BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Weird Walk
By ‘Weird Walk’!
Published by Watkins Books, 2023 rrp £19.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
The Weird Walk zine has been selling well at Bookbuster for a while now, and has reached issue #6, as well as putting out one-off zines, Magic Circle, Ritual, and new-in, Leyline. But now they have gifted us a really lovely book. There is little overlap, though zine features get mentioned along the way, between book and zine. Naturally, though, the book follows the format and explores ‘wanderings and wonderings through the British ritual year’. Author attribution is to itself, though I assume Owen Tromans is behind much of it.
Weird Walk, the book, is divided into sections by season, beginning with Spring. Under each section a selection of spooky places gets examined, and a short list of regional events to match each season is given. As you may expect, Hastings Jack-in-the-Green gets a mention in ‘Spring’, and the Lewes Bonfire in ‘Autumn’.
A FOLKLORIC RAMBLING GUIDE
Choices of places to examine for walks are many and varied. Though predominantly sites chosen have neolithic stone circles or burial mounds, a number of ‘weird walks’ are through more recent landscapes. The definition of ‘weird’ is signposted by various other inherently vague concepts, such as ‘uncanny’, ‘haunted’, and ‘liminal’, essentially, you know it when you see / feel it! The preamble describes the book as taking ‘the form of a folkloric rambling guide; a gazetteer of the physical, historical, and magical landscapes of the isles, and the customs and traditions that arose around them’.
The zeitgeist is rich with references to ‘hauntology’ these days, and it is a key idea behind Weird Walk. Although coined by Derrida, it has become common usage through The Wire magazine’s application of it to a certain brand of ‘retro’ ‘spooky’ music, such as Burial, Kode9, all the artists on the Ghost Box label, Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s 1970s radio and TV soundtracks, to name just a few. The late Mark Fischer popularised it, too. It is a close cousin to ‘psychogeography’, as exemplified by Peter Ackroyd’s early novels, and the stories gifted us by occasional St Leonards resident Iain Sinclair, and Gareth Rees. The musician John Foxx recently produced a spoken-word album that, too, is centred on the hauntological and the psychogeographic.
AUTONOMOUS SENSORY MERIDIAN RESPONSE
Touchstones for the movement, if we dare call it such, are Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, and his Stone Tapes. Also, The Children of the Stones, filmed in Avebury and referencing the old Christianising custom of interpreting the stones as petrified dancers, as described in Weird Walk in the chapter on the nearby megaliths at Stanton Drew. In such cases the audio effects and music queues are a fundamental element of the atmosphere created. Many of us drawn anyway to neolithic sites such as Avebury and Stonehenge get a more or less ‘tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine’, peddled as ‘autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) not only in visiting such sites – also described in the book, as ‘an uncanny disruption’ – but also from a shared nostalgia for these cultural tropes.
The book gives eight walks to each season. Here I will give examples, two from each season: Spring includes Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the Druid’s Temple in North Yorkshire; Summer, Castlerigg in Cumbria and the hill of the White Horse at Uffington; Autumn, Coldrum Long Barrow in Kent and Fernworthy Forest on Dartmoor; and Winter gives us Wiltshire’s Silbury Hill and the ultimate liminal zone after Dungeness, Dunwich Beach in Norfolk, of which ‘it is said that if you find yourself alone at high tide…the bells on the sunken churches can still be heard ringing out from the depths’. Each site has a fascinating potted history given before the route of an actual walk is broached.
WE LOVE THIS WEIRD, DIVERSE, HAUNTED PLACE
There are excellent anecdotes throughout the book too. For example, the entry for Padstow notes that Edward Woodward, who starred in another hauntological touchstone, The Wicker Man, is interred there. In the Stanton Drew chapter the Worzels founder, ‘North Somerset legend Adge Cutler’, gets a look in. It seems only right that the chapter on Avebury references another superb book on our spookiest heritage, Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian. The chapter on Castlerigg has a fascinating aside chronicling the trade in Langdale stone axes, giving us a brief glimpse of the reach of Neolithic trade routes. Many of the sites used for winter solstice rituals were much larger than you might conclude from the remains we see today and we now believe people travelled to the most special of these, such as Stonehenge and Orkney’s Barnhouse Neolithic Settlement, from far away, in the latter case possibly as far away as Norway, Shetland, and the Western Isles.
The Kent chapter speculates about leylines and notes other nearby mythic sites along the Pilgrim’s Way, such as Kit’s Coty, and speculates that this ancient track may have extended through the Salisbury Plain mega site as far as the Somerset complex. Just in time for Halloween, the chapter on the Rollright Stones gives an insight into the injustices of the witch hunts. At the ‘very centre of England’ lies Lud’s Church, associated with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the location of a novel by another uncanny storyteller, Alan Garner, a ‘must visit’ amongst this great selection.
A minor criticism is that each could benefit from a map alongside the text although O/S references are given. But this is easily forgiven. Weird Walk can be summed up with a quote from EF Benson, who wrote about the liminal zones at Dunwich and Romney Marsh: here you can meet ‘something out of the past, some condition of life long vanished, […] leaking through into the present’. The author(s?), after trawling around Britain’s byways, ‘found that we love this weird, diverse, haunted place even more than we did when we started’. Now, it’s our turn!
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