 50s science fiction cinema. Sometimes it was just a vaguely mumbled rationale for bringing on the giant monsters – Godzilla, ants in Them, an oversized spider in the self-explantory Tarantula. At other times it used to more subtle, metaphorical ends. The nebulous cloud which causes the protagonist of The Incredible Shrinking Man to begin his slow, lonely journey towards the microworld and into the infinities beyond. The pandora’s box in the delirious pulp noir Kiss Me Deadly. Hammer had made its own radiation picture, X the Unknown, a great little film which is punctuated throughout by the ominous popping crackle of Geiger counters, wands which effectively render death sonically visible. In The Damned, it is combined with another common science fiction theme of the time, that of the mutant child or children – part of a generation which potentially represent a new stage in human evolution. They are sometimes persecuted outsiders, spurned for their difference. At other times, they are a menacing threat.

Children of the Grave - These are the damned

In SF literature, examples include Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (an early iteration from 1935), Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids. The latter two are particularly relevant here. The Chrysalids even ends with another helicopter arriving like a deus ex machina to bring the ‘different’ children to a new and more civilised settlement where they will no longer be persecuted. The Midwich Cuckoos was filmed as Village of the Damned in 1960, the year before The Damned. The children here are malevolent in intent, the offspring of aliens who have, by unspoken implication, impregnated the women of a sleepy English village. They are capable of forming a gestalt mind which gives them enormous telepathic and telekinetic powers. The children in The Chrysalids are mutants in a post-apocalyptic world which has reverted to a pre-technological level, with an accompanying resurgence of superstition and persecution. The signs of their difference must be hidden lest they fall victim to this new form of witch-hunt. The children in The Damned fall somewhere in between these two breeds. They are exploited and kept in darkness – denied enlightenment in a literal and figurative sense as they are imprisoned in their shelter beneath the cliffs. But they are, through no fault of their own, also deadly to those not like them. They carry the poison of radiation, and live in an environment uninhabitable to ‘normal’ human beings. This is the tragedy at the heart of the film.

Strange Angel - King in the graveyard of St George's Church, Portland

I also chose this film because of its local setting. The locations here may be familiar to many of you. The Victorian seaside town of Weymouth and the cliffs and quarries of Portland Bill which loom above it. You can see Portland Bill from Exmouth or Dawlish on a clear day. There is a great deal of location shooting on The Damned (another reason why it was so expensive to make), and there are many incidental pleasures to be had. The steam train heaving up and down the quayside, the fashions of the extras and bypassers in the Weymouth town centre scenes, the general surreality of seeing familiar places incorporated into a fantastic fictional scenario. The 18th century Georgian church of St George’s is used to good effect, with Oliver Reed’s character King outlined leaning out from a memorial in the graveyard like some strange, demonic angel. The tombstones could be protruding from the bunker where the mutant children live, because their home is effectively a mausoleum; a cold modernist crypt to contrast with the clean classicism of the Georgian building above. The church is built from Portland stone, naturally enough, and there are also scenes set in the Portland quarries. These carry an ingrained symbolic weight, particularly when it comes to the climactic confrontations between establishment characters and the outsiders who have stumbled onto their activities. Portland stone has been used to build a good number of monumental buildings which represent different aspects of the Establishment, expressing entrenched and seemingly unassailable power. These include Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster (the House of Lords and Commons), St Paul’s Cathedral and, going further back, The Tower of London. It was also used extensively in Exeter Cathedral.

Quayside steam

Joseph Losey was a director who appeared to have a particularly European sensibility, along with an acute insight into the workings of the British establishment and class system. It’s surprising then to discover that he was a Midwestern boy, born in Wisconsin in 1909. It’s an origin he shares with Orson Welles, and like Welles he began his career in the theatre and ended up a Hollywood exile. In the era of Roosevelt’s New Deal he was involved in many radical productions in New York; radical in terms of their progressive, leftist politics and in terms of their experimentation. He also directed a large number of plays for the radio, again with a distinctly leftist slant. Perhaps the height of his theatrical career was a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the exiled German playwright’s Life of Galileo, which starred Charles Laughton. Losey’s first film, made in 1948, was a fable about difference and persecution called The Boy With Green Hair. It shares The Damned’s unambiguous anti-war stance. It could also be read as an anti-McCarthyite allegory.

Clocktower bikers

As such, it was probably one of several factors leading to Losey being targeted by the McCarthy witch hunts in Hollywood. He was called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, but decided to remain in Europe, where he was working at the time and avoid the grimly farcical and hysterically conducted proceedings which would inevitably ensue. As a result, he was blacklisted by Hollywood and remained an exile for the rest of his life. Looking back, he was sanguine about his fate, however. In 1983, a year before his death, he reflected ‘for some reason interviewers are always saying that the experience has left me embittered and this just is not the case. In a way my being blacklisted was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it forced me to go to Europe to continue my career as a filmmaker. Otherwise I might have stayed on in Hollywood, merely making money instead of making pictures I wanted to make’.

King by the clocktower

It also forced him to work within the bounds of genre pictures, and the tension between his coolly formal artistic temperament and the requirements of story and genre produced some memorable results. Before The Damned he has made several distinguished crime thrillers, including The Criminal, which starred Stanley Baker, one of his key actors. The Damned would have been much better served with Baker in the role of Simon. Losey was also slated to direct the Hammer SF picture X the Unknown. But the shadow cast by Hollywood in the wake of his blacklisting extruded its dark hand over the Atlantic through the agency of the film’s McCarthyite American star Dean Jagger, who objected to his participation.

Modernist cage

Losey’s leftist, anti-establishment leanings and concern with form and structure come through very strongly in The Damned. It is a film which works through contrasts, parallels and comparisons. The generic clash is one striking aspect of its structure, with the SF elements only introduced some way into the story. The locations and sets are also distinctly different but throw each other into clear relief. The bleak, fragmented cliffscape of Portland Bill and the long, empty sweep of Chesil Beach beyond are contrasted with the faded, peeling, formerly elegant Victorian façade of Weymouth town centre and seafront. The once-confident architecture of Empire is set against jagged cliffs and outcrops littered with blasted blocks of quarried stone which could be a vista from a pre- or post-human world. This is, after all, the promontory which extends the furthest southerly pseudopod of land on what is known as the Jurassic coastline, which begins further west in Exmouth. It’s an expanse of stratified bedrock steeped in deep time. The cliffs are in turn contrasted with the stark, cold modernism of the interior world beneath the cliffs in which the children are kept. This is the brittle, spindly modernism of the 50s – Festival of Britain modernism.

Feeling the rock - sculpture emerging from the geological spirit of place

The music also offers contrasts. James Bernard, whose strident scores for Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein and subsequent Hammer gothics did so much to define their mood, here produces something very different. A desolate, drifting, vaguely atonal flute melody which is reminiscent of the first of Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes or Gustav Holst’s brooding tone poem Egdon Heath. The latter comparison is particularly apposite given that Holst’s piece is an evocation of the bleak moorland which features in a number of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels and stories. Bernard’s restrained chamber music is contrasted with the brash rock ‘n roll song which blows it away when Losey’s roving camera takes us down into Weymouth. A rather tame, defanged piece in the Bill Haley mould, its lyrics nevertheless express the violence and menace which run throughout the film. Its inane melodic refrain is a recurrent motif, whistled by the bike gang as a kind signature tune and used as a call sign. The incongruous combination of jaunty ditty with the threat of violence is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, in which Malcolm McDowell’s Alex breezes through Singin’ in the Rain as he and his gang set about a vicious round of destruction, assault and rape.

King and Joan

The psychosexual interaction of the characters and the linguistic power games they play anticipates Losey’s collaborations with Harold Pinter in the latter half of the 1960s. At the heart of the film, and driving its initial narrative thrust, is the semi-incestuous relationship between Oliver Reed’s King and Shirley Anne-Field’s Joan, an edgy depiction of unhealthy obsession and arrested development. The two female characters in the film, Joan and Freya, both have or have had relationships with older men in which an element of ownership is involved. The artist Freya rents a cottage owned by her ex-lover Bernard, the scientist running a secret project nearby. Joan is intitially picked up by Simon, the American tourist, who thinks she is a ‘tart’. He becomes our nominal ‘hero’, although his behaviour makes him a far from noble one. He evidently still thinks she’s a tart when he takes her off on his yacht, an obvious status symbol which attracts her with its promise of further riches and luxurious pleasures. She is expected to pay for the privilege of being onboard, and he roughly embraces her in what amounts to an assault. The men of power, the scientist who has joined the military establishment and the rich American who has retired from the insurance business, both assume a proprietorial position of ownership. This is a man’s world dominated by male wealth, self-assertion and violence.

Bernard and Freya - a faded intimacy

Losey creates a multi-layered picture of British society, a series of refracting planes which demonstrate that its seemingly wildly disparate elements are in fact closely interconnected. This picture is encapsulated in the brilliant opening scene in which the camera glides up and around the clock tower, contrasting King and his gang with the memorial to King George III and drawing Simon, the American outsider, into their world – into England, in effect. King leads his gang, his ‘troops’, in mock military marches, and apes the chummy language and plummy accents of the establishment, satirising the breezy heroics and stiff-upper lipped stoicism of the war movies which filled the cinemas in the 1950s. King stands out from the rest of his leather-clad gang, wearing a stylish check jacket and swinging a tightly-furled umbrella with rigorous, square-bashing precision. He’s like a mod who has somehow found himself heading a band of rockers. The uniform of the gang who he marches through the streets echoes the uniforms of the military men in their secret, fenced-off base. Several times in the film, characters express their bewilderment at the seemingly mindless gang violence. ‘Why do they do it?’ they fret. It’s like the moment in The Wild One where Brando’s Johnny is asked ‘what are you rebelling against’, and he replies ‘what have you got?’ Losey shows how the gang violence is inextricably linked with the pervasive violence of society embodied in the military establishment. In the wake of the second world war it has now settled into the subterranean machinations of the cold war, its corrosive power still holding sway. The Edgecliff military base where Bernard’s secret project is housed has echoes of various secret military establishments in the West Country, most prominently Porton Down, home of the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment. Rumours and accusations of human experimentation were attached to Porton Down for years. And it was here in 1953 that a young 20 year old airman called Ronald Maddison died after being exposed to the nerve gas sarin.

King as frightened chiid

King and Henry

The last ride

King is like a child, aping what he sees around him, absorbing the violence which is in the air. He rejects the adult world and adult sexuality, and wants his sister to do the same. ‘It’s you and me against the world, Joanie’, he says. When he meets the children (recoiling with horror from the touch of their cold, dead flesh) one of them, Henry, forms a close bond with him. There’s a sense of fellow spirits connecting. Henry is a little boy lost, and we imagine that this was how King was when he was younger. Henry clings to King’s side, even when the latter tries to push him away. He insists on trying to escape with King at the end, telling him that he doesn’t want to go back since ‘none of the others really like me’. The scenes with them both are really very touching. King and Henry (King Henry?) are, for all of King’s violence, two innocents in the face of the tyrannical, depersonalised control of the military. King becomes something of an anti-hero, leading the children into destructive rebellion, trashing the joint like Teds ripping the seats out of a cinema where Rock Around the Clock is showing. His instability becomes manifest as the radiation sickness takes hold, and his underlying vulnerability becomes affectingly apparent. By the end, we understand something of his violence and rage, and desire to distance himself from the world. His final stand is a defiant fuck you to the British establishment.

