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[title]Remember your first Druidic Epiphany? Us neither, but artist Ben Edge does. ‘It was nine years ago. I was feeling a bit lost and not knowing where my life was going, taking long walks through London to reconnect with the folklore of the city,’ he says. On a ‘folkloric mission’ to the Tower of London to meet the Ravenmaster (that guy that looks after the ominous birds to ensure, as myth has it, the Crown doesn’t fall), Edge came across a procession of figures draped in white cloaks.
The gaggle of magi, it turns out, were the Druid Order, seeing in the Spring Equinox and scattering seeds to bless the year ahead. It was a rite of passage for Edge that changed everything. ‘I felt so lost and urbanised and disconnected from the deeper human experience that something aligned with me. I reconnected with something profoundly human, with a new energy to research folk customs,’ he says.
His project Frontline Folklore was born, taking him to clown conventions in Haggerston, hare pie scrambles in Leicestershire and flaming tar barrel runs in Ottery. He captured them all in a series of paintings and an accompanying shot-on-phone documentary. ‘I could tell the story of tradition in the same way that I would tell the story of someone’s life through a portrait. They connect us to the past,’ he says.
But he wasn’t alone on his quest. Thousands of Brits from Devon to Dumfries are flocking to folk festivals, equinoxes, effigy burnings, stone circles and magical ceremonies, searching for something deeper. For decades, these rituals were as esoteric as they were eccentric, with mainly locals and true traditionalists getting involved. Now, though, more and more Brits are becoming accustomed to these strangely enchanting customs. ‘It very much wasn’t in the zeitgeist when I was first going to these things,’ Edge explains. ‘There were a few people like me but mainly just communities there. But now, there’s an influx of people coming from London and all over [to these countryside customs] to check out what it’s all about.’
And there are more events than you can shake a staff at. There are tons on at the moment for May Day: from Deptford Jack in the Green (a parade in south east London featuring a man covered in shrubs) to the Dorset Ooser (a gigantic, horned man-in-a-mask jigging along with Morris dancers). But the folk calendar is stacked all year round with all sorts of weird and wonderful happenings.
These new countryphiles, though, aren’t anoraks silently spectating at existing rituals or just rambling on about the past; they’re forming their own communities and getting the word out there. Younger than traditional folklorists, mostly living in cities and working together as a loose digital commune, they go hand-in-hand with a general folk revival across music, art, fashion and movements like The Stonehenge Alliance. It’s led to a bumper crop of offshoot, grassroots projects, all connected to traditional folk culture but ingrained with a new sense of adventure.
And many of these people, like the Stonehenge massive, get their rocks off by looking for boulders. ‘I grew up in Ireland and Cornwall so have always been surrounded by the ancient landscape. For me they have always acted as a great focus for a walk,’ says Lally MacBeth, who co-founded Stone Club with Matthew Shaw. Boasting more than 3000 members of all ages – including artists, archeologists, musicians and scientists – Stone Club runs a night at The Social bar in Fitzrovia every other month, bringing a mixture of talks, performance, film and music based on everything from medieval stone masonry to mapping London as a tarot deck. MacBeth also heads up The Folk Archive, an online curatorial platform dedicated to preserving ancient customs. ‘It’s often informed by details that people tell me and then I go down a rabbit warren to explore,’ she says.
And if you’d like to encounter some actual rabbit warrens, there’s Weird Walk, a project founded by three friends who decided to walk across southern England for three nights and ended up stumbling across Neolithic burial chambers, traversing sacred hills and sleeping in haunted boozers. The trio run their own zine, signposting some of Britain’s most fabled pathways through poetry and photography.
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While most of us can get on board with long walks and nice stones, other, more arcane customs are being reinvigorated. Including – and these two words might strike fear into your very soul – morris dancing. ‘We’re a collective vision of preserving the vitality of the dance whilst gently subverting the tradition, fuelled by a mutual appreciation of folk music and culture,’ says Lily Doble, founder of Boss Morris. They’ve danced at Glastonbury with Hot Chip and jigged with Wet Leg at the Brit Awards and are friends with Molly No-Mates, a drag king Molly dancing side based in Bristol.
Most of this folk resurgence is taking place in the great outdoors, but it’s also being mapped and tracked indoors, too. The exhibition Making More Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain has just opened at London College of Fashion’s East Bank campus following a stint at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, celebrating the diverse range of costumes on show throughout the UK’s folk traditions. ‘Vernacular culture in the UK has been overlooked and undervalued for so long that I think ordinary people have enjoyed seeing their community values reflected in the exhibition,’ says Simon Costin, one of the exhibition’s curators and founder of The Museum of Folklore. And while we’re on the subject of fashion, in 2024, folk is very much en vogue. Designers like Simone Rocha with her gowns inspired by the Irish harvest festival; John Alexander Skelton with his pagan-inspired tailoring; Story MFG with its hippyish, hand-embroidered shirts and Chopova Lowena with their folkish streetwear are all following the thread back to ancient times.
