Barring Burrow Head, Anwoth’s Old Kirk is, for me, the most evocative of all the locations from the film. It’s reminiscent of Alloway, with a roofless ruin, and similarly grand headstones bedecked with lichen and moss. The setting though is far lonelier, with just a scattering of nearby residences, including the old schoolhouse opposite the entrance gate – a holiday home that reclaimed its original role during the packed seven-week shoot. Inside, Howie questions the children about Rowan but is met with a unanimous denial of her existence. He’s drawn to the empty desk in the centre of the classroom and opens its lid, hopeful perhaps of some evidence of the girl. Within, a beetle is tethered by a piece of black thread to a nail. It moves in a continuous anti-clockwise circle; eventually the poor old thing will become trapped up tight to the nail, a dark-haired girl in pigtails explains.
‘Poor old thing! Then why in God’s name do you do it, girl?’ is the sergeant’s outraged response. And he’s right – to me this remains one of the most chilling and memorable sequences of the film: an odd forewarning of the callous indifference to come.
There is no maypole standing by the wall as I pass through the kirkyard gate, no singing children. It’s virtually silent. No noise of traffic, just distant birdsong punctured by the insistent monosyllabic call of a great spotted woodpecker that passes overhead and lands in a birch on the gorse-covered hillside that rises from the boggy depression away at the rear. Six sizeable yews, ambiguous symbols of both death and resurrection (and also thought to possess properties that ward off the Devil), tower over the graves. I come across a table-like slab dedicated to the memory of a murdered Covenanter:
Here lyes John Bell of Whitesyde who was barbourously shot to death in the paroch of Tongland at the command of Grier of Lag anno 1685. This monument shall tell posterity that Blessed Bell of Whytesyde here doth ly.
I enter inside the walls of the tumbledown church, where Sergeant Howie places an improvised wooden cross, like those I saw earlier at St Ninian’s Cave, on the redundant altar. Next to him an islander breastfeeds her baby, her outstretched left palm balancing a bird’s egg as part of an esoteric fertility ritual. At least one of the headstones in the film was a prop – there is no grave of Beech Buchanan ‘protected by the ejaculation of serpents’ – but the distinctive skull and crossbones of the memento mori on the large tomb in the centre of the hollow-skied nave is present. The exhumation of Rowan was carried out in this place too. On that icy-cold October evening the stoic crew were no doubt mindful of the words carved above the locked doorway of the mausoleum beside the ruin: ‘Until the day break, and the shadows flee away.’
Before I leave Galloway I call in at Kirkcudbright. With its attractive whitewashed houses and narrow passageways, the small town is where many of Summerisle’s village scenes were filmed. (The pretty harbour where Howie lands his seaplane, however, is at Plockton – 180 miles to the north, on the west coast of the mainland across from Skye.)
Kirkcudbright was also home to Edward Atkinson Hornel, one of the ‘Glasgow Boys’, an impressionistic Scottish art movement at the end of the nineteenth century – albeit a loose one – that was a precursor to modernism. From the 1880s and into the twentieth century the town became something of an artists’ colony in the mould of Newlyn or St Ives: its residents included E. A. Taylor and his wife, the illustrator Jessie King, while other painters such as George Henry were frequent visitors. The gaudy palette, in particular of Hornel’s oils, many of which are on display in his impressive residence, Broughton House, seem in stark contrast to the muted colours of the early spring countryside I passed through on the way from Burrow Head.
In the tourist office I get into a conversation with the friendly woman who works there about why I’m in the area. ‘Have you not seen him yet?’ she asks. ‘I’ve had a few visitors coming in saying he’s out on the main road out past Dundrennan, past the Abbey.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The Wicker Man! We used to have the Wickerman music festival out there in the summer, you see. But it’s not run now for the last few years. They’ve still got his statue though. He’s in a field on the left once you’re out of the village. You’ll not miss him.’
As it isn’t much of a detour from my route home, of course I go and look. And indeed there he is, rising more than twenty feet in height, the wicker gatekeeper that greeted the visiting crowds.¶¶¶ It doesn’t at all resemble the squared-off structure of the film, but is like some sinuous, faceless elemental guardian that might inhabit the depths of an Algernon Blackwood story.
I have come of my own free will to the appointed place. The game’s over.
* I’m not sure anyone else does a graveyard with quite the grandeur and solemnity of the Scots. Edinburgh, too, is riddled with impressive assemblages of dark-stoned monuments to the departed, in kirkyards like St Cuthbert’s and, particularly, Greyfriars. At the latter, the maudlin Skye terrier Bobby supposedly sat in mourning by his master’s grave for a fourteen-year stretch in the middle of the Victorian century – the canine embodiment of the public grief of the monarch for her lost husband, with which the lone dog’s vigil coincided.
† I was lured into joining my local church choir through the promise of its midweek games club and various exciting-sounding day trips out – not because of any religious devotion on my part (or of that of my parents).
‡ The name Oliphant is shared by the excellent Scottish Victorian ghost story writer, Margaret Oliphant, whose much-anthologised ‘The Open Door’ – set on the outskirts of Edinburgh – is, according to M. R. James, one of only two ghostly tales known to him ‘wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror’; it too features a haunted, roofless ruin with a discomfiting ‘door that led to nothing’.
§ Thom ended up staying in America, producing more statues, before carrying out decorative stonework on buildings including the Gothic Revival Holy Trinity Church in Manhattan – the tallest building in the country from the time of its completion in 1846 until 1869, but which today is dwarfed by the office blocks of Wall Street.
¶ The true fate of the three Flannan Isles keepers was presumably more prosaic – and more poignant – most likely involving them being washed out to sea and drowning during fierce winter storms; I picture them perishing each in turn while trying to come to the aid of their stricken colleagues.
** The film wasn’t shot on St Kilda, but on the most westerly of the Shetland Isles, Foula. As well as the finished print, Powell also left behind an evocative contemporary account of the filming (in which, memorably, the crew were marooned by October storms), originally published as 200,000 Feet on Foula.
†† The lonely waypoint, which wears ‘an indefinable look of desertion, as if man had attempted to domesticate himself here and failed’, features as a haunted dwelling in E. F. Benson’s Norfolk-set story ‘A Tale of an Empty House’.
‡‡ As I’ve grown older my own fear of heights has increased, a trait I share with my father. Since we lived in the flattest part of the country this was not ordinarily a concern. However, on holiday certain routes took on a foreboding mystique in his head, so that he was loath to drive along the dreaded Wrynose Pass when we visited the Lake District, or ascend Exmoor’s mighty Porlock Hill.
§§ Although The Wicker Man’s scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer never mentioned having seen Robin Redbreast, it’s tempting to imagine it had some influence – the BBC play explicitly references the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer’s 1890 study of ancient pagan cults and rituals, The Golden Bough, which Shaffer used in his research for the film.
¶¶ Even though The Wicker Man was made on a modest budget for a cinema feature – said to be around £335,250 – its resources still dwarfed those of a British television drama.
*** Roman Polanski’s satanic 1968 film is another I first watched at far too young an age.
††† Interestingly, in Witchfinder General no black magic or signs of the supernatural are on display, just
the eerie East Anglian landscape and a surfeit of sadism. The horrors of The Wicker Man are entirely the result of human agency too, though this certainly isn’t the case in The Blood on Satan’s Claw …
‡‡‡ Recent examples of films often bracketed as ‘folk horror’ include the New England-set The Witch (2015), and Ben Wheatley’s disconcerting A Field in England (2013), which features an alchemist and dark magic at the heart of its psychedelic portrayal of a fractured land haunted by the spectre of the Civil War.
§§§ The butchering and reordering of the original script has generated much debate, including Allan Brown’s book Inside The Wicker Man, which tells in detail the convoluted story of the film’s genesis, production, and fitful forays into cinema theatres on the way to achieving cult-classic status. Despite enjoying the individual scenes subsequently restored to these longer edits, I still find that on balance – though Christopher Lee would not agree – I prefer the more enigmatic tone of the shorter version.
¶¶¶ Each year, another even larger statue was set alight on the Saturday evening of The Wickerman Festival. This one remains as a testament to the now-lost event.
Chapter 6
BORDERLAND
The shore he used to look out across, over which he would sometimes walk, shimmers through the glass. Perhaps this was even the room in which he wrote – it’s said he preferred to work at night – though I’d hazard that would have been up on the third floor. The great boulders of the wall that form a defensive line before the blue would not have stood there in his time, being added in 2011. Beyond them the beach is starkly demarcated, the rounded stones of grey shingle replaced with light-brown sand that, from the photograph I have seen of him promenading, appears more in keeping with how he would have known it. In the picture he stands in the foreground, this side of his bonnet-clad favourite sister, Lissie, almost as if they are joined at the shoulder. He is looking into the distance, out to sea, his mouth slightly agape in a smirk, his hands in his pockets. He is dark haired and tanned, and at five foot four and a half is only just taller than her, but undoubtedly he is handsome; by all accounts he was a hit with the young women of the village.
Hope Hodgson and his sister on Borth Beach. Image supplied by Ray Russell via Jane Frank (photographer unknown)
Bookcases fill two walls of the room, a mixture of titles stretching from floor to ceiling. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past sits alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, and in turn the pair are sited above a shelf containing the poetry of R. S. Thomas and texts on the history of art. A rugby match – I have no idea which teams are involved – is playing out silently on the television that stands on a low occasional table in front of the window. I had doubted whether I would be able to find this place: the Welsh house in which one of the greatest English writers of weird fiction wrote a significant amount of his work, including my favourite of his four novels, The House on the Borderland. Like many details about this author’s life, the exact timing of when and where he worked on each of his books is subject to debate, though it seems he was living here during the book’s completion and publication. This much we know, because he signs and dates his name below the introduction to The House on the Borderland’s mysterious manuscript:
William Hope Hodgson
‘Glaneifion,’ Borth, Cardiganshire,
December 17, 1907
I had arrived sometime after lunch in the likeable coastal resort of Borth, a few miles north of Aberystwyth. It’s mid-April and, after a harsh winter, feels like the first proper day of spring – the sun finally has some warmth to share, which is an unfamiliar feeling. After squeezing my car into one of the few available spaces, conveniently next to a pleasant-looking café, I take advantage of the weather and buy an ice cream: a local flavour whose unlikely name, ‘Squirrel’, appeals – it’s actually crème brûlée and is good. I expect the ad-hoc mission I’ve given myself – to see if I can find William Hope Hodgson’s house – will prove fruitless, as in the century that has passed I’m sure names are bound to have changed. I do know, however, that the Hodgsons’ accommodation had its back to the sea, so I concentrate on that side.
I’ve just started into my ice cream and crossed the road and there, directly in front of me, it is – a quest that has taken less than a minute. Glaneifion. The name, I am to learn from the house’s present owner, Anthony, has its own mythic connotations and loosely translates as ‘Eifion’s shore’. Eifion, it is said, was the grandson of Cunedda, one of the earliest founders of the Gwynedd dynasties – a great chieftain who was brought down from Scotland to North Wales to help defend the region from Irish invaders around the fifth century. It seems a suitably poetic epigraph for the place.
An attractive three-storey villa, Glaneifion has a claret-coloured door and windows. Its dark exterior has a mottled appearance, as if capillaries flow beneath its surface. There is nothing to confirm this is where Hodgson lived on and off between 1904 and the end of 1910, and where in earlier summers his family holidayed. But it feels right. I stare at the building and wonder if I should knock, though as I’m still scoffing my ice cream, which is doing its best to drip down my shirt, I figure I’ll take a walk first. A passageway bisects the terrace a few doors down and I emerge from shadow onto the upper beach, which resembles the familiar shingle shorelines of my native East Anglia – only here the pebbles are much larger and flatter. I’m not sure whether I will be able to work out which is Glaneifion from this new angle, but it’s instantly obvious. Four figures sit at the boundary of its garden, overlooking the glinting sea; I decide to wander to the shoreline before accosting them.