Freya and Sid

Freya on the brink - working to the end

If King is one of the film’s isolated outsiders, then Freya is another. She is the artist as natural outsider, and thereby perhaps a reflection of Losey’s own status. She is also an outsider in that she is a foreigner (again like Losey), her name that of a Nordic Goddess. At the end of the film she speaks of the children in almost mythic terms. She refers to Bernard’s plan ‘to set nine ice-cold children free in the ashes of the universe’. It’s as if she is talking about the Norse eschatology of Ragnarok, the final battle in which only nine gods will survive to live on in the blasted remains of the world. The nine children echo this mythic pattern. Freya lives almost literally on the edge, isolated in the cottage on the clifftop. In one highly symbolic scene, she and King wrestle at the very edge of the cliff. They are both on the brink, outside of society looking on from the borderlands. King is not stupid – his mimicry has wit and satirical bite. But his deeper feelings, his raging inner conflicts, remain unarticulated. Freya has her art, which can express both the personal and the universal, inner and outer landscapes. King, perhaps jealous of what he cannot speak, maliciously smashes a sculpture she has been working on. A potential communion of outsiders is broken at the same time.

Bernard with expressionist double (the night mare)

Bernard as man of power - the scientist as God

Bernard, the scientist, is another individual amongst the deindividuated, the uniformed and ranked. His name may be a nod to Nigel Kneale’s famous scientist character Quatermass, first name also Bernard (Kneale’s tribute to Bernard Lovell, the British scientist who set up the Jodrell Bank radio telescope). But unlike the doggedly anti-establishment Quatermass, this Bernard has allowed himself to be co-opted by the military, even if it is supposedly he who is in charge. Freya mocks him for this. She provides a voice of dissent, undermining the assumed authority of his newfound status. She tries to reconnect him with his soul. But she knows him well enough to realise that the attempt is ultimately futile. The air of melancholy and regret which suffuse their scenes together is an acknowledgement that they now inhabit separate worlds. And just as it means death to enter the vault of the children unprotected, so it is death to enter the professor’s world. He is in fact a figure of death. The major in his radiation suit is referred to as the Black Death by the children, but he is really just one of Death’s minions. The professor carries his own poison with him; A mental and ideological poison, born of despair but feeding on power.

Indoctrination machines

Remote learning

‘Civilisation’ is contrasted with the ‘barbarism’ of youth culture, classical art with modern. The children, in their modernist bunker, are force-fed a classical diet of ‘culture’ to prepare them for the world to come. By implication, they will begin as the old generation left off, building a new Empire on the model of the old. The aristocratic Captain Gregory, played by the absurdly plummy-voiced James Villiers (a one-note performer if ever there was one), reads them the poem The Prisoner of Chillon by Byron. They are far too young for the poem, but it encapsulates something of their tragic fate:
My hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white
In a single night,
As men's have grown from sudden fears:
My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose,
For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those
To whom the goodly earth and air
Are bann'd, and barr'd—forbidden fare.

Looking at the world for the first time

Looking at a flower as the monster approaches

The scene in which the children briefly leave their cavernous prison for the light and air is powerfully moving. Joan looks after Mary, one of the little girls, and they sit on top of the cliff looking out over the seemingly endless expanse of the sea. ‘Take a look Mary’ Joan says, ‘that’s the world’. Mary is frightened by its sheer enormity, the lack of enclosing walls, so Joan suggests that she hold on to a small part of it and picks a flower for her. It’s at this point that one of the military men approaches in his radiation suit and tears Mary away from Joan’s arms, herding her, along with the rest of the children, back into their Portland pen. The violence of the establishment becomes brutally evident in the pitiless manner in which the soldiers go about their appointed task – men in frightening costumes brandishing guns. These are the Black Death night visitors emerging from the rocks to carry the children away in broad daylight; Nightmares in the waking sunlight, undeniably real. They are dehumanised by their radiation suits, which make them look like shambling, thuggish ogres, picking up small children as if they intend to eat them. This might appear to be a Hammer film without monsters. But they come out in an attacking horde in this climactic scene. They just happen to be human.

Remote viewing

Watching

The film also depicts a world in which everybody is being watched. King watches over his Joanie, and his bikers become a lookout gang, whistling code signals to alert each other to the whereabouts of Simon and Joan. When King disappears, Sid (the most sympathetic of the bike gang, played by Kenneth Cope) takes it upon himself to continue the surveillance with his high-powered binoculars to find out where he’s got to. The military base is surrounded by watchdogs and guards. Freya is watched over by Bernard and his underlings in an attempt to shield her from dangerous (indeed fatal) knowledge, but also to monitor whether she has been exposed to that knowledge and thereby become a threat which needs to be dealt with. The children are watched by remote controlled surveillance cameras, and their only contact with the outside world is via a TV communication screen, on which the professor’s face looms with imposing largeness. Freya’s sculptures also watch and wait. Her angel standing on the cliff’s edge looking out to sea, where navy ships are moored; her bird perching in windowsills or crouching behind the professor’s shoulder. Finally, the helicopters are like technological realisations of Freya’s birds, smooth mechanoid hybrids of bird and fish and insect which hover over the outsiders, Simon and Joan, Freya and King, herding them towards their end. Helicopters were still a relatively novel technology at this time, and became a symbol of futurity, representing freedom (as in the Chrysalids) or an oppressive, harrying presence. The shadow cast by the helicopter at the end of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly provides the manifest outline of the spider god which the unstable Karin has been hallucinating during the film. In The Damned, the helicopters are another aspect of the depersonalised power of the establishment. Highly mobile surveillance machines which ensure that there is no longer any way of escaping the all-encompassing grip of authority, no matter how fast and wild you drive down the long, straight coast road.

Captain Gregory - not an art lover

The children are all terribly well-spoken. It’s as if they have absorbed the speech patterns of those who indoctrinate them. They are set against the deliberate and ritualised insolence and rough speech of the bikers, who do their best to get on the wick of establishment types like the Major, and succeed admirably. Captain Gregory, meanwhile, shows them the same patrician disdain and studied disinterest which he reserves for anything and everything. An acute awareness of class and the antagonism, resentment or deference which this creates is present at every level of society, on civvy street and in the military camp. Captain Gregory still exudes an aura of Imperial arrogance and entitlement. He may be lower in rank than Major Holland, but he assumes an air of inherent superiority. Any bully can push people around, he says, looking pointedly at the Major, but ‘a gentleman commands loyalty’.

Return of Fuseli's Nightmare

King as art critic - attacking the manifestation of his self

On the cliffs above the children’s bunker, the sculptures produced by the artist Freya Neilsen offer a modernist, expressionistic perspective on the contemporary world. These sculptures were actually the work of the British artist Elizabeth Frink. Her birds, horse heads and human figures seem to emerge from the rubble of the quarry, fierce, half-formed beasts assembling themselves from the rocky material around them. Like the children, these creatures seem to be waiting for the post-apocalyptic world. Will this be the forbidding fauna which awaits them when they emerge from the cave? Frink was loosely associated with a group of artists known as the ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors, although they were really a generation older than her. The title comes from the influential art critic Herbert Read’s comments about the British exhibitors at the 1952 Venice Biennale. He wrote ‘these new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance…Here are images of flight, of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear’. Frink’s hulking male figures, like chthonic trolls turned to stone, are filled with brutish, threatening power. King, Oliver Reed’s gang leader, hates them. He confronts her piece Warrior which she made in 1954, a nude male figure with helmet fused to head as if it is a natural extrusion of the skull, with revulsion and disgust. It angers him. Perhaps it offers too clear an insight into his own soul. Joan, on the other hand, seems to instinctively find something instinctively right about them, feeling a natural, almost sensual connection, enjoying work which is an expression of female creation and imagination. Frink's staring horse head, again made in 1954, looks like the fearful apparition appearing from the shadows at the side of the bed in Henri Fuseli’s famous painting and print The Nightmare. This is one of the most famous of horror images, in which a malevolent imp crouches on the chest of a restlessly sleeping woman and glowers out of the frame, as if it has just noticed our watching presence. Her heavy angel with its stunted wings is destined never to fly, but to remain rooted to the rocks, gazing out from the brink of the land over the empty expanse of the ocean.

Cafe raptor

Bernard's familiar shadow

The sculpture we see with the greatest frequency, however, is The Bird. It is referred to in the film as the graveyard bird, forging a link with King when he perches on one of the grave obelisks in the churchyard later on. This sharply predatory creature, tensed for a killing swoop, was an early work of Frink’s. The Tate bought it in 1952 whilst she was still at art college. This is the work of a young woman, then, further bringing out the generational gulf which runs like a seismic rift through the film. The bird is associated with Bernard, the scientist at the head of the secret project which is preparing the chosen children for a post-nuclear future. It almost acts as his twisted familiar spirit. It denotes the primal violence and predatory ruthlessness lurking beneath his civilised exterior. Its presence subtly undermines his rationalism and the carefully reasoned justifications he presents for his monstrous actions. We see it framed in the window of the seafront hotel café where he meets his military colleagues (his major and captain). Its shadow also arcs over his shoulder whilst he addresses the children over the remote communication system. Art expresses the truthful spirit which lies beneath the blandly constructed surface of civilised behaviour.

Modernist prints

Mention should finally be made of the cast. Oliver Reed is definitely the standout presence here. He brings a nervy intensity and incipient instability to his role, making of King a real character rather than a two-dimensional thug. He wins our sympathy in way that Malcolm Macdowell in A Clockwork Orange never does. Reed was one of Hammer’s repertory actors in the early 60s, and it was with the studio that his career really took off. After a minor part in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, he had his first major starring role in The Curse of the Werewolf. After that he was in the smuggling thriller Captain Clegg opposite Peter Cushing; the pirate movie The Pirates of Blood River opposite Christopher Lee (with rogueish eyepatch); the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade; and the post-Pyscho suspense thriller Paranoiac. All of which shows the sheer range of pictures Hammer were making before they turned to specialising more exclusively on the gothic.

State violence and youth violence - an uneven match

Kenneth Cope, the biker who features most prominently in the story, will be familiar to many as the white-suited ghost detective in the 60s TV series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and also as a Corrie regular in that decade. He appeared in the 1981 Dr Who serial Warrior’s Gate, the final part of the e-space trilogy, a favourite of mine with its Cocteau references.

Why? - Macdonald Carey

Macdonald Carey, who plays Simon, nominally the hero, was one of a number of American actors Hammer shipped over to star in their early films, one eye firmly fixed on US box office potential. They couldn’t afford the latest stars, so tended to go for actors a little past their prime. Most notoriously, this included the casting of Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass, a choice which Nigel Kneale abhorred. Carey was best known in the movies for his roles in westerns. But he was better known in the States for his starring role in the long-running TV soap Days of Our Lives.

His May to September romance with Shirley Anne-Field’s character is one of the least convincing aspects of the film. But perhaps it is supposed to be – a jaundiced reflection on the artificiality of romance. Shirley Anne-Field was in a number of key British films of the new wave or kitchen-sink movement, including The Entertainer and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and she also appeared in Alfie later in the 60s. Her role here is more reminiscent of her part in the 1960 film Beat Girl, however, whose US title Wild for Kicks tells us all we really need to know.

Trashing the joint - the children's rebellion

The marvellously named Viveca Lindfors, who plays the artist Freya, was a Swedish actor of stage and screen who moved to America after the war and appeared in a large number of films and TV shows over the next 6 decades. I know her from George Romero’s horror comic movie Creepshow, in which she plays the tipsy Aunt Bedelia, whose abusive husband comes back from the dead on the anniversary of his birthday to demand his cake. It ends up decorated with poor old Bedelia’s head.

One of the child actors, Nicholas Clay, pursued an acting career into adulthood and appeared in one of my favourite films. He played the noble, handsome but fatally human Sir Lancelot in John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian fantasia Excalibur.

