Raising the Dragon

The weekend before last we put on a French and Breton folk dance here on Dartmoor with Red Dog Green Dog and Wod (gig photos by Rima Staines, with thanks).

Red Dog Green Dog warming up for the gig

Though ostensibly secular, a party or a gig is nonetheless a kind of ritual. It begins with an invitation...

...and the preparation of a ritual space, in this instance the transformation of a boxy 1970s village hall, complete with badminton court, into something resembling a festival tent (huge thanks to everyone who gave their time and energy to make it happen).

Here, I'm a great believer in the quiet power of bunting. A quintessential piece of English magic, it draws the eye, breaks up straight lines and lifts the spirits. A parachute, some Indian wall-hangings and coloured lights also helped massively.

There was a dance workshop for the uninitiated...

...and then we were away, with both bands playing for an hour and a half each. From the off the atmosphere was fantastic. Beginners and seasoned dancers piled onto the dance floor in true festive fashion, with many of the dances reaching that level of transcendence we all secretly crave.

Wod

At the end, both bands came together to play on the floor, the dancers jostling close by. Come the inevitable curfew, no one wanted to stop.

Clearing up the hall and returning it to normal is all part of the post-ritual cool-down, as is the all-important cup of tea immediately afterwards. But in order to stave-off that terrible feeling of anti-climax, I organised a Sunday afternoon session in a warm but gritty local pub, the Northmore Arms. It was truly one of the best sessions I've played in, with gorgeous tune following gorgeous tune, several outbreaks of Gypsy Jazz, and even a slinky 'Ninja Tunes' version of Matty Groves. When it came to a natural end, the ritual was closed.

As with all good rituals, everyone came away slightly transformed, with that honeyed sense of levity that comes from something having happened. Though much anticipated, the exact nature of that something can never quite be predicted.

What was particularly wonderful for me was that the gig brought together an extended group of friends - a tribe if you will - that time and circumstance had rather scattered to the four corners.

Broken toy, found outside the gig venue

It was in the mid-nineties that a group of us ex-road-protesters started going to France, to the folk festival at Saint Chartier. We returned with pipes, hurdy-gurdies, a bagful of tunes and the feeling that this yearning, droning, earthy music was ours. It was a heady time - to be young was very heaven - and though all things must pass, I miss it dreadfully.

But at the gig, and for the first time in over a decade, the spirit was there again.

I felt the dragon move.  

The Story of Stories

Something of a departure for me this time - a story - so I hope you're sitting comfortably. It arrived, as so many of my ideas do, in that fertile hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking, and it did so fully formed: names, plot, the lot. If it seems a little stranger than my usual fare, that's because it arrived directly after I first walked with Madam Craw.

Now, if you're ready then I'll begin (illustrations by Nomi McLeod).

The Story of Stories

A long time ago and further away than the back of beyond, the world was grey because there were no stories. No tales to lighten the gloom; no myths of how the world came to be; no there-and-back-again; just there, and there, and there. A world without memory.

The people shuffled about in a daze, chewing bark and gathering what food they could: a few berries, a little carrion. With no stories, how could they hunt? They didn’t know how. They slept where they fell.

Once, a young man met an old woman in the forest, though he neither knew that he was young nor that she was old nor where he was nor which way was up. She wore a long pale dress and a cloak of red, all flocked with tufts of white. Her silver hair was braided into a thick plait that fell below her knees and her eyes were a piercing blue, the colour of frost. A raven croaked at one shoulder and a wolf followed at her heel.

She looked at him, smacked her lips and muttered a while. Seeing a glimmer of greatness in him she reached into her pocket and pulled out something that looked like a small piece of dried cake, wrinkled and red. She popped it in his mouth and instinctively he swallowed.

When at last the honey drained from his chest and the colours faded and the twitching dance left him he realised that he had a name, Helix, and that the noises coming from her mouth made sense.

‘The problem is, there’s no stories. Don’t you see? No stories. He’s got them all trussed up in a sack, a sack that teems and heaves like the carcass of a fly-blown mole. Deary me yes, like a fly-blown mole. You’ve got to go and get them back. Understand?’

And when she saw that he did, Madam Craw told Helix what to do. She found a silver birch tree, then spat on the ground near its roots. Six crawbreads came up one by one. She picked them and laid them out in the sun to dry. When they were like little cakes, wrinkled and red, she gave them to him in a leather bag and sent him on his way.

