Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Uist

Photo: Jack Bush

By Emma Jones:

On the ferry our bikes are all tied up with string to keep them stable. I am not a seafarer and do not know the knots. I twist and wind the rope and hope that it will be enough to keep my bike from toppling over. My bike is heavy, all loaded up, front and back and frame bag. We are two weeks into our trip and my packing is becoming untidy, clothing shed and then not put away properly, instead glove fingers peeking, a shirt tied unceremoniously, one arm flapping in the breeze. 

These two weeks are felt in the body too. My legs are tired, calves stretched and thighs hot, lower back burning. Hair stuck down to my scalp. Clothes streaked with mud and sheep shit and sweat. In the mornings wriggling about inside the tent I keep myself curled up so as not to touch the sides and let the dew in. A whole home folded up and wrapped tight. Kneeling my weight down onto my roll mat I feel the air being pushed out of it and something gives way in this act of deflating, like I am letting all of that is pent up inside of me out too, shaking myself out in the wet morning light. When we leave, all that’s left behind from the night before is an indistinct shape in the flattened grass.

Climbing up to the deck we sit on the little plastic seats and feel the salt and wind sting. It's another grey day where I do not cast a shadow, as if a part of me is missing, as if I have nothing to project. I watch the diving birds fold their wings and turn themselves into one long beak and barely upset the water. I watch the ferry engine churn everything behind it up into white foam. I look for land, and look, and look, and then, finally, it’s Uist that rises from the sea. 

I am politely told by a man we meet on the ferry that I am pronouncing Uist wrong. It should, in fact, be an oo sound and then the ee and a short sharp st. Not Ooohisst but Oooooeest. More like a whistling sound, he says. I try it on, but struggle with its call. Each small town and road sign is noted in Gaelic, the collection of letters and accents unfamiliar to me, a language that is, in part, an act of civic reclamation. English was enforced here, first among the clan chiefs, and then the schoolchildren. I read these signs as a form of taking back. As a way to think about place but also the body. Does language impact and change the shape of the tongue? Until the body forgets what it used to speak with ease? My own struggles to take the shape of this place in. I cannot speak it, despite the sign telling me Failte gu Uibhist a Deas.  

Uist isn't one place exactly, but a collection of six islands, stippling the coast of West Scotland. A collection that seems unsteadily attached to the water beneath, as if at any moment it could shudder and give way, become unmoored and break up even further. Each island is connected via causeway, with rocks buffeting each side. Whenever we cycle over them the tide seems to be perpetually out, revealing white sand or fecund matter and the faint smell of something rotting. It is very open and the wind is against us. I try to keep close behind Jack, use his body as a type of shelter. He is a stronger rider than me, pushing us forward while I hang back. We’re both tired and not talking in that gentle familiar way that comes from being in each other's company a lot. And so, I am mainly left alone, just my body and my thoughts.

Photo: Jack Bush

Perhaps it is the proximity to the sea, and the grey nothing of the day, that makes it hard to feel as if I am doing anything but moving through, floating through, passing through. I feel strangely unplaced here. Letting the road dictate my movements but not taking anything further in. Only the asphalt beneath me. Swift and sharp pushes over small rises, dipping into another collection of houses, feeling the cars passing with a metallic reverb. We plan to travel from south to north over the course of the day, and it is distance that keeps me occupied. I keep tracking how far it is I have travelled, how far there is still to go. I am chasing the miles, wanting my body to become a blur. 

I am trying to act as if it's impossible for this place to be felt. As if cycling isn't a series of impressions in which place and body meet. But each turn of the pedal feels like another chance to look again. A cliché about wheels turning, a place that beckons as a type of rotation. Calls out, fades, calls out again. 

It is not as if this place is empty. When we pause at a Co-Op car park to eat lunch a car pulls up and I watch a man in a heavy green quilted jacket walk up to the curb to kick and scrape his boots. Signs of industry and labour are everywhere. There are sprawling farms with jagged half fence posts and abandoned rust-toothed machinery. Fishing nets all tangled up in a dense weave. So too, are signs of this industry fading as the permanent population of these islands steadily decreases. Former homes reduced to an outline of bricks and gaping doors and windows. In one field we watch a short-eared owl quartering dreamily just above the grass, silent on its daytime hunt for the squinting voles.