The Major and the Biker

Douglas Gamley, who arranged the Black Leather Rock song, later jumped the Hammer ship and attached his colours to the rival company Amicus, where he produced some rather more distinguished scores. He worked on Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, And Now the Screaming Starts, The Vault of Horror, From Beyond the Grave and The Beast Must Die (from rock ‘n roll to blaxploitation wah-wah funk), as well as post-Amicus pictures The Land That Time Forgot and The Monster Club (the first horror movie I ever saw in the cinema).

The Black Death

In 1963, the year of The Damned’s release, Joseph Losey teamed up with another of his key actors, Dirk Bogarde, and with the writer Harold Pinter. They made The Servant, the first of a number of pictures which would fully establish his reputation as an arthouse auteur, a central figure in 60s British cinema. The Servant was followed by The Accident in 1967 and the Dirkless The Go-Between in 1970, the last of his collaborations with Pinter. It has to be said, there were also a few stinkers along the way. His comic-strip adaptation Modesty Blaise, with Sir Dirk and Antonioni star Monica Vitti was generally considered a dismal failure, although its colourful pop art stylings still make it a visual pleasure to watch. Boom from 1968, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor wearily going through their Tennessee Williams routine once more, has been chosen by trash director John Waters as one of the films to accompany his forthcoming season at the BFI Southbank. He describes it as ‘beyond bad, the other side of camp – a film so beautiful and awful there is only one word to describe it: perfect. If you don’t like this film, I hate you’. I wouldn’t go that far in describing The Damned. But I do hope you like it.

The Devon Folklore Tapes VI release Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor was brought to life in the Phoenix, Exeter last week, not far away from the terrain from which it drew visual, aural and even biological material. The sounds on the DVD, CD, vinyl singles or cassette (the Folklore Tapes folk are catholic in their use of media) are often ambiguous, both spatially and in terms of identifiable sources. The prospect of discovering how they went about building this soundscape, which invokes both the Dartmoor environment and the haunted spectres, legendary beasts and fey creatures which are conjured from it, and how they would go about projecting it into a small hall rather than a living room or headphone-space was an intriguing and enticing one.

N.Racker - with cover image taken from Juraj Herz's 1969 film The Cremator

First up was N.Racker, aka Sam McLoughlin of Sam and the Plants renown, an old Folklore Tapes compatriot. I’d previously come across him at the late lamented LLAMA (Lynton and Lynmouth Arts and Music Association) festival, where he was utterly absorbed in striking coiled springs suspended from the frame of the small marquee tent which canopied his antediluvian electronic equipment. There seemed to be a good deal of wooded casing, and it looked as if it might have been salvaged from a WW2 radio communications HQ in the post-war period. This produced a pleasing visual analogue to the springy, metallically glinting radiophonic sounds he coaxed from his hands-on box of tricks. It was music for crackling campfires or starlit summer skies streaked with the occasional meteorite trail.


Tonight, he explored darker realms, and kept the lights down low. He sat in the midst of a modest array of small synths, electronic circuitry and home-made or modified instrumentation, lit only by the green glow which casts its heart of the oakwood radiance through a hexagonal box (a defunct bass drum?) at the front of which a dessicated frond of bracken was silhouetted. Sam scraped and struck and plucked whatever came to hand: zithers, lyres whose strings were metallic rods embedded in a length of wood (Les Sculptures Sonores and Harry Bertoia came to mind here), and an electric hand fan whose blades served as whirling, whirring plectrums. Everything seemed to be mic’d, so an object dropped to the ground produced a clangourous thump. This could then be looped and incorporated into the organically expanding soundmass.

There was a definite improvisatory, aleatoric feel to the proceedings, with chance and accident welcomed as cues and ideas for intuitively exploring new directions. The vaguely ominous ambience suggested supernatural scenarios, with synth lines brewing up John Carpenteresque Fogs. Sam even essayed the dextrous Rick Wakeman stunt of playing two instruments simultaneously, arms bridging the right-angled span between keyboards (or synth and zither in this case). Conspicuous virtuosity was not at issue here, however. The instrument banks were many degrees smaller than Wakeman’s monumental podium-mounted edifices, and far from requiring their own articulated lorry to transport them, could probably comfortably fit in a hatchback boot. Besides, Sam wore a self-effacing white t-shirt rather than a glittering cape, making his lack of interest in such showmanship quite plain. This was more a question of contrasting textures, the plucked string electro-acoustically transformed and the synthesised sine-wave.

The music came to the end of its natural lifespan, expiring after Sam had looked around for the next object to pick up and decided that, no, he had nothing further to add. He modestly suggested that we could repair to the bar now if we wanted, while he embarked upon a further sonic expedition. Perhaps it was a friendly warning. Because he proceeded to unleash a howling jungle of sound from his synth, harsh hissing, stridulent screeching and squelchy croaking. Several people did indeed decided it was time to refresh their glasses. I found it an exhilarating storm of noise, however. It reminded me of Henning Christiansen’s Symphony Natura, which I heard as part of the At the Moment of Being Heard sound art exhibition in the South London Gallery in Peckham last year, and whose sounds were recorded in Rome Zoo. It also brought to mind Bernard Parmegiani’s De Natura Sonorum and Pauline Oliveros’ early 1967 electronic piece Alien Bog. The latter is a marvellous title which could equally have lent itself to this unleashing of the untamed forces at the wilder edges of the synth spectrum.

David Chatton-Barker and Ian Humberstone commune with the spirits of Dartmoor

The two artists behind Devon Folklore Tapes VI (and the whole Folklore Tapes project), David Chatton-Barker and Ian Humberstone, came on to introduce their performance. Besides being musicians and sound artists, Barker is a visual artist and graphic designer and Humberstone a writer and librarian. These professions and talents combined in the first half of their programme, as words and images were harmoniously combined. They told us of the life and remarkable work of the folklorist Theo Brown, who was herself a talented visual artist. Photographic portraits and examples of her striking, dramatic woodcuts were shown on a small screen to the right of the stage. After this eulogy, they took it in turns to read out a selection of the tales which Theo told. We heard of the Sow of Merripit and its pitiful plaint; of the siren call of Jan Coo and the dangerously capricious moods of the Piskies; of the demonic invasion of the church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor by hovering and prowling ball lightning; the hunting down and eradication of the last wolves in the Dartmoor forests; the grimly humorous anecdote about the death of the Warren House Inn publican and winter preservation techniques in the remote heartland of the moor; and of the sad isolation of Dolly Copplestone in her lonely moorland stone cottage. All of these legends were told in David and Ian’s soft, mellifluous Mancunian and Edinburgian tones, which gave them a storyteller’s distance from their source. There was a delightful air of Jackanory about the whole thing. A zither provided the odd emphatic flourish, underlying a dramatic moment or bringing things to a conclusion, as if turning a page or firmly closing a cover. It was a touch which made a connection with older oral storytelling performance traditions; traditions superbly brought to life by Benjamin Bagby in his wonderfully atmospheric telling of the Beowulf tales, his cradled lyre providing the dramatic musical interjections.

The young Theo

The reading were lent an accompanying visual poetry by projections cast onto an adjacent screen. Whoever had ceded the storyteller’s chair crouched down over an Overhead Projector laid on the floor to the rear of the stage and sifted through a jumble of transparencies. These were slid onto the illuminated table and the sometimes rapid progression of images making their momentary appearance on the screen gave an impression of basic yet evocative and effective animation. They offered prompts for the imagination. It was somewhat reminiscent of the Eastern and Central European animations of the mid 20th century, with their cut-outs and silhouettes. This was the kind of hands-on device (and hands were indeed visible on the screen from time to time) which the duo favour. An OHP is an old-fashioned and readily graspable mechanical apparatus which you can manipulate and tinker with, a more personal level of technology than that which we are confronted with in every aspect of life today. One noticeable advantage of using an OHP rather than some modern digital affair is the absence of the lengthy prelude during which a procession of people try to figure out just how you magic your meticulously prepared and catalogued laptop pictures onto the projector screen. Here we’re back to the old days of simply pressing the on switch. There was a certain element of randomness and the chance moment to the rough order from which images were selected; an openness to the happy accident similar to the musical approach taken by Sam in the first half.

Simple means were ingeniously employed to create OHP special effects. A semi-opaque circle within a black square of masking card framed a picture of the Widecombe-in-the-Moor church tower, enveloping it in a sulphurous brimstone haze. Moorland matter – leaves and twigs and bracken – was scattered onto landscape photos to produce branching, brachiate silhouettes which invoked the Matter of the Moor. Red sweetwrapper cellophane smoothed out over the Warren House Inn sign cast it in a hellish glow. Dark inkdrops splashed onto a woodcut of a wolf were smeared out to reveal their blood red pigmentation. It could almost have been an homage to the ominously portentous opening scenes of Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, in which Donald Sutherland’s characters spills something on a slide of a church he is studying, causing a red stain to spread across it like an expanding pool of blood. It was a very effective moment. There was something inherently refreshing and involving in watching the performers busily sorting through and playing with the images in the background. The process was made transparent. It re-connected us with the materiality of art, with the palpable feel for the way in which images are created. There seemed to be a deliberate rejection of the kind of digital sophistication which can remove us from any sense of human agency or individual artistic signature. Long the defiantly Luddite amateur, the inspired tinkerer, their actions silently cried.


Such an ehos was carried through into the second half, when they picked up their instruments, and were joined by Sam, who returned to the stage. This trio provided a soundtrack to the super 8 film they had made on their travels through the Dartmoor landscapes and villages. The film itself veered towards flickering ochre abstraction, its bracken, heather and granite colours partly the result of the biochemical processes of decay caused by its burial for a period in soil and organic matter brought back from the moor .The film material itself embodied time and erosion. As images of tors, ponies and rivers, churches, bridges and inns manifested from the kinetic play of transformative colour and nebulous form, memory (personal and cultural) and the elusive spirit of place was poetically evoked. The music incorporate field recordings, along with effects-blurred guitars, bowed objects, electroacoustic zithers and home-made instruments and electronic wizardry and gimcrack inventions of diverse and mysterious variety.

It formed a continuous, evolving suite, with moods shifting from the haunted and sinister through the devilishly playful to the plaintive and melancholy. Hints of Radiophonic soundtracks to supernatural children’s TV series came through – think the Moon Stallion and The Changes (out this month on DVD!!) There was a touch of spacy dub to the Widecombe section, tracking the floating balls of lightning across the pews, and a Ghost Boxy ambience to some of the more melodic passages. There was also a good deal of abstract soundscaping, which suited the constant transformations hypnotically flickering and flaming across the screen. It was a highly effective translation of the atmosphere of the DFTVI recordings into a live context. For a short period of time, the spirit of Dartmoor’s landscape was raised in the Phoenix. And who knows, a part of it may remain there still.

Jovan Nicholson gave a talk about his grandparents Winifred and Ben Nicholson as part of the Dartington Ways With Words Festival in July this year. He has curated an exhibition of their work, Art and Life 1920-1931, which is currently on display at the Dulwich Pictuer Gallery in London. The show also incorporates three other artists with whom the Nicholsons were close in the 1920s and early 30s: Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William State Murray. Nicholson was particularly enthusiastic about his inclusion of the latter. He hopes that this renewed exposure will go some way towards reviving the reputation of a potter whom he feels was one of the finest exponents of the art in Britain in the twentieth century, quite the equal of his contemporary Bernard Leach.

Ben and Winifred Nicholson in 1923

Nicholson’s approach to his subjects in the exhibition and the accompanying book is a comparitive one, and this was the approach he took in the talk as well. He set particular works alongside each other, and thereby illustrated ho the artists influenced and inspired one another. They sometimes painted or drew the same landscapes in their own individual manner, initial similarities gradually diverging significantly as they established their signature styles and outlooks. Ben’s pencil sketch and Winifred’s watercolour of a rural hillside scene at Tippacott in Devon, where they went in 1920 just before their marriage (in fact, they got engaged during this trip), show a congruent, straightforwardly representational approach to the view. Trees, hedgerows and hillcrest contours are all present and relatively proportional in both pictures. At this formative point in their artistic development, their way of seeing the world was largely convergent. Later, and speaking in a broadly general sense. Jovan outlined the way in which their work would diverge: Winifred would concentrate more on colour, and Ben on form.

Winifred found her metier early on, painting some of her first threshold flowers in 1921, the painting Polyanthus and Cineraria being a good example. Its bright contrasts pointed to her future explorations of colour combinations, whilst the undulant brushstroke of blues above the brown flowers on the left side of the vase anticipates in abbreviated form the exuberant, canvas wide waves of her 1928 St Ives painting Boat on a Stormy Sea. Jovan drew attention to the metaphysical and symbolic elements of Winifred’s principal subject matter. The division between domestic interior and exterior landscape, with the nurtured blend of floral colours (and the stable forms of the vases, jugs or glasses from which they emerge) placed in between, represent the conscious act of seeing, of intense, aware vision.

Winifred's Chelsea roofscape on the cover of Christopher Andreae's book

Ben took longer to explore and develop his feel for austere, simplified form, which eventually led him towards total abstraction. An early abstract painting from 1924 was shown here, but it was a tentative experiment which didn’t immediately lead anywhere. It was held back and worked on over a long period of time. It derived from a collage, and the ragged edges and superimposed rectilinear shapes were faithfully reproduced; in its own way, a piece of representational art. Jovan’s comparison with Winifred’s window-framed 1925 roofscape, Kings Road, Chelsea, painted from the same Chelsea studio in which this work was created, led you to see a similar arrangement of chimneys, brickwork, sloping roofs and squares of sky in Ben’s abstract.


Slides were shown in carefully chosen pairs, projected onto the white plaster wall of Dartington Hall, above the large mouth of the fireplace. This provided an interesting and generally highly appropriate additional element of medieval texture. Ben Nicholson’s 1925 still life Jamaique was shown alongside Winifred’s Flowers in a Glass Jar from the same year. It amply served to demonstrate how far they had diverged in their approaches by this point. But Jovan pointed out the clear correlation between the pink pentagonal base on which Ben set his flattened objects and the pink which Winifred used for the principal flowers in her composition. William Staite Murray’s elegantly shaped bowls, pots and vases with their boldly imaginative patterning and painted designs, and the unconventionally shaped boards which Alfred Wallis used, which often guided the compositional form of his paintings, were shown to have inspired Ben to be daring and intuitive in his own explorations of form. His instinct towards reduction, a preference for simplicity and a stripping away of extraneous detail, was encouraged by his exposure to Wallis’ work. The extent to which he began following through on this instinct was seen in the two drawings of the same Cumberland landscape made by Ben and Christopher Wood on a sketching trip they made together in 1928. Wood’s depiction of the scene is full, depicting all the elements he saw before him: outlined trees, a farmhouse, a river, a shaded hillside horizon line and a chimney smoke haze. It pointed to a richly detailed landscape which might later be produced. Ben, on the other hand, leaves wide expanses of empty space, with a few boldly outlined trees scattered singly or in tight clusters and the outline of the River Irthing sharply curving across the flattened foreground. The horizon is marked by a single lollipop-shaped tree, a darkly shaded marker beacon. The farmhouse has completely vanished, surplus to compositional requirements. Ben was now transforming what he saw to conform with his own rigorous artistic vision.

Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight - Winifred Nicholson

Jovan talked about the work rather than the lives of his grandparents. Personal touches did come through, however. He confessed that he found it almost impossible to rad the recriminating letters they wrote to each other when the marriage was falling apart in the early 30s. Winifred’s 1931-2 painting Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight, depicting two of their three children sitting at the table of the house she had rented at Fishbourne for the winter, dates from the period of their separation, after Ben had gone to live with Barbara Hepworth. Jake and Kate wear party hats, which suggests it might be Christmas. But as Jovan pointed out, they look bewildered and lost rather than excited. The disjuncture between the light colours and carnival hats and the children’s sombre faces is very poignant. Jovan evidently felt an empathetic connection with them as he described their expressions. ‘The one on the left is my father’ he added, almost incidentally.

He also showed his steel when a questioner at the end implied that there might have been an element of exploitation in Ben’s relationship with Alfred Wallis, and that he made a healthy profit from selling his paintings on to London dealers. Jovan took a deep breath before replying, paused significantly and acidly thanked the person in question for giving him the opportunity to put such myths to rest, which he proceeded to do with thoroughness and conviction. His grandfather’s honour was vigorously defended, and Wallis depicted as a sharp, highly self-aware individual. Not the sort to allow themselves to be exploited by anyone. He firmly stated that he had found no evidence of Ben ever selling any of the Wallis paintings that he had bought. Rather, he donated a good many to a wide variety of galleries and museums. This, together with his tireless promotion of Wallis’ work, raised (and indeed initially created) Wallis’ profile in the eyes of the metropolitan art world, and brought people to his door in St Ives, generating many commissions. For this, he was vocally grateful, and Jovan told us that he loved the attention which he received as a result.

He also countered the general perception that Ben could be doctrinaire and hardline in his promulgation of the artistic school of thought he happened to favour, his work ascetic and forbidding as a result. He emphasised the humour he found in his work. The trompe l’oeil play with perspective in his 1925 Still Life With Jug, Mugs, Cup and Goblet, for example, the white goblet on the left being simultaneously in front of and behind the adjacent slate grey vase. His animals display a certain childlike delight, too. Jovan found this sense of ‘fun’ in Wallis’ work, as well. The parallel array of pyramidal sails and icebergs in Schooner and Icebergs (1928) was highlighted as an example of Wallis’ lightness and humour.

Poster for the Kettle's Yard showing of Art and Life, with Ben Nicholson's Jamaique

He was also fulsome in his praise for Jim Ede, the former Tate Gallery curator who set up home in four converted cottages in Kettles Yard, Cambridge in the 50s. He was also a long-term supporter of Wallis, and of Ben and Winifred. Kettles Yard housed a good number of their works which he had bought for his own collection. It still does to this day, as a wonderfully atmospheric house and gallery, the paintings and drawings taking their place amongst aesthetically arranged domestic objects and fittings (Wallises in the bathroom, Nicholsons above the bed). His use of the familiar diminutive ‘Kit’ when referring to Christopher Wood suggested a feeling of personal connection here, too.

Wood’s ravishingly sensual portrait of the aristocratic Russian émigré Frosca Munster, The Blue Necklace (1928) paints a picture of an emotionally complex man, as Jovan explained. Letters between the two, and from Winifred to Frosca, made the depths of Kit’s feeling for her plain. Her departure from Cornwall, and the British Isles, was almost certainly precipitated by her becoming pregnant by him, and he was left bereft by her sudden absence from his life. His primarily gay sexuality was frankly expressed in the 1930 interior Nude Boy in a Bedroom, which Jovan also showed us. It has a casual, relaxed sense of intimacy, with the subject half-turned away from our (and the artist’s) view as he dries himself with a towel. Picture cards are scattered on the bed as if they’d just been studied (the boy is looking at another small reproduction on the wall) and the shutters are half closed, letting in light whilst maintaining a sense of a private domestic world.

Christopher Wood - Zebra and Parachute

Jovan showed us the last painting Wood finished before his suicide in 1930, Zebra and Parachute. The stark, white lines and masses of the modernist architecture in front of which the passive body of the zebra is posed have echoes of the white reliefs which Ben would produce in the mid-30s. They also anticipate Berthold Lubetkin’s introduction of European International Style modernism to London Zoo (and England) in 1933-4 via the gorilla house and penguin pool he designed for Tecton. But the hanged man limply suspended beneath the bright colours of the parachute in the background, along with the incongruously exotic creature in the foreground, hint at a possible turn towards surrealism belying the ascetic modernist backdrop. This would certainly have put him at artistic odds with Ben, widening the personal rift which his heavy use of opium had already opened up.

The period whose end was so tragically and drastically underlined by Wood’s death, and soon after by the break up of the Nicholsons’ marriage, saw the group of friends and compatriots who had been so close in the 1920s drift apart both personally and in terms of artistic style and intent. But during that intense decade during which they shared each other’s thoughts, homes and paints, they left a lasting mark on each other which continued to make itself felt in their work. The 20s were the years in which the seeds were sown, and the enriching cross-fertilisation took place. Jovan Nicholson’s talk, his book and the exhibition which he has curated ably and definitively traces the streams of influence and inspiration which flowed between them, and which kept them invisibly connected throughout their lives, no matter how far their outlook diverged, or how strongly their opinions were expressed. Some things just can’t be broken.

The Spectral Book of Horror is an instantly attractive volume. The cover is graced by a gorgeous painting by Vincent Chong showing two boys and a girl standing against a cracked and peeling wall, illuminated by a sickly yellow light. The girl clutches a standard issue creepy, porcelain-faced doll to her chest, whilst a large, bloodied knife hangs loosely from the hand of one of the boys. They wear animal, skull and Cthulhoid masks, and cast monstrous and devilish shadows, projections of their dark animas. It looks as if they are preparing to enact some ritual invocation, or are taking a break from one which is in progress. An invocation designed to raise those shadowy outlines in bodily form. Can we judge the book by this cover? To a certain extent, yes. It suggests that the terrors within will be of a largely domestic variety, and that whatever supernatural elements are present won’t be made overtly manifest. Rather they will be half-glimpsed, distorted shapes momentarily caught in the periphery of vision, or wraiths suggestively coalescing from the darkness in the farthest corner of the room. There may also be hauntings from the spectres of the intense childhood imagination which are never wholly exorcised, even if they are eclipsed by adult preoccupations. Both of these presumptions prove to be accurate.

The introduction by the collection’s editor, Mark Morris, recalls the days of the Pan, Fontana and Armada paperbacks of the 70s; a halcyon period of plenty for the short story in all the genres of the fantastic. These collections, the Pan Books of Horror Stories in particular, mixed old classics of terror and the supernatural with modern nasties, contes crueles which were sometimes little more than set-ups for gruesome fates, described with lingering relish. The Pan series was edited by Herbert van Thal, a man with a name eminently suited for the task. It looked great on the covers, and conjured an image of a Peter Cushing Van Helsing type, a smoking-jacketed connoisseur of the grim and ghoulish commenting urbanely from his walnut-panelled, book-lined study whilst drawing on an ornately curving pipe. Morris fondly summons up a childhood picture of reading torchlight under the covers on stormy winter nights, a memory which invites smiling nods of collective recognition. It envelops these anthologies in a warm, blurry haze of period nostalgia, and posits them as a strange form of comfort literature. My experience was rather different. The bleached photographic covers disturbed me, particularly the one with the half-buried head the colour of a swede, half-human, half-root vegetable. There were a couple of nasty stories which gave me bad dreams for a good many nights, and which I tried vainly to cleanse from my mind.


Morris seems to have the long-running Pan Books of Horror in mind when voices the hope that the Spectral Book of Horror may be the first in a regular series. Times have changed since van Thal churned out his increasingly tawdry selections, however. Newsagents no longer have revolving wire racks of mass-market paperbacks for people to pick up as casually as the daily paper. The market for short stories has shrunk drastically, spurious notions of value for money leading to ever-more bloated mega-novels, the increased wordage designed chiefly to expand the breadth of the spine and occupy a more prominent proportion of the display shelf. Concision is a largely lost novelistic art, and the short story is an increasingly rarefied and endangered species, protected by a few dedicated conservationists. Gene Wolfe wryly commented on the situation back in 1989 when he actually entitled his latest short story collection Endangered Species. A regular anthology from Spectral Press would by hugely welcome, then.

I think the first Spectral Book of Horror is a bit classier than the Pan books, however. Firstly, there’s that nightmarishly beautiful cover of everyday Lovecraftian terror. True, there are a few stories within which might have taken their festering place within the musty Pan covers. Anecdotal squibs like Tom Fletcher’s Slape, Michael Marshall Smith’s Stolen Kisses and the initial stages of Brian Hodge’s Cures for a Sickened World, which are essentially set-ups for gross pay-offs. All they need is an afterword from a cackling, corpse-faced crypt keeper cracking off-colour quips to complete the feel of an EC comics vignette. The other stories are far more substantial, however, with a refreshing lack of hastily scrawled tableaux of intricately agonising death (or worse). These stories are, dare I say it, more literary. They veer towards what was once defined as dark fantasy in an attempt to distinguish it from the splatter of the more visceral body horror emerging in the 1980s.


The majority of the writers are British, and the settings of their stories largely portray a determinedly de-romanticised view of the country. The stories of M.John Harrison and Robert Aickman, set in the dank, dilapidated no-spaces of unglamorous provincial towns and cities, are a touchpoint here; Harrison’s Egnaro, A Young Man’s Guide to Viriconium, The Incalling and his novel The Course of the Heart in particular. So too is the clammily creepy episode from the Amicus portmanteau film From Beyond the Grave in which Ian Bannern’s frustrated city commuter visits the drab home of ex-serviceman Donald Pleasance, from whom he has been buying matches, and meets his eerie, ghostly daughter (played by Pleasance’s actual daughter, Angela). This certainly came to my mind when reading Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites, in which a Canadian post-grad student comes to lodge at the dingy Oxford house of the morose Mrs Moreland and her two palled, hostile nieces.


The Spectral Book of Horror is bookended by two well-known and highly respected genre writers, Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Volk. Volk’s novelette Whitstable, an affecting tribute to Peter Cushing in the form of a fictional portrait of the actor in his later years, some time after the death of his beloved wife Helen, was published by Spectral Press to great acclaim last year. There is a judicious mix of well-established writers and new voices (new to me, at least) throughout. I was particularly pleased to read something new by Lisa Tuttle, a writer familiar to me from her superb 1986 collection A Nest of Nightmares, along with subsequent novels and stories. Other familiar names include Robert Shearman (who re-introduced the Daleks to the revamped Doctor Who, and is a particularly fine exponent of the short story), Steve Rasnic Tem, Nicholas Royle (forming a connection with the early days of Interzone, and thereby indirectly with New Worlds, whose experimentalism it initially carried on), Conrad Williams, Michael Marshall Smith and Stephen Laws. But newer or less established writers provide material of equal power and accomplishment here. The Spectral Book of Horror serves a vital (and increasingly rare) function in this respect, providing new stories from familiar names, which will attract the attention of the discerning genre reader, whilst also building a nurturing environment in which a fresh generation of talent can be fostered.

Ramsey Campbell’s story On The Tour opens the collection and to a great extent sets the tone. Its portrait of Stu Stewart, former drummer of Merseybeat also-rans The Scousers, finds Campbell back on home, Liverpudlian territory. Stewart’s is a life eked out on the thin, dusty sustenance of worn and threadbare dreams, confined within the grooves of the record stacked amongst the seldom-browsed LPs of Vin’s Vintage Vinyl, the shop where he works. The mirthless humour of the exchanges he has with his boss Vin, dialogue underscored by indirect power play, together with the sense of a life staged as an increasingly desperate performance for an imaginary audience (the rock nostalgia tour bus which purportedly includes his house on its programmed route) puts this in the absurdist territory of Pinter and Beckett. The horror here is of mental breakdown, of sustaining illusions being dispelled. We are caught unsparingly within the subjective viewpoint of a life and a mind unravelling, following Stu’s steadily accelerating descent. The ironic juxtaposition of this narrative perspective with our comprehension of its increasing illogic and delusory disconnection from the real is reminiscent of the psychological sketches of the inner life Katherine Mansfield drew in her short stories. Campbell’s subtle direction of events towards a point where they go very badly out of control is what pushes this in the realm of horror, although the terrain is not established with any obvious generic markers. The suggestive final paragraph is a classic case of allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in detail, creating manifold horrors from the shadowy substance of their own fears.


Further excursions into the absurd can be found in John Llewellyn Probert’s The Life Inspector, in which the right to continued existence is weighed up according to the hermetic illogic of a relentless and briskly efficient bureaucrat. Nicholas Royle’s This Video Does Not Exist is a self-interrogating story, pitching a surrealist piece of absurdism involving a man who wakes up to find his head is no longer visible in any reflections against real world horrors read about in the papers and seen online and in the news in which people genuinely lose their heads. National and international events mirror each other, and the whole world seems to have descended into absurd drama, staged for a ready audience plugged into diverse media. In the face of this new, terrifying reality in which globalised, digital technology goes hand in hand with barbarous savagery, the main character’s personal crisis of identity comes to seem like an indulgence, and the story ends abruptly with his inner narrative being abandoned. The existential headless man scenario might be seen as typical of Royle’s thematic and stylistic territory, and as such there’s an element of auto-criticism here. I can imagine the story’s initial conceit being inspired by a Magritte painting, just as his novel Saxophone Dreams was inspired by the surrealist paintings of Paul Delvaux. Indeed, Magritte’s painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced), depicting a man looking in a mirror which reflects the perspective we see of the back of his head, is described in the story, suggesting a probable point of inspiration. It was also used in the 1974 film Un Homme Que Dort (A Man Asleep), based on a short novel by absurdist writer Georges Perec, who also worked on the adaptation. This tale of existential drift and disappearance in Paris has definite affinities with Royle’s work (as well as dovetailing with his cinephile side), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was familiar with it.

Magritte - La Reproduction Interdite

One of the pleasures of an anthology which has no explicit linking theme or subject lies in creating your own connections. Certain similarities or correspondences reveal themselves, and conspicuous differences in style and approach also become apparent. The subjective realism which Campbell establishes is further explored by a number of writers here. The fear of aging, and the attendant sense of life’s possibilities diminishing - of watching your life slide out of view, as Jarvis Cocker put it – is present in Michael Marshall Smith’s Stolen Kisses, Angela Slatter’s The October Widow, Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval, Nicholas Royle’s This Video Does Not Exist and Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Night Doctor. A number of stories also feature lonely characters who are disconnected from society, for whom the prospect of mental disintegration is an everpresent and very real terror. Nora Higgins, the socially withdrawn protagonist of Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites, conspires in her own fate, almost welcoming the oblivion of its cold embrace. Cecil Davis, in Angela Slatter’s The October Widow, is an aging, isolated character leading an enervated, bare bones life dedicated with van Helsing purity of purpose to the pursuit of a Pagan seasonal spirit, one of whose sacrificial victims was his son. The central relationship of the protagonist of Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval, an aimless office drifter, is with his guitar, which becomes a dangerously uncontrolled channel for his suppressed emotions and banked up anger. And Ramsey Campbell’s Stu Stewart, trapped in a moment of eternally recycled nostalgia, is another aging loner cut adrift from the here and now.

Family life is another common thread, but few comforts are offered to counterbalance the hollow loneliness and mentally fraying isolation found elsewhere. Instead, it is shown at its most claustrophobic and controlling, swallowing up and absorbing individual identity and endeavour. This is the family of knotty Freudian entanglements, the unspoken subterranean roots dug up and exposed to the withering light. In Gary McMahon’s Dull Fire, the couple tentatively beginning a relationship carry the ghosts of their abusive mother and father with them on their rootless travels. The story contains a sentence which encompasses the generally downbeat tone of the collection, a Philip Marlowe-esque observation that a rundown hotel room is ‘the kind of place lonely suicides might come to end their miserable days’. It is, instead, the place where the protagonists try to start something which will ease their loneliness and misery. Robert Shearman’s Carry Within Some Sliver of Me (a poetic title with echoes of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison) is full-on Freudian horror, describing a monstrous, devouring mother with repulsive literalness. As with McMahon’s story (with its equally monstrous father), the fear (or dull acceptance) of inheritance, of growing into the monstrous parent, is foremost. Monstrous fathers also turn up in Rio Youers’ Outside Heavenly and (to a lesser extent) Stephen Volks’ Newspaper Heart, while Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites has a monstrous mother-in-law by proxy.

South coast modernism - the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Alison Moore’s Eastmouth is about being absorbed into someone else’s close-knit family, and the anxiety of the isolated individual over loss of self-identity. The protagonist, Sonia, sees her dreams of a showbiz life wither and fade, reduced to the antediluvian end of the pier attractions of a southern seaside town caught forever in a mid-century stasis. The description of a ‘modernist pre-war building’ suggests that Moore may have had Bexhill in mind. The amazing De la Warr Pavillion, built on the seafront in 1935, is one of England’s finest buildings in the modernist International Style. It’s actually been recently restored to its former glory in a 2005 refurbishment and hosts a fine programme of art exhibitions and concerts. But I know what Moore has in mind – the tattered, dilapidated remains of pre-war utopian dreams. The story contains a sentence which perhaps contains the purest distillation of horror in the whole collection, when the man whom Sonia seems fated to marry boldly declares that Cannon and Ball, who are appearing at the theatre, are his favourite act of all time. She should have run screaming at that point. Moore’s evocation of out of season melancholy and grubby memories of childhood excursions to the seaside exemplify the seedy scenarios of a good many of the stories in the collection. It’s a place where ‘nothing changes’, where you are stared at by ‘dead-eyed gulls’ and the front is weakly illuminated by ‘sunlight the colour of weak urine’. An entropic environment redolent of personal and national inertia and decay. The view of the family as an oppressive, constraining force is here extended to the whole town; a closed community monomind, just a few shambling steps away from agglomerating to become a gesticulating zombie horde. There’s something a little reminiscent of an English variant on Shirley Jackson’s classic short story The Lottery here.

Ironically, the only positive take on the family as a supportive, encouraging unit is offered in Stephen Laws’ Slista; and the family here is monstrous, murderous and possibly not even human. Alison Littlewood’s story The Dog’s Home plays on the reluctant obligations and financial wheedling attendant upon relations with more indirect, spiky branches of the family tree. It’s also one of a number of stories whose first person narrative voice gives a misleading initial impression of balance and reason. Scary Aunt Rose is the dragon of the family, whose thorny harshness is tolerated and indulged in the hope of charming or inheriting a share of her hoarded wealth from her. Her hardness in the face of the family’s penury is contrasted with the unconditional love and loyalty of her dog. This dog becomes the emotional focus in a tale of betrayal and cruelty. Again, it is madness, the loss of rational control, which is seen as the ultimate horror here.


The family stories culminate in Stephen Volk’s Newspaper Heart, the Spectral Book of Horror’s final tale, a powerful piece firmly rooted in a specific time and place (October 1970 in the Welsh Valleys). As he did in his intense scripts for the Afterlife series, Volk unearths the fears inherent in family life, bringing them to life and examining them unflinchingly but with great compassion and empathy. The story is partly a variant on the creepy ventriloquist’s dummy tale, the dummy in this case being a baby-faced bonfire night guy rather than a tux-clad wooden-head with fixed grin and ruddy cheeks. It’s also a descendant of the old changeling folk tales, an acknowledgement of the ancient roots of late October and early November fire festivals. The horror elements here are a way of exploring any number of emotional and psychological subcurrents within the family. Parental anxiety over the child’s safety; the effect of economic depression on a marriage, and of marital drift on a child’s mental stability; the slowly corrosive effects of class-selfconsciousness and division; the thin boundaries between childhood and adulthood, with the marital home compared with the school playground; and a mother’s guilt at the unutterable suspicion that they might not love their child as much as they’re supposed to – or even that they might wish that they’d never had them. The familiar litany of period TV favourites are intoned (Blue Peter with Val, John and Peter, the Vision On gallery music), along with the more conservative end of the pop spectrum (Elvis, Mary Hopkins and Smokey Robinson). But rather than a prompt for nostalgia, these are used more to suggest stultifying routine and narrow limitations. This counter-nostalgia is re-enforced by the simultaneous citation of news stories about Vietnam, Biafra and Northern Ireland. The mention of the Mexico 70 World Cup also summons up retrospective feelings of disappointment, an ‘end of the 60s’ come down. Newspaper Heart demonstrates just how multi-layered and complex the short story form can be, with a dense pattern of allusion, metaphor and symbolism combining to crate potently suggestive and multivalent meanings. Importantly for a horror story, it’s also very scary, with a few of those moments of chill frisson which masters of the supernatural expertly engender. This is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the collection, and I can see why it was chosen as the closing story.

Two authors provide variations on the theme of the performer becoming confused with their signature stage or screen role, either in their own minds or that of their fans. Brian Hodge’s Cures for a Sickened World is a third story of warped and delusory rock dreaming, of the spurious power which its self-mythologisation confers, to add to Ramsey Campbell’s On the Tour and Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval. It begins as a sick revenge on the critic tale, with a snide, destructively negative online reviewer’s hyperbolic figures of speech, used comparatively to delineate what he’d prefer to do rather than listen to the music of a costumed shock metal band called Balrog, taken at face value by its lead singer, Ghast (aka Tomas Lundvall). Cue Saw-like punishments designed s morally corrective lessons. The story develops beyond such limited, mechanical parameters, however, going on to explore notions of moral culpability, the relative nature of evil, the delicate balance between a performer’s stage persona and his or her real self, and the corrupting effect of the urge to use shock-tactics to gain attention in a media-saturated world.

The disjuncture between real and media selves is also the subject of Lisa Tuttle’s alliteratively titled Something Sinister in Sunlight. It features an English actor, Anson, who has become shackled to the role of a serial killer called Cassius Crittender, a character who has become increasingly charismatic as his popularity flourishes, gradually completing the transformation from cold-blooded psychopath to agonised romantic. It’s a moral metamorphosis which many fictional monsters undergo as they become familiar to the point of becoming de-fanged and -clawed. Now it’s the turn of the mythologised serial killer, that very modern monster, to be romanticised, as we have seen in the later Hannibal films and the TV series Dexter; the good serial killer thwarting the bad. Tuttle’s story plays upon this romanticisation and all that it implies – the old connection between sex and death familiar from Freud and French decadent writers and poets. The fact that Cassius’ attraction is mainly felt by women whereas Anson is gay adds another level of play-acting complication between performer, role and obsessive viewer. When Anson accepts an invitation to dinner at a female fan’s house, the tensions which these layers of illusion create come to the surface, with alarming results. Tuttle’s stranding of an English actor in LA in this role is a wry comment on the way that British stage gravitas translates into villainy in Hollywood. There’s another allusion to the weakness of the English sun. But whilst it was a symbol of provincial dullness in Alison Moore’s story Eastmouth, a dim spot from which the main character dreamed of escaping, heading for the bright lights of America, for Anson the opposite is the case. He yearns to return home to his partner, to fly away from limiting fame and from the bleached out light of California to get back to the grey, rain-heavy skies of Blighty. It’s a neat reversal of the more common location of Hollywood as the locus of dreams of escape.

Two stories make play with language to create narrative perspectives removed from the norm. The first person narrative of The Slista by Stephen Laws is written in a phonetic language whose stunted words suggest a devolved version of our world. The basement dwelling family hints at first at a post-apocalyptic scenario, with the simplified spelling similar to that in Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker. But is soon becomes apparent that whoever is speaking in this strange, slurred tongue is part of a group of shadowy wainscot dwellers looking out on the contemporary world from the spaces in between. The Book and the Ring by Reggie Oliver is written in formal Elizabethan English, the language conveying historical antiquity with first person immediacy. It reminded me of the 16th century narrative of David I Masson’s 1965 tale A Two Timer, first published in New Worlds. The Book and the Ring is an M.R.Jamesian tale of ancient books uncovered during scholastic researches in ecclesiastical surrounds which bring to light strange and troubling stories of long-buried occult encounters. The devil which is summoned by the Elizabethan composer Jeremiah Starcky from the usual tome of dangerous lore acquired from a local witch takes the standard passive aggressive Satanic approach of giving human greed, lust and attendant paranoia space to fashion their own irrevocable damnation. It’s a tale told with great gusto, taking particular delight in period cursing and swearing. With its full panoply of witches, devils, books of the damned and souls in mortal supernatural peril, this is one of the most purely pleasurable stories in the collection.

Oliver’s story is atypical in its traditionalism. The Spectral Book of Horror withholds many of the traditional pleasures of the genre. The classic gothic bestiary is extinct here, perhaps because it currently thrives in terrain purists disdain. There are few manifestations of the supernatural or intrusions of the exobiological (ghosts and monsters). And what devils do appear are at least partly demons of the mind. The writers mine the dark caverns of the human spirit for their fears and terrors. Newborn monsters are present at the edges of some tales, however. The torturous, vampiric relationship between rock star and journalistic parasite in Cures for a Sickened World gives birth to a new breed of demon, waiting in the shadows to be fully defined by human appetites. And the title creature of Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Night Doctor is a spectral figure with an inhuman, faceless head and a dark, leathery bag who appears when you are sleeping to offer dubious cures which may ultimately be worse than the illness itself. It’s an embodiment of fears of aging, physical decline and death, either of oneself or of those one loves.

Older forces are summoned up in Angela Slatter’s The October Widow and Rio Youers’ Outside Heavenly. Slatter’s tale is a piece of modern Pagan horror, bringing sesasonal sacrifices into the contemporary world. Inevitably, there are some echoes of The Wicker Man here. Very faint ones, though, perhaps more from its endless citation as a point of comparison. Outside Heavenly is a piece of Midwestern gothic which also incorporates elements of the police procedural. Police Chief John Peck is an inadvertent occult cop, as opposed to the more traditional occult detectives such as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki. Demonic energies have destroyed a monstrous father with grim thoroughness. The devil here is a wish fulfilling avenger, but one which also represents the psychological (or even spiritual) damage the abused offspring inherits from the abuser, even (or especially) after they are caught and punished. It’s to Youers’ credit that he doesn’t pander to the easy release of the revenge fantasy here. The evidence which the Police Chief eventually uncovers is akin to the folktales of Lucifer over Lancashire – burning hoofprints left in a huge striding trail across the landscape.

This is a fine start for the Spectral Book of Horror. The stories tend towards the darker end of the spectrum, and the moral certainties of older gothic horror forms have totally disappeared. It makes for an uneasy read at times, perhaps even connecting with personal anxieties to disconcerting effect. This is not horror as escapist fantasy, but horror facing the fears and uncertainties of the modern age, and of the modern, embattled psyche. By thus confronting them, we can go some way towards dispelling, or at least controlling them. Let us hope that Mark Morris’ and Spectral’s plans for further volumes come to fruition, and that we are offered further caustic, homeopathic balms for our unconscious terrors.

Lucius Shephard’s sequence of linked but discrete stories featuring the Dragon Griaule originated in a Clarion Writer’s Workshop in the early 1980s. Seeking inspiration, Shephard went outside, sat under a tree and smoked a leisurely, contemplative joint. As he relates in the 2013 Gollancz Fantasy Masterwork collection of the Griaule stories (which sadly can now be considered complete since Shephard’s death earlier this year) he was visited by the dope-genius revelation ‘big fucking dragon’. And Griaule is indeed gargantuan, the mother of all fantasy dragons, more a mythic alpine landscape of the terrifying sublime than a living creature. From this unpromising seed grew one of the greatest sustained works of fantasy literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Dragon Griaule is a central presence throughout the stories, but also a significant absence. It is almost wholly quiescent since a duel with a wizard in a past distant enough to have been obscured in the distorting haze of layered myth and history. The traditional elements of heroic fantasy are here reduced to remote memory, twice-told tales and rote superstitions. The dragon is a landscape feature – it’s almost as if it’s been read into the landscape, ridges, rock-faces and caverns given animal form and animist soul. It is a scaled mountain range with forests bristling its back, its head a craggy outcrop and its gaping mouth a dark cave leading down into the labyrinth of its internal system. This sluggishly vital underworld, along with its unique ecosystem, is extensively explored in the second story, The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter. Shepard has a fondness for such vast, enclosed worlds. His novel The Golden is a vampire tale set in an immense, Gormenghastly castle whose endless spaces form a many-levelled gothic universe, towering and hermetic.


The attempts to understand Griaule and the power it continues to exert, and finally to destroy it completely, forms a subtext which runs beneath all the stories. It is subjected to scientific analysis, cultural criticism and historical interpretation, but remains ultimately elusive – the unanswerable question and insoluble enigma. These studies are expressed through extracts from biographies, histories, memoirs, religious texts and art critiques, all of which make clear the multivalent impact such a manifestation of the sublime, an invasion from the fantastic other, has upon the mundane world. The actuality of this astonishing being is never in doubt. But it is something which is difficult to define and quantify. Its presence in the world pushes at and warps the boundaries of the possible, mockingly redefining humanity’s understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. In the extraordinary opening to the 2004 story Liar’s House, Shepard writes a Genesis myth in which the dragons are held to have flown through the first fires of creation. As a result, they embody a metaphysical duality, an uneasy division of soul from body, which reflects the true nature of Creation. Their souls surround them like a cloud and affect the material body from without. Shepard concludes that ‘of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the Dragon Griaule’.

Griaule becomes a mutable metaphor .The externalised soul is commonly perceived as a baleful influence exerted by the spellbound leviathan. The lives of those living in its shadow are characterised by a dour heaviness of spirit. They are afflicted by it as by a dull, background headache which won’t go away. It is thought to impose its will indirectly, guiding men and women’s actions as part of some greater plan. The ends to which it is working remain obscure, but it is assumed that they are destructive, vengeful and fuelled by hatred. It is bent on reasserting its dominance and ultimately revivifying its earthbound carcass, breaking free from the long rhythms of geological time to which it has been bound. It is a terrifying god, then, requiring constant appeasement an obeisance. Or it is a violently oppressive political force, thought vanquished and banished; a dangerous ideology driven underground but regathering its strength and coherence. Its continuation as part of the local landscape symbolises in solid form the drag of the dead, anchoring weight of the historical moment. This is a history which has been transformed over time before ossifying into a delimiting set of beliefs and assumptions. It also represents the arguments for and against the idea of free will within the human soul. And it is, above all, an inescapable genius loci, an overpowering spirit of place. A landscape which lives and breathes, and whose great, golden eyes occasionally blink open and stare blankly out from the beneath the bony overhang of its occipital brow. All of these possible aspects, these potential meanings, are explored in the Griaule stories. Indeed, they are themes Shepard has iterated in much of his fiction over the years. But here, they find their perfect, readily adaptable context.


