Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65 

A Hidden Glen

By Ian Grosz:

We returned to a cottage we’d first rented twenty years before. Hardly anything had changed. There were a few modern scatter cushions on the same old armchair; a new washing machine and sink unit, but it was the same bowed, pinewood ceiling and the same, thick stone walls; the heavy lintel above the fireplace; the same broken clock and faded landscape pictures on the walls; the same, old map of the glen hanging by the stairs up to the mezzanine bedroom. On the shelf beneath the sash and case window looking out to the pines that line the rushing burn coming down from the hills, was a guest comments book still with our entries from twenty years previous. We sat there, reading messages from ourselves from another lifetime. 

The cottage was once the laundry for the main house of an estate belonging to the Ogilvy family, hidden away down Glen Prosen with the evocative name of Balnaboth. Like most Highland estates, with farming and shooting no longer bringing in the revenues they once had, many of the properties had been given over to holiday lets. Even the house itself was now on Airbnb; but when we had first come here the family still lived in one of the two main wings. Their dogs would come to the cottage and scratch at the glass panes of the door to take us for a walk in the mornings: an eager west highland terrier named Una and a low flying, long-haired dachshund whose backside was always tangled up with pine twigs and fir cones.  They’d take us on a tour of the grounds, chasing the resident peacocks and barking at the squirrels. The dogs are long-since gone, but the scratches from their morning wake-up call on the glass of the door are still there, revealing themselves when caught in the low autumn light filtering through the trees. 

There was a thick mist when we arrived, the estate’s trees materialising out of the landscape as we followed the long, single-track road that winds its way up the glen from Kirriemuir, a small country town of red sandstone and the birthplace of the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. Barrie had returned frequently to spend some of his holidays away from London in the glens, and was buried in the town’s cemetery. Arriving at the cottage we settled our things; the years rolling back with that curious feeling of never having left. We jammed our weeks’ worth of food into the small fridge and, remembering the dogs, we took a stroll around the grounds to re-familiarise ourselves; the mist clinging to our clothes as we walked back down the track, past the now empty main house with its bright orange-yellow wash of lime rendering and its accumulated memories.

There has been some form of house at Balnaboth since the thirteenth-century, its original name stemming from Baile nam Bochd – the Stead of the Poor – but in its present form is thought to date from 1815 when Donald Ogilvy made a series of improvements, conjoining and adding to earlier buildings after taking over from his father Walter, whose Jacobite brother was exiled in France after the defeat of 1746. Barrie spent time at the house on his retreats from London literary life, meeting here with his ill-fated friend Robert Falcon Scott and later, the Scottish politician Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was the first Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority labour government for a short term in 1924 and again at the turn of the decade. He later headed a coalition government with a conservative majority during the early thirties, leading to his dismissal from the Labour party.

It is odd to think of a socialist being entertained at the tucked-away grand houses of the landed gentry, with associations that included the writer and high society hostess Lady Londonderry, wife of conservative cabinet minister Viscount Castlereagh, Secretary of State for the Air during the nineteen-thirties. He was central to pushing through the iconic Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft to replace an outdated fleet in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming, but he had openly antisemitic leanings and known sympathies for a burgeoning Nazi Germany and was forced out of the cabinet in 1935. He died after a series of strokes in 1949, still with a porcelain figurine of an SS flag-bearer on the mantlepiece of his smoking room: a gift from Hermann Göring. 

MacDonald was demonised as something of a traitor due to these associations and in his role with the coalition government during the Great Depression; the government having pursued a policy that protected the currency over maintaining assistance to the poor and unemployed. He was seen to have put his career before his principals in aligning with the Tories, but in his own eyes was putting his personal politics aside for the national good at a time of crisis, holding the country together through a dark period in history. He was a founding member of the Labour Party, with a strong reform agenda, and for the time, held some radical socialist views that looked to redress the inequalities of British society. I wonder how much he might have confided in his friend Barrie in the years leading up to the difficult period of the Depression. 

Born out of wedlock to a farm labourer and housemaid at a farm in Lossiemouth and into a culture of strict nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, he got off to an inauspicious start. The prejudices of his religion would set tongues wagging, but the class system and the inequality of the British state was a very real barrier, there to keep folk in their place and the ruling classes in theirs. His parents never married and he was brought up in the Free Church, but became a teaching assistant, enabling him eventually to move to Bristol to take up a position with a philanthropic clergyman. He later moved to London where, after a period of unemployment, he took up a position as a clerk and deepened his interest and involvement in socialism. 

