Maps of the Lost volume 1
...from the hills that are made with older hands
the stones
There's a small field that never gets farmed because it is littered with stones, and is owned by no one. The farmers who work the land around it know that if you take a stone away from it, something will put two back overnight. You might think to stay up all night to see what it is. I wouldn't. Six of the stones in the field had that idea.
Notes from the Cartographer
Welcome to the first Maps of the Lost newsletter, and thank you for subscribing. For now, this is going to come out once a month, although I won’t yet promise which day, to give myself a little breathing space. So roughly a month. If it becomes popular, then it might become more often. We’ll have to see.
Someone asked on the Maps Facebook page where the idea for it came from, but the answer to that is found in another question: why do I write them? I have a day job, and another writing career of sorts, so why over five years of throwing out onto the internet these strange little pieces of folklore and myth? I thought about that for a little while, and the answer is that I love writing them, it feels like play, rather than work, and nothing else that I write makes me as happy in the writing as these do. All of which then got me thinking, so why is that?
The answer is that ever since I was a child, and climbed up my dad’s bookshelves when he wasn’t looking to get down what was to become one of the most precious things I own (more on that later), I have loved the strange and the eerie, the wild and the lonely places, that feeling you get when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as if you are being watched but no one is in sight, the moment in the woods when you know you are not alone, the hush of the early hours when the barriers between this world and others feel so thin that you could just step through them.
From that, and from all the books and film and music that evoke the same feelings…comes Maps of the Lost.
odd John
Guidebooks will tell you that the grotesque carvings of a face in the stone of a country church in Suffolk are thought to be medieval representations of the devil, or of a jack-in-the-green, which in medieval minds may have amounted to one and the same thing.
This is not true. The carvings are in fact a skilful representation of the mason's adopted son, Odd John, who was found as a baby in the middle of a ploughed field in a storm, and who although generally benevolent could make crows fall from the sky by pointing his finger. He made a fair living being rented out to farmers.
churches on churches
In Sussex, there is a very old church built on a hill. If you wander into it to pass the time on a drowsy summer's day, when even the bees seem half-asleep, you may find a badly-printed leaflet that tells you that it is built on the site of a previous place of worship.
This holds more truth than the author (a rather pompous Edwardian sexton, who was murdered by a goat, but that's a different story) realised. The church is built on an Anglo-Saxon place of worship, which was built on top of an Iron Age barrow inside the hill, which once had a megalith on top dragged up there by Neolithic hands (and which was shattered to make stones you walk on as you enter the church), but the hill was made by older hands, wooden bucket of earth over wooden bucket of earth, on top of layers of timbers that hide the hole that leads you down out of this world and into another.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
Each newsletter is going to feature inspiration and further reading, books and films and links that may have nothing in common other than that in my mind they live in the same neighbourhood as Maps of the Lost. The neighbourhood where something is making noises under the ground, the streetlights flicker on and off, and the shadows don’t move quite how they should.
That book that inspired and delighted and scared me beyond belief?
This one. An endlessly rich and rewarding insight into the amazing folklore of the British Isles. This battered copy is the same one I read four decades ago, the 1973 first edition that sat up on that bookshelf. When my dad died, and my mum asked me if there was anything of his that I wanted…this was what I asked for.
I’m going to include a quote from it in each newsletter. Here’s the first:
Boston, Lincs
The breezes that blow around the exposed tower known as Boston Stump are said to be the result of a struggle between St Botolph and the Devil. The saint so belaboured Satan that he huffed and puffed, raising a wind that has not yet died down.
The welcoming friendly chap on the cover is the Dorset Ooser: expect more from him every month.
Next up: many of you might be familiar with this Guardian article already, but if you’re not, you’re in for a treat. Robert MacFarlane is a terrific nature writer, and all of his books come highly recommended. He’s also a fan of the weird, and his article from 2015, The Eerieness of the English countryside, strides right into the middle of Maps of the Lost territory. (Note to readers: you should not stride into most of the places I write about: you’re much better off sidling cautiously, and stopping often to see what it is that moves in the shadows behind you).
We are, certainly, very far from “nature writing”, whatever that once was, and into a mutated cultural terrain that includes the weird and the punk as well as the attentive and the devotional. Among the shared landmarks of this terrain are ruins, fields, pits, fringes, relics, buried objects, hilltops, falcons, demons and deep pasts. In much of this work, suppressed forces pulse and flicker beneath the ground and within the air (capital, oil, energy, violence, state power, surveillance), waiting to erupt or to condense.
It’s a fantastic starting point to explore books, films, music and art, and although ‘never read the comments in a newspaper’ is right up there with ‘don’t poke what they say is only a man dressed as a demon at the midwinter fair’, this time, make an exception. There’s some great stuff in there too.
Lastly for this newsletter, I’d like to recommend Bob Fischer’s Haunted Generation. Bob has a regular column in the Fortean Times (both the column and the magazine always worth reading), and Haunted Generation provides some essential extra-curricular reading to accompany it. In his own words, Bob is ‘exploring some of the contemporary music, art and literature inspired and influenced by feelings of mid-20th century childhood disquiet’ and the blog ranges through books and music, all shot through with that particular sensibility of a rainy Sunday afternoon in a 70s childhood when the world seems just that little bit off-kilter, as if the angles are all wrong, that is a big influence on Maps.
the oracle
There is one phone box in every city where if you dial a certain number, you will speak to someone who can answer any question you have, about anything. Use it wisely, because afterwards you will find that the number will never work again.
Secrets The Wind Whispers
I’m going to regularly feature audio pieces in this section. As regular followers may know, I’ve been publishing a Maps podcast for the last few weeks, and thank you to those of you who listen to it. I’ve entered it for a competition run by Rode (who make audio hear), who ask for a 1-2 minute version of the podcast. You can listen to that tiny episode here. I’ll be recording more audio just for this newsletter in future editions.
six, twenty-one, three, eleven
Way up in the shortwave, right in the middle of the static, there is a radio station. A female voice, with an accent that no-one can place, reads out a list of numbers. She never stops. Six, twenty-one, three, eleven, eleven, eleven, six. Numbers station enthusiasts on the internet speculate that this station is Russian, or British, or American, or Chinese. Intelligence officers from each of these countries all assume that the station belongs to one of the other sides.
They are all wrong. They also do not know that if the numbers stop, the world comes to an end.
Beyond This Point There May Be Dragons
You’ve been reading Maps of the Lost. Or have you? It’s hard to tell. Maybe this is all just a dream. Or a prophecy, or a forewarning. I hope you enjoyed it. Feedback is always welcome, as I’d really like to shape this newsletter to be what you’d like to read and hear. So ideas, suggestions and comments welcome. You can just reply to this email if you like.
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You can also listen to the Maps podcast, or follow on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Or just listen to the calling of the birds, or the whispers of the wind. Thanks for reading. Stay safe - and choose your questions wisely.