(ill. Davina Ware) In 1972, walking up Glastonbury Tor, I was talking with a chap who, like me, had just hitch-hiked into town. As we approached the tower, he started talking about leys, which he’d just read about. For some reason, the topic sparked off something inside me; the next day I headed home […]
#6: That obscure object of desire: Leys, Watkins and ‘energies’ Read More »
The last column addressed the commodification of history as Spectacle; well, that’s modern tourism for you, and I’m not innocent of it. But the Society of the Spectacle is also at work in much humbler surroundings. In our last issue, a reader wrote in to lament ” Time was when it was possible to visit
#5: Spectacle, consumer capitalism and New Age religiosity Read More »
Continuing our editorial musings on modern antiquarian implications Last time, our alt-antiquarian found themself side by side with a psychogeographer, contemplating the landscape and its variant pasts, real and spectral. And, our psychogeographer will point out, some of those pasts we imagine today are well-managed, staged dramas for a populace weaned on screened stories. There
#4: The Ancient Spectacle Updated Read More »
Places predate monuments; monuments imply a concrete materialisation of narratives that over time becomes more codified – the narratives become myths, become scriptures etched on to place. Journeys between places infused with narratives become less nomadic, more pilgrimages. Dominant cultures are taking shape, and represented on a landscape; alt-antiquarians need to note that the objects
#3: The Society of the Spectre Read More »
Cognitive maps and other inherited understandings can illuminate historical landscapes with a phenomenological focus The presence of memory accretes to locations – not for nothing do we describe places as ‘our familiar haunts’, for at any one time a place is composed of layers of itself. It haunts itself… from what we see now,
#2: Thinking in the style of our pasts Read More »
It is necessary to regularly review the ‘state of play’ regarding key elements of the earth mysteries spectrum, and here we take a look at leys. This simple concept has been taken down so many speculative paths that it is sometimes hard to see the core of the concept. NE editors John Billingsley and Mike
History for the Ley Person Read More »
Moving earth mysteries along Over the 27 years that I have edited Northern Earth, and the 47 years since I wrote my first article on the subject area, I have become increasingly aware that the topical implications of the field still occasionally known as earth mysteries stretch very much beyond even the broad inquisitorial sweep
#1: Subjectivity in an objective frame Read More »
John Billingsley isn’t the only one to get a buzz from the countryside; here he reports on some experiences of the so-called ‘hummadruz’. “This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs” wrote William Shakespeare for Prospero in the play The Tempest. Perhaps he was writing from personal experience, for this isle of Britain
The Buzz or ‘Hummadruz’ Read More »
Thomas Hanley’s fascinating account of aerial apparitions of military manoeuvres first appeared in the Yorkshire Folk-Lore Journal in 1888, and remains of much interest in the annals of northern forteana. On the 18th of January, 1792, a singular meteoric appearance was observed near Stockton-on-the-Forest, about four miles from York, which resembled a large army in
In 2010, Northern Earth invited readers to send in place-names and lore associated with saints – but not the bona fide type of saint. What we were looking for was spurious saints… here are some of the dubious divines we received.