Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth and Forebears of the Layers Beneath the Land: Ether Signposts #51/52a

I’ve been reading Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth novel, which Powel and Pressburger’s 1950 film was based on.

The book was originally published in 1917 and is described on its back cover as being:

“A fine story of the Welsh Borderland, of a beautiful girl, a veritable child of Nature, who is loved by one man but seduced by another.”

It seems to be a forebear of more contemporary explorations of the land as being a place which is layered with stories, history, echoes and undercurrents, of a spectral or hauntological landscape – the patterns beneath the plough, the pylons and amongst the edgelands.

Or to quote Simon Reynolds when discussing the A Year In The Country released album The Restless Field:

“…places that are spectrally imprinted with past conflicts and struggles.”

Although it is possibly more a consideration in part of religious concerns, for myself the section below in particular seemed to highlight a sense of the undercurrents of the land and quite frankly stopped me in my tracks: