I (as I mentioned in the last interview) had become deeply interested in the connections between story and place, and ‘restorying’ the landscape. He settled in the UK with the question: ‘What is the white-man’s dreaming?’ as his central concern. Eric came to storytelling and landscape through his work as a community artist with Aboriginal peoples in the Australian outback. How have you done that?Įric and I have been running these courses for more than twenty-five years. Looking at the brochure every year I’m always amazed at how you manage to keep things fresh and rarely repeat. Though some years we’ve drawn on a more agrarian mythology – The ‘Passion of the Corn’ explored Neolithic myth, ‘Frost and Fire’ explored the cyclic seasonal rituals… and we’ve run several courses where we’ve delved into the Saxon/Norse pantheon.

The courses that Eric and I run at Ty Newydd, because of their location and its surrounding landscape, inevitably lean towards the Celtic end of the storytelling repertoire. Hugh and Eric attempt to lift the Gronw stone on an early Ty Newydd storytelling retreat in the 1990's. Of course those distinctions don’t mean much today when very few people are engaged in farming… but they inform the consciousness of place on some deep level. North Wales is mountainous, rugged, a herding culture, traditionally bound by cycles of grazing on high and low pasture. The two landscapes, East Anglia and Wales, reflect that mix… they are both homelands, I feel comfortable in both.Įast Anglia is farmland, largely arable, fertile, traditionally bound by the agricultural cycles of ploughing, harvesting etc. When I think about the two dragons that Merlin reveals to King Vortigern on Dinas Emrys, the red dragon of the Celts and the white dragon of the Saxons, I think of the mix in the blood that runs in my veins: the red corpuscles and the white. Let’s begin by thinking about those two very separate landscapes, of Norfolk, where you live, and North Wales and the Lleyn Peninsula, where for the last twenty five years, you and fellow storyteller Eric Maddern, and year after year of eager students – which four times included me – have been exploring landscape and myth at the entirely wonderful Ty Newydd Writers Centre. Hugh, Olivia Ross, Rob Harbron, John Dipper and Chris Wood in front.

Meantime I hope you enjoy this second chat as much as I did. For those of you who particularly enjoyed the selection from Hugh's picture archive last time, I promise you a few more crackers, beginning with the one below.! And if you did miss the first part, you can find it here by backtracking through the archive, or simply typing in my name. The second part of my interview with storyteller, writer, poet and lyricist Hugh Lupton, carries on the theme of landscape in more detail and relates it particularly to the landscapes of Mid -Wales and Norfolk, and Hugh’s books on John Clare and The Mabinogion.

Norfolk Folk Tales by Hugh Lupton