Fortean Times

When I started this blog, one of the things that (for reasons that completely evade me now) I omitted to put in the title was the word fortean.  This is a massive oversight on my part, as the word covers just about nine-tenths of my interests in the outside world.  Please allow me to explain.  Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer who lived from 1874-1932.  His overwhelming preoccupation was phenomena that did not fit accepted theories and world views of the time.  He made copious notes on aforesaid phenomena and published several books concerning them.  For those of you particularly fascinated by this character I have put a link to the Wikipedia entry about him.

Because of the nature of his researches, he has not only gathered a large, posthumous following but also folk have felt moved to publish magazines and periodicals detailing and documenting modern anomalous phenomena in his name.

The first one that came to my attention was Fortean Times.  I must have been in my mid-late twenties at the time, and I was working on a small but busy street in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.  I had cause to use the shops, including the newsagents, regularly.  I cannot, at this distance in time, remember precisely what it was that made me buy it, but it’s quite obvious in many ways as to why I would be attracted to it.  It offers both current and past examples of UFO (UAP) sightings, cryptozoology (think from the Loch Ness Monster(s) to undiscovered “normal” animals), parapolitics (conspiracy theories) – well, I’m sure you get the picture by now.  All sorts of odd stuff with good to wonderful pictures and (very important, this) intelligent articles written by people who do their best to research and check their arguments presented with a dash of much-needed humour and self-deprecation.  The brilliant thing is that it’s still going strong (let’s hope that this is not the kiss of death)!  The founder of this journal is Bob Rickard and the origins stretch away back to the late sixties.

Over the years I have found Fortean Times to be the one constant inspiration for both information and imagination.  It was available before the Internet was, and even now provides me with a welcome respite from glowing LCDs.  There are other publications in the UK that cover and overlap as far as subject matter is concerned, but they all seem to be a poor second.  Either the articles are incredibly subjective, with researchable and checkable facts conspicuous by their absence or the writers are po-faced in extremis.  The biggest selling point by far is that it hasn’t been (and, I trust, never will be) overrun by wafty, indeterminate (except for profit-making) New-Ageism.  I have to admit that the New Age is, to me, a small blessing and a large curse.  More on that elsewhere.  It reads like level heads are in charge and doesn’t centre on a particular belief system.

I would like to finish by saying more power to its editorial elbow and long may it continue.

The Voynich Manuscript

Wikipedia entry

Mysteries keep the world going and make it more interesting.  Certainly they add spice to life and give the mind something to dwell on other than the mundane.  This document surfaced early last century and has kept some of the finest minds occupied - all to no avail.  It seems that the only thing that anyone can be sure about is that it is actually mediaeval, due to tests performed on both the vellum and the ink.  If you fancy yourself as a code breaker and detective - or you just want to see what the fuss is about then you can download it from here.

Happy decoding!

Rennes-le-Château - A New Angle?

This post is concerned with two themes that intertwine: Rennes-le-Château and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.  The former is a village in the department of the Aude in France and the latter is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.  I will be looking at both of these in greater detail in later posts, but, firstly, let us look over the information pertinent to these subjects.

 Andrew Gough has summed it up on his website when he says that there is little new to the mystery (and no-so-cottage industry) that is the enigma of Rennes-le-Château.  However, Josh Kroeker has discovered something about certain works of Nicolas Poussin that, whether it belongs to the aforementioned mystery or to another riddle, does seem to be something overlooked by anyone else.

