Rosehip, nettle and moonshine bright
A local arts group’s retelling of Dorset folklore

This article first appeared in the Beaminster Team News Magazine in 2021

In 1566, John Walsh of Netherbury was examined by the Commissary of the Bishop of Exeter for actions “touching Witchcraft and Sorcerie”. Walsh tells the Commissary of his meetings with fairies upon hills, an obscure “booke of Circles” that he owned, and a familiar who would come to him as a dog, dove, or like a man in all proportion “saving that he has cloven feet”. Despite such fantastical details, Walsh argues that his main use of them was in the mundane service of helping people retrieve lost and stolen goods. Ultimately his examination gives the impression less of a figure engaged in a nefarious pact with the devil and more of a local folk healer immersed in the common culture of the land. The outcome of John Walsh’s examination is ultimately unknown, but his story nonetheless alludes to a rich folk culture that, despite witch hunts, persisted in rural England round hearths, up chimneys and in bowls of cream left overnight, until at least the 19th century. 

Cut to October 2019 and three of us at Chasing Cow – an arts group we have set up with a couple of other returning graduates – are reading about John Walsh at Bridport’s Local History Centre as we research our debut film. The idea behind the film, first dreamed up by Bryony Moores O’Sullivan, is that of a young woman in the 21st century who rediscovers and adapts a series of folk rituals tied to the West Dorset landscape and attempts to use them to win the heart of a local lad. Over the ensuing months, we scramble down ditches, up cliffs and wade into the winter waters at Eype as we patch together, scene by scene, the film that would become Brink by Brink.  

The film opens on a cold midwinter morning, with the first ritual: scattering seeds to the four corners of St Mary’s churchyard in Netherbury. We chose the Netherbury churchyard as a site that would help to evoke a sense of timelessness. The building holds history in its walls, with some parts dating from the 12th to the 15th centuries.  

In the archives, we found details of love charms performed by young women seeking a husband, as well as references to ceremonial seed scattering to urge the prosperity of crops or fertility of livestock. The links between the two go back to Neolithic mythology where, as Armstrong writes, human sexuality “was regarded as essentially the same divine force that fructified the earth”. In this opening ritual moreover, human desire is connected to the earth and takes the place of desire for a good harvest. For seeds, the main character uses hemp which we learned was often used in love divination. 

The rituals of the film are slightly bent to her will, altered to suit a particular need or fancy.  Folkloric practices take root and evolve as they are passed on through communities and generations – until the spell, as it were, is broken. In the second ritual, she places a lamb’s heart up her love interest’s chimney, aiming to put paid to his blossoming feelings for another woman. An animal heart, pierced with pins or thorns, was thought to have apotropaic properties (warding off maleficent influences) or to break a spell as it shrivels in the smoke. In many houses dating from the 19th century or earlier, an array of shrivelled bullock’s hearts, mummified cats, and other objects have since been found stuffed in chimneys or walls.  

The main character of Brink by Brink exists on the margins – an anachronism, out of step with her more secular, disenchanted times – yet in her solitary strangeness and force of will she upends the world of those she encounters. Rather than using magical powers, she appeals to the power of the natural world, tuning into our fears and desires: of a setting sun cloaking the world in darkness, of the vast sea. We wanted the rituals to fall somewhere between magical and tangible, where dark and light are at work at once. 

In the end, our film only hinted at the vast wealth of folklore that pervades West Dorset’s past, but we hope to have begun the work of bringing it out of the archive and back into the landscape. After all, folklore never really makes complete sense when it’s fixed, set down as text, and laid out for examination. It has to be acted, adapted and performed, offering us ways to help make sense of our often chaotic experience and, in doing so, keeping the spell alive.  

Brink by Brink was awarded Best Mid-Length film at Derby Film Festival 2021

Watch Brink by Brink here