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Trackless Paths
Rarely are the realms of the unseen, the unknowable secrets of human life and death, so masterfully evoked than in Tweddell's meticulous prose. Rarely do we find ourselves sharing the same deadly longings, the same sadness as his doomed protagonists. Arcane knowledge often comes at a hefty price.
Having previously appeared in small runs, all long out-of-print, the stories included in this Egaeus Press book are :
A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow
The Measurer of All Things
The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor
The Paths of the Dead
The Salix Arcanum
The Place of Remaking
The book is a 244 page sewn hardback with printed endpapers; featuring as its cover an original painting by Irah Solomon Stewart. It is limited to just 325 copies.
Having previously appeared in small runs, all long out-of-print, the stories included in this Egaeus Press book are :
A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow
The Measurer of All Things
The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor
The Paths of the Dead
The Salix Arcanum
The Place of Remaking
The book is a 244 page sewn hardback with printed endpapers; featuring as its cover an original painting by Irah Solomon Stewart. It is limited to just 325 copies.
- GenresFiction
Hardcover
First published March 16, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 29, 2024
In the collection’s opening novella, A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow, Daniel Turner, a bookseller, and widower, moves to Wellington, in West Somerset, in search of a new beginning. His decision to open a bookshop on a whim proves to be a misjudgement. Increasingly isolated, Turner’s nostalgic wanderings around the provincial town slowly become a compulsive haunting, as he’s lured into a mystery that seems to echo his grief.
Tweddell’s eloquent descriptions of place invest the landscape with a sense of immanence, a genius loci that slowly beguiles and troubles the reader. The landscape evokes the sensual contours of a body, an expression of Turner’s loss and his longing to find his late wife in a communion with Nature. Yet in yearning for that epiphany Turner becomes susceptible to another more malevolent presence, that haunts the story’s terrain.
Turner’s attempts to belong by mingling with the locals fail, magnifying his vulnerability at the coming of a new age, as 1930 looms. He seems to be aptly named; as if his arrival there fulfils a symbolic role, that of the Fool perhaps, undertaking an accidental yet sacred journey, foreshadowing an air of impending danger and decline.
Yet Tweddell’s deft prose brightens and varies the tone, when Silas Bartholomew, an old patron of Turner’s bookshop, arrives with a plan in mind. Turner’s suspicion gives way to the charm of an emerging friendship, as the two embark on an investigation into the legend of Wulfric of Culmhead, a Tudor prophet. Their camaraderie is soon in jeopardy however, when the promise of treasure becomes a threatening prospect instead.
The tale’s denouement demonstrates how Tweddell’s skilful writing tends towards the elliptical, subtly conveying those peripheral slippages and lacunae of sensory experience that resist definition, that haunt the margins of perception. As we find with the other stories in the collection, there’s a recurring theme of absented histories working their elusive influence upon the present. The stories draw upon Britain’s folklore and mythologies, of the ghosts of the interwar period, of the silenced traumas of the First World War and the imminent threat of World War Two, to convey dangers arising from Britain’s inner borders as well as without.
In the second tale, The Measurer of All Things, Harlow, a land-surveyor arriving at an inn at a remote rural location, has been employed to replace Edgar Bancroft, a seasoned researcher. From Taylor, Harlow’s new colleague, we learn that Bancroft went missing while undertaking a project around a mysterious locale called Durnham Hill. In sifting through Bancroft’s notebook, Harlow gradually reveals his predecessor’s unorthodox and esoteric methods.
When Harlow undertakes his duties with Taylor, they find that the land seems to defy their methods. As Harlow retraces Bancroft’s research he uncovers an indigenous folklore of the land, and increasingly falls under its spell. In following in Bancroft’s footsteps is he undertaking a visionary pilgrimage? What remains must vanish into mystery.
In the collection’s second novella The Veneration of Polwheveral Manor, Jacob Thurman, a retired army doctor rents an isolated cottage in postwar Cornwall, appearing to seek a hermit’s life, while coming to terms with a degenerative eye condition.
Suspecting that he is being watched at night, Jacob discovers that the cottage lies on the outskirts of Polwheveral Estate, a hereditary home to the De Monte line, a family once revered then despised by the locals. Exploring the nearby community, Jacob hears of Julius, the surviving heir of the De Montes, who lives in seclusion in Polwheveral Manor, and who according to rumour, is the custodian of holy relics and was miraculously cured of blindness.
