I’m heading up to Dumfriesshire this weekend for the May Day celebrations to mark 50 years of Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man. My band Candidate have been kindly invited by some fans to play songs from the 1973 film, and from our own 2002 Wicker Man inspired LP ‘Nuada’ as well, as part of a festival to mark half a century of the definitive British folk horror flick.
I’m looking forward to it, even though I’m also concerned that we’re going of our own free will and so are highly likely to be burned alive to ensure a good harvest. Still, I hear their apples are renowned, so we’re helping a local economy recover post-Covid, so I feel it’s the least we can do.
It’s just a duo for this gig, rather than the whole band: me and my brother, Alex, two voices, two guitars. It’s our first show in a very long time. We’ve got a new record out later in the year, so this seemed like a good excuse to blow the dust off the guitar cases. It’s nice to be practising and playing and enjoying making live music, which we so rarely do (we were a studio project, even from the beginning, that was the point). Plus, we get to visit the film locations, and play our songs at the site of the original film’s sacrifice, on the actual ritual day, which is a bit magical. After three years of limited freedom and undeniable strangeness, it’s nice to be able to just move about and do stuff, on impulse, with other people again.
But it won’t be the first time I’ve made this journey. Unlike Edward Woodward, I’ve been to the Wicker Man locations and come back again and again.
This is a holiday snap of me and Alex almost three decades ago, in 1995, on the beautiful coast road that runs down the spine of Wicker Man country, looking out to Ailsa Craig. This was our first pilgrimage to visit the place where the film was made. Even though you can see an island in the background there, and the opening sequence of the film is all about a sea plane going a very, very long way away, the Wicker Man shoot didn’t take place on an island, because a low-budget film would make every effort to get its crew to and from the location as easily as possible.
It’s not even the Highlands, let alone the Islands. This bit of the West Coast of Scotland is all main roads, and the head of land where the Wicker Man itself is set ablaze is, if you draw a line across a map of the UK, about level with Keswick, in the Lake District (where the lovely Pencil Museum is). Burrow Head, the burning site, looks South across the sea to the Isle of Man. Fittingly for the film’s theme of an alien culture on our doorstep, it’s not far away at all.
The weather every time I’ve visited has been surprisingly mild, with the same Gulf Stream-balmy climate that Christopher Lee’s character says helps grow Summerisle’s celebrated crops of apples. Again, good for filming people in flimsy May Day dresses during an Autumn shoot.
We had gone up in 1995 with my family. It was my dad’s idea. He loved the film. He and mum had been to see it on release, when it was the B-feature to Don’t Look Now. I’d stayed up late to watch it one schoolnight, on his recommendation, and had to go to bed early (just after the islanders appear on the harbour wall in their animal masks) and so didn’t know what happened at the end. I didn’t sleep. The images literally haunted me. ‘It’ll be on again soon,’ I thought. And then it wasn’t, for years.
I became obsessed. It was a cult film, and that meant you couldn’t buy it, or find it anywhere. You were dependent on TV schedulers. It was trailed once in the paper, and then cancelled due to the Orkney child abuse case, which was almost the last burst of the 80s satanic panic, and hadn’t even happened, which was maddening. By the time I finally got to find out the shock ending of The Wicker Man several years later (which my dad had, amazingly, kept secret), I was totally committed to this film. It meant something.
So we went up to visit the locations as a family holiday. My mum put up with it, because it was a nice trip somewhere unfamiliar, but for the family fans, it was an important, magical journey. We were paying homage.
The thing that’s hard to understand now, 50 years after the release, now the film tops polls, has websites and fan communities, and can be the punchline to commonly understood jokes, is that there was absolutely zero information about it. This was pre-internet, and before the film’s acceptance into the mainstream. It was a forgotten schlock B-feature. To find where we needed to visit, we had to ask other people to go to archives. My dad knew a film journalist, who dug out a photocopy from his newspaper’s files. It was a blotchy black and white location report from 1973. We pored over it, then worked out where that meant we had to drive on the map.
We got this one right, the Old Kirk and ‘schoolhouse’ at Anwoth. That was an absolute banker. Iconic locations, opposite one another, out in the countryside, instantly recognisable.
But this picture here, of me being the Wicker Man, isn’t the location of the burning of the Wicker Man at all. Nowhere bloody near. Miles we drove. Down the wrong headland. Making this one an entirely meaningless photo. Might as well have posed at Beachy Head.
