The Hollow Hill Is Everywhere

The Hollow Hill is Everywhere Phil Smith I have been walking on hollow hills, above giant serpents coiled and asleep beneath churches, basked in the spiky beams of a black sun, admired the peculiar grave of William Lovecraft, followed The Devil’s Footprints, descended into Puritan’s Pit, and visited England’s first UFO contact site. All this for my project – ‘Anywhere: a mythogeography of South Devon’. Over the next 45 minutes I will try to describe the project, highlighting the gothic and supernatural narrative layers among its multiplicities. I began a year ago. Six years before I had published ‘Mythogeography’, in which I advocated exploring space by unfolding and animating its multiple layers while walking in a hyper-sensitised state of limited paranoia, combining rigorous peer-reviewed research with non-respectable, Fortean and paranormal sources. However, apart from some fragments – Queen Street in Exeter, a route through Suffolk – I had not created a detailed mythogeographical account of anywhere. So, I decided to draw on twenty years’ work in central South Devon in England, to make a book-length study of a 150 mile walk I took through the area – putting myself at the mercy of the terrain, and following up my experiences with desk-based research. Let me describe a very few of the entanglements that resulted, first in the seaside resort of Torquay: where, I was tracking up the seafront, somewhere up on the cliff ahead of me the nineteenth century home of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of ‘The Coming Race’ – a hollow earth novel, with a sinister after-life. I was coming from the nearby Riviera International Centre, where I had gate-crashed the opening ceremony of the conference of Global Geological Parks. In this a chorus called The Humans Beings, dressed in generic peasant/caveman costumes, were patronised by a smaller group of singers called The Experts. The Geo-Parks’ opening ceremony mirrored the then on-going US Presidential and EU referendum campaigns: a chorus of the “the great unwashed” – a phrase coined by Bulwer-Lytton – lectured at by increasingly frustrated experts. In the constituency of Torbay, where I was walking, 63% voted in favour of BREXIT. The muddy chorus of Humans, emerging from the planet’s bedrock, were familiar stereotypes of primitive subterranean dwellers – Morlocks, dull beings of the soil; a figure turned on its head in Bulwer Lytton’s hollow earth novel with its underground super-race, waiting to take over the surface from an inferior population. As I laboured up the steep cliff road, towards a sickly yellow mansion, I was stopped in my tracks by simulacra – two blue-painted decorative twiddles on the wall of a derelict hotel: one looking like a grumpy old man, and the other, a face in terror, chewing its fingernails. The yellow edifice was Bulwer-Lytton’s mansion, the hotel with the simulacra was until recently the home of horror-novelist Brian Lumley; author of the Necroscope series. The proximity of these texts and properties was prescient. The morbid 1980s landscape of Lumley’s Necroscope novels is one that is returning to us: with its retro-Cold-War paranoia, its repressed conspiracy theories and monstrous normativities on the rise, and an all-pervading cultural clumsiness which makes it hard to tell stupidity from genuine mystery and inexactitude from injustice. The novels express an obscene and entitled disgruntlement, notably with the pleasures of others – sex departing from strict norms is quickly punished. Like Bulwer Lytton, Lumley has his super-race: the psychic necroscopes who communicate telepathically with the dead; morally and magically superior to their Eastern counterparts: the corpse-eviscerating necromancers. However, the necromancers are not the real evil: Lumley rifles familiar vampire narratives to locate badness as a geographical and geological ‘other’ in the East: “[I]ts very soil was alive, dark with blood, given strength by blood” – and in this soil waits a “thing”, a “Wamphyr”, which impatiently explains its ideology: “Show me a creature which lives, which does not devour lesser lives?” Using imperial Cold War politics to magnify his horror, Lumley exposes his saga’s geo-political contradictions: for while Russia may be the expansionist power seeking to “devour lesser lives”, his heroic necroscope, Harry Keogh, uses his power to promote a freedom defined by competitive individualism. Lumley’s saga – which begins not in an underground bunker but in a secret service paranormal agency on the top floor of a hotel – ends with Keogh dead, his remains teleported to the past, where, in an act of literary cynicism, they generate spores that bring his “Wamphyr” nemesis into being.... The moral architecture of the saga is shown not only as contingent, but deceitful; however, by then it’s too late for a reader who has invested in the saga’s liberated self-disgust – “Did he as a male even exist after that?” - essentialist racialising, entitled disgruntlement, radical traditionalism, unhinged scales of value and political games with mirrors; an orrery of dynamics and attitudes that feels very familiar at the moment; and which is pushing arcane narratives like Bulwer-Lytton’s, of lost or wronged civilisation and of an awakening super-race, closer to mainstream political discourse. Lumley is a mediocre stylist; but what he offers is the construction of a world milieu at a pace that anyone can follow - a democraticised colonising trope that plays to my suspicion that, as a reader, I am often invited to enter such ‘alternative worlds’ as a thief rather than as a curious stranger. Until his hotel’s sale in 2007, Lumley’s wife organised an annual gathering there of his Necroscope fans; translating her husband’s imaginary world into rentable space. This echo of a morbid and democratised colonial impulse – profitable property fabricated from numinous wasteland – resonates in Torquay, where empire has been dying – and yet somehow reproducing - for a very, very long time; its spores breeding new monsters – imaginary and real.... like the local council’s 1937 hosting of Von Ribbentrop’s Nazi-charm offensive on board ship in the bay and at its Marine Spa, now a zoo; four years after Dachau concentration camp admitted its first prisoners. In the nineteenth century, the uninhabited coastal valley at Torre’s Quay was transformed into an upper class resort; a pseudo-city, described by the zoologist-novelist Charles Kingsley as a “wharf of Lethe,” to which urbanites came to “rot ‘dull as the oozy weed’ and in the evening indulge in “a soulless réchauffé of third-rate London frivolity: this... life-in-death”. The town had strictly segregated class-defined areas, open sewers, occasional riots, – and narratives of child murder and cover-up. In the words of one Canadian visitor: “I have seen more luxury since being in Torquay than in all my previous life, and I know I never saw such pitiable poverty before”; the English rich were joined by dying imperial monarchies, fleeing Europe’s democratic revolutions. The town’s brief history as a violently hierarchical place of international ruling class exile, royal reviews of the Fleet, a symphony orchestra premiering pioneering works – before mutating into a proletarianised version of itself – haunts the place in the forms of dark, featureless shapes. And haunted me in the shape of four black Labradors that joined me in the sea near the Crystal Cave, a woman in black who helped me talk down a woman threatening suicide, the Black Knight from Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’ movie mistakenly believed to have been dismembered in nearby Occombe Woods, the ‘black swans’ at Dawlish, adverts for ‘The Black Farmer’, a lost black cat who crossed my path, and Blackstone investors, distant and powerful bankers who have taken over the largest local employers, named after its joint founders - Stephen A. Schwarzman and Peter G. Peterson – obliquely conflating themselves into the figure of Black Peter... These shady silhouettes thicken most at two places. The first under the GATT limes at Cockington Court, in the valley between Paignton and Torquay. Close to a dead tree with its roots in a plague pit, where park gardener Charlie Fey was hospitalised after digging up bones. Ordered by “the authorities” not to speak about what he had seen underground - he obeyed. By the way, when I say “GATT limes” – these are not a particular kind of lime tree, these are the 42 trees, one for each participant nation, planted to mark the 1951 Torquay conference of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. For it was here that the early spadework for deregulation, globalisation and neo-liberalism was done. After GATT came the Bilderberg Group, assembling in Torquay in 1977; among the participants were Henry Kissinger, Giovanni Agnelli the Fiat boss, and Tory politician and Thatcher advisor Sir Keith Joseph. Among the subjects for discussion was: “the future of the mixed economies in the Western democracies”. One wonders in how much detail the subsequent dismemberment of public ownership and services under the Thatcher/Reagan nexus was put into place in Torbay. Close to the plague pit and the limes, a black silhouette was sighted at dusk in 1958, caught in the beam of the bicycle headlamp of another of the gardeners, Jack Steer. Steer described a featureless shape, wearing what appeared to be a flowing black cloak and broad-brimmed hat; like the stereotype of an anarchist-bomber, a Guy Fawkes, a ‘bogeyman’. The second thick haunt is in the inner suburbs of Torquay, close to a flat where the body of a reclusive, elderly and isolated woman was found; identified, only by the medals in one of her drawers, as a former secret service operative. With the help of Google Earth I found ‘Monte Rosa’, the house built on the site of the demolished ‘Castel-a-Mare’ mansion, where in the early twentieth century Theosophist- Spiritualists held séances; sounds of running feet were heard, doors opened and closed of ‘their own’ accord; and a furious entity – a murderous foreign physician – took possession of mediums. Things really took off when some choirboys broke into the derelict mansion, armed with candles and a crucifix. One happened to be a future novelist – the