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‘The hedgerows are high, and the hillsides curve gently to wooded tops. This is Bix Bottom, a portal of a place, where history and fiction overlap. For here the weird walker may travel through time…’ What a way to begin a hiking guide, though Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings Through the British Ritual Year (Watkins, 2023) is a little more than that. Compiled by three anonymous zine makers (met upon the heath in thunder, lightning or rain, one imagines) this 200-odd-page compendium expands on six issues of the Walkers’ hit 2019 pamphlet ‘concerned with standing stones, folklore, rambling and good fellowship’.
The aim of the book is re-enchantment – through the ancient landscapes of the British countryside and the waymarked seasons – reacquainting a new generation of stone enthusiasts with a physical sense of time. And what better route to fresh beguilement than yomping across ‘the land of Silbury Hill and Avebury stone circle, of Wayland the Smith and the great Uffington White Horse… the land of the druids, the first farming communities, the last Saxon kings, and countless age-old folk tales’?
For many megalith enthusiasts – the Weird Walkers included – musician Julian Cope’s left-field, late 1990s The Modern Antiquarian provided practical and academic inspiration. As wide-ranging and ambitious as cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, which set out to map Parisian life through the city’s iron-and-glass passages, Cope’s famously slipcased tome documenting 300 ancient sites was the first enthusiast-made walking guide to ancient Britain.
Cope, who fronted 80s post-punk group the Teardrop Explodes, authored the cult gazetteer after visiting the Avebury stone circle and, finding no decent handbook cataloguing similar sites, decided to write one himself. The Modern Antiquarian cemented his status as ‘rock musician’ in tune with the neolithic, and has inspired a host of weird walkers to follow his merry way.
Weird Walk takes the same popular form as Cope’s monolithic guide. With the addition of a Pratchett-esque introduction by well-known ‘writer/clown’ Stewart Lee, the Walkers flit through the fun side of critical theory – Jacques Derrida, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Debord, Simon Reynolds – in a ‘preamble’ that introduces a gazetteer of 32 sites, organised by season.
Despite the book’s formalised feel, Weird Walk hasn’t lost the cut-n-paste quality of the zine, nor the enthusiasm of the authors for quirky trivia (particularly pop culture-related) and anachronistic metaphor. The Pentre Ifan dolmen in western Wales, for example, is described as having a ‘Millennium Falcon of a capstone’, and this punk attitude to archaeology makes for an entertaining guide. ‘To our eyes this is an extraordinary megalithic sculpture, a feat of design and execution overshadowing any of the 20th century’s celebrated modernist greats,’ write the Walkers about Pentre. ‘Imagine, then, the intense effect of this Neolithic architectural flex in prehistory, when the built environment was comparatively sparse.’
Serious critics may scoff, but they’d be missing the point. Weird Walk is for enthusiastic ramblers by rambling enthusiasts. Ideas spiral out from the central theme of stones, and you might find yourself down one of several rabbit holes after reading an entry, such as Shakespearean-era comic actor William Kempe’s mad 200-mile morris dance, Flamborough swords, green man folklore, Stone Tape theory, the making of folk horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw or countercultural ruralism via John Seymour and the Incredible String Band.
If you’re not up for delving too deeply into the mythology and ritual surrounding the menhirs, each site is summarised by a Robert Christgau-style description (Druid’s Temple in North Yorkshire is billed as ‘ersatz enchantment in a faux-Neolithic wonderland’, which could equally be describing an Enya album, but gives you the gist) and concludes with practical walking notes about grid references, parking fees and nearby pubs.
Standing stones, about which little is truly known and much is theorised, are an apt starting point for the type of re-enchantment the Walkers want other wanderers to find. They’re encircled by the same peculiarly British mythic history that inspired the magic-suffused and universally beloved works of authors such as Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and, of course, Tolkien. ‘By walking the ancient pathways, visiting the sacred sites and immersing ourselves in the folklore and customs of these isles, we hope to fan the faint embers of magic that still smoulder in the grate and conjure that elusive temporal trackway of history and mystery, a route that bypasses nostalgia and leads us back towards optimism,’ write the Walkers. This is not a yearning for an imagined Arcadian past, the Walkers are quick to note, but rather an earnest interest in rediscovering wonder in the physical world and becoming reacquainted with seasonal time.
‘In Britain today we live in thrall to timetables and technology, our lives increasingly scheduled and surveilled… disconnected from the rural lives of our ancestors,’ the Walkers explain. ‘In cities, with their air conditioning and constant light, we can sometimes feel suspended in a continual non-season, a metamodern limbo of everything-all-the-time.’ Romantic poet William Wordsworth said much the same thing in 1807, but didn’t live to see the first British folk revival at the tail end of that century.
Happily, Weird Walk appears in the wake of a general and somewhat recent re-engagement with folklore and nature, which has seen the establishment of Simon Costin’s Museum of British Folklore (WoI March 2010), the artist-founded Stone Club, and Zakia Sewell’s quest for Albion documentary radio series, and helped formerly marginal books like Robert Macfarlane’s Old Ways and Max Porter’s Lanny find popular appeal. When the world is too much with us, as Wordsworth put it, it seems that linking up with with landscape and lore – and a bit of earnest oddballery in the form of morris dancing or ritual cheese rolling – can act as a counterbalance.
For anyone who has stood in an ancient place – whether in Britain or beyond – and felt that slight, uncanny needling or faint vertigo, seeing time as a long shadow stretching back forever and sensing for a moment the many civilisations who walked this route before, enchantment (as the Walkers call it) is a way to feel connection in an increasingly atomised and dislocated present. But as ‘the arch-drude’ Julian Cope claimed, ‘people don’t go anywhere unless there’s a signpost’. Weird Walk provides these waymarks to would-be wanderers and wonderers alike.
For more about Weird Walk, visit www.weirdwalk.co.uk
