You touch on some important points. If folk is your link to permanence, lineage, the transcendent it's fulfiling a vital role. Where I part with many is that, like creationists who see only dragons in the fossil record, I fail to see any historical strata as being more 'real' than now. I can hear echoes back in folk but they're my soundings.

Fantasy is much under appreciated in this country. Peter Woodcock in his book 'This Enchanted Isle' maps British visionaries against the onslaught of (for example) CIA funded Abstract Expressionism which sought to quell the Commie undertones of romanticism with its shamanistic belief in barbed nature and I'd argue we're still under the thrall of tattooed nation 'realism' in TV and film which is no mirror to England I'd recognise or acknowledge. It's a top down hegemony that only looks like it's bottom up folk work.

The important thing is that the Imagined Village contains imagination and it isn't a wobbly line of spurious deduction and cod proofs. I trust my imagination to feed back what's 'right' without pecking orders or informed mediation.