A long time he walked, this way and that, through thicket and briar. At twilight he reached the farthest edge of the forest where the North Wind yollops and yowls and only the wolves go. There he heard a grimbling, grumbling sort of sound. Silhouetted against the gloaming was an old man with a conspicuous drip hanging from the end of his nose. He shuffled this way and that, bent double with the weight of a sack, a sack that teemed and heaved like the fly-blown carcass of a mole. From time to time he reached to the sky and gouged at it with a grimy finger, then licked it with a slobbery smack. The Grimgribber was eating stars.

‘Dishgushting! Nashty shtars. Shitting shtars. Eat them all!’

He stopped, sniffed the air, turned and saw Helix standing there, alone.

‘Whatsh thish? Juishy morshel? Tender shnack?’ and the Grimgribber lurched at Helix with outstretched arms. Helix stood firm and did exactly as he’d been told.

‘Here, try one of these’ he said, offering a crawbread to the creature.

The Grimgribber instinctively took one, popped it in his mouth, chewed a bit, looked pleasantly surprised, then swallowed.

And when at last the honey drained from his chest and the colours faded and the twitching dance left him, the Grimgribber said: ‘Nishe. I shposhe you’d like shomething in return?’

‘Give me a story from that bag on your back, the one that teems and heaves like the fly-blown carcass of a mole!’

Well he grimbled and he grumbled and he yowled and complained, just as you’d expect, but in the end even the heartless Grimgribber agreed that the trade was fair. In any case, he thought to himself, he could always catch the story again once he’d eaten the boy. So he loosened the leather fastenings and squeezed out one story, just the one, the very first.

And oh, Helix knew Sun and Moon and how, when the world was fresh and wet with dew, they clattered and crashed together like tumbling rocks, fighting over which of them should rule the heavens, until, his head pounding, the Maker cried ‘Enough!’ and separated Day from Night and finally got some rest…

‘Come back tomorrow’ said the Grimgribber, yawning and already falling deeply asleep.

The next evening Helix returned. There were fewer stars than before.

‘Tashty crawbread?’ whined the Grimgribber, who’d decided that once he’d eaten all the cakes he was definitely going to have the young man for afters. This time, being a greedy sort, he snatched two crawbreads, wrinkled and red, and swallowed them down.

And when at last the honey drained from his chest and the colours faded and the twitching dance left him he loosened the fastening of his sack, the sack that teemed and heaved like the fly-blown carcass of a mole, and squeezed out a story, just the one.

And oh, Helix knew how the Lord of all Animals heard cries coming from the mountain, and so cleft the rock with his stick to let out all the creatures of the world in one tumbling ball of feather and fur, and how he rules them still, and how once a famine came when, after too much crawbread, he fell to the ground and slept for a month so that no animal could be found anywhere, and the starving people had to yammer and dance all night to wake him up again…

‘Come back tomorrow’ said the Grimgribber, yawning and already falling deeply asleep.

The next day Helix returned. The sky was seared with great patches of black. This time the Grimgribber helped himself to the last three crawbreads, wrinkled and red, but before the honey drained from his chest and the colours faded and the twitching dance left him he fell to the ground insensible, just like the Lord of all Animals himself.

Helix sat with his back against a tree and watched. As his hand played through the leaf litter he picked out a stone, a piece of flint, as sharp as the dawn. He crept up to the sleeping Grimgribber, picked up the sack that teemed and heaved like the fly-blown carcass of a mole, and slit it from side to side.

And all the stories that ever were and ever will be came rushing out in one great whoosh. They entered him. He saw everything. He knew all there was to know. He roared like a triumphant god, then staggered under the weight. The pounding in his head become a clamour and he, too, fell to the ground. Days later, Madam Craw found him wandering through the woods, burbling like a newborn, birds in his hair. He was all inside out.

She cooled him with bilberry juice, painted on his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids. She quieted him and watched as he changed. Then she soused him and his juice shot across the sky and filled the empty spaces with stars.

And when he could speak again she said ‘You are Helix, the in-between, and you must ever tell stories lest they rise up and overwhelm you like the flowing tide’. And that is how he became the first storyteller and how he released all the stories of the world and how he was ever in-between and always slightly inside out.

And the Grimgribber? One day he’ll wake up and pluck stars from the sky, fix his moleskin bag and capture all the stories to make the world grey again, which is just how he likes it. And the thought of this makes children shudder in the night.

