One of several enjoyable but quite phenomenally squelchy walks I have done this month began and ended at the Dorset village of Melbury Osmond. It is, as you can see below, extremely pretty even under a dishwater sky, the kind of regularly primped place that makes someone like me feel like a living sack of straw the second he emerges from his car, its central lane lined with what has been called - although nobody seems to remember who by - “a calendarsmith’s dream of thatched cottages”, leading down to the village splash (a genteel Dorset version of what more ordinary villages are content to call a ford). Thomas Hardy’s parents got married in the warmly preening 18th Century church at the top of the hill and Hardy went on to use the village as the inspiration for Little Hintock in his sometimes quite boring 1887 novel The Woodlanders. Melbury is a perfect example of what, many years ago, when I first moved to the West Country, prompted me to hastily and unfairly dismiss Dorset as a neater, more Torified version of Devon. This being before I gradually fell in love with it and realised it was a quietly dark and ineffably deep county steeped in ghosts, chalk, murder, surprisingly affordable secondhand vinyl records and abstruse folklore ritual.
Melbury, for example, might look dainty, but here is its most notorious resident:
He is called the Dorset Ooser. His face is made from bullock horns, cow hide, and the hair and teeth of formerly living humans. He resided in a malthouse in Melbury for many years, where one of his jobs was to scare trespassing children. At other times, he was brought out for use during local events such as Rough Music or the Skimmington Ride, sort of pre-Industrial Age versions of the website Twitter where people guilty of what were locally perceived as wrongthinking acts had rotten veg thrown at them, pans and other kitchen implements banged in their vicinity, and - amongst other forms of public shaming - were sometimes made to ride a horse or donkey while sitting facing its tail. The original Dorset Ooser (in fact pronounced “Osser”, but let’s ignore that because it ruins the Beck pun in the title of this essay) was thought to be a representation of the Devil, and went missing somewhere in the vicinity of Crewkerne not long after the beginning of the 21st Century. This makes sense to me, somehow tallying with my own experiences of Crewkerne, a town of many pockets, with more mystery to it than is immediately apparent, where I recently heard the following conversation in what was very obviously a shop devoted to the selling of antiques:
Woman walking into antique shop: “Do you do feet?”
Antique shop owner: “How do you mean, do we do them? Are you asking if we sell them?”
Woman: “No. I mean do you do them. Do you work on them?”
Antique shop owner: “Er, no. You’d probably want a chiropodist for that. There’s one just around the corner on Church Street.”
A coachman called Lawrence who was entrusted with the Ooser head’s care by the doctor called Edward Cave who legally owned it, used to wear it to frighten people in the streets of the town during the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign, but by this time it was falling apart, much like the hare mask my friend Mary constructed for me 12 years ago for my 36th birthday, which was made of cardboard rather than bits of humans and farm animals, and with which I unintentionally brought a postman close to cardiac arrest by wearing to open my front door in spring 2012.
Unlike me, wearing Mary’s hare mask, a person wearing the Dorset Ooser had no provision to see where they were going. My guess is that being inside it was overwhelmingly claustrophobic and smelly, and possibly an even more distressing experience than being goaded by the person wearing it. According to the 1973 Reader’s Digest Folklore Myths And Legends Of Britain - on whose cover the Ooser stars - there was once a time when almost every Dorset village had its own Ooser. In some, it was known as The Christmas Bull and its purpose was to roam through the neighbourhood scaring members of the public until they provided it with refreshments - not unlike the Mari Lwyd skeletal horse from Wales or the original Straw Bear from the Fens who, when I first went to watch it parade through the town of Whittlesey in its revived form in the early years of this century, used to be accompanied by an exchange Straw Bear from Germany, a smaller but more disturbing creature who pulled women down on top of him from the side of the street, refusing to let them go until they furnished him with a kiss.
As of the time of writing, the cheapest copies of the Reader’s Digest Folklore Myths And Legends Of Britain available online - none of which have the dust jacket - are around £50. Some are closer to £100. I bought mine in the late 90s from a charity shop in Sheffield for £1.50, noting with excitement that the year of its release was the same as that of the Wicker Man, a film I watched during the same period with near manic regularity, as if trying to suck it into my bloodstream. I remember staring mesmerised at the selection of illustrations - especially Samuel Palmer’s Cornfield By Moonlight and the alchemic 16th century painting Splendor Solis - and the way, one by one, the book seem to strip back the layers of Britain in my mind and make it a more haunting and interesting place.
I also couldn’t help noticing, upon reading the book, that witch’s familiars were often far cuter than people gave them credit for being.
I remember, during the first part of my obsession with this Bible of Wyrd Britain, which has now almost reached cliche status on Folk Horror Instagram, walking home across Blackheath in south east London on a winter night, in the fog, flanked by feckless suburban crows, feeling like a person whose interests were straying incautiously outside what they were supposed to be, thinking about the still-active spores of the plague victims buried beneath the heath, thinking about the contours of history beneath everything. I can remember yearning to get to, and live in, places far more empty and strange than the one where I was, wanting to understand them and everything they had been. I could taste something in the air, something that I wanted to be and explore as a future author of books, but I couldn’t articulate it, would not, in fact, be able to articulate it until I had tried and failed to write the books several times, then written some of the books and, while doing so, walked many hundreds of miles in these places I had been reading about, and thinking of them in their more elemental and magical Reader’s Digest guises as I did. The Summer Land. The Witch Country. The Marcher Lands. The Danelaw.
It’s still at this time of year that I feel closest to whatever that taste was. It remains a little hard to define, a tad abstract. These days I perhaps think of it mostly as the flavour of storytelling. Right now, with everything stripped back, something is accessible that remains covered during other parts of the year. A strange bundle of clothes stuck to a fence that you didn’t see until the leaves died away that immediately makes the word “fencewitch” pop into your mind, unbidden. An old scarecrow upended in a hedge. The path beaten back to a ruined one-room building whose purpose remains recondite. The 18th century town lock-up I noticed a fortnight ago on a walk near Mells in Somerset that, with its thick half-bent door, seemed to have so much more to say about its past in the pale winter light. Yet this time of year is my least favourite. I am ergonomically constructed for a hot climate. I swiftly become hemmed in by mucky December days and their stingy pseudo wedge of sunlight. I feel capitalism’s claws more deeply into me than in any other month, a greater sense of mass production and its attendant ruinous waste. But I also discern a necessary dark magic, a starkness that can be oddly comforting.
It’s a period when something extra seems available, as a writer, and as a reader. I go out into the landscape and look for it. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I don’t. Whatever the case, it’s part of my antidote to a compulsory, almost dictatorial jollity that gets more oppressive every year, my antidote to capitalism’s knack of cleverly employing willing armies to make people like me feel like we’re “spoilsports” for not thrilling to the idea of being in a packed supermarket listening to some mindnumbingly overplayed song clearly written with all the joy and passion of a date entry on a chequebook, or being in a 3.30pm (aka midnight) ring road traffic jam watching two overstretched fellow drivers stop millimetres short of beating the living shit out of each other, when in fact, in the rare moments we’re given the opportunity to remember it, there’s a lot about the more ancient side of Christmas we enjoy: the opportunity it can afford to spend pleasantly aimless time with people we are fond of, the primal sense of conclusion, or something turning over, and the books. Especially the books. I intend to read at least a dozen between now and January the 1st and something about this time of year, its symbiotic relationship with storytelling, makes that feel possible, even if it’s not.
