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The Old Weird Albion: A Journey to the Heart of the English South
A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps.
Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head.
When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion?
A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs.
Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.
Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head.
When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion?
A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs.
Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.
171 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 3, 2016
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380 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
February 2, 2019
There are two places that I know well on the South Downs, Ditchling Beacon that I remember camping on one night in the late summer, and the other is Beachy Head. I remember walking up the hill to the top to look out and being terrified as a boy of going anywhere near the edge. It is Beachy Head where the American writer and artist Justin Hopper begins his book with his grandfather's first wife, Doris Hopper, seen standing at the edge of the cliff and in the next moment then seen to be falling. This act would leave an echo in his family history that almost no one would speak of.
His journey to find her will take him along the chalk ridge from Winchester to the sea. Along the way, he meets pagans, eco-therapists and someone who knows something about crop circles. But this is not just about the people, it is also the landscape that Hopper wants to discover more about. Where I live at the moment has lots of history draped over the landscape and it turns out that Sussex is not a lot different to Dorset. There are layers and layers, some more visible than others; the landscape of cold rivers, standing stones, old churches and prehistoric remains that show how and where humanity has existed along this route and the pagan elements that existed for hundreds of years that are still present if you know where to look.
As Hopper unravels his complex family history to find out more about the tragic death that was not spoken of, he ventures into the surreal and the unknown. All the way through the book he uncovers more details about Doris, giving him a glimpse of her life and up to the point she stood at the top of the cliff. As an American with English relatives, he has some of a sense of who we are as a people, but he can also take a wider perspective too on our culture and foibles. I ended up liking this a lot without having a sense of being able to say absolutely why, but it is probably the mix of personal discovery and his explorations of the landscapes. As he travels the thousand-year-old paths over the chalk downs it really is the foundation and bedrock of the book. As a little aside, I really liked the brilliant illustrations from the artist Mairead Dunne at the beginning of each chapter.
His journey to find her will take him along the chalk ridge from Winchester to the sea. Along the way, he meets pagans, eco-therapists and someone who knows something about crop circles. But this is not just about the people, it is also the landscape that Hopper wants to discover more about. Where I live at the moment has lots of history draped over the landscape and it turns out that Sussex is not a lot different to Dorset. There are layers and layers, some more visible than others; the landscape of cold rivers, standing stones, old churches and prehistoric remains that show how and where humanity has existed along this route and the pagan elements that existed for hundreds of years that are still present if you know where to look.
As Hopper unravels his complex family history to find out more about the tragic death that was not spoken of, he ventures into the surreal and the unknown. All the way through the book he uncovers more details about Doris, giving him a glimpse of her life and up to the point she stood at the top of the cliff. As an American with English relatives, he has some of a sense of who we are as a people, but he can also take a wider perspective too on our culture and foibles. I ended up liking this a lot without having a sense of being able to say absolutely why, but it is probably the mix of personal discovery and his explorations of the landscapes. As he travels the thousand-year-old paths over the chalk downs it really is the foundation and bedrock of the book. As a little aside, I really liked the brilliant illustrations from the artist Mairead Dunne at the beginning of each chapter.
January 17, 2018
Enjoyed it. The quality of the writing is good, which makes it possible to forgive almost anything. But it made me wonder about psychogeography: is it vulnerable to being used merely as a hook for a writer to hang a memoir upon?
This was the impression the book sometimes gave, that the journeys offered the author a convenient form rather than a real subject for a narrative. Sometimes it seemed obvious that what was presented wasn't what happened, such as the episode in which Hopper meets a musician in a remote, empty church. We learn much about the details of the musician's life, so evidently there was an interview, an exchange of details, certainly something less spontaneous than the encounter is presented as having been. But, as mentioned, the writing was good, the reading was enjoyable, and some of the places were described in terms atmospheric enough to make me want to visit.
This was the impression the book sometimes gave, that the journeys offered the author a convenient form rather than a real subject for a narrative. Sometimes it seemed obvious that what was presented wasn't what happened, such as the episode in which Hopper meets a musician in a remote, empty church. We learn much about the details of the musician's life, so evidently there was an interview, an exchange of details, certainly something less spontaneous than the encounter is presented as having been. But, as mentioned, the writing was good, the reading was enjoyable, and some of the places were described in terms atmospheric enough to make me want to visit.