Courtyard Books

Of all the little pleasures in life, browsing in a secondhand bookshop is second to none, especially when the shop is well stocked with esoterica and other unexpected treasures. Glastonbury's Courtyard Books is just such a shop.

I dropped in on my way to Bath, and while the shop has always been good, I think it may have got better, for Ben Tweddell, ex-guitarist of the much missed psych-folk band Thistletown, is now working there. He's brought with him a bibliophile's love of rare and obscure titles, and an extensive knowledge of magic and psychedelic literature. The shop is positively brimming with good stuff and if he hasn't got what you want, he'll know where you can find it.

I came away with a copy of The Hermetica - thanks Ben! - and sound advice on which translation  to read. Now that's the kind of service you want from a bookshop.

Not only that, while you're there you also get the benefit of Ben's excellent psych and folk record collection playing in the background, making this one of the best browsing experiences I've had in a long time. When every other shop in Glastonbury sticks to the tried and tested cosmic-didge-bhajan-drone music, it's refreshing to hear something different.

But I've got a book to read, so I'll leave you with some trouser-widening, laid-back psych grooves from Ben's latest musical project, Twelve Hides. 

Animal Magic

I was invited to play at Ludlow Medieval Fair this weekend, always a good gig and a chance to catch up with friends and musical sparring partners from back in the day. This time we shared the stage with a group of energetic lads from Ireland: the Armagh Rhymers.

I'd not heard of them before, but what's so striking about their show is that they perform much of it wearing beautifully crafted wicker masks.

Minstrels in animal heads make an arresting image and I was reminded of those medieval pictures of mummers, maskers and guisers.

I was also reminded of the animal masks in The Wicker Man - obviously nabbed from the local party shop but chilling nonetheless.

There's an old, not-quite-dead tradition of mask making in Ireland, and the Rhymers were lucky enough to get some of theirs from a master of the art before he retired. He's in his nineties now and never found anyone to train as an apprentice, though others are trying to revive the skill.

The masks are light and strong, sit perfectly on the shoulders and are, yes, rather scary: exactly as they ought to be.

The use of masks and of ritual theriomorphy - transformation into animals - is no longer a central part of English folk customs (Mari Lwyds and the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance notwithstanding, though with the latter it's doubtful that theriomorphy was ever the goal). 

That's a pity because both invoke an odd, almost indescribable atavistic feeling. It seems to me extremely important that we all should know that feeling first hand, that we should experience it at key moments in our lives and in the yearly round of winter, spring, summer, fall. For whatever else the feeling is, it's the sense of being brought up sharply against something Other, and you never know, that might just save us from ourselves.

The Folk Music of Krk

The Croatian island of Krk has some of the oddest folk music in the world. I first heard it on a collection of field recordings made by Alan Lomax in the 50s and I thought it must be some kind of joke. The good people of Krk harmonise their jaunty tunes - played on a type of shawm or oboe - with abrasive parallel lines. Take a listen and you'll see what I mean. It's like a bunch of bemushroomed pixies getting the keys to the music cupboard.

Give it some time, however, and the strange becomes a little bit more familiar. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a pleasant listen, but then, hand on heart, who can say that of Serialism or Free Jazz? But the music does have a kind of otherworldly intensity that I find oddly beguiling. I might not want to listen to it every day but I'm very glad it exists. 

The Salmon are Leaping

Yesterday we walked down to the River Teign to watch the salmon returning to their traditional spawning waters, something we'd never seen before. The drama comes from their having to get past obstacles like this:

The photo doesn't really convey the height of the salmon-leap, nor the sheer weight of water pouring over it, but it's breathtaking to see the fish leaping out of such a torrent. It seems impossible that any make it up and over but somehow they do. Apparently they need the river to be in flood else they have nothing to swim against.

It was also rather wonderful to see how many people went just to witness this natural annual spectacle. In other cultures I suppose there'd be a festival of some kind, but here we did it the English way, sitting quietly without fuss or bother.

I've heard it said that in some American Indigenous cultures the salmon symbolises the need to return home to rejuvenate, a story I can quite relate to having come home to Devon for exactly that reason. In the Druid tradition, the salmon symbolises wisdom, that is to say intuitive wisdom rather than book-learning. But I think the salmon deserves recognition, and a toast, for its sheer bloody-minded determination, for persisting against the odds.

Blowzabella

Back when I was an undergraduate in the late eighties, my friend Chris made me compilation tapes from his vast vinyl collection of psych, prog, folk and other assorted weirdness. That's how I discovered Blowzabella.

Named after a seventeenth century English dance tune, Blowzabella played a mix of English, French and Balkan tunes with characteristic gusto and relish on instruments like the hurdy-gurdy and the bagpipes, instruments that in England at least had been largely forgotten. Though never fully embraced by the English folk establishment their influence has been immense.

For instance, they took a major role in reviving those instruments in the UK. Founder member Jon Swayne went on to become an internationally acclaimed pipe-maker, known especially for his English Border pipes (or English Half-Longs).

Many of the band's compositions became session standards, played in Britain, Germany, Holland, France and America: tunes like The Man in a Brown Hat, the Motorway Mazurka, the Rose of Raby and so on.

Their popularity abroad is such that when in 2003 they played a three-hour, headline set at Saint Chartier in France, the crowd was so large the organisers had to pull up the dance floor to make room. By the end of the gig there was so much dust in the air you could barely see the band.


But most importantly, I think, they helped reignite interest not only in traditional dance-music but also in drone-music more generally. In 1987 Jon Swayne wrote presciently that:

'a reassessment is taking place, whether conscious or unconscious, of the values symbolised by the forces of Dionysus/Bacchus representing irrationality, chaos, the power of the inner feminine; these are rising against the values of Apollo, the upward-striving play of reason and intellect, masculine control, the cool music of the spheres, which have help sway for two thousand years.'


That reassessment is still underway.

The extraordinary thing is that after thirty-five years on the margins of British folk, in which they've suffered the usual trials and tribulations of any long-lived and independent band, they're still going strong, still playing to sell-out audiences, still knocking out the killer tunes.

I certainly owe them a lot for I wouldn't be a musician or a piper without them. Much of my repertoire comes from their albums. My pipes were made by Jon and, indeed, I studied technique with him for a couple of years when I lived in Bristol. It was therefore a great honour and privilege to be asked to play a tune with them in Exeter on their recent tour. Thanks guys.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, surely now it's time for their lifetime achievement award?

Mosaik

Regular readers will remember that a few posts ago I shared a video from Polish band Mosaik. Their mix of indigenous Slavic folk with Eastern and medieval influences seems to have hit the spot for a number of you have been raving about them. Here's the video again in case you missed it.

I've just discovered that their next album is already recorded but they need to crowd-source the money to put it into production. Supporting the album couldn't be easier - just go here - but best to use a browser like Chrome that automatically translates the Polish for you. As I write there's just under a month left but they still have a way to go, so go on, give them some pennies! 75zl is about £20, for which you get the album and a t-shirt - bargain, I'd say.

Meanwhile, here are their two promo videos, the first a time-lapse sequence of them sorting out their studio, the second them playing in the fields as a huge thunder storm looms. Cracking stuff.

On Druids, Magic Mushrooms and Cultural Memory

News that the psilly season is officially underway (with early reports that this might prove to be a bumper year) means it's a good time to return to the question of whether psilocybin mushrooms were ever used in British prehistory.

When I was researching Shroom I found a complete absence of evidence for anyone consuming magic mushrooms before the eighteenth century, and even then such reports as exist show ingestion remained accidental and unintentional right up until 1970, a staggeringly late date. Many lines of evidence have been put forward to suggest our Stone, Bronze and Iron Age forebears deliberately used mushrooms, but sadly none are categorical and each is open to alternative and typically more parsimonious explanation.

The absence of evidence in the archaeological record is unsurprising given that fungi rot away to gloop unless actively dried or preserved in some way. Nor does consuming magic mushrooms require any special paraphernalia - pipes, grinders, pouches or so on - the kind of things that do turn up in excavations. So until Liberty Caps are found jammed in a pot or preserved in the stomach contents of a bog-body, we're left in the unsatisfactory position of not knowing one way or the other. It does mean, however, that we're pretty much free to believe whatever we want.

I concluded that if prehistoric people had used psilocybin mushrooms then they must have done so in a small-scale and localised manner. For if psilocybin mushrooms formed the backbone of prehistoric religious practice, as so many have claimed, there there surely would have been more unequivocal evidence than the occasional bit of 'possibly-trippy' artwork in a passage-grave or on a cave wall. But the traces just aren't there. Now I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't too hasty.

What got me thinking again was watching an old episode of Britain BC in which archaeologist Francis Pryor likened the Roman slaughter of the Druids on Anglesey in AD60 to the much more famous burning of the library at Alexandria. In that dreadful inflagration countless precious papyri, the great works of the ancient world, were permanently lost. The Druids famously eschewed the written word, so why the connection?