The interplay of intrigue and revelation is subtly and perfectly executed as the story unfolds, as Jacob is compelled to seek out the assistance of the last De Monte, a reputed seer. Julius and Jacob move as ghostly reflections of one another in this hermetic drama of visions and forgotten rituals. While astute readers will recognise echoes of writers such as Poe, Machen, and M.R. James, Tweddell has his own distinctive voice and wears his influences and esotericism lightly.
The next story The Paths of the Dead, with its crystalline and elemental language, acts as a kind of poetic interlude, a wayfinding too, reaffirming the hidden routes, or trackless paths the reader must find through each text. The territory of the story is named, yet is also imaginary, timeless, and primordial.
Resembling a Beckettian drama in its starkness, it’s enacted in the environs around Branheath Tor, on moors in heavy snow. Coffin-bearers must follow the Lych Way to Yethford Church, undertaking their journey to bury their dead in hallowed ground stipulated by the presiding Bishop. There’s the inference of tensions between the Church’s laws and older traditions, of the privilege of the Clergy and the suffering of the countryfolk.
As the coffin-bearers wend their way along the Corpse Road, we hear of how the elders believed that the road itself was made by their ancestral spirits: the surviving traces of a mythic tradition that the Church seeks to supplant. Contrasting with the Bishop’s arbitrary diktat, we sense Nature’s rhythm within the rhythm of the countryfolk’s ritual march to bury their dead. Slowly we find that through the apparent futility of the coffin-bearers’ duty something sacred emerges. Even the oppression of the Church is in time subsumed into and eroded by the older ways.
In the novella The Salix Arcanum the theme of sacred sites recurs, and with it a sense that the collection has firmly established the paths that branch through Tweddell’s highly distinctive fictional world.
Henry Godwin, a gentleman, and contemporary of the Edwardian bohemian Augustus John has recently arrived in Norfolk, seeking artistic inspiration in the county’s water meadows. After renting a cottage, he is the cause of some unease amongst the villagers, who are disconcerted by his liberal attitudes. Yet Henry is an outsider in more ways than one, as it’s revealed that he left London under a cloud: since the ending of a relationship, he’s suffered disturbing dreams urging him to travel to the area.
The rural environs are vividly depicted, and many of the exchanges between the characters have a charming Jamesian tone in their formality. From these naturalistic descriptions an air of discomfort is subtly introduced, as with all the stories in the collection, the events and their settings have a sense of being rooted in an integrated and lived history; Henry learns from an old farmer about the area’s vanished heritage, of tragic floods and bodies lost to the waters. The land and its past have a palpable presence that at times manifests as a threatening and disorientating force.
While Henry wanders in search of scenery to sketch, he stumbles across St. Hild’s chapel at Sedgemoor. Surrounded by expansive marshland, it is one of the book’s many sacred sites, that occupy the stories like apparitions, and like Turner in A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow, Henry is compelled to haunt that marginal place, drawn there by experiences of inexplicable ecstasy.
He encounters Reverend Paxton there, a source of knowledge about the chapel’s history, and a researcher of local folklore. The priest admits how he too has been entranced by the chapel and its grounds, where a great Willow, or Salix tree grows. Sensing some affinity, Henry and the priest agree to meet later at The Waterman’s Arms.
While returning to the village, Henry explores the paths of the water meadows but becomes disorientated. Surviving an almost fatal accident he suspects that something sinister works its influence through the marshes and St Hild’s chapel.
Shaken by his near drowning Henry seeks solace in cider at The Waterman’s Arms and while drunk he begins to unravel as he suspects that “some stealthy creature stalked him on trackless paths.” A pertinent phrase, anticipating the story’s conclusion, for the paths ahead stray further into the watery labyrinth when Henry encounters the reclusive Jeremiah Lynch and learns of the chapel’s origins. To say much more would risk disclosing too much, other than to say that The Salix Arcanum further explores the collection’s recurring themes of hidden and restless histories beneath the skin of the familiar, the mutability of identity and desire, and the unexpected sacrifices that hidden knowledge demands for its revelations.
In the final tale, The Place of Remaking, three old friends meet at an isolated inn for a reluctant anniversary in Wilmington, marking the occasion of having joined the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift in childhood, a pacifist social movement founded after the First World War.
The three men discuss Hargrave, the Kindred’s leader who influenced them all as boys. James and Arthur recall him with some ambivalence, yet the third man, Lawrence is increasingly outspoken in his bitterness. Lawrence insists that Hargrave betrayed them, misleading them with unsound beliefs, leaving them ill-prepared for the outbreak of another war in which they all served. To diffuse their argument, they agree to leave and walk a route remembered from childhood.
As they walk the familiar trail Lawrence persists in his criticisms of Hargrave, expressing regret for his youthful idealism as they pass an old cottage, his childhood home. The path ahead reawakens memories of the Kindred’s customs and ceremonies on the hills. They agree to make a fire in honour of what might be their final meeting there near the Long Man and the barrows, the sacred sites of the Kindred. They toast their memories with a hip flask, yet the alcohol soon enflames Lawrence’s anger, causing him to make a traumatic confession.
The Place of Remaking ends the collection on a contemplative and genuinely moving note. As with the settings of his other stories, in evoking Wilmington, Tweddell remarks on the secret histories of its landscape, describing pathways and stories that are indivisible, that mirror memories of encounters and conflicts between long-since vanished peoples. It is a land that bears the sign of the Long Man, the chalk giant as a symbol, whose history is uncertain and undecided. He stands as if holding apart the supporting beams of a doorway, opening a threshold to trackless paths, and the restless past.
Tweddell’s eloquent descriptions of place invest the landscape with a sense of immanence, a genius loci that slowly beguiles and troubles the reader. The landscape evokes the sensual contours of a body, an expression of Turner’s loss and his longing to find his late wife in a communion with Nature. Yet in yearning for that epiphany Turner becomes susceptible to another more malevolent presence, that haunts the story’s terrain.
Turner’s attempts to belong by mingling with the locals fail, magnifying his vulnerability at the coming of a new age, as 1930 looms. He seems to be aptly named; as if his arrival there fulfils a symbolic role, that of the Fool perhaps, undertaking an accidental yet sacred journey, foreshadowing an air of impending danger and decline.
Yet Tweddell’s deft prose brightens and varies the tone, when Silas Bartholomew, an old patron of Turner’s bookshop, arrives with a plan in mind. Turner’s suspicion gives way to the charm of an emerging friendship, as the two embark on an investigation into the legend of Wulfric of Culmhead, a Tudor prophet. Their camaraderie is soon in jeopardy however, when the promise of treasure becomes a threatening prospect instead.
The tale’s denouement demonstrates how Tweddell’s skilful writing tends towards the elliptical, subtly conveying those peripheral slippages and lacunae of sensory experience that resist definition, that haunt the margins of perception. As we find with the other stories in the collection, there’s a recurring theme of absented histories working their elusive influence upon the present. The stories draw upon Britain’s folklore and mythologies, of the ghosts of the interwar period, of the silenced traumas of the First World War and the imminent threat of World War Two, to convey dangers arising from Britain’s inner borders as well as without.
In the second tale, The Measurer of All Things, Harlow, a land-surveyor arriving at an inn at a remote rural location, has been employed to replace Edgar Bancroft, a seasoned researcher. From Taylor, Harlow’s new colleague, we learn that Bancroft went missing while undertaking a project around a mysterious locale called Durnham Hill. In sifting through Bancroft’s notebook, Harlow gradually reveals his predecessor’s unorthodox and esoteric methods.
When Harlow undertakes his duties with Taylor, they find that the land seems to defy their methods. As Harlow retraces Bancroft’s research he uncovers an indigenous folklore of the land, and increasingly falls under its spell. In following in Bancroft’s footsteps is he undertaking a visionary pilgrimage? What remains must vanish into mystery.
In the collection’s second novella The Veneration of Polwheveral Manor, Jacob Thurman, a retired army doctor rents an isolated cottage in postwar Cornwall, appearing to seek a hermit’s life, while coming to terms with a degenerative eye condition.
Suspecting that he is being watched at night, Jacob discovers that the cottage lies on the outskirts of Polwheveral Estate, a hereditary home to the De Monte line, a family once revered then despised by the locals. Exploring the nearby community, Jacob hears of Julius, the surviving heir of the De Montes, who lives in seclusion in Polwheveral Manor, and who according to rumour, is the custodian of holy relics and was miraculously cured of blindness.
The interplay of intrigue and revelation is subtly and perfectly executed as the story unfolds, as Jacob is compelled to seek out the assistance of the last De Monte, a reputed seer. Julius and Jacob move as ghostly reflections of one another in this hermetic drama of visions and forgotten rituals. While astute readers will recognise echoes of writers such as Poe, Machen, and M.R. James, Tweddell has his own distinctive voice and wears his influences and esotericism lightly.
The next story The Paths of the Dead, with its crystalline and elemental language, acts as a kind of poetic interlude, a wayfinding too, reaffirming the hidden routes, or trackless paths the reader must find through each text. The territory of the story is named, yet is also imaginary, timeless, and primordial.
Resembling a Beckettian drama in its starkness, it’s enacted in the environs around Branheath Tor, on moors in heavy snow. Coffin-bearers must follow the Lych Way to Yethford Church, undertaking their journey to bury their dead in hallowed ground stipulated by the presiding Bishop. There’s the inference of tensions between the Church’s laws and older traditions, of the privilege of the Clergy and the suffering of the countryfolk.
As the coffin-bearers wend their way along the Corpse Road, we hear of how the elders believed that the road itself was made by their ancestral spirits: the surviving traces of a mythic tradition that the Church seeks to supplant. Contrasting with the Bishop’s arbitrary diktat, we sense Nature’s rhythm within the rhythm of the countryfolk’s ritual march to bury their dead. Slowly we find that through the apparent futility of the coffin-bearers’ duty something sacred emerges. Even the oppression of the Church is in time subsumed into and eroded by the older ways.
In the novella The Salix Arcanum the theme of sacred sites recurs, and with it a sense that the collection has firmly established the paths that branch through Tweddell’s highly distinctive fictional world.
Henry Godwin, a gentleman, and contemporary of the Edwardian bohemian Augustus John has recently arrived in Norfolk, seeking artistic inspiration in the county’s water meadows. After renting a cottage, he is the cause of some unease amongst the villagers, who are disconcerted by his liberal attitudes. Yet Henry is an outsider in more ways than one, as it’s revealed that he left London under a cloud: since the ending of a relationship, he’s suffered disturbing dreams urging him to travel to the area.
The rural environs are vividly depicted, and many of the exchanges between the characters have a charming Jamesian tone in their formality. From these naturalistic descriptions an air of discomfort is subtly introduced, as with all the stories in the collection, the events and their settings have a sense of being rooted in an integrated and lived history; Henry learns from an old farmer about the area’s vanished heritage, of tragic floods and bodies lost to the waters. The land and its past have a palpable presence that at times manifests as a threatening and disorientating force.
While Henry wanders in search of scenery to sketch, he stumbles across St. Hild’s chapel at Sedgemoor. Surrounded by expansive marshland, it is one of the book’s many sacred sites, that occupy the stories like apparitions, and like Turner in A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow, Henry is compelled to haunt that marginal place, drawn there by experiences of inexplicable ecstasy.
He encounters Reverend Paxton there, a source of knowledge about the chapel’s history, and a researcher of local folklore. The priest admits how he too has been entranced by the chapel and its grounds, where a great Willow, or Salix tree grows. Sensing some affinity, Henry and the priest agree to meet later at The Waterman’s Arms.
While returning to the village, Henry explores the paths of the water meadows but becomes disorientated. Surviving an almost fatal accident he suspects that something sinister works its influence through the marshes and St Hild’s chapel.
Shaken by his near drowning Henry seeks solace in cider at The Waterman’s Arms and while drunk he begins to unravel as he suspects that “some stealthy creature stalked him on trackless paths.” A pertinent phrase, anticipating the story’s conclusion, for the paths ahead stray further into the watery labyrinth when Henry encounters the reclusive Jeremiah Lynch and learns of the chapel’s origins. To say much more would risk disclosing too much, other than to say that The Salix Arcanum further explores the collection’s recurring themes of hidden and restless histories beneath the skin of the familiar, the mutability of identity and desire, and the unexpected sacrifices that hidden knowledge demands for its revelations.
In the final tale, The Place of Remaking, three old friends meet at an isolated inn for a reluctant anniversary in Wilmington, marking the occasion of having joined the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift in childhood, a pacifist social movement founded after the First World War.
The three men discuss Hargrave, the Kindred’s leader who influenced them all as boys. James and Arthur recall him with some ambivalence, yet the third man, Lawrence is increasingly outspoken in his bitterness. Lawrence insists that Hargrave betrayed them, misleading them with unsound beliefs, leaving them ill-prepared for the outbreak of another war in which they all served. To diffuse their argument, they agree to leave and walk a route remembered from childhood.
As they walk the familiar trail Lawrence persists in his criticisms of Hargrave, expressing regret for his youthful idealism as they pass an old cottage, his childhood home. The path ahead reawakens memories of the Kindred’s customs and ceremonies on the hills. They agree to make a fire in honour of what might be their final meeting there near the Long Man and the barrows, the sacred sites of the Kindred. They toast their memories with a hip flask, yet the alcohol soon enflames Lawrence’s anger, causing him to make a traumatic confession.
The Place of Remaking ends the collection on a contemplative and genuinely moving note. As with the settings of his other stories, in evoking Wilmington, Tweddell remarks on the secret histories of its landscape, describing pathways and stories that are indivisible, that mirror memories of encounters and conflicts between long-since vanished peoples. It is a land that bears the sign of the Long Man, the chalk giant as a symbol, whose history is uncertain and undecided. He stands as if holding apart the supporting beams of a doorway, opening a threshold to trackless paths, and the restless past.
May 13, 2024
Tweddell, Benjamin - Trackless Paths
Almost shameful how this striking author has been overlooked.
Then again, most of his works seem to have been with a minuscule press that sold to select, or to secondary resellers.
Tweddell is a masterful storyteller, mingling histories, myth and whispers, always in fine prose.
“A Crown Of Dusk And Sorrow” makes for a heady opener. Daniel had relocated to Quorts Moor following a visual epiphany; a sighting, an experience that left him thunderstruck. Alas, no matter how hard he tried, the frisson never repeated. Until the encounter with Silas, who soon leads him beyond, high beyond, to Woden’s Barrow, where Daniel is gifted with the curse of second sight.
Jacob, gradually losing his vision, isolates himself in a remote cottage. His nearest neighbor, across a deceptive creek, is Julius, a Catholic shunned by local folk. Julius had likewise gone blind earlier, only to have his sight miraculously return. The chapel, the shrine, the holy relic, are all used in a tale, steeped in faith and doubt, “The Veneration At Polwheveral Manor”.
Another lonely chapel, this one deep in the fens, irresistibly beckons Henry in “The Salix Arcanum”. Henry, trying to recover from a broken relationship has sought artistic refuge in rural oblivion. The small church, now abandoned, may have pagan origins. Locals, from simple stock to the vicar, try to caution Henry, appeal to his reason. And yet –
The collection concludes with “The Place Of Remaking”. Three childhood friends, aging member of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, reconvene at the bygone home. Bloodied by war, carnage, and too much death, the men are soured, cynical. Nevertheless, the tale is one of redemption and reawakening.
Almost shameful how this striking author has been overlooked.
Then again, most of his works seem to have been with a minuscule press that sold to select, or to secondary resellers.
Tweddell is a masterful storyteller, mingling histories, myth and whispers, always in fine prose.
“A Crown Of Dusk And Sorrow” makes for a heady opener. Daniel had relocated to Quorts Moor following a visual epiphany; a sighting, an experience that left him thunderstruck. Alas, no matter how hard he tried, the frisson never repeated. Until the encounter with Silas, who soon leads him beyond, high beyond, to Woden’s Barrow, where Daniel is gifted with the curse of second sight.
Jacob, gradually losing his vision, isolates himself in a remote cottage. His nearest neighbor, across a deceptive creek, is Julius, a Catholic shunned by local folk. Julius had likewise gone blind earlier, only to have his sight miraculously return. The chapel, the shrine, the holy relic, are all used in a tale, steeped in faith and doubt, “The Veneration At Polwheveral Manor”.
Another lonely chapel, this one deep in the fens, irresistibly beckons Henry in “The Salix Arcanum”. Henry, trying to recover from a broken relationship has sought artistic refuge in rural oblivion. The small church, now abandoned, may have pagan origins. Locals, from simple stock to the vicar, try to caution Henry, appeal to his reason. And yet –
The collection concludes with “The Place Of Remaking”. Three childhood friends, aging member of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, reconvene at the bygone home. Bloodied by war, carnage, and too much death, the men are soured, cynical. Nevertheless, the tale is one of redemption and reawakening.
January 12, 2025
Quite nice!
Tweddell covers a lot of topics I find interesting in a way that's enjoyable to read.
The one blemish I kept thinking of was a bit of repetition in themes and words - surely you noticed how everything is filled with the smell of damp and decay. :)
Less horror than I thought, more...I guess spiritual (non-derogatory) than I expected.
Tweddell covers a lot of topics I find interesting in a way that's enjoyable to read.
The one blemish I kept thinking of was a bit of repetition in themes and words - surely you noticed how everything is filled with the smell of damp and decay. :)
Less horror than I thought, more...I guess spiritual (non-derogatory) than I expected.
March 23, 2024
Having read all the stories, that were previously published in extremely limited editions (Mount Abraxas and Side Real Press), i am happy that the works of Benjamin are available again. Hope he gets the attention he deserves, as he is truly one of the best writers around....
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews