About this site

My name is J.C. Aldred. I've been reading about British folklore for long enough to know that most of what's written about it is either too academic to enjoy or too breezy to trust. The Chalk & Thorn is my attempt at something in between.

The name comes from two things embedded in the British landscape that have accumulated meaning over centuries. Chalk — the ancient downland of Avebury, Wilmington, and the Uffington Horse, the white scars cut into hillsides by people whose names we don't know. Thorn — the hawthorn tree, left standing alone in a field for a thousand years because nobody wanted to be the one to cut it down. Both of them carry the weight of old belief without announcing it.

That's the register I'm aiming for here. Not ghost stories for Halloween, and not footnoted scholarship either. Writing that takes the subject seriously — that treats folklore as evidence of how people understood the world, not as charming superstition to be smiled at.

The posts cover creatures and landscape, ballads and witchcraft, folk horror and the writers who have drawn on all of it. The geographical focus is the British Isles, though the ballad tradition in particular doesn't respect national borders and neither will I when the material demands otherwise.

If you're here because you've read Robert Macfarlane or Alan Garner, because you watched The Wicker Man and wanted to know what was real, because you grew up near a place with a name nobody could quite explain — you're in the right place.

New posts go out on Tuesdays and Fridays. You can subscribe below to get them by email.