But why are we suddenly heading to the sticks to get our kicks? Well, as ever, the pandemic played its part, with many of us discovering new pastimes and savouring sprawling walks in green spaces. ‘People’s relationship to the land changed because we were trapped. We realised there are good things about the country and that we can do good things,’ Edge says.
A milestone moment for the movement also came around this time when broadcaster Zakia Sewell, who also hosts spiritual music show Questing on online radio NTS, launched the My Albion podcast on BBC Sounds. ‘It wasn’t really until after the series came out that I became aware there were other people tuning into this folk frequency. It’s been wonderful recognising this dormant community that is now becoming visible, all tapped into a desire for new ways of making sense of Britishness,’ she says. Her own journey into folklore began as a kid, when she spent a lot of time in Wales with her grandparents near where poet Dylan Thomas lived. The Questing host became obsessed by the ‘magical mystical landscapes’ and ‘rich mythology’ of the area.
‘I guess I’ve always been a bit woo-woo,’ she laughs. She’s currently working on a book, Finding Albion, named after the idyllic literary term for ancient Britain favoured by many folklorists. It’s already taken her far and wide. ‘I was at the Glastonbury Tor at 6am on the Spring Equinox, watching a a druid ceremony and naked people gyrating to shamanic drumming, which was an experience,’ she says, explaining she’s off to Oxford tomorrow to talk to some morris dancers and explore the legacy of Cecil Sharp.
It’s been wonderful recognising this dormant community that is now becoming visible
Many of us are also going through a prolonged period of spiritual disillusionment. Thanks to doomscrolling culture, the cost-of-living crisis, an intensely depressing news cycle and climate catastrophe, we’re all feeling more than a bit wayward right now. ‘Currently we are in a state where 21st-century postmodern culture offers nothing of spiritual value and we are crushed by the exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism,’ says Costin. ‘It’s no wonder that the young are searching for something which offers an escape and has a spiritual dimension which comes without judgement.’
For MacBeth, something as simple as a stone can create a solid foundation. ‘In an increasingly nebulous and unsettling world it seems that stones might offer something fairly sturdy and unchanging,’ she says. ‘You can visit an ancient site when you are three, and when you are 16, and then perhaps at 30, and it's unlikely that it will have changed a great deal. They can represent places of continuity in otherwise unstable times.’
This seemingly unchanging nature of folk culture, though, creates a challenge. The past is, of course, sacred for rural enthusiasts; it’s why Edge, for example, is working to protect the collection of legendary folklorist Doc Rowe. The Museum of Folklore, too, is a vital archive. But it also leads to concerns surrounding folk’s associations with far-right movements and traditions. From the British National Party’s co-opting of folk culture to the blackface of Morris dancing (which was banned by the Joint Morris Organisations in 2020), traditional folk customs can range from overly patriotic to openly racist.
These new creatives, though, are keen to position the current wave of folk culture as something progressive and truly inclusive. For Edge, folk was never an ‘unbroken lineage’ and is instead an ever-changing, anti-capitalist movement. Doble thinks that although traditional Morris dancing was ‘less than inclusive’, folk movements are the ‘absolute antithesis’ of nationalistic movements and can create a space for everyone. MacBeth, meanwhile, believes there is a ‘responsibility for modern folklorists to respond and engage in conversations around entrenched prejudice rather than ignoring them’, to unlock folk’s progressive potential. After all, folk is rooted in the people on the ground rather than those in power.
‘I want people to feel that other ways of thinking about our national story are possible without shying away from the darker aspects of our collective history in Britain,’ Sewell says. ‘So many things are wrong and ugly and misshapen in Britain right now. I hope my book inspires hope by finding alternative symbols and mythologies in our past to conjure a brighter future and a more healthy, progressive and inclusive national story.’
As we get hardened by the world we lose touch with magic – it’s very important to hold onto that childlike wonder
This utopian optimism is the lifeblood of the new folk movement. Interrogating, instead of ignoring, certain traditions, these creatives are simultaneously preserving the past and taking it to pastures new. But they’re also reimagining the magic at the heart of it all. ‘As we get hardened by the world we lose touch with magic and that sense of enchantment. It’s very important for me to hold onto that childlike wonder,’ Sewell says. There is, after all, an unspeakable, sublime feeling you get when you touch grass, stones, or the shaggy hay costume of the Straw Bear – or when you stumble across a load of druids on your way to the Tower of London.
‘I wonder how many of these behaviours are in our DNA,’ Edge says. ‘It doesn’t feel weird when you stay up all night and watch the sunrise at Stonehenge on the solstice. It’s not alien. It’s mesmerising and amazing, but it feels like you’re in the right place at the right time.’