Although corporations will gladly attempt to convince you otherwise, there’s a lot that’s awkward, if not impossible, about trying to transpose the Scrooge narrative to an era as materialistic and ecologically shagged as the one we now live in. It can still be very involving, however, if executed imaginatively, and that was very much the case with Humbug, the Wandering Tiger theatre company’s alternately funny and terrifying take on A Christmas Carol, which I saw this time last week at the Eleventh Century St Nicholas Priory in Exeter. Yes, there were the audience-participation songs and the cheesy feelgood ending, but the real reason most of us were there was soon apparent: it was the ghosts. The one I’ll be taking the longest time to forget (a century? eternity?) was in fact a puppet stuffed with a fan-powered vape and topped with a carved 50p block of foam with two LED lights stuck into it. As he barked his warnings at Victorian London’s answer to The Wolf Of Wall Street, he was walked around the room by two masked actors and I, for one, was in no doubt at all that what we were seeing was the real spirit of Jacob Marley as opposed to a collection of metal coat hangers twisted together, with some fake money stuck to them. It remains the most truly, primally Christmasy thing I’ve seen this year. The macabre mannequin I saw slumped nonsensically on a bench the following day, after a walk through Lydford Gorge - a deep chasm of moss-caked rain forest known as the most cursed place in Britain, back before the building of the first branch of the PRYZM nightclub chain - was also impressive but she was a victim of timing. If I hadn’t met Jacob the night before, she’d have hit me a lot harder in the spooks.
While I was photographing the Lydford mannequin, with my car pulled over unobstructively to the side of the adjacent country lane, a white van hurtled past. The driver opened his window and shouted something in my direction, which I caught only enough of to discern that it wasn’t a comment whose theme was Christmas cheer or reconstructed toxicity-free male bonding. It could have been a number of things. “‘Ere mate, you look a right c*** in that floral poncho!”? “Why the fuck are you photographing that scarecrow? She your girlfriend?”? Or perhaps just a general expression of frustration that, by causing him to briefly have to drive slightly less like a nutsack, I had made him half a second late for the pub, where it was his plan to drink ten pints of Stella before trying to sleep with his best friend’s wife? I suppose we’ll never know. To be fair, I do sometimes forget that it’s not what your average person might view as a normal activity, going around the countryside, looking for ghosts and photographing ruined buildings and cheaply but creatively constructed humanoids. I do it for the same reason I do a lot of things: I can’t help being chronically interested in stuff. At this time of year, when the land is as dead as it ever is, when the veil is at its thinnest, there’s something else at play too. Death feels more present, basic, eerie representations of it more haunting, more interesting. They seem like the gatekeepers of history itself, history’s dizzying length, the way its stories - all still out there, hidden in plain sight - spellbindingly dwarf us.
I suppose, in weird rural mannequin hunting terms, spotting an Ooser in the wild would represent some kind of jackpot: perhaps more flabbergasting even than the time, during a winter walk in Norfolk, in 2010, I found a chubby scarecrow in a blue boiler suit hanging from a tree by a noose. I’ve not come across one yet and going to see the most recent Christmas Bull - made in 1975 - at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester, where it currently resides, isn’t quite the same. There’s still a lot of mystery around the Ooser’s exact purpose and few mentions of it in 19th Century literature. One is in Hardy’s Return Of The Native, where Mrs Yeobright - a country lady with a town outlook - asks a boy called Johnny Nonsuch, “What have made you so down? Have you seen a ooser?” As it turns out, Johnny hasn’t. He’s just seen a scary face at a window. Me? I’ve not seen one either, not in the wild, so that’s not why I’ve been down. It’s just the dark days and the asinine consumerism: the stuff I ride out, every year, in the ways I have learned best, until the light floods back in and makes me whole.
Crewkerne resident here - I can confirm your feelings of something 'other' in this strange little town. There's a portal to the past just inside Oscar's Wine Bar, taking you into a pub you remember from your stupid youth. Pints are cheap, plates of food overflow and you can have a heated discussion with a local without fear of getting stabbed in the courtyard later.
Take a wrong turn out of the churchyard and you're in the middle of deep country. Walk up the hill a bit and the hollow ways could take you three ways. Choose wisely.
And there's a bookshop that specializes in the exact content of the Reader's Digest Myths, Folklore and Legends (a constant companion in my childhood, btw).
It is a strange place, Crewkerne.
I understand this feeling so well, Tom. The winter solstice is always the turn of the year for me, when I can look for the tiny increasing moments of light, and try to forget the shit that commercial Christmas has become.