worlds of the paranormal and the literary are often entangled and mutually reinforcing. Once in the house, the aspiring wordsmith noted that his thought processes were slowing down, anaesthetised. Another of the boys became separated from the group, there were sounds of a struggle, and the boy emerged with an account of a dark shadow moving quickly at him, a shape in the form of a man but without any features: “it was black, shaped like a man”, “I could see no face, only blackness”, “it made no noise as it raced at me over the rotting boards”, “black, silent and man-shaped, it... knocked him to the floor”. The account is remarkably similar to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s description of a ghost in ‘The Haunter and the Hunted’ – a well enough known story to be familiar to the ghosthunters at ‘Castel-a-Mare’: “it was a darkness shaping itself forth”. So, what was this recurring featureless black absence? Any why, like other monsters here, was it released by the repurposing of space? A furious power in the form of a man without light, without reflection? A man without depth, only outline and emptiness. A human surplus denied human-ness? Was this the energy of excesses, profits, thefts, come from the colonies, unable to contain the absenting of the human from the body, in the shape of a slave? For, paradoxically, while locals would have been familiar with North African slaves prior to British colonialism – with Venetian trading ships, rowed by slaves regularly calling at local ports, one sunk on the rocks at nearby Teignmouth, and William of Orange riding through Torbay in 1685 at the head of (quote) “200 Blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America” all wearing “Imbroyder’d Caps lin’d with white fur, and Plumes of white Feathers, to attend the Horse”. When British imperialism’s slaving really took off, slave bodies increasingly disappeared from Britain. When I looked on Google Street View at ‘Monte Rosa’, the house built on the site of ‘Castel-a-Mare’, it was sat under a massive storm cloud, the shape of a skull visible in a front window. Escaping from ‘Monte Rosa’, down an alley and into the next road, a gorgeous yellow sandstone lion rested on a gatepost, its huge front paws casually crossed, looking across to the valley where mountain lions had once sipped at the stream that still occasionally pushes up the manhole covers and floods Fleet Street. Beside me, new flats were going up, on the site where Oliver Heaviside, a pioneer of electro-magnetism, second only to Maxwell, had lived. In the stage musical ‘Cats’ the ionised layer around the earth named after Heaviside stands in for the feline afterlife: “Up up up past the Jellicle Moon, Up up up to the Heaviside Layer’. Heaviside once observed that the more science looks at matter, the more the animate and inanimate appear the same. By the time Heaviside lived here, his eccentric domestic life was sinister. Ostensibly the tenant of Mary Way, the unmarried sister of his sister-in-law, he imprisoned Mary in her own house, replacing her furniture with blocks of granite, stoking up fierce open fires into which Mary stared for hours on end, unable to go out without his permission and forced to sign a contract promising “never to marry a black man” – though “black man” is not the term he used. It was their next door neighbour who broke into ‘Castel-a-Mare’ and saw the entity: “black, silent and man-shaped”. Some accounts like to explain away Heaviside’s behaviour as a part of his genius, along with his intuitive guess about a reflective ionised layer around the Earth, and his facilitation of long distance cable transmissions by installing periodic induction coils. His real ‘genius’, or his ‘genius loci’, however – his realisation of the ‘genius’ of this part of Torquay – was to take his work on electromagnetic waves, facilitating the crucial technology for expanding a geographically limited and contested empire of things into a globalised and incontestable empire of information, and to distil it down to a single house, and a single soul, staring into a screen of flame, irrelevant to comfort, all difference prohibited and all subjectivity vaporised. That was his “genius”. His racism was a part of his morbid technological magic. Numerous local nineteenth and early twentieth century literary figures wrote political, explicitly white-supremacist narratives: the novelist William H. Mallock of Cockington Court, John Trevena, whose dystopian romance ‘The Reign of the Saints’ is about a mixed race, football-obsessed welfare-state Britain, critic and architect Sir Reginald Blomfield who exonerated his hated modernism as at least distinct from (quote) “those primitive animal instincts to the expression of which such Art as that of negroes sullenly gropes its way”, or the travel-writing of race-theorist James Anthony Froude... but where these, and others, operated in prose as ideologues for colonial practice, Heaviside leapfrogs them all, pre-empting the post-political, the post-human. He intuits the way a section of geo-philosophy, as practiced by the likes of Nick Land, have shifted, from their encounter with the amoral malevolence of the Earth’s molten core, via literary horror, to the spectacle of a digital Alt-Right’s ‘dark enlightenment’. Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that the early modern literature of central South Devon is entirely reactionary – there are fabulous life-enhancing texts associated with my walk’s route: William Beckford’s ‘Vathek’, the criticism of Mary P. Willcocks, even the doggerel of the Exeter prophetess Joanna Southcott – but before I can lighten the tone, I want to address one more reactionary supernatural text, covertly set, rather surprisingly, at Dartington Hall. In 1925, the Dartington Estate, was purchased and renovated by the wealthy philanthropists Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. Possibly the richest woman in the world at the time, Dorothy had associated herself with the far-left in her native US. Together, through the middle decades of the twentieth century, Leonard and Dorothy pioneered at Dartington a unique self-educating community of radical performers and visual artists, mystics, and agricultural and design innovators. Walter Gropius worked there, likewise the potter Bernard Leech, Rabindranath Tagore was a regular visitor. Its influence is still profound; through the thousands of pupils and students who passed through its radical free school, arts college and in workshops with its resident and visiting practitioners, and in the innovations in farming, design, educational methods and performance which, if not originated at Dartington, were sustained and developed there. And in politics.... It was at Dartington that the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, blueprint for the most radical transformation of British society, was drawn up. In the 1930s, in its Tiltyard, the dancers of the exiled Jooss Company, famous for their anti-war ballet ‘The Green Table’ exercised alongside actors under the tutorship of Michael Chekhov, the irascible psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’. Among them was Dorothy Elmhirst’s daughter, Beatrice Straight, who would win an Academy Award for the Trump-like ‘Network’ – “I’m angry as hell and I won’t take it anymore” – and who appears in the original ‘Poltergeist’ movie. Above the Tiltyard is a reclining female figure sculpted by Sir Henry Moore; the kind of located sculpture about which Dame Sylvia Crowe, key thinker in the design of nuclear landscapes, was particularly enthusiastic, describing Moore’s “extension of the organic world” as a re-jigging of the human senses to meet a cosmos in which “experience has penetrated into regions which were [once] inaudible and invisible.... The cavities and solids of Henry Moore’s figures are less an idealization of the human mean than.... [a] groping for his position in the universal framework, while his mind and experience has attained a new mobility which enables his consciousness to travel over the whole gamut of creation”. That’s what the community at Dartington was about; just as a new intensive farming was pioneered there, so there was also a cultivation of new kinds of feeling, sensing, experiencing and showing. In anarchic arts experiments, a nurturing of new, un-designable ‘structures of feeling’; preparing the modern soul for a coming hypermodern economy. It seems that the British Secret Service took an ongoing interest in Dartington; given what we know of the American secret state’s involvement in the artistic avant-garde, one wonders if MI5 thought it might have something more to gain by a protracted observation of arts and design experiments than checking any threat. Initially, though, their interest was a hostile one. The Elmhirsts’ alliance with the Soil Association, and their eclectic and experimental mix of mysticism, experimental arts, urban radicalism and rural crafts must have looked like a Strasserite wing of English fascism. While the Elmhirsts’ Free School - whose headmaster denounced the political establishment and announced that a ‘new elite’ to replace it was being trained at Dartington – rattled British Intelligence’s far right. An MI5 file was drawn up, linking the school to Communism and European federalism, and suggesting that the Elmhirsts’ house in London was being used by the occultist Aleister Crowley (a sometime resident of Torquay) as a Satanic initiation temple, its neophytes shipped off to Dartington. The report’s sources included Captain Arthur Rogers, of military intelligence and the League of Empire Loyalists, an organisation set up by Arthur K. Chesterton, the Editor of the Torquay Times. The Elmhirsts took Rogers to court and he backed down. The far right’s suspicions were not entirely without foundation, however: for, at the time, Dorothy Elmhirst’s son Michael was spying for the KGB; his eventual confession triggering the exposure of leading British double agent Anthony Blunt. The conflation by Dartington’s accusers of Satanism and Communism, was seized upon by a young security operative and novelist who was sent down to Dartington to investigate the Free School. Although he disguised his source, by relocating the school to Wales, the novelist, one Dennis Wheatley, is