In this book is a radical idea. By walking the ancient landscape of Britain, engaging with the traces of the deep past and following the wheel of the year as it turns, we can find a pathway that reconnects us to our shared folklore, to the seasons and to nature, setting a course towards optimism, re-enchantment and brighter futures. A lovely mix of early Autechre and classic Tangerine Dream… this is electronica as an enveloping tonal journey, chiming and pulsating with analogue life” Just an absolute and total TOME, without which it is highly unlikely we would be typing these words you are reading. Top shelf material of the most sacred and venerated kind. He’s a dab hand at writing tunes too. Hail to the Arch Drood. Harold’s Stones in Trellech are said to have been flung into the village during a competition between a wizard and the devil. Photograph: Homer Sykes/Alamy Running through modern Scottish and Irish mythology, the legend of the Cailleach may well have begun life in literature before tumbling into the world of folklore. The goddess is a shaper of mountains and wild places, a bringer of storms and winter. Although it is unclear how old the animistic practices associated with Tigh nam Bodach actually are (some say they were developed in the 18th or 19th centuries by shepherds), the place names in this landscape certainly suggest a venerable association with the goddess.

Rob Young’s peerless overview of Britain’s ‘visionary music’ explores a tangled web of folk connections, from song collectors and pastoral composers to acid folk eccentrics and electronic pioneers. All are united by the inspiration they draw from this haunted old place we call home. AUTUMN Bring in the harvest with the old gods at Coldrum Long Barrow, and brave the ghosts on misty Blakeney Point Here was the land of Silbury Hill and Avebury stone circle, of Wayland the Smith and the great Uffington White Horse, whose annual scouring is a true pagan survival; here also was the land of the druids, the first farming communities, the last Saxon kings, and countless age-old folk tales. It was a potent path indeed, and the trip soon led to others. Dartmoor is a weird place; temporal dislocation comes with the territory. Wayfinding is not easy among this gorse, these rambling tors and secluded brooks. And when an autumn mist descends, you can be transported: a bronze age farmer to your left, a medieval tin miner to your right, and up ahead the lord of the manor has antiquarian ambitions. He’s just repositioned those stones. The earth gnomes don’t approve.Once passed around playgrounds as charmed objects, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks remain a potent way to while away the hours in a torchlit tent or moorland hostelry sans Wi-Fi. Obviously get the mid-eighties edition if you can. WINTER Make merry at the Chepstow wassail, and listen out for the sunken church bells of the lost medieval city of Dunwich The wheel turns and we find ourselves halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Signs of new life emerge, the earth awakens, a new issue of Weird Walk pokes through the fecund mulch…

Leyline is a quest and a rite of re-enchantment: by day seeking out connections in the landscape, and by night delighting in music and merriment, we embrace a collective endeavour in the time of the individual. One of the most beautiful and fascinating photo books of all time, and another heavyweight (both in terms of the book’s heft, and HS’s sizeable influence on the Weird Walk worldview) that deserves a place on everyone’s coffee table – especially those with an interest in the strange and arcane calendar customs that still thrive in the margins all over the British Isles. A ruminative and rather beautiful thing. Boards Of Canada, Cluster and Craven Faults are among those whose influence can be felt throughout” Fenella operate in a shadowy, crepuscular world. The experimental ensemble led by Jane Weaver (and long term collaborators Raz Ullah and Pete Phillipson) return with hallucinogenic excursions into ambient textures and hypnagogic drones. Fenella make spirited melodic progressive pop music that pulsates with the same magnetism that fans of Jane Weaver’s own The Silver Globe and Modern Kosmology have come to expect and hold closely. St Nicholas church, Trellech, where sculpted side panels of a 17th-century sundial bear witness to the village’s mysteries. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Visit Monmouthshire

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Hutton’s brilliant investigation into deity-like figures in Christian Europe shows us that these characters are much more complex than was once thought. The epilogue features the definitive account of the evolution of the Green Man.