Tour Magdala

from Wikipedia Site for Rennes-le-Château 

The story goes, very loosely, like this.  Bérenger Saunière was a poor priest to the aforementioned village from 1885 to 1909.  He was responsible for commissioning quite a few buildings around the hamlet, which sounds quite pleasant and civic-minded of him.  The start of the legend is here, though.  Where did he get the money?  Whilst it is true that he was guilty of simony (that is, the selling of masses) it did not bring in enough to pay for all of the fancy new edifices popping up.  These include a (gaudy) revamp of his ancient church, l’eglise Ste. Marie-Madeleine (the Church of St. Mary-Magdalene), the Villa Bethania and le Tour Magdala.  The Villa Bethania is a large house that Saunière doesn’t live but uses to entertain guests at extravagant parties.  The Tour Magdala, which is a stubby, square tower perched right on the edge of the cliff that Rennes-le-Château stands on, seems to be a combination of study, library and look-out post.  What a country priest would want with something like this is beyond most people – and most certainly beyond me.  It did not help that Saunière himself was a bit – well, stroppy.  He never got on well with authority and, in some ways, one cannot help but think that the Catholic Church, with a rigid, hierarchical system that would be the pride of any army, was not an obvious career choice for him.  In those days (come to think of it, even now) the area into which he was born and in which he worked was isolated and choices were few.  It is, however, the money that is the mystery.  The money that no-one can account for, quite literally.

This, then, is the enigma.  It helps to create mythology (or doesn’t if one is a seeker after the truth) that the region has had a romantic and bloody past.  The Romans, the Visigoths, the Knights Templar and the Cathars, an heretical sect that the Vatican waged war upon, all lived and died there at one time or another.  It is a land utterly steeped in inscrutability and history.  I had the huge luck to go there, and the combination of black mountains, surprisingly lush greenery, scorching sunshine, astonishingly ancient, isolated settlements with plaster falling off and streets so narrow you wonder what the point is in having them at all turns out to make you feel in your skin that the land is clutching secrets in the very rocks.  No wonder, then, that the merest sniff of something different is enough to inflate any happenings there into the most mind-blowing and blasphemous epic of the age.

We move onto that book.  The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail basically guesses that the priest of a tiny village found documents that hinted at a link to the first royal dynasty of France – the Merovingians.  So far, so fairly unremarkable.  After all, there’s nothing particularly astonishing about linking to royalty from your own land.  Well, as many of you probably know, the guess turned into a leap – a leap of faith, ironically enough, and the leap was that the Merovingians were descended from Jesus Christ after he married Mary Magdalene and had children.  As for this rarefied line of holy offspring; I went off and opened a spreadsheet.  I assumed that for one couple, there would be two couples in the next generation, and so on.  I assumed that growth would be exponential (two, four, eight, sixteen… each generation doubles).  I also assumed that, unlike in the modern West, each generation could be expected to have children at the average age of fifteen.  By the time I had finished, the final sum looked like the kind of figure that astronomers work with.  It was (drum roll, please maestro) 1.09E+40.  If I remember aright, it is a one with forty decimal places after the dot.  Billions, in other words – the other words being squillions and such.  Not a particularly exclusive club then.  Now, my methods were quite a brief and slapdash approach to such statistics but, even including complex algorithms for variations in location, weather and age, we’re almost certainly looking at a million or so souls, possibly with the genes of God, walking our Earth today.  Nobody tell Richard Dawkins.

Okay, we have a very-well-off priest in the back of beyond holding loud parties in posh, new houses that he never lived in and the root of his wealth could be that he was blackmailing his employer with the information that children of their God were sharing the planet with them and, presumably, making the Catholic churches’ claim to be the one, reliable source on this planet of what God wants a bit shaky.  Where I fall out with this is that I am of the school that the so-called “historical” Jesus might not even have existed.  Even St. Paul seems to have treated Jesus as a purely incorporeal god similar to the other deities of the day.

What I will say in favour of The Holy Blood, though, is that it started many people on the road to thinking about the church, the Bible and claims related to them.  Rather than just accepting the story of Christ as it is taught by the Church, folk started to question, which, even by itself is a good thing in my opinion.  When I was much younger, I read this book when it first came out.  It made me look for conundra amongst the mundane and enlivened my life considerably.  Nowadays, especially in the wider world, the arcane lurks to surprise and, hopefully on occasion, delight us.

