Albion?
A Folk Horror Glossary
Who haunts Albion? (2025)
Arriving on Albion (As a term, a place, or a myth)
Albion, dervived from the Latin Albus, meaning ‘white’, as in the white chalf cliffs of England, is the old mythological term for this land. A country long sustained and shaped by its stories. Some of these stories are very old indeed, and some are not so old, but they borrow from the old to make up new stories about how great the old was. Sometimes a story can be found in an ancient well, once used for its healing properties, but now belonging to a saint. Then the well, the saint, and those who used it before are all forgotten. Until, that is, these watery stories are pulled up again and are molded into something else, something convenient perhaps, to whoever is doing the digging.
Sometimes I am the one digging. I like to go roaming through this isle, looking for various stories that lie just beneath the soil. I like to walk through a place and feel the eerie, enchanting presence that seems to wrap around much of the British landscape at a certain time of day. Then I go home and dig again, only this time in books and on the internet (My least favorite place to dig, it’s too bright, and there are too many holes). Then I return to the same place I was roaming, camera in hand, to see which of these characters might want to appear.
This act of uprooting and reanimating stories shapes how I think about place. It ignites that sense of genius loci, meaning the spirit of a particular place, or its unseen guardians. For me, these are the ones we find in the stories of ‘Old Albion’: completely made up, yet real in our collective imagination. They are kept alive by storytellers, filmmakers, and artists alike, or by your local farmer, pub owner, or anyone who still might like to leave a piece of bread on a stone as a blessing.
Recently, I have been aware of another sort of digging happening in the same soil, another ‘unearthing’ bringing up tales of a ‘Deep England’ - a term coined by academic Patrick Wright from his 1985 book On Living in an Old Country. Deep England is a nostalgic, dreamlike and extremely conservative vision of what England used to be. It has never actually existed but is a fantasy of what England was like before urbanisation and immigration.
While I’m afraid to confront the resurgence of nationalism sweeping our landscape, I realise that to keep making work about this mythical country, to walk the unsteady tightrope between the tensions of our past and our present. I need to confront how the tales of this “wyrd” and enchanted land are being retold and reshaped to fit a certain political agenda.
Sometimes I am the one digging. I like to go roaming through this isle, looking for various stories that lie just beneath the soil. I like to walk through a place and feel the eerie, enchanting presence that seems to wrap around much of the British landscape at a certain time of day. Then I go home and dig again, only this time in books and on the internet (My least favorite place to dig, it’s too bright, and there are too many holes). Then I return to the same place I was roaming, camera in hand, to see which of these characters might want to appear.
This act of uprooting and reanimating stories shapes how I think about place. It ignites that sense of genius loci, meaning the spirit of a particular place, or its unseen guardians. For me, these are the ones we find in the stories of ‘Old Albion’: completely made up, yet real in our collective imagination. They are kept alive by storytellers, filmmakers, and artists alike, or by your local farmer, pub owner, or anyone who still might like to leave a piece of bread on a stone as a blessing.
Recently, I have been aware of another sort of digging happening in the same soil, another ‘unearthing’ bringing up tales of a ‘Deep England’ - a term coined by academic Patrick Wright from his 1985 book On Living in an Old Country. Deep England is a nostalgic, dreamlike and extremely conservative vision of what England used to be. It has never actually existed but is a fantasy of what England was like before urbanisation and immigration.
While I’m afraid to confront the resurgence of nationalism sweeping our landscape, I realise that to keep making work about this mythical country, to walk the unsteady tightrope between the tensions of our past and our present. I need to confront how the tales of this “wyrd” and enchanted land are being retold and reshaped to fit a certain political agenda.
Folk Horror as a genre is constantly pulling the past tensions into the present and the contemporary. It draws on a literal or mythological haunting, or a collective feeling of a cursed past. The consequences of separation from our land during the Enclosure Acts, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, saw the privatisation of common land, and forced rural communities into the cities to fuel the ongoing Industrial Revolution. This marks a turning point in both rural life and access to the common land, an act with effects so brutal that they can still be felt today in terms of land rights in the UK.
As a genre, Folk Horror tends to present isolated rural communities as being “the folk” who turn horrific. When a community becomes so detached from modern life, it begins to appear too other, too separated, almost monstrous in the eyes of the modern observer. This classic trope of the “innocent outsider,” who carries with them all the moralities and technological advancements of the ‘modern man,’ serves as a placeholder for what is considered good and ‘proper’ in society.
When this innocent protagonist stumbles upon a secular and unchanged community, one that has formed a peculiar, often sacred but usually unsettling relationship with their land, unburdened by modern technologies, they are seen to have turned back to the ‘old ways’, or to the old gods found in the fields. These communities often embody a forgotten relationship to the land, one of ritual, worship, and perhaps animism.
