Ten Words For A Northern Landscape: Episode 3: Witchcraft

Somewhere high up in the North Pennines, between everywhere and nowhere at all, is Weardale, a remote northern dale. It’s a place of old lead mines, deep worked out limestone quarries, and hill farming; the home of day-dreamers, explorers, incomers, artists, philosophers, sky-watchers, story tellers and travellers.

Over a series of ten exclusive interviews with writers and poets Caroline goes in search of what it means to live in England’s last wilderness.

In episode three, Caroline looks at the thin divide between religion, folklore and witchcraft, as well as the ‘othering’ of outsiders and incomers, with local resident John Gall and horror writer Andrew Michael Hurley. Andrew Michael Hurley’s Costa Award-winning novel The Loney – set in an another rural northern landscape – wavers in an unsettling place between the supernatural and the merely strange.

Narrated and recorded by Caroline Beck
Produced by Jay Sykes

Ten Words for a Northern Landscape is commissioned Northern Heartlands and produced as part of Durham Book Festival, a Durham County Council event. The recording was made possible by funding and support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. Look out for Ten Words for a Northern Landscape on the New Writing North podcast and Durham Book Festival website.

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