A celebration of the numinous and wonderful in a far from mundane world.
I love exploring the spaces where history, religion, magic and folklore gently overlap with ordinary life: Christology, ecclesiology, hagiography, thaumaturgy, mythology, and all the traditional and often curious folk customs and beliefs that sometimes go unnoticed all around us. Welcome to my site.
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Wall Paintings in Shorthampton
A few miles outside Charlbury, down a lane that gives no warning of what’s at the end of it, sits the chapel of All Saints, Shorthampton. It is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. Shorthampton was built…
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Highgate Cemetery
Many years ago whilst living in San Francisco, I found a book from the 1980s called “Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla”, The book was filled with photos of what appeared to be a completely overgrown, if not somewhat abandoned cemetery in…
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St Ethelwold’s House and Garden
Just south of Oxford is the town of Abingdon on Thames, home of St Ethelwold’s House and Garden. When I was studying English Local History at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, I went down to Abingdon to research…
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Oxford May Morning
May 1st is a Big Deal in Oxford. For over 500 years crowds have been gathering before 6am at the foot of Magdalen College tower to hear the choir sing to welcome Spring. Afterwards, there is singing and dancing in…
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Pilgrimage Badges
Since I first encountered pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago many years ago, I’ve been fascinated with Pilgrimage badges. They began to be used in the 13th century, and were usually displayed as an indication of the completion of a…
My other sites
The Cunning Folk Cards
A deck of 54 cards telling the history of England’s cunning folk, the village healers, charmers and treasure hunters who worked as service magicians for centuries. Often confused with witches, most would have considered themselves dedicated Christians using their god-given gifts to help others. Grounded in the work of historians like Tabitha Stanmore, Emma Wilby and Owen Davies.
Tarot History
A site exploring six hundred years of tarot’s real history: where the cards originated, the game of triumphs they were first played as, the curious iconography that still defies easy classification, and how the cards changed as they spread from Italy to France, Switzerland, Germany and beyond. Includes an academic research forum I founded in 2008, the oldest still running on the subject.