The eeriness of the English countryside

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie the skull beneath the skin of the countryside. But for a new generation this has
nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism its a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears
Robert Macfarlane
Friday 10 April 2015 12.17BST

inety years ago this spring, MR James published one of his most unsettling ghost stories, A View from a Hill. It opens on a hot June
afternoon, when a Cambridge academic called Fanshawe arrives at the house of his friend Squire Richards, deep in the south-west of
England. Richards proposes an evening walk to a nearby hilltop, from where they can look over the country. Fanshawe asks if he can
borrow some binoculars. After initial hesitation, Richards agrees, and gives Fanshawe a smooth wooden box. It contains, he explains, a pair of
unusually heavy field-glasses, made by a local antiquary named Baxter, who died under mysterious circumstances a decade or so earlier. In
opening the box, Fanshawe cuts his finger on one corner, drawing blood.
So the two men walk up to the viewpoint, where they stop to survey the lovely English landscape spread out beneath them: green wheat,
hedges and pasture-land, scattered cottages and the steam-plume of the last train. The smell of hay is in the air. There are wild roses on
bushes hard by. It is the pinnacle of the English pastoral.
But then Fanshawe raises the binoculars to his eyes and that lovely landscape is disturbingly disrupted. Viewed through the glasses, a
distant wooded hilltop becomes a treeless grass field, in which stands a gibbet, from which hangs a body. There is a cart containing other
men near to the gibbet. People are moving around on the field. Yet when Fanshawe takes the binoculars from his eyes, the gibbet vanishes
and the wood returns. Up, eerie; down, cosy. Up, corpse; down, copse. He explains it away as a trick of the midsummer light.
From there, though, the story takes further sinister turns. The next day Fanshawe bicycles out to Gallows Hill, as it is called locally, to
investigate the illusion. In the wood on the hilltop, he becomes convinced that there is someone watching him from the thicket, and not with
any pleasant intent. Panicking, he flees.
Eventually the grim secret of the binoculars is revealed. Baxter had filled their barrels with a fluid derived by boiling the bones of hanged men,
whose bodies he had plundered from the graves on Gallows Hill, formerly a site of execution. In looking through the field-glasses, Fanshawe
was looking through dead mens eyes, and summoning violent pasts into visible being. Prospect was a form of retrospect; Baxters macabre
optics revealed the skull beneath the skin of the English countryside.
We do not seem able to leave MR James (18621936) behind. His stories, like the restless dead that haunt them, keep returning to us: readapted, reread, freshly frightening for each new era. One reason for this is his mastery of the eerie: that form of fear that is felt first as unease,
then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack. Horror specialises in confrontation and aggression;
the eerie in intimation and aggregation. Its physical consequences tend to be gradual and compound: swarming in the stomachs pit, the telltale prickle of the skin. I find the eerie far more alarming than the horrific: James is one of only two writers (the other being Mark Danielewski)
who has caused me to wake myself with my own screaming. Saw sends me to sleep.
A second reason James stays with us is his understanding of landscape and especially the English landscape as constituted by uncanny
forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships. Landscape, in James, is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer
picturesque consolations. Rather it is a realm that snags, bites and troubles. He repeatedly invokes the pastoral that green dream of natural
tranquillity and social order only to traumatise it.
Jamess influence, or his example, has rarely been more strongly with us than now. For there is presently apparent, across what might broadly
be called landscape culture, a fascination with these Jamesian ideas of unsettlement and displacement. In music, literature, art, film and
photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging
that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of dwelling
and belonging, and of the packagings of the past as heritage, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.
Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture this
occulture is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians,
utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political
activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.
To name names: in music, I think of PJ Harveys albums White Chalk (2007) and Let England Shake (2011); of Julian Cope (of course); of the
heavily haunted music of Richard Skelton; of English Heretic, the Memory Band, and the Owl Service (whose 2010 album was called The View
from a Hill); of Rob St Johns circlings of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, associated with the north-west witchcraft trials and hangings of 1612; of
the spectral electronica of Grasscut; and perhaps above all of These New Puritans, especially their albums Hidden (2010) and Field of Reeds
(2013), both informed by the estuarine Essex environment in which the bands members grew up. Their 2010 single We Want War thrums
with buried furies, encryptions and the stirring of things best left unstirred: Secret recordings were made in the marsh / I bore a hole in the
tree just to see, chants Jack Barnett, Knights dance in molecules / Theyre rising back up, theyre rising back up.
Contemporary literature is rich with this ghost-writing, as we could call it. Paul Kingsnorths The Wake (2014) forges an Anglo-Saxon shadow
language with which to evoke a new-old sense of how in angland all is broc; Melissa Harrisons novel At Hawthorn Time, published on 23
April, gives ghostly voice to the hedges and lanes of England itself; M John Harrisons most recent novel, Empty Space: A Haunting (2012),
continues his brilliant union of science fiction with everyday English life; and the influence is ubiquitous of both China Mivilles weird
fictions and WG Sebalds wraithy peregrinations along the Suffolk coast and across the Manchester moors, in which landscape is figured as a
porous or brittle substance, and in which place operates often only as a sum total of losses and confusions.
Then there is the poetry of Geraldine Monk and Autumn Richardson, Tim Dees lyric disinterments in Four Fields (2012), Nina Lyons ongoing
pursuit of the Green Man myth, Jez Butterworths Jerusalem (2009), with its channelling of English place lore into the toking, joking figure of
Johnny Byron, and indeed Mark Rylances broader commitment to being, as he recently put it, curious outside the set cosmology. My book
The Old Ways (2012) has four eerie episodes in it, each narrated without analysis or interpretation. One took place at night on Chanctonbury
Ring in the South Downs, a wooded hilltop not unlike that on which Fanshawe experiences his malign watcher. I have received more letters

and questions about that incident than any other in my books.

In 2013, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton created On Vanishing Land, a 45-minute audio essay that traverses the Suffolk coastline from the
Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo, tracking what Fisher calls the cumulative forces of the eerie that
animate the East Anglian landscape, and openly in conversation with both the stories of MR James and the music of Brian Eno. There is also,
unforgettably, Iain Sinclairs extraordinary work in prose, film and poetry, committed for decades to the retrieval of heterodox histories and
eldritch pasts even as they face occlusion by regeneration and other forms of cultural flattening-out.
In film, I think of Patrick Keillers Robinson in Ruins (2010), Michael Hrebeniaks forthcoming Stirbitch, located around Stourbridge Common
in east Cambridge, Ben Riverss Two Years at Sea (2011), the mooorland expressionism of Daniel Wolfes Catch Me Daddy (2014), and Ben
Wheatleys brilliant A Field in England (2013), in which an alchemists assistant joins a group of civil war deserters, high on psychedelic
mushrooms, on a hunt for treasure supposedly buried in a field. The film is shot in black and white, which invests the grass, trees, clouds and
gun smoke with a strangely luminous intensity of greyscale. The result of the treasure hunt is unspeakable violence in a rural setting, in
Wheatleys phrase, or Apocalypse Now among the hedgerows, in Jonathan Romneys. Over the last year I have been working with a young
writer and film-maker, Adam Scovell, to adapt a co-written book called Holloway into a nine-minute Super-8 short, inspired in part by Derek
Jarmans early silent film Journey to Avebury (1971). Holloway is about about time-loops and unexplained occurrences in a sunken Dorset
lane; among its histories is the hanging at Dorchester in 1594 of four Catholic recusants. In the longer term I want to adapt Algernon
Blackwoods 1907 ghost novella The Willows for screen, relocating it from the willow deltas of the Danube to the Phragmites reed forests of
the East Anglian fens.
The eerie is widespread in contemporary English art, there in the work of (among others) Tacita Dean, Marcus Coates, Steve Dilworth, Stanley
Donwood and Jeremy Millar. In 2011, also inspired by Blackwood, Millar created a sculpture entitled Self-Portrait of a Drowned Man (The
Willows). He cast his own body in silicone, dressed it in his own clothes, then gouged his face and skull with odd puncture wounds, as
occurs in Blackwoods novella. The disconcertingly lifelike (deathlike) drowned man that resulted was displayed prone on the gallery floor.
It was first shown at Glasgows CCA, and proved so unnerving to audiences that warnings had to be issued. It is presently on show at Turner
Contemporary in Margate. Earlier this month, the Duchess of Cambridge visited the gallery and was photographed looking at Millars pseudocorpse selfie. The image went viral: two divergent Englishnesses were embodied and juxtaposed, the monarchical/hereditary and the
uncanny/unsettled.