As Ronald Hutton demonstrates in his magisterial Blood and Mistletoe, much of what we think we know about the Druids comes from the works of classical sources and is therefore not necessarily to be trusted. Authors like Pliny the Elder and Julius Caesar either romanticised the Druids from afar, or regarded them with suspicion as the enemy to be overcome. Nonetheless it does seem likely that the Druids were a kind of priesthood, involved in law-giving, settling disputes, divination, performing sacrifices and so on, and that becoming a Druid was a long and complicated process in which the noviciate was required to commit vast tracts of cultural lore to memory. It was this oral knowledge that Pryor was alluding to. All of it was lost when Gaius Suetonius Paulinus sent his troops across the Menai Straits to cut down the sacred groves and put every last Druid to the sword.

Once again absence of evidence has allowed every generation to reinvent the Druids, for example as devil-worshipping heathens or as proto-Christian prophets or even stoned-out hippies.

And as a child of my time I tend to think of the Druids as woojied-up, tattooed shamans with a profound knowledge of plants, animals and the land. In other words I'm starting to wonder if they might n't have known about and used magic mushrooms after all. To be clear, this is at best an inference, most likely pure fantasy, but, well, it's a hypothesis.

To illustrate the kind of knowledge I mean, here's an excellent talk by anthropologist Jeremy Narby recalling his ontologically-shattering encounter with indigenous Amazonian worldviews as a PhD student back in the 80s. Then he was as unable to countenance the indigenous view of plants - that, when seen through the ayahuasca telescope, they talk to us - as I suspect the Romans were that of the Druids.

So Pryor's observation has opened up the possibility for me that Iron Age Druids might have known about and used magic mushrooms even if there's no way of testing it.

Either way, it's a sobering reminder of what happens when cultural memory is lost. For in the Amazon, as elsewhere, we continue the Romans' work with renewed virulence. And with every shaman that falls so too do whole libraries that would put Alexandria to shame.

Red Dog Green Dog and Wod

What happens when Red Dog Green Dog and Wod get together to jam, late at night, a little worse for wear, for the benefit of the last remaining dancers in an eighteenth century barn on an organic farm in Dorset?

Why this, obviously. The tune is one of Jim's, a rondeau called Bright Silver Dog.




Should you want more, we're doing another joint gig on Dartmoor in December. See you there.

On Hats and Looking Like Guy Fawkes

Owing to the vagaries of genetics I have rather limited options for playing with pogonotrophy. My facial hair grows naturally into the d'Artagnan 'tash and goatee I've been sporting for years. Apparently this gives me the likeness of one Guido Fawkes, but I don't see it myself.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be invited to do a Round Table interview with Howard Gayton and the elusive occult artist, Rex Van Ryn during which Rex asked if I'd consider modelling for the character of Guy Fawkes who is to appear in the forthcoming second volume of their excellent graphic novel series, John Barleycorn Must Die. Naturally I said yes, for though I prefer my protests to involve a little less blowing up, like Guy I do love a good hat. Hat-wearing is one of the few perks of middle age.

Before...

...and after.

This weekend, love of a good hat took me to what is possibly the best hat-shop in the world, Snooks of Bridport. Friendly staff, great service and definitely no snook-cocking whatsoever.

My old Rat Pack had started to whiff a bit like old rat and to everyone's relief I decided it was time for something new. Sadly I lack the necessary je ne sais quoi to pull off the Silk-Cut-purple fedora so settled instead for a black Stingy Brim.

Alas, I think I look more like Guy Fawkes than ever. Better keep my head down in the coming weeks.

Drawing Inspiration

As any creative person will tell you, there are times when inspiration strikes and the work pours out as if it comes through you, not from you. For poet, essayist and novelist Robert Graves this produced what he called Muse poetry, poetry that is 'composed at the back of the mind; an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined.'

The quest for inspiration, poetic or otherwise, is central to contemporary Druidry where it is called awen. This Welsh word can be translated as flowing spirit and may ultimately derive from an Indo-European root meaning to blow. Awen is said to course through the universe like a benign electricity where it can be channelled by anyone into creative acts.

Druidry has also given us an increasingly popular way of depicting inspiration, the awen symbol: three rays of light descending from heaven. Or perhaps three drops of inspiration flying from the cauldron of Ceridwen, a witch who appears in the medieval Welsh story of Taliesin.

