I decided to name author Gail Simmons and her extremely bad book Between the Chalk and the Sea, about a walk across southern England, because of her constant errors (from after pg56 which caused this thread):

pg64 "Christians, quick to embrace pagan rituals to placate the incumbent population" - no, lmao, definitely not in the British Isles;

pg68 "Early Christian writers, keen to appropriate popular pagan traditions transformed him [a "god" Lugh she claims is "Celtic"] into the Archangel Michael" - also no, Christianity inherited Michael from some forms of apocalyptic Judaism, and he's mentioned in two different books of the Christian new testament;

pg68 "in Ireland, where Lugh was strongest [citation needed], he metamorphosed into the leprechaun of Irish folklore" - lmao, presumably sourced from some Victorian antiquarian who'd huffed too much Celtic Twilight.

pg93 Mention of "Druids", as I predicted, but the modern type so she managed to get her factette correct (the pagan sort do sometimes "revere" yew trees*)

pg94 cba to type out a quote but there's a whole horrifying scene where she visits a village churchyard during a funeral (presumably held under covid protections that restricted the number of people attending) and tries to engage the gravedigger in conversation then, because he's short with her, she concludes he's an archetypal strong, silent, son of the soil rather than an acquaintance of the deceased who wishes she'd shut up and go away and take her increased risk of infection with her.

pg113 Even her editor didn't read this rubbish: "It's said that a holloway sinks by one metre every 300 years, so by that reckoning this one was nearly 1,000 years old, fitting perfectly with the Roman occupation of Britain from AD 43 to 410." Lmao, Gail Simmons believes she lives somewhere between 1043 and 1410 CE.

So, in conclusion, this is badly written in style, the content is nonsense, and the person who wrote it decided to go for a long linear walk with multiple overnight stays in the worst part of a pandemic.

* One of the few religious impulses I understand is feeling reverence towards a living being that's 1000+ years old.

#books #reading #history #EnglishHistory #Christianity #Paganism #covidiots #PandemicHistory