I watch a foot step through a doorway. The walls of this place are crumbling and bare, lit by candles sitting on pipes, next to rubble bags, and in front of propped up mirrors. We are in a cellar, namely that of Billie Dibb’s house. I know this from asking her, and admittedly I know where to look because I have watched her film a few times, the way to work out that by turning 180 degrees, you can catch Billie’s entrance. Filmed using a 360 degree camera, Billie Dibb has made her New Year Ritual virtual, available to be watched online. It’s interesting, being in this decrepit, enclosed space. What I expect of this ceremony, calling upon the elements of earth, fire and water, seems constricted beneath a house. I can’t help but imagine the weight of the rooms above pressing on the ceiling, beneath which Billie draws on ancient practice and modern technology. Billie’s bare feet and shoulders in the cold cellar of this Manchester house make me shiver, imagining the familiar cold floor and cool damp walls. Nature is seeping into the foundations of this house, I can almost feel the layers of concrete and soil pressing against these subterranean walls. 

She settles in our straight-forward view, after calling upon the elements. At one point, a spider scuttles through the frame, descending its web mid-air. We get a sense of simultaneous participation and disruption here; Billie has come down to the cellar to be in a space that is private and detached, among the ecosystems that inhabit the subterranean worlds of Victorian Mancunian homes. However, her bringing of light and motion change that world, the spiders’ love of dark damp stillness interrupted. She smiles as she burns her letter, the spider floats through our field of vision, like a cell caught against our eye. Our position as observer is cemented, the technology through which we watch this ritual ever more apparent. I think that the spider knows that what watches it is not human, I reason that that is why it comes so close to our vantage point. It’s interesting, the way that a camera has become so entrenched with the act of thought. I feel constricted in this moment, unable to satisfy the arachnophobic urge to jolt away. Instead, we stay put and wait for it to disappear. This is the spider’s space, after all. 

From the ashy dirt on the floor of the room, Billie draws Wiccan symbols on the walls of the cellar. I think about the next owners of this house, whenever they may come, finding the remnants of this ceremony on the walls beneath their home. What will they think? They may feel a sense of unsafety in the symbols, not knowing what they mean or why they are there. Maybe they will video themselves finding them, upload it to YouTube with the title ‘Satanic symbols in the basement of our new home?!’. Perhaps they will begin to convince themselves that the sounds of old pipes are spirits attached to the shapes in the cellar. Billie participates in a mythology with her marking of the walls, consciously or not. The homemade-ness of this film gives it a found footage feel, the recording of this ritual exemplifying the echoes left by our actions, reverberating between the four walls of this space. 

 Borrowing from a 2000s indie-grunge horror aesthetic, Billie’s recording pulls on several horror-ified motifs, namely witchcraft, basements, darkness, fire, and home recordings (although the techy-ness of a 360 camera offsets this). The potential for fear here, borne from not knowing, tethers us to mythology, more specifically the mythology surrounding witchcraft. This mythology runs deep, a rich vein which spreads through the history books. In 18th century East Sussex, Holly trees were left to protrude from hedgerows to stop Witches from running along the top of them. The Witches of English folklore are absolute outsiders, operating in irreconcilable opposition to the behavioural code of English society. Witchcraft as an outsiders’ practice remains a spectral association, the 18th century belief that witches ran along hedgerows demonstrating the terror of pastoral boundaries being breached or, perhaps more frighteningly, disregarded. In Billie’s film, we are in opposition to the idea of ‘outside’ - we occupy a close inside space within her family home. Billie’s ritual, as told by her symbols, invites rebirth and blessing, healing and self realisation. As we crouch in her cellar bathed in candlelight, the potential for a fearful mythology feels calmed, salved by the consideration of Billie’s practice. After being invited to protect this circle, our moveable position invites participation and inclusion, opposing the night-flights of England’s imagination. 

 In a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it way, we are suddenly plonked in the middle of a mossy, wet field, perched among decomposing tree branches and shielding our eyes against the shock of daylight. Billie now wears a coat and shoes, holding the fruit from her ritual and looking for something in the grass. The sky is the type of cold blue that Mancunians know well - the 3pm light of January’s premature evenings. I recognise the landscape immediately to be one of Manchester’s manmade natural spaces, Cholrton Ees, a rubbish dump restored to a sprawling wetland/ woodland/ flood land/ meadow, bleeding out from the Mersey at its heart. This is a series of fields used by dog walkers and teenagers alike, a site of clean air for South Manchester. Billie told me that she once came across a Wiccan New Year ceremony taking place in the Ees as a child, out with her mother. She returns for this film, and we watch her among the tangle of reeds and fungi. 

 Audio begins to break through, sharp sounds that are like traffic and birds, but at different speeds and very loud, quick, thin and rough. There is that sense of echoes again, the memory that sometimes things break through, out of order and between layers of time. Billie stands up after a while, before disappearing into the trees. We are left to look around, wondering where she has gone. If you look closely, you can see her pale face between some far away trunks. Led by the horror tradition that she references throughout, I find myself spinning the screen around, half expecting a jump scare to finish us off. There isn’t one, we are just left alone in the field, a vague sense that Billie might now be watching us. Or not. With her leaving, the ritual is no longer accessible to us, although it is not necessarily over. Who knows - maybe we could argue that it never really ends, that the circle isn’t ever really closed.  The film does end, however, as it must, our screen becomes black and I am no longer in the geography where I grew up. From the digital image of the outdoors that Billie conjured for us, I am left with my laptop screen and some questions. I message Billie on instagram, and ask if I could write about the film for Tundra. She says yes, and tells me about the symbols and what the ritual meant for her. Witchcraft in this film doesn’t seem alternative or scary, in fact it seems quite the opposite. Moveable and unmastered, Billie’s film documenting her new year ritual feels like something she simply wanted to do. In witchcraft’s politicised and moralised history, Billie’s motivation of healing and rebirth feels everyday and relatable, and something that I want too. We are taken on a journey in this film, from the manmade to nature and back again. To reiterate her earlier whisper: protect this circle.