The Wishing-Tree of Isle Maree

Ceri Houlbrook, ‘The Wishing-Tree of Isle Maree’ in Ceri Houlbrook, Natalie Armitage, eds., The Materiality of Magic: An artifactual investigation into ritual practices and popular belief (Oxford: Oxbow, 2015) ISBN 978-1785700101.In April 2012, a ‘wishing-tree’ was created by a local artist on the shores of Loch Maree, Scotland; visitors to the tree were encouraged to attach ‘offerings’ of rags, ribbons, and wooden baubles. In isolation, this appears to be a contemporary community art project. However, this construction boasts far more heritage than its recent creation would suggest, for it was intended as a reproduction of the nearby wishing-tree of Isle Maree, which has been the focus of folkloric customs since the 1700s. This chapter explores the numerous recontextualisations this custom has undergone since the 18th century, from the original tree’s various incarnations – as a rag-tree, pin-tree, and coin-tree – to its modern-day manifestation on the loch’s shore. A consideration of the custom’s shifting materiality will demonstrate the versatile nature of ritual, illustrating the importance of viewing popular belief as an unfolding storyboard rather than as a fixed and isolated snapshot.Peer reviewe

From Popular Culture to Popular Custom, and Back Again : A love-lock's tale

Walk over a major bridge in a Western city and chances are you will come across at least one or two love-locks. These are padlocks inscribed with names or initials and attached to a public structure, typically by a couple in declaration of romantic commitment, who then proceed to throw the key into the river below. Some assemblages of these love tokens are modest; others number the thousands. This has become a truly global phenomenon, with over 400 love-lock assemblages catalogued across 62 countries in all continents bar Antarctica: popular custom in the true sense of the term. Although this custom was practised prior to the 21st century, with evidence of it in Serbia and Hungary in the 1900s,i it did not gain widespread popularity until the mid-2000s — sparked, this paper contends, by an Italian teenage romance novel. This paper explores the transition from popular culture, defined here as mass-produced cultural products — including but not limited to television, film, literature and music — accessible to and consumed by the majority of a given society, to popular (or folk) custom. It also explores the reverse. As the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture.Peer reviewe

Ritual, Recycling, and Recontextualisation: Putting the concealed shoe in context

The concealed shoe is, possibly by design, shrouded in mystery. All that is known for certain on this subject is that a large number of shoes, usually old and damaged, were concealed in various, unconventional locations within buildings throughout England, and that this practice was particularly popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other than these few facts, all other information on the subject is speculation. With no contemporaneous written sources on the practice of concealing shoes, this article will utilize the archaeological evidence in order to ascertain the motivations behind the act of concealment. An analysis of two case studies of concealed shoe caches from North Yorkshire, with a particular focus on their locations and conditions, will hopefully prove invaluable in the investigation into this unusual practice, together with an examination of the relevant folk beliefs and superstitions of the period. It will also be questioned where the concealed shoe stands in relation to our everyday classificatory systems. As a marginal, mutable object, the concealed shoe boasts a highly complex biography, calling into question the pertinence of such categories as valuable/rubbish, and particular attention will be given to the shoes’ numerous recontextualizations, from practical footwear, to apotropaic device, to archaeological artefact; transitions which I have dubbed ‘ritual recycling’.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Revealing the Ritually Concealed: Custodians, Conservators, and the Concealed Shoe

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Material Religion, on 19 April 2018, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2018.1443892. Under embargo until 19 October 2019.Concealed shoes are footwear purposely concealed within domestic buildings. The motivations behind their concealments are unknown to us, but the prominent theory suggests that shoes were employed as apotropaic (evil-averting) devices. The metonymical connection between shoe and wearer is believed to imbue the shoe with the necessary protective power, and one theory suggests that, to possess this power, shoes must bear the unambiguous imprint of their past wearers, hence why the vast majority of them are old, well-worn or damaged. From the point of discovery (often during restructuring work), the concealed shoe’s biography can follow a variety of courses. Some debate, for example, surrounds their removal. Some finders believe it to be “bad luck” to remove concealed shoes and therefore wish to keep them in situ. Others are donated to museums, where still more debate surrounds their treatment: should they be restored by textile conservationists or left in their original state, their damaged conditions being considered central to the interpretation of the custom? This paper aims to trace the complex biographies of several examples of concealed shoes following discovery, considering how they have been variously perceived and treated by their finders and custodians.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Suburban Boggart: Folklore of an inner-city park

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Ceri Houlbrook, 'The Suburban Boggart: Folklore of an inner-city park', Gramarye: The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Vol. 11, May 2017, published by the University of Chichester. © 2017 The Author.Non peer reviewe

The Other Shoe: Fragmentation in the Post-medieval home

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Ceri Houlbrook, 'The Other Shoe: Fragmentation in the Post-Medieval Home', Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 27 (2): 261-274, first published online December 2016. The Version of Record is available online at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774316000548. COPYRIGHT: © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2016.Deposits are not always recovered whole; many are found broken and damaged. The obvious explanation is that such objects were accidentally broken; however, some have been interpreted as having been deliberately damaged by their depositors, a practice termed ‘fragmentation’. Objects are broken into parts and deposited incomplete, often in ways that make their missing parts starkly evident. Thus many fragmented deposits denote synecdoche. It is the position of this paper that the absent (part) is just as integral to an understanding of the whole as the present (part) is, and this notion is explored by focusing on the post-medieval concealed shoe: an item of footwear that was fragmented by being deposited within the fabric of a building without its counterpart, for reasons unbeknownst to us. Drawing on a sample of 100 examples, this paper questions why such shoes were deposited as singles (the present parts), what became of the ‘other shoe’ (the absent part), and how such consideration aids our understanding of this enigmatic custom.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Mutability of Meaning: Contextualising the Cumbrian coin-tree

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Folklore on 4 April 2014, available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.2013.837316.This paper examines the mutability of the ‘meaning’ of folklore, as articulated by Lauri Honko. It aims to illustrate the amorphous and ambiguous nature of customs and traditions by considering the multiple ‘meanings’ ascribed to a contemporary British folkloric custom: the Cumbrian coin-tree.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Saints, Poets, and Rubber Ducks: Crafting the Sacred at St Nectan’s Glen

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Folklore on November 11, 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0015587X.2016.1197593 The Accepted Manuscript is subject to an embargo period of 18 months. Embargo end date: 11 May 2018This paper focuses on St Nectan’s Glen, Cornwall, where layers of ritual deposition imply a long history of spiritual significance – an implication that is debunked by a diachronic examination of the site, which reveals a relatively recent, and conscious, crafting of the sacred.Peer reviewe

‘The Stone Axe from Way Back’: A Mutable Magical Object in Folklore and Fiction

Objects of ‘magic’ and folklore do not always begin their lives as such. Often, they are natural objects or mundane artefacts, crafted for utilitarian purposes, which become objects of magic through processes of re-utilization and redefinition. This is a process poignantly explored by fantasy writer Alan Garner in many of his works, but captured most overtly in his 1973 novel Red Shift. This article offers a commentary on this novel, exploring how Garner uses fiction and folklore to illustrate the mutability and multiple authorship of the magical object.Peer reviewe