Stone Club Walks and Talks

In today's episode we talk with Philip Carr-Gomm. We chat about ancient sites, sacred spaces and nature. We talk about initiation, The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids⁠, Alfred Watkins and Ley lines. As a very special extra feature Philip leads us on a Stone Club meditation.

Philip Carr-Gomm is a writer and psychologist and the former Chief of OBOD. His online school, the Art of Living Well offers courses in sophrology, sleeping well, the Tarot and magical creativity.

In this episode we talk with Amy Grantham about her artistic practice, about developing work and ideas in relation to health. We talk about folklore, folk culture and community, about music and about the stones and sites that connect us.

Amy is a self-taught artist and photographer who lives and works in New York City. 

In this episode we talk with author Oliver Smith. We discuss ancient sites and modern pilgrimage. We talk about some of the folks that Oliver met and revisit some of the places that Oliver travelled to while writing On This Holy Island. Take a trip with us across the isle of Albion into ancient and modern spaces.

Oliver Smith is an acclaimed travel writer working mostly for the Financial Times, The Times and Outside Magazine in the USA. For 10 years he worked for Lonely Planet Magazine.During his time there he won Travel Writer of the Year at the Travel Media Awards, was AITO Travel Writer of the Year on three occasions, and was nominated for PPA Writer of the Year. On This Holy Island is his first book with Bloomsbury Continuum.

In this episode we talk with Angeline Morrison about her new album Orphelia and about ancient sites in Cornwall. We discuss Angenine's previous solo lp The Sorrow Songs and some of the stories that make up that lp as well as her contribution and collaborations with We Are Muffy and the album Grace Will Lead Me Home with Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne & Jon Bickley.

Recently hailed as one of MOJO's 'voices taking folk into the future', Angeline Morrison is a singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose work combines a deep love of traditional song, a deep respect for the hidden ancestral voices of Old Albion, and a strong belief in magic and enchantment as powerful charms for decoloniality. 

Angeline mostly makes music in the genres of wyrd folk and psych folk.  Her songs have a feral approach, a handmade sonic aesthetic (found sounds, homemade instruments) and a belief in the importance of tenderness. 

Today we talk with Sam K. Horton about his debut novel Gorse. we also talk about ancient sites, standing stones, the Cornish landspape, about folklore and myth and about the process of writing and creating new worlds.

An author of literary fantasy, Sam lives above the moor in North Cornwall, and draws on its wild landscape, wide skies, and windblown folklore for his work.

Growing up on a sheep farm near Hereford, he left for London and trained as a costume designer working in film, theatre and opera before moving into visual art, still working with narratives, texts and stories. It was during his last project, surrounding the discovery and development of Eythin (an island lost off the coast of Cornwall, halfway between Boscastle and the Celtic Deep) that he found his talent for writing rich, detailed mythic worlds. This came as a surprise—despite a lifelong love of reading anything within reach, and over a decade working in libraries—but a welcome one.

Today we talk with songwriter musician and singer Katy J Pearson.

We talk about Katy's new album Someday, Now, her remaking of The Wicker Man soundtrack, of finding places of historic interest while on the road as well as Katy's favourite artists and new music to keep an eye on.

May the wind be always at your back chants Katy J Pearson over the opening seconds of her third solo record. Though lifted from the age-old Celtic Blessing, it is also disjoined, glitchy; transformed into a murky, modern good-luck charm for an electronic advent. Indicative of a shift in heart and sound, it fires the starting pistol for an album on which Pearson refuses to kick her heels; running red lights, resisting retrogrades, and exercising her own autonomy — in life, in love, and in the recording studio.

Ruth Allen is an author, pyschotherapist and geologist.

We talk to Ruth about her phenomenal book 'Weathering', about stones, about climate change, thresholds, healing and journeys through life.

Ruth lives and works on the edge of the Peak District, Derbyshire, Ruth believes that we all have an ‘ecological self’ that longs to be better connected to the natural world than many of us feel day-to-day

Hosted by Stone Club co-founder Matthew Shaw

Today are guests are Slomo. A band made up of members Chris (“Holy”) McGrail who recently contributed to Julian Cope’s Dope and Queen Elizabeth projects and Howard Marsden who co-runs Hebden Bridge’s already-legendary Ambient Bowling Club, where experimental music mixes with environmental sounds, low chatter and the soft clank of bowls.

We discuss ancient sites around the UK, The Modern Antiquarian and Slomo's musc to date including their fifth album in 20 years, “Zen and Zennor”; their sonic palette refreshed, their focus again tuned to the spectral otherness of Land's End. The cover star – Zennor Quoit – is a colossal megalithic structure to be found on moorland above the village of Zennor, 4.5 miles to the west of St Ives.

Hosted by Stone Club co-founder Matthew Shaw