Goodnight. ‘Hark! is that a horn I hear, In cloudland winding sweet And bell-like clash of bridle-rein, And silver-shod light feet? Is it the elfin laughter Of fairies riding faint and high, Beneath the branches of the moon, Straying through the starry sky?’ ~ Walter de La Mare~ see alt text.

Up north, a goddess dons her wolfskin and leaves her orchard to make the seasons change each year. Our 52nd #darkspringtide tale is a strange little story of things always changing and still remaining the same. But read it for yourself below 🎨 Rachel Gillig

Goodnight. ‘The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness— The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.’ ~Plath The Moon: third day, Secrets of the stars, 1922.

"The town lay hollow under the new moon. The old mines had emptied. The hearths had grown cold. The young had gone to seek coin in far cities, and the old had gone to dust. Only the owl returned." www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...

Frances Featherstone

“The contemplation of beauty causes the soul to grow wings.” (Plato, attr.) 🎨 “Contemplation” (1847) - Franz Xaver Winterhalter, #BOTD 1805

Wyrdlings! #EarthDay falls on a #WyrdWednesday this year and we celebrate the planet with: “Wyrdly Beautiful Places, Wyndrous Creatures and Wynderful Plants!" as this week’s topic! Come, share your tales and celebrate with us 🌍🌏🌎

3.05 am Owl eyes Bat wings Moon dance Night things - Siana Bangura #OwlishMonday

In the week before Walpurgis Night, the owl came one last time to the lost town of Stolberg on the foot of the Harz mountains to remember. Our 51st #arkstringtide story is a little tale for #owlishmonday. Read it below. 🎨 Craig Kosak

Goodnight. ‘Mostly it is a pale face hovering in the afterdraught of the spirit, making both ends meet on a scream. It is the breath of the churchyard, the forming of white frost in a believer, when he would pray; it is soft feathers camouflaging a machine.’ ~ R S Thomas, Barn Owl. #OwlishMonday

Goodnight. ‘I stand beneath the mystic moon. An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, Exhales from out her golden rim, And softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top, Steals drowsily and musically Into the universal valley.’ ~ Poe. 🖼️ New Moon, Isaak Brodsky.

“I shall be pinch’d to death.” (“The Tempest” 5.1) 🎨 Arthur Rackham, from Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb, 1909 #shakespearesunday

On the second Sunday after Easter, Misericordias Domini, the artist met a hare outside Nuremberg. In a way, the hare would stay with him for the rest of his life. Read more about Albrecht and the hare in our 50th #darkstpringtide tale below. 🎨 Hans Hoffmann (after 1576)

"I'm not being horrible Edmond Dorf," I said a little louder. "You don't have to shout," said Jean, "and I'm afraid the travel vouchers and tickets are ordered. Berlin has been told to expect Edmond Dorf." ~ Funeral in Berlin (1964), Len Deighton. #BookWormSat #Berlin #MichaelCaine

‘The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.’ — Thomas Hardy, 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' (1891) #BookWormSat

‘Half-past three, The lamp sputtered, The lamp muttered in the dark. The lamp hummed: 'Regard the moon, La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory.’ ~ Eliot 🖼️ Maria Clara Eimmart, 1697.

"Girls had met the Virgin Mary in the grove talking to them and only the bravest boys would gather twigs there on the eve of May Day. One or the other did not return from that venture over the years, so the stories went. And neither did Elin." www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...

As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound, And the waves and the thunders, made silent around, Leave the wind to its echo. – P. B. Shelley, 'A Vision Of The Sea' 1820. He died in shipwreck in 1822. #booksky #art Ivan Aivazovsky

There is a birch grove near a village by the Klarälven in Värmland and it is considered uncanny, because a Skogsrå is said to dwell there. Young Elin Vinter seems to have met her one evening in April, a long time ago - read her story in our 49th #darkspringtide tale below. 🎨 Lisa van Meter

‘(A)nd at length found myself…within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.’ ~ Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. #BookWormSat

#BookWormSat "Truth has many faces and the truth is like the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive at the Holy Isle of Eternity ..." Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Mists of Avalon 🎨Kimsol [DeviantArt]

"buildings or places of note...real or imagined" #bookwormsat Fortress of Solitude, Doc Savage no.23. By Kenneth Robeson. April 1968, cover art by James Bama. #booksky "It was also too bad that John Sunlight was destined to be the man who found the Strange Blue Dome."

"places of note" #bookwormsat - certainly not a safe place to go swimming alone Creature from the Black Lagoon by Vargo Statten. 1954, cover by John Richards. #booksky

#BookWormSat "They [Marabar Caves] are like nothing else in the world, a glimpse of them makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely, without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen ..." E M Forster - A Passage to India

6:30pm TODAY on @BBCRadio4Extra From 2023, Omnibus 📻 “A Tomb with a View” The 2020 book “A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards” by Peter Ross, abridged by Anna Magnusson Read by Andy Clark #BookchatWeekly #BookwormSat #BookSky

#WorldHeritageDay & #BookWormSat: Glanmore National Historic Site—ornate, historic, and quietly haunted. Whispers of Harriet Phillips, unseen footsteps, and shadowy figures keep this Belleville landmark steeped in folklore. Link to my #GlanmoreHouse blog niftybuckles.wordpress.com/2022/10/13/g...

