Episide 7: Beyond The Wicker Man Effect

In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca speaks with Sophie Parkes-Nield, writer, researcher, and folklorist, whose work explores how calendar customs and intangible cultural heritage are represented in contemporary fiction.

The conversation begins with Sophie’s practice-based PhD research, which she is now developing into a monograph for University of Exeter Press. Her work asks why writers are so often drawn to folkloric material, what calendar customs do within fiction, and how rituals, processions, seasonal gatherings, and local traditions can shape character, plot, place, time, and belonging.

One of the central ideas in the episode is what Sophie describes as “The Wicker Man effect”, the tendency to frame calendar customs as eerie, insular, sinister, or strange. While folk horror has created a rich and compelling visual language around ritual and tradition, Sophie invites us to look more closely at what these customs mean to the people and communities who keep them alive.

For many people, calendar customs are ways of marking time, remembering place, gathering community, honouring continuity, and locating oneself within a longer story. They may be joyful, odd, beautiful, contentious, moving, inconvenient, funny, or deeply meaningful, and often they are several of these things at once.

Rebecca and Sophie discuss Morris dancing, processions, Padstow May Day, the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the Whittlesea Straw Bear, invented customs in fiction, and the ethics of writing with folklore.

At the heart of the conversation is the question: how can writers approach living traditions with imagination and sensitivity, without treating them as decorative atmosphere or easy shorthand for danger?

The episode also touches on Sophie’s work with the National Folklore Survey, a project exploring folkloric belief and custom in England today, from ghosts and magpies to Halloween, Bonfire Night, and the rituals people continue to carry in everyday life.

This is a conversation about folklore as lived experience, calendar customs as forms of belonging, and fiction as a place where tradition, memory, community, and imagination can meet.

Bio

Sophie Parkes-Nield is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England project (nationalfolkloresurvey.co.uk). She completed her PhD in 2024 at Sheffield Hallam University where she is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing. A book based on her thesis is currently under contract from University of Exeter Press. She also teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Arts University. Writing as Sophie Parkes, her debut novel, Out of Human Sight, was published in 2023. sophieparkes.co.uk 

Links

Sophie’s Website: www.sophieparkes.co.uk

Instagram: @sophieparkeswriter

The Folklore Survey: www.nationalfolkloresurvey.co.uk