November 30, 2020
Psychogeography is a new word for me this weekend. This is part travelogue/part memoir with a touch of family history thrown in as Hopper explores the connection between humans and the landscape around them. The book meanders along in parts and is strangely poetical in others.
August 26, 2024
Erm this was a curious mix of journal, psychogeography, family history and random observation. Although interesting in parts, I don't think Hopper got it totally right. Some sections seemed completely disconnected and not really related to anything else. Other sections dragged a little.
I love anything related to areas I know little of. The South Downs is one of those areas. I feel that Hopper didn't do anything to improve my knowledge of or enhance my literary experience of this part of the UK. I came away with little more than when I started.
A 3 star read at most.
I love anything related to areas I know little of. The South Downs is one of those areas. I feel that Hopper didn't do anything to improve my knowledge of or enhance my literary experience of this part of the UK. I came away with little more than when I started.
A 3 star read at most.
April 3, 2018
A wonderful book. This is not a travelogue, nor is it a traditional book about the myths or folklore of the South Downs. It is a series of essays where the author explores people’s connections to the landscape of the South Downs, including his own. He meets a variety of people on his journey and writes about their connection to the land around the South Downs.
He also traces the journey of his grandfathers first wife who lived in South London but died at Beachy Head. The chapters or essays are short, engaging and quite poetic in style. The author sometimes makes clear his initial cynicism of disbelief in some of the things he encounters, but he never descends into nastiness. I think the author wants to believe, rather than dismiss what he is being told.
You get the feeling that he is genuinely curious and interested in the conversations he has along his journey. All of the encounters that he writes about are ultimately treated with great respect and courtesy.
He also traces the journey of his grandfathers first wife who lived in South London but died at Beachy Head. The chapters or essays are short, engaging and quite poetic in style. The author sometimes makes clear his initial cynicism of disbelief in some of the things he encounters, but he never descends into nastiness. I think the author wants to believe, rather than dismiss what he is being told.
You get the feeling that he is genuinely curious and interested in the conversations he has along his journey. All of the encounters that he writes about are ultimately treated with great respect and courtesy.
August 14, 2018
The Old Weird Albion starts with the sentence, "Once there was a woman who stood at the edge of a cliff."
With this heavy duty beginning, Justin Hopper begins the tale of his grandfather's first wife, to whom "something had happened"at the edge of England at Beachy Head, a notorious south of England rendezvous with death.
Hopper draws from the incident's meager details and keeps returning to these ideas of predecessors and place as he pieces together a family history and a meditation on belief in a very reassuring and human manner.
"I tucked Beachy Head into the back of my mind, but it crept out at night, the woman on the edge appearing to me in period costume. But it was the wrong period. When I imagined her it was as the headmistress of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the wrong time, wrong nation, wrong age. But, still, she was there."
Note: I've had some great conversations with Hopper, and have taken a museum course from him, enough to know that what isn't shown or said can be the most important thing. As you read the book, you see how English reserve competes with trainspotting fascinations. For instance, I could never come to any conclusions about why Doris takes her own life. People just don't talk about these things.
But things —clues, maybe —keep turning up. As Hopper explains, there may be a reason.
"In Philip K. Dick's short story 'Paycheck,' a man wakes up to discover he's traded all his wealth for an envelope of banal objects: a bus token, a used ticket stub a broken casino chip. He soon discovers that he is in grave danger, hounded and threatened at every turn, and at the crucial moment of every peril, and his envelope contains the object he needs to escape."
The book's cast of characters includes family—forebearers and progeny —and friends, strangers, and literary and archeological characters who Hopper converses with along the psychogeographical road.
"William Burroughs famously decried urban living's 'continual stream of second attention awareness, every license plate, street sign, passing stranger is saying something to you.' I imagine that's what it's like for Mick as he strides up the Downs, a riot of language enveloping him, and so many of us passing by without noticing."
Any walk in the uncanny English countryside also collides with ley lines and crop circles:
"'You're connecting to that system' of landscape, memory and myth, said [Dr. Rob] Irving. "You're making this connection to the same views our ancestors had.' And you never would have stood there, never would have looked outwards with that perspective, until that circle appeared."
