BATHSHEBA LOCKWOOD BROOK attends the premier of artist Ben Edge’s latest film, Avebury.
The church of All Hallows-on-the-Wall was packed, although the assembled congregation didn’t look exactly as you might expect from the local Anglican parishioners. A fair few attendees seemed dressed more for a festival than a sermon; Wild Mountain Thyme floated out over the sound system, and in the painting hanging from the projection screen, a grinning devil peered out from behind a standing stone. This, along with Storm Darragh howling up a ruckus, all felt very—well, something.
The setting of the church, the artist Ben Edge agrees when I speak to him a few days later, “worked really well with the raging storm outside”. It’s all part of the “enhanced experience” he likes to curate for his events; a sense that something’s at work beyond what meets the eye. We had come for the premiere screening of Edge’s new film Avebury, a documentary portrait of the community of pagans who live and practice within the Neolithic henge: three concentric stone circles covering over eight square miles and enclosing the village of Avebury itself. The documentary takes the form of a series of vox-pop interviews, mostly shot against the backdrop of the stones: a misty, ambiguous landscape, dominated by watercolour splashes of muddy grey and green.
“There’s a lot of energy going on”, says Gordon Rimes, the conveniently loquacious pagan priest who shares the central role with the stones themselves. “If you’ve got any spiritual feeling, you’ll feel it here.” Church, says Rimes, didn’t do it for him—but still, “something was there”. This ineffable something keeps re-surfacing throughout Edge’s film: a sacred space since the ice age, Avebury is a point on which meaning seems to snag.
Edge stumbled across his characters by chance, having developed a fascination with the site through the work of the 18th century antiquarian, William Stukeley. His introduction came in the form of Dennis, a Wiccan priest he struck up a conversation with over a pint in Avebury’s Red Lion pub–the only pub, Edge notes, which sits within the ring of a stone circle. Dennis “generously opened up a whole universe” for Edge, introducing him to Rimes, and other key figures on the local pagan scene. From there, gaining access was surprisingly straightforward; once he had a foot in the door, it swung wide open.
As it turned out, Antoinette, the landlady of the B&B where Edge was staying, was also part of the pagan community. Initially reticent, she felt comfortable opening up to Edge after Rimes put in a good word, and was eventually interviewed for the documentary. “Everything just happened”, says Edge, “nothing was planned”.
Edge seems to attract this sort of coincidence. “It’s serendipitous in some way”, he says, “but at the same time, you find yourself in the right place at the right time. It’s remarkable how the minute you open up to things, things seem to come”. It’s a common thread throughout the film: those who arrive in Avebury often speak of the sense that they were drawn there. It’s a place where the plants in your garden grow ten feet tall, the sun rises late, and sets early. Rimes’ first taste of magic came, like everything else in Avebury, by happy accident, and in rather more mundane circumstances, beneath a full moon in a park in Rotherhithe. Although their spirituality is sincere and heartfelt, the pagans maintain a healthy sense of humour about themselves: Rimes admits, conspiratorially, that he’ll sometimes leave out a bowl of crisps as a ritual offering.
Perhaps what’s strangest here is how normal everybody seems. There’s some grumbling from Rimes about Halloween (“popularised by American Christians”) that reminds me, almost word-for-word, of my dad; I’m pretty sure he used the exact same line to fob me off when I wanted to go trick-or-treating as a kid. This is an immediately recognisable type of guy; Rimes fusses over his homemade elderflower wine, while Henk the Archdruid strolls out to conduct a ritual in jeans and a Berghaus jacket. It’s all very familiar; it’s all very British.
Edge’s respect for his characters is unmistakable; the camera refrains from any hint of mockery. His own openness to the community’s beliefs, says Edge, allowed him access: “They could tell I was there for the right reasons”. Edge was permitted to observe and film their rituals, and Avebury is at its strongest in these moments, when we’re granted a glimpse into the practice itself. May Day is celebrated with a game of kiss-chase among the stones. A handful of younger guys in their twenties really throw themselves into it, whooping and racing across the fields, while the older crowd follows at a more stately pace. A young couple tumbles onto the wet grass. For all this, the whole thing is relatively tame, and when the pursuers finally catch up, affairs are limited to a peck on the cheek. Rimes offers a prayer, closing with an exhortation to “go forth and multiply”—this is greeted with a lot of cackling, from both the celebrants and the audience.
The biblical reference may be tongue-in-cheek, but there’s some overlap here, embodied by the Reverend Maria Shepherdson, the vicar of Avebury, who is interviewed in the film. Shepherdson is a passionate advocate for her pagan neighbours, and paints an enthusiastic, albeit somewhat rose-tinted, picture of Avebury as a vibrant inter-faith community. The church, it seems, hasn’t always been so welcoming. In several instances throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, villagers demolished and buried the stones—depending on which version of the story you believe, to preserve them from the church’s reforming zeal, or for fear of their presumed satanic influence. There’s some reticence from Rimes and Dennis regarding their own history with the church—under the previous vicar, relations were somewhat strained. But that’s all in the past. Dennis holds up the church’s guest book as evidence; the camera lingers on a crudely drawn biro sketch of a vagina, captioned “THE DIVINE YONI OF THE UNIVERSE”. When the reverend saw it, she cried laughing.
The film closes on this note—not within the circle, but beneath the far younger stones of St James’ Church. Rimes and Shepherdson stand together at the altar, two custodians of local faith, singing an old folk song.
The screening ends, and Rimes takes to the stage for the Q&A alongside Edge and the writer John Higgs. We get a glimpse of Rimes as showman when he points out, to general amusement, an error in Edge’s painting The Risen Son at Avebury: the sun is rising in the wrong direction. “This”, he says, shaking a finger at Edge, “would have disastrous consequences”. Someone asks something technical about soil composition, which Rimes doesn’t have an answer for, although he has his theories. He sketches out an elaborate hypothesis involving generating electricity from the chalk soil beneath Silbury Hill—this, however, “is not necessarily the opinion of the National Trust or English Heritage”.
The film doesn’t always achieve clarity, nor is it meant to. Edge provides his footage without comment, and is a barely discernible presence in the documentary, as a gently enquiring voice, or caught in reflection in a car wing-mirror. “What is magic?” asks Edge. Ultimately, Rimes echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s old adage: magic is science that we don’t yet understand. But, he adds, “it’s all in the head”: if you believe in it, sooner or later, it’ll materialise.
In this respect, Rimes and his coreligionists have a lot in common with the TikTok girlies and their penchant for manifesting. Possibly a certain shared sensibility is responsible for the increased interest in folk culture amongst young people, with fresh faces noticeable at festivals, and groups like Goblin Band and Folk of the Round Table gaining popularity with the 20-30 age bracket. Edge dislikes the term folk revival. “It makes it sound like a passing phase. It’s much more important than that. It’s plugged into some really big issues—climate change, national identity crisis, urbanisation, disconnect from the natural world”.
Is there something politically hopeful, I wonder, on a larger scale? Absolutely. When Edge was a teenager, he says, “the idea of Britain felt quite grotesque, we all rejected it”. He was more interested in American folk culture, with its dreamer-poets and mountain singers. “But now there’s something about reframing your own culture; people are waking up to this idea that they have a lot more in common than they realise”. Folk culture, says Edge, emerges as a riposte to the oppression of the working people across the centuries. His own generation maintained a “fuck-it” attitude towards Britain; now, there’s a sense of custodianship: people are trying to look after the land, “without having an ideal forced upon you that isn’t relevant”. He sees the endurance of these traditions as a radical act: “it’s through the power of the people that these things survive; it goes against the idea that we’re not in control of our own lives”. Whether or not you’re a believer, the portrait of an alternative Britain painted by Edge and his optimistic pagans is undeniably compelling. If you don’t like it, Edge suggests, better go out and create your own.
Featured image: Ben Edge, The Risen Son at Avebury (2024). Image source: benedge.co.uk.