In North Uist, the final island of the day and where we plan to spend the night, the landscape changes into earthy peatland. There are small incisions from where it has been cut out in blocks. There aren’t many trees here and so the peat is burnt for fuel. The local population knows how to take from this landscape and use it up. While riding, I am trying to do the same. It is not a moving through, but an attempt to take in. We stop for dinner and I try Lobster for the first time, a local catch, and am surprised when it is served cold. I dig my little trident under the shell, pull out white flesh. 

A woman in the pub asks if we are staying and I wonder how many people she sees each evening with bags on their bikes, or else, all wrapped up in the metal shell of a camper van. How many of them, like me, will be trying to remember and gather up as much as possible before the next place sits on the tongue. There is more of Uist than I am able to tell but still, I am here, trying to find a way through. 

In the late spring it doesn’t get dark here until after 10pm. Toward the end of the day the sun starts to break through the clouds and soon everything is turned soft with a peachy hue. On the way down to the beach where we plan to camp there’s an old graveyard between the sea and the machair. There are old graves mixed with the new. And beneath the graves are the bodies of the people who lived here, the ground finally pushing into their bones, in a way that it will never do for me.

***

Emma Jones is a non-fiction writer and Curatorial Assistant, Photography at Tate. They hold an MA in Writing from Royal Holloway, London. As an arts writer and curator, Emma has been published in Source Magazine and contributed to the recent publication Photography: A Feminist History (Octopus Publishing). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow

A Plot of Land

By Dermot O’Sullivan:

In a suburb somewhere in Dublin, swarms of pebble-dashed houses clamour silently about the fringes of an oblong patch of land. Long ago, this plot was just one of the countless green fields that mantled the foothills of the mountains. Then it was the last one, lost among the new grey sprawl. Finally, it was flooded with cement and cinder blocks. 

For many years after this, a dairy and the HB factory coexisted here in convenient symbiosis. Their combined workforce was sufficiently large to make driveway blockage an issue for the locals, even though most of the employees walked to work from the nearby council estates. After bouts of letter writing and public representation, an overflow car park was built and peace returned to the cul-de-sacs.    

Then the dairy was shut down and demolished. The rubble was piled in heaps at one end of the flat wasteland and, within a week, the travellers had moved in. Bikes were stolen. Litter and faeces accumulated. Somebody’s son was struck on the cheek with a broken hula-hoop. In short, havoc was unleashed. Letters were written, words were exchanged and the inaugural residents’ association meeting was conducted in the school sports hall. Relief and disappointment mingled when the travellers left without warning one rainy Tuesday morning.

To prevent a repeat, the council constructed a pathetically low wall all around the site and so facilitated its transformation into a hang-out spot for local teenagers. The emerging generation drunk, smoked and fucked themselves through adolescence amid the tangled weeds and shattered masonry. Slugs nested in the slowly rusting cider cans. Cracks in the concrete of the former dairy floor collected a bedding of stained cigarettes butts. Within a couple of years, parts were totally overgrown and the drone of insects in the summer was loud enough to drown out the endless hum of suburban traffic. The overflow car park was decommissioned: its entrance was bricked up and the painted white lines began to dissolve slowly into the tarmac.

During these few years, the HB factory limped on partnerless until it too was shut and flattened. The whole site was levelled and the weeds and beer cans were swept away. The walls were raised and a security guard was appointed, fully equipped with a Beware of Dogs sign though not with any actual dogs. Baked teenagers gazing at headless dolls or rusted bicycles left by the travellers, and drunken ones rolling on the ground blocking orifices, were no longer tolerated. The land was worth something now and something was going to happen.  Then it happened: a block of retail units was built. Then a block of stylish apartments. A giant electrical goods store opened. A second block of apartments was planned. Then the calendar rolled on and hit 2—0—0—8.

The other retail units are still vacant: their big bellies of glass hold gloomy interiors strewn with pallets and plastic sheeting. The cement dust has settled in deep undisturbed drifts. Not one of the apartments has sold. Their silent rooms are full of unconnected bathtubs and unused floor tiles. Their unpainted grey windowsills are speckled with pigeon droppings. Beads of damp sweat gather in the high corners.

The security guard still sits in his little box, but soon he too will have to go. Perhaps, at the same time, the apartments will be boarded up or even torn down. Or perhaps not. In any case, it seems likely that one day the empty space will return and sober and stupefied brains alike will stare at the rubble or scaffolding or whatever it is that comes next.        

***

Dermot O'Sullivan is an Irish writer whose work has been published in various journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Dalhousie Review and Fence. He currently lives in Brazil, where he recently had his first full-length play produced.

The Cuckoo's Place

By Rebecca Welshman:

I follow an overgrown track alongside the dark recesses of a Sitka spruce plantation. Although sunshine rarely penetrates these shadow-wrought trunks, a feathered visitor has taken up a perch among the topmost boughs to sing. The sound carries through the air, stands out above everything else. I heard my first cuckoo in Henfield, Sussex where I spent my childhood. The scrubby streams and unkempt meadows surrounding the village at that time were the cuckoo’s ideal habitat. In East Sussex the arrival of the cuckoo has long been associated with a specific place. At the annual cuckoo fair in Heathfield each April a cuckoo was released from a wicker basket to mark the start of spring – a tradition with origins at least as far back as 1315 when the fair was given a charter. In the mid nineteenth century an elderly woman was still known to visit the vicinity at dawn to “turn out the cuckoo”. Today the fair is still held, and pigeons are released from a basket instead by “Dame Heffle”. As a herald of spring, the cuckoo symbolises the return of the light; the life-renewing emergence from the dark dormancy of winter. 

But for many years the cuckoo fell silent in my life. Over a period of ten years, as I moved to Liverpool, to Somerset, then Cumbria, I heard only one. The last place I heard it was in Shropshire, three years ago: a faint distant call, holding memories of fields and woods. Now, in Dumfries and Galloway the cuckoo’s song is once again part of spring. The very real reason for this of course is that cuckoo populations have declined in England, and increased in Scotland. The valley where the male cuckoo has taken up residence lies at the edge of the Ae Forest, a sheep-grazed island within an area of industrial forestry that stretches for miles in all directions. Its gently sloping sides are planted with sitka spruce, with some recently clear felled areas. Its floor is a broad soft tussocky expanse bisected by Garpol Water, a shallow fast flowing burn that has its origins in the Lowther Hills. Many thousands of years ago this would have been a river basin. Domed heads of islands still pepper the landscape, and amongst them are scattered the last remaining native tree species of the valley – birch, rowan, and oak. Although the ordnance survey map draws a clear yellow line along this part of the hillside, the forest has no real boundary on the ground. Miniature spruce grow wherever they happen to put down their resilient roots, in walls, on mounds, or amongst the gritty broken tarmac of forest roads. At the forest edge-lands any sense of ownership dissolves. 

A maverick of the bird world, the word “cuckoo” is synonymous with “strange”, and “eccentric”, suggesting its lack of conformity, a lone existence. While the bird is celebrated as an emblem of British springtime, it has also been maligned as a trickster and thief. Their true breeding habits were strongly disputed until the 1920s when ornithologist Edgar Chance made the film “The Home-Wrecker”, which showed the cuckoo laying her eggs in other birds’ nests. One of only two avian brood parasite species, fledgling cuckoos manoeuvre the eggs of their host bird parents out of the nest to make room for themselves. While these behaviours may seem treacherous or cruel, it is not our place to judge them by human standards.  Cuckoos feel the pull of spring time in the British Isles as much, or deeper, than we do. Their actions are hard-wired into them, set deep in their psyche after centuries of repetition. The instinct that drives them to return here each April to breed is detectable in their haunting two-tone call, which carries a beguiling air of mystery, compels me to listen, taps into my own instinct to pause whatever I am doing. 

This remote Dumfriesshire valley, now the cuckoo’s summer home before it returns to Africa, was once a contested area. A twelfth century castle mound still guards the rough track leading into it, and the rectangular outline of a much earlier earthwork is just visible amongst the green bog grasses beside the burn.  An ancient way visible on nineteenth century maps once threaded the valley from west to east and connected the distant hills with the infrastructure surrounding the Romans and Reivers route a few miles to the south. Deep within the valley can be found the remains of a circular monument with an entrance stone still standing. Remnants of cairns lie scattered around. A single aged oak tree growing from an islanded knoll watches over. Its branching trunks, dead at the ends, are angular and defiant, like antlers against the skyline. 

Scrub and heath – types of terrain that do not lend themselves to cultivation – are some of the cuckoo’s favourite places. As such the bird has long been associated with borderlands and heaths that once lay at the edges of medieval land units. The historic place name Yekheth in Acton parish, near Nantwich, derives from the Old English “gaecc” meaning “cuckoo”. It is a high point in the landscape, as is the neighbouring Wrenbury Heath a few miles to the south. In Irish folklore the cuckoo is attached to landscapes with historic human presence. The field of the mythical battle Moytura, in which the forces of light fought against the forces of darkness, has the highest concentration of megalithic monuments in Europe. A high point once known as “Cuckoo Hill” is marked by Eochaidh’s cairn. According to the writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, in his play Moytura, this spot was once known as “the cuckoo’s starting place”. That this bird of summer haunts the cold stones of an ancient tomb again reaffirms its association with the tensions between light and dark. The cuckoo, which embodies the light and dispels the shadows, has penetrated the human psyche at a deep level. It is no wonder that people all over the country still stop to remark upon hearing its first call.

Here at the edge of the Ae Forest the cuckoo’s mellow wood-note rings with piercing clarity. I draw closer, thinking that at any moment my footfalls and presence will disturb him, but still he calls. At the top of the hill I turn right onto the Southern Upland Way which leads away from the forest into the valley. As I leave him behind his echoing calls gradually grow more distant, and even though I know I cannot see him, I still turn back to look. This wizard of the woods has me under his spell. 

***

Rebecca is an author and researcher who lives in Dumfries and Galloway with her family, and numerous animals. Her publications include edited collections of the works of Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, and essays about literature, language, and the natural world. Her writing can be found at: rebeccawelshman.wordpress.com/blog and https://liverpool.academia.edu/RebeccaWelshman

Canal

By Rachel Sloan:

2000

The first time I find the canal, it’s an accident.

It’s January, I’m twenty, I’ve been in London only a few weeks. I’ve never been abroad before and everything dazzles me. But I spent last night in a crush of bodies in some West End club and this morning I’m desperate for quiet and space, so Regent’s Park it is.

Restless, I stride past the places I already know well and head north – in search of what, I don’t exactly know. I know Primrose Hill lies beyond, but before I reach it, I glimpse a snaking line of trees. Patches of water flash between the gaps. There’s a path and I follow it down and then everything changes.

The canal unspools in both directions. To my right, a long green ribbon of water and the peaks of Lord Snowdon’s aviary. To my left, a string of weeping willows, bare branches bowed toward the water like a group of mourning fair-haired giants; an enormous double-decker scarlet barge that looks like leftover opera scenery; a low bridge through which the canal bends away sharply and disappears. I turn left.

I pass gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, arbours laced in barky coils of wisteria, warehouses with windowpanes punched out like black eyes, thickets of trees and brambles wedged against brick walls. The silence is near total, the clangour of traffic sinking away into leaf mould and water. Crumpled lager cans and eviscerated crisp packets drift together in makeshift islands but when I stare down into the water I catch flashes of silver and gold tipped with red: roach, maybe bream. I round another bend and catch a heron picking its way through fallen twigs, its neck unreal, its eyes locking for an instant with mine.

I grew up thinking that the world was parcelled into boxes marked City, Suburb, Nature. As I walk I feel those tidy divisions blowing apart. In their wake is something rich and strange. Something that just yesterday I would have laughed off as an oxymoron. 

Urban nature.

I don’t yet have the vocabulary to get to grips with this new kind of nature, just a bone-deep feeling of belonging, despite this being a place I’ve only known for weeks, unlike the place I was born and where I lived for eighteen years. What I find at the canal isn’t the Romantic landscapes of Keats and Wordsworth that I spend my days dissecting in cramped seminar rooms.

One day, browsing a bookshop table piled with contemporary poetry, I stumble upon Tobias Hill. The Regent’s Canal runs through his poems like a mud-flecked golden thread. Here is someone who understands this place that exists within London and yet is not fully of it, that ticks along on its own parallel time, someone who can feel and give form to what the canal does to sound and light. He writes of air ‘pressed / into white slabs of mist’, of a dying eel entangled in a sunken shopping trolley, of canal-side magnolia blossoms glowing like lightbulbs and blackbirds whose pollen-filled mouths ‘burn with it / like fuse wires’.

When I leave London at the end of my semester abroad, Hill’s books are in my suitcase. I cling to them over the next fifteen months as I half-heartedly try to fit myself back into the contours of a life and a country in which I no longer feel I belong, as I plot my return. When I move back to begin a postgraduate degree, they, too, retrace their journey across the Atlantic. The canal is just as I’d left it; walking the towpath is a homecoming. But Hill has stopped writing poetry. He’s turned to novels, and although I try to love them I somehow can’t. As the years pass I dip into his poems now and then and I can still sense a kindred spirit – a ghost, growing ever fainter.

Only fourteen years later, chancing across a newspaper interview, do I learn that Hill and I have something else in common besides our love for the canal: he, too, is Jewish. And only some years after that will I realise how rare the two of us are, writing about nature, urban or otherwise.

2014

I’ve been walking the Regent’s Canal for years by now, in sun, fog, veils of rain. I’ve kayaked it too, clambering from my boat glazed in duckweed. I know it – or so I think – like the back of my hand.

One Saturday in November I visit the London Canal Museum and I discover how little I really know. In the grand scheme of things, the Regent’s Canal is a bauble, a plaything beside the mighty Grand Union Canal. I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence without having any notion of its course; now I learn that two of its arms link the Regent’s Canal to the Thames in a series of snaky, unruly bends just over 20 miles long. I need no further urging. The next morning I’m on the towpath at Paddington Basin, walking to the Thames by the longest possible route.

The Grand Union has none of the tame prettiness of the western reaches of the Regent’s. At first it’s tough, gritty, obviously industrial. It curls past windswept tower blocks, empty warehouses. Islands of rubbish outnumber waterbirds. There are regular signposts for walkers but no other accoutrements of leisured walking: no waterside pubs, no enticements to linger. London seems, resolutely, to turn its back on the canal.

And then, imperceptibly, the canal grows wilder. To my right stretches the majestic mossy ruin of Kensal Green cemetery; seen from the canal you’d never guess it was still in use, the tombstones crumbling under skeins of ivy and bramble. To my left is a gargantuan Tube depot, an unravelling braid of steel in a sea of gravel, crosshatched by wires.

A few miles on, a mobile drift of snow carpets the towpath and I blink in disbelief. The snow resolves itself into the largest flock of mute swans I’ve ever seen. I edge toward them cautiously – no cygnets in evidence, but I know how quickly swans can shift from regal aloofness to hissing and snapping. They show no inclination to move out of my way. If I try to go round them I’ll end up either in the canal or snagged in brambles. Holding my breath, I wade through a sea of swans and everything changes again. The canal spills out into fields punctuated by scrub, thickets of hawthorn, banks of water-loving willow and alder that gradually condense into low-lying woodland. According to the map I’m still in London. But I know by now that maps can be right and wrong at the same time.

By four o’clock the shadows are fading. The edges of the clouds glow pink. Despite my woollen gloves, my fingers ache. I’m hollow with hunger; there are no blackberries to scrump now, just last summer’s wizened black buttons. I curse my poor planning. How could I have thought I could cover 20 miles in a day in November? Admitting defeat, I turn off the canal path to the nearest Tube station.

Greenford is on the branch of the Central Line that goes to Ruislip, the one that I’ve never had any reason to take. I almost lose my way in the cookie-cutter drabness of the streets. There’s a Polish delicatessen across from the station but fantasies of sinking my teeth into a hunk of poppyseed roll or a slab of apple pie are instantly dashed by the CLOSED sign on the door.

The platform at Greenford is above ground. At the top of the stairs, I find myself standing under a vault of flame and pearl, mackerel clouds stained rose-gold drifting away from the setting sun. Despite cold and hunger part of me wants to stay here until the last light fades, but the temptation of the warm interior of the train is too much. As the doors slide shut behind me, I remember a snippet of wall text from the Canal Museum. I didn’t think to note down its author, but this wise person observed that the joining of the Regent’s Canal and the Grand Union Canal, and their links to the Thames, effectively turn London into an island. An island within an island.

With one last glance at the blazing sky, I let the train carry me inland, away from the canal and into the heart of the Island London that I have made my home.

***

Rachel Sloan an art historian, curator and writer. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she has called the UK – first London, now Kent – home for most of her adult life. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Moxy, Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and Canopy: an anthology of writing for the Urban Tree Festival (2021). Her short stories have been Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize, runner-up in the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition and longlisted (twice) in the 2021 Mslexia Short Story Competition. She was also longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize; 'Canal' is an excerpt from her longlisted book proposal, a nature memoir entitled Taking Root.

Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

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Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Between the Years

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

We were supposed to leave on Boxing Day, but the waves raced in off the North Atlantic, crashing against the harbour walls and rolling over the loading bay where the fishing boats had been pulled on wheels out of the ocean’s reach. There was no ferry that day, as there hadn’t been since the 17th December, and the forecast was not good.

For two further days the wind and the waves hammered at the island. São Jorge is a thin sliver, a line of volcanic peaks falling away towards the ocean. If there is flat land to be found it is often on lava debris fields at the foot of cliffs, where villages were built that, for centuries – and in some cases still – are only accessible by foot. Across the channel it is possible to spy the neighbouring islands of Pico and, from the right vantage point, Faial. But if the winds and the waves are high, it does not matter how close they might be. No boats will leave the harbour, and no planes will rise from the airstrip.

We hunkered down, waiting for the break. At a local surf shop, the owner looked at the same website as the owner of our guesthouse had shown us on his phone. A line of coloured boxes, filled with numbers. The website is hosted in the Czech Republic but is apparently bookmarked on every browser in São Jorge. The surf shop owner translated what it meant. High winds. Big waves. We weren’t going anywhere.

Each evening came and with it the message that the ferry was cancelled for the following morning, until one evening when it didn’t. Our guesthouse owner was hopeful. Tomorrow, you can sail. But he promised to leave our beds made just in case. We were to message him only once we left harbour. Only then, would he know we had finally checked out.

At the port in the morning a trickle of passengers became a tide. It was more than ten days by now since the ferry to Pico and Faial had run. In that time, Christmas had come and gone, although the decorations were still up in town and festive songs were still playing through the loudspeakers that had been erected some time in December. Passengers checked in their bags and waited in the terminal buildings. 

Others lined up their cars, waiting to board. At the check in counter, a woman delivered a parcel that would travel on the ferry without her. A man did the same. A taxi driver delivered three boxes and then queued to pay for the transportation, before driving off to work the next fare. The weather forecast for the next day was bad, and for the day after too. This might be the only chance.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

We sat on deck and watched Velas and São Jorge slowly retreat. It would take two and a half hours to reach Faial via Pico, and the island remained in view throughout. It was a long farewell. The first crossing was rocky, the second was rough. Perhaps they wouldn’t have made the crossing if it hadn’t been more than a week since the last one. We stayed on deck and watched the horizon. Some passengers slept, laid out across the plastic chairs. Others headed inside and tried to ignore the motion, watching films on their phones or tablets. 

In the channel between São Jorge and Pico, in the central islands of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, the internet connection was better than Berlin. We weren’t surprised.

We were between the years and between the islands. In the channel between Pico and Faial a windsurfer raised alongside the ferry, flying above the waves that we were crashing through. The waves seemed to grow bigger the closer we got to Horta and our destination. The spray reached the top deck. Gulls hovered above. At least one passenger was sick. The time between the years is usually when nothing much happens. As we approached land and the rise and fall of the ferry seemed to intensify, we wondered if there were any more surprises left. 

At Horta harbour, where sailors from around the world have left their mark in colourful murals on the harbour wall, and where the first transatlantic seaplanes used to land between the boats, we felt solid land beneath our feet. That evening in Faial, we would still be able to hear the ocean breaking against the rocks below where we were to sleep. We could still feel the motion where we lay. And we could see the dance of the white horses as they broke between the islands behind our closed eyes.

Outside it was calm. The sky had cleared and the stars shone down on the islands and the ocean. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. But the waves had been growing, and the colours and the numbers on the Czech website were not good. The messages had been received. The ferry for the next morning had already been cancelled. 

Photo: Katrin Schönig

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His latest book is In the Pines, a novella of the forest with photography by Eymelt Sehmer, and published by Influx Press.

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. 

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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.