clearly referencing Dartington in his page-turner ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’. Where, at Dartington, there is a free-standing tower, part of a dismantled church, used in the second world war as a US army communications post, there is, similarly, a re-purposing of deconsecrated property in Wheatley’s novel: “the school authorities had converted the crypt of the Abbey into a Masonic Temple.... a Lodge of the Grand Orient.... Fellowship of it gave one lots of pull in the political and financial worlds.... pupils.... were given a special course during their last term to prepare them for initiation”. Dennis Wheatley had no personal belief in the supernatural, though he was happy to affirm the impression that he had in order to increase sales; skewing neo-paganism in the process, as people began to use his invented rituals as if they were traditional practices. There is nothing as postmodern as modern witchcraft. In ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’, Wheatley mixes demonic possession with Stalinist subversion, the whole thing coloured by anti-Semitism; a German Jewish agent seeks to infiltrate and influence the Labour Party (an interesting resonance given the estate’s role in the 1945 manifesto). In the end it turns out that the Crowley-esque ‘Grand Orient’ and the Communist infiltration stories are all just a cover for the work of a Satanic Brotherhood; its ‘high priest’ declaring his faith: “It is Socialism, but on the highest plane.... through the agency of Communism, my master, the Ancient of Days, the Archangel Lucifer, the Prince of This World, will at last enter into his own again”. When one of Wheatley’s characters expresses surprise at an apparent contradiction in his plotline – “It was so obviously absurd to think of the masters at Weylands dabbling in spiritualism. They were all dyed-in-the-wool materialists” – Wheatley captures real tensions at Dartington between the proto-New Age thinking, Marxism and post-structuralism wandering warily around each other there. The novel ends – in a big catch-all symbol to solve all contradictions – the vaporisation of a Giant Spider. In Wheatley’s book, fictional conservatives resist a collectivism with a darker, older foundation in authoritarianism; but the real reactionaries were equally opposed to the modern, bright, rational, Apollonian side of Dartington. So, when modernist houses were built at a small nearby seaside village, designed by Elmhirst-funded experimental artists, this model for a new kind of village was abruptly scuppered. As one local councillor deftly put it: “I hope it will never be mentioned to those who may dwell at Churston that they are intended to become a community or that there would be any species of communal life”. This biopolitical metaphor signalled a deep, visceral fear of the viral nature of collectivism. Individual and family were ‘natural’ formations; anything else might take on species-qualities, leviathan, monstrous; why, with the unimpeded sea views of the modernist houses, thanks to their flat roofs, what fishy things might the occupants become! But I haven’t got to Lovecraft country yet.... I only got there by invitation from my friend, ornithologist and enthusiast for the unusual, Tony Whitehead. Tony had discovered that the ancestors of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft had lived in a small group of villages just North of Torbay, so I joined Tony for two days exploring lanes and villages looking for any signs of the Lovecraft family, and any hints from the landscape that might have been carried as family-memory to America and informed Lovecraft’s uncanny: a meteor had fallen on one of the Lovecrafts’ villages in the 1600s and Tony wondered if some memory of that might have inspired H. P.’s ‘The Colour Out Of Space’. The urban terrain of Torquay, with its population of nearly 70,000, is intense. I was surprised to find the Lovecraft triangle, with three small villages and scattered farms, just the same. The encounters with challenging terrain – down pits, in caves, nervous about uranium dust deposits – and the narratives – of found footage horror and female divines – were every bit as detailed and relentless. We triangulated the terrain by three hollow hills; one under West Ogwell church, tthat above caves at Torbryan, and Denbury Hill fort built on the tombs of ancestors by the Dumnonii, so named by the Romans invaders after the natives’ goddess of the deep, Dumna. Approaching West Ogwell, via Puritan’s Pit – a roofless cavern - and Chercombe Bridge, haunted by the sounds of a galloping horse; we crossed the fields. In preparation I had re-watched a 2013 found footage horror movie, ‘The Borderlands’, partly filmed in West Ogwell church. The movie follows the efforts of two paranormal debunkers from the Catholic Church and their agnostic techie, who (quote) “believes... stuff”. Troubled by persistent bumps, groans and pixelations in the chancel, the investigators are joined by an unorthodox exorcist called “Father Calvino”; possibily a nod to Italo Calvino and his ‘hidden cities’. At the end of the movie the investigators race around