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Paper short abstract

I explore how a phenomenological approach to site generates new insights into old stories, discussing the legend The Witch of Wookey Hole. I show how walks around the Mendip Hills informed subsequent works; retelling the tale through voices other than those of a patriarchal, extractive perspective.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I explain how I use experiential walking as a methodological tool. Placing my body into zones of industrial fallout, ecological crisis, and social amnesia allows me to interrogate, unpick, and eventually to retell old place stories. Wookey Hole, for example, is a large cave system situated in the Limestone Karst of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England. These caves have long been run as a commercial tourist enterprise that makes full use of a legend of the curse of a local witch of to attract visitors.

I draw from the Feminist Marxist writings of Silvia Federici and the work in the early twentieth century of archaeologist and speleologist Herbert Balch to show how legend of the witch’s ‘curse’ contains a more complex story of ecological collapse, historic lead mining, and a systemic campaign against the autonomy of women that was related the rise of capital and wage-based economy.

I show how my process of repeatedly walking Wookey and its wider locale allowed me to access ‘voices’ of the lively materials and more-than-human others of the Wookey place assemblage. I describe my attempts to retell this tale from such non-human perspectives in academic writings, a new book of folk stories, and a series of public performances.