Maps of the Lost volume 23

from a lost place and onto the path back home..

Mar 09, 2025

the track down

There's a mountain in Snowdonia you might walk up. Thousands do. But you might be one in a thousand, one in a hundred thousand, and when you are at the summit you will hear a great roaring of air and everything around you will become electric, as if the biggest storm you have ever seen is about to break. Then it will all be gone, and you will be back with people rustling past you like crisp packets in their Gore-Tex and people opening plastic tubs with sandwiches in and people posing grinning by the trig point.

You drink your tea which has that Thermos flask taste which you love because it reminds you of childhood holidays and big skies and a sense of freedom that lasted even when you got back to the car and sat staring out of the window as trees ticked the countryside away back into motorways and towns and home and school.

When you start back down the mountain, you only get fifty yards down the track when without even thinking about it you stop to build a small cairn of stones, only inches high, just to the left of the path. A couple of hundred yards later, you stop and do the same thing again. If anyone asked you why, you wouldn't know, but would just feel a moment of electricity and air moving around you like waves crashing on a shore.

Don't build any more cairns. Fight the idea with all your strength. Just keep walking, step after step after step, and never pick up a rock, never stoop for a stone, never stop.

You have been chosen to mark the track down for what has been trapped on the mountain for two hundred years. Don't show it the way back to the valley, because it will tear down the mountain in a rush of air like wings beating and then it will be upon the world and there will be all the horrors.

Notes from the Cartographer

Well, it's been a hot minute. I hope you're all well. Hello to the people who have joined since the last edition, a long time ago. I'm a terrible person, sorry.

The world is upside down, and sometimes it's nice to wander back to a different world for a while. I hope you enjoy this newsletter being part of yours again.

Expect it more often now. Hello again. Share this with a friend. Or an enemy.

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watchers and listeners

If you are walking up Highfield Lane in the Northumberland town of Prudhoe, you may notice a slight rise in the earth just where some old telegraph poles end. This is what’s left of a Royal Observer Corps Underground Monitoring Post, one of many set up in the Cold War to monitor for the effects of any nuclear strike.

The parts of the Post above ground have long been demolished, and if you were able to climb the ladder down into the dingy chamber that lies below ground, you would find nothing of interest, just a smell of damp and peeling paint.

As you walk away from the rise in the earth you might think you have heard something, something faint and distant under the earth, but best not mention this to anyone. If you do, just to be on the safe side certain people will pull up next to you in a van and you will be put in it, and that will be that.

There is a bunker under the bunker, and this one is still very much in use. Unlike the disused bunker above, the people who work in the much larger one below are not on alert for what might come from the skies. They are listening for what might come up from deep inside the earth, they are listening for what has come up before and what will do so again.

But you will never know about their tireless work. Unless the monitoring and the defences fail. Then you will know about it. We will all know about it. For the short time we have left.

how evil still exists in this world

In a wood in East Kent there's a small pond, green with algae. On a little rock, next to the pond, there's a small frog, blinking in the sunlight, contemplating its little world.

A little way from that pond lived a man called Brendan who through much contemplation and even more tea came to realise that true evil lives in this world, having crept through from the next, and that it makes so much of our suffering come into being. Through years of thought about a geometry that doesn't exist in our world but nonetheless could be brought into being, he discovered a way to trap the evil in a corner that we could not see or understand but which it could never escape from.

Unfortunately, just before he wrote this down a sorcerer turned him into a bluebottle and he staggered and waggled through the air, not quite sure how to fly, until he got to a pond and at the pond was a frog and that's how it ended, and how true evil still lives in this world.

Maps Traced By Other Hands

I love, love, love the stories of Robert Aickman. They leave me feeling disconcerted for weeks after I read them, as if the world isn't right, as if any moment I might get a glimpse behind it and never be the same again without every being able to explain how.

Here's a 1987 TV adaptation of his most well-known story, The Hospice. If you haven't read it, I'd recommend trying to find it first before watching this.

Many of you will have heard this already, but I can't recommend Blindboy Boatclub's podcast enough. Genius and profane, rambling and cutting to the quick, and returning to folklore every so often, there's nothing quite like it. You get a good idea by the fact that, as of the time of writing this, the title of the latest episode is 'The history of Ginger Nuts and understanding the Human Condition via the Temptation of Christ'.

You might like episodes of the podcasts like Quantum Physics in Irish Mythology, New Jersey UFO's and a Medieval monastery in Offaly, Folk Mythology, Dog Saints, The Heroes Journey. Not for the faint-hearted. Check out his short stories too.

Since I last sent a newsletter out, it’s been fascinating to see how the Uncanny podcast has taken over the entire world. There are American excursions for the podcast, Christmas specials, live events, mugs and tee-shirts, TV shows and I would be very surprised if you couldn't go to bed tucked up in your Uncanny matching duvet and pillow set. Bloody hell, Danny.

(Can't begrudge a moment of it: he seems such a lovely man, and it's put the weird back on the mainstream media map).

The film ‘Enys Men’ is strange and haunting. Find out where you can see it here (you can switch country).

The Ooser Speaks

(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain')

Just outside of the Herefordshire village of Sutton St Nicholas stand the Wergin Stones. They have hollowed-out bases, which were probably used to collect rents.

Local legend says that one night in 1652 the Devil moved the stones 240 paces (presumably he was bored), and it took nine yoke of oxen to drag them back to their proper home.

the walkers

You may find yourself driving the dark, narrow country lanes at night in Devon, the moonlight only filtering through the trees every now and then. Drive with care, as there may be walkers on the road, late night wanderers home from a country pub, or young lovers sneaking back home to climb in through the window they left open. If you pass anyone, slow down, and give them plenty of room. We all have to live in this world together.

However, if you turn a bend and see a crowd walking up the lane toward you in silence, a crowd of dozens, a hundred maybe, walking in slow unstopping silence towards you, then do not drive with care and do not slow down and give them plenty of room, and no matter what, do not pull over, do not ever pull over. Put your car into reverse and spin the wheels and take yourself backwards as quick as you can, no time to turn, just backwards, backwards, until you are at least a mile away. Then turn the car around, and drive away, and do not speak of what you saw.

There are 102 of them, they walk and they walk and they walk, and when you encounter them it would be a very bad time to stall your car.

findings

Up in the hills of the Scottish Borders there is a group of four trees up on a hill, and between the trees is a grassy mound.

It's never been excavated, which is unusual. There's barely a barrow or a mound in this island that hasn't been delved into by an enthusiastic Victorian amateur or a local looking for burial treasure. A few have thought about digging into this one, some of them have even made plans, but something else has always got in the way, the need to travel, a sudden illness, a confusion and forgetfulness.

If anyone ever does make it there with spade and pick, they won't know what to make of what they find. There will be coins from recent centuries in the earth below coins from a thousand years before, and coins from places four thousand miles away. They will find object that must be tools, but their purpose will be unclear and it's hard to see how you could hold them in your hand, and there will be animal bones that you can put together any way that you want but still won't make the shape of any animal we know.

And they won't see it, but there will be something else which when they leave with a backpack full of findings will slip after them down the hill, all shadow and shade, and it will catch up with them before the road and then all the things taken from the mound will be put back there along with some new bones.

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. You can just reply to this email if you like.

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