And some charming Englishness...
"We passed through the hollow-way of Mouse Lane, a road in use for at least 500 years under that name."
Some of the characters are easily pegged as eccentric. Hopper approaches all with empathy, but best connects with a character called The Scientist, who seems to synthesize Hopper's own views.
"He knows that signs, symbols, portents, can be a trick of the mind, but also a liberation..."
"'Jung defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle" — and at times of crisis, that synchronicity comes thick and fast.'"
Before he ends up at home, Hopper takes one more trip to Beachy Head, where he questions whether a young woman, perhaps not unlike his grandfather's first wife, might be considering taking her own life, and, in turn, has someone question his own motives for standing near the precipice. This is followed by a short sidebar about a ministry to keep people from committing suicide off Beachy Head's white cliffs, and yields one of my favorite lines. Amid all the prose regarding the real and unreal, I welcomed Justin's affirming statement, both humble and sublime:
"... I'm glad people are looking out for another, even if we usually get it wrong."
This is a book about love, about daytime pints in charming pubs, about good walks and magical moments. By the ending I feel like The Scientist, entangled in the seen and unseen:
"'My whole life I've been of two mindsets...interested in the weird but without being credulous."
After reading this wonderful book, I think even more so.
With this heavy duty beginning, Justin Hopper begins the tale of his grandfather's first wife, to whom "something had happened"at the edge of England at Beachy Head, a notorious south of England rendezvous with death.
Hopper draws from the incident's meager details and keeps returning to these ideas of predecessors and place as he pieces together a family history and a meditation on belief in a very reassuring and human manner.
"I tucked Beachy Head into the back of my mind, but it crept out at night, the woman on the edge appearing to me in period costume. But it was the wrong period. When I imagined her it was as the headmistress of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the wrong time, wrong nation, wrong age. But, still, she was there."
Note: I've had some great conversations with Hopper, and have taken a museum course from him, enough to know that what isn't shown or said can be the most important thing. As you read the book, you see how English reserve competes with trainspotting fascinations. For instance, I could never come to any conclusions about why Doris takes her own life. People just don't talk about these things.
But things —clues, maybe —keep turning up. As Hopper explains, there may be a reason.
"In Philip K. Dick's short story 'Paycheck,' a man wakes up to discover he's traded all his wealth for an envelope of banal objects: a bus token, a used ticket stub a broken casino chip. He soon discovers that he is in grave danger, hounded and threatened at every turn, and at the crucial moment of every peril, and his envelope contains the object he needs to escape."
The book's cast of characters includes family—forebearers and progeny —and friends, strangers, and literary and archeological characters who Hopper converses with along the psychogeographical road.
"William Burroughs famously decried urban living's 'continual stream of second attention awareness, every license plate, street sign, passing stranger is saying something to you.' I imagine that's what it's like for Mick as he strides up the Downs, a riot of language enveloping him, and so many of us passing by without noticing."
Any walk in the uncanny English countryside also collides with ley lines and crop circles:
"'You're connecting to that system' of landscape, memory and myth, said [Dr. Rob] Irving. "You're making this connection to the same views our ancestors had.' And you never would have stood there, never would have looked outwards with that perspective, until that circle appeared."
And some charming Englishness...
"We passed through the hollow-way of Mouse Lane, a road in use for at least 500 years under that name."
Some of the characters are easily pegged as eccentric. Hopper approaches all with empathy, but best connects with a character called The Scientist, who seems to synthesize Hopper's own views.
"He knows that signs, symbols, portents, can be a trick of the mind, but also a liberation..."
"'Jung defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle" — and at times of crisis, that synchronicity comes thick and fast.'"
Before he ends up at home, Hopper takes one more trip to Beachy Head, where he questions whether a young woman, perhaps not unlike his grandfather's first wife, might be considering taking her own life, and, in turn, has someone question his own motives for standing near the precipice. This is followed by a short sidebar about a ministry to keep people from committing suicide off Beachy Head's white cliffs, and yields one of my favorite lines. Amid all the prose regarding the real and unreal, I welcomed Justin's affirming statement, both humble and sublime:
"... I'm glad people are looking out for another, even if we usually get it wrong."
This is a book about love, about daytime pints in charming pubs, about good walks and magical moments. By the ending I feel like The Scientist, entangled in the seen and unseen:
"'My whole life I've been of two mindsets...interested in the weird but without being credulous."
After reading this wonderful book, I think even more so.
September 28, 2018
Everyone enjoys a bit of psychogeography, right? Especially when it's on your own doorstep.
I was instantly attracted to The Old Weird Albion when I saw it in my local library and, after reading a few sections, took it out. I'm glad I did, it's a charming and highly readable exploration of an area I know and love.
American writer Justin Hopper recounts his journeys along the South Downs, from Winchester to Beachy Head, and his family connections to the area, most especially a grandmother who had thrown herself off Beachy Head in July 1932.
It’s a mixed bag of stories and myths. Most are very engaging and inspiring. It's well worth a read if you have any interest in, or affinity with, the South Downs.
4/5
I was instantly attracted to The Old Weird Albion when I saw it in my local library and, after reading a few sections, took it out. I'm glad I did, it's a charming and highly readable exploration of an area I know and love.
American writer Justin Hopper recounts his journeys along the South Downs, from Winchester to Beachy Head, and his family connections to the area, most especially a grandmother who had thrown herself off Beachy Head in July 1932.
It’s a mixed bag of stories and myths. Most are very engaging and inspiring. It's well worth a read if you have any interest in, or affinity with, the South Downs.
4/5
October 19, 2024
This is a beautiful hymn of praise to the South Downs Way, which stretches along the South Coast of England from Winchester in the West to Eastbourne in the East. It is part journal, part family memoir, part spiritual search. The author, an American with family links to the South of England, visits key spots along the Way in no particular order, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of old friends, New Age Pagans or local historians. Whilst reminiscing about much-loved deceased family members - and in particular one family member, his grandfather's first wife Doris whom he never met - he also recounts many of the myths and numinous encounters with which the Way is liberally strewn. He follows ley lines, climbs beacons, circles standing stones, communes with Yew Trees, meditates in Churches, explores a lost village, sees ghosts and revisits childhood haunts. Hopper's particular blend of 'hopeful scepticism' as a wannabe believer in the numinous ensures that one doesn't have to be a fully-fledged Pagan, mystic or medium to enjoy and appreciate this wonderful book.
November 28, 2019
Having lived almost the first 40 years of my life in that area I feel that this book really captures the timeless other-worldliness of the South Downs. I think this book could have really benefited from some photos or illustrations but Google was my friend.
October 3, 2019
I book plucked at random, turns out to be an intriguing journey of myth, magic and re-traced family footsteps along the South Downs. Combines history and people in a love of landscape and healing.
Learnt lots of new facts that sent me looking up references both historic and poetic.
A magical landscape journey that makes you want to set of there now.
Learnt lots of new facts that sent me looking up references both historic and poetic.
A magical landscape journey that makes you want to set of there now.
March 25, 2023
Spellbinding. A work of great truth and beauty, at turns haunting, funny, elegiac and wise. If there is a better evocation of this corner of the south and the landscape of the Downs then I'm yet to read it.
October 16, 2020
Initially attracted to this as it's about the South Downs, the hills that I have got to know much better during the pandemic, I was pleased to find late in the book a connection to the place I was brought up. This reflected the synchronicity touched upon in the text.
Part family history, part travelogue, part exploration of mythical England, Hopper brings the (mostly) Sussex landscape alive. His observations of those he meets on his travels are perceptive and warm.
It might be too whimsical for some but I enjoyed this exploration of the author's relationship with his family, nature and the experience of walking.
Part family history, part travelogue, part exploration of mythical England, Hopper brings the (mostly) Sussex landscape alive. His observations of those he meets on his travels are perceptive and warm.
It might be too whimsical for some but I enjoyed this exploration of the author's relationship with his family, nature and the experience of walking.
July 11, 2022
WOwow!
Finished this within a couple of days, couldn't wait to pick it up again and finish it whenever I had some free time.
Was not expecting it to be so emotionally raw (suicide and 'the woman at the edge/ledge' is a thread running through the book). Loved the peppering of references to other artists, writers and works, including new names I can't wait to learn about, alongside familiar favourites and hidden gems that the author does a great job of honouring.
