Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man… Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Edward Parnell 2019
Cover illustrations and chapter initial illustrations are by Richard Wells (www.richardwellsgraphics.com)
All other images are by the author, or from the author’s own collection. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material, in some cases this has proved impossible. The publishers would be grateful for any information that would allow any omissions to be rectified in future editions of this book.
Edward Parnell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Emigrants by WG Sebald published by Harvill Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1996
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008271954
eBook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008271961
Version: 2019-10-01
For the ghosts
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Epigraph
6 Contents
7 Prologue
8 1 LOST HEART
9 2 DARK WATERS
10 3 WALKING IN THE WOOD
11 4 THE ROARING OF THE FOREST
12 5 MEMENTO MORI
13 6 BORDERLAND
14 7 GOBLIN CITY
15 8 LONELIER THAN RUIN
16 9 WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING?
17 10 NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANY MORE
18 11 TROUBLE OF THE ROCKS
19 12 ANCIENT SORCERIES
20 Epilogue
21 Selected List of Sources
22 Acknowledgements
23 Index
24 Also by Edward Parnell
25 About the Author
26 About the Publisher
LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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Always the ghosts.
Reaching into the past concealed behind the glow-in-the-dark cardboard apparitions that decorated my childhood bedroom, the fascination was there from the start: on a family holiday to Wales, aged four, asking the tour guide in Caernarfon Castle whether we might see the place’s spectral lady; a few years later, obsessing over Borley Rectory – the ‘most haunted house in the world’ – which called out to me from my spine-creased Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World; or, at the Halloween party I begged my mother to let me have (long before such events were a commonplace British occurrence), dressing up as Dracula, my friends as the Wolfman and various grinning ghouls.
The writer M. R. James once wrote: ‘For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. “Thirty years ago,” “Not long before the war,” are very proper openings.’
And if I think back through three decades of self-obfuscation, a host of recollections give confirmation.
With me, always the ghosts.
Yet even with hindsight no disquiet comes to me from these memories; they are reassuring, I can find shelter within them. Only later were we to become a phantom family – a host of lives lived, then unlived. The disquiet comes when I realise there’s no one left to help me reconcile the real and the half-remembered.
