Hellebore #9 - The Old Ways Issue

In an essay written years after The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kenneth Grahame referred to the “country of the mind”, a place to be found during his long, solitary walks in the countryside where he would live “high adventures”. For Grahame, and for many others before and after him, landscape doesn’t have merely a physical dimension.

In our perceptions of landscapes we are not only informed by our senses, our knowledge, and our experience, but also by something ineffable—a link between our imagination, our inner life, and something that transcends us.

The Old Ways Issue celebrates landscapes, the way we navigate them, and the stories we tell about them. Pilgrimages and rituals of crossings, tales of malevolent lights luring travellers off the path, patterns in the landscape, invisible lines of force, the mystery of megaliths. In these pages we explore the sea, the marshland, rivers and fields, stone circles, the moors, and the enigma of outer space to unearth the stories that fascinate us and to acknowledge how they’ve shaped us.

HELLEBORE is a collection of writings and essays devoted to folk horror and the themes that inspire it: folklore, myth, history, archaeology, psychogeography, and the occult.

Featuring words by Katy Soar and Niall Finneran, Kenneth Brophy, Francis Young, Verity Holloway, Madeleine Potter, Icy Sedgwick, and Darren Pih. Artwork by Clare Marie Bailey and Nathaniel Hébert.

Edited by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo.