#interrail 2025

When I walk the lanes ways of England the ghost soil coats my boots and sings stories of the secret land to me. For no field in England is truly fallow. Strange blooms of stories grow in the ghost soil whether the land is tended or not. Those that walk the ancient lanes of England walk with folklore to be harvested from hedge and to be collected along with the mud and dust underfoot. All our old paths are shortcuts to story. The land is long memory. Soil home to ghosts. Fields remember the dead buried in them long after no-one living knows their names or that they were even once living. The land is the final remembrancer. Every clump of trees huddling together for protection, every diminished wood, casts a ghost shadow of when they were forest. If I have learnt anything from folklore it is that the old gods are not dead, not lost, but merely sleeping on the borders between those deep seasons of time that turn in cycles slower than the year. They wait to wake and walk beside us again. I am of the green church. I am of the church of awe. I have no business with any faith nor priest peddling a fear of the divine. I enjoy delcious moments of landscape terror. A sense of what is buried below, the scream of the horizon. Between unearthing and open sky, my soul is overwhelmed. This a is a good thing.