This ‘old way’ is still visible across our landscape in ancient burial mounds, standing stones, and the yew trees found in every churchyard. However, we seem to have collectively forgotten what they were for. Thus, the old ways become haunting. They become horrific in their unfamiliarity.
But what if we turn this old trope on its head? What if we turn the stone to see that these strange folk could be an analogy of ourselves? Their horrific and often brutal acts may mirror what we have done, what we are still doing, and what we fear is yet to come when we consider our relationship with the environment. Furthermore, do these “horrific folk” perhaps not only embody the anger of a scorned landscape, but also stand as an expression for the folk who have been and are still excluded from it? Those who cannot cross the “private land” signs, those of us who must keep to the paths, all those who have been told to move on, who “do not belong,” who have been made to feel unwelcome in the land they call home.
Children of the Stones
In the 1970s, there was a notable and strange rise in folk horror themed children’s TV programs being shown on British channels. The renewed interest in the occult and the ancient landscape was very possibly a response to the cultural anxieties felt at the time, many of which feel eerily similar to those of today, with concerns around technological advancements, ecological collapse, and the erosion of traditional or rural communities. The typical image of the nuclear family structure had been the hallmark of the 1950s and 1960s, and many youths who may have been disillusioned by these models of modernity found themselves turning back to the land and to the old ways. This return coincided with a broader folk revival in film and media, which brings us to Children of the Stones, a 1977 children’s program broadcast on ITV, written by Trevor Ray and Jeremy Burnham and directed by Peter Graham Scott.
The series tells the story of astrophysicist Adam Brake and his son Matthew, who move to the small village of Milbury (based on and shot in Avebury) because Adam has been sent there to study the stone circle that surrounds the settlement. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes apparent that the village is being controlled by cosmic forces that connect the stones to outer space, thereby trapping the residents in a cyclical time loop.
Children of the Stones has been described as “the scariest program ever made for children,” according to comedian Stewart Lee in a documentary radio series by BBC Four.* Scholar Manuel von Trummer writes in their thesis, “Child be Strange! – Adolescent folk horror as counter heritage in British TV series of the 1970s,” that, “By interpreting the past through a different lens, folk horror creates counter memories and counter heritage which shift the perspective toward marginalized and subaltern social groups.” Trummer asks us to consider what a counter memory for this land might be, and how we could reflect on which memories have been fed to us in contrast to those that lie in our stones.
Did you know there’s a sacred well behind a carpark in Bromley
Excavating under an Oak tree
Two years ago I returned to live on a small holding in Devon. I grew up on this field, living an off grid way of life before solar panels and wind turbines had gone mainstream. At the time, it did not feel cool as a teenager having to use a solar powered shower outdoors in December.
But it was a magical upbringing nontheless. I was raised by a community of Neopagans who, for all their contradictions, taught me to honor and devote time to the land, the seasons, and our more than human kin.
When I returned to this field twenty years later, ready to escape London and return to a ‘simpler life’, I began to record my experience of learning to live with the land again, and of learning to live with an uncomfortable, half forgotten past that lay in this field. This led to the second film I made there, titled Oak Tree Film.
The oak tree in question lived at the bottom of the field, where strange men with long chest hair used to live and occasionally tell me about aliens. Next to their caravans stood a huge tree that seemed to watch over our odd little community. I was told he could be found in the Domesday Book. I didn’t know what that meant, but I understood it meant he was really, really old.
I decided to make a film about this old friend, so I began visiting him each day. I noticed the soil was soft and squidgy under my feet when I stood close to him. I knew this also meant it would make good clay. I had never foraged my own clay before, so I walked up to the top of the field by the car park (the only place to get signal) and watched a short YouTube video about how to do it. I then got to work.
I put on a white full body work suit I had picked up from a charity shop. I wasn’t entirely sure how deep I needed to dig or what kind of soil I was actually looking for, but the digging felt cathartic. I found a piece of white cloth with lace on it, and after letting the soil sit in water to separate, I placed the remaining mud in the cloth and squeezed. On film it looks as if I am squeezing a heart, the deep reddish brown water dripping from the fabric, covering my white overalls. The shots cut between this and me digging and digging in the ground, as if I am excavating for a long forgotten body, for my mother, for my forgotten friends. As if I were creating my own personal folk horror: a horror of off grid living, a horror of forgetting. Horror can be the most cathartic genre when it comes to your own demons coming out to play.
Grim.
“Several names of prehistoric landscape features such as earthworks, hill forts, and flint mines, include the element ‘Grim-’. The name Grimsditch occurs in eleven counties (in some, more than once); Grimsbury twice; Grime’s Graves, Grimspound, and Grim’s Hill once each. Presumably this Grim was a super-natural entity—perhaps Woden, since his Scandinavian equivalent, Odin, had ‘Grimr’ as a secondary name, and since the massive earthwork Wansdyke (Wiltshire) was undoubtedly named for him. However, there is also an Anglo-Saxon noun grima, meaning ‘goblin’ or ‘spectre’”.
A Dictionary of English folklore, Oxford University Press (2000)
Jaguars as aliens.
My friend Dan once told me that when he was growing up in Stroud, his mother would take him into the woods on weekends to set up trail cameras around the trees. They would sling a lump of meat bought from the butcher high into a nearby branch. Then they would return the next day to collect the cameras and see whether they had captured a glimpse of what they were searching for: big cats.
The big cat myths in England have been around for decades. In 1976 the UK introduced the Dangerous Wild Animals Act. The act required owners to obtain a licence from their local authority to own wild animals. Many people believe that when these new rules came in, some owners released their animals into the countryside rather than complying and paying the fees for licensing.
Over time this idea grew into a modern folktale. Farmers reported livestock being mauled by something unknown. Blurry images of large black shapes appeared on news channels and still do from time to time.
The main criticism for this theory is simple. If big cats were truly roaming England, surely they wouldn’t go unnoticed. Surely everyone would be spotting these huge creatures. However, Dan’s mother, along with a few of her friends, thought they might have the answer. Whenever they collected the footage from their trap cameras, the meat was always gone, and strange little orbs floated through the images. Their conclusion, the big cats are actually aliens.
This remains my favorite folktale.
M
Mother
We never gave our mother a gravestone. We buried her under the apple tree by the pond. The pond isn’t there anymore; it’s gone. The water dried up, and now all that remains is a large dip filled with plastic liner, moss, and the odd stone or shell.
We never gave our mother a gravestone. We buried her by the barn in the orchard so she could look over the field and haunt us into pruning the trees.
We never gave our mother a gravestone, but there is a stone circle at the bottom of the garden. I never did ask her where she got those standing stones from. Did they want to be moved in the first place? Are they also haunting us now?
O
I tried to film my offering to the hawthorn tree three times. I knew I shouldn’t ; surely the act of giving an offering loses something if I then try to gain something back from it. Traditionally you are meant to bring milk or whiskey (for the fae who inhabit Hawthorn) the corner shop only had kefir, so that became my stand in.
I snuck into a farmer’s field in Chistlehurst, the only place I could find that had enough Hawthorn to gather from. As I poured kefir onto the tree and tried to film it, I pondered on whether kefir is toxic to horses. I then wondered whether, at 28 and living in London, it was acceptable for me to be trespassing on a farmer’s field to give an offering to his trees. I wondered if he might have a gun. I wondered if he would think I was crazy. I wondered if maybe I should pack all this in and get what they call a “big girl” job. Personally, I think big girls should be out in the fields, but field-work doesn’t always pay the rent.
Anyway, none of the footage came through. Every segment where the kefir actually poured onto the Hawthorn tree had vanished. The hawthorn was mocking me.
Q
Qanon is like mythology for people who spend too much time on the internet and no time outside.
Super 8 and specters
Mark Fisher describes the term ‘eerie’ in his book The Weird and the Eerie as “when there is something present where there should be nothing, or when there is nothing present where there should be something.” Something similar happens when with shooting film; in fact, one might describe the whole process as strange, magical, and definitely eerie. From loading the film into the camera, to winding it up and pressing the trigger, to washing, bleaching, and redeveloping it, to placing it on the drying rack and praying it comes out, and finally to seeing it projected onto the wall for the first time, every step is hands-on and requires a certain amount of hope or prayer. So much so that you start to feel there is something happening that is out of your control: the way the chemicals interact, the way the image slowly emerges before you.
But the main moment is the first viewing. Sometimes everything you thought would be there is not, and the things you assumed might not work arrive in full focus and contrast. The film takes you on a different journey from the one you believed you went on. Light and stains and dust begin to speak in flickers; images you know you shot start to disappear; things you do not quite remember filming take center stage. When you do this enough times, it can feel ghostly, as if you are capturing another world, one just beneath the surface, one that requires a different lens to be revealed.
“Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”
3 May 1981
Citations
Burnham, J. and Ray, T. (1977) Children of the Stones (TV series) UK HTV and ITV.
Fisher, M. (2016) The Weird and the Eerie. London, Repeater Books.
Parliament of the United Kingdom. Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976. c. 38.
Simpson, J. and Roud, S. (2000) A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London, Verso.