Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

I'm standing on Beachy Head, a chalk headland rising to 531 feet/162 metres above sea level and despite intermittent spring sunshine, there's a sharp wind coursing over the wide open space. Beachy Head is known as the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. It's found west of Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the south-east coast of England. The name originates from the corrupted French beau chef meaning 'beautiful headland.' The writer and walker Richard Jefferies wrote about the place in 1883 in an article aptly named The Breeze on Beachy Head. 'The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.' I agree. I too am wind-swept and washed with air. The headland is visited and walked on all year round, more in good weather than in bad, but even in November mists or strong February winds, the site can make you refocus on yourself and your sense of existence. It can turn you inside out.

Local inhabitants and visitors from all over the globe are attracted to the area for its space, height and the views: to gaze out across the light of the English Channel with a post-Brexit vision, to imagine the land mass of Europe beyond the horizon. It's a place of meeting and transience, evocation and conversation. It's also a darker place given the number of people who come here to end their lives. On average twenty people a year throw themselves over the edge. On one of my previous walks up here a man with tears in his years walked past me and muttered that someone had gone over. Division of land masses, division of existence.

The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, set up in 2004, is a volunteer led organisation whose members are trained in skilled crisis intervention support. Members take regular patrols along the length of this coastline ready to save lives and help anyone in need. I often see them on their walks dressed in their high-viz jackets. The headland is an 'edge place', physically and psychologically, signified by the number of wooden signs conspicuously announcing in stark white lettering 'Cliff Edge'. In the past, friends and relatives used to leave bunches of flowers with written card notes attached to the thin wire fence which runs at intervals alongside the cliff edge. Sometimes, small crosses have been placed in the ground near to the spot from where the deceased person jumped. In 2018, Eastbourne Borough Council decided in its wisdom to remove these memory tokens and shrines, no doubt in a move to counter a site favoured for suicide in favour of encouraging more positive tourism. 

On this Sunday afternoon I feel pivoted between air, land and sea, and I think of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for not only seeing what's around me but also what's within me. Admittedly there's no fog to be seen, but the vast sky with its scudding clouds makes me feel insignificant on the land's design.

A road not far away runs past the Beachy Head public house, the Countryside Centre with its shop and rotating exhibitions and a large car park. A public telephone box bears a prominent sign stating that the Samaritans are always there, night and day, to receive your call. They are there to listen. Listening. At the beginning of the Cold War, Beachy Head was chosen as a strategic site for a government radar installation. An underground bunker was built and by 1954 the 'looking and listening' site was fully operational. It was only around 1960 when decisions were made to wind down the activity that the complex was eventually demolished.

Although concrete slabs and grass have now covered over most of the surface evidence, traces of the operation are still around if you know what to look for. As I walk around I notice a ring of metal barriers with Keep Out notices has been erected around a grassy mound, part of which has been ripped apart exposing smashed concrete slabs. I go closer to investigate and can just make out a narrow flight of rusty metal rung steps leading down into an underground darkness, no doubt once an entrance to an operations room monitoring codes and signals. It's not only the height I must be aware of, but also what's under my feet.

There's more to the breeze on Beachy Head than is realized, as it's one of the prevailing natural forces which continue to batter and pummel at the chalk cliff, wearing away half a metre of land a year. Regular news reports in the local press announce alarming splits near to the cliff edge, followed later by reports of large rock falls onto the beach below. Emergency barriers are then erected and the Cliff Edge signs are moved once again. The visitors walk around and the land moves. All notions of stability are questioned on this 'edge place.'

During WWII, Beachy Head was the last land formation many aircrews saw on their missions to occupied Europe. To mark their operations a large memorial block of granite has been placed on the headland with images and inscriptions relating to the work of the squadrons. Now, in place of aircraft, there are regular meetings of a paragliding club whose members are often seen exploiting thermals, floating and soaring above a once defensive landscape, attached to their curled coloured fabric wings like surreal insects. I've often heard their 'music' as they swished above me.

I'm not tempted today by the ice-cream van parked strategically in one corner of the car park. It has a small queue of customers desirous of icy satisfaction. I turn away and start on my walk back home. On the way down I spot a discarded plastic printed arrow, black on yellow, a reminder of last year's annual autumn Beachy Head Marathon. Yes, add runners to the mix. All is movement, all is flux.

***

Julius Smit is a photographer, poet, zine maker and a member of the Walking Artists Network - Website

Photo Essay: Fancy Hill, by Rob McDonald

by Rob McDonald:

Though I have lived here thirty years, I have never felt settled in Southwest Virginia. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but my home, where my sensibilities were formed, will always be the sandy coastal plains of South Carolina. Winding roads and deep-green hollows may appear picturesque in some light, but for someone like me, they mostly feel claustrophobic, isolating, unsettling. Whenever my wife, driving to the store in our first months living here, would round a curve and mistake a distant mountain range for a looming storm, I understood.

There’s one spot nearby that has always felt different, however. I noticed it when I visited for the job interview that brought me to the area in 1992, and I have indulged something close to an obsession with it ever since.  Fancy Hill, as it is known, is listed on the Register of Historic Places because of its inclusion in a group of important 19th-century farms known collectively the “Seven Hills of Rockbridge County.” A roadside marker noting its prominence focuses on the main house, a three-story treasure of 18th-century Federal architecture. But what I love is the field: a 21-acre parcel that rolls beautifully down from the house, then up and off toward a high horizon.

Records suggest the topography is virtually unchanged from when Fancy Hill was claimed, mapped, and cleared by Anglo settlers of the region more than two hundred years ago. In this otherwise craggy valley, it’s an especially open and stirring expanse.  From various points outside the post-and-wire boundary fence, the entire landscape is visible, swelling, stretching and dipping, displaying itself. It undulates, almost musically. I have studied it in different seasons and times of day. I believe I could sketch its contours with my eyes closed.  

One day, I looked up the name of the farm’s current owner and called to explain that I wanted to walk out into the field with my camera, to explore a place I’d thought about and imagined for so long. He was receptive, even understanding. He’d inherited the land and decided to protect it with a conservation easement so, unlike adjacent farms of similar beauty that have been subdivided into mini-estates for the new country gentry, it can never be developed. The whole parcel was leased for hay-making, keeping it arable, but I had permission to come and go as I wished.

With that opening, I spent whole mornings and afternoons traipsing up, down, and across Fancy Hill, making photographs in an attempt to represent the experience.  In the process, I learned some things that had been imperceptible from the periphery.

I found very quickly, for example, that the lay of the land at Fancy Hill is neither as gentle nor as comprehensible as it appears. There are demanding grades and dramatic drops. You walk a distance and grow breathless. There are spots where the rest of the world disappears and you’re upright in a cradle of earth, with only the sky for orientation.  

Also, the ground is surprisingly rocky, sheer stone in spots. The vegetation, a uniform and mesmerizing seasonal green or gold from the fence line, is often a frustrating tangle of grasses, weeds, and briars underfoot.  Walking unsettles all manner of flying, hopping, and crawling creatures, some seen, some heard and reasonably surmised. Droppings and tracks suggest regular visitors to a stream that originates in a cinderblock well-house, runs a bit, then disappears.

Another note:  There’s a stand of trees along the high north boundary that I’d not taken into account in all my years of looking from the fence. My eye had always stopped where the grasses end, but right there stands a broad thicket with impressive oaks that must have been seedlings when Fancy Hill was established.  

I discovered that the finest view of the property is under that tree line. Each peak and trough of the landscape is visible, where it originates and how it plays out.  Mirroring the view from below, the wide field appears to flow outward and down toward the enormous main house, which from that spot looks for all the world like a miniature version of itself.

The perspective is clarifying, like the view from a watch tower.

Fancy Hill, it turns out, is most beautiful in context of this whole place, encircled, defined, and clarified by a dark line running in the distance—not a storm, but the ancient rambling range of the Blue Ridge.

***

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. He was awarded a Professional Fellowship (Photography) from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and was a residential fellow in the Visual Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Find him online at robmcdonaldphotography.com. Connect with him on Twitter at @RobMcDonaldVA.

Five Questions for... John Rooney

By Sara Bellini

One of our favourite Berlin bookshops has recently reopened its doors - with a new look, in a new location - and we couldn’t be more thrilled. After the non renewal of their rental contract back in August, Curious Fox. had been absent from the Berlin map until this February, when it moved to Lausitzer Platz in Kreuzberg. While walking down the stairs that lead you to the bookshop, you step under a beautiful black and white mural depicting the new neighbourhood, the nearby overground train, and of course a fox.

The hand behind the artwork is that of Derry-born illustrator John Rooney. “The owners Orla & Dave are good friends of mine and asked me to work on a larger mural on the exterior of the new shop. Unfortunately I had just decided to leave Berlin at the time and thought a smaller mural inside would be more feasible. Myself and Orla are keen bird enthusiasts so I included a kestrel and a jay (which live in the trees opposite the shop). I drew some buildings from the neighbourhood too. It was a very fun way to spend my last week in Berlin.” 

You might have seen some of his works in Standart magazine or on windows and walls across Berlin - and Ireland. Drawing inspiration from pop culture (cult movies, sci-fi and literature), nature (he has a dog collage series) and architecture (check out his cityscapes), each composition strikes us for its dynamicity and layers of details, perfectly balanced between accuracy and artistry. If you are curious about the aesthetic potential of the garden spider, the common pipistrelle bat or the Portuguese man o’ war, have a look at his wildlife map of Ireland. No snakes obviously. 

In his hand-drawn bird collages and wildlife maps, John Rooney presents a place through its fauna, giving equal importance to the tiny creatures and the majestic ones. The latest addition to its portfolio is the wildlife map of Canada, with over 480 species checked by experts at the Biodôme in Montréal. 

According to his bio, “John has not stopped drawing things ever since he was the age of three”, and we are glad to hear he has no plan to stop any time soon. We caught up with him just before he left Berlin, where he had been based for the past four years, to embark on adventures around the world.

What does home mean to you?

A place where you feel at peace and have people around you that you care about. Cliched, I know, but it's that simple for me.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I'm not sure if you'll accept a place that doesn't exist anymore but I'd have to say a pub called the 'Bound for Boston' in Derry where I spent most of my late teens / early twenties. It was always full of sound people and had great bands playing every week. I have a lot of great memories there. I do love Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin too. 

What is beyond your front door?

Not much right now to be honest. I'm living in the suburbs of Derry and the nearest pub is 15 minutes away and it's dodgy as fuck. Although there's some football pitches behind my house that have a lot of nice trees with bullfinches and siskins flying around the place.

What place would you most like to visit?

I'd love to just stand at the foot of Mount Everest just to see it and take it in.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I'm currently reading a comedy book called Mickey Doc by a Derry author called Fintan Harvey. I'm watching the Kanye documentary and also Lovecraft Country. I'm listening to some Junior Brother and a lot of Kylie, who I rediscovered after watching an episode of 'Reeling in the Years' on RTE.

John Rooney's Website
John Rooney on Instagram

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.

Film: Rights of Nature

Watched by Phil Scraton:

Narrated by Ireland's fine singer-songwriter, poet, story-teller, and environmental activist John Spillane, Rights of Nature is a fine short film proposing the necessity of taking a 'journey of unlearning' to develop and progress a 'dialogue with nature'. It envisions a new socio-economic narrative for Ireland that resonates well beyond its shores.

It is self-evident that living beings are subjects despite consistent attempts to objectify the human experience, limit potential and impose restrictions on freedoms of thought, association and movement. We live in environments alongside non-human subjects consistently objectified as property to be used and discarded. Land is owned, enclosed, exploited and changed forever without consideration of long-term consequences for the future of life in its broadest definition.

The film asks what it means to claim ownership, to 'belong' within place, exploring the significance of cultural and spiritual inheritance and their connection to identity. It considers the destruction of culture, language and community through colonisation and its invidious political-economic exploitation and cultural subjugation; the objectification of place and the control of land through property law; the denial of access and the right of commons. It proposes a new dimension in approaching democratic rights.

The narrative challenges the assumption that nature is nothing more than property to be owned, developed, laid waste and destroyed by private interests but is essential to the construction and maintenance of communities through time. It calls for the defence of our environments against commercial exploitation and the clear evidence of harm. Only through personal engagement and collective activism, committed to challenging the short-termism of that commercial exploitation, will the health of communities, the land and seascapes be protected and advanced.

Together with the depth of his narration, John Spillane's music is woven into the film's dialogue.

Filmed and edited by Simon Wood
Directed by Peter Doran