My Email in Paranormal Magazine

Paranormal Magazine

Arguably the main theory as to why UFOs are here and among us is the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis.  This says that UFOs are from other planets.  For quite a few reasons to do with UFO-like manifestations throughout recorded history and the behaviour and biological structure of the described creatures associated with the now culturally familiar Close Encounter, I believe that the entities and possible machines linked to this phenomenon are part of our existence, but not necessarily of this world.  The explanation that makes sense to me is that of the Extra-dimensional Hypothesis, or EDH.  This puts forward the idea that the presences in UFO experiences come from what is best described as a parallel universe and that they have been interacting with mankind throughout our time on Earth.

I have set out my thoughts in the aforementioned email published in Paranormal.  If you fancy a read, it's on page 77, issue 52 (October 2010) out now!

The Knights Templar - Yet Another Book

The Great Seal of the Knights Templar

A Brief History

Where to begin?  The Knights Templar, or Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici) to give them their full title, were an order of warrior knights.  These orders were the closest, to my knowledge, that the Western world got to the Shao Lin temple.They were not just any old monks with swords and horses; they were the shock troops of Christendom.  Their fighting skills were legendary and they sprang out of the Crusades to defend pilgrims travelling to the holy sites of the Middle East.  They also became incredibly rich and powerful back in Europe and are credited with starting modern banking and the cheque system.

Things were fine for them for roughly two hundred years, then King Philip IV (Le Bel) of France (who wanted their money amongst other things) had the Order in France arrested on 13th October 1307.  They were tortured and the Order banned by Pope Clement V.  Ever since then, rumours of black magic and heresy have abounded and haunted the memory of the Templars.

Many books tend to be a little - well, shall we say - hyperbolic when dealing with their history.  However, Michael Haag's book: The Templars: History & Myth seems very level-headed and well-researched.  It offers much common sense in a disputable and variable area of history.  It is also very readable and enjoyable to the layman, expecting nothing in the way of prior knowledge or expertise.  There is one glaring omission, though, and that is footnotes.  It is always good to know how someone came to a particular conclusion, and (especially in mediaeval history, where primary sources are thin on the ground, I for one would appreciate knowing where a particular quote came from so that I can draw conclusions, too.

On the whole, though, I'd still recommend it.

The London Mysteries

Temple Church, London. © Mandy Bristow 2009

I was just in the process of updating the info section of my Facebook pages when it struck me that, although London has many stories, there isn't a collective term for them.  I quietly put forward the title of this piece as a contender for such.

I am aware that other large cities have similar mythologies.  Personally speaking, however, London is the place that I am the most drawn to.  It is my home and the place of my birth.  It's not surprising, therefore, that the tales it generates are those I love best and are close to me.

London certainly has been around for over two thousand years.  When it started it was not as grand as Rome was at the time and, thanks to the depredations of war and developers, it has nowhere near the stock of ancient buildings as the Eternal City, but if one ever ventures into the alleys of the City or the cluttered markets of the East End, you start to see the belly of the beast.  Tales set in these dark and twisting backstreets can be far darker than the most disturbing fairy tales.

The primary and most obvious mystery is that of Jack the Ripper.  The murders attributed to an unknown person who became known as the world’s most notorious serial killer took place in Whitechapel in 1888.  The theories as to who he (or she) was, or even if there was an actual Ripper at all as opposed to a series of murders connected and conflated later by an infant tabloid press, still abound today.  To me, they were a result of a morbid fascination with a squalid ghetto of the forgotten right next to the monumental financial City of London, which at that time was growing more fabulously wealthy, fulfilling its rôle as the imperial capital it had become.

The next areas of unexplainable phenomena are the hauntings and strange materialisations on the London Underground or, as it colloquially known, the Tube.  The first line opened in January 1863 and was very popular indeed.  This led to expansion of what was the first rapid transit system in the world, and still the largest in terms of passengers.  The spectres seen include not only people but also entire trains.  The appearance of these shades seems to have started quite early on after the first lines were built, and persist strongly today.  There are reportedly even ghosts that can only be seen on CCTV.

Ghosts also abound in London’s famous theatres.  It would seem that the dead’s appetite for public appearances outlives their earthly bodies as many historic auditoria experience the icy presence of the departed.  It has been claimed that the ghosts of such board-treading luminaries as Joseph Grimaldi, the father of both modern clowns and the pantomime as we know it today, and the music hall stalwart Dan Leno, both still practice their brands of slapstick on the unwary players and stagehands to this very day.  Although, as the sceptics will say “Oh no they don’t”!

We return to the Tube for our next legend.  Mutants have been rumoured to live in the underground railway.  The creatures described are both animal and human.  Rats are said to retreat, quite understandably, into the large, dark spaces where food discarded by people and shelter may be found.  Whilst this is true, some folk also think that the rats have changed bodily in order to survive better in a world under the earth.  These tales also extend to supposing that groups of derelicts have, since the late nineteenth century, taken to living there.  As time has moved on, they have bred and changed in ways unknown to us surface-dwellers.  Whilst some say that there isn’t enough room down there, others tell of abandoned stations and stretches of tunnel still there but no longer used by either trains or passengers.  It might be worth thinking about how quickly mutations are supposed to appear in mammals in order to come up with a plausible answer to biological change, but it’s not hard to work out that those who can see and hear better in the dark, and those who are stealthy and nimble would have more success in adapting to the man-made caverns of the Underground.

What are we to make of the attempts, just after the Great Fire, to remodel London with the benign influence of the Cabalistic Tree of Life?  A certain John Evelyn who worked with Sir Christopher Wren in order to help rebuild the town is said to have submitted a new street plan that resembled the Sephiroth – the Tree of Life.  This was because many eminent Britons truly believed the British were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.  If this were so then London was to be no other than a New Jerusalem.  It might be worth remembering that, the next time you tread the streets of our capital city, that not only was it the capital city of a world-spanning empire, but that much of it was deliberately reshaped to be a British Holy City on Earth.  Some of this crosses over into my other post Nicholas Hawksmoor - Dark Geomancer?

Naturally, as a seeker down those stranger pathways of existence on this Earth I would be very pleased to hear from anyone who wishes to add to this, admittedly all-too-brief list.

Robin Hood - More Than an Outlaw?

Robin Hood.  I have mentioned elsewhere that I have been fascinated by this swashbuckling character since childhood.  It may just be that there were not many mediaeval figures to feature in stories when I was a mere stripling, but my interest has held fast over the years.  There has been much scholarly debate whether he actually existed, or was an exercise in mythological folk tales and such.

I have also found the knight-errant stories absorbing, too.  Along with plastic cowboys and the like I also had toy knights - namely crusaders.  Their armour (unbeknownst to me at the time) was also fairly accurate for that period.  When, later on in life, I learned about the Knights Templar (the warrior monks of Jerusalem) I became even more engrossed in the period of time surrounding the Crusades.

I have been a regular reader of a magazine called the Fortean Times for at least fifteen years now.  Named after Charles Fort, an American who collected reports of strange phenomena and later wrote several books on the subject, it has been a constant delight and eye-opener.  Imagine, therefore, my surprise and delight when I found both subjects covered in one article!  To try and summarise; the Templars were outlawed by the Pope at the time and some of them may have hidden in the woods.  They were very skilled in feats of arms, and so one of these bands could have been led by the character we came to know as Robin Hood.  The chap who wrote the article, John Paul Davis, has written a book - "The Unknown Templar" - on this very theme.  I fully intend to get my hands on a copy.  Here is a link to their site.  Try registering and typing "Robin Hood" into their Search.  See what you think.

Fortean Times

What I've been missing up until now - Beer

Christianity won't seem the same after this

These are videos on YouTube that follow theories as to the origins of most religions - especially Christianity.

Astrological explanation of Jesus' story (amongst others)

Astrological ages and Moses Roman social control

Nicholas Hawksmoor: Dark Geomancer?

Nicholas Hawksmoor was a pupil and protégé of Sir Christopher Wren and has also been known by the rakish appellation the devil’s architect.  Both Wren and Hawksmoor are reputed to have been Freemasons, although this is difficult to prove for obvious reasons.

