Book mini-review: Another Kind of Magic (Mollie Harris, 1971)

Mollie Harris (1971) Another Kind of Magic, Illustrated by John Ward and John Sergeant (republished by Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1985), pp 210.

Mollie Harris peddled her bicycle up, down and around the Cotswold hills in western England some time in Late Antiquity, possibly in the 1940s and 1950s.

She worked, cycled, walked, talked... listened a lot, and obviously kept many notes. Sat under trees and on stone walls. Followed many garden paths. Drank many cups of tea, and not a little beer. Became a writer, and then an actor in TV shows reconstructing the life of rural England.

In modern terms, her work could be called "Action Anthropology".

She writes lightly but the details are real, and the whole of this collection of short episodes is greater than the sum of its parts. Rural England is reconstructed even as it is vanishing in the front of her eyes.

My niece is getting married in a stone "barn" in the Cotswolds sometime soon. It might have been a potato storage shed when this book was written. I hope my attempts to excavate the venue in search of ancient food remains do not interfere with the wedding feast! 

Peter Matthews (Research Cooperative, 7th June, 2018)