Great touches of history and culture, and loved the way that the author humanised all the characters major and minor - the ancient artist scratching pictures into the inside of a cliff, the archaeologist that discovers them centuries later and changes every reference in his notes from 'he' to 'she' once he finds out the skeleton he discovered is female.
Fantastic exploration of myth and memory, nature and humanity and the way all of these things intersect.
A magical atmosphere permeates the book, was in a consistent state of semi-goosebumps reading.
Some quotes I liked:
"There are places in the landscape that exude what might be called the 'everywhen'; they are haunted places"
"You road I travel and look around! I believe you are not all that is here! I believe that something unseen is also here."
"A nice place to wait out a wide variety of apocalypses"
"Mine is the world that puts up signs; Mick's is the world that ignores them"
"Our sacred demon of ungovernableness... be secret, child be strange: dark, true, impure and dissonant"
"The Devil was always itching to destroy Sussex for any number of reasons"
"If it was joy from the dreamtime, rather than the 'real', is that any less valid?"
"I hope that the evening she went over the edge was like the evening on which I visited" followed by the description of the beautiful scene the author had experienced
"The visible world isn't even the half of it"
"There is something older, something weirder. It lingers."
Finished this within a couple of days, couldn't wait to pick it up again and finish it whenever I had some free time.
Was not expecting it to be so emotionally raw (suicide and 'the woman at the edge/ledge' is a thread running through the book). Loved the peppering of references to other artists, writers and works, including new names I can't wait to learn about, alongside familiar favourites and hidden gems that the author does a great job of honouring.
Great touches of history and culture, and loved the way that the author humanised all the characters major and minor - the ancient artist scratching pictures into the inside of a cliff, the archaeologist that discovers them centuries later and changes every reference in his notes from 'he' to 'she' once he finds out the skeleton he discovered is female.
Fantastic exploration of myth and memory, nature and humanity and the way all of these things intersect.
A magical atmosphere permeates the book, was in a consistent state of semi-goosebumps reading.
Some quotes I liked:
"There are places in the landscape that exude what might be called the 'everywhen'; they are haunted places"
"You road I travel and look around! I believe you are not all that is here! I believe that something unseen is also here."
"A nice place to wait out a wide variety of apocalypses"
"Mine is the world that puts up signs; Mick's is the world that ignores them"
"Our sacred demon of ungovernableness... be secret, child be strange: dark, true, impure and dissonant"
"The Devil was always itching to destroy Sussex for any number of reasons"
"If it was joy from the dreamtime, rather than the 'real', is that any less valid?"
"I hope that the evening she went over the edge was like the evening on which I visited" followed by the description of the beautiful scene the author had experienced
"The visible world isn't even the half of it"
"There is something older, something weirder. It lingers."
April 8, 2022
This book is about people and their relationships with place and landscape.
Hopper meets many quite different people in his explorations, primarily in the downs above Brighton and around Eastbourne. Some of these have some very alternative views and lifestyles, but Hopper treats them all with respect and fairness, displaying an easy balance of open-mindedness and scepticism.
He revisits some 'ghosts' from his own ancestry, and finds comfort in the places they share as he tries to understand a tragic event of the past. He also introduces his own son to the places that mean so much to him.
The thing I took from this book, perhaps because it echoes my own beliefs, is that we all have a personal relationship with the land, one that connects us to specific places, to nature, the past, and to the ever-flowing stream of life. For some, like me, that takes the form of simply being there observing and reflecting, feeling (excuse the pun) grounded. For others there is a more spiritual aspect bound up with ritual and behaviour that is a way of life. It's good that The Old Weird Albion has room for us all.
Hopper meets many quite different people in his explorations, primarily in the downs above Brighton and around Eastbourne. Some of these have some very alternative views and lifestyles, but Hopper treats them all with respect and fairness, displaying an easy balance of open-mindedness and scepticism.
He revisits some 'ghosts' from his own ancestry, and finds comfort in the places they share as he tries to understand a tragic event of the past. He also introduces his own son to the places that mean so much to him.
The thing I took from this book, perhaps because it echoes my own beliefs, is that we all have a personal relationship with the land, one that connects us to specific places, to nature, the past, and to the ever-flowing stream of life. For some, like me, that takes the form of simply being there observing and reflecting, feeling (excuse the pun) grounded. For others there is a more spiritual aspect bound up with ritual and behaviour that is a way of life. It's good that The Old Weird Albion has room for us all.
