Strange Folk, Country Folk, Trendy Folk

By Will Hale

There are fewer things more bruising to the ego than being back home in the countryside, however briefly. Stepping onto the 376 from Bristol to Glastonbury is a reminder that you can move as far away as you like, but you’ll always be bargaining with your mother for a lift to the town hall bus stop. The “Welcome to Glastonbury” sign, set against the backdrop of the mediaeval Tor, ushers visitors into the Ancient Arthurian Isle of Avalon where ‘mysticism meets modernity’. You’re never far from legend: you can still find Merlin outside the ruins of the Abbey in a starry blue-hat and curtain robes, offering runic divinations for a fiver.

A neon-blue Boomtown Tinkerbell, fresh from the Town Hall Faery Fayre with eyes twinkling and pupils dilated with fairy dust, makes way as I step off the bus. For the price of £30, aspiring dryads and druids are encouraged to ‘express their inner witchy fae-self, in an atmosphere of love and acceptance’. Waiting for me at the bus-stop, my mother can only offer a tut at the “interesting” people we share a county with, as she gives way to a druid on stilts.

A week prior, I found myself stuck in the familiar rhythms of conversation with the city-minded folk of Oxford. Having spent half an hour weighing the merits of NW6 and NW4, and hearing I live in Glastonbury (ish), my newfound acquaintance from Highgate announced: “I just think people from outside of London are so much more interesting!” Perhaps my lack of a Hot-Fuzz twang, or that I was sipping on red wine rather than scrumpy, was one surprise too many. This dichotomy between country and city is nothing new, despite how striking it can be to hear a literary-minded individual from North London paying lip service to a world beyond the M25.

Whilst my acquaintance found it strange that one might have to wait more than thirty minutes for a bus or make a day-trip of visiting an H&M an hour and a half away, recent trends in online, zine-driven culture have refashioned the countryside as once-again strange and unfamiliar. The emergence of zines like Weird Walk and Hellebore, whose first issues were published in 2019, represents a growing desire to refashion the English countryside away from the twee into an aesthetically palatable product. By tapping into walking as a means of finding the uncanny, haunted and mythic qualities embedded within the land and its traditions, Weird Walk hopes to challenge a sanitised nostalgia for Merrie England and re-enchant the land by means of a day out to a stone circle.

In an interview with digital marketing agency Nativve, co-founder of Weird Walk Alex Hornsby rejects such high-brow analysis. With an air of the smoking area folk-philosopher, he eloquently describes the walks across the South Downs which birthed the project as a search for ‘vibes’. Aptly enough, Weird Walk also offers tote bags for sale, a visual testament that you too understand that the vibe has shifted from city slicking to starry-eyed country meandering. Glastonbury Tor graces the cover of Weird Walk’s fifth issue, figured in a faint black and blue haze redolent of cheap fantasy paperbacks and VHS tapes of 1970s BBC television serials which the zine draws inspiration from; and there isn’t a vibe-killing bargain basement sorcerer in sight.

Cecil Sharp, the Edwardian collector of folk tunes, envisioned Morris dancing on the village green as the emblem par excellence of an arcadian England that was always one step removed from reality. As a one-time country dancer myself, it’s an embarrassment that I desperately hope wasn’t captured on video; God forbid the perpetuation of imperial nostalgia in such an unflattering leotard. Weird Walk, however, frames such mawkish displays within a darker, more eerie vision of English folk culture. Rather than sneering at the Morris Dancers on Mayday, Weird Walk’s Instagram is plastered with images of neo-pagan strawmen kicking their legs against a weather-beaten heath. Another image of a group of ‘folk’ dancers from Abbots Bromley, their heads adorned with reindeer antlers and swigging from bottles of ale, asks us not to cringe but to admire their dedication to the strange particularity of these quasi-traditional village rituals.

Attempts by the likes of Sharp to date such a tradition are pointless; it exists in the elusive, vibey measurement of the folkloric ‘who knows when’. A West Country exile such as myself, with one too many reading groups under the belt, might point to the image of the dancers alongside the red-brick housing and tarmac-ed estates as exemplifying an attachment to individuating rural tradition that’s to be admired: tradition as a means of resistance against the backdrop of the one-size-fits all Barratt Homes which litter the countryside. Then again, as Weird Walk’s tacit celebration of the countryside’s incongruence might have it, perhaps it’s their immaculate ‘vibes’ which matters most of all.

Organisations such as Folk Horror Revival and its sub-project The Urban Wyrd are no longer niche endeavours catering to those with an academic interest in ‘folk horror’, or a penchant for cider and cult cinema. ‘Folk horror’ resists definition, encompassing everything from The Wicker Man to Worzel Gummidge, but the genre’s concern with England’s intertwined folklore and the landscape elevates it beyond an episode of Countryfile dubbed with arpeggio strings. Charlie Cooper’s recent documentary travelogue exploring the folklore of the British Isles and its proponents, Myth Country, meaningfully engages with tradition by acknowledging both the absurdity and genuine passion lying behind England’s folkloric obsession. Where a wander to the local ley-lines was once an exclusive activity of neo-pagan oddballs or wrinkled pintmen haunting the corner of the local village pub, it has been made a suitably Instagrammable phenomenon to those with an aesthetic attachment to 70s TV and knock-off esoterica.

By re-enchanting the landscape, new media casts the village askew: tradition made trendy. I’d love to find that same vision of enchantment at home, but next door’s dog has died and I’m told the best way to express my condolences is to stop parking my car so close to their wheelie bins. Yet perhaps, the next time I return home to my parents’ village for Christmas and my mother asks me if I’d like to see the family next door perform Christmas carols in the 14th century monastic fish-house at the end of the road, I won’t turn up my nose as I usually might. Imagining I’m following the ghosts of those dead monks and ignoring the off-key rendition of ‘Little Town of Bethlehem’, I’ll be one of those new trendy country folk; I might even make an Instagram post.

WILL HALE is hoping for a better forecast.

Art by Eloise Cooke