Christ Church, Spitalfields.  A Ripper murder took place opposite - was this the altar?
by stevecadman on Flickr

Whilst it is true that there are portraits of Sir Christopher Wren in full Masonic regalia, some people have suggested that the Brotherhood was not averse to ‘adopting’ eminent men without their knowledge.  The Craft, with its emphasis on the Temple of Solomon and putative connections with many things ancient Egyptian, would have added fuel to Hawksmoor’s fire as it was known that he held a fascination with the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World that informed and shaped his output especially the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.  Although he was indeed an apprentice to the acclaimed architect Sir Christopher Wren, his designs were no mere aping of his master, concerned as they were with forms of antiquity that sometimes went back further than the Greeks and Romans and a bold, confident use of shapes that were mainly unfamiliar in English architecture at the time and less easy to pigeonhole.  After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there was a determination to rebuild.  A result of this was originally a plan to build fifty new churches.  However, a mere twelve were built before the project ran out of steam.  Hawksmoor himself only finished six, although he added to two more.  Despite the seemingly modest number of churches completed, they were to stay in Hawksmoor’s life until a few years before he passed away at the age of 65.  It is these churches and additions that concern us here.

Iain Sinclair, the poet and psychogeographer, has an abiding fascination with London, but most especially the East End, which has both troubled and inspired him to rich and strange musings.  Some of these musings were written into the prose poem Lud Heat (A Book of Dead Hamlets), which he published it in 1975 using his own imprint - Albion Village Press.  In itself it is a remarkable and haunting work that took the shabby and rundown and transformed it into the sinister and liminal.  To sum up the parts of the poem that are relevant here; Hawksmoor built the churches and additions in such a way as to create malignant lines of force across London.  They combined with what some folk know as ley lines.  The result may be interpreted as a vast Eye of Horus across the City.  It may also be possible to interpret the Jack the Ripper murders as ritual sacrifices either deliberately planned utilising the evil force of the churches' disposition or, in an even more disquieting fashion, as a direct result of the forces channelled by these alleged temples of the damned.  Another powerful writer, Peter Ackroyd, took this concept, embellished and adapted it in his excellent yet disturbing novel Hawksmoor.  The essence was the same, however.  The architect, this time named Nicholas Dyer, was an acolyte of a man calling himself Mirabilis who teaches that Jesus was the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the Devil should be worshipped in His stead.  They also sacrificed virgin boys, to safeguard against pestilence and war, in order to secure the greater good.  Dyer killed and buried the boys in the foundations of his churches, thereby mirroring the real-life practise of burying or immuring a domestic animal in new buildings in order to guard against the influence of evil spirits.  Cats seem to have been preferred for this sacrificial ritual, but by no means exclusively.  In a personal aside, it was a synchronistic shock to pick up the novel and find that Nicholas Dyer’s assistant is a Walter Pyne.  My surname is Pyne and, whilst not completely rare, it is an unusual surname.  This gave a sense of there being a mystery that, quite literally, called to me by name.

Interestingly, Sinclair has his Hawksmoor laying his churches out across the East End to create an Egyptian hieroglyph, whilst Ackroyd’s Dyer plots his after the positions of the main stars in the constellation of the Pleiades.  The possibility of at least one star map being created and imposed upon London starts to move into the disputed territory of supposed star alignments in building complexes such as the pyramids on the Giza plateau, where some researchers think that the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure may be laid out to reflect the three main stars of Orion’s Belt along with the Thornborough Henges near the village of Thornborough in North Yorkshire.  The positioning of the celestial upon the terrestrial may be seen as a very bold act of magick indeed.

A short while ago I plotted the positions of the churches on a map.  The Church of England denies that Hawksmoor was using his creations in any way other than orthodoxy dictated.  This may well be the truth of the matter.  However, plans were already put forward to create street plans after the Cabbalistic Tree of Life by those who saw London as nothing less than the New Jerusalem.  Also, the relationship in terms of distance and orientation to points of the compass was echoed by Sir Christopher Wren himself when he rebuilt St Paul’s and reproduced the spatial association between the Dome of the Rock (St Paul’s) and the Holy Sepulchre (Temple Church).  Some of this crosses over into my other post, The London Mysteries.  None of this is definitive proof, but it is certainly my opinion that the relationships between buildings and their surroundings are not always left to chance and, certainly in the case of London, will repay further scrutiny.

Morris Dancing - Unloved Englishness

Photo: Jim Champion

We are all very familiar with the modern contempt that Morris dancing is held with.  So many things come and go as far as fashion is concerned, and it seems that this tradition became associated with a pastoral way of life that nearly all of the country had left behind when the factories beckoned and football and the music hall moved into those places people’s hearts reserve for their loyalty to such things.  Morris dancing was, as was the way with many things that were associated with a lost way of rural life, ‘revived’ on several occasions, the most recent being in the 1960s that accompanied a wider folk music revival.  Before then it has been dated back to dancers at court in the fourteenth century.  The dances devolved over the centuries, spreading from the royal household to church festivals, then, as the Puritans took over, hardly anything at all.  When they moved from kingly splendour, so did the costumes, and the poorer folk tended to forego the splendour of court costumes in favour of ribbons and bells attached to their everyday clothing, the continuation of which can be seen in today’s Morris costumes.  As with most gaiety, it didn’t come through the thirteen years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth well and, like Christmas, faced a steady decline.  When the Industrial Revolution broke up many communities in the countryside and workers flooded to the towns and factories, much in the way of tradition was not only forgotten, but deliberately cast aside as being out of step with new life in the cities.  It was preserved by four teams in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and sought out by folklorists from the late nineteenth century onwards as they rediscovered it.


Despite the generally accepted tradition that Morris dancing is so-called because it was brought into England via soldiers returning from the Crusades, and hence corrupted from Moorish dancing, what evidence there is does not back this up.  Shakespeare mentions Morris twice; “I have seen/Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,/Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells. (2 Henry VI Act III scene i)” and “As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney, as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib's rush for Tom's forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen to a wrangling knave, as the nun's lip to the friar's mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin. (All's Well that Ends Well Act II scene ii)”.  This shows that Morris dancing was established by his time of writing and a tradition so common that the audience understood these references.
As would be expected with such a venerable pastime, there are many regional differences in dance, music and costume.  These have come down to us under mainly regional names, although even these, as with other ancient traditions, could vary a fair amount from town to town.  Other old dances, however, such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, are distinct from the Morris tradition and (in this case, most certainly) predate it substantially.  It is worth noting that the Horn Dance is still performed to this day and can be seen on Wakes Monday, the day following Wakes Sunday, which is the first Sunday after September 4th.
The real beauty of Morris dancing, apart from preserving a part of our national heritage that property developers and local councils cannot touch, is that it is very much active and real.  As with much English culture, Morris has been successfully taken with expatriates to some rather far-flung corners of the globe.  As would be expected, it is the English-speaking nations that mainly embrace the eclectic nature of this style of dancing, with a slight, yet welcome, surprise being that of the Hong Kong Morris.  
Many local events have a performance by a local side, and they can occasionally be seen outside (and quite a lot inside) pubs and inns.  There are large annual events that are intertwined with Morris.  The most famous of these is The Rochester Chimney Sweeps Festival, which takes place around the May Day holiday.  Here is a large gathering of sides from all over the country and the festival also involves a parade of the dancers and their accompanists, plus performances by the cream of the nation’s folk musicians.
On a personal note, whenever I have watched Morris dancing, it affects me in the same way that looking around an old stone church or drinking in a village pub with exposed wooden beams.  It’s soothing yet electric – a direct connection to our past.  It does not matter that the church has been desecrated by Cromwell’s Puritans and revamped by well-meaning Victorians.  It does not matter (too much) if the old pub has brilliantly-lit lager pumps.  In that same spirit, it does not matter if the Morris dances are not strictly local, or if the ribbons are polyester and the bells made in China.  What matters is that something that was relevant hundreds of years in our past is still relevant, living, lively, entertaining and part of us to this very day.
I last saw Wolf's Head and Vixen Morris in the foyer of Fairfield Halls during Witchfest, where I was sitting on a bar stool with a glass of mead in my hand.  They have a distinctly modern twist on their dress, adding such touches as dark glasses to their all-black ensemble, but their dancing adheres to a distinct tradition and it is a joy to watch and a sight to gladden the heart.  Long may they dance!

