Hookland County Chronicle
Issue 13
I am of England of the tumps. Where almost every mound or tumulus holds rumour-hoard and is ghost-guarded. Where the temporal echoes of ‘I’m the King of the Castle and You’re the Dirty Rascal’ do battle with carnyx cries. For where the ghost soil rises, mystery lives. I am of Hollow Hills England, where to put your ear to the ground is to hear whispers from St. Martin's Land or echo of the year-long breaths of sleeping dragons. An England whose Neath is tunnel-crowded and legend-guarded. A land where we walk atop marvels. I am of the England of roads turning towards ghosts held in old stone homes. The England of walls to be leapt into other worlds, walls bordering wonder. A land where you can tumble into the dreams of wooden knights, church groteseques. My pride is in its mysteries, not its munitions. – C.L. Nolan
Hello. Welcome to Issue 13 of the Hookland County Chronicle – read by some 2150 souls in 45 countries and 49 US states – including West Virginia. In the numerology of Hookland, 13 symbolises both a testing of the spirit and the first transcendent step out bafflement. Unfortunately, I can mane no claim for this issue’s ability to chase away bewilderment. Due to extreme Musk pisspuffinry, you can now not only find Hookland on Substack Notes and Facebook, but also on Bluesky as @hookland.bsky.social. Such complexity does not appeal to my Edwardian-possessed soul, but the county will always try to manifest where people want to read it. – David
We witches have our green temples where rent is respect, the caretaker is genius loci. Our walls can be of sentient oak, ash or birch. Our floor the living soil itself. Tell me again how I must pay high fees to a coven? The threshold the witch’s temple can be where wave eats the shore's certainty or the tree line of wood where the wild makes its first scratches. Wherever she makes her crossing of it, the hearing of the land's songs, an entering into the power of place. – Extract from Wild Witchery, the correspondence course in witchcraft first run by Emily Banting in 1982
You Beast You! Antlered Dormouse
These days, three species of dormice are commonly accepted to make England there home. The native and increasingly threatened Hazel Dormouse (Mduscardinus avellanarius), the European Edible Dormouse also known as the European Fat Dormouse (Glis glis) and the Garden Dormouse (Eliomys quercinus). However, according to persistent folklore and certain ancient bestiaries, England was also once home to highly improbable Antlered Dormouse (humorously labeled by the Victorian naturalist Valentine Darrow Cornibus glis). A favourite of mediaeval marginaliasts, as its name suggests the Antlered Dormouse was usually depicted having an impressive set of branched horns with at least a dozen tines. Due to folkore allegeding it possessed glowing eyes and fur as well as a viscious nature, it was also often depicted holding a lantern and a spear whilst fighting with squirrels or bothering the exposed flanks of monks or maidens.
Both the Weychester Book of Beasts and Woodville Psalter describe the Antlered Dormouse as being at least nine inches in length with a tail never less than a foot long, though other contemporary accounts suggest bigger specimens were not uncommon. As if its size, having antlers, glowing eyes and fur were not enough to distinguish them from the Hazel Dormouse, both tomes claim the Antlered Dormouse also had a regenerative, detachable tail it would shed if grasped by a pursuer. This latter claim might be explained away by conflation with European Fat Dormouse which has limited power of self-amputation of the tail.
In 1198, the cleric Ralph of Wyrmshall claimed to have tamed an Antlered Dormouse that had plagued the orchards of an abbey. Across several years he noted the habits of the beast and formed a close bond with it – though the suggestion by some later historians that he gave homilies with it resting in the hood of his robes seem somewhat fanciful. Ralph recorded that the rodent shed its antlers yearly and used them as protection against predation, more than once watching it see off the unwanted attention of a cat. He disputed folklore that the creature glowed, but gave testament to its viscousness if denied its appetite for apples, nuts and eggs or if you tried to wake it early from its six-months of hibernation.
The Antlered Dormouse seems to have survived in England until at least the late 17th century. Hookland diarist Dr. Bron detailed encountering a group of them in the King’s Chase forest in 1638 writing: ‘When you hear the shrill constancy of their night-calling it is no longer a matter of wondering why they are oft titled ‘the Devil’s Chorus’. They emit but a soft light, yet may be seen clearly despite the deep-dark of the wood. Some folk come into the Chase when it is the season after their rutting to search for their antlers which are considered a powerful token against malign magic.’ In 1686, the village of Spellford claimed it was plagued by Antlered dormice who not only devastated it orchards, but invade homes in the hope of finding a warm place to hibernate. Up until 1913, The Antlered Dormouse inn in the nearby Stubbock publicly displayed what was claimed to be a stuffed version of its name-gifter. Unfortunately, there is no record of who purchased this mount from the inn-keeper.
Enough places in southern England maintained a memory of the Antlered Dormouse for it still be part of the living folkloric current in the 20th century. This persistence was aided by children’s author Jane Tempest using one as a main character in her popular series of books and the motor manufacturer Woodfield-Zenith producing the Antlered Dormouse small sports car in the early 1960s. In 1976, Miranda May’s Marvellous Monsters (Hookland Associated Television’s somewhat shameless clone of David Attenborough’s children’s BBC programme Fabulous Animals) had an episode devoted to the Antlered Dormouse.
The programme intrigued its young viewers by showing how Garden dormice glowed in an assortment vibrant colours when exposed to ultraviolet light thanks to bioluminescence. While seeing dormice with glowing green noses and bright purple fur was intriguing, Dr. May was not able to explain why the dormice had evolved this process, nor how it could explain reports of glowing eyes and fur in the mediaeval period before man-made sources of ultraviolet light. However, she did offer this conclusion: “For centuries, people treated claims of glowing dormice with suspicion, but now science reveals it as a truth. Whether through contact with bioluminescent fungus or a mutation in their genetics, I’m convinced our ancestors may have seen exactly what they say they saw.”
Mystery lights have many names in the county – Ghost Lights, the Devil’s Lanterns, Old Clip’s Candles, Witch Balls. I think my favourite names for them are Dead Boy’s Bonfires or the Shining Sisters. Out at Shuckford they call them Punkle Torches, at the Uppers its Terror Torches. You really don’t want to know why folk at Cavehill call them Lost Children’s Lanterns – too heartbreaking by far. They’ve been explained away as everything from spirits of the dead to faeries trying to lead folk astray; owls coated with bioluminescent fungi to piezoelectrics or marsh gas. Even those who insist they are nothing more than misperceived headlights and temperature inversions still call them by their folkloric names as if they can’t quite convince themselves that isn’t a better description. – Matt Adams, from his diary entry for June 17th, 1981
Notes From the Wyrd Lab
Archaeologia Hookland, Dr. K. Brophy and Putting the ‘Long Neolithic’ into People’s Mouths
Hookland was born with agendas. To be a place for fully-grown Changelings. To make it more difficult for fascists to squat the common ground of folklore. To manifest the belief that re-enchantment is resistance. It was always intended to explore embedding an active act of magic within fiction, to see what happened if I refused landlordism and allowed others to freely use the county. It was always a gathering place for refugees from tepid irony and art cant. Always adventures in word frailty, the art of misrembering. From the start, Hookland had 206 bones of intent.
However, as is the way of living things, Hookland developed trajectories I could not have predicted or dared to hope for. One of the most pleasing was that this little patch of folklore rewilding became a place many from the archaeological community came to dig. I’ve no education beyond dusty A-levels and have the overwhelming sense of not being needed anywhere in academia that many working class folk struggle with, so seeing so many PhDs cross its borders was a shocking delight.
My interpretation and anticipated use of the county by others ends the moment I hit the publish. It is there to be utilised however anyone* who needs and wants it desires. While I expected werewolf poets, distressed magicians, feral folklorists to find some application for a pre-enchanted landscape, I never expected it to be employed by archaeology professionals. My generally ardent, over-assured imagination failed to ever see Dr. Katy Soar and Dr. Kenny Brophy marvellously manifesting it in Room 826 of University College London as Archaeologia Hookland – the archeology of a lost English county from toadstone to pylon hum as part of the 41st Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference**.
Given the event and Dr. Kenny Brophy’s public announcement that he was ‘Keeper of Hoookland’s Stones’ I felt no reticence about borrowing his name for Weychester University’s most influential Senior Lecturer in Archaeology. None. The county is a territory where agreed reality becomes a salt-line blur. If someone looked up a quote by Brophy on the Long Neolithic and found he was teaching at the University of Glasgow and younger than they presumed – so be it. After receiving a string of abusive emails from a professor at Cornell University in 2016 for waisting hours of his life trying to find a non-existent BBC documentary series made by John Betjeman***, the amount of fetid dingo kidneys I gave about the county as confusion was as substantial as Betjeman’s English Alphabet – E is for Eccentric.
The character of Dr. K Brophy has become one of my favourite voices to talk about archeology and public engagement; deep time; community responses to ancient mystery and everything from prehistoric geometry to the standing stone as mooring post for folklore. Dr. K Brophy is definitely one of my favourite voices to not only express joyous wonder as a response to prehistory, but my fury towards those who spin tales of lost white civilisation exceptionalism about it.
However, some have increasingly become worried about my placing words in his mouth. I’ve received several messages suggesting I might get him into trouble, messages that believe the inventing of his paper on the Long Neolithic and Site Perpetuation with reference to space research installations was a ‘step too far’. How do I know he would say those things about iron railings, the importance of touching the past? One correspondent has even gone as far to suggest that naming Hookland characters after real people was ‘more than a little unethical’.
Does the obfuscation of fact and fiction have limits for me? Absolutely. As soon as Kenny says stop I will. But he hasn’t yet. In fact, he has never asked to have any approval or for me to edit any words I attribute to his fictional counterpart. I try to honour that trust by channelling the voice in ideaspace as one that any archeology student would want to listen to, by creating a fragmentary fictional biography that reflects his real-world position as an inspiration to many folk excavating the ghost soil of place.
As part of the death-proofing of Hookland, I’ve drawn up a skeleton for an illustrated catalogue of Hookland’s Neolithic monuments with an introductory essay by it’s alleged author Dr. K. Brophy that could be written by someone else after my passing. At some point Kenny and I might meet up for a curry and a couple of pints to see if its something to manifest before I am shuttled off this mortal coil. Quite what those who worry about beclouding county and this vague thing called reality will make of A Survey of Hookland’s Stones – Spines Through Time if it ever happens will be interesting.
*The small print on anyone is obviously no ethnostate numpties, no homophobes and no misogynists.
**My only complaint about this event – aside from not getting a chance to speak more to speakers such as Katy Whitaker and David Petts – was I couldn’t actually afford to pay to attend. This meant I had to sneak into the building to deliver my talk The Barrow is Never Empty – Ghost Soil Excavations in Hookland, which just amplified my imposter syndrome and working class alienation to a new level of personal devastation.
***I did write back to him expressing my opinion that having spent hours believing in something fantastical wasn’t waisted, but rather a short journey into wonder that many of us, possibly even John Betjeman, would be glad for.
Layer upon layer of weirdness till to dig down is to become crazed, till it’s all so odd that people can only explain it through a madness of theories. I’ve seen high strangeness haunt people Nokes, I’ve seen it wound and break them. It’s like an infection that weakens the ability to think critically so folk end up possessed by utter bullshit because they need to have an explanation, because they can’t carry the mental weight of an encounter with mystery. That’s why I hate the likes of Danebury. Almost all these pushers of single conclusion are predators. It’s not just their monster of the month bullshit they use to sell books and conferences, it’s the lie that they’ve got answers. Every good copper knows the world isn’t neat and tidy. It won’t ever be all down to aliens from the planet Skareg or the electromagnetic fields of sleeping dragons. The Strange isn’t one thing, it’s a condition of life. – DI Callaghan in conversation with DS Nokes on the occasion of the publication of Brian Danebury’s book: Wildmen – The Hollow Hills Revelation
Is It Worth It? The Apostle
When it was announced in 2017 that the director of The Raid franchise Gareth Evans was shooting a period, gothic folk horror, a lot of fans of the genre got excited. Deeply excited. When The Apostle eventually premiered on Netflix in 2018, the response was significantly less enthusiastic. Possibly this was because when you expect a 21st century genre classic to be delivered, you are always going to be disappointed. It might also been to down to a dissonance between a viewer’s desire for what the film might have been and what you end up with on screen.
The plot of failed missionary and opium addict Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) travelling to a remote Welsh island to rescue his sister from a blasphemous cult never feels less than over familiar. As stock characters come into play in the form of crazed cult leader Malcom Howe (Michael Sheen), his daughter and his brutal lieutenants, young lovers Jeremy and Ffion et al there’s an inescapable sense of not only knowing the tragic trajectory of things, but finding it hard to care.
This does not mean The Apostle is a bad film. Far from it. The period setting is gloriously realised in a few broad strokes early on in the film such as boiling clouds of steam as a train crosses the gothic magnificience of the Pontsticill Reservoir and is maintained by solid costuming and sets. Matt Flannery’s cinematography is by turns beautiful, engaging and able to deliver profound visual trauma. The audio landscape and soundtrack are both superb. The music of Aria Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal is intoxicating. Not only does it supply or amplify much of the film’s atmosphere. it creates space for the cast to at least hint at the emotional depth of their characters despite the constraints of the script and action scene kineticism.
The casting is superb. No actor is ever less than excellent. Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, Lucy Bynton and Kristine Froseth deliver a sense of interior emotional complexity that goes way beyond the script. Paul Higgins is a powerhouse of believability in the unreal, Mark Lewis Jones is a constant engine of dread and violence waiting to explode. There is no deficit of atmosphere and menace in The Apostle. You are given by visuals and sound that enfold you in cultish claustrophobia, a pervading disquietude. You can feel Gareth Evans ambitions to deliver a nuanced, slow-exercise in tension that ends in inevitable, shocking savagery. However, despite all the wonderful component parts of the film, it never delivers what is promises.
The deep flaw of the film is that yet again we have something written in what appears to be tepid tribute to The Wicker Man. Worse, it appears to have been written using the constraints of that busted flush of the folk horror block chain which says the genre only consists of work featuring: landscape; isolation; skewed belief system; a summoning/happening. Folk horror is not a one trope pony. Driving the narrative into the crowded cul-de-sac of sacrifice to land and its gods is dull beyond belief and strips the story of any possible surprise.
Despite the bloated pacing of the film’s middle section, interesting things implied such as the problems of building socialist utopias, opium addiction, the impact of Wales being under the heel of the British Empire are given time to be explored. What could have been fascinating thoughts on Christianity merging with Pagan roots become no more than visual metaphor. The rich mythscape of goddess worship, folk ritual arising amid almost communist communal conditions are twisted away from. Even the central contradiction of the island’s institutionalised misogyny despite the proclamation of its inhabitants being people of the goddess is woefully neglected.
While the landscape is beautifully shot, it remains just landscape rather than utilisation of place as character. Given the plot is so heavily focussed on the idea of the island’s spiritual guardians, this isn’t just a minor limitation. Where the audience needs to feel more than a mere sense of location, there is only a hollow knowing that another opportunity for greatness has been swerved.
The film is also burdened by an element of torture pornography that seems to be signalling the director’s love for Michael Reeve’s Witchfinder General and Ken Russell’s The Devils. However, it does little to add to the film’s strongest asset of a soaked-in sense of dread. Rather, the jars of blood thrown at the screen and used to feed the island’s goddess end up desensitising you to the intended Grand Guignol of the ending.
With all the talent on and off screen that The Apostle has, for all its stabs of disturbing beauty, for all the pressure of its thick atmosphere, the audience is most haunted by film’s sense of having been here before. Despite its flirting with being a gothic Welsh western, masterful effects and the potential trauma of a certain sewer scene, it is still more of a bloody mess than bloody brilliant. I am sure Gareth Evans has a masterpiece about folk faith at the bruised margins of the British Empire in him, but The Apostle isn’t it.
I am sick of love letters to the past that have nothing new to say to the now. Further iterations of The Wicker Man kindle no desire in me to watch them again. The sermon of how man is more monstrous than any folkloric monster has been taught with this particular parable too many times. The spirit of Robin Hardy needs no new resurrection. The folk horror genre and filmmakers working within it desperately need to explore new paths across the ghost soil.
7/10 Sort-of. Good for those who want atmospheric gore, poor for those who need something nuanced or new. The Apostle is brilliantly acted, beautifully shot and full of ambition, but ultimately empty of any expected greatness.
My attitude towards every contactee, every experiencer of the high strangeness that often comes when you intersect with a UFO, has always been one of curiosity-focussed listening. Whether someone is telling you about the time a seven-foot tall cockroach in a spacesuit telepathically offered them ‘space LSD’ or how they met Seldek, the leader of the Cosmic Council of Co-Operatives in the late night garage, judgment has to be parked, questions prioritised. Did the cosmonaut cockroach have an odour associated with it? Was the ‘space LSD’ a free sample or was it a proposed trading arrangement? How long do you estimate its antenna were? Did its spacesuit feature any insignia or unusual details? Was Seldek making a purchase at the garage or was he just loitering there in hope of instigating conversation? Do you think your observation Seldek looked uncannily similar to Ziggy-era Mick Ronson ‘but paler and with less glitter’ was part of an attempt by him at blending in? Were you surprised when Selek confessed his marriage problems to you in between explanations of interstellar socialism and his culture’s rejection of economic determinism? – Mel Marbury, editor of Hookland UFO News
An Entry from The Encyclopaedia of Hookland
MYSTERIES BEYOND SHERLOCK!
One of the most popular non-drama series produced by Hookland Associated Television in the 1970s was its true crime and paranormal documentary show Mysteries Beyond Sherlock! Featuring a mix of dramatisations, interviews with witnesses and experts, each 26-minute episode would typically feature one unsolved crime and one unexplained Fortean conundrum. Both would be introduced by the show’s host Peter Cushing whose star power and calm gravitas were the production’s key attraction for many viewers. Originally developed as an hour-long bank holiday special that aired on August 30th, 1976, it examined the mysteries of the Bonehouse Butcher, the disappearance of Lady Stane and the Blagden Ball UFO flap. It was a surprise winner in the ratings and quickly commissioned as a full series which aired in the spring of 1977. Each episode was introduced by Cushing with some variation of the text: “I have been a lifelong fan of Sherlock Holmes. Since I first read those incredible tales of world’s greatest consulting detective by Arthur Conan Doyle as a boy, I have been fascinated by his powers of deduction, logic and observation. It has been among the biggest delights of my professional career to have portrayed him on film, television and stage. I have even had to honour to contribute forewords to books dedicated to great man. My admiration is almost boundless. Yet I have to confess, there might just be an enigma or two he would struggle to solve. There might just be mysteries beyond Sherlock. I wonder what the great detective would have made of the case of …” Having given a brief introduction to the mystery and after the filmed segment featuring dramatisations and interviews was complete, Cushing would then give an opinion on whether the mystery would have foxed Holmes. Running for five seasons, the production team favoured historical crimes and possibly paranormal conundrums. Most puzzles examined were drawn from Hookland and its neighbouring counties for budgetary reasons, but cases outside the county such as the dream factor in the exposure of the Red Barn Murder and the Thornton Heath poltergeist were also included. Giving an interview to Clive James ahead of the release of his 1984 Sherlock Holmes film The Mask of Death, Cushing explained the show’s cancelation: “I adored that show. They used portraits of Holmes I had painted for the opening titles and they always found such wonderful locations to film my segments in – libraries, museums, a necropolis railway station which had not been open for decades. However, I stopped doing it a couple of years ago because some of the mysteries they wanted to do were just too silly to be associated with Holmes.” The original films of Mysteries Beyond Sherlock are believed lost in the fire that destroyed the Hookland Associated Television archives in the 1980s although some pirated video copies of several episodes are known to be in private circulation.
Do you know the speed of green gods?
No minutes ticked in unfurling leaves
No hours in root tangle, rain-swelling
They blink in seasons, spin in centuries
Precession clock of star, crow-black sky
No answer made to prayer of rapid noise
Gift instead stone for slow swallow down
Gift signs fated to furring with moss maps
Wood stalking rate, erosion feasting pace
This is how you speak to green speeded gods
– C.L. Nolan, The Speed of Green Gods, among the final batch of poems written by him in 1937, the year of his death
Hookland Roll of Kindness
Byron Ballard
Amy Brennan
Scott Campbell
Roger Clarke
April Cole
Lee Ann Day
Nathan Downs
Gordon Peake
Sarah-Jane Farrer
K J Stark
Maria Strutz
Paul Wilson
In kindness there is connectivity, an impulse for good and a better world that is not denied. Kindness is a refusal of darkness. In its graceful light friendships have been found, lives saved and hope restored. – C.L. Nolan
If I say I loved that you received a string of abusive emails from a professor at Cornell University, I trust you'll understand my sentiments - definitely a tribute to your creativity, David.
"The Speed of Green Gods" is a wonderful piece. You are so adept at breathing life into uncanny things.