beneath the church, through a downwardly spiralling labyrinth, until they are trapped in a softer, wetter and living section. It closes up behind them; a sleeping worm-shaped thing under the church – perhaps put to bed by Pope Gregory’s instruction to preserve the sacred spaces of the pagans while replacing their symbols – has wakened and swallows them. For Tony the birdman this resonates with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos – with its giant dragon-like tendril-thing sleeping and dreaming in a hidden city, R’lyeh. What feels more uncanny, however, on approaching the church through a herd of red South Devons, is the quiet thrill of walking through the landscape of a film; the gentle green space, among views of what an ‘English landscape’ is supposed to look like. Rolling hills, a patchwork of fields, one or two farmhouses nestled under the protective windbreak of goyles and combes. There is barely anything to West Ogwell; the church has been redundant for forty years. There is nothing recognisable as a village, a few scattered farms, and a large sixteenth century manor house which has passed to the New Age, now called ‘Gaia House’. At the bottom of the church tower someone had painted in white rectangles over a five letter word. Possibly SATAN or DEVIL. Maybe DAGON, or even DUMNA. Some animal had been digging at one of the graves. Inside, the chapel has a simple beauty. A medieval elegance. There is a heraldic plaque for a Mister Silly, Churchwarden. And under the altar someone had placed a small ‘fetish’; a forked twig and a piece of slate secured together with green twine. The bible on the lectern was open at a description of a massive ritual cleansing pool: “[T]hen he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round.... and under it was the likeness of oxen encircling it all the way round, ten to a cubit, all the way around the Sea”. I thought of the red Jersey cows outside, stood on a limestone sea bed. In the movie the techie character argues with one of the priests that “pagans” have always been more grounded in their beliefs, because they worship “what’s there”, the sun and the moon. And, presumably, the snake coiled under the hill. I was repeatedly seeing snake symbols along my route – it was certainly “there”: Hidden in an old BT logo, at Starbucks (Melusine, their mascot, is not a mermaid but a serpent from the waist down), on discarded tins of the Monster energy drink, as the man-eating ‘biscione’ on the badge of Alfa-Romeo cars, and when I googled for the Blackstone’s logo, I got their LifeSet Network.... it might be a kite, but to me it looks like a snake crawling out of a diamond shaped hole. And the geology was also ‘there’ - the techie’s materialist theology is Hermetic; what is spiralling above (the priests out of control) is also spiralling down. Perhaps there is no monster beneath West Ogwell, but there is a significant and agentive ‘down below’, a space that produces an atmosphere, a living something that has attracted there first the pagan, then the Christian, then the filmmaker: spilitic lavas from subterranean seas, subjected to metasomatic transformations by the action of cooler waters. A traumatic geological memory curled up like a serpent; an offstage cast member of Donna Haraway’s Cthulhucene. What ‘The Borderlands’ says is: attend to what is there. Not to dogma, but how the genius loci of a place arises from its shaping by its hidden rocks. At the second hollow hill in Lovecraftland, at Torbryan caves, a devout draper’s assistant, despite – or perhaps because of – his fears of hobgoblins in the lanes and fairies in the hills, braved dark caves to discover an ancient chapel. In 1960 F. E. Zeuner, Professor of Environmental Archaeology at the University of London, concluded that it was unlikely to have been an official chapel. No mention in diocesan or parish records. Instead, it was comparable to a chapel in north Devon, destroyed by the church authorities in 1352, where an altar was erected to “proud and disobedient Eve and unchaste Diana”. Had an altar at Torbryan once been decorated with an image of a medieval descendent of Dumna? Tony and I were struck by our repeated encounters with images of female saints and goddesses. Saint Apollonia with the pliers used to remove her teeth – that night one of my teeth fell out and Tony received an email about his 6 monthly dental check-up – cavities close to the Torbryan caves, Sidwella with the scythe used to spill her blood – associated with the wells in her Exeter parish – one of which I found in a newly opened Vegan cafe, bizarrely decorated... And then in the Chapel in the Woods – there was Mary, the gushing water at her feet, similar to that at the feet of Sidwella.... The English churches – where we found many of these images – are becoming remarkable. As institutions and dogmas have declined, their spaces have become deregulated, accidentally Symbolist, places where signifiers are released from signifieds to be remade in the imagination again; spaces where we do not believe in the elves anymore, and yet the elves still have their effects. A comparable sense of dispersal prevails