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Hellebore Zine
The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain
Exploring castles, museums and manor houses, megaliths, moors, mountains and lakes, this lavishly illustrated travel guide covers the rich history of magic and the occult in Britain and Northern Ireland and its inextricable bond with the landscape.
Delve into a world of witchcraft, ancient rituals, and occult ceremonies. From the ancient stone circles of the Cornish moors to the wealthy manor houses of Hampshire, from the windswept headlands of Northumbria to the golden streets of Oxford, from the turbulent Scottish borderlands to the rugged Causeway Coast, this guide ventures into hundreds of locations with magical links, exploring the works of authors and creators inspired by their strange, numinous beauty; the lives of the occultists, witches, and cunning folk who inhabited them; and the legends that persist.
Explore over 500 locations with magical links: The Scottish mansion where Aleister Crowley summoned the Lords of Hell; The Cotswolds town that worshipped Pan; The desolate moors that inspired Conan Doyle’s ghostly hound; The library where Elizabethan magus John Dee conjured a demon; The 'evil oratory' where Sir Gawain met the Green Knight; The gateway to Fairyland in Iona; The spectral Yorkshire town that inspired Dracula; The ancient forest where Gerald Gardner’s coven performed a ritual to prevent the German invasion... and many more.
Includes film, TV, and literary locations of folk horror and occult classics.
Contributors: Reggie Chamberlain-King (Northern Ireland), Elizabeth Dearnley (Scotland), Verity Holloway (South East, East Anglia, London), Maria J. Pérez Cuervo (South West, Wales, film, TV, and literary locations), John Reppion (North East, North West), and Katy Soar (East and West Midlands).
Delve into a world of witchcraft, ancient rituals, and occult ceremonies. From the ancient stone circles of the Cornish moors to the wealthy manor houses of Hampshire, from the windswept headlands of Northumbria to the golden streets of Oxford, from the turbulent Scottish borderlands to the rugged Causeway Coast, this guide ventures into hundreds of locations with magical links, exploring the works of authors and creators inspired by their strange, numinous beauty; the lives of the occultists, witches, and cunning folk who inhabited them; and the legends that persist.
Explore over 500 locations with magical links: The Scottish mansion where Aleister Crowley summoned the Lords of Hell; The Cotswolds town that worshipped Pan; The desolate moors that inspired Conan Doyle’s ghostly hound; The library where Elizabethan magus John Dee conjured a demon; The 'evil oratory' where Sir Gawain met the Green Knight; The gateway to Fairyland in Iona; The spectral Yorkshire town that inspired Dracula; The ancient forest where Gerald Gardner’s coven performed a ritual to prevent the German invasion... and many more.
Includes film, TV, and literary locations of folk horror and occult classics.
Contributors: Reggie Chamberlain-King (Northern Ireland), Elizabeth Dearnley (Scotland), Verity Holloway (South East, East Anglia, London), Maria J. Pérez Cuervo (South West, Wales, film, TV, and literary locations), John Reppion (North East, North West), and Katy Soar (East and West Midlands).
313 pages, Paperback
First published December 7, 2021
11 people are currently reading
672 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
December 1, 2023
Next time I'm in the UK, this book is coming with. The unstoppable crew at Hellebore have created a mostly (though not completely) comprehensive guide to magical places in teh British Isles. Sections are divided geographically, so you can pull this Baedeker of the bizzare wherever the ley lines have taken you and have a Virgil to your Dante.
The book itself is a handy size and seems well-constructed, which you'll want if you're taking it with you. Most of the place entries have a postal code listed, so if you can interpret that (or ask a local postmaster), you'll be good to go. Entries range from megalithic tombs to occult bookstores to locales tied to famous practitioners of magic (though one should take any location related to Aleister Crowley as questionable because, you know, Crowley).
Now, I have two slight complaints. First, and this one is small . . . too small . . . the print is too small! This is the case especially in some longer, colored text blocks. Pardon the old guy with eyes that are going bad who are interested in this subject matter. There are thousands of us, I'm sure. Might want to consider bumping those fonts up a point and doing a slightly longer book.
Earlier, I said that this book was mostly comprehensive. Of course, not everything can be covered in an almanac such as this, but I noted two glaring ommissions of which I am personally very aware. I won't go over details in this review, but if you read my blog post on The Priory at RAF Chicksands and The Devils Quoits, you'll see exactly what I mean. The weird thing is that Clophill Church, which I mention in my blog post, and which is DIRECTLY tied to the Chicksands Priory (albeit by an undergroudn tunnel - I kid you not; I've been in that tunnel myself) is mentioned, while the priory is not. I don't get it. The very reason that people went to Clophill Church to put up satanic graffitti and sacrifice animals was because the church was physically tied to the alegedly haunted priory. So why no Chicksands Priory? It's not about accessibility. You can arrange a tour of the Priory with the non-profit that cares for it. I don't get the ommission.
