On The River’s Other

The River Beneath

There is a river
beneath the Yarrow.
This other is a dark
cascade. A black
and ceaseless torrent.
It is the lure
which all rivers
follow. And a line
that you can
never cross.

(Landings: Names Dates Genealogies, 2011)

The Cult Revived

The Cult Revived is the working title to an ongoing piece of research that draws together many of the strands from my recent work, stretching from Landings (2009) to Moor Glisk (2012), Nimrod (2014), Ferae Naturae (2015) and Beyond the Fell Wall (2015). It is a proposed ‘linguistic excavation of northern Britain’, although the scale of such an enterprise is perhaps too large for a single work. Initial areas of interest include: archaeology (particularly early hominins); geology, edaphology and taphonomy; funerary landscapes; history relating to animal persecution; mythology relating to animal veneration (particularly horned and antlered deities); earth cults; vegetation and fertility rites, folk-ritual and magic, including masks, shamanism, apotropaia and therianthropy.

Perhaps in acknowledgement of its over-ambitious scale, I have decided to publish both research and work-in-progress in the form of a blog, and a series of printed publications. The first booklet, picking up where ‘Belated Movements’ left off, examines the discovery of a ‘bog body’ at Scaleby, Cumbria, in 1845:

http://thecultrevived.tumblr.com/tcr1