There are mushrooms in the top field again, now that the rain has returned. Not the kind you’d cook with, not unless you fancy a long sit down and a serious conversation with your ancestors.
It’s easy to dismiss psychedelics and mind-altering chemicals as a modern, urban invention, something developed in a lab in the Sixties and leapt upon by those seeking to drop out of functional society. If you start to delve behind the sofa cushions of history you can start to find snippets of evidence, hints that the rural folk were tripping long before Timothy Leary rolled up a tab and strapped himself in for launch.
Visions in the Vicarage
It’s easy to forget how much of rural folklore reads like a fever dream. The stories of witches flying through the night sky, of faerie rings that steal away both children and time, of beasts and battles and visions – it all sounds like something dreamt on a damp hillside with the wrong mushroom in your stomach. But there is more than metaphor in those stories, and maybe we should see it as part of our shared ethnobotanical culture.
The plants and fungi that grow in our fields and forests have long had the power to bend minds and twist truths. We’ve just forgotten how to read the signs – and are too quick to assume that psychedelics were invented somewhere around the back end of the Summer of Love, probably by a man called Dave in a kaftan.
I think we have to look deeper than folklore, deeper even than chemistry – it’s another footnote in a much longer story, written in spores and whispers, and largely edited out of the official rural narrative.
Rudolf’s Dealer
Take the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. The most cartoonish of the lot, all red cap and white spots, as if drawn by a child. But beneath that cheerful facade lies a pharmacological hand grenade. Across Lapland and the boreal forests of Scandinavia and Siberia, the mushroom has long been entwined with ritual and story. Reindeer were known to seek it out deliberately – sniffing, rooting, and finally eating it before bounding about in wild, spasmodic joy. Local shamans took note.
Knowing the direct effects were often violently purgative, they devised a workaround. The reindeer’s liver filtered the worst of the ibotenic acid, converting it into muscimol – a more stable psychoactive compound. By drinking the urine of the intoxicated animals, the shamans could partake in the trip without the vomiting.
From there, the visions began. Spiralling patterns, contact with spirits, and journeys through layers of the sky. The red-and-white colour scheme, the concept of flying through the air, the animal guides – it all begins to sound suspiciously like the ingredients for a Christmas myth. One theory even suggests that shamans, clad in red and white ceremonial dress, would enter the yurt or tent of a household through the smokehole during midwinter rituals – delivering the gifts of vision and connection, not toys and tinsel. The idea of flying reindeer and chimney-traversing, scarlet-clad gift-bringers isn’t just whimsy; it might be the residue of a very real, very altered state.
Berserkers, Balms, and Botany
Our druids, if they ever dabbled in such things, left no recipe books behind. We have very little knowledge of what our deep ancestors did with plants and fungi as, unlike with bones and shells, very little physical record remains. Some fragments of tale and myth have survived, but as the monks and the Church were the keepers of written record they were selective in their narrative – most of our plant-lore was lost, or only held orally.
In Norse and Saxon accounts, biochemically-enhanced warriors went berserk – biting their shields and howling, immune to pain and fear. Henbane and fly agaric both reduce startle response and dull pain. Add fasting, chanting, drumming, and a strong belief in your own deathlessness and a place on the guest list in Valhalla, and you have yourself a very convincing god complex. Or, at least, a very dangerous man in a fur cloak.
Then there’s the mandrake – Mandragora officinarum. Half plant, half myth. Said to scream when pulled from the earth, loud enough to kill. The old texts say you should tie it to a dog and let the poor beast do the work while you plug your ears. The root resembles a little man, and perhaps it speaks to some primal part of us, like the way we see faces in trees. But it’s the chemistry that counts. Mandrake root carries scopolamine and hyoscyamine – powerful hallucinogens that straddle the line between medicine and madness.
In one modern account, a tincture made from dried mandrake root – just a half dropper held beneath the tongue – sent the user into what he later called “erotic dementia.” He described falling asleep and waking throughout the night into different realities, his mind cast adrift into frightening and seductive visions. Psychotic mantras echoed through his brain. He was certain he was awake, though he knew he wasn’t. Eyes open, but dreaming. Erotic. Frightening. Strange. And, by his own words, “worth repeating.”
The mandrake doesn’t offer a gentle nudge into the mystical. It grabs your collar, drags you sideways through the undergrowth, and leaves you wondering if you’ve come back the same.
Witches, they said, used it in their flying ointments, mixing it with fats and rubbing it on their skin. Along with henbane, belladonna, and hemlock, these concoctions didn’t just create visions – they created journeys. The sort where you believed yourself flying through the night to a sabbath on a far-off hill. A mind opened too far, and perhaps never quite closed again.
The Bishop and the Pins
My own ancestor, Bishop John Prideaux, found himself dragged into the margins of such a tale in 1606. He gave testimony during the infamous Star Chamber case of Anne Gunter, a young woman who claimed to be tormented by witches and possessed by devils. She spat pins, spoke in tongues, and drew quite a crowd. John Prideaux – Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford at the time – witnessed her torments and lent his theological gravitas to the affair. But the whole thing turned out to be a hoax, orchestrated by Anne’s father to settle village scores. Still, the pins were real, and so were the hallucinations – manufactured or not, they spoke to a time when belief and perception blurred frighteningly easily, and where magick was still recognised by the church.
The Gunter affair wasn’t unique. Across Europe, witchcraft accusations often came laced with visions, convulsions, and behaviours that now read like case studies in toxicology. Ergot, belladonna, henbane, mandrake – each had a place in the rural pharmacopoeia, capable of inducing flights of the soul or full-blown delirium. Some historians argue that panics like Salem, the dancing plagues of medieval Europe, or the possessions of French convents may have owed more to contaminated bread than covenant with the Devil.