Wolfs Head and Vixen Morris (above) by kind permission

Christmas Dickens festival and others

Famous Potatoes - Folk Band

They come from Leigh-on-Sea, which is now a suburb of Southend-on-Sea in Essex.  I went to the same school as the lead singer, and the same church as some of the rest of the band. Despite living very near to (and working in) one of the few areas that might be called traditional and villagey in the area, their music is much more heavily involved with American folk.  As a result, they have carved a distinct niche in the local scene and are in demand all over the South-East.  Be sure to catch them at the Leigh Folk Festival - an annual get-together that does what it says, etc..

Leigh still retains a distinctly laid-back air, and the old town has a thriving cockle fishing industry; you can see the boats puttering back and forth with strange, corrugated hoses wrapped in the rigging.  The hoses actually hoover up the shellfish that are brought back and cooked in the cockle sheds that are still a main feature of the western beach.  All manner of seafood can be purchased here, short of actual white-fish.  The winkles are also a locally-caught speciality.  The pubs have a history of villainy and smuggling and there are four in a tiny, tiny space, so you can actually do a pub crawl and hardly travel at all!  How good is that?

Introduction - after a(n old) fashion

Just to kick things off, by mentioning how I became interested in all (or most) things traditional and British.

The spires of St. Michael's Cathedral and (to the right) Holy Trinity, Coventry

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coventry_spires-2Aug2005-2rc.jpg

When I was a boy at junior school, one of the books I was given was about King Arthur. Another was tales of Robin Hood. Even though, along with other boys of that time, I was also interested in cowboys, indians and pirates, it was to these two that I kept returning. The Quest for the Holy Grail especially fascinated me, even then; something I have to say that has never left me.

It continued at my grammar school. We had many, many day trips from school, much to my sister's chagrin. I wouldn't exactly say I was a swot, but when we arrived at the destination which, of course was historical, the other boys lost no time in "losing" their work sheets and sloping off to buy cigarettes and such. I actually preferred to look around what we went there for, and to enjoy the feeling of being in contact with the past. I felt a rush from doing that; it was almost like time travel for me. It still feels like that now.

Music, especially, is one of the ways that I feel in touch with aspects of the past. Let me say now that I'm pretty sure that I don't want to live there! Firstly, I have savage myopia. I'd be stumbling around virtually blind. Coupled with no modern medicine, communications, transport links, etc., I reckon it's better to be nostalgic. However, that doesn't mean that we should not celebrate the good stuff from the past, including that which helps give us our identity today. When I was in my late teens I was trying to be a Christian. I was attending polytechnic in Coventry at the time. I was a member of the Methodist church and normally went there, but on this occasion I fancied something more traditional. Advent was here and, although Methodist Central Hall had its charms, it was as if someone had started building cinemas about fifty years early. It even has fold-up seats. Everyone knows about Coventry Cathedral, irreverently known as the Godbox due to its rectangular architecture. What visitors hardly knew about is that there is a large church, Holy Trinity, adjacent to the cathedral. This was constructed from the same local red stone as most of the older public buildings in Coventry and was built in the 12th century. When it was floodlit, it stood out as orange and grey against the darkening sky, more like a cut-out than a 3D object. Breathtaking. When I went along on my own, the service was a candlelit carol service. The gothic architecture and womb-red stone lit from within by flickering candles, combined with carols, some of which were written hundreds of years ago, seemed yet again like a form of time-travel to me. Surely this was what it must have been like to have worshipped in mediaeval times!

After this, I purchased a copy of the "Oxford Book of Carols". I'm no real musician, and just about played the bass guitar, but I started to look to the past for music and more inspiration, both artisitic and spiritual.

Southend Pier - Inspiration

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dammmmian

It's just orbited around and around since then.