Michael Haslam recounts weird experiences on West Yorkshire and Highland moors Story: A Stone Circle on Midgley Moor I came to live at Foster Clough, on the edge of Midgley Moor, in September 1970. I’d visited the area a few times, and I had gained a rough idea of local topography. I’d come to join […]
Rock-solid Boggarts in a Ring: An experience of ‘other’ Read More »
A common theme throughout the history of earth mysteries is engagement with the spirit of places around us. Artists and writers have creatively explored this interface, and Mark Valentine suggests how drone music is exploring the same area For the past 10 years or so, a new musical form has been emerging amongst independent artists
‘A Flint for the Memory’: A Note on British Ambient and Drone Music Read More »
Traditions of a powerful ‘genius loci’ drew Jill Smith to an island in the near Atlantic, and a sense of presence Living in the Hebrides, I have for decades been somewhat obsessed by the islands and stacks of St Kilda, which lie 40 miles to the W of Lewis and Harris. They come and go
The Amazon Woman of St Kilda: a landscape figure Read More »
Traditional healing takes many forms and can be found in unlikely places… John Billingsley came across some curious Japanese traditions in an Orkney showcase. On a trip to Orkney, I came across a page of a diary written by J J H Scharbau,1 a doctor visiting Japan in 1874 and evidently diligently collecting traditional cures
A Japanese water healing pharmacopeia of 1874 Read More »
A previously unrecorded solstitial sunset brightens up an evening on a Pennine moor. An archaeo-astronomical site described by John Billingsley (images) and David Shepherd (text) This composite feature was described some time ago (Shepherd 2007, 2014), the essential point being that the new, midwinter sun appeared to rise / be born from the vulvaic Miller’s
Catching the Sun on Midgley Moor Read More »
Looking and seeing are different things, and understanding depends on what we do with them; this is where phenomenological perception is vital to our field Koyaanisqatsi, made 40 years ago, is a movie celebrating the beauties of the Earth, and the impact of modern civilisation upon it; a stream of images upheld by a Philip
#9: Para leer en forma interrogativa… Everyday Perception Read More »
“We shall not cease from exploration…” Eliot’s advisory for perception. 3 We have been talking of the past, and of the present, and of the hauntological membrane of experience between them. That membrane is of course unanchored, timeless, a hiatus between the twin towers of objective evidence and lived documented experience. Between the two lies
#8: “We shall not cease from exploration…” Read More »
Paul Screeton asks, quite reasonably, what’s the editor on about? Modern understandings of the past, says the editor… Paul Screeton, Seaton Carew: What to call ourselves collectively is a topic which not only has its peaks of discussion while forever in flux, but also there are also elements of cultural tracking. Neo-antiquarianism distinctly takes inspiration
#7: What’s the editor on about? Earth mysteries, phenomenology and psychogeography Read More »
(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 »