Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

On a brief trip to visit friends and relations in Yorkshire and Manchester last October, I began encountering an unsettling number of severed heads. Not real ones of course. Stone heads, with an archaic, Celtic vibe. The one pictured above I've...

 Talking with a group of Girl Guides a while ago, we fell (as you do) into a discussion about house spirits. The best known example, annoyingly enough, is Dobby the house-elf from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I have a soft spot for hous...

The village of Malham in the Yorkshire Dales is set in a landscape of remarkable natural beauty which includes the great curved cliff of Malham Cove and the dramatic narrow gorge of Gordale Scar. Turner painted Malham Cove (see above) and Wordsworth...

[A Christmas Eve tale from Scandinavian Folklore, William Craigie, 1896]At Ottesund Ferry on Limfjord there was a ferryman whose name was Reimer. He had gone all the way to Copenhagen to get a licence to allow him to ferry over the Sound. It took him...

This wonderful little city stands, as if sprung from the soil, in a neighbour's garden. It reminds me of the medieval French city of Carcassonne, whose name was used by Lord Dunsany for a faerie city in one of his tales, though rather oddly he seems...

When I was a child, of all the Narnia books The Last Battle was the one I liked least. I read it perhaps only two or three times compared with countless re-readings of the others; this was because I found it uncomfortable, disturbing. It’s a book i...

One from the archives (October 2016) What – if anything – happens after death? A fantasy world, no matter how beautifully constructed, lacks something if there’s no thought given to what happens when characters die, or at least to what beliefs...