This wrong headland is the middle of nowhere. That’s the giveaway. The location of the actual burning of the Wicker Man was a caravan site. Again, practicalities, not ritual, were the most important thing. A holiday camp gives you infrastructure. Toilets. Somewhere to get changed, made up, eat lunch, and for Britt Ekland to hide from the wind when she’s freezing in a light frock and winter is icumen in.
We found the actual location in 2002, when we went back with Candidate to record our Wicker-inspired LP. By this time, not only were we in a band, on a microbudget indie label with enough cash in the pot to fly us back up, but the film was available on DVD, and there was an internet, with location maps, and photos, by other fans who’d done their research and got the facts right.
And that meant that this time, we found the Wicker Man.
Those are his actual legs. Art Director Seamus Flannery sunk the things in concrete, so that when the fire died down, and the set was struck, they stayed behind. You could sit by them. We took guitars up and recorded a load of atmospheric scraps for the record there. It’s the first thing you hear if you find ‘Nuada’ on a streamer and press play on the first track, that’s a field recording from between the legs. Here’s Ian with a boom grabbing some authentic Scottish seagull noises that we used. You have to get birds with the right accent.
We did the ritual properly. We stayed in the actual hotel where Edward Woodward’s character stayed, for the same number of nights. We even played ‘Gently Johnny’ on guitars in the actual alcove where the folk musicians in the Green Man do their set. Again, though I am not a person prone to ‘woo’ of any sort, it’s all an act of magic. If you do something that you feel you need to do, that doesn’t make logical sense, you are performing magic. Humans do that. It’s why we say ‘Good luck’ to each other, or ‘Happy birthday’. We do small acts of magic all the time.
And our second pilgrimage bore fruit. Maybe we’d done the ritual right. The record did well, especially for a tiny band on a tiny label. It’s still the most popular thing we did. It was named an album of the year on Radio 2 and in the Sunday Times, and it’s still something we’re very proud of. It’s been lovely learning it again, to play to the assembled Wicker massive for the 50th bash, whether they care about us or not. I’ve very fond memories of the second pilgrimage we made, this time with proper purpose, and the internet on our side.
The next time we went up Wicker Country, the comedy writing had taken off. It was a strange but exciting time, doing two projects in parallel, comedy and music, but hey they’re the same thing, using the same bits of the brain, and damn it I’ll die on that hill. Like Edward Woodward did, and at least I now know which hill it is.
This visit was in 2006, for one of the Bollocks To Alton Towers books we wrote about quirky British tourist attractions. Racking our brains for interesting places to go, we always dug through memories of UK family holidays first, and this seemed like an excuse to check in on the place. Four schoolmates wrote the book (the same gang who wrote The Framley Examiner) and we split a lot of the visits, for economic reasons, and to get the job done fast. With the Bollocks books we always had a nice relaxing summer, having signed an exciting book contract, and then remembered we also had to write the book, and set off too late. There was always a kick-bollock scramble to visit before tourist places shut for the winter, which is why the books include things like ‘some wood on a hill’ which can’t shut. Jason and I did the Scottish leg of the research tour. We visited Anwoth Old Kirk again, for maximum bang-for-your-location-pilgrimage-buck, and then drove down to Burrow Head to say ‘hi’ to Seamus Flannery’s wooden legs.
I loved writing that chapter – celebrating an iconic cultural monument that only existed by accident. But we had to add a sad coda, because two weeks after we visited, the legs had gone.
Nobody knew where they’d vanished to. I promise it wasn’t us; we had a very small car with limited boot capacity. As far as we know the Wicker Man’s wooden legs have never turned up on eBay. Maybe some camper ignorantly chopped them down to make a fire. But I suspect that what had happened is that a cult film had crossed into the mainstream, thanks to continued fan pressure, enthusiasm, and its own excellence, and that word had got around that an iconic film prop was just lying round in a Scottish field. I do wonder who’s got them in their garden? Has anyone checked Reece Shearsmith’s gaff?
A year later, I was on honeymoon, in the actual Highlands where the Wicker Man pretends it’s happening. I saw a road sign and recognised the name from all that long-ago location research in 1995. I’d been to everywhere that the film had shot around the South West Coast, but hadn’t visited the iconic harbour wall that had kept me awake as a teenager. Plockton, where the seaplane scenes were filmed, and the villagers appear in their intimidating masks (arguably birthing the whole genre of folk horror, and certainly inventing Midlake) is a long way away from the legs. It’s near the bridge to Skye, in the Hebrides, roughly in a straight line across from Inverness, where my wife has family. But we were driving past, on the way back from visiting them after the wedding, and it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Incidentally, I also found this iconic piece of 1970s film and TV memorabilia, which as far as I know is still in this pub in Plockton, and hasn’t been stolen and erected in Reece Shearsmith’s gazebo. His loss.
I love visiting these places. I’ve already been, so I don’t quite know why it’s so important to go back. I love that Bill Drummond, of the KLF (someone who lives for psychogeography, coincidences, patterns, and acts of magical thinking) comes from Newton Stewart, where the Ellangowan Hotel is, doubling for the Green Man Inn, where Edward Woodward is tempted by Britt Ekland. Newton Stewart is a place that was quiet and boring and dull enough to inspire a musician, like all places musicians come from, but is famous for one thing: an act of simulated magical ritual happened once in the area, which is the most KLF thing in the world.
I’ve not been on Wicker pilgrimage since. This weekend will be my first return. And it feels incredible that this is going to be a crowded ‘happening’, not a small family holiday, or a lone enthusiast’s trip, or a quiet research jaunt. This is going to be a festival. A gathering.
When my wife and I visited in 2007, we looked across the water from the harbour wall in Plockton. This was being built. It was obvious what it was. I think it was for fireworks night. We did ask. They confirmed it was going to be a very big ritual fire.
Whether the ancient Britons ever really burned people in wicker men is debatable. It may have been Roman propaganda. But we do like to gather and have a big fire. We do like a ritual. And something in this film haunts and fascinates us. It’s definitely about us, and something about us. Its story – despite its 1970s period trappings – stays pressing and urgent. It’s been remade terribly, and had terrible sequels written and filmed by the same brilliant people who made the original, and it’s always, always awful. They got it right, perfectly, accidentally, superbly right, but only once. And we can’t look away.
Thematically, as a piece of writing by a clever man fascinated by mythology, it’s always been fairly clear what the film is about: the problems of certainty, and faith. About how your sure vision of the world only works within your own tribe, and a clash of cultures can leave you not even able to read simple stories; so a policeman can’t even solve a routine case of a missing child, because his internal roadmaps of intention and motive fail in the face of the unreadable worldview of a rival tribe.
But The Wicker Man was made in 1973, the same time as Nigel Kneale was working on his soon-to-be-abandoned 1970s Quatermass serial (the John Mills one about stone circles that wouldn’t be finished until 1979, by which time it was fun but virtually meaningless.) These form a pair of cult hippies-go-bad projects, by the best screenplay brains of their age, and they are totally a product of their time. It wasn’t until I watched a documentary on Laurel Canyon during lockdown that I finally understood that this is what The Wicker Man was about. That shift from Scott McKenzie flowers in your hair, to the darkness and the fire, and the ritual gatherings, and the death of Altamont. The birth of British folk horror is tied up with fears about crazy hippies. What happens if the gentle music from Bagpuss made people go mad? I mean, it’s a tale as old as time.
The Wicker Man asks a pressing Aquarian Age question: what happens when the free love youngsters go rogue? When they turn out to be Hell’s Angels? What if they sing folk songs, but also kill you? These are contemporary middlebrow, middle class, middle aged paranoias about unease in the face of the confident young.
Most frighteningly, what if their new super-woo religion has such authority when compared to all that rotting Christian hypocrisy? What if has such ‘ancient’ truth to it (even when that long heritage is openly faked for capitalist reasons by Lord Summerisle’s sinister unseen agri-businessman dad) that it gives these floaty naked kids the same confidence that they’re completely, unarguably right as the old religion?
Those hippie kids look like Jesus and wear sandals. When you think about its origins, Christianity is just a load of peace and love guys, who somehow ended up with an empire, setting the rules, insisting on their own certainty, shaping our minds, running the world. Is there a straight line from a bunch of happy clappy peace and love dudes to the Crusades and the Inquisition? Is this just what humans do when we think we’ve worked it out?
These stories of nature-kids off-the-rails are about what happens when a happy cult gets too big, too confident of itself. And what dark, strange, dangerous certainty that might unleash.
Anyway, I’m off to a cult film festival for a cult that’s got much bigger than anyone expected. Nothing bad can happen. And if so, nobody warned us. It’s all FINE.
I think that when I’m visiting these places, it’s not just because it’s a cool film that I like. It’s because there’s something clever and dark and interesting in being in the same spaces as these clever filmmakers were once, where they were making quick, scrambled, intelligent decisions, all united on a project together, asking these difficult, persistent, awkward, interesting questions about faith. Making the pilgrimage is an act of creative psychogeography. I want to be where they were. I want to soak up some of that brilliant, incendiary thinking.
I’m really looking forward to this May Day trip, because going up Wicker Country is inspiring, and it always makes me catch fire.
Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.