Ceremonial County Tapes Vol.XXIV – Cumbria | Wiltshire is a special release in Folklore Tape’s Ceremonial Counties series, in more ways than one. Firstly, it features my home county, the land of chalk and bustards. Secondly, it’s the final tape in the series. Fittingly, both sides feature members of Folklore Tapes mainman David Chatton Barker’s immediate family. Barker teams up with his son Rowan, an electric guitarist, to form a new collaborative entity called Monkshood. They provide the Wiltshire side. But first it’s the turn of Mary Stark, David’s wife. She tackles Cumbria with a track called The Priory, which features field recordings of her mum’s house and Conishead Priory near Ulverston, now a Buddhist retreat. Her dad contributes recordings of Tibetan Buddhist mantras, which in a decontextualised setting sound eerie and unsettling, but also oddly calming. As a child, Stark lived in a converted stable in the priory’s grounds for five years, before moving to a house about a mile away, where her mother still lives. This familial closeness shows through in the intimacy of these field recordings: we get a glimpse of a child’s-eye view of the countryside and all of the magic and mystery that entails. There are loving details throughout the piece, but it’s best listened to holistically: what really makes it effective is the way the human aspects interact with notions of the divine, and with the landscape, its history and its wildlife. It is an exercise in care, a paean to home in its most spiritual sense.
And so to Wiltshire, and to the end of the series. Here, Rowan plays guitar, and David supplies the percussion. The pair explore the site of the West Kennett Long Barrow, a five-and-a-half-thousand-year-old tomb near Avebury. The piece was recorded inside the barrow itself, in a single improvised take, as visitors came and went. Rowan is influenced by heavy metal, which is evident in his searching, ringing electric guitar lines, which provide a gorgeously abstracted, often discordant portrait of this most mysterious of sites. The percussion thuds ominously. There is the occasional metallic clang. The atmosphere, brilliantly conveyed, is harsh and ancient and perfectly evocative of the barrow’s cave-like interior, but the sound is thrillingly contemporary. Hats off to the pair of them: given Rowan’s evident gift for timing and pacing – the sign of a good improviser – you wouldn’t think he was still only eight years old.
Rowan is part of a fertile future of experimental music, so what better way to bring us to the end of a series that has uncovered some of England’s most ancient landscapes? It’s a kind of full circle moment, a realisation that landscape, music and ritual are forever knotted together in a single dance, full of repetitions and variations. In the words of the Incredible String Band, be glad for the song has no ending. This ambitious and stunningly executed project might have run its course, but its resonances can be felt in every field and hedgerow, in every stone circle and abandoned industrial site in England.
Ceremonial County Tapes Vol.XXIV – Cumbria | Wiltshire (April 4th, 2026) Folklore Tapes
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as part of a full subscription, and they are available directly from Folklore Tapes at www.folkloretapes.co.uk, via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/, and from selected independent record shops.
Read all our reviews in this series so far.