Religions based on the fear (and secret hope for) wrathful reprisal are built up around the dragon and its mythology. Artists are inspired and consumed by the spirit of place, and those who don’t consider themselves artists feel compelled to create images of the dragon, or to collect relics associated with it. Ideologies and power bases grow up around its most significant relic in the remarkable final story, The Skull. This returns Shepard to the politicised territory of Central America which he mapped out with searing ferocity in early stories such as Salvador, Mengele and in the novel Life During Wartime. Shepard’s rootless, drifting characters, lacking moral compass or inner resolve, are the natural vessels of Griaule’s subtle manipulations. Or is it their own weakness, their inability to locate a firm centre of self or to form a solid sense of purpose, to find meaning in the world, which leads them to fall into reflexive behaviours which are then blamed on an external, demiurge force. As is often the case with Shepard’s characters, a hard-nosed, world-weary attitude prevails. Corroded romanticism, sexual obsession and a recklessness born of ennui lead to self-destruction, but also occasionally to the possibility of the salvation which is subconsciously yearned for. This may or may not be found in The Skull, which remains necessarily ambiguous. It is a political fantasy of extraordinary power and moral force. The spirit of Griaule becomes the template for all oppressive dictatorships, his dissipation into myth and the associated ideologies which the matter of myth breeds allowing for his rebirth in other forms. As Snow, the protagonist of The Skull, says about Jefe, the charismatic leader of the Temalaguan PVO (Party of Organised Violence) who is the reincarnated spirit of Griaule, ‘that prissy little fuck’s going to make Hitler seem like a day at the beach’.


In all the stories, the awe-inspiring, passively aggressive presence of Griaule is seen as an intrusion into the world, an invasion of the fantastic. This is a fantasy series in which the singular, dominant fantastic element represents control and oppressive, limiting power. As such, it is an anti-escapist fantasy, a quality it shares with M.John Harrison’s Viriconium tales. Whatever vague anti-heroism is to be found in Shepard’s Griaule stories is aimed at destroying the dragon. The erasure of the fantastic from the world, thinning its possibilities and reducing it to the mundane, is the ultimate goal. Fantasy, and the need for escape which it feeds, can be a dangerous force. It can breed monsters which grow in size and influence until they control our lives without our even being consciously aware of it. Perhaps it is significant that the dragon is finally rendered into a ruinous rubble by the power of art. We see how the obsessive, all-consuming art of the very first story, The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule, comes to fruition many years later. Representing the monstrous, detailing the mechanisms of its power and bringing its depredations to light can, incrementally over time, lead to its destruction. The Griaule stories are a handbook to the dispelling of damaging fantasy, to killing the dragons in the unwary mind and in the hard, unforgiving world. Their cynical surface is a necessary part of the process of dis-illusionment. What they ultimately offer is fantasy in the service of the real.

The latest release from the Folklore Tapes folk (the Devon prefix dropped as they search further afield), Fore Hallowe’en, finds them taking a new direction, recalibrating the co-ordinates. Previous recordings have focussed on the stories and atmospheres which suffuse particular places and areas, lending them that indefinable sense of magic and sacred presence. Fore Hallowe’en (a title to file alongside Sandy Denny’s After Halloween) marks the beginning of a new venture, resetting the co-ordinates for time rather than space. It’s the first in a proposed series ordered under the title Calendar Customs, which will investigate the ritual observances, customs and moods of seasonal festivals and sacred days. Calendar Customs 1 guides us through one of the most powerful and atmospheric of these periods, the smoke-wreathed and cinnamon-scented days of Hallowtide. The ten artists who contribute to the compilation unearth and re-animate the spirits of the Celtic festival of Samhain, the foundation upon which Halloween and the All Saints and Souls days of the Christian period have been erected.

As with most cultural and spiritual transitions, there is no sudden and absolute transformation. Rather there is an evolution which leaves many elements of the beliefs and customs which have ostensibly been incorporated, co-opted and supplanted intact. It was a subtle evangelising tactic on the part of the early church in Britain to absorb and recalibrate rather than confront and destroy a deeply ingrained worldview and the long-observed rituals associated with it. Indeed, it was an approach specifically put forward in a letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine in the late 6th century. He instructed the missionaries who were setting out to convert the Britons ‘do not pull down the temples. Destroy the idols, purify the temples with holy water, set relics there and let them become temples to the True God’. The aspect of this true God becomes subtly altered by what remains of the old ways, however. More localised and vernacular, reflecting aspects of the landscape and environment, and the culture which they shape. It inadvertently serves to illustrate the universal ground connecting all religions at some deep level, the common need for a sense of meaning and sacred presence in the world which they express. Britain my have gradually become nominally Christianised, but people’s lives still centred on the routines passages of the agricultural year. It was around these that celebrations and holy days of whatever doctrinal colour were moulded.

Samhain was a festival marking seasonal transition. The harvest had all been gathered in and it was now time to prepare for the encroaching cold and darkness of winter. In the Celtic calendar, this was the deathly start of the year, beginning at sunset (the inverted dawn of the Celtic day). It was tenebrous moment in which the world was less fixed and stable than usual, the boundaries more permeable. Supernatural forces were able to pass through with greater ease. The dead were available to commune with, and goblins, demons and witches were abroad, full of capricious or evil intent, determined to make the most of a night which lent them such potent license. It was brief interlude filled with fearful danger and intoxicating possibility. It is this spirit which the Folklore Tapes artists seek to evoke.

We begin at the end, with The Summons of Death. Ian Humberstone’s track opens with spectral winds, synth white-noise susurration from which shifting masses of Ligeti cloud voices coalesce. Glinting sounds in the background hint at something ghostly darting and swooping within the rushing currents of air. A faint, piping melody emerges, distant, haunting and half-heard. It’s both sinister and lulling, a lilting, swaying charm of a tune, leaving the listener hypnotised and rooted to the spot with rapt, immobile fascination. And then, a crashing upstruck chord on distorted guitar marks an appearance, a landing. IT’S THERE. Death has made its dramatic ‘boo!’ entrance from the smoke of a stage explosion. The soft piping melody is picked up on electric guitar (because Death is, like, heavy), the wah-wah fluctuations suggesting the beating of wings or the sharp swish of the scythe. Popping Casio percussion provides the bones of a skeletal rhythm, the carpal steps for a dance of death. This is something of a pantomime Reaper, a figure from a medieval pageant played out in the village square (or even in the graveyard of the parish church) rather than the saturnine chess-player of Bergman’s Seventh Seal. Sounds of flight at the end, the beat of displaced air, leave him winging his bony way into the night, the appointed soul harvested.

Magpahi's EP on Finders Keepers

The title of Magpahi’s Derwen Adwy’r Meirwon is Welsh for the oak at the gate of the dead. It’s the name given to a notable tree standing sentinel at the head of Adwy’r Beddau (the Pass of Graves). It bore arboreal witness to the Battle of Crogen in 1165, a triumphant day in the annals of Welsh history. It was here, beneath Castelh Crogen, that Prince Owen Gwynedd ambushed the cocksure army of Henry II and massacred them. The ancient oak is now fantastically distended with age, its bole bloated with layers of fungal growth. Magpahi (aka singer Alison Cooper) invokes the spirit of the oak in its dying days, taking on its voice and celebrating its longevity and the centuries of history (‘1004 winters’) to which have passed around it. The lyrics adopt the anthropomorphised perspective of the oak, portraying it as a sentient, self-aware being. The fragile, echoing vocals and circling acoustic guitar figure are tinted with small touches of instrumental colour: a breath of harmonium, a flutter of recorder, a passing buzz of bowed overtones and a scattered shower of percussive rain. It’s a sound which draws comparison to psych folk old and new, from Mellow Candle and Vashti Bunyan to Espers and Marissa Nadler. The melancholy beauty of the song recognises that the great oak’s days are nearing an end. ‘I’m splintered in two’ it laments, ‘branches next to dew’. For the ‘keeper of these gates’ it is ‘time to depart’. We hear those gates open with a rusty skreek like the scratching of branch against glass. The wordlessly crooned outro sounds like a mind wandering, fading away, language put aside for once and all. As with Ian Humberstone’s track, it ends with a departure. The dissipating ghost of the melody is something which will, perhaps, remain in the air as an aural haunting. The imprint of the spirit of place.

Snail Hunter’s Domnhuil Dhu has absolutely nothing to do with Sir Walter Scott’s famous poem Pibroch of Donuil Dhu, a misty-eyed bagpipe clarion call designed to stir the patriotic blood of the Scotsman It is far, far stranger than that. The title may offer some clue. It’s Gaelic for Black Donald, an old Highland nickname for the Devil. Such a familiar mode of address points to the common belief that the Devil and the pre-Christian supernatural beings from which his malevolent trickery descended were living amongst everyday folk. Only a few subtle, tell-tale signs distinguished them to the sharp-eyed observer, dispelling their veiling disguise.

Snail Hunter’s track is essentially an imaginary soundscape, a programmatic piece whose effects are prompts for pictures projected onto an inner screen. An intitial descending sprinkle of notes sounds like an arpeggio stroked from an omnichord, the 80s electronic autoharp which resembled a plastic artist’s easel. It’s a landing, a fade-in, or the drawing apart of a cinema curtain. It’s also vaguely reminiscent of the glittering descending chords punctuating the soundtrack of the 1970 Czech film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which alert us to moments of magical transformation and protective enchantment. The sense of cinematic scene-setting is furthered by the introduction of a late 70s high-pitched, ethereal synth drone à la Shine On You Crazy Diamond. We gain the impression of having passed into some otherplace, a territory adjacent to but at some remove from the mundane world.

Graculus - the friendly cormorant

Footsteps church through shingle. Then, in the distance, we hear a weird, choking gull squawk voice, which appears to be spitting out the words ‘what is this?’ in a tone of horrified disbelief. Is it a shape-shifter caught somewhere between human and avian form. Perhaps it is a cormorant, a bird which has amassed a good deal of folkloric associations over the ages. It is often seen as an embodiment of ravenous hunger and greed, largely due to its ability to gulp implausibly large fish down its gullet. It’s black plumage and habit of sunning itself with wings outstretched like a gothic cloak have inevitably led to comparisons with the Devil. Milton makes such a simile in Paradise Lost. In a passage concerning the Devil’s winged travels he writes ‘up he flew, and on the tree of life,/The middle tree and highest there that grew,/Sat like a cormorant’. It has also been seen as a bird of ill omen, portending doom, often in the form of an oncoming storm at sea. It is associated with death, and there are Nordic myths which hold that fisherman drowned at sea can return home from time to time in the form of a cormorant. It’s importance in ancient folklore and mythology was recognised by Oliver Postgate, who made the loyal watchbird of Noggin the Nog, Graculus, a cormorant.

A sharp intake of breath in the aural foreground suggests that our point of view protagonist is taken aback by this apparition. It is something he has come across by chance, a strange spectacle which is both fascinating and alarming – and also potentially dangerous. Mellow synth fluting reminiscent of the music produced by Radiophonic Workshop composers Peter Howell and Roger Limb for early 80s Doctor Who whistles in the background, maintaining the otherworldly ambience. As the bird voice grows more prominent in the sound spectrum and we creep nearer to whatever is making these guttural utterances, we also hear the break and recession of waves. We are on a shoreline, then. The cormorant (let’s for the sake of argument assume this is what it is for now) repeats its three words pained bewilderment. Has it become suspended halfway between a magical transformation from man to bird? It seems to be choking something (there are those associations with gluttony). Has it been poisoned? Or caught its gullet on a fish hook and line? Or is it spewing up oil from a slick it got washed up with? I have a picture in my mind, but I won’t reproduce it for you. It’s for each listener to discover their own mental movie. Our POV character, having approached nearer and nearer with a stalker’s stealth, now reveals himself. No longer fearful, he bursts into harsh peals of cruel laughter, a devilish guffaw. It’s the self-delighting mirth of the villain at the point of triumph, when he realises that his evil masterplan has been realised to the last detail. Perhaps he was a huntsman all along, the birdman his prey. The subliminal background atmospheres suddenly explode into a wild electronic bacchanal, a frenzied and violent freak out of blurting, distorted synth. There’s a furious sloshing of water, as if something is being held beneath the surface and is thrashing about, desperately trying to get free. And then all is calm again. Whatever has been done has been done. Perhaps the cormorant’s power has been appropriated, absorbed. We end with an ascending chord, the mirror of the descending chord with which we started. The curtain is closing, the scene fading out – or it may be an ascent and another flight.

More watery shoreline sounds set the scene for Eva Bowan’s Aos Sí. The Sí are perhaps better know as the sidhe or the shee, the supernatural fairy race in Irish and Scottish folklore and mythology. The shoreline atmospheres and subaquatic compression of sound suggest that we may be encountering a selkie, the mythological Celtic and Gaelic creatures who transform from seal into human form when they leave the sea (a sort of wereseal in effect). Unstable, wavering arpeggios evoke the bob and sway of oceanic swell. A girlish voice whispers half-decipherable lyrics in a high Bjorkish register. It is dispersed in blurry ripples of phased and floating reverberation. Foggy guitar chimes sound like a narcotised version of Robin Guthrie’s hazy Cocteau Twins chords. The whole song passes in a slow dazed drift, heavy-lidded and somnolent. The voice becomes progressively more processed until it is just another element in the dreamy soundscape; the selkie gradually divests itself of all traces of the human side of its nature. It becomes submerged in the harmonic drone of the sea from which it briefly arose, until we begin to wonder whether we really heart it at all. A few sounds at the end conjure one last picture. Steps on the shingle, bells calling the watcher back inland, waking him from his reverie, and the ever-present wind which, if you listen carefully, might still carry the faint voices of the siren singers.


The cold wind blows into the next track, sometime Clinic duo Carl Turney and Brian Campbell’s Punkie Night. There’s a thoughtful continuity in this connectivity of atmospheric weather conditions which makes for a satisfying whole. It gives the impression of a journey, with magically instantaneous transitions from place to place, granting a multiplex perspective on this special night. It’s like a sonic equivalent of Ray Bradbury’s novel The Halloween Tree, in which a group of children take a supernatural flight across the world to learn about the varied traditions of Hallow’s Eve and the Day of the Dead. One of these, Punkie Night, is particularly prevalent in Somerset. Children march through villages or towns carrying lanterns made from pumpkins or mangel-wurzels, sometimes following a cart on which the punkie king and queen ride. They sing the punkie song as they go along: ‘It’s punkie night tonight, it’s punkie night tonight. Adam and Eve would not believe it’s punkie night tonight’. The lanterns, with their grotesque carved faces, were supposed to ward off evil spirits, but can often seem to gather them together instead, their fiery glow transforming children’s faces into flickering shadow-masks with mischievous goblin grins.


The wind whistles in the chilling pitch it is constricted to when blowing through the cracks in doors and windows, or fluting down the long flue of the chimney. A struck match reinforces the impression of a stark, bare interior, now lit by candle or rushlight. Choral synth voices flowing up and down hint at aethereal spirits abroad in the windblown night. A children’s chorus begins to chant the punkie night song. It’s a repetitive and banally declamatory refrain which seems to grow stranger with every re-iteration. An eerie resonance gradually envelops the words until they become spatially ambivalent. Are the chanting children still outside or have they somehow gained access to the domestic interior? Or, more terrifyingly yet, have they taken up residence in the intimate, private spaces within the skull? Ritualistic, tub-thumping drums beat out a hopping and leaping processional, which is joined by a rolling melody. Low metallic harpsicord hammers and repetitive folk techno patterns bring to mind the occult electronica of The Haxan Cloak, or Pye Corner Audio in certain moods, with a similar indebtedness to horror movie scores. Rising, gliding notes in the background conjure images of lines of floating punkie heads bobbing along, angular eyes and serrated grins aglow with fluttering candlelight. The synth choir of strange angels comes soaring back in, and we have the sense of a great assembly coming together. A colourful village custom being enacted for another year, or something less innocent? Once more, we are left with the wind whistling its chill tones through the cracks in the doors and windows, the procession receding into the distance outside. But is there anyone left inside, or is the room now empty, its gathering shadows dimly held at bay by the dwindling stub of a sputtering candle?

Such troubling speculations are dispelled by the clatter of junkyard rhythms as the Taskmaster, Trickster, Troublemaker of Bokins’ track takes to the makeshift stage. This dancing, skeletal percussion brings to mind Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. Clicking spoons and clanking iron, shaken bunches of keys and rattled tins full of dried beans provide the dry, jerky moves for a bony reel. A guitar adds a disjointed melody, phased effects giving it a broken, hesitant flow. Strummed intervals give it the sound of a spirit-possessed Appalachian dulcimer at times, lending a folkish aspect to the grim merriment. A hobo ghost dance around a fire some way from the mountain trail, perhaps, glimpsed peripherally by the weary traveller. A few synth blurbs are added to heighten the sense of the uncanny. The analogue synthesiser is definitely the chosen means through which to evoke the supernatural on Calendar Customs I, and has proved adept at doing so in many other contexts too. A babble of voices becomes vaguely audible, pouring forth a chittering, half-human burst of goblin scat. Then there is a change in register. A sinister drone shrouds all sound, somewhat in the misty mould of John Carpenter’s score for The Fog. It’s a ‘something inexorably approaches’ drone. We hear clanking, hammering, rusty creaking and the actinic glint of sparking metal. Some dread forge or unholy workshop, perhaps. The track ends before we are able fully to divine the nature of this infernal space.


Children of Alice are a trio bringing together James Cargill and old Broadcast compatriot Roj Stevens with Julian House, Ghost Box co-founder, graphic designer and artist (under the guise of The Focus Group). This is an incredibly exciting venture for fans of Broadcast, amongst whom I unhesitatingly number myself, suggesting as it does a new post-Broadcast direction. Their debut piece, The Harbinger of Spring, was released on Folklore Tapes V – Ornithology last year. Something of the same concrete collaging which the characterised the Broadcast and Focus Group collaboration Witch Cults of the Radio Age is used to delineate the strange dimensions of the Liminal Space (the edgeland or interzone), their track on Calendar Customs. It begins with a tuning in, a crackling sweep across the frequencies until the desired wavelength has been fixed. A trundling, ratcheting rotation suggests motion, as does the plodding, pedestrian bass pacing which lopes alongside it. Fragments of fluting synth melody paint impressionistic glimpses of the passing world. These are low key sounds, soft and muffled, their origins obscure. They seem to be coming from somewhere else – the liminal space. Through one of the jump cuts and aural transmutations which were a feature of Harbinger of Spring, the wheel is displaced by a watery trickle. Perhaps it was a waterwheel all along. It’s a gentle, liquid sound which also seems to carry the faint murmur of voices. This sense of voices emerging from and merging with natural sounds is a characteristic of the Calendar Customs compilation as a whole.


We hear some kind of clicking and ratcheting clockwork machinery. It’s the kind of complex, interlocking polyrhythmic patterning which ran through Roj Steven’s Ghost Box album The Transactional Dharma of Roj. Are we inside the mechanism of a large clock, like the one which features in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders? The Children of Alice, individually and collectively, are expert at transporting us through a progression of discrete spaces and states. It’s the equivalent of an aural psychedelic trip, something which Broadcast singer and writer Trish Keenan used to talk about. We hear the opening melody and the trundling rotation again. It feels different in the context of what we have heard since. Could it be a strange music box turned by a small handle? The piece is anchored and given structure by these repetitions, lent variety and contrast by the juxtaposition of different sound blocks. A coconut clopping once more gives the impression of movement – the horse pulling the cart whose uneven roll we have been listening to, perhaps. Backward vocals are slowed and processed until they are no longer recognisably human. They become part of the general ambience, the hum of the aether, tuned out. This music which is all about transformation and transition. The wheel keeps on turning, but it’s travelling in no readily identifiable direction. It is non-spatial motion – a temporal rotation, fitting for this new calendrical Folklore Tapes venture. And then, suddenly, it stops.

Mary Stark’s Nos (Us?) creates a sound picture of a huge, resonant space – a cavern, perhaps. It is filled with the scuttle and stridulation of insects and the call and fluttering flight of birds. Some stertorous breathing and sighing suggests a living presence; The case itself as a womb filled with life. Bat squeak and pizzicato droplets add further detail to the scenario. The swell of an organ drone, which has the overtone shimmer of church bells heard from within the nave, gives this the feel of a sacred space. And then the echoing, compressed resonance, which has mapped out a confined interior, is gone. We are in the open air, the birds still singing. They have made the transition between states. There’s a sense of relief, of horizons expanding and light flooding in. It’s as if we have arrived at some illuminating conceptual breakthrough, one which has finally allowed us to walk out of the Platonic cave.

David Orphan’s La Mas Ubhal (Quinque Sect) refers to a drink which mixes spiced ale, cider and roasted apples. Sometimes referred to as lamb’s wool, it was made for the old Irish feast of apple gathering, which used to take place on All Hallow’s Eve. Quinque Sect means, roughly, The Fifth Way. The track begins with roughly bowed notes, scratchy and coarse. The apples being peeled, perhaps. The piece as a whole has something of the feel of free improv, with the kind of small, discrete sounds which AMM or the Art Ensemble of Chicago used to deploy. Warm analogue synth notes are introduced, full and rich, adjusted to give off a flickering vibrato shimmer. This is the solar sound of a fire burning steadily and comfortingly in the grate. More small instrumental noises suggest quietly purposeful activity: The tracery of a thin, synth oboe-like pattern of notes (a tendril of cinnamon scent curling from the pot, Bisto-style), a slack jazz bass twang and an electric bass riff. Bowed overtones glint into the shadows, and there’s a strange trumpeting, some beast emerging or maybe just stomachs rumbling. The electric bass takes up a Fog ‘something’s getting nearer’ riff – four beats with the first strongly emphasised (DUHN, duhn duhn duhn). We hear a coalescence of voices, half chanting, half gasping (they want some of the mas ubhal, and now). A slithering, shuffling approach with sweeping guitar effects hinting at something uncanny in the air. A chanting voice is abruptly cut off. The Quinque Sect is never revealed to us. Perhaps it is a mercy.


Rob St John finishes the Calendar Customs survey with a lovely instrumental piece, Old Growth, which is full of wistful seasonal melancholy. Descending chords are picked out on a classical guitar which sounds like a lyre or Celtic harp. They are limned by delicate synth accompaniment, the mellow light of the late October sun. This descending sequence paints a picture of bronzed and yellowed leaves slowly spiralling to the ground. As the title suggests, it as an end, but also a beginning, making way for new growth in a new year. A blackbird sings its heavenly song, and further songlike synth notes are added to fill out the mantric repetition of the underlying chords. It fades out on a long held chord, which encourages you to add you own humming drone to the autumn harmony.

It’s a beautiful, prayerful note on which to end a really fine and varied collection, which evokes, through means traditional and experimental (the two poles blending without any sense of contrivance or strain), this magical time of year in all its varied moods: beautiful and unsettling, dark and illuminated, wistful and impish, fearful and full of hope. The first exploration of Calendar Customs has produced riches and treasures aplenty. I look forward eagerly to further investigations.