Witches, snow and wonderful creatures!

Waiting for the Snow and Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch
New Books from Gordon MacLellan

Where would you hide a witch?

Where would you hide THIS witch?

Because when the witch in question is magnificent, ancient and flies through the old woods of the world in a mortar, rowing herself along the winds with pestle, and when her house is likely to wander off on its own and play with the capercaille in the shadows...hiding isn't really the idea....

 

Anyway, I've got two new books out now. One ( small spellbook of a booklet) is about Baba Yaga, that wonderful old witch who challenges, tricks, confronts and transforms just about anyone who survives the encounter (and if you don't, never mind, your long bones and skull will feature in the Yaga's garden fence!). The other book is gentler (perhaps). Waiting for the Snow is a new collection of recent poems of mine

 

From the cold stillness of a woodland in winter, to the wonder of bluebells, the perils of still water and the richness of orchards, Waiting for the Snow invites a different connection to the world around us.

Look outward, walk on the riverbank with open eyes and a willing heart. Turn inward and step carefully around the cracks in the pavement. There are mysteries here as well, watchful shadows lurking. Threatening, they still hold their own promise and the possibility of change.

Step out. Step away from the familiar and let Waiting draw you into a world of enchantments.

 

In Waiting you will find charms from birch trees and the wild frolics of the Birken Hoss. There are quiet reflections among bluebells and a dark, cold brooding menace that sits behind the Arctic nights. One of my personal favourites is Vigil that grew out of regular visits to the windswept, story-shrouded hilltop of Fin Cop here in the Peak District

 

BUYING COPIES (yes, please do!)

LINKS TO SALES ON EBAY:

Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch

 12 pages, 80cm x 150cm

Waiting for the Snow, 40 pages, A5 sized

If you would like a full set of recent books: Baba Yaga, Waiting... and Sacred Animals, message me directly and I'll send payment details and post the set to you directly

There is also a set of colourful postcards for sale if you want that extra touch of something tree-ish to send a friend or convince a foe that you're really a very nice (if rather leafy) Person....  

Hide a witch,

Inside a house,

Inside a wood,

Inside a beck,

Inside a bog,

Inside a crag,

Inside a world,

Inside a doll.

 

 

Cathedral Reflections

Cathedral reflections

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall

Malmesbury abbey

I have been asking myself why I find myself attracted to old churches and cathedrals, especially cathedrals. When visiting a new city, or returning to one I know well, sooner or later, I’ll need to check out a cathedral or two.

Is this an unguessed hidden desire for conversion? Don’t think so.

Or perhaps a challenge, an infiltration….again,no. I don’t (often) find myself cackling in old hag triumph.

 

Is it because both large cathedrals and smaller churches feel like very planned temple-caves…Ah, now there is a thought: entering great vaulted chambers of stone. The Mines of Moria, perhaps, or the Chambers of Erebor? The Hall of the Mountain King. Walking through stone forests. Castles also have that sense of a stone space and they exercise their own fascination for me but they hold a degree of intentional violence that can be off-putting. Of course, cathedral histories are rarely sedate themselves, but their initial intentions were perhaps less combative.

Partly, it is the atmosphere. The silence and the ability of a cathedral to swallow the noise of a group of excited tourists, say, without that distracting from the overall experience. And these places hold stories, personal stories: of campaigners, heroes, villains. Of the noble couple with their dogs asleep at their carved feet. Of the martyred saint. Of the lost explorer. Here their stories wait among their named stones: no judgement, just stories to read. To hear. There are bigger stories, too, bound into the stones with holes from musket shot in walls, with the legacy of competitive chapel building, with penances bought, prayers sold. Windows tell their own stories: biblical subjects and in their construction, there are tales of rivalries and changing technologies, replacements rallying communities, the glory of colour spilling into the heart of the cave.

St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

I come back again to silence and reflection. These are places where people gave thought to issues wider and deeper than themselves and the everyday issues of survival. Here they communed, commune, with their connection to the infinite. I may not agree with a lot of the conclusions they reached in such consideration: I have spent a lot of my life as someone who would not be approved of, generously forgiven perhaps, if I came creeping back, but the proud awareness of who, and what, and how, I am would not have been welcomed. Still wouldn’t be for some of these people around me as I wander. I know others wouldn’t care but I have a long memory and carry a legacy of accumulated damnations with me.

 

St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

But here I can sit and settle into that contemplative silence, can feel old stone shaped with love and skill. I can hear footsteps whispering on stone floors worn smooth by centuries. Here I can appreciate someone else’s wonder and find a connection to my own.

 

As I was writing this, I also spent some time at the Stones of Stenness on Mainland, Orkney. There birdsong falls like rain. There, there is a different connection. There, there is still silence, lying behind the showers of song. Here, being with the Stones is like meeting old friends and the greatest feeling is joy.

 

Stones of Stenness, Orkney

 

CATHEDRAL

 

St Olaf, St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

They built a ship,

A tall ship of stone,

To sail our souls in,

With a crew of carved and painted saints

To set it on its way.

 

If I had a soul,

That ship could have brought me to pray,

With its power and grace,

But we are the soul-less, my kind and I,

The doors of Paradise closed to us,

You tell us.

Unwanted, unrepentant, disturbing,

The Fallen, the Doomed, the Damned.

 

The wind that fills your ship is song,

And those songs rise,

Bright birds flying,

Soaring,

To be trapped

Against the rafters and the slates,

 

But we are spirit,                                                              

And sing as spirit, not soul,

And the west calls us

To islands in the wide seas,

And a sunset beyond the edge of the world.

We leave these sinking ships

Behind.

 

This poem was inspired by St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. Originally, it also grew out of a conversation in the hollow hills of Orkney’s chambered tombs but while the second voice began in faerie it could just as easily be me talking as the human that I am

A dream from the seed's wings

 

Treasuring Trees: celebrating Derbyshire's Trees

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery•

19th february - 8th june 2022 

 

Birch tree,

Will you gift me a dream,

From the seed’s wings,

...From the mere’s mirror?

Three of us have worked together to gather this exhibition. While Sarah and Valerie are visual artist creating paintings, drawings and photographs, I’m a storyteller, a puppeteer and a poet as much as anything else so inspiration for me shapes itself into characters and words 

 

Birch Boggarts waiting for hair...

I like birch trees: their dusty elegance, their endurance, the simple moonlit beauty of their bark all intrigue me. There are stories bound up with birch trees.In the Highlands of Scotland, birch woods are haunted by “The One With the White Hand” who drifts through the trees like mist. If she (?possibly? people don’t usually enter close conversation to get a real sense of gender!) sees you, she may pursue you….If she catches you, a touch from one of her long slender fingers on your forehead will inspire you, make a bard of you. If that finger taps your heart….you will die

 

Birch trees for me went in a lumpier direction and I found birch boggarts waiting to speak… A set of birch tree boggart puppets are taking shape for Treasuring Trees. With them came words, a set of late night, just before sleep, snippets whispered into my drowsy mind by the boggarts that live among the birch roots. These are pages from the Birch Boggarts’ Spellbook. 

 

A time ago, a while ago, the life of a birch ago, a birch wood was being felled and the boggarts of that wood knew they would die with their trees, so they gifted their Spellbook to a human, giving him permission to share its pages.

 

In the Birch Box at Treasuring Trees some of those pages will accompany “my” Birch Root Boggarts….I have been enjoying these lines: they hold mix of danger and beauty that marks most encounters with the peoples of Faerie:  

Birch is the breath

Of inspiration through the wood 

(from: “To be sung when brewing birch-bud tea”)

 
And then:

Our curse lies in a cold wind

And a shadow behind the door.

At some point during the exhibition, all the available pages of the Spellbook will be posted on this blog as a booklet to download for anyone who needs a bit of Birch Leaf Wine in words

 

 

 

*19^th February – 8^th June 2022 at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. Entrance is free so please feel inspired to buy some postcards or a print in the shop!

 

 

Treasuring Trees: celebrating Derbyshire's trees 

find out more: Treasuring Trees

Elder Tree story on film

 

When the Elder Tree Laughs

- of ancient faeries and troublesome witches

We woke with a rustling rhythm
A stamped percussion,
The rattling beat of twigs on bark.
We woke, 
Dancing!

Creswell Crags on the eastern edge of Derbyshire holds some of the most significant prehistoric cave dwellings in the UK. Here Neanderthals lived. Here early Homo sapiens carved and drew and etched into bone. Here mammoths walked and reindeer ran and wolves waited.

And here sometime a few centuries later, people carved witch marks into walls and slabs and hoped they could keep some wickedness away. Or maybe not. The witch marks are there: the biggest collection of such marks in the country. Usually found in ones and twos in homes, on lintels and thresholds, a symbol to keep the house safe. Here there are hundreds, piled on top of each other: line and cross and curve, the Virgin Mary invoked through letters, a prayer against danger

A line beside a line beside a line

Strike the line and strike and strike.

Each line a blow, a beat, a bolt,

This line is an arrow, a knife to cut a witch’s flesh.

With the witch marks as a theme and with the dwindled numbers of visitors this year, the Crags organised a weekend of digital events: the Creswell Crags Midwinter Festival of Folklore. 

This piece of mine featured in that Festival but now is available on the Creeping Toad youtube pages. The Festival and its features were free to watch but there is a JustGiving page and if you enjoy our little poem you might like to  a) go to the Crags vimeo page and see which festival films are still on there and b) after enjoying all of that richness, go to the JustGiving page and, well, just give!

"When the Elder Tree Laughs" weaves the spirits of landscapes together with scared people carving witchmarks and the wild witches who don’t really care about marks, the power of prayer or people invoking Mary. Read by myself and a cast of nine other people, we invite you to make a hot drink, find a biscuit or a mince pie or three and settle down for a 20 minute tea break and an adventure into mystery and the bitter taste of ancient anger 

With many thanks:

• to Creswell Crags for the inspiration
• To the cast for their voices and enthusiasm: Susan Cross, Jo Crow, Woody Fox, Lou Hart, Annie Lord, Sarah Males, Peter Phillipson, Philippa Tipper, Gillian Wright
• to Ruth Evans for permission to use her beautiful painting in the film!

On Law Hill

 on Law Hill

There are ravens here, I think. I hear their voices, the clap of their wings, but those voices croak with laughter as I turn to spy them and I don’t know if I am seeing or simply feeling the metallic gleam of sunlight on green-black wings.

I would like to know the story of this hill, of the Scots Pines who grow straight on this windswept outcrop. Standing here, I can turn east and feel a wind fresh from the North Sea and see the Lomond Hills. Westward on a clear day, there are the Ochils and past them the Campsie Fells and beyond them it feels that all the reach of the central lowlands lies before this knoll on the foot of Hillfoot Hill.

I would like to know who grazes this hill. There are no little offerings, although sheep nibble the flanks of the hill where the scouts of an army of gorse are poking cautious gold-dusted green heads over the curves of the hill. The grass here inside the fenced compound is short. Rabbits? Deer? Fence-hopping sheep? Perhaps this is just new spring growth but even in summer the grass here is short. I would like to know. I would like to know who walks the gentle curving paths that circle the hill, wandering routes that spiral to a tree-ringed centre. It feels a more ceremonial approach than simply to march up and stride on to the hilltop. The modern access is fenced. It is straight and obvious and terribly sensible but is a good path to walk barefoot when you are clear of the trees by the car park. Then it stops and you step from that straight, orderly path onto soft grass in the shadow of the trees and a curving path to peace.

Under the gaze of the Ochils, of Hillfoot Hill, of Whitewisp and Saddle and Kings Seat, Law Hill is an outcrop, the upthrust toe a sleeping giant. It feels like it should be a hillfort or hold a barrow or a Roman sentry post or perhaps a camp of brigands watching for the Muckhart Droves, bringing pigs down Glendevon to the Pools and the Gates.  It might be a faerie hill with no camp or barrow or building for the good sense of not doing any such reckless thing on a hill where the Good Neighbours watched. I could fill this small hilltop with stories.


On this cold spring afternoon, a moment comes when everything stops. Even the wind takes a breath and the hilltop echoes with silence. Unexpected, unbidden, lines from the Havamal surface in my thoughts, “word following word, I found me words; deed following deed, I found me deeds…”. Angular pine twigs lie in runes in the grass and I am sure there is the story to tell. Then an explosion of titmice bursts through the trees and the moment lifts into a small glory of feathers and avian laughter.

I could fill this hill with stories, my stories. Or I can listen to the stories the trees tell me. Or i can just soak in a spring afternoon and walk homewards refreshed and uncurling like the ferns in the sweet chestnut woods below the hill.

https://getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/local/law-hill-clackmannanshire


An earlier visit:
On Law Hill
    They always say you should never…
Early autumn, mid-day and safely,
I went for a walk

An east wind blowing, long and cold
Over flat lands with a distant taste of the sea

Scots Pine sigh like a shore
Receiving waves.
The grass moves,
A round hill breathing peace

    They always say you should never…..

I leant against a tree-trunk and
Let my worries go,
Feeding them as leaves to the wind

I let them go
    (They always say…)
I let it all go
    (They always say you should never…)
Debt, doubt, despair, despondency,
The wind took them for me
And left.
    (They said. They always said.  Who ever listens…)

Ever now,
Never now,
Ever and for always,
Old stone and tree-roots,
I am sitting here still.

And you…
You may choose a spring morning,
    (Please don’t sleep, don’t snooze in the...)
Stones warmed on the edge of summer.
Sitting back, leaning back,
Slipping gently, warmly,
Comfortably into sleep.
An afternoon snooze,
Endless dozing,
    (Don’t...)
Rest your back against me,
Listen to the trees speaking peace.

You may prefer a frosty noon when,
(Inviting rest, Faerie Hills and Faerie Hollows)
Sun melting invites a rest or
A fey midsummer with heat shimmering the distance,
    (They said, they said, too late, they said...)

But rest, just rest, a while.
Settle.
Slide down the stone beside me.
Slide into stone beside me.

On Law Hill is to be found in the book Old Stones and Ancient Bones: poems from the hollow hills, by Gordon MacLellan. Find it on Amazon or buy direct from me (cheaper!)

Plan your own visit: https://getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/local/law-hill-clackmannanshire

Myths, legends and mazes: workshops in Derbyshire

Myths, Legends And Mazes

workshops in Derbyshire libraries

Derbyshire stories and monstrous tales; make a puppet and use it - or them - to  weave new stories of your own. 

secret woods and forgotten pools,
who knows where our local stories are lurking?

This year’s Summer Reading Challenge has “mythical mazes” for it’s theme...an invitation to go wandering down the corridors of our imaginations and to get lost in the knotted remains of furniture or in the dust under the bed...or perhaps to stray into the gardens where stone lions where coral hats, plastic bag dragons go flapping past and boggarts leer at us from the shadows....

The Summer Reading Challenge is an annual initiative inspiring young people to read 6 books during their summer holidays. At the end, they receive a medal and certificate. It is run through libraries in conjunction with the Reading Agency. Find out more here 

http://summerreadingchallenge.org.uk/ 

One of last year's
spooky houses

Last year's theme was Creepy House with readers earning some spooky smelly stickers during the weeks of the Challenge, (the strange scent of the garlic sticker lingers with me to this day). I was leading workshops in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Nottingham City libraries creating the creepy houses we would like to visit. Who knows what will appear in this summer's sessions?

This summer I am doing workshops in both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire libraries. Follow this link for Notts venues and dates. I am also part of a team leading workshops across Derbyshire. There are three of us: Maria Whatton, Debi Hedderwick and myself and while all three of us are doing individual workshops, there will be four days where we will work together in a library creating a performance story that will be told, danced, plunged through or whatever at the end of the workshop.

There is a blog for this project: Derbyshire myths and legends where details of other workshops can be found. My dates follow

who is hiding behind the reflection
in a mirror pool?

My sessions

Come along and listen to Derbyshire stories; make a puppet and use it - or them - to  weave new stories of your own. 

doorways to marvels

Suitable for 8– 12 years 

Booking essential 

Workshops

are free

are aimed at 8 - 12 year olds and spaces are limited os places need booking. 

will either be morning or afternoon: there will be another workshop in a nearby library in the other half of the day

Contact your local library to book a place and to check times

http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/find_your_local_library/default.asp

Date (August)	Library	Time
Saturday 2nd	Eckington	10am - 12noon
	Staveley	1.30 - 3.30 pm
Saturday 9th	Killamarsh	10am - 12noon
	Dronfield	1.30 - 3.30 pm
Monday 11th	Brimington	10am - 12noon
	Whitwell	2 - 4pm
Saturday 16th	Old Whittington	10am - 12noon
	Wingerworth	1.30 - 3.30 pm
Monday 18th	New Mills	10am - 12noon
	Gamesley	2 - 4pm
Tuesday 19th	Chapel-en-le-Frith	10am - 12noon
	Hadfield	2 - 4pm
Thursday 21st	Hayfield	10am - 12noon
	Whaley Bridge	2 - 4pm
Thursday 28th	Creswell	10am - 12noon
	Clowne	2 - 4pm

 

Joint event days

Date	Library	Time
Tuesday 29th July	Glossop	10 - 4pm
Wednesday 30th July	Ashbourne	10 - 4pm
Tuesday 5th August	Long Eaton	10 - 4pm
Monday 1st September	Chesterfield	10 - 4pm

Derbyshire's stories run back
through hundreds of years

Images in this post include one (the last) from Buxton Museum's digital collection, why not visit their website and take a look? Here!