I won't spend much time on the other one, The Devil's Quoits, in Oxfordshire. Sure, it's hard to find (my wife and I got lost looking for it at first), but it's a beautiful megalithic structure that has been researched rather well. maybe it's because the archaeological dig that revealed the full scale of the Quoits was only done in 1945, so it doesn't have the old magical associations that, say, the Rollright Stones do? Again, I don't fully understand.
Perhaps one can slip index cards in with one's own entries where the Hellebore guide is missing them?
Still, it is enough. Not complete, but enough. If you are lucky enough to live in the UK, you really should buy a copy. And if you're visiting and looking for the magic of the isles, you definitely need to take this with you to read on the plane flight over. It's a long flight, trust me. Be prepared.
The book itself is a handy size and seems well-constructed, which you'll want if you're taking it with you. Most of the place entries have a postal code listed, so if you can interpret that (or ask a local postmaster), you'll be good to go. Entries range from megalithic tombs to occult bookstores to locales tied to famous practitioners of magic (though one should take any location related to Aleister Crowley as questionable because, you know, Crowley).
Now, I have two slight complaints. First, and this one is small . . . too small . . . the print is too small! This is the case especially in some longer, colored text blocks. Pardon the old guy with eyes that are going bad who are interested in this subject matter. There are thousands of us, I'm sure. Might want to consider bumping those fonts up a point and doing a slightly longer book.
Earlier, I said that this book was mostly comprehensive. Of course, not everything can be covered in an almanac such as this, but I noted two glaring ommissions of which I am personally very aware. I won't go over details in this review, but if you read my blog post on The Priory at RAF Chicksands and The Devils Quoits, you'll see exactly what I mean. The weird thing is that Clophill Church, which I mention in my blog post, and which is DIRECTLY tied to the Chicksands Priory (albeit by an undergroudn tunnel - I kid you not; I've been in that tunnel myself) is mentioned, while the priory is not. I don't get it. The very reason that people went to Clophill Church to put up satanic graffitti and sacrifice animals was because the church was physically tied to the alegedly haunted priory. So why no Chicksands Priory? It's not about accessibility. You can arrange a tour of the Priory with the non-profit that cares for it. I don't get the ommission.
I won't spend much time on the other one, The Devil's Quoits, in Oxfordshire. Sure, it's hard to find (my wife and I got lost looking for it at first), but it's a beautiful megalithic structure that has been researched rather well. maybe it's because the archaeological dig that revealed the full scale of the Quoits was only done in 1945, so it doesn't have the old magical associations that, say, the Rollright Stones do? Again, I don't fully understand.
Perhaps one can slip index cards in with one's own entries where the Hellebore guide is missing them?
Still, it is enough. Not complete, but enough. If you are lucky enough to live in the UK, you really should buy a copy. And if you're visiting and looking for the magic of the isles, you definitely need to take this with you to read on the plane flight over. It's a long flight, trust me. Be prepared.
March 26, 2022
A well-designed pocket guide to the magical and mystical and fictional Britain. It has a comprehensive sweep, perfect for those traveling the UK and Ireland. However, the images are incredibly grainy, the text is highly repetitive (how many times did people make wages against the Devil?) which makes one wonder just how much solid research and exploration was made in the writing? I wanted more of a lived travel log of someone walking, talking to locals, and researching the dark tales of the past. This seems very Googled to me, though I may be wrong. That said, next time I'm in the UK I'll be bringing this with me as a primer.
February 8, 2022
I've only barely scratched the surface of eldritch travel in the UK, but as soon as travel becomes less nightmarish I have ambitions to make more trips and this book will surely go with me. Organized by region and sized to fit a backpack or a pocket, Hellebore's first book makes fine reading even if one isn't wearing hiking shoes. Hellebore is one of my favorite magazines and this excellent little volume shows the same dedication to research and the same distinctive graphic design as the journal. Ideal for a travel companion, it makes good reading in isolation and I can't think of a better tool for planning a future vacation.
July 25, 2024
delightful maps!! wish a few sections were more detailed, but will definitely take with when im next properly out of london :)
November 16, 2023
Delightful guidebook crammed with sites of occultural interest. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
February 21, 2022
The title tells it like it is: a guide to U.K. sites associated with the occult, so places with occult folklore, associations with ceremonial magic, and standing stones. The entries are fairly short, but detailed and interesting, organized by region. Many of the illustrations are pretty small, and it's understandable why that is, but I wished they were a little bigger. That's totally a quibble. I'm not likely to get to the U.K. any time soon, but I'd definitely use this to plan some sightseeing, and as is gives a vicarious travel experience!
February 8, 2025
This is a beautiful little book that works just as well as something to sit on the sofa and read or to put in your backpack and hit the road and explore. The book is quite ambitious in that it intends to be somewhat of a little travel guide describing sites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland of occult interest. So we have stately homes, neolithic stone circles, film locations, places where cunning folk and witches lived and enough places where the devil was raised and lost a game of chance than there are cards in a deck.
The book is set out by region, and then by county which makes it pretty useful if you are out and about or passing through somewhere and want to stop off to see some fairy steps or old houses with screaming skulls in the walls.
The book is quite small in size but several hundred pages in length. What this means is the text is quite small and you get a surface treatment of each site. The visitor is going to want to learn more if they are going places and there is in places things you can't really see which kind of defeats the object. I get things like 'this is now on private land' because that's a big 'wink-wink' to go and have a look anyway, but there are also a few 'private houses not open to visitors' which makes visiting such a site kind of pointless unless looking at a front door is your thing. The art direction means that the images are kind of grainy, but I think that's an aesthetic choice to add an air of mystery. In any case if you're interested in a particular place then you're going to need to do more research.
The book does do a decent treatment of the area, but I kind of felt Lancashire where I live was short-changed. There is only the Pendle Witches and a graveyard twenty minutes walk away mentioned. It's hard to be thoroughly comprehensive - a book with all sites of interest would need to be about five times bigger but even so I kind of felt some areas were better represented.
Those niggles aside, this was a joy to read - I was given so much inspiration for my own creative endeavours (I'm running a roleplaying game leaning heavily into folklore and occult of Britain). It also really made me appreciate the richness and history of the stories we tell, which make us who we are. How legends develop over hundreds of years and give me a depth to the land I walk on, and how important that much of this weird and wonderful heritage needs to survive.
The book is set out by region, and then by county which makes it pretty useful if you are out and about or passing through somewhere and want to stop off to see some fairy steps or old houses with screaming skulls in the walls.
The book is quite small in size but several hundred pages in length. What this means is the text is quite small and you get a surface treatment of each site. The visitor is going to want to learn more if they are going places and there is in places things you can't really see which kind of defeats the object. I get things like 'this is now on private land' because that's a big 'wink-wink' to go and have a look anyway, but there are also a few 'private houses not open to visitors' which makes visiting such a site kind of pointless unless looking at a front door is your thing. The art direction means that the images are kind of grainy, but I think that's an aesthetic choice to add an air of mystery. In any case if you're interested in a particular place then you're going to need to do more research.
The book does do a decent treatment of the area, but I kind of felt Lancashire where I live was short-changed. There is only the Pendle Witches and a graveyard twenty minutes walk away mentioned. It's hard to be thoroughly comprehensive - a book with all sites of interest would need to be about five times bigger but even so I kind of felt some areas were better represented.
Those niggles aside, this was a joy to read - I was given so much inspiration for my own creative endeavours (I'm running a roleplaying game leaning heavily into folklore and occult of Britain). It also really made me appreciate the richness and history of the stories we tell, which make us who we are. How legends develop over hundreds of years and give me a depth to the land I walk on, and how important that much of this weird and wonderful heritage needs to survive.
April 13, 2024
THE HELLEBORE GUIDE TO OCCULT BRITAIN
First let me say you cannot go wrong with anything Hellebore puts out. It is always top notch, exceptional quality. This stunning little book is par for the course, remarkable in its thorough content and intriguing subject matter. Anyone with even a passing interest of the occult is going to find something of interest here.
Separated by region, each chapter discusses the occult influences and legends of the area. Entries discussing witchcraft, magic, ancient rituals, portals, demons, castles, museums and so much more make this more of a dark tourism guide than just your average travel book. There are also many references of film, tv and literary locations. Take it from me, this thing is jam-packed full of beautiful darkness!
I feel it’s most necessary to applaud the mere look and feel of the book. It’s small but not pocket size, and it’s a heavy book of over 300 pages….absolutely stunning, with pictures galore and encyclopedic descriptions. They’ve left very few stones unturned in this impressive book—I’m telling you, there’s no way you’re not going to love it. And when I use a double negative, you know I’m not fooling around.
Worth every penny of the Royal Mail fees and overseas travel costs, I want to thank Hellebore for another creating yet another treasure!
First let me say you cannot go wrong with anything Hellebore puts out. It is always top notch, exceptional quality. This stunning little book is par for the course, remarkable in its thorough content and intriguing subject matter. Anyone with even a passing interest of the occult is going to find something of interest here.
Separated by region, each chapter discusses the occult influences and legends of the area. Entries discussing witchcraft, magic, ancient rituals, portals, demons, castles, museums and so much more make this more of a dark tourism guide than just your average travel book. There are also many references of film, tv and literary locations. Take it from me, this thing is jam-packed full of beautiful darkness!
I feel it’s most necessary to applaud the mere look and feel of the book. It’s small but not pocket size, and it’s a heavy book of over 300 pages….absolutely stunning, with pictures galore and encyclopedic descriptions. They’ve left very few stones unturned in this impressive book—I’m telling you, there’s no way you’re not going to love it. And when I use a double negative, you know I’m not fooling around.
Worth every penny of the Royal Mail fees and overseas travel costs, I want to thank Hellebore for another creating yet another treasure!
May 16, 2023
This guidebook is pure gold!
As part of my research into ancient and occult Britain this book by Hellebore is fantastic! With it, I've been to Minerva's shrine in Chester, Highgate cemetary in London and a stone circle in the lake district so far.
A brilliant little travel companion giving you historical folkloric/occult accounts of the area you visit.
The down side: Once again another guide book of Britain that doesn't offer enough information of ancient/occult Lancashire. Other counties are meatier to read about, Lancashire's section is scant, even though Lancashire does have many sites worthy of note.
I'll continue to be dipping in and out of this at my leisure and whilst exploring the spooky wilds of Britain!
As part of my research into ancient and occult Britain this book by Hellebore is fantastic! With it, I've been to Minerva's shrine in Chester, Highgate cemetary in London and a stone circle in the lake district so far.
A brilliant little travel companion giving you historical folkloric/occult accounts of the area you visit.
The down side: Once again another guide book of Britain that doesn't offer enough information of ancient/occult Lancashire. Other counties are meatier to read about, Lancashire's section is scant, even though Lancashire does have many sites worthy of note.
I'll continue to be dipping in and out of this at my leisure and whilst exploring the spooky wilds of Britain!
March 21, 2022
Now let's all pray we get a reprinting of cope's modern antiquarian!
marking as read even though this isnt someting one reads front to back.
a small, traveling companion to ancient UK sites, perfect companion for backpackers but to me just a nice way to find more folk horror and live vicariously not being able ro visit myself the places listed. informative, it breaks it down into 9 categories (witchcraft, portents, demons, etc.) among the 3 countries. reading about the Lambton Wyrm as i finished Stoker's "Lair" is how I'll be using this as travelling companion without traveling. if you think this is yr shit, it is. I'd welcome an oversized version without the dot-matrix images, too.
marking as read even though this isnt someting one reads front to back.
a small, traveling companion to ancient UK sites, perfect companion for backpackers but to me just a nice way to find more folk horror and live vicariously not being able ro visit myself the places listed. informative, it breaks it down into 9 categories (witchcraft, portents, demons, etc.) among the 3 countries. reading about the Lambton Wyrm as i finished Stoker's "Lair" is how I'll be using this as travelling companion without traveling. if you think this is yr shit, it is. I'd welcome an oversized version without the dot-matrix images, too.
April 9, 2022
Great guide to finding standing stones, reading about local folklore, literary and filming locations for books, film & TV on magic & horror. I'm less interested in places modern occultists hung out, but the majority of this book is fascinating.
August 12, 2024
Need a jumping-off point for your new down-the-rabbit-hole historical obsession? This is it, baby. A little pocket guide to interesting stories and places, with entries short enough to read on your coffee break, but detailed enough to fuel your later online search for weirdness.
May 22, 2022
not very thorough
July 4, 2023
'HELLEBORE is a UK-based small press devoted to British folk horror and the occult.' - from their website
I loved this travel guide!
#UniteAgainstBookBans #fREADom
I loved this travel guide!
#UniteAgainstBookBans #fREADom
December 11, 2023
This is fun, it's just like an expanded form of the zine organised by regional maps. Definitely nice to have a nose and see what's near you or your mates. Nice glossy illustrated pages as usual.
April 29, 2024
Entertaining and nicely designed.
December 12, 2024
I've already made a list of attractions I'm planning on seeing during my next tour of the UK!
June 9, 2025
An excellent resource for all thing Occult. Makes me want to quit my job and fly over seas and spend the rest of my days wandering the English countryside.
July 3, 2025
A handy little guide, but the sections devoted to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were embarrassingly brief.
August 28, 2025
Love this book. Using it while traveling all around the UK and learning so much!
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews