The View
From Children of the Stones to Julian Cope, our desire to connect with the deeper and stranger mysteries of the landscape may be unquenchable…
IF YOU’VE BROWSED your local bookshop recently, you may have spotted a bright yellow hardback elbowing for shelf space alongside Richard Osman and Colleen Hoover. It’s called Weird Walk and it’s a spin-off from a cult quarterly fanzine of the same name dedicated to perambulations around mythic, pagan and occult(ish) sites around the British Isles.
It is, I suppose, part of the upsurge in interest in all things slightly strange and ‘otherly’ such as folk horror movies – see the continuing appeal of The Wicker Man, currently enjoying a 50th anniversary re-issue – spooky podcasts like the popular Uncanny and even some modern leftfield music. I first came across Weird Walk when a radio listener sent me a piece from it about Dungeon Synth music, an eerie micro-genre of electronic music designed as a soundtrack for twilit wanderings and fantasy board game evenings.
Many of us have long been a sucker for all this, nurtured perhaps by childhood memories of spooky TV shows like Children of the Stones and The Owl Service, with their heady combination of dramatic, slightly forbidding landscapes, relatable teen heroes and mild paganistic peril, best enjoyed accompanied by Crispy Pancakes and Viennetta. I am not the only one – I know Stewart Lee was an acolyte – to have pored over a battered copy of Janet and Colin Bord’s famous 1974 tome Mysterious Britain, a gazetteer of ancient British weirdness passed around at the back of the class by the cool nerds along with well-thumbed volumes of Erich von Däniken and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Like von Däniken, the Bords’ book is full of what now seems like abject nonsense about ley lines being flightpaths for commuting UFOs. But it could fire a kid’s imagination on a wintry schoolnight and make for good bus queue chat.
Then along came Julian Cope’s definitive and delightful Modern Antiquarian. First published in 1998, The Teardrop Explodes and solo psychedelic rocker’s handsome volume was an exhaustive travelogue of British megalithica from barrows to stone circles, menhirs to dolmens. Wanting to get his boots on and get out into the field to stomp and explore, but dismayed at the sketchy nature and speculative hippy meanderings of the existing guidebooks, he decided he could do better. And he did, in the long, noble and honourable line of 18th and 19th century amateur antiquarians (albeit with a more rock and roll attitude), inspiring many of us to seek out these amazing and evocative places ourselves. It has sold almost 50,000 copies and probably inspired many people to enrol on ancient history courses.
The Archdrude, as we affectionately know him, is a remarkably level-headed and pragmatic guide though. He once told me, when we were discussing t