The line between sacred vision and poisoned grain, between trial and trip, was vanishingly thin.
One for the Road (or the Train)
The liberty cap – Psilocybe semilanceata – still grows quietly in the sheep fields of Wales and northern England, often unnoticed among the clumps of grass and dung. It’s the most widespread psychedelic mushroom in Europe, and arguably the most potent.
As with most plants and fungi, there’s little in the way of hard archaeological proof of ritual use in Britain – but there are suggestive signs elsewhere. A Bronze Age gold cap found in Germany has been reinterpreted by some researchers as a possible depiction of Psilocybe semilanceata. In Iron Age Spain, ceramic vessels have yielded trace compounds consistent with psychedelic use. And across Europe, the folklore of fairy rings and enchanted mushrooms mirrors the classic effects of psilocybin: time dilation, music heard from nowhere, paralysis, and visions of otherworldly beings.
Britain’s first reliably documented encounter wasn’t carved into standing stones, but jotted into the notes of a London chemist. In 1799, a man and his four children picked mushrooms from Green Park and cooked them into a meal. Soon after, they began to laugh uncontrollably, their pupils dilated, and their sense of reality took leave. Augustus Everard Brande recorded the episode, and naturalist James Sowerby later confirmed the culprit: liberty caps, then listed under a different name in his 1803 guide.
The quiet trade in mushrooms never really went away. I know someone who funded an entire summer in Ibiza with nothing but a flush from the fields behind what was then the local psychiatric hospital. Dried in an airing cupboard, portioned into sandwich bags, and sold to pub-goers who had no idea they were buying into a 10,000-year-old sacrament.
It’s an opportunist’s game, too. I once spent a day driving a photographer around a country estate on assignment for a broadsheet. Misty autumn light, low clouds, deer browsing in the parkland – and, dotted along the grass, liberty caps. He broke off from composing a landscape shot, dropped to his knees, and began gathering them like a starving man at a harvest. By that evening he was on a train back to London, a camera bag stuffed with lenses, memory cards, and enough organic Class A material to fuel a vision quest in Zone 2.
Raveageddon
By the 1970s, liberty caps had made their return – not in sacred groves but in free parties. Raves in Welsh valleys, hand-painted signs pointing down forestry tracks and Transit vans of dubious safety. When the pills were scarce, the mushrooms were abundant. Partygoers would pick them fresh from the hills, brew them into tea, and dance until the trees started to breathe.
One friend recalled a night where half of her theatre group ended up in a hedgerow, half-naked and howling, the rest off their tits and absolutely certain that the colour orange was laughing at them from a hawthorn bush.
It wasn’t a return to tradition, exactly, but a reconnection with something older and stranger than modern nightlife.
A kind of paganism for the disaffected (and possibly disinherited).
These were not spiritual quests in the traditional sense – there were no chants or sacraments, no rites besides the lighting of roll-ups and the sharing of bottles. But something happened out there in the dark, beneath the beeches and birches and sodium-orange glow of stolen road lamps. Something closer to a communion with the wild, however temporary. The mushrooms didn’t care if you wore a robe or a bomber jacket. They just opened the same door they always had, even if all you found on the other side was another version of yourself.
Things Seen in Glades
And then there’s the folklore. The fairy rings. The time slips. The stories of people stepping into a glade and returning days later, unaware that they’ve been gone. The idea that the Otherworld is only ever a toadstool away. It’s gloriously romantic nonsense, some of it – but not all. Folklore is a cultural memory, preserved through exaggeration. Something happened, once. Enough to warrant a story.
Some stories are stranger still. The Wild Hunt – ghostly riders galloping across the night sky – has haunted British folklore for centuries. Sometimes it’s a warning of war, sometimes a portent of death. But what if it’s a memory of starvation-fuelled hallucinations, of fever dreams triggered by fungal toxins or madness borne of winter isolation? The line between legend and perception wavers, especially when the winds howl and your nerves are overstretched.
Then there’s Anglo-Saxon leechcraft – early medicine bound up in charms and chants. In texts like Bald’s Leechbook or the Lacnunga, herbs like betony, mugwort, and St John’s Wort were recommended alongside ritual speech. It wasn’t just the plant that healed, but the words spoken over it. A kind of pharmacological prayer, a keyphrase to unlock the door to the other place. Among these old cures are plants now known to affect mood and vision. You took the herb, and you said the words – and you waited to see what might arrive
The Hedge Remembers
Today, psychedelics are having a revival – and funding. Researchers speak of neurogenesis and trauma therapy. Microdosing has made its way to commuter trains and corporate boardrooms, sparking creativity and re-balancing brain chemistry. They are even being used to treat PTSD, to take the user back to that time and place and allow them to take back control of their own memories.
What some call fringe today was once folklore, and before that, it was simply knowledge – passed hand to hand, over hedges and under breath. The country folk knew their pharmacopeia well enough to curse or cure, and not always with the vicar’s approval. Over time, the Church sought to distance people from these plant-based sacraments, replacing their chemical ecstasies with liturgical ones – the visions of saints instead of the hallucinations of hedgerow brews. We’ve paved over much of that with bylaws and broadband, and perhaps with good reason.
But the hedgerow remembers. The mushrooms are still there, quietly enduring among the sheep droppings and leaf litter. They do not beckon. They do not warn. They have no ethereal aura. They just are – as they always have been. And for those who go looking, it might not be visions they find, but the thin and uncertain line between past and present, sense and story. One best approached with respect.
And perhaps, these days, a solicitor on speed dial.