Yes, the contemporary eerie feeds off its earlier counterparts, as with Millar off Blackwood, Fisher off James and Scovell off Jarman. A
renewed interest in classics of the tradition is in evidence: director Robin Hardys 2013 print of The Wicker Man (1973) for instance, or
Witchfinder General (1968), a film that, as Sinclair put it last year, really takes on landscape to reveal the underlying sense of psychotic
breakdown, by staging an argument between the English pastoral and unscripted brutal violence. Wheatley cites it, with Culloden
(1964), as hugely influential for A Field in England. The radical histories of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollos Winstanley (1975) are taken
up again by Keiller in Robinson in Ruins, which examines moments of failed revolution in the quiet fields of todays Cotswolds.
There is also the recent reissue of Alfred Watkinss cult book of landscape mysticism, The Old Straight Track (1925), the argument of which is
largely built around the views from hills, and the totemic status among contemporary place-writers of JA Bakers The Peregrine (1967) all
bloody killing, field-haunting and ritual reperformance. Vital to the modern moment, too, are the novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper;
especially Garners The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Owl Service (1967), and Coopers dazzling The Dark Is Rising sequence,
published between 1965 and 1977. Once read, these novels are hard to forget. They lodge and loom in the memory. Garner turned eighty80
last autumn, and a volume of essays exploring his legacy, called First Light, is being compiled at present, with contributions from Philip
Pullman, Ali Smith and Neil Gaiman among others. I regard the second book of Coopers sequence as among the eeriest texts I know; Helen
Macdonald is another for whom Coopers novels have been imaginatively vital.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as an excess of hokey woo-woo; a surge of something-in-the-woodshed rustic gothic. But engaging with the
eerie emphatically doesnt mean believing in ghosts. Few of the practitioners named here would endorse earth mysteries or ectoplasm. What
is under way, across a broad spectrum of culture, is an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The
supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression. Contemporary
anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters: our noun monster, indeed, shares an
etymology with our verb to demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal (with a largely lost sense of omen or portent).
We are, certainly, very far from nature writing, whatever that once was, and into a mutated cultural terrain that includes the weird and the
punk as well as the attentive and the devotional. Among the shared landmarks of this terrain are ruins, fields, pits, fringes, relics, buried
objects, hilltops, falcons, demons and deep pasts. In much of this work, suppressed forces pulse and flicker beneath the ground and within
the air (capital, oil, energy, violence, state power, surveillance), waiting to erupt or to condense.
Taken together, in all its variety, this work suggests what the writer and archaeologist Eddie Procter recently called a new landscape
aesthetic: dedicated to a busting of the bucolic, a puncturing of the pastoral. Last month an interdisciplinary conference was convened in
Cambridge on The Alchemical Landscape, prompted by the increasing number of writers, artists and film-makers [who] are reinvesting the
landscape with esoteric and mythic imagery, and seeking to assess how this body of work articulates pressing contemporary concerns.
What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a
phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of
species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is
present. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate
catalogues of losses (Skelton and Richardsons poetry, for instance).
There is a dissenting left politics also at work here. Joe Kennedy has sharply documented how the pastoral has become a cornerstone of
austerity politics under David Cameron, with the compensatory cant of Green Toryism helping kitschly to reduce the rural to Bake Off
tents in flower meadows, Hunter wellies, and Keep-Calm-and-Holiday-at-Home messages, even as fiscal forces churn and ruck the landscape.
For Kennedy, this cupcakification of the nation this rise of Mumfordland has generated a vigorous anti-pastoral counter-culture,
animated by what he nicely calls the terror in the terroir. In a blistering 2013 essay, Nick Groom used the infamous Lets discuss over
country supper soon text from Rebekah Brooks to Cameron, sent on the eve his leaders speech to the Conservative Party Conference, to
excoriate the Tory reduction of the rural to a Cotswold pageant of G&Ts and predistressed timber tables. Groom deplored the pastoral cliches
that have tyrannised the land for decades; we need to start rethinking what we understand by the English countryside, he wrote, and we
need to be doing it now. That political rethinking is partly apparent in the preoccupation of eerie culture with the English civil war (there in
A Field in England, in the band name of These New Puritans, in Keillers Robinson in Ruins), a historical moment in which, as Wheatley puts it,
the country was so radicalised that normal people were forced into political positions they had never been in before.

Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of
capital. Keillers Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them
outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatleys deserters rapaciously extract treasure from the soil, by means of
enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient
entity, developing Marxs implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild. Negarestani, like
Miville, is inspired by the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft (18901937). I eagerly await the English oil-horror film that must surely soon be shot:
Quadrilla as Godzilla, sink-holes as maws from out of which rises Chthulu (Chthoilu). Perhaps filming is already under way, somewhere in a
field in Dorset, with nodding donkeys backlit on the skyline.
Why does the countryside seem such a fit place for violence? Matthew Sweet asked Wheatley on Radio 3, reflecting on the charnel-house
ending of his film. Wheatley, who grew up in Essex, spoke of his long-standing sense of the English countryside as somewhere in which
violence was always imminent. There was something in the land-scape, he said, that plainly terrified me ... If you went out into it you
could just be killed. His comments echo those of Sinclair, who invoked King Lear on the heath: Youre turned outdoors into something more
savage than you are, and you know something terrible is going to happen.
They also uncannily recall those of the photographer Ingrid Pollard, whose remarkable 1988 series of images, Pastoral Interlude, explored the
black British experience of the English countryside and especially the Lake District, where Pollard wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of
white. A visit to the countryside, she wrote in the caption to one image, is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread. Pollards
19th-century photographic techniques allude to the connections between the high-Victorian pastoral and the colonial control in Africa and
the Caribbean that enabled that pastorals maintenance. The photographer Marc Atkins and the poet Rod Mengham are together making a
study of English arable land, responding to fields that all look the same to some extent, but that have undergone utterly different specific
histories, from battlefields to prisoner of war camps to sites of execution.
Contemporary eerie culture is also drawn to the military and security infrastructure that occupies much of Englands land and air space, from
Salisbury Plain to Otterburn to Foulness. This dispersed geography of conflict and surveillance has attracted the interests of Garner (Alderley
Edge), Fisher and Barton at Bawdsey Manor (the Suffolk home of radar research in the 1940s), Keiller (passim), and WG Sebald at Orford Ness,
where still standing are the high towers and fine string-antennae of Cobra Mist, a top-secret cold war over-the-horizon radar station, which
allegedly provided returns so clear it could track the movements of individual trains in Siberia. The monumental era of 20th-century
detection technology, when structures needed to be vast in order to see further, has proved especially attractive. Tacita Dean and Brian Dillon
have both responded to the sound mirrors of Denge, near Dungeness, in Kent. These forerunners of radar are huge acoustic mirrors,
resembling listening ears, designed to concentrate into audibility those forms of distant noise (approaching aircraft engines, for instance)
that would otherwise subtend the range of human hearing.
It isnt hard to see why contemporary eerie culture should be drawn to such evidence of record and detection. If the eerie is as Fanshawe
found on Gallows Hill about the experience of being watched by a presence that you cannot perceive, then this, certainly, is another cause
for its present relevance. For the state has never before been as able to detect and follow the movements of its subjects. Nor since Snowden
have we been as conscious of the extent to which we are continuously being observed by unseen forces, not always operating with what
Fanshawe called pleasant intent. Yet state surveillance is no longer testified to in the landscape by giant edifices. Instead it is mostly carried
out in by software programs running on computers housed in ordinary-looking government buildings, its sources and effects like all eerie
phenomena glimpsed but never confronted.
Shortly after A View from a Hill appeared in the London Mercury in May 1925, MR James was contacted by the poet AE Housman, a friendly
acquaintance and fellow Cambridge don. Housman admired the story, but felt there was something wrong with the optics. It was a nitpick
on Housmans part he was suggesting that anyone looking through liquid-filled binocular barrels would experience a blurred refraction of
vision, rather than its strange sharpening. His literalism missed the point entirely, of course and it is tempting to read Housmans quibble
with the story as a broader objection to Jamess unsettling of the pastoral, a mode in which Housman was deeply invested. For there was, in
fact, something very right with Jamess optics. Where Housman looked backwards, to the land of lost content, James looked forwards, and
saw the English countryside not only as a place of beauty, calm and succour, but also as a green and deeply unpleasant land.
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WG Sebald
Alan Garner
PJ Harvey
Ben Wheatley
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