Clouties is a ghost story filmed at Grovely Wood, in southern Wiltshire, England.
“It’s the same impossibly straight road, haunted, so it’s said, by marching soldiers; and there’s the ditch, curving and wriggling round the edge of it, like the worm which once, so it’s said, ate the village of Steeple Langford…”
The film is made by Andy Thatcher. He writes:
“I spent nine months visiting Grovely Wood, a 2,000 acre registered common and former Norman hunting forest near to Salisbury, Wiltshire. Grovely has a distinctive, slightly eerie atmosphere, is rich in ancient trees and folklore, is traversed by a Roman road and has a complex, fascinating history.
Clouties – a Scots word for offerings hung on trees – brings together folklore and history and explores Grovely affectively. It’s also my first foray into fiction, and has a light folk horror touch. It premiered at the 2022 Biennial Conferance of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland) in Newcastle.”
To find out more about Andy and his work, visit his website.
This article is part of our season on Strange Natures.