It may be easier to say what Bardskull is not. It’s not a memoir. It’s not poetry. It’s not a compendium of myths and ancient wisdom. It is, rather, all of these things, plus some faux-naive drawings, loosely structured around an autofictional account of several journeys that oral storyteller Martin Shaw seems to have undertaken on Dartmoor over the course of 101 days, a kind of wilderness journey. Or in Shaw-speak: “I walked out one summer morning and barely ceased till St George’s Day of the next year … These are words from the rough, from the stomp. Things hurtled through me, old things. I am not the same.”
There is certainly a tremendous urgency to the account. “I know we are moving fast here,” writes Shaw. “But this mad jumble is where I live. I abide in a place where a Greek hero will resemble my mother at the same moment magical sows from Welsh myth glower through the rain.” We get occasional glimpses of real, live other people – “Tony of Scorriton says you can’t trust cider without some cow shit in it, scudding around at the bottom of the glass” – but essentially this is a deep descent into Shaw’s inner self, into the murk of memory and ideas and reflections, mixed and blended into a kind of thick mystical soup.