at our third hollow hill; Denbury Hill is one of the Dumnonii’s rare, defensive retreats, the tribe otherwise living without centres, in dispersed communities, in anti-cities, the shape of which endures around West Ogwell. These pre-textual people – interesting to us as we become post-textual – built no great temples, worshipping at springs and groves. Exploiting very little of the local resources for commerce, generous to strangers, peacefully but independently co-existing with both Roman and Saxons, they speak of a completely ‘other’ culture, unimaginable to a modern or hypermodern, but perhaps not to a genuinely postmodern and posthuman, mind. A culture of dispersal and the facing of darkness and the deep. My walking weaves together this Dumnonian diffusion with the wounds, wells and cavities of the spaces of Sidwella’s and Apollonia’s martyrdoms. Similar to Dumna’s domain of deeps and darknesses at the heart of things, necessary for both a simple survival and a sophisticated individuation of a soul. When, my journey later took me to the city of Plymouth, I attended a performance there by the live artist Natalie Raven, similarly dissolving dogma and faith, and evoking numinous, unhuman and bloody realities like the supernatural performances of Mary, Sidwella and Dumna.... While the city of Plymouth itself was similarly hollowed and dispersed. I had gone there in response to a parking space. One I had found not far from Lovecraft country. It was decorated in broken ceramics with astrological symbols mixed in with an ankh, yin and yang, and watched over by a master’s square.... with the symbols of the four gospel writers – ox, lion, eagle and angel. And a Kabbalah tree of life. One of my online contacts suggested that these were symbolic instructions for seeking the “nine points of light” and directed me to a book called ‘Cosmic Magnetism’ written by Percy Seymour, one time Senior Lecturer in astronomy at Plymouth University, responsible for its Planetarium, now its Immersive Vision Theatre. Repurposing again! Seymour had been studying the gravitational and electromagnetic forces of the Sun and the planets on each other, but began speculating on their effects on human destiny. For this shift, from astronomy to astrology, he was mostly, and given the shoddiness of his arguments, understandably, disowned by his colleagues. The symbol of eclipse in the lobby of the Vision Theatre is poignant, given Seymour’s disgrace, and failure to discern any exact entanglement of giant planetary bodies and personal human journeys. Seymour isn’t the only connection between Plymouth and the parking space. After Plymouth city centre was levelled by bombing in the second world war, the first plan for its rebuilding, by the feng-shui influenced chief architect Patrick Abercrombie, was pretty clearly based on the Kabbalah Tree of Life. The clear shapes of this plan are, however, barely evident on the ground, compromised by pragmatic concerns about traffic and pedestrian flow. Yet, this makes the trace-like, spectral Tree powerful – an elusive presence, only very partially shaped, to be sought after and understood. Similar destructions have left similarly partial spaces, like this arch, all that remains of giant barracks. Or this park, repurposing an eighteenth century defensive ditch and assembling architectural fragments broken by second world war bombing. On its lodge is a twin-tailed and muscular Dumna or Melusine; placed in a tile grid, a Master’s Square. Nearby, a headless stone beast, two feet like a pig, two with claws, like a lion. And a fragment of pillar, carved like a tree stump, but sprouting a tentacle, two bird’s feet where its roots should be.... The park is every bit as esoteric as the parking space; dispersal by explosive and re-assemblage invites as intuitive a response as the hollowed churches. And so, the significance of the hollow hill changed during my walk: from a dark underground of disgruntled entitlement and wronged races, to a model for emptying creeds and symbols, and repurposing them for exploration and enquiry. To sum up - three provisional conclusions from my gothic encounters in South Devon: that the plethora of poisonous racist narratives – and the darkness shaping forth – appeared in a space left empty by the colonial absenting of its explicit bodies; and this absence continues to exert a morbid, opportunist and disgruntled force – though a hope for its weakening lies in the accelerating return of those bodies. My reading of ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’ suggests a generalisable ‘counter-paranoia’. A hypothesis that a conspiracy narrative is a kind of speech act, a participation in a conspiracy; in this case – the monitoring of the Dartington experiment – one that poses difficult questions for experimental artists about the co-opting of their work by the subjects of their critiques. And, finally, that the hollowing out of sacred spaces, and the floating free of symbols – Dumna, Melusine, Sidwella – constitute a repurposing of gothic spaces – caves, cavities, shadows and voids - as spaces not of faith and scepticism, but of exploration and enquiry. 22