Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty.

It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or story. It is a sequence of incantations and a series of battles.

For each of the three journeys, he walks alone into a forest in the heart of Dartmoor and waits.

What arrives are stories - fragments of myth and folk tale that he has carried within him for decades: the deep myths of Dartmoor itself, tales from distant family members, Arthurian legend, folk tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia.

But these stories and their tellers don't arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. They come to challenge, to undermine, to sow doubt.