August 5, 2021
A journey into the ancient and eerie landscapes of the South Downs of Hampshire and Sussex, a part of the country I’ve never visited and about which I know little. Justin Hopper, although brought up in the US, has a strong ancestral connection with the region and his explorations are haunted by echoes of past lives and a mysterious family tragedy that may or may not have happened here. Moving between town and country, secular and sacred landscapes, and meeting some fascinating figures along the way, The Old Weird Albion is a vivid evocation of a place and the impressions made on it by millennia of human life, work and belief.
April 3, 2018
Excellent book about one mans journey across Albion as he searches for meaning and truth in his life. Justin meets a few different people along the way who show him their own version of spirituality set among the stunning scenery of the south downs. With further interviews with the people he meets justin is able to develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the differing encounters and shows how they have affected him in his search. An easy writing style that is very much like having a conversation.
March 16, 2021
A personal journey over the spine of the South Downs in search of myth and memories. Drawn together as a collection of interconnected tales all centered on the hope of connecting to a long lost relation.
From the discovery of neolithic carvings in a chalk mine to secretive illicit rock climbing, the topics and characters plucked from the Downlands are both surreal and genuine.
I grew up on these downs and really enjoyed this book. It's both charming and fascinating and will send you down many rabbit holes of your own as you discover more about these rolling green hills..
From the discovery of neolithic carvings in a chalk mine to secretive illicit rock climbing, the topics and characters plucked from the Downlands are both surreal and genuine.
I grew up on these downs and really enjoyed this book. It's both charming and fascinating and will send you down many rabbit holes of your own as you discover more about these rolling green hills..
March 29, 2024
The Old Weird Albion is beautifully written, tapping into the spirit of the old roads and the old ways, dancing with both ancestral memories and anything else the land itself has to offer up, as Justin Hopper traces steps across the South Downs between Hampshire and Sussex. Beachy Head plays a central part in the book, but it was often a simple glimpse astride the Downs which put me in touch with a memory or a person of my own like my Grandad, and brought a tear to my eye. A much wider canvas to this book than I had expected.
June 27, 2020
This is the last book I gave my father and the first that I read after his death. It couldn't have been more fitting. Hopper's ramble through the downs, their heritage, their characters and their spirituality is seamlessly intertwined with his own family history. Engrossing, evocative and just the right, light touch of weird.
June 30, 2022
A perfect delight. Hopper takes a poetic, personal, agnostic approach to the mysteries of the downs. It's a world view that chimes strongly with my own and the whole book is a joy to read. He's an American in the UK. I'm a Brit in Arizona. An odd but beneficial side effect of this book was instead of making me homesick, it reignited my curiosity for where I live.
May 5, 2023
A haunting and poetic exploration of a man's family history in connection with the changing landscape of the south downs.
Part travel book, part folk horror Hopper makes us ask questions about our own relationship to the land, our past and the old "Gods" that inhabit them, even if they are only our own shared memories and traumas.
Part travel book, part folk horror Hopper makes us ask questions about our own relationship to the land, our past and the old "Gods" that inhabit them, even if they are only our own shared memories and traumas.
October 20, 2024
Having picked up this book at an open studio event a year or so ago I had no pre-conceptions or expectations. I'm glad to say it pulled me in from the start. I enjoyed the sense of place, the interactions with various characters and Justin's personal connections to the landscape he was exploring both literally and in a literary sense.
July 8, 2020
Very nice writing around things known and unknown in the Sussex South. A personal story of ghosts and landscapes and a degree of wish fulfilment as the author finds his own haunts of memory on concealed paths.
August 4, 2021
This is an account of the author’s connection with the South Downs. He travels around, exploring the unfamiliar, the weird and the well known and linking it to his own history (his grandfather’s first wife tried to commit suicide at Beachy Head). Engaging and atmospheric. Would recommend.
November 28, 2019
Pleasant guided walks on the Sussex Downs discovering local history and meeting the occasional friendly ghost.
September 3, 2020
Very nice book
Lovely book about one man’s life and his relationship with the land around him. A short easy read and worth your time.
