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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

A study will be conducted to explore avenues for restoration, future-proofing and possibly even relocation. Let’s hope this funding injection saves Willow Man from his sad and sparse state and ensures his enigmatic watch over Somerset can continue.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

But in November 2023 Somerset Council announced it is set to receive £35,000 from the National Highways’ Designated Funding programme to begin looking at a feasible way forward.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

Despite a reported £20,000 hair cut in 2006, mostly to replace material the birds had taken for their nests, the wicker giant began steadily to fall into disrepair. A 2018 appeal for funding did not meet its target and by 2021 the head and both arms had fallen off.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

Since then it has suffered both desecration and neglect. The first iteration was the victim of an arson attack in 2001 and had to be rebuilt inside a large protective moat.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

Somerset Levels. Locally it became known as both Withy Man and the Angel of the South. The wicker also provided a novel habitat for Somerset’s native bird species, becoming itself a part of the county’s ecology.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

When unveiled in 2000, Serena de la Hey’s Willow Man stood at 40ft with a 16ft arm span and was built from black maul willow withies woven over a 3-tonne steel frame. As well as marking the millennium the sculpture was intended to celebrate the role of willow in the traditional crafts of the

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 06/02/2024

The Willow Man, a once great giant bestriding a field in Somerset, glimpsed by motorists on the M5 and rail travellers between Bristol and Exeter, has in recent years fallen in stature. Could 2024 be the year he is made majestic once more?

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

So much so that many parents sign up their children to the decades-long waiting list of volunteers, so that one day they might have the opportunity to be pelted with root vegetables.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

Like most fiestas it also serves as an excuse for music and merrymaking, and the festivities spill out onto the streets for the whole day. Far from ignominy, being selected to be the Jarramplas is a great honour.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

The reenactment of that night has been played out every year for over a century.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

Local legend has it that a thief snuck in to the village one night to relieve the ranchers of their animals, but didn’t reckon on the might and ingenuity of the townsfolk, who used everything to hand - mainly turnips - to fend off the thief.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

Next day’s bruises must be about as colourful as the costume.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

This villain, played by a lucky volunteer, runs around the 1,200-strong town banging a little drum while local people throw turnips at him in an attempt to expel his general bad vibes for another year. Two tonnes of turnips if you want the specifics.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

The focus of events is the costumed ‘cattle rustler’ named el Jarrampla, who wears a cloak of multicoloured rags and is adorned with a great horned mask.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

Lighten the dry Jan blues by visiting the Jarramplas Festival, which takes place in Piornal, in the Spanish region of Extremadura every year on 19-20th January. As well as being a sight to behold it is also BYOT (bring your own turnip).

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

Such a metabolic process has never before been observed in nature. So it seems Blood Falls does indeed conceal impossible life, strange as any great scaled beast and far, far more numerous.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

Eventually they adapted to live with almost no oxygen. Instead the microbes respire sulphate with ferric ions, metabolising trace levels of organic matter trapped with them.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

Perhaps surprisingly, the Falls are rich with life, with 17 types of microbes discovered so far. These microbes have existed in the subglacial pool in a sort of time capsule, isolated from other marine microbes and evolving separately for up to 2 million years.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

In 2017 scientists finally figured out the strange phenomenon. A team or researchers led by the University of Alaska concluded that the red colouring is due to oxidised iron in hypersaline water from an ancient lake under the ice, similar to the usually dry process of rust.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

polar explorers initially put it down to some sort of unknown red algae.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

Ok fine, no. Blood Falls was discovered in an area called the Taylor Glacier in Victoria Land, East Antarctica in 1911. Though a red sputtering gouge would have been the last thing they could expect among the vista of blue-white and must have come as quite a shock,

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

An atavistic Thing of the Deep, vanquished by an equally-statured adversary, speared and gutted and bleeding out? Nature Herself, crying for our insatiable blood-lust for her resources, an accusation written in violence and gore, the only language humanity truly understands?

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 02/01/2024

Happy new year, the Antarctic is bleeding. There’s a wound in Antarctica pouring blood into a waterfall the height of a five-storey building.

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Folk Horror Magpie 🌬️ @folkhorrormagpie.bsky.social · 08/07/2023

It’s out! The Bleeding Tree is OUT NOW in hardback and ebook! Amazing sentence to be able to type: get your copy now online or in all good bookshops! 🌸🌻🌷🌱🌼🪻 smarturl.it/TheBleedingTree

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