Elisabeth Flett
Whatever we do and wherever we be, we’re travelling to the grave…
There are secret and haunted trails to be found across the picturesque countryside of Cumbria, if you know where to look. These are the Corpse Roads, the paths taken for hundreds of years by locals carrying their dead to their final resting place. Storyteller Daniel Serridge and musician Heather Cartwright weave stories and songs together in this evocative and unnerving folkloric journey along these forgotten roads, taking their audience on a winding, wandering walk past country pubs, moonlit ponds, deserted hilltops and unquiet churchyards….
When the audience are first introduced to Daniel Serridge and Heather Cartwright it looks as though the two of them have already made themselves very much at home in their onstage liminal space reality. Dressed in comfortable hiking gear, backpack and guitar close to hand, the two of them drink beer, munch crisps and chat as though we are a pleasant but unnecessary addition to their enjoyable evening at the pub.
It doesn’t take long, however, for Serridge to wryly break the fourth wall and admit that the “half-arsed pub that we’ve got going on here” is pure fantasy. The whisky tumblers hold peach iced tea. The beer is non-alcoholic. Serridge himself must surely have been beginning to sweat already at that point in their performance thanks to his outdoor clothes and knitted hat.
The setting is fake, then, but the history behind the show is very much real. Corpse Roads – or Coffin Roads, as they’re known in Scotland – date from late-medieval times and were often over ten miles long, the weary villagers resting the dead on ‘coffin stones’ along the way as they made their journey to consecrated ground. The Corpse Road is specifically about the folklore surrounding these roads in Cumbria, and whilst there is quite a lengthy ‘audience onboarding’ section at the start so everyone is up to date with Cumbrian folkloristics the show is self-aware about how much information it’s asking us to absorb before the stories begin, with Serridge’s jokes about how “context is always the most exciting part of storytelling” keeping us laughing as well as learning.
The Corpse Road is a show which is unapologetically about the topic of death. Serridge encourages us to think about “the ways we say goodbye to people” as part of this performance, and the two stories our performers share are about people who come to respect the dead and accept the role death plays within their lives.
An overly boastful farmer builds a barn over the local Corpse Road, and is paid a night-time visit by a dripping corpse. A young, grieving drunkard is given an unenviable task by the fae and agrees to drag a dead body towards her final resting place. Both stories are gripping, entertaining – and genuinely quite terrifying. Serridge has a gift for conjuring images of creepy folklore horrors, and his descriptions of a silt-leaking, water-bloated vengeful corpse and a darkly-lit graveyard full of crawling, screaming skeletons in particular will live rent-free in this reviewer’s mind for some time to come. (Particularly late at night.
When I’m trying to sleep and wondering if there’s a corpse waiting outside my bedroom door, getting ready to slide into bed next to me. Does the show budget includes requests from audience members for eldritch horror-induced therapy appointments?)
Daniel Serridge and Heather Cartwright are an excellent onstage duo, with Heather Cartwright’s lyrical guitar playing and sweet, clear vocals adding depth to Serridge’s captivating storytelling. There were a few moments when that storytelling faltered slightly, Serridge’s oratory rhythm hitching due to the stories needing to be a little more settled into his repertoire, but more performances of the show would no doubt ease out the occasional small moments of narrative uncertainty.
The stories told in The Corpse Road are “riddled with men who do not know what they’re meant to do, and silently do as they’re told”. The audience of this show, however, leave knowing exactly what we’re meant to do: appreciate our lives, and acknowledge our dead. It’s a good message, and this is a very good show. Just be prepared to sleep with all the lights on after going to see it.
Performances of The Corpse Road have now concluded at Edinburgh Tradfest 2026.
Recommended Drink: a hearty nip of whisky is highly recommended as a bracing accompaniment to this deliciously creepy show.
Shay Mace
