On Weird Walk’s Wanderings and Wonderings Through the British Ritual Year
(Watkins Publishing 2023)
Housed in this precious tome of forgotten time, landscape’s living.
Origins of perception from the age of ice to fate’s heat
Returned in the words of the Weird Walk collective,
Names withheld and yet hidden as England’s old identity now completes.
Stewart Lee sets the scene with his pagan primed introduction,
By connecting with Modern Antiquarian Julian Cope in perspective,
if not in direct content, or style;
Years once thought lost are sourced in streams, stones and ruins
Newly tasted beneath us, as if there were flavours inside secret miles.
Ice preserves all, yet under solstice sun sleepers travel;
Countries formed from such crossings saw the pre-historic create wall and moor,
Home and life sprung from soil, as if survival’s rose could charm nature,
Only to find the Earth Mother’s tit turned like witches towards the mystic air’s
open door.
Leaving the Now is the aim of the aim of this book and is accomplished by walking,
Leasing split Britain in order to secure Albion
Sets both a task and a tide. As the present recedes Weird Walk’s guiding
Through time-travel traipses across soil as sea to stand on.
Ridgeway’s Trail sets the path, charted towards the Avebury Stone Circle,
Offering an ancient age’s assistance in the fresh telling of a horrifying new tale.
Mesolithic and myth grow despite our dead gardens’ curations,
Apostolic archives, says Stewart, which shift the tectonic under each day
as dreams sail;
New voyages, as what was weird works its magic.
Silsbury Hill climbed as a summit despite the missing o with Peter Gabriel’s
Song-sound.
Hours peeled to free fruit from the dried out days we’re all living;
On foot we are brailling each word and wound on old ground.
Rituals unearthed through these seminal and seeding guides to location,
Notes granted as Weird Walk become our ghost-writers and allow
all we once were to be found.
Spring starts us off as sunshine and squall aide renewal.
By Pentre Ifan and Bix Bottom we witness the first equinox.
Yearning learnt and time earned, epitomised by the Cerne Abbas giant,
Nipples as eyes, while his phallus of penis and club levels rocks
Into flat-earth submission, as seen from an A352 Car-park;
Caretaker of portent and passion as his pornography on the hill
Honours some past spell of sex as the still fertile field flowers,
Opening orifices as we witness the strength of his seed and the spill,
Lapped up by land as if Wales wanked for wisdom;
Lust leaving traces as the giant’s graffiti cock becomes quill.
Suffice to say, there’s much more as the Weird Walk comes to Yorkshire,
Temples raised by the druids outside of Ilton Village HQ
Reversals of faith as the pagan promise delivers
Objects of fascination and fear, from cromlech and altars, to menhirs
And trilithons.
Masham’s the place and its Baroness talks of camping students
All of whom heard devil-worship and saw the stone tables which had a pig’s head blooded on.
Nearby breweries help to foam each watering hole with time’s tincture,
Swinton Bivouac has a car-park from which we can see these dark oaths.
Holes within stone are portals and proof of the touches
Of those who tore madly at the fabric of time and of clothes;
Rites rhymed with light which is still the same shining on us,
Night and time now condemning as we become the thing legend loathes.
Summer arrives at Stanton Drew, formed through the arcane kiss of folklore.
Beer becomes potion, brothering with time’s stream,
Yeast yielding years while making them rise as we’re reading;
Near Thaxted we’re dancing, Morris-ing back beyond Middle Ages,
Intoxicants for feet and throat granting rhythm to this walking work’s
Scheme and theme.
Castlerigg captures all, as it has led to centuries of enchantment.
How many poets from Keats and Coleridge on
Oracle in their lines the seeds within this special stone circle,
Langdale’s Axe engineering the neolithic as well as the modern work-song.
Look into Bryn Celli Ddu and you see a still sacred entrance.
Sex with the past. Stone vaginas pagan penetrated widening to give birth
To the buried sons and to the progeny and old order.
Return to these children and to the daughters of dream and find worth.
Opening as a wound weeping the primal blood of beginning;
Man, child and woman find flesh and form from such stone.
As painted cloudscapes perform through the mystic mask’s contours,
Now rock and ruin are actors, with grass grown as chorus,
Spotlit to show you how the knoll on which you perch becomes throne.
Harvest festivals usher Autumn in as we approach Coldrum Long Barrow.
On Pilgrim’s way from Winchester to Canterbury and Kent
Ramblers commune with Thomas Becket, as Julia Cartwright
Near Medway shows how silt becomes heaven sent.
Stone Circles surround. Coldrum’s megalith is one of Britain’s oldest structures,
By picking hops, beer is worship as the gathered throng now imbibe
Yesterday as the wine as the encountered land becomes bible
Not just a guide-book, but guidance itself. Thank you, Scribes.
In reading, we walk, whether on foot, or sat simply,
Curations of essence and of what we have lost filling us.
Here in this beautiful bind and this book which Watkins Publishing savours
Oil is ink burning brightly illuminating revelations to both observe and discuss.
Lessons left out in the cold for far too long,
Light moved from them. Thankfully Weird Walk’s footsteps fire
Stonehenge, Chepstow and Dunwich which are still strong with winter
and able to defend dream’s deep trust.
Treks to England’s haunted Atlantis entice. As on page 218
Recorded echoes remind us.
On Land by Brian Eno captures the famous Dunwich Beach and its air
Made both otherworldly and real, as Stonehenge is also trap and tease
for all tourists,
And at the Devil’s Arrow in Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire
Nature is not just the soundstage but the true character set for time’s care.
Stages prepare extremes of evolution.
Giants dance on old platforms, long toppled now.
There are entire civilisations we’ve lost.
We do not feel their lack. This condemns us.
This book serves our sentence.
Within the reverberations of reading, and of walking
We ride truth’s last vow.
Thus, this is the most crucial of books,
As it is about the world we’ve lost sight of.
Now, in our blindness and in our blandness, too
We are damned. Not just by soil but by sense.
As we anchor our own poor Atlantis.
We are sinking through stone. In these pages
Are the things we should search for.
And yet for now, there’s one question:
Caught in our chaos, will we in time, understand?
We do not know. Harsh winds blow.
But we cannot feel them. Stone is a mirror
As well as mask.
This graves know.
David Erdos 5/8/23
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