A week in Orkney

By Tim Cooke:

One summer, my father took us, Rob and I, to the Orkney Islands, to see the Viking burial sites, Pictish and Neolithic ruins, and to do some fishing. I was still in primary school – year five, I think. The first evening we arrived, we watched three locals unload their catch from a small motorboat onto the boggy shore of the lake we were staying on. We ate dinner in a barn, or outbuilding, with stuffed fish mounted on the walls, gawping over our shoulders at our food. Dad drank Guinness, as he would each night for the coming week, while me and my brother sipped ice-cold cans of Irn-Bru. I don’t remember what we spoke about, just that Rob kept repeating Will Smith’s line from Independence Day – Let’s kick the tires and light the fires, Big Daddy.

We fished most mornings, Dad steering us out to the silky deep, but didn’t catch a thing. He’d choose a spot, kill the engine and cast our lines, then wait quietly for a bite. Every so often, one of our wires got snagged in the weeds. My lack of experience meant the first few times this happened, I flicked up my rod and shouted, I’ve got something, only to reel in handfuls of mulch. After every twenty minutes or so – not nearly long enough – Dad broke the silence by announcing we were to move on, because the fish were surely basking in that pool of sun over there, or whatever. Reflecting on our failure one night, he blamed the seal apparently stalking the boat and stealing our trout. He’s stuck to this story ever since.

We’d travelled to Scotland a number of times before our week in Orkney. I’m not sure how many trips we’d made, but they’ve all sort of amalgamated into one in my mind. I recall, for instance, a murder of crows alighting on the roof of Edinburgh Castle, and that very same day, as far as I can tell, driving beside Loch Ness. I was obsessed with the monster mythology and told everyone I was going to see it. And then I did. I had this pamphlet with a condensed history of the beast – a few grainy black and white shots dispersed between paragraphs – that I must have read a thousand times or more. I loved the ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ – categorical proof, if any was needed, that some time-evading horror lurked below us and would, on occasion, rise to the surface. 

I held on tight to this leaflet as we drove along a narrow country road. There was a screen of lush green foliage to my left, beyond which the water bobbed and chopped. I longed for a breach, and sure enough it came. I’d only been looking at the loch for a matter of minutes – ten perhaps, without averting my eyes – when two humps broke the crest of a wave, followed by a third and fourth, and finally the pointed tail, the last bit to disappear back into the sloshing abyss. It was over in three seconds flat, only ripples remaining – working away from the site of incision like lights on a radar dial.

There – I saw it! Look, over there! Look at the water!

My parents were enjoying my burgeoning interest in cryptozoology and had told me they, too, believed in the creature.

Well there you go, Mum said, you’ve seen it now. You can tell Nan when we get back to the hotel.

Did you see it, though? I was bouncing in my seat.

They smiled at one another and Dad confirmed he had, indeed, seen something.

Nearing the end of our time in Orkney, we visited Maeshowe, a Neolithic cairn and passage grave constructed around 3000 BC. From the outside, it looked like a small hill, a place a hobbit might inhabit. The entrance tunnel, which runs to the central chamber, is only three feet tall, so we had to shuffle through on our hands and knees. As I crawled along, I was struck by the smell of the damp earth, far stronger than that I was familiar with. It left an almost bitter aftertaste. We’d been told there were bodies here and, despite the likelihood of this information being false, I could feel them. I paused in the passageway, unsure as to whether or not I should go any further, but Rob was gaining on me, so I had to keep moving. It was as if I was being sucked into the ground.

Stepping into the chamber was like stepping out of our world and into a different dimension, a time capsule. While the guide talked about dates and architecture, man-hours and angled buttresses, I zoned out and heard sounds and voices swirling in a maelstrom around me. I’d been thinking a lot, at night, about death and heaven. Dad tried to comfort me with words of God and eternal life, but to be honest the idea of forever scared me more than anything else. I couldn’t get my head around it.

I stood facing the wall, looking at an image of a dragon scratched into stone by a Norse graffiti artist in the twelfth century. As recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, a group of Viking travellers broke into the tomb and left more than thirty runic inscriptions, the world’s largest collection of such engravings. It occurred to me that this dragon I was staring at might, in fact, be skulking in the depths of Loch Ness. Had they seen him too?

I flinched at something wet and warm moving along the back of my skull. I turned around to see Rob grinning. He’d taken, lately, to surreptitiously chewing a tuft of hair protruding from my crown – he loved that I hated it so much. What’s the matter with you? 

Back outside, in the fresh air, we walked along the coast. It could have been a different day, I don’t know. We paused by a farmer’s field and watched a woman delivering a foal, her arm inserted deep inside the back end of the horse. Rob touched the fence and jolted backwards. 

It’s electric. He touched it again. Whoa. That’s so weird. He turned to me. You have a go.

I placed my finger on the wire. Shit! It felt as though my bones were being pulled from their sockets. 

Dad caught up and joined us. 

It’s an electric fence, I explained.

Don’t be silly.

The woman in the field looked up. It is actually. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.

His hands were already stretched out – it was too late to retract them. Strewth! Bloody hell. The woman shook her head.

We continued walking along the cliffs. The wind was blowing hard now and the sea writhed like a snake pit. Always full of energy, Rob ran on, sidestepping knots of couch grass, skipping over divots and molehills. He was straying dangerously close to the edge.

Robert, get away from there. Dad was holding my wrist ten or fifteen metres inland. Come back here with us. The wind is very strong. Rob strolled over, his mouth twisted into a smile.

What would you do if I fell?

I’d grab your brother and jump off too. The words startled me – I looked up to see if he was joking, but his face was stern, almost angry. I could never go back to your mother with just one. Where was she, anyway? Why hadn’t she come with us? I looked out at the ocean, at the thrashing waves, and felt unsafe.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

Quoyle's Point... an interview with Annie Proulx

As a companion piece to the second of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Quoyle’s Point from The Shipping News – we present an interview with Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel.

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house, moored to a rock. The house at Quoyle’s Point is a vivid character in the book, dusty, gaunt, despite the efforts, and moaning in the wind. 

I contacted Annie Proulx to ask her four questions about the role of Quoyle’s seaside house in her book and about her own relationship with water.

What is your relationship with water and with the sea? What does the sea mean for you?

Like most people I am attracted to shorelines, whether lake, river or ocean. All of these locales have been severely damaged by humankind over the millennia—wetlands drained, rivers dammed, ocean-shores faced with armored rock walls, estuaries polluted. My interest in today's warming oceans is based on concern as the waters move toward acidity, as coral reefs die, as kelp and eelgrass decline. I watch with trepidation as fish stocks dwindle and the shells of tiny pteropods dissolve. I walk regularly on the shore, picking up plastic as I go and feeling grief at the damages inflicted on these habitats. 

Quoyle is afraid of water and yet he has to overcome his aquaphobia to own a boat and live by the sea. What does his fear symbolize in the book?

I’m not big on symbols. His fear can mean whatever the reader thinks. Books are somewhat cooperative in this way, that a reader can use her or his own experience of life to interpret the actions and thoughts of a book’s protagonists.

What role does the house at Quoyle’s Point play in The Shipping News?

The house is his link with the past—it is the ancestral home of the Quoyles. It also carries bad memories for the Aunt so that what happened in that house a generation before drives the story. And it is a testament to the staying power of Newfoundlanders of the fishing-village period when people lashed their houses to the rocks against the pounding seas and hurricane-force winds. 

Would you agree to spend a summer at Quoyle’s house (if it would be still standing)?

Of course! Where do I sign up?

***

Read Anna Iltnere’s essay about Quoyle’s Point here.

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

The Puffin Watcher

By Christina Riley:

In the early hours of a midsummer morning before any other eyelashes began to flicker open, I rolled onto the cool side of the pillow and felt the warm air shift beneath the covers. Not in my city bed, not even in my city; I awoke on a fold down mattress in the middle of a seaside hotel room in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Or, almost seaside. Nestled between the road and the ocean it stood just far enough from the water on one end for the cars on the other to drown out the waves.

The days were busy and my mind chose to mirror them, leaving the usually fierce ocean struggling to get a word in edgeways; today I’d let it speak first.

There was no time for a shower or contacts and it was considerably too early for coffee – those are all markers for the start of the day and that wasn’t quite what this was. This was a secret window, hidden somewhere between night and day, swaying between them in a haze of slumber still lifting. In a jetlagged dreamstate I picked up the clothes that had been laid out across the arm of the couch the night before and layered up the best I could using the contents of a summer holiday suitcase. The sandals sat by the front door were slipped on and I tiptoed out into the west coast air.

Holding down the handle to silence the click, I closed the cabin door and snuck across the courtyard, through a narrow path that hugged the last house in the square. It was signposted for the beach not with words, but with a knee high spout over a metal grate for any returning sandy feet, and beyond a quiet street led the way with pastel porches and the drifting smell of seaweed.

Darkness had passed but it’d be wrong to call it daybreak. The night didn’t snap open and pour the sun over the town. It was more of a day bending, a soft thawing as the last shadows of twilight warmed and melted over the rising sun like butter into the sea.

Upon reaching the end of the street, the air felt freer and swam between the tall thin grass of the dunes and through my hair like an otter. Moving from tarmac to sand with my sandals in hand I took the biggest breath of the morning so far, and whispered good morning to the waves. 

The sand felt cold and a heavy mist was still hovering above the horizon, desaturating a sky not quite as eager to roll back the covers as I was. The whole beach sounded distant somehow, as if it courteously turned down its own volume so as not to wake anyone.

Along the shore the high tide line presented an array of treasures just as on the west coast of Scotland, though its offerings here were notably different; fragments of sun bleached sand dollars, frosted sea glass and one slight white feather, translucent, a whisper diffusing morning light like breath on a cold day and defying gravity in my hand; tracing its spine I couldn’t be sure I was touching it at all. Pristine and unweathered by westerly winds and waters, I imagined it ruffling free from the round belly of a gull. Further down the beach a garden tiger moth splayed flat on its furry chest, shining bittersweetly orange and smooth cream in its sandy resting place. A little further still, a small bird lay neatly on its back with wings by its side, head tilted up towards the houses and black webbed feet pointed towards the sea. Side by side along the beach, they could have been sunbathing.

Up ahead the imposing Haystack Rock shot up through earth, sand, sea and fog, towering over the beach like a mountain peak piercing through the clouds; a reminder to breakable bodies that something much bigger is happening. Initially a dark mass to my tired eyes, one by one its crevices revealed themselves with each bird that fluttered out from its sheltered nook or circled back in from the sky, disappearing into the basalt.

Moving closer to the rock my eyes traced higher and higher as if the stone continued to rise up from the ground before me, until eventually, something invited my gaze back down the horizon.

Drawing nearer, the low mist between us dissipated to reveal a man. Sitting on a camp chair in the middle of the beach he faced the rock purposely, the sand beneath his seat still holding residual puddles from the retreating tide. Unconsciously slowing my stride I watched him; the only other soul I’d seen so far without wings.

Within moments he raised his arms and a pair of binoculars were brought to his eyes, fixed on something at the very top of the sea stack.

He lowered the binoculars, though not his gaze.

After a few minutes of my own hushed observation (and quick weighing of shy trepidation against eager curiosity) I decided to approach him, feeling intensely that I would regret it later if I didn’t.

Conscious not to disturb what looked like a perfectly peaceful morning I approached slowly, rolling over the wet sand to mute my squelching, and all too late became a little concerned that my careful act of consideration could be made redundant by giving him a heart attack. Fortunately he noticed me from the corner of his eye and rested into the back of his chair as I stopped alongside him, letting my feet sink into the ground and deciding to stay. He tilted his head towards me just an inch and squinting up to the bright white sky behind my head, raised the corners of his mouth like they were attached with little strings. Welcoming, almost as if expecting, the company he said “Good morning” with such sincerity in the word ‘good’ I saw it float towards me and make the salty air between us glow a little warmer. 

Glancing at the binoculars resting on his lap, both hands still readily placed upon them, I asked what he was looking for. “Puffins”, he told me.

I listened intently as he gestured to the impressive 235ft shard of volcanic rock and explained that it’s home to around 120 tufted puffins; he was recording their numbers for a local conservation group. 

Puffins! Up there! I’d never been near a single puffin in all my life and here above me perch 120 of them. 

“They’re actually doing quite well this year”, he reported proudly, comparing his findings to other years, other hopeful mornings, he’d spent monitoring the bright billed characters from his camp chair on the edge of the sea. Together we froze the space around us, spellbound — he with the puffins and I with him. I stood in awe with the sheer simplicity of it all. Of all the options presented to us every time the sun rises, of all the ways we’re told to spend the fleeting hours, productivity and progress and escape and repeat, this is what he chose. To think how much we could do if we just sat still and looked closely once in a while. 

With my mind fluttering I wished him good day and good luck, and turned back towards the house just as the sky finally decided to draw back the curtains, letting the light spill through windows and dance on eyelids all along the shorefront. 

Looking down at the sand I searched for feathers and wondered if I could find any plumage belonging to one of the tufted puffins. Holding my feather from earlier I brought up an identification website on my phone to figure out who it belonged to, selecting ‘White’ and confidently clicking ‘Next’. But is it a primary feather or a secondary feather? Juvenile or adult? I’m not sure, after all it was on the ground (and the bird was nowhere to be seen to ask). I put it back in my pocket where it remained as a gull’s beaming underbelly.

Holding down the handle I crept back into the still silent house and thought of birds for the rest of the day. I thought about the gulls overhead, dazzling white against the velvety grey sky, swirling through the last of the mist to dust off the morning. I thought of feather patterns and of everything I don’t know, of everything I can’t see above and beneath the water’s surface. I thought of how much more there is. 

When I could no longer hear the waves the words of the puffin watcher replayed in my head, and when I was out of sight of the rock I closed my eyes and saw the auks above a gleaming silver sea. 

120 puffins. 

He’d counted 20 so far.

***

Christina Riley is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. She is currently working on her debut collection of essays, At Tidelines, which was long listed for Canongate's Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing 2019, and has created artwork for The Frayed Atlantic Edge (David Gange, Harper Collins), Gold Flake Paint, Lagom and The London Reader. In 2019 Riley began The Nature Library, a reference library and reading space installed in public places across Scotland. 
Website

Unreal estate No.02: Quoyle's Point

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the second of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Quoyle’s Point from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Annie Proulx herself.

“The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought.”
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 1993

“There was something about that hard, bare rock, the whistling wind, I found very appealing,” American author Annie Proulx said about her first time in Newfoundland, when she went there on a fishing trip, for a The New York Times interview 26 years ago. “I liked the loneliness and desolateness, the heavily wooded feeling of it. I felt clasped to that stony bosom in a way. I was physically shaken.” 

The idea for The Shipping News, her second book, was born. Annie Proulx fell in love with the landscape on this large island in Atlantic Ocean off eastern Canada, and later even bought her own house in Newfoundland, a cottage where she spent part of the year, dividing time between her other house at that time in Wyoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, published in 1993, is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house at Quoyle’s Point, a house that is itself a vivid character, dusty and gaunt, moaning in the wind.

“I feel that stories come out of geography, climate, weather,” Annie Proulx said in an interview for SaltWire, “out of wind and mud, the placement of houses and villages, local landscape markers and anomalies.” 

The House

Quoyle’s Point is an imagined place in Newfoundland. For forty-four years a house has stood there empty, until the protagonist Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and “thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love”, travels to Newfoundland with his two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and aunt Agnis Hamm, who was born in the house years ago. Quoyle’s faithless wife, and the girls’ mother, dies in a car accident after selling her two daughters to a sexual molester. Quoyle gets his girls back and they are ready to leave the broken life in New York and start anew. Aunt isn’t sure if the house is still standing, but inwardly believes that something had held, “that time had not cheated her of this return”. For Aunt the house is filled with good and bad memories.

The house was built a long time ago on Gaze Island (also a fictional place), where all Quoyles once lived. They were pirates that lured ships onto the rocks. When Gaze Island became flooded with Christians, the Quoyles dragged the house over a frozen bay to the shore and put it “like a hat on a rock”. In the beginning of the book it is hard to imagine that Quoyle’s ancestors were pirates. He is afraid of water and is described as a failure at life. On the ferry to Newfoundland, to his new life, Quoyle sits seasick, his face “the color of a bad pearl”. 

On the western side of the fictional Omaloor Bay, the Quoyle’s Point thrusts into the Atlantic Ocean like a bent thumb. Aunt left the house behind when she was fifteen. She wonders now which has changed the most, place or self? “She leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” When a ferry approaches the coast, Aunt suddenly has a glimpse of the building into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!” 

When they arrive at the Quoyle’s Point, it is all foggy until the wind goes under the fog and drives it up. The gaunt building appears. The house is the green of a grass stain. Bunny hates the colour, it makes her nauseous. The distinctive feature of the house is a window flanked by two smaller ones, “as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders.” Half the panes are gone. Paint flakes from wood. There are holes in the roof. “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is straight as a ruler,” Aunt says. Quoyle wants to check inside, if floors haven’t fallen into the cellar, but Aunt laughs. “Not likely,” she says joyfully. “There is no cellar.” 

The house is lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. The cables bristle with broken wires. Long before Aunt was born, there were no cables. The house rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. “Made the women sick, afraid,” Aunt tells Quoyle, “so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.”

“Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless,” Quoyle thinks, when exploring the inside of the abandoned, dusty house. Through the windows he sees the cool plain of the sea. “The bay rolled and rolled.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. The floorboards slant under the feet, wood as bare as skin. “And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.” 

In a couple of weeks with the help of a local carpenter Dennis Buggit the house is fixed as far as to be safe to move in. “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” says Bunny, when they arrive with bags. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.”

No matter what they did to the house, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the fog. “How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice?” Quoyle wonders. The idea fixed in him that the journey over the frozen bay had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. At one point in the book he visits the Gaze Island and finds a place of flat rocks laid out, where his house once stood. 

They had started to live at Quoyle’s Point in May; the end of September is the first time Quoyle is alone in the green house. He stomps around the still underfurnished rooms as “dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it”. At night the wind moans through the house cables, a sound that invokes a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulls the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and sleeps again; “Getting used to nightmares.”

When winter nears, Aunt becomes worried. Snow could keep them trapped inside the house, quite far from everything. She encourages them to move across the bay to the city for the winter. “Consider this place a summer camp,” she says. “We can move out to the green house again in spring, as soon as the road is open. It’ll be the sweeter for waiting. I mean, if you still like it here. Or maybe you’re thinking of going back to New York?”

They can’t buy a new house for the winter season, because Quoyle has put a lot of money into the old house. He doesn’t have much left. They have to rent a place to stay. Quoyle returns to the green house, to pick up the rest of the things. The gravel road to Quoyle’s Point, had never seemed so miserable to him. Inside the house the abandoned silence. The stale smells. As it was the first time. As though they had never lived in it.

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odourless gas. The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought. Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. The vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive. That was it, in the house he felt he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

Winter in Newfoundland is savage cold. Early spring brings a huge storm. Wind noises at night causes nightmares to Bunny. She sees the green house being blown away by the wind. “Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained towards the sea.” Then cables snap one after another in her nightmare, caused by the real storm outside. Glass burst in her dream. House lifts in wind at the freed corners. “The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.” 

Was it just a dream? What Bunny saw turns out to be prophetic.

“You know I believe your ’ouse is gone. Take a look.” Archie says on the next morning with cigarette in his mouth and hands to Quoyle his old-fashioned binoculars. “No, you won’t find ’er for she’s not there. I looked out for ’er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ’ard wind we ’ad. How many years was them cables ’olding ’er down?” Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the Aunt time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice. 

“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyle was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.” 

Good thing, Aunt had insured the green house, first thing she did when they arrived in Newfoundland. Quoyle didn’t know that. Aunt didn’t worry too much about the loss and planned which place to buy for the insurance money, for Quoyle and Wavey, his new love that he will marry, and girls. 

“In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Landscape With Man And High-Vis Jacket And Alpaca

A film poem by Daniel Bennett:

'For the last ten years, I've made the same train journey through the Hampshire countryside, from London out towards the coast. The landscape has become a familiar companion during this time, although remaining remote and elusive, trapped beyond glass. One night, on a diversion forced by bad weather, the train pulled along a remote area of track, where a high tensile fence had been strung across a patch of flooded marshland. Through the steam on the window, I could make out a man wearing a high-vis jacket staring back at me in front of a tent, an alpaca grazing by his side. This weird, fleeting glimpse into someone's life formed the basis of a long poem, taking in themes of rootlessness and austerity, one of many poems about place and landscape in my first collection, West South North, North South East.'

***

Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and live and work in London. My poems have been published in numerous places, including The Stinging Fly, Black Box Manifold and Structo, and I'm also the author of the novel, All The Dogs. You can find more of my work online at Absence Club.

Akinbode Akinbiyi at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

By Sara Bellini

In The Language of Cities Deyan Sudjic writes“A city is made by its people, within the bounds of the possibilities that it can offer them: it has a distinctive identity that makes it much more than an agglomeration of buildings”. Akinbode Akinbiyi’s pictures are portraits of a street, a corner, a moment. He captures the soul of a place through its inhabitants and the social texture that binds them to their cityscape.

“What I’m doing is observing, taking part in this urban phenomenon and trying to record documents. It is a kind of fine sensibility of understanding the passageways within the city.” In his psychogeography of the image on film Akinbode Akinbiyi explores the particular and the everyday, achieving a universal representation of what makes up collective life and how people experience their shared environment.

Akinbiyi is a photographer and artist that has walked and documented the streets of cities and coastlines of Europe, Africa and America. He has lived in England, Nigeria and Germany and is now based in Berlin. His collection of works reflects his wanderings and includes series like African Quarter (Berlin 1990s–today) and Lagos: All Roads (1980s–today). Selected pieces from his long-term projects will be on display at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin from today until 17 May. The exhibition is called Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air and is curated by Natasha Ginwala.

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air
Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
07th February 2020 - 17th May 2020

Glen Banchor

Photo: Merryn Glover

By Merryn Glover:

I’d always heard about the forgotten glen round the back of Newtonmore, in the south-east corner of the Cairngorms National Park. There are ruins there and old, old stories. Someone said you could see eagles, and one of the Wildcat Trails goes that way. A long time ago, everyone went that way.

The locals pronounce it ‘Banachar’ but on the map it’s spelled Glen Banchor and arcs round the back of Creag Dhubh – Black Rock - the hump-backed hill that rises between the villages of Newtonmore and Laggan. Standing at the summit one freezing December, we looked down into the Glen, a span of silence with not a breath stirring the snow.

“Down there,” I said to my husband. “That’s where all the people lived.”

The following February we take mountain bikes into the Glen on a cold, breezy day. The sky is brooding and the Monadhliath mountains to the north form a dark wall. But where the sun breaks through, the fields glow and the raindrops in the bare trees turn to diamonds. Below us, the Calder makes the deep curve for which the glen is named: in Gaelic, a beannachar is a horn-shaped bend in the river. In the early days of Celtic Christianity, there was a monastic cell here dedicated to St Bridget of Kildare, and though nothing remains of the cell, the church in the village is called St Brides.

We cross Allt a’ Chaorainn burn at Shepherd’s Bridge and then Allt Fionndrigh, where we find the first of the abandoned dwellings. An old wooden barn and two stone houses, they were vacated recently enough to still look wounded and waiting. Like so many glens in the Highlands, this is a landscape of loss. At its peak in the late 18th century, between 300 and 400 people lived here in 14 ‘townships’, the cluster of dwellings that shared grazing. There was no bridge over the Spey then - the bigger, faster river in the wide strath on the other side of Creag Dhubh - so Glen Banchor was the major highway north for cattle, goods and travellers. 

It’s almost impossible to imagine that now, as the trail rapidly dwindles into muddy grass, leaving us to churn through bog. Much of the time we have to get off and push, or even carry, the bikes. Occasionally a path resurfaces, but then vanishes again or forks into sheep tracks that head in unpromising directions. We keep scouring the map and the landscape for the route we’ve missed, but conclude it has gradually disappeared, like the people.

This is the ghost story that haunts much of Scotland, where glens that were once populated - even in remote places - are now empty. There were usually several intersecting reasons for the departures: poverty, hardship and poor harvests; emigration to the cities and new colonies; changes in agriculture. But the most significant, and the most shameful, was the Clearances, where landowners removed subsistence farming peasants to make way for large flocks of sheep. A history well-known in Scotland, but very little beyond, it reached its peak in the early 19th century, and then gave way to the Victorian era and the rise of the Highland sporting estate when sheep were side-lined in favour of deer and game birds. But the people never came back.

If you know what to look for, you can see the ruins of their dwellings across the glen, most little more than stone foundations, others with bits of wall, or even a roof. High in the mountains, there are circles of overgrown rocks, the remains of the shieling huts where the women and children lived every summer, grazing their cattle and making cheese. And under the flooded ground and the blowing grasses you might detect the outlines of the old corn-lands and the ‘run rigs’, the raised crop beds that lie in dark ridges like the ribs of a buried giant.

It’s not just human life that is missing; north of the Calder there is barely a tree. This kind of barren sweep is so common in Scotland that many people see it as natural. Even beautiful. True, in certain lights there is a harsh beauty about these open reaches and the contours of heath and mountain. But it’s certainly not wilderness. Every inch of this landscape has been shaped by people for thousands of years and the reality is that most of it is damaged, with only a fraction of the plant and animal life it once had. It creates an environment that continues to degrade – the banks of the Calder are painfully eroded - and offers little livelihood for human or beast.

This impoverished state developed over time, influenced by climate change, timber extraction, agricultural shifts and the extinction of Scotland’s major predators - lynx, wolf and bear. But the major driver in the past two hundred years has been over-grazing by sheep and deer and the routine burning of heather to support grouse. Sheep numbers have dropped dramatically (as they are barely profitable, even with subsidies) but deer and grouse are maintained at artificially high numbers for field sports across large swathes of Scotland. These are hotly contested issues in a country struggling with multiple land challenges, not least the most unequal ownership pattern in Europe.

There’s no bridge or stepping stones over Allt a Bhallach, so we carry our bikes, ankle deep in freezing water, to a bothy on the far side. Desolate, its slate roof is giving way, its door and windows black; the sole room is full of sheep droppings and the back wall gapes onto the dark hills, half hidden in cloud.

We have muffins and a flask of coffee to warm us, then push on through the watery world. Within the great quiet there is the sustained rushing of the Calder and its tributaries, and the occasional gurgling of a startled grouse. Though only a few ragged patches of snow cling to the hills, the mountain hare bounding away over the moor is still pure white in its winter livery. I feel a shot of joy. Despite rare human traffic, wildlife here is scant. We don’t see an eagle and I doubt anyone would see a wildcat.

The clouds shift, one moment casting the whole glen in forbidding greys, then pouring sunlight through a gap and turning everything to gold. It reflects my feelings about this place: sad, yet also thankful for its solitude. Barely a crow-flying couple of miles from the A9, Scotland’s main arterial north, this is a valley of wind and wide spaces that opens the head.

We ford another two burns, the last one churning up to our shins, and by the time I heave my bike up the bank, my feet are stumps of ice. We are now at Dalnashallag bothy, a stone hut with rusting corrugated roof used as resting place for wanderers. The main room smells ashy and damp, the fireplace wall smeared with soot, the couches sagging; an incongruous strip of floral wallpaper runs faded and peeling round the window bay. But spare as it is, the bothy book gives testament to its welcome shelter. 

“Cycled from Balgowan with Andy and Islay the collie. Lovely evening for it. Just in time for tea.” Louise and Andy from Lancaster.

“It is beautiful,” write Molly & Sue. 

“Talifa from Samoa island and Kallo from the Netherlands.  Just passing by this warm house after a good walk in the hard lands.”

Yes, Glen Banchor is beautiful, but these are hard lands, and just as I hope its story is never lost under the grass, so too do I hope its story is not ended, but can be written in a new chapter, teeming with life.

***
Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. Last year she was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and has been commissioned to write a non-fiction book about the mountains. Her features have appeared in several publications including The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.