Lovely book about one man’s life and his relationship with the land around him. A short easy read and worth your time.
August 17, 2023
A family story with a rich core of the British eerieness. Reminded of Rings of Saturn.
August 7, 2024
review to follow...
December 10, 2025
I haven’t been back to my home, England, in decades, and until then, books like these - quiet, beautiful, haunting - will (almost) do.
September 7, 2022
The viewer sees a painting that appears to be composed of watercolour and charcoal, of a winding road or track, possibly even a river, leading towards a line of downland hills, the whole created entirely in black and shades of grey, with the title and author scrawled into the picture in brilliant white, as though it were a prehistoric figure etched into the Downs themselves.
And that’s just the cover.
This is a book quite unlike any I have read before, in that it is a book about the south of England, especially the South Downs of Sussex, but it is far more than geography and the associated disciplines such as geology and biology, rural history and architecture, and folklore. Psycho-geography was not a term I had come across before, but there is an aptness to it that becomes apparent as you read.
The book opens at Beachy Head, a beautiful piece of Sussex with a dark reputation for suicide, as a woman throws herself off the edge. Quickly, we learn that this woman was the first wife of the grandfather of the author, Justin Hopper. And we learn that this book is in part a chronicle of his efforts to discover this person and learn something of her life and, consequently, her motives for such an act.
In so doing, he needs to revisit parts of his earlier time in Sussex and examine his own relationship to the area as well as the relationship of other players, not just his grandfather and other members of their family.
He has a gift for sifting and selecting the weird in these relationships, not just at sites that might be naturally expected to encourage the weird, such as Chanctonbury Ring, high on the Downs above Steyning or in old ruined buildings, but also in humdrum blocks of flats in modern developments. He references modern phenomena like crop circles and throughout there is the presence of ‘magic’, in the sense of a natural force. Many of the people he meets are an eccentric mix of the weird, too, although I choose this description carefully, largely in the old, original meaning of the word of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’.
A strength of this book is its intensity, and I feel impelled to look at the pictures it references and read the books it quotes. So much so that upon finishing the book, I spent some time tracking down an old copy of one of those books, which I am now reading, and which holds my interest in just the way Justin implied it would.
On a personal level, this book came just at the right time for me, in that I am reacquainting myself with the geography and history, and the plants and animals, of the South of England, where I grew up and which formed my love of the natural world, and the book has encouraged me to look at this in a new way.
Most certainly a five star book for me.
And that’s just the cover.
This is a book quite unlike any I have read before, in that it is a book about the south of England, especially the South Downs of Sussex, but it is far more than geography and the associated disciplines such as geology and biology, rural history and architecture, and folklore. Psycho-geography was not a term I had come across before, but there is an aptness to it that becomes apparent as you read.
The book opens at Beachy Head, a beautiful piece of Sussex with a dark reputation for suicide, as a woman throws herself off the edge. Quickly, we learn that this woman was the first wife of the grandfather of the author, Justin Hopper. And we learn that this book is in part a chronicle of his efforts to discover this person and learn something of her life and, consequently, her motives for such an act.
In so doing, he needs to revisit parts of his earlier time in Sussex and examine his own relationship to the area as well as the relationship of other players, not just his grandfather and other members of their family.
He has a gift for sifting and selecting the weird in these relationships, not just at sites that might be naturally expected to encourage the weird, such as Chanctonbury Ring, high on the Downs above Steyning or in old ruined buildings, but also in humdrum blocks of flats in modern developments. He references modern phenomena like crop circles and throughout there is the presence of ‘magic’, in the sense of a natural force. Many of the people he meets are an eccentric mix of the weird, too, although I choose this description carefully, largely in the old, original meaning of the word of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’.
A strength of this book is its intensity, and I feel impelled to look at the pictures it references and read the books it quotes. So much so that upon finishing the book, I spent some time tracking down an old copy of one of those books, which I am now reading, and which holds my interest in just the way Justin implied it would.
On a personal level, this book came just at the right time for me, in that I am reacquainting myself with the geography and history, and the plants and animals, of the South of England, where I grew up and which formed my love of the natural world, and the book has encouraged me to look at this in a new way.
Most certainly a five star book for me.
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