50 years is a long time to wait for a book. In September 1956, Alan Garner started writing his debut novel, a children’s book set among the landscape and folklore he’d known all his life – Alderley Edge in Cheshire, 12 miles south of Manchester. First published in 1960, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen followed the adventures of 12 year-old twins, Colin and Susan, on the Edge – “a long-backed hill… high and sombre and black.”
In tribute to the late Band legend, who died in April 2012, this week’s archive feature is a fascinating piece from October 2009’s Uncut (Take 149) – Barney Hoskyns travels to Levon Helm’s Woodstock barn for one of his Midnight Rambles, a musical hogroast-cum-celebration of the drummer’s life and legacy. “To me,” says Helm, “it’s just rock’n’roll…”
________________________________
The announcement came at the very end of last week that the novelist Alan Garner has written the third instalment of a story he began in 1960 with The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen. To anyone raised in the Seventies like me, the news might have prompted a sudden, sharp reconnection with their childhood; The Weirdstone, and its 1963 sequel The Moon Of Gomrath, were touchstones of my adolescent reading.