William Hope Hodgson was born in November 1877 in the Essex village of Blackmore End, a few miles north of Braintree and thirty miles south of where M. R. James grew up. Like James, Hodgson’s father was a curate, though there the comparisons stop, as the Reverend Samuel Hodgson was an unorthodox character prone to disagreements with his superiors, which led to him being posted to various disparate parishes around the country. William Hope Hodgson – known to his family as Hope, to distinguish him from his well-to-do tailor grandfather – was the second of twelve children, three of whom (all of them boys) were to perish before reaching the age of two.
Unlike James, and unlike his parents, the young Hope showed an aversion to organised religion, though a spiritual element is present in his second novel The House on the Borderland (published in 1908), and his final full-length work The Night Land from four years later. The earlier book is ostensibly set around an otherworldly mansion located ‘some forty miles distant’ from Ardrahan on the west coast of Ireland’s County Galway, the place where the Reverend Hodgson was exiled as a missionary in 1887. There he was charged with converting the local Catholics to Protestantism, an exercise doomed to failure as the resident population resented the presence of an Anglican English family in the Old Rectory, out of sight and apart from the village like the titular house of the novel, down a lengthy drive encased by vast orchards. These same expansive surroundings, in which the unruly Hope once spent several days stuck up a tree he had climbed – he was fed and sustained by the family’s servants before he finally descended – were stripped of their fruit by the villagers as tensions between the two strands of Christianity came to a head, resulting in the Hodgsons’ return to England.
There, in 1890, they settled in the northern industrial heartland of Blackburn. Late the following year, Hope, aged thirteen, ran away properly after a ratcheting up of the friction between father and son, signing on for a four-year apprenticeship as a cabin boy in the Mercantile Navy, which paved the way for a further stint of similar length as a seaman. By the time Hope came back from sea in 1898 – a spell that was to have a profound influence on his first works of weird fiction – his father had long departed, a victim at the age of forty-six of cancer of the neck or throat. This, it has been speculated – though the claim sounds spurious to me – resulted from the tight dog collars the Reverend Hodgson was forced to wear.
His death plunged the family into several years of financial hardship alleviated only by the passing of Hope’s wealthy grandfather and namesake.
After his return to Blackburn, Hope opened ‘W. H. Hodgson’s School of Physical Culture’ during the second half of 1899. His early gymnasium apparently proved popular with the local police force, running for the next few years and perhaps right up until he moved to Borth in 1904. Hodgson also wrote various articles for national magazines on ‘scientific exercises’ – as a result of his short stature he had long been conscious of the importance of building his own strength, and prided himself on his physical prowess. In October 1902 he was involved in an extraordinary incident in the Lancashire town’s history, when the American escapologist (and later debunker of fraudulent mediums), Harry Houdini, visited:
Mr W. H. Hodgson, principal of the Blackburn School of Physical Culture, took up the challenge issued by Houdini, the ‘Handcuff King’ who engaged to forfeit £25 to the infirmary if he failed to free himself from any irons placed upon him.
Far from delivering good publicity for Hodgson’s gym, the episode proved shambolic. Houdini struggled for over three-quarters of an hour to loosen himself from irons supplied by Hodgson that the showman claimed had been tampered with; over the noise of the increasingly vocal crowd Hodgson was overheard to say: ‘If Houdini is beaten then let him give in.’ Hodgson left the theatre before the end of the performance, having being ordered home by a police sergeant who was fearful that a dangerous public disturbance might result. Addressing the audience when he finally freed himself, Houdini stated that in fourteen years he had ‘never been so brutally treated’.
Ghostland Page 13
