England has forgotten its gods. We must remember them.

Once upon a time in the heart of the British countryside there lived a fair maiden, who try as she might could not fit into the world around her. Wherever she would turn a great darkness would follow. Then one night she had a strange dream and was told that the answers to all her problems lay within the land around her. She was told the truth was in the soil.

The common, land owned by none, held by all, is home to commonwealth of folklore, the commonwealth of imagination. I regard it as sacred. Mankind’s dream are a wilderness where monsters are free to roam, time itself may be dissolved and all our collected folklore is the surest guide to its ever shifting landscape.

Article

The Eeriness of the English Countryside

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of god
On England's pleasant pastures seen?


And did the countenance divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

When I walk the lanes ways of England the ghost soil coats my boots and sings stories of the secret land to me. For no field in England is truly fallow. Strange blooms of stories grow in the ghost soil whether the land is tended or not. Those that walk the ancient lanes of England walk with folklore to be harvested from hedge and to be collected along with the mud and dust underfoot. All our old paths are shortcuts to story. The land is long memory. Soil home to ghosts. Fields remember the dead buried in them long after no-one living knows their names or that they were even once living. The land is the final remembrancer. Every clump of trees huddling together for protection, every diminished wood, casts a ghost shadow of when they were forest. If I have learnt anything from folklore it is that the old gods are not dead, not lost, but merely sleeping on the borders between those deep seasons of time that turn in cycles slower than the year. They wait to wake and walk beside us again. I am of the green church. I am of the church of awe. I have no business with any faith nor priest peddling a fear of the divine. I enjoy delcious moments of landscape terror. A sense of what is buried below, the scream of the horizon. Between unearthing and open sky, my soul is overwhelmed. This a is a good thing.

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds . . .”

They were real fairies. Some had wings and some not…. They were once sitting in a patch of sunlight on a low bank…. It all seemed so peaceful and friendly…. Sometimes they came up, only inches away, but I never wanted to join in their lives.

Time had gone soft at the crossroads - and let me tell you how...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

"Not haunted," said Gwyn, after a while. "More like - still happening."

And it matters because of its exceptional richness and diversity. If you're a modern inhabitant of Iceland, Estonia, Greece, Italy or Germany, for example, your pagan heritage will consist of one pantheon of goddesses and gods with an accompanying archaology, but just because so many peoples ended up here, we in Britain have no less than four different sets of deities, including the vast array form the entire Roman Empire, and before that no less than six different ages of prehistory to provide their input.

These are an extraordinary resource to inspire the imagination of the modern age, to inspire music, literature and art, and to enable people to define their own spirituality if needed - either sympathetically with the ancient religions, or against them.

But what makes these particularly fine as a resource with which to think is that the whole of prehistoric British religion - and even much of that from the early historic periods - defy confident interpretation.

A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was “re-enchantment”. He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth

Don't you get it yet? It must work like...a recording. Fixed in the floor and the walls, right in the substance of them. A trace...of what happened in there. And we pick it up. We act as detectors - decoders - amplifiers.

“What made these films so powerful to me as teenager was that you didn’t know anything about them. They weren’t repeated. There was no internet to help you crack them. They kept their mystery.”

It was evening before I climbed the bank. The sun had very nearly slipped out of the sky by this time, and I could not get a good view. You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw – low colourless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep – perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams. Happy the man, happy the woman, who awakes the hills of Wessex. For though they sleep, they will never die.

Now when you are ready, put down the book and return to where you began