In The Dancing Druids (1948) by Gladys Mitchell, the first two chapters depict a group of varsity young men on a cross-country run of the ‘hare and hounds’ type: one in front, the others trying to track him and catch him up. This sport uses town and country routes of varying terrain rather than formal athletics tracks, and is recorded from at least Tudor times, although organised clubs date from the mid-Victorian era. There is a noted Oxford versus Cambridge meeting.
Mitchell sets the scene in a lightly-disguised Dorchester. The lead ‘hound’ takes sightings from the banks of both the Roman amphitheatre there and the nearby great ancient earthwork of Maiden Castle. Mistaking his quarry, he soon gets lost in the Dorset countryside in pursuit of the ‘hare’ and finds himself in lonely, eerie terrain: a wood, though a new plantation, seems dark and brooding; a remote house has a forbidding, disturbing aspect.
The author gives very precise directions (perhaps a bit too detailed), presumably because she is describing a real locality and wants the reader to be able to follow every twist and turn, and she builds up a compelling atmosphere. Some of the route is noted by reference to ancient monuments, including old tracks, bell barrows and standing stones. This opening would work equally well as the sinister beginning to a supernatural story. But soon the obligations of the crime genre cut in and her character stumbles into a murky business.
The lead hound and the ‘hare’, his cousin, go back over the ground the next day and find odd anomalies in time and distance. One of the landmarks they visit, remembered from the night before, is The Dancing Druids, a prehistoric stone circle, based, as Mitchell tells us in a note at the beginning of the book, on the Nine Stones at Winterborne Abbas. The pair become uneasy about the incidents and end up consulting Mitchell’s saurian series sleuth, the psychologist Mrs Bradley. Her secretary, the Amazonian young woman Laura, herself an athlete, is enthralled: ‘You know, I feel I’m going to enjoy this business. There’s a smack of Edgar Allan Poe about it which rather appeals to my sense of the bizarre and the macabre.’ Later, an M.R. James story is also invoked.
Mrs Bradley links the affair to a series of unsolved disappearances in the area which seem to have several things in common, a deft move by the author as it continues the landscape interest while widening the mystery. Laura spends some time studying OS maps armed with a compass, dividers, ruler and protractor. She has a hunch, proved correct, that an ancient trackway links the Dancing Druids with other ancient monuments in a straight line to the sea. It is in fact an 'old straight track', a ley, in Alfred Watkins’ original sense.
Moreover, she notices that the stone circle is the hub from which the circumference of a much larger circle can be drawn which links significant places in the mystery. This is an unusual example of geomancy deployed in a work of popular fiction at a date when interest in this field was somewhat on the wane. As veteran earth mysteries researcher Jimmy Goddard has recently noted: 'When Watkins’ Straight Track Club wound up in the 1940s, leys went out of public consciousness for the most part until 1961' (‘Leys and UFOs’, The Newsletter of the Network of Ley Hunters, Issue 54, Imbolc 2025, pg 1).
The central role of the Dancing Druids is emphasised when Mrs Bradley and Laura and their two athlete clients witness a torchlit ritual there one night, involving processions, strange dancing and chanting, attended not just by the celebrants but by a large crowd of spectators. This, of course, was at a time when pagan ceremonies in public were only acceptable if they were depicted as old folk customs, such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance or the Helston Furry Dance (mentioned here by Mitchell), or could be seen as charmingly eccentric, such as those conducted by the revived Druid orders. There were, however, also clandestine pagan rites by secret covens at the time, as Philip Heselton has shown in his Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival (2000) and similar studies, and he describes one in particular that was based in Dorset. Could Mitchell have heard rumours of this?
It will not be giving too much away, however, to say that the setting among Dorset antiquities and the apparent signs of thriving pagan worship are a diversion from more worldly, criminous conspiracies: the conventions of the form require that. Nevertheless, the sinister, brooding aspects of the landscape, though subjective, are not explained away, nor is the original folklore dismissed, and the novel certainly has affinities with supernatural fiction of the period.
As with an earlier book by her involving antiquities and folklore, The Devil At Saxon Wall (1935), opinion in Glayds Mitchell circles is divided about the quality of The Dancing Druids. In the ‘Best and Worst’ rankings of her 66 novels at the excellent The Stone House tribute website devoted to her work, one has it as her fifth best, one just inside the Top 20, a third puts it about half way, and another 41st, but another has it as her worst but one. That’s a pretty broad range of opinion.
I suspect for a crime fiction aficionado there’s not really enough close, logical detection and the machinations are not sufficiently explained: this is more of a thriller. However, the reader who relishes a clear topographical element in mystery novels, a story they can follow on the map, and those who enjoy a strong sense of the uncanny, will probably see it as one of her most interesting.
(Mark Valentine)
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