The Seven Stones of Hordron, Derbyshire. A wonderful moorland circle with an indeterminate number of stones (whatever it is, it’s not seven). #StandingStoneSunday
There are some parts of the wood where winter lingers. Tangled stretches that seem unwilling to move forward till the resident Wood Sprite wakes. Snowbell alarms were missed and they continue to growl in their sleep, dreams leaking out as grey headache into a cowered bosk.
The Merry Maidens
Occasionally you come across mausoleums bereft of bodies. Some seem to have been waiting patiently for decades to receive corpses that never came. Others hold a sense of having been abandoned by their residents. Stare too long at their locked gates and you may risk a revenant's return. – #CLNolan
Prehistoric cup and ring carvings at Whitehill Farm, near Faifley in West Dunbartonshire. 📸 My own. #RockArt #Prehistory #Archaeology #WestDunbartonshire
It was a gentle March day, the sort where the village politely coughed its ghosts and pretended there wasn't that much to shiver about. The pub had beer, the shop had biscuits and the gossip only rated 4.2 on the established Banley Spite scale. – Charlotte Perry, 'Doom Pond Diary', 1982
Traditionally the collective nouns for ghosts are an ambush, a stare, a whispering. In the county a risk of ghosts, a procession of ghosts and an unsettling of ghosts are common as are a nagging of ghosts and a disturbance of ghosts.
The county has long history of places that wander. Pubs. Churches. Even whole villages you cannot trust to stay still, to be where you remember when you attempt to revisit. We have centuries of reports that the White Tower is not always at the end of usual track. – George Kindred, 'Haunted Hookland'
Some villages hold their hurts with fearsome grip. Stones leak stories, shadows are spirit-stalked. A visitor may find them picturesque, but the resident knows them as harsh haunted. Mortwell is such a village. It is a risk of ghosts. – #CJosiffe
Joining in the 400th birthday celebrations 17th century antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey!
Among his many discoveries, it was Aubrey who first recorded the local belief that Silbury Hill was the burial place of ‘King Zel,’ but no evidence of any burial has ever been found there.
📷 July, 2023
And the winter coat tomorrow...
The witch feels the land's waking. Feels the greening of her soul. Her sorceries grow, her sorceries bloom. A thousand new feral songs swim her blood. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky
Another March Hare. This is ‘The Hare Woman’s Cottage’. Available as a print and a reminder that the print shop will be taking a couple of months break from 19th March.
Once you realise many tombs are nothing more than dream incubation chambers for the dead, a walk in Ashcourt Necropolis becomes a navigation of visions. No amount of bricked thresholds stops them leaking. Stay still too long and you risk being caught in terminal ephialtes. – #CLNolan
The Empress from Tarot of the Owls - sitting pretty in her luxurious nest throne!
Art by Elisabeth Alba, written by Pamela Chen, published by Llewellyn
The original painting will be up in next week's Changeling Artist Collective Flora & Fauna auction at www.facebook.com/ChangelingAr....
St-Michel tumulus at Carnac in Brittany, built in the fifth millennium BCE. The chapel on top dates from the 17th century. #TombTuesday
📷 Personal photos, June 2023.
Some days I just feel like this Edward Gorey bird gets it.
Today's frog is the galaxy frog.
In her ‘Rite of Pan,’ Dion Fortune summons the god Pan as ‘a hidden god of elemental power: this we name the Pan within.’ According to Gareth Knight, the rite may have been performed by Fortune’s magical order, The Fraternity of the Inner Light, in the late 1930s at their temple in Belgravia.
Looks good to me!
For #StandingStoneSunday The peaceful, rural stone circle of the Piper's Stones, Athgreany, Co. Wicklow in Ireland in 2019.
I first visited in autumn 1989 on a bike during my year off as an aspiring archaeologist waiting to go to uni.
📷 My own, 2019
Castlerigg - wow, what a site! A few times I’ve been lucky enough to have the stones all (or almost all) to myself, following a downpour. #StandingStoneSunday
‘Oh Great God Pan, I know Thee! — I thank Thee — I bless Thee ... for indeed beneath the mantle of the God whose name is Love, is there not room for all in His world to shelter?’ — Margery Lawrence, ‘How Pan Came to Little Ingleton’ (1926)
🎨 Nicoletto da Modena, c. 1500-1510
Art: Cyndy Salisbury
Who's getting excited about the Whimsy Woods Tarot?
This is the High Priestess from the deck I'm creating w/ Deborah Blake, with whom the village turns to for guidance... and tea!
A year(-ish) from now you'll have this deck in your hands + can immerse yourself in this magical world we created!
"This morning I watched the deer
with beautiful lips touching the tips
of the cranberries, setting their hooves down
in the dampness carelessly, isn't it after all
the carpet of their house, their home, whose roof
is the sky?"
Mary Oliver
🎨 William Morris tapestry (detail)
#BookWormSat
The train window is one of the best cinema screens It forces us to stitch together narratives from the briefest glimpse. In a blurred moment whole stories race into us. We see a track and know it is older than the line we travel. We see a track and all of its treading ghosts wave to us. – #DAKilroy
Looking forward to reading the book!
Inside the witch is a library of feral spirits, a hundred books that need not be written for their knowledge is best told by tree root and hedge blossom. Her living practice is a curation of wonders and wild wisdom. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky
