@cultauthor.bsky.social
Have written the line: 'Yes Voltaire you chump.' Not sure it will ever get used, but hey-ho-potato that is where my mind is at.
My last speaking engagement this year will be at the wonderful @treadwells-books.bsky.social where I will be talking about re-enchantment as resistance; communities of story and the importance of links between folklore and place. www.tickettailor.com/events/tread.... I hope to see some of you there.
Buy tickets – Hookland with David Southwell – In-Person Lecture – Treadwells Books
Hookland with David Southwell – In-Person Lecture – Treadwells Books, Thu 24 Sep 2026 - The creator of England's imagined lost county on re-enchantment as resistance. Through near-daily postings in th...
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According to locals, the steps at Maryworth are ghosted by the drunken dead who fell down them after a session at the pub and my those who succumbed to heart attacks trying to climb then. Once you know this, your can't help but feel yourself in the company of phantoms. – #MattAdams
Goodnight from Alison Rayford, lighting desperate candles in St. Theodore’s church in hope the Smuk Knocker will pass her by. Goodnight from Amanda Vine, safely back in London, but ruing buying a ceramic souvenir of the The Long Witch standing stone. Goodnight from Hookland.
About to go into the funk of absolute terror and doubt about my words as I have to write a new talk for next month and I am empty. Medical malarkey and fear has hollowed me, but beyond that I am just out of good gear.
Today's perfect for nephomancy or as it's called in Hookland, cloud-telling. According to Mother Walton's Book of Shapes, this formation is known as: 'The terrier chasing butterflies'. It is said to represent diversions leading to misplaced attention and labour. – #EmilyCBanting
A Touch of Frost - a detective series I swerved for decades partly because the soundtrack seemed to have been written by either a saxophonist auditioning for a Gerry Rafferrty cover band or a pianist whose aspiration was composing new songs for Vera Lynn.
My path to a positive AI future Mr. Zuckerberg is to infect every data centre with curses and then dismantle and recycle every single of one of them not engaged in purely scientific and medical research.
We ride the rural roads of Hookland unable to dismiss them as Zones of Anomalous Possibility (ZAP). They are ghost-patined. Marked not just with white lines to guide our driving, but stories of UFO interruptions, darting Woodwoses. Tarmacked green tunnels into lost hours. – #DAKilroy
The concrete cicatrix of war distorts time, explode it so that we no longer have a linear experience. We know in our hearts that the English haven't stopping fighting World War II, but being out among the abandoned gun placements on Hookland's coast makes it manifest. – #DAKilroy
Nothing in Hookand is made up, just remembered differently.
Folk Horror Revival 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️@folkhorrorrevival.bsky.social · 4d agoHave to say I wasn't expecting the obscure Herefordshire village of Yazor, just up the road from the house where I grew up, to make an appearance in the A-Z. I visited the church not long ago on a trip round the detached bell towers of north Herefordshire and even got a photo of a wooden angel.
The older you get the more annoying it is to be kettled by the police.
It's not just the stone saints and grotesques that watch us with judging eyes. Their wooden cousins in slow time also scrutinise with unflinching, unblinking gaze. At some psychic level we hear their tutting in heads, know the ungodly words they think about us. – #DAKilroy, 1982
When I am out of notebooks, Hookland and everything else I write is really done on the backs of envelopes.
This means a lot. Jamie Delano is one of the writers who have deeply shaped me and Hookland. The county might not exist or exist differently without his inspiring work.
Jamie Delano@jamiedelano.bsky.social · last wk.Honoured. Thank you, @hookland.bsky.social
On the salted edge of the Restal Waste, the Marsh Ape Research Society (MARS) have installed a number of observation towers. The unkind say those manning them are at no risk of being driven mad by seeing a crpytid as they already proven lunatics for spending their time looking for them.
The servants of the Queen of Owls are many and strange. Strigiformes-chimera are found carved into many a wooden bestiary of pew ends. Subjects of her feathered crown. Spying servants that keep her fed with gossip. Through their eyes, we are all in her gaze. – #CLNolan
The narrow, high-banked path that carves a channel through the boneyard of St. Urian’s at Wormford is notoriously ghost-soaked. We would expect nothing less for a old wraith way, yet it has a pleasing diversity of phantoms: giant spiders made of smoke; flaming wheels; floating pillars of blue light.
“All writers are making maps of the cicatrix of their lives, disturbing the ghost soil, unearthing artefacts of unreliable memory. Being an English child of the 1970s, there is possibly a little more need than usual for exorcism. For there’s no getting away from the fact it was a bloody weird time.”
Goodnight from Beryl Brewer, wishing the cleaning supplies for the County Museum weren’t stored in the basement next to a room labelled Bone Depository. Goodnight from the cloud pond on Weland Hill, where a Harrowhound pack has come to slake their thirst. Goodnight from Hookland.
We drive darkening, ghosted roads. In these last minutes of solar alchemy, every turn is towards folklore. We become one with the land's long memory. One with a hodology where every traveller is another time's temporal shade. We become high strangeness. – #DAKilroy, 1982
I think it is meant to be a compliment when friends say you've aged into a 'one-eyed Alan Moore'.
Those feral churches – beyond diocesan office, enjoying green communion – call the imagination. Even before visiting, we've a knowing their ivy-blinded windows, their ghost-congregation cooled interiors, refuse this barbarous heat. Offer spirit-shaded sanctuary. – #DAKilroy
Some stone pilgrims come to connect to the energy they feel. Some to make communion with the dead, to sit with the stones' stories. In this brutal heat, I slump in the shadow of the Long Neolithic, grateful for bothi it shade and ongoing mysteries. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday
A defining problem of living in Hookland is so many of its buildings refuse to stand still. It has wandering pubs, chapels stone circles and even castles. I find those the most perplexing not only because they seem overly sprightly for ruins, but for the question: where do they go? – #CLNolan
