The Horsingdon Transmissions No.36: In Memoriam

Metropolitan modernity at the edges of desolation, as the eerie manifests at the foremost extremities of Greater London. Here, the rarely used A403 Southcote Road (by which one finds one's way to the villages of Dedham and Witchford in the county of Buckhinghamshire) intersects with the borders of Boreham Park: once the grounds of Boreham Mansion, now overgrown and in an advanced state decrepitude and ruination, and with a befuddled and strange history.

In his final book, Mark Fisher notes that the category of the eerie,

'Like the weird...is also fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand  the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in  landscapes emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?..,The eerie concerns the fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something? The unseeing eyes of the dead; the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac - these provoke a sense of the eerie, just as surely as an abandoned village or a stone circle do...The eerie also entails a disengagement from our current attachments...[a] detachment from the urgencies of the everyday. The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.'

Such is nature of the eerie as it is all-too-often encountered in the borough of Horsingdon.