In 1887, he witnessed the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of Trafalgar Square, when marchers protesting against unemployment and coercion in Ireland clashed with the British Army, inspiring a later career as a freelance journalist that began with an article in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled ‘Remember Trafalgar Square: Tory Terrorism in 1887’. Throughout the late eighteen-hundreds he continued to educate himself at The Birkbeck Institute, now the University of London, and in 1888 took employment as private secretary to Thomas Lough, a wealthy tea-merchant and a radical Anglo-Irish politician, opening doors for MacDonald that would secure his own, later political career. 

In MacDonald’s early courting of celebrity and his frequenting of the grand houses of the Tory heirs, I saw perhaps more than a move to influence and maybe a lingering deference to the upper classes; a need in him to prove his ascendancy; to gain approval and validity from those in the very establishment he wished to reform. He was a supporter for Home Rule in Scotland, declaring in a paper published in 1921 that ‘the Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past.’ Wandering around the old estate grounds a hundred years on, his legacy felt increasingly present. 

We crossed a low wooden bridge spanning the burn, which was full and fast and courses its peaty way down from the hills like a torrent of frothy Coca-Cola. Following a muddy path through mixed woodland up a short rise into open ground again, we arrived at the old glass house that lies in ruin on a slope overlooking the burn, its timber frame mostly collapsed into its lower brickwork. A few panes of glass were still in place, but its interior was overgrown with tall ferns; a young tree reaching up through its roofless frame. An old wheelbarrow lay at rest under the shade of a nearby fir tree, as though the gardener who had once tended to the vegetables had simply downed tools and walked away. 

A sense of time and time’s passing was all around us; a sense of decay, and yet it was a comforting sort of sadness held within the crumbling walls of the garden and in the collapsed frame of the Victorian glass house. It felt deliberate, almost staged in its picturesqueness, as if arranged for the sentimental eye of the romantic; the grounds slowly but surely giving way to nature and its landowners democratising a once private estate. I felt it was part of the appeal of the place, this fading grandeur; a reminder of the inevitable certainty of time and change. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. Drawing largely from the landscape, he is published across a range of magazines and journals both in print and online. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in January 2022. Ian is currently working on a personal, narrative nonfiction book-project exploring the ways in which landscapes shape a sense of place and identity. 

On Barra Hill

By Ian Grosz:

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.  
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.

I have lived in northeast Scotland now for many years. It is home, and yet always seems to remain at arm’s length; never quite a place in which I feel I truly belong. I grew up in the northwest of England and spent my early childhood playing in the back alleys of the tightly packed terraced housing of our town; on family days out to Southport and Blackpool; and soggy summer camping holidays in the Lake District. Later we moved to the suburbs where I roamed the playing fields and neighbouring farmland with my friends, taking our BMX bikes far beyond where we were allowed. We knew every patch of ground within a ten-mile radius as intimately as our own homes; named trees and hiding places; invented our own legends and hauntings. Our places lived within us: every track and shortcut; every park and empty house; every field, brook, hill, dip and hollow. No map could be as richly textured as those that we embodied in the landscapes of our young lives. 

Perhaps the need to somehow make a deeper connection with where I live now – to understand and fully realise that connection – is through the lack of this intimate knowing of place that comes from childhood, and born of the experience of being an outsider in a place that I consider to be home. It is home, but I know deep down that I am not from here, not of the place. My connections to it come from circumstance, and my roots go back for only as long as I have lived here; no further. 

Rising up above the village where I live, is Barra Hill; its flattened dome presiding over the immediate landscape.  I have walked the hill many times; have become familiar with its landmarks filled with their hidden histories. In an attempt to get under the skin of the place, I’ve explored these histories; delved into the time held by the hill. 

Close by is the fourteenth-century battle site of Robert the Bruce and his rival John Comyn, part of a bitter fight for the Scottish Crown which led to the formation of a medieval independent Scotland. ‘The Bruce’, as he was known, is said to have directed the proceedings of this battle from a chair-shaped boulder once sited somewhere on the hill’s slopes. This is known as Bruce’s seat, and now sits by the roundabout on the road leading out of the village, complete with a small plaque: a site of half-forgotten story and remembrance; but still reminding us of the long and troubled history between the two nations. 

Earthen walls on the hill’s summit form part of an old fort, built in three phases from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Neolithic stone circles ring the hill’s flanks, while remnant undulations from medieval rig and furrow cultivation give its upper slopes the appearance of a crumpled, grassy carpet. On its far side, an old church houses a seventh-century Pictish symbol stone. The hill tells the story of this small corner of northeast Scotland stretching back to the last Ice Age, but holds much more personal histories too. 

I set off early not long after sunrise to make my way up to the hill through a short section of woodland at its base. Gorse laced with spiders’ webs glisten with dew. Cow parsley and nettles fill the woodland floor and a wren darts amongst the brambles that line the path. The trees of the woods seem to hold the morning: imbue it with a spirit of place and time as I walk beneath their high, heavy branches. A small burn gurgles contentedly through a narrow gulley, running down toward the village where it empties into the larger Meadow Burn. The name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is likely drawn from this burn and the prominent flattened dome of the hill. 

Meldrum is an anglicised conflation of the old Irish meall-droma and the old Scots Gaelic mealldruim, both of which mean ridge of the hill. The ‘Old’ is likely to have a phonetic, elided origin in the Gaelic ‘Alt’ which means the burn, or stream, possibly referencing the Meadow Burn running from the hill toward the edge of the modern village before draining into the nearby River Ury.  Alt Mealldroma therefore appears to be a geographic signifier for the beginnings of what became the modern-day settlement, its literal translation a direct reference to the burn of the ridge of the hill. Learning of this brings the village and its context within the landscape closer to a truer understanding. But it also signals my outsideness, my Englishness: reminds me that the people who named this place so long ago were somehow foreign to me; or rather, coming from a place outside of it, I am in some way foreign to this landscape.

The air is still cold as I emerge onto the open hillside, my breath billowing out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. My eyes seek out a line of trees along a ridge leading to the hill’s summit, silhouetted now against the skyline. I have always been drawn to these trees. Their rootedness reinforces my own sense of place here, brings me closer to a sense of belonging. 

Their silhouettes have seemed familiar since moving here over a decade ago, take me back to my childhood in the northwest of England. They remind me of trees my eye sought out on the bus journey home from school as a boy; a secret marker in the landscape between the school and home known only to me, I imagined; something I held within me that brought me home ahead of the bus. Seeing them after the regimentation and continual tussle of the school day was a signal that home was drawing near. Recognising them in the trees along the ridge leading to the hill now, fills me with nostalgia; a sense of both reassurance and loss. I am simultaneously here and there: where I live now and where I have come from; transported by the ghosting of trees from my childhood.

Finally reaching the summit, there is a definite sense of trespass as I enter the old enclosure, as if the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard against intrusion. The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side, down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now peaceful looking fields filled with ripening crops. The village is visible below, with its old centre dating back to the seventeenth-century; the new houses at its outskirts and the small, modern industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the village by-pass and a passenger-jet traverses the sky in a wide circuit for the airport to the south, as if in slow motion. 

A group of swifts have begun darting and swooping across the open enclosure around me, catching midges and flies on the wing. The orchestra of their flight is a language without words, communicating with a deeper sense within me. It is something that is in me rather than in them; something within me that I recognise in them. It seems connected to the landscape; to the trees along the ridge; the morning light now brightening the fields. Everything around me feels perfectly a part of this place, bound up with the language of the swifts. I am just as much part of this landscape as the swifts are now; as much as the people who once occupied this fort; part of the endless narrative thread of life woven through the land and time, and yet I remain somehow outside of its slow unravelling. 

***

Notes: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (1995, repr. London, Harper Press, 2004), p. 7

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

On Place and Time

By Ian Grosz:

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, emerging from the trees as the lady from the house whose grounds I was rummaging around in, politely pointed out that while under Scottish laws of trespass I’d every right to be there, I had parked on her lawn. She raised an accusing finger toward my camper van left on a patch of grass clear of what I took to be the entrance to her property and the narrow lane leading up to it. 

I had left the van beyond a large stone wall and gateway that looked to me like an obvious boundary. It’s true I had crossed that boundary on foot to gain access to a ruined mausoleum that lay in the trees just on the other side, and adjacent to the property, but I hadn’t thought the property extended to the mausoleum or the access road leading up to it. I apologised and told her as much by way of inadequate explanation, telling her I’d move the van. She nodded gruffly, turned, and began her long and dignified walk back to her large steel-framed house just visible beyond the trees. 

This was in the tiny farming hamlet of Bethelnie where I’d come to look for the visible traces of lost and half-forgotten histories, a pattern I was beginning to repeat at various places all over Aberdeenshire. Bethelnie, according to the Banffshire courier of December 1893, comes from the word bethnathalan, meaning house of Nathalan because of a church Saint Nathalan is supposed to have established here, after which, the parish of my home turf was once named. The mausoleum still extant houses the medieval remains of the Seton, Urquhart and Meldrum family lines, dynasties that once gave the area its identity and can still be found in its place names. 

All trace of Saint Nathalan’s church has long-since vanished, but his legacy is retained in local folk memory. In the village where I live, there was a public holiday dedicated to him celebrated until the late 19th Century. An ash tree marks the spot where Saint Nathalan is said to have collapsed and died, having become exhausted through ridding the area of a plague by making a circuit of the district’s bounds on his knees, praying to God to spare its inhabitants. Where his staff of ash went into the ground as he fell, a holy spring came forth and an ash tree grew. The tree is known as the Parcock Tree, the current tree planted in the 1990s and replacing a much older tree that was said to have stood for over three-hundred years in the same spot, itself arising from a lineage of trees going back to the time of Nathalan in the Seventh Century. 

The holy spring at the site of the Parcock tree is long-gone, with only the trickling outflow of a drainage pipe that carries the run-off from a small hill nearby in its place. This far from holy water passes under the modern bypass that borders the site of Nathalan’s alleged demise, unlikely to be of any assistance in the modern pandemic that is playing itself out across the world. But up until the mid-twentieth century, local children would go there to play, drawn, perhaps, by the tales of Saint Nathalan and the spring’s legendary healing power. 

Outside the ruined mausoleum, possibly built on the site of Nathalan’s church, erratic gravestones span the 12th through 19th Centuries: layers of time and burial, records of forgotten people with only a long-ago placed stone and a fading inscription to tell us they were once here. Among them is the sad and simple inscription for Isabella Gordon-Hunter who died at the age of three, joined by her parents many years later; the three children of Arthur Sangster and his wife Elizabeth Smith: George aged eighteen, Ann aged eleven and Robert aged just seven years, all dying in the year 1837, perhaps due to the influenza outbreak of that year. The earliest stones, stretching back into the 12th Century, are barely readable. 

Stood amongst the trees and the graves, I felt I was intruding on not only the privacy of the property owners, but on the silent, layered gathering of the dead. Their witness to time’s unstoppable cruelty felt pressing. How many lives have passed and never been known? How many absences are there in our histories? What is so compelling about these absences? Why is it that what is not there, what is not known, is more compelling than what is? Is it simply mystery: our innate curiosity that always seeks out a puzzle? Or is it something else? 

Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that something was but is no longer. Through living inside of time – constrained by it – comes a need to try to reach the past, to somehow gain a tangible sense of a larger and continual process of collective loss from the landscape. But what is it I hope to gain by visiting the ghost-sites of these places? Is there some secret message to be found in picking up on their atmosphere, their mood, their sense of place, as though the air or the ground, the trees, the crumbling walls, the grave stones, might be encoded with a form of language that, if not difficult to discern, is like the sighting of a ghost itself: quite probably just a figment of imagination? Is there some additional information available that cannot be gleaned from a map and google? 

Presence in absence - knowledge of what was - however that’s communicated, imbues the landscape through a combination of imagination and literal sense. But what is it that we sense? We sense the air, feel the breeze on our faces, see the same contours in the hills and fields that others now absent once did, and this connects us through imagination. We begin to sense that the past is somehow more present, as though almost coexisting alongside our own time. It is like standing on the far side of a precipice that we wish to cross, and find there is a half-standing bridge that, while it doesn’t allow us to cross fully to the other side, closes some of the gap, brings the two sides of the divide closer together. 

In the book Senses of Place, the philosopher Edward Casey tells us that ‘space and time come together in place,’ by which he means that places are defined by event. They are simultaneously the where and when of things, and in this way they draw space and time into them. Experiencing them brings us closer to those who went before. We see their absence, but we feel their presence. We begin to hear their voices across the precipice of their time and ours. Perhaps it is time itself that I am grappling with, finding its most poignant expression in place, the unstoppable forward motion through which we perceive the world leaving me with a feeling of wanting to hold on to time, to pause and to dwell outside of its relentless march. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and as well as previously featuring on Elsewhere, is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10