“It is not down in any map; true places never are”
Exploring and reimagining the folklore of “the zone” using psychogeography
“The zone” is the extended emergency planning zone around the Sizewell nuclear site - encompassed by a 15km radius around the existing 2 reactors. Part of a wider long-term project, “the age of consequence”, begun in 2020 to deep map all three emergency planning zones from a 3km to 30km radius during the planning and construction of Sizewell C, this project uses 3 psychogeographic methodologies. By ”standing in place”[1], undertaking dérives [2] by foot and bicycle and performing magical rituals [3] what Ana Samoylova calls a “speculative archive” of maps, videos, photographs, histories, tales and found objects has been created.
Myths, legends and folklore are tales created from a hazy past, descending through telling and retelling, becoming mistier, shape-changing over time. They have multiple cultural uses and meanings, nothing is certain, anything can be construed. Read these new tales forwards, backwards, upside down. Take what you need, feel the land.
As Edward Docx says
“The landscape is a time machine.
I am walking in the ancient world
and the world that is yet to come.”
“The zone” is thus a magical journey in both time and place and of earth, spirit, water, fire and air to see “the skull beneath the skin of the english landscape”…
The rich folklore and dialect of Suffolk are integral to its psychogeography and “The zone” offers 5 legendary places for investigation. Blaxhall - where George Ewart Evans dived into land culture via oral history, Orford - where the Castle keep housed a merman, Dunwich - which slid into the sea, Shingle Street - where the beach was on fire and Minsmere - where the marsh air was poison but the consecrated earth could create protective talismen.
In Blaxhall we uncover “the hagstones”. Hagstone mythology is not unique to Suffolk, but George Ewart Evans describes it in “Ask the fellows who cut the hay”, his 1956 oral history of Blaxhall - a village within “the zone”. Hagstones – flints with naturally occurring holes in them – were thought to repel witches. Other sources suggest by looking through the “eye” of a hagstone one could see whatever one was looking at “as it really is” - thus revealing a disguised witch. In Scotland, the hagstone’s hole is thought to allow the seer a vision of the future. “The hagstones” re-positions the stones as sources of female power and agency in concert with nature – a response to the threat of the climate emergency and local eco-cide from the new nuclear build.
The myth of the wild hairy man of the woods, sometimes known as the “Green man”, is not confined to Suffolk, but Suffolk has a unique version of the story - “the wild man of Orford” - who was a sea-dwelling woodwose. He was brought from the sea and tortured as a curiosity by the medieval castle-folk, but escaped back to the sea without ever making a noise. Woodwoses in Suffolk are commemorated on many church fonts in “the zone” as well as in Randolph Stow’s 1980 novel “the girl green as elderflower”. “Woodwose” puts “wudu-wasa” (Middle English derivation) back in their natural sylvan idyll and explores ideas of transhumanism – perhaps positing humanity’s ungendered post-apocaylptic future within the “wood-wide-web” rather than extinct or silicon-based.
In Dunwich, 12 churches were lost to the rising sea and local legend tells of the church spire bells still tolling today. “The zone” has been reclaimed from the sea and is slowly eroding back into it as the sea advances with polar melt during the climate emergency. The new nuclear build of Sizewell C will be an island requiring enormous concrete sea defences. Linguistic history gives us a way in to explore these ideas. The Suffolk dialect is rich and constantly evolving. Moor’s Suffolk words & phrases 1823 tells us the word “Waterslain” is now obsolete but explains
“Waterslain - land retentive of surface water, and requiring to be drained,
is thus well described. We should say poisoned - or rather “piezen’d with water”
- hence killed or slain, by an easy process.”
“Waterslain” imagines a tale of the near future, and the distant past, where sea-levels rise due to human activities – the consequences of the “anthropocene”.
Shingle Street is a place of modern myth. In the Second World War, so legend goes, one night the sea was on fire and the next morning hundreds of burned bodies were washed up on the beach - by the morning after they had disappeared. No explanation was ever given as to whether the bodies were a successfully repelled German invasion or an unsuccessful weapons test. Orford Ness is nearby - secretive site of Cobra Mist and radar and nuclear testing in the Second World War. Frequently refuted by official sources, the tale lives on locally. “War games” considers the consequences of literally setting the world on fire.
Minsmere is legendary in the 20th Century for bringing avocets back from extinction. But in the 12th century there was a considerable abbey on the marsh. Local lore describes how the villagers were always unwell - a modern perspective posits malaria - and they blamed the marsh and sea mists for bringing poisonous air. The monks were said to be less affected, their holy site protective. Nonetheless, they did abandon the monastery in the 14th century, building Leiston abbey from Minsmere’s stones on higher ground. The local villagers took the consecrated earth from around the remaining chapel and made clapperless clay bells to hang at their lintels for protection. The legend of the minsmere bells tells of an unfortunate village farming couple who, despite terrible farming and personal losses survived to an unbelievably old age: raising the possibility of immortality... Eventually, they decided they were weary, smashed the bells, opened all the doors and windows, went to bed in a close embrace and were found peacefully dead in that position next morning. Here, “The minsmere bells” speaks of hope, light and air. Of protection and endurance in the landscape.
[1] “I have also employed the technique of remaining still in the landscape and sort of letting it carry on around me” poet Suzannah Evans, Exploring Meers Brook.
[2] the dérive (drifting) is a playful technique for wandering … without the usual motives for movement (work or leisure activities), but instead the attractions of the terrain, with its “psycho-geographic” effects.
[3] “Across the varied terrain of psychogeographical walking, magic is used to conjure an openness and vulnerability to voices “hidden” in the landscape.” Alistair Bonnet, the enchanted path