Sussex Coils and Loops

Fine edition

– sold out

Limited to 12 copies, signed by the author

Hand bound in full ivory goatskin, gold tooled and blind debossed, all edges gilt, custom paste endpapers by Victoria Hall. Finished with a red ribbon and presented in a custom, lined slipcase.

Standard hardback edition

– £40

Limited to 300 copies

Bound in chalk white cloth, red foil glyph on front board and titling on spine, green end papers, and dust jacket.

Paperback

– £22

Unlimited

Printed on 120 gsm paper, sewn binding.

Contents

1614
Shrine
Strange, yet now a neighbour to us
The hidden thing, the herdsman, the goad
A daily code, a layered mass
Its gloomy mazes often the theme
A book of Bessie and Sallyann
The double pupil
I saw never fowler wormes
Interview with Jon Williams
The Climping working
Lewinna
Typhon | Delphyne | Python
A final shrine

A serpent or dragon temple
Azimuth fragments

Addenda

Description

‘Sussex folk seem ever to have had a leaning towards snaky things.’

Sussex Coils and Loops is a work of parafolklore on the great serpents encountered in the land of south-east England. The book describes a series of ritual actions performed between the winter solstice of 2017 and the summer solstice of 2022 at sites with serpent or dragon legends associated with them. 

We explore hidden woods, secret pools and lonely churches, find clues in stained glass windows, graveyards, fading murals, tattered pamphlets and video games. There are hermits and saints, headless horsemen, mighty oaks and giant puddings. Shrines are constructed, encounters logged. 

Each generation is seen to have added to the recursive legend, and the sources range from Anglo-Saxon and medieval Latin accounts to contemporary storytellers. All seek to plumb the depthless knucker holes and reveal their great and terrifying wyrms.

In Sussex Coils and Loops, Holman deploys a number of strategies to demonstrate and report on these workings. The writing is in turn experimental, documentary, and scholarly. This is unashamedly contemporary landscape magic. 

Holman resists any characterisation of folklore that privileges a notion of authenticity as inherently conservative. Rather, he sees it as a dynamic and unstable process which is constantly taking on provisional, dare we say, snaky, forms

Through its careful scholarship, field investigations, and experiments with form, Sussex Coils and Loops offers a variety of entry points into this living tradition, honouring its unruly, indefatigable nature, and curious to see where it might go next.

Press, interviews, reviews

“This study alone successfully illuminates the long and winding journey of a folk-cultural corpus, as its narratives are embroidered, patched or excised by the vicissitudes of time, fashion, and inclination. It illustrates how folk legends are not inert historical artefacts but living, evolving entities in their own right; initially shaped by, then helping to shape, a specific place, identity and set of customs. These are the things providing a bulwark against cultural homogenisation, and alienation from the land. They should be cherished.”

– Mark Nemglan, In the company of dragons: experiments in parafolklore