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Welcome! This blog serves as a temporary hub for research that circles around an is about the life of Douglas Traherne Harding. Because of this temporaryness, and until the research finds a more permanent home, the material presented is constantly undergoing reconfiguration - which may be echoed in it’s fragmentary form.

Research was first utilised at The Well; an exhibition developed through a year-long program at Open School East, alongside many other interesting works. The material for this first iteration was collected and displayed by George Harding, with support from Lou Lou Sainsbury, Chloe Ashley and Sara Trillo - amongst many others.

Subsequent projects, works and events that arise through utilising Douglas’ research will also be documented here.

Documentation of the first iteration can be found here. A pdf copy of Douglas Harding Dream Estates can be found here.

“The speaker (player, performer) begins with a description of a landscape; then an aspect or change of aspect in this landscape evokes a varied but integral process (or jogging) of memory, thought, anticipation and feeling, which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the speaker (player, performer) achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem - which often rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood or deepened understanding - a result of the intervening meditation.”

M. H Abrams on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’. Oxford University Press. pp. 527–8. 1965. [edited]

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Profile: Douglas “Traherne” Harding

(12 February 1909 – 11 January 2016)

A child of Shoemakers and Innkeepers, Douglas Harding was born and raised by elders of the Plymouth Brethren – a strict sect of the Christian church. His upbringing was harsh and presented very few opportunities for interaction with those outside of his immediate community. After impressing his tutors with the speed at which learned to read and write, and showing promise in many of his early literary endeavours, Douglas was granted access to various journals and illustrated books. This rare and lucrative material granted him a momentary glimpse of the outside world – and set many things in motion.

When the abrasive nature of his home grew to much, Douglas retreated to the journals he kept, slipping away to a secretive realm, a place of his own making - a shifting landscape, unfettered by the Brethren's grasp.

Upon his twenty first birthday, after finding courage in the mind of another conflicted member of the Brethren, Douglas confronted his community and announced his departure...

Douglas’ Walk & Early Collections

Upon leaving the Brethren Douglas was known to have undertaken an extensive journey by foot across the lower parts of England - leaving a note that illustrated a desire to find himself in thorned bush and ploughed field.Little was known about this journey until a few key fragments of information were recovered from a battered lockbox found trapped under a number of _________. The first section of the archive presented here is split across eight sites that Douglas is now known to have visited. Though each sites relevance is slippery, Douglas’ wandering his way through an on-going revival of folk music in the British Isles, whilst simultaneously being present at a number of the first table top roleplaying games. The archive was built on an exposure to two rigorously active communities - one very much at the forefront of political and social change, the other a underground, subversive network.

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Folkloric Episodes

As more of Douglas’ journals, notebooks and other ephemera are unearthed and documented, whilst other outside perspectives are illuminated, this section of the archive will expand.

Site I J. England’s Garden

Site II The Hill of Vision

Site III Rock Mill

Site IV Warlock & Moeran

Site V The Kyrle

Site VI Fairport House

“Think of Fairport Convention as an old county mansion, its entrance and exit doors permanently open to successive tenants who have passed through, stayed, abandoned it and returned. Some have lived there for most of their lives, some are new, some come knocking on the door again after a turn of travelling out in the world. Each new set of inhabitants may refurbish rooms; the exterior might become a little shabby sometimes; but it’s never quite allowed to tumble in ruins. And the house has now been standing for so long that a whole community has sprung up around it.”

Rob Young on Fairport Convention. ‘Fairport & Electric Folk: Faber Forty-Fives 67′ - 70′. Faber & Faber. pp. 2. 2012

A Space of that coming and going - of ritual renewal. Reforming and redecorating itself around those who interact with it.

Site VII Holst & Noel

Site VIII Vashti & The Road

Site IX A Song Has No Ending

“Only a palace with interior doors / Well painted well gargoyled with multiple floors / Two windows let free this projector machine / And the magical world here appears on the screen / My servants attend me with tricks of the senses / The past and the future and similar tenses.”

The Head. The Incredible String Band ( taken from ‘God’s Holiday’)

Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending. The Incredible String Band. 1970.

An important film (shot by the BBC) that was intended to be a ‘straight laced’ documentary of the band. It was quickly morphed into a theatrical excavation of the bands ethos and influences - tapping into the mystical landscape that they had dug themselves into around the broad fields of ____ - At 1:28+ a dizzying recital formed equally as a setlist and inventory - akin to a Georges Perec text - of the bands influences, that serves as the portal at which to dive, head first, into their fragmentary and wild world. To exhaust and understand their subject.

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The Pirate and the Crystal Ball pt.1 + pt.2.

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Folk Collectors: Variations on Memory

A Selection of English Folk Songs. A. L. Lloyd. 1960.

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A Selection From The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. Various Artists. 1985.

[Both of the above form an important compendium of folk song - in written and sonic form. All of the songs featured on the 85′ album were taken from the ‘The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs’ edited by Ralph Vaughn Williams and A. L. Lloyd - important archivists alongside Cecil Sharp]

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Cecil Sharp’s Collections

> A comprehensive source for information on other folk archivists can be found in the ‘full english’ section of the EFDSS site.

“We haven't all that many fairy ballads, and this (Tam Lin) is by far the finest. It's fairly venerable, it was already printed on a broadside in 1558, and it wasn't new then. It seems to be uniquely Scottish, though there are international folk tales that come near its story; a Greek tale considerably more than two thousand years old tells how Peleus, wanting to marry the sea-nymph Thetis, lay in wait for her in a cave and seized her as she came riding in naked on a harnessed dolphin. She turned herself successively into fire, water, a lion, a snake, even to an ink-squirting cuttlefish, but Peleus “held her tight and feared not”, and in the end she gave in and the Olympian gods all came to the wedding.” ~ A. L. Lloyd’s liner notes

Greek myth can be fucking crazy and should be referenced with care but it keeps popping up in many forms. Here we have an good introduction to protean thinking/being - a notion that will present itself further into the archive, and an introduction to one meeting central to the revival and adaptation of folk music during the 60s.

Tam Lin, Tamlyn and Young Tambling REF

> Fairport’s adaptation & lyrics

> Steeleye Span’s version

“The way in which folk tunes would appear, in slightly different versions (often as settings for completely different worlds) in various parts of the country was a source of fascination for Vaughan-Williams and the other composers and musicologists who were busily collecting tunes.”

Five Variants on “I Bid You Goodnight” REF

A Very Cellular Song. The Incredible String Band. 1968.

“Weaving between styles as divergent as Bahamian funerary music, East Indian incantation and ancient Celtic mysticism, 'A Very Cellular Song' represents a high point in the band's creativity. Handclaps, kazoo, harpsichord and pipes intermingle and morph into each other. If this sounds like dissonance and chaos, it is.” ~ Music Is Rapid Transportation. Bill Smith. p164. 2010.

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