Stephen Holder — Writing
The Wild
Margin
Wild creatures, old stories, and the folklore buried in the British landscape. Published on Substack.
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Latest issue
The Lonely Pilgrim
A stork crossing the sky with thoughts of longing and melancholy. He has been travelling so long that the need to land has become theoretical. He climbs a thermal and the earth tilts away, a slow movement of his wings, a motion without effort, more like breathing, more like something older than that.
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The Otter: The Water Dog
In the 1970s nearly all otters had disappeared from England. The rivers were poisoned, the fish were gone. Then the chemicals were banned, the water cleared, and the otters came back — quietly, when the river was worth living in again.
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The Gannet: Built for One Thing
Britain's largest seabird drops from thirty metres and hits the water at sixty miles an hour. Every part of the bird is the solution to a problem. The problem being: how do you hit the sea like a missile and come back up with a fish?
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The Raven: Mythology, Folklore, Memory
Odin kept two ravens — Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory. The raven wasn't a symbol of death in those traditions. It was a symbol of knowledge and of witnessing. The old stories knew this long before science caught up.
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The Red Squirrel: Last Strongholds
Most people in England have never seen one in the wild. There are around 120,000 red squirrels left in Britain, and three quarters of them are in Scotland. The rest of the country lost them decades ago and barely noticed.
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The Jackdaw: Britain's Most Audacious Bird
Smallest of the corvids, and absolutely aware of it. Sacred in Wales, an omen of death in other counties, a narcissist in ancient Greece. Its scientific name, monedula, is literally a reference to its reputation for stealing.
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The Red Kite: Return from the Dead
By the 1930s fewer than a dozen red kites survived in Britain. Here is how ninety-three birds changed that — one of the most remarkable conservation stories this island has ever produced.
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The Shadow Wolf: Wolves, Folklore and Britain's Lost Wild
On Mac Tire, the British wolf's erasure, and why the absence still has a shape. Something of it stayed behind — in the place names, the folklore, the unease at the edge of certain fields after dark.
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The Adder Stone
A holed stone, worn through by water, was said to have been made by a great mass of serpents writhing together. What people wanted was a piece of the adder's strangeness. The power without the danger.
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The Hare at the Edge of Things
The hare has always lived at the margin. Not quite tame, not quite wild. Present in the field at dusk, gone before you can be sure of what you saw.
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