This podcast will feature selected materials presented in part at a one-day symposium bringing together academics from different disciplines (archaeology, history, folklore) with English Heritage staff and representatives from the National Trust and other heritage bodies.
The subject of the symposium was the supernatural in place. Presenters examine the residue of supernatural sites across the land, their loss, their ruined visibility, and what layered multifarious posterity reads into them and tells stories about them. The goal was to begin the process of recoupling the idea of unexplained story to sites in the landscape as its anchor. Contributors also discussed and investigated questions of contested ownership and contested rights, alongside questions of curatorship or its lack, local versus national identity, generational engagement, and competing layers of story, some of which directly concerned magic and others that explained it away.
Held on Friday 4th December 2020.