For #WorldHeritageDay & #BookWormSat: Green Gables Heritage Place, PEI—where Anne of Green Gables first bloomed and Avonlea still feels just around the bend. I’ve returned time and again; the charm never fades.

#BookWormSat #WorldHeritageDay Fortress of Louisbourg, Cape Breton NS 18th-century French fortress (reconstructed); site of sieges in Anglo-French wars; local ghost folklore (White Lady on ramparts, sorrowful French soldier). Visited every summer as a child; my dad, a #WW2 Navy Veteran, loved it!

“... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” (Emily Brontë)  🎨 Greenwood #bookwormsat

I asked Hank Williams 'how lonely does it get?' Hank Williams hasn't answered yet. But I can hear him coughing all night long about a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song -Leonard Cohen #BookWormSat

#BookWormSat „Im ganzen entsprach das Schloss, wie es sich hier von der Ferne zeigte, K.s Erwartungen.“ *** „Altogether the castle, as seen in the distance, lived up to K.'s expectations.“ ✍️Kafka, Das Schloss / The Castle

In Andrzej Sapkowski's "The Witcher" book series, Kaer Morhen (corruption of Elder Speech: Caer a'Muirehen, meaning Keep of the Elder Sea) is an old keep where witchers of the School of the Wolf used to be trained. #BookWormSat 🧵

#BookWormSat „It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.“ ✍️Frank Herbert, Dune 📷 Château Gaillard of Richard Lionheart,Normandie

Some slock they must hiv hin on them, haevan man-shorn rock fae quarry tae dig, their own hand’s deueen hewn intae the face o it… —Ingrid Leonard, “Maeshowe – I” from SOUND OF AN ICEBERG: New Writing Scotland 37 (ASL, 2019) #BookWormSat #WorldHeritageDay #poem #poetry asls.org.uk/publications...

Silo is a dystopian series of post-apocalyptic science fiction books by American writer Hugh Howey. The story takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity clings to survival in the Silo, a self-sustaining subterranean city with 144 floors. #BookWormSat 🧵

“Oh if I were but in my own bed in the old house…And the wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel it-it comes straight off the moor-do let me have one breath!” Wuthering Heights- Emily Brontë #BookWormSat 🖼️ = photo from 2009 BBC miniseries

...high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more; So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose - Wordwsorth, King's College Chapel, Cambridge #BookWormSat

“As they drew near the end of their journey, her impatience for a sight of the abbey returned in full force, and every bend in the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen #BookWormSat 🖼️ = Apley Priory

“…the great globe itself...” Shakespeare, THE TEMPEST, 4.1 @shakespearesglobe.bsky.social #ShakespearesGlobe #BookWormSat #WorldHeritageDay

Arkham Asylum- located in Gotham City, first appearing in Batman (1974) Based on H.P. Lovecraft fictional city of Arkham, MA #BookWormSat 🖼️ = Mikel Janin, Batman vol 3, 2016

#BookWormSat "Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine ..." Henry James - in a letter, 1869

I pulled all my mother’s expectations with me, like a child’s kite, giddy with stir of spring… —Lynn Valentine, “St Kilda Crossing” from DON’T. EVEN. ASK. TOO. HOT. New Writing Scotland 42 (ASL, 2024) #BookWormSat #WorldHeritageDay #poem #poetry asls.org.uk/publications...

#BookWormSat Thomas Hood's book length poem, with illustrations by Herbert Railton, 'The Haunted House' (1895) earned praise from Poe, especially the stanza 'O'er all there hung a shadow & a fear, A sense of mystery, the spirit daunted, And said as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is Haunted.'

‘This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.’ ~ Mervyn Peake. #BookWormSat

‘The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled.’ ~ Peake @racheldeering.bsky.social here for the rest of a bricks and mortar #BookWormSat 🖼️ Charles W Stewart

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world.” ‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all….’ Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY #BookWormSat

To someone standing in the nave, looking down the length of the church toward the east, the round window would seem like a huge sun exploding into innumerable shards of gorgeous color. Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth #BookWormSat

#BookWormSat Places of note, real or imagined The House of Cthulhu (1973) by Brian Lumley. One of his Primal Land stories, blending his own ancient sword-and-sorcery setting with the weird fiction mythos of other authors. Title story in this 1991 collection. Art credit in alt text.

You know sometimes he walks four hours together Here in the lobby. Polonius, Shakespeare, HAMLET, 2.2 #BookWormSat #Helsingør #Elsinore #WorldHeritageDay