Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings through the British Ritual Year

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Running through modern Scottish and Irish mythology, the legend of the Cailleach may well have begun life in literature before tumbling into the world of folklore. The goddess is a shaper of mountains and wild places, a bringer of storms and winter. Although it is unclear how old the animistic practices associated with Tigh nam Bodach actually are (some say they were developed in the 18th or 19th centuries by shepherds), the place names in this landscape certainly suggest a venerable association with the goddess.

Just an absolute and total TOME, without which it is highly unlikely we would be typing these words you are reading. Top shelf material of the most sacred and venerated kind. He’s a dab hand at writing tunes too. Hail to the Arch Drood. St Nicholas church, Trellech, where sculpted side panels of a 17th-century sundial bear witness to the village’s mysteries. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Visit Monmouthshire Rob Young’s peerless overview of Britain’s ‘visionary music’ explores a tangled web of folk connections, from song collectors and pastoral composers to acid folk eccentrics and electronic pioneers. All are united by the inspiration they draw from this haunted old place we call home. WINTER Make merry at the Chepstow wassail, and listen out for the sunken church bells of the lost medieval city of DunwichTigh nam Bodach, from where the goddess Cailleach, her husband and their children watch over the land. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Dartmoor is a weird place; temporal dislocation comes with the territory. Wayfinding is not easy among this gorse, these rambling tors and secluded brooks. And when an autumn mist descends, you can be transported: a bronze age farmer to your left, a medieval tin miner to your right, and up ahead the lord of the manor has antiquarian ambitions. He’s just repositioned those stones. The earth gnomes don’t approve. So infuriated were the gnomes by the quarrying of their finest granite to rebuild the farmhouse at Fernworthy that they stole the firstborn child of the farmer who had committed the sin. On Dartmoor, “don’t upset the gnomes” seems to come pretty high on the list of folk rules. Hauntology OG, E.F. Benson’s wonderful, eerie tales often focus on resonances, with the spectral imprint of past events reemerging in the present. This collection features an account of the author’s supernatural experiences at his house in Rye. The revenant presence is described in terms familiar from Benson’s ‘spook stories’: ‘It was as if something out of the past, some condition of life long vanished, was leaking through into the present.’

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Hutton’s brilliant investigation into deity-like figures in Christian Europe shows us that these characters are much more complex than was once thought. The epilogue features the definitive account of the evolution of the Green Man.

In this book is a radical idea. By walking the ancient landscape of Britain, engaging with the traces of the deep past and following the wheel of the year as it turns, we can find a pathway that reconnects us to our shared folklore, to the seasons and to nature, setting a course towards optimism, re-enchantment and brighter futures. Leyline is a quest and a rite of re-enchantment: by day seeking out connections in the landscape, and by night delighting in music and merriment, we embrace a collective endeavour in the time of the individual. The inn has its share of tales told around the fire, a favourite being “The Salted Corpse”. This yarn tells of a traveller staying overnight who opens up an intriguing chest in his room. To his horror, he finds himself gazing upon the face of a dead man. Suspecting murder, he rushes to the landlord, who casually informs him that “tis only father”, the old man having been salted down and stored until the trip can be made from the remote inn to Lydford for burial. Consisting of two stunning stone circles, the Grey Wethers are one of the megalithic highlights of this part of the world. Their position makes them even more appealing – you’re likely to be sharing the circles with relatively few visitors or perhaps only the skylarks that dance overhead. Harold’s Stones in Trellech are said to have been flung into the village during a competition between a wizard and the devil. Photograph: Homer Sykes/AlamyThe wheel turns and we find ourselves halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Signs of new life emerge, the earth awakens, a new issue of Weird Walk pokes through the fecund mulch… One of the most beautiful and fascinating photo books of all time, and another heavyweight (both in terms of the book’s heft, and HS’s sizeable influence on the Weird Walk worldview) that deserves a place on everyone’s coffee table – especially those with an interest in the strange and arcane calendar customs that still thrive in the margins all over the British Isles. Dartmoor is not as out of the way as it once was, and we would hope that there is less need to reach for the salt cellar these days. However, this land has somehow managed to retain a peculiar flavour of isolation well into the 21st century, and, especially away from its most-frequented spots, it still holds almost limitless possibilities for exploration.