Though I live for those rare moments when inspiration calls I've never particularly warmed to the awen symbol. Perhaps it's because of its unfortunate resemblance to a cricket stump (a game I despised having to play as a child), or to those uncanny Mason's marks you see on old buildings. I find it too rectilinear and a bit too goddy.

Indeed the symbol was the creation of Iolo Morgannwg (1747-1826), Welsh nationalist, Romantic, laudanum addict and master forger, whose own inspired writings laid the foundations of modern Druidry. Iolo saw Druidry as a kind of radicalised Christianity and I can't help but think that in creating the symbol he was thinking of the Holy Spirit descending from on high.

Well, I prefer to think of inspiration - in as much as it is helpful to do so - as a triskele or triskelion, an ancient symbol often, though not exclusively, associated with the Celts. It's a symbol for Brittany too, which is where I picked up this key-ring.

In the triskele, I see inspiration welling up from the centre rather than descending from on high. In its flowing curls I see waves surging round rocks, the unfurling of fronds, the lick of a flame, the leading edge of a cloud. I see ingress and egress, ebb and flow, a reaching out and a drawing back. Threeness is preserved but in the ever-moving shape of the equilateral triangle, itself a time-honoured symbol of the transcendent.

I think we often fall into the mistake of thinking that symbols mean something in an X equals Y kind of way. The first thing we ask of an unfamiliar symbol is 'what does it mean?' But if that were so symbols would be words and we wouldn't need them. Symbols don't mean anything; rather they are fecund triggers to the imagination that allow meaning to arise through their contemplation.

Either a symbol works for you or it doesn't and all I'm expressing here is my personal preference. But for me the triskele is a more faithful representation of the experience of inspiration which comes as soft summer rain, never hard light through clouds. It always wells up unbidden and can never be invoked. The trick, then, is to make it good with craft - Graves' 'powerful discipline' - before it ebbs away again.

The Homeliness of English Folk

An old friend Sam came to stay and as he's one of the best English fiddlers of his generation we naturally got talking about English folk music.

The reason he loves it so much, he said, was that it makes him feel truly at home, rooted, like he belongs. When he hears a Morris tune he knows it's 'his' and that he can 'muck about' with it (though Sam's mucking about is everyone else's sublime and careful  handling).

My relationship with English folk music has been far less straightforward. That I've learned to love it has everything to do with The English Acoustic Collective. They persuaded me - through seeing them live, hearing their album Ghosts, and in person at their summer school - that there's more to English folk than the rumpety-pumpety, humpty-dumpty, fal-da-ral-daro I'd always despised. It's not all relentlessly upbeat and sweet: there are dark undercurrents and rhythmic complexities lurking there.

But the fact that I've had to learn to love it is telling. The very homeliness that Sam loves instilled in me a kind of musical wanderlust, a yearning for something else, for other times and places. I looked South to France, East to the Balkans and India, and backwards to the to the Middle Ages. I've always liked music that makes me feel distinctly unhomely.

Actually, that's an exaggeration - I struggle with abstract free-form jazz for example - so it's fairer to say that I love music on the threshold.

Perhaps it's down to the fact that he plays fiddle and I play bagpipes. However much it limped its way into the twentieth century there was nevertheless a tradition of English fiddling for Sam to pick up. Southern English bagpiping - whatever that was - died in the seventeenth century, maybe even earlier. No one bothered to write it down. So while there are many English country dance tunes you can play on the pipes, there aren't many bagpipe tunes (unless and until you head north). That layer in the musical archaeology has gone, which is possibly why English folk as we know it lacks the goatishness I've found elsewhere.

But whatever the differences in our relationship with English folk music, our respective hankering for the homely and the unhomely, I'm extremely grateful to Sam for turning me on to Polish band Mosaic. I'd be hard pressed to find a better example of what I mean.

Dragon Paths and Pilgrimages

In 1969 the old-Etonian writer, antiquarian and ley-hunter, John Michell, published The View Over Atlantis, a book that would pretty much invent Earth Mysteries.

The ley-line wasn't new. Alfred Watkins 'discovered' it back in the 1920s when he had a vision of the landscape criss-crossed by ancient trackways. He spent much of his later life searching for straight alignments between the wells, churches, standing stones, nooks in the skyline, and so on that he thought had been waymarks on these prehistoric paths.

Michell went a step further. He took Watkins' alignments and fused them with ideas from Chinese geomancy such that leys were now conduits of earth or dragon energy. Just as acupuncturists redirect chi through the meridians of the body, so Michell thought the ancients channelled dragon energy by erecting stones, building wells and raising mounds at auspicious, sacred sites. These nodes were distributed across the land according to the principles of number, proportion and sacred geometry.

Correct use of dragon energy led to bountiful harvests and harmony between humankind and nature. Indeed, the gradual attrition of this knowledge was what had caused our current ecological crisis: its recovery would enable our salvation.

Michell's most famous discovery was the St Michael line. He noticed that two Somerset churches dedicated to St Michael - Glastonbury Tor and the wonderfully named Burrow Mump - had not only been situated on distinctive conical tors, both of which rise up dramatically from the Somerset levels, but were also aligned precisely to the Mayday sunrise (27 degrees north of East). When he drew a line between them, and extended it in both directions, he found to his astonishment that it passed through sacred sites like Avebury in Wiltshire, the Hurlers and the Cheesewring in Cornwall, and also through a disproportionately high number of churches dedicated to St Michael, including St Michael's Mount.

St Michael is known for his war with satan and is often depicted standing triumphant over a fallen dragon. Could it be that he was a Christianised Sun god and that here was an ancient ley, a dragon path, but one that had been gradually suppressed by a Church hostile to paganism?

Then in the eighties two dowsers, Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst, set out to dowse the currents of dragon energy all the way up the Michael line. They published their results in The Sun and the Serpent. What they found was that the earth energy meandered about Michell's ley-line like a serpent on a Caduceus. Or rather, like two serpents up a Caduceus for they discovered a second energy current that they called the Mary line, the feminine counterpart to the masculine Michael line.

Now it turns out that there's a group working to create a long distance footpath along the Michael and Mary lines, all the way from the tip of Cornwall to the coast of Norfolk. They've already opened a trial section from Brent Tor to Glastonbury, presumably using existing footpaths, and have published two guidebooks. The route passes pretty close to the village where I live.

It's not hard to find fault with the concept of ley-lines. Britain is so pock-marked with ancient sites that if you dropped a line down at random you'd be hard-pressed not to find something of significance along its course. We have what the ancients did not - maps - that afford us a God-like aerial view and allow us to plot lines and angles unappreciated from the ground. And isn't dowsing just a process of wish-fulfilment?

Well, here I'm prepared to keep an open mind. For, if nothing else, I love the idea of dragon energy spiralling through the land as a metaphor for the spirit of place. I prefer my landscape enchanted, thank you very much.

And as I maintain that the best way to know the land is to walk the land, to feel its rising and falling beneath the feet, or as Robin Williamson puts it, to tread 'the hard mile after the easy mile' (assuming of course this option is available to you), I fully support this new venture.

For it doesn't really matter whether earth energy or the Michael line exist or not. Here on Dartmoor there are a number of long distance trails. Some have legendary or semi-historical origins, such as the the Mariner's Way and the Abbot's Way; others like the Two Moors Way, the Dartmoor Way, and the Taw-Teign link are purely modern, secular creations.

But once a route is created it opens not so much a physical connection between places, which was there anyway, but a mental connection. We experience Glastonbury Tor, say, in a different way when we know we could, by simply following a straight line, walk to Avebury in one direction or St Michael's Mount in the other. The landscape becomes not so much a succession of different places but a connected whole.

At a time when many of us experience a profound sense of disconnection or even alienation from the land, we need more modern pilgrimages like this. And if we summon up the dragon as we go, so much the better.

On drones

At Breaking Convention I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a panel on 'the future of psychedelic music', hosted admirably by Matthew Watkins of Canterbury Soundwaves and Secrets of Creation fame. At one point Matt asked me why it is that drones often feature in psychedelic music and I gave a rather hurried and insubstantial answer. Here's my more considered response.

It probably goes without saying but a drone is a constant note used to underpin melody. You can hear the effect of adding a drone in this video, in which I play a snippet of a medieval estampie on a rudimentary homemade double whistle.

I'm not sure when I first encountered drone music - probably when I was an undergraduate - but it immediately spoke to me at a deep level. To modern ears, accustomed as they are to equal temperament and Western harmony, drone music can sound limited and austere. Not to me. I find it positively transcendent.

In popular usage we tend to think of drones as boring. We talk about people droning on monotonously, and if drones consisted of pure sine waves they would, I think, drive us mad. I wonder how much of this you can stand?

But drones, as used in traditional music, are harmonically complex. Compare the irksome sin wave with the rich unfolding timbres of a tampura, used in Indian classical music. No wonder it is called a river of sound.

Furthermore, however much we are taught as, say, bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy players to keep our drones steady, there are always subtle variations in timbre and pitch as the wheel turns or the bag empties and fills. In other words, drones breathe (which is why synth programmers have to add filter sweeps and other harmonic variability to pure sin waves to make them sound more 'organic').

I suspect the origin of the drone, as with all music, is the human voice. By varying the shape of the mouth and by directing sound into the various resonant cavities of the body we can make pleasingly undulating 'wah-wah' sounds that support a second melodic voice. But always there is the problem of having to inhale: the vocal drone is punctuated and interrupted, unless many voices cascade together.

So drones mimic human breathing through their rising and falling but at the same time achieve what the human voice is incapable of: continuous sound. I think this endless unfolding is what gives the drone its alluring pull and is why it is associated in many cultures with trance.

Perhaps by transcending the biological limitation of having to breathe, drones (in combination with certain repetitive rhythms and melodies) have an actual physiological effect upon us, drawing us into a state of intensity or trance. Certainly that sense of continuous unfolding mirrors the internal, unfolding sensorium of the psychedelic experience. The one seems to map the other.

Of course, there's another more prosaic reason why drones have been seized upon by psychedelic musicians from the 1960s onwards. The musical cultures with which they're typically associated - North Africa, the Middle East and India - are also those that are also typically orientalised by the West as exotic, primitive, other, and more innately concerned with spirituality. Thus in the 60s slapping a bit of sitar on your track became the easy, and rather lazy, shorthand for saying - 'hey man, we're freaks too.' In the same way, the didgeridoo served the same function in the 90s.

Nevertheless I think the very nature of drone music (and don't forget, up until the Middle Ages we had it too) invites metaphors that appeal to the psychedelic imagination. The drone provides a ground for the melody. The old word for a drone is burden. It bears the music, in both senses of carrying it and giving birth to it (quite literally, in that all the notes of the scale are present within the harmonics of the drone).

As Pythagoras is said to have discovered, some notes played against a drone form pleasing, or consonant, intervals. They do so because their frequencies form exact harmonic ratios (1:1 unison; 2:1 octave, 3:2 fifth, 4:3 fourth). Others are more dissonant and the human ear 'wants' these notes to resolve up or down to a more stable, consonant note.

To play any scale, mode, rag or maqam against a drone is therefore to negotiate a series of pushes and pulls. The intrinsic consonance and dissonance between note and drone creates narrative, endless variations of home and away, or there and back again. Or even up and down, for there is also a sense of verticality within drone music.

So, when a master bansuri player like Hariprasad Chaurasia, teasingly introducing the notes of this rag, finally arrives at the octave, it is a sublime moment. We have reached a higher place. Then he takes us higher still, before gently wafting us back down to earth again.

And that is why I think drones are so popular in psychedelic music. For if psychedelics aren't about that fundamental yearning for transcendence, what then?

A Field in England

My latest Spiral Earth column, about Ben Wheatley's intriguing film A Field in England, is now up for your general delight and delectation. Do take a look.

Vive la difference

I recently met a woman who dislikes bagpipes. In fact she finds the sound so grating and unbearable that whenever she hears a bagpipe of any kind she just wants it to stop. Quite naturally I was flabbergasted. It's salutary to discover that others may be offended by the things one feels most passionate about.

Well, it's fair to say that she would probably detest the music I'm currently listening to. La Novia is a collective of experimental folk musicians from Central France, broadly speaking the Auvergne. That they are impeccable traditional players is clear, but they add a modern, psychedelic edge, playing tunes for a long time, detuning drones, adding electronics and so on. It's intense stuff.

My current favourite is the band Jéricho, whose extended sets and haunting vocals leave me breathless and uplifted.

Jéricho

Now I freely admit that even without the layers of experimentation, the Auvergne bagpipe, the cabrette, is an acquired taste.

But, as with one of those mould-encrusted French goat's cheeses that offends the nose, burns the tongue and scrapes the palate, once you have it your life will never be the same again. A whole world of experience awaits.

But there I go. I can't help myself. I'm remonstrating. I'm wedded to the idea that with enough persuasion I can get everyone to love the bagpipes as I do. Let it lie.

For the truth is that music evokes such strong passions and powerful tribal loyalties that there will always be polarised differences of taste. The trick is learning how to live with them.