Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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It all makes for a highly evocative and original guide to our ever-fascinating, multilayered landscape, so full of shadowy mysteries and stories.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Hardcover Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Hardcover

Harte gives us the tales of toadsmen, horse-whisperers, and porch-watchers possibly already known to the kind of person reading this review.

He also discusses the cunning men and women of England, though his suggestion that those practitioners did not understand the books they had due to illiteracy seems contentious, particularly given some recent scholarship by scholars like Owen Davies et al.

Cloven Country « enfolding.org Book Review: Cloven Country « enfolding.org

An invented use of the Devil - whether early modern or later romantic - becomes so embedded in a community that a later folklorist hears the tale, ascribes it to a canon and assumes a great past (though folklorists have got wise to this now).

Cloven Country is at its core a distillation of the hoof prints left on the English landscape over the centuries.