Postcard from... Norfolk

By Rachel Alcock-Hodgson:

On my first morning home I wake up to the wide open view. Morning damp, not quite mist, hangs from the heathery drifts of bare trees beyond the fields. The purple and lichen green of the branches picked out in the golden light. The birds are in full throttle, twirling blackbird song layering over the thrum of wood pigeons. I step out, and begin to try and breathe the fresh coolness in, but it can’t quite calm my jangling brain, or ease the pressure on my chest.

The following days are defined by forcing my thoughts to settle and appreciate small pleasures - walks round the fields, bike rides, sitting in the sun looking out of the window and drawing. I have left the city and work to give myself headspace to negotiate a rush of crippling physical anxiety I had been hit with a couple of weeks earlier, seemingly from nowhere. This gives me the double edged luxury of time to appreciate where I am, but with a mind that I can’t keep on the straight and narrow, and routinely dives off into eddies of existential dread where my future is mundane, monotonous and always pointless.

The peace and quiet that penetrates bit by bit hustles with non-human busyness. I watch the negotiations at the bird feeders, blue tits shuttling back and forth between the feeders and the cover of the big half-pruned bay tree, nuthatches hanging upside down, squirrels making off with as much as they can carry.

Bike ride number one is my first lycra-clad ride in too long. By the house, the air is tangy with salt - surely we are too far from the coast for it to be from the sea? But mum can smell it too when I call her out. Neither of us have smelt this here before. As I ride, the rhythm of the exercise makes space for spring to dawn on me. Heading out of the village, the hedges are alive with jittering sparrows. The views I cycle through are full of wide, wet, ploughed, brown-pink fields, ready to sprout. Rich and solid, something in between the red of Devon soil and the black of Lincolnshire. Kestrels hang, fluttering at the edges. When one swoops low, its red-brown back is a softer reflection of the fields. 

Dense clumps of acid yellow primroses hug the ground, clustering at the bottom of trees on the verges. Near Happisburgh and its red and white lighthouse, there is the hazy, vanilla smell of daffs, and as the road winds and sinks down through sheltered banks, strong wafts of wild garlic. I remember that I love the feeling of battling the wind for miles and miles then turning the corner and my bike taking off and the tarmac starting to hum.

There’s a comfort in navigating by place names I know, not needing a map. Knowing the landscape feels like I am part of it, connected to those who have gone before me and walked the footpaths and lokes that crisscross the fields and squeeze in between gardens and houses.

Buoyed up by this, ride number two starts with us - my dad, mum and me - pootling out into the chill dusk. We are heading towards the landmarks of my childhood, Witton Woods, Bacton Gas terminals, Happisburgh lighthouse.

Even before we had quite set off en famille, mum started to give us a guided tour, accompanying the first pedal strokes with an anecdote about the post-man who’s just driven off and his ‘lunchtime liaison’, then telling us who lives in every house and what lies ahead at every cross-road. Uncharacteristically, and surprising myself, I don’t default to grumpiness (‘I know where we are mum!’), instead letting myself listen. I have the obvious but startling realisation that my connection to this place is not just an innate one with nature, or general countryside, it is also because of the web of community my mum has spent 30 years working hard to create. Resting into the familiarity of place and people, feels like leaning back into a hot bath.

On Sunday, mum and I walk. We end up on the hill above the village in the wind blasted churchyard where my maternal grandmother is buried. Her stone is dull stormy grey. Tall, blunt and asymmetric, conspicuous above the others. It commemorates her achievements in blocky capitals: her Merit award from the Royal College of Physicians, her ‘Dr’, and her specialism, rheumatism, in Greek. Very her. And very different to the usual ‘in loving memory’ and family lists, on smoothly curved and polished granite. 

My grandmother never lived here. Her name is Scottish, via New Zealand, worlds away from the generations of Hannants and Dixons that populate the graveyard. Though her family connections aren’t listed, she is here because this is where my mum chose to be. We sit sheltered on the grass, bathed in warm spring sun and feel held by the generations beneath us. My tangled feeling of family connection and connection to the land all the more significant.

We end the day by gardening into the dusk, bonfire cracking and smoking like on the busy Sundays of my childhood. I enjoy the methodical and companionable progress of weeding, listening to the woodpecker jackhammer a hollow tree, and a blackbird’s aria. We stay out until the birds leave and the cooling shadows overtake the warmth of the sun, finally going inside quietly contented with the day. 

***

Rachel Alcock-Hodgson lives in Edinburgh, but has roots in Norfolk. She is a walker, climber, swimmer, knitter, mender of anything, gardener, cyclist and reader. She did an English Literature degree a few years ago, and is getting back into writing after a pause - having realised that it’s an important part of her understanding of the world.

This story was published previously in a different form by Mxogyny.

Definitions: Loke is a Norfolk word for a short, narrow lane. Used in the countryside and towns. 

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Letting Frogs Pop into Existence

By Blaise Kielar:

Walking the interlaced paths of Duke Gardens, carefully maintaining proper social distance, I catch myself possessive of my airspace, far beyond six feet. In finding my little corner of solitude and quiet, I fear a wind-borne germ as if it tags along with the yellow pollen already raining down from the pines. Like the virus, a pollen grain is invisible, that is, until thousands pool on the ground. My sneeze is doubly unwelcome.

I’m grateful for this urban oasis, started in 1938 by Sarah P. Duke’s daughter as a tribute to her nature-loving mother. The major buildings of Duke University’s West Campus were completed by 1935, planned around Duke Chapel with its 210-foot-tall bell tower, perched on the highest spot of the campus. The garden was an inspired use of a ravine within easy walk of Duke Hospital, the Chapel, the library, and the dorms.

I meander down a gentle slope, calmed by artful groupings of small trees, groundcover and boulders, unperturbed by sporadic beeping of construction equipment nearby. The beeps remind me of how humans alter our environment, and I realize the rocks are of a variety of types with different weathering patterns yet are arranged to appear like natural groupings. The engineers and landscape designers had plenty of budget to lay out this exquisite garden to deliver each visitor a taste of the beauty of Mother Nature, on paved walkways in formal gardens or dirt paths in themed habitats.  

A gray stone beckons me to sit, more appealing than the elegant bench just uphill. I want to spend some time with a Japanese Maple that has caught my eye. I marvel at its gracefully rounded shape, like the top of a well-shorn man’s head. Low to the ground, all its branches are visible - the buds have not yet burst forth into leaves. The thick short trunk is far to the right. Three main branches twist chaotically to underpin the smooth crown. As I admire this dramatic asymmetry, I realize this tree has been trained by generations of gardeners - bonsai on the scale of a small tree. I stand to look for clues. There are few obvious pruning scars. All these gnarled branches crisscrossing each other repeatedly have been coaxed by man, perhaps with string or wire, maybe turnbuckles; a vision taking decades of management to fulfill. My eyes get lost in following just one of the branches – it seems like it touches all the others on its journey from trunk to its delicate buds.

I return to my boulder and admire the whole tree, the urge of nature tempered by the skill of man. Knowing that I am admiring art and science as well as nature does not separate me from its beauty. What wonders arise when I just slow down and truly see! Reminds me of decades ago when I’d take friends into a side lobby of the Morehead Planetarium building at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  A ring of marble columns encircled a rotunda and set off elegant wood paneling with portraits hung between pairs of columns. Among the stiff portraits hung a genuine Rembrandt. Anybody could wander in, even late at night, and behold that secret!

I stand, expansive at discovering my secret tree, offer thanks to the Japanese Maple, and wander on. Small groups walk together – my shoulders tighten. Should I be mindful of not walking in the wake of their breathing?

“I’m scared.” A small girl, eyes scrunched up to hold back upcoming tears, runs away from her mother. The bee she saw is already gone.

“If you don’t bother him, he won’t bother you,” the mom replies in a soothing tone. The child is unconvinced.

I watch them walk quickly away. A red-lacquered bridge beckons me to cross, its dramatic arch evoking Kyoto. I stop in a part of the garden unknown to me and empty of people. Shoulders loosen. An inscribed pole tells in English and Japanese that this tumbling waterfall garden was dedicated just five years ago. It looks ageless. Water flows from a hidden pump over jumbles of rock in two tumbling streams, uniting in a tiny pond near the footpath. I admire the artful placement of the boulders, the regular horizontals energized by leaning verticals and strong diagonals - a dynamic composition, just like an Old Master landscape. I sit on a stone where it is permitted and notice the split bamboo arches that prevent climbing on the other side of the water.  A Japanese Maple is a central feature, left to its organic shape reaching for the sky. A narrow streamlet leaves the little pond and heads downhill, its gentle burbling washing away my Covid worry.

 Peace returns - until I recall a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where she details all the life in a square foot of ground – over a thousand critters including mites, springtails, millipedes, beetles. Was it millions of creatures if you include microbes? The lack of signs of animal life makes my little Eden seem like an outdoor museum behind invisible glass. I long for ant mounds or a bee buzzing, even a mosquito! I focus my intention and let thoughts dissolve. Ten blissful minutes pass. With a sudden pop my eyes resolve a pattern on the ground into a frog! It did not exist two seconds ago. Nothing has moved, other than my brainwaves. The leg and torso blend with the jumble around it. How did I miss its brown skin on the light mulch, after sitting there for half an hour? I stare into its bulging eyes until my concentration fades. Pop – there’s another frog – and a third! One in the cleft of a rock, one among some low scrabbly growth, much better camouflaged. Now clear in my visual field, they are an exciting part of my world. I congratulate myself on my stillness and observation skills. Pop – I see another further downstream, and a minute later, the largest one appears just beyond arm’s reach! How did I not scare him off when I sat down? How did I not see him, big and brown, perched on a slanted light gray rock, just below my eye level? For close to an hour I sat in a faux forest scene, playing the role of a faux human, missing the reality of frogs, so at home in their environment that they could hide in plain sight.

 Me and the big frog maintain eye contact a long time. He is as still as his rock. I get self-conscious every time I shift my arm or tilt my head. I finally notice movement – his throat sac slowly pulses as he breathes. With no ribs or diaphragm, the subtle expansion and contraction of the sac pulls air into his lungs and pushes it back out. Discovering this sign of our equal dependence on air, my connection with him seems stronger. When I break my gaze, I see that one of the other frogs is gone. I scan to check on the other four. While looking right, I hear a plop from the left! Only three remain. I never see movement, only presence or absence. Now you see it, now you don’t. I stare into the large frog’s eyes one last time as if to find the secret of this magic. I resolve to come back soon to revisit his world. My heart warms to discover a safe way to feel connected in this time of social distancing. Alas, Duke closes the Garden the next day over Covid precautions. Now just a feature of my inner landscape, frogs pop into existence only when my worries fade.

***

Known in North Carolina as the leader of the Bulltown Strutters, Durham’s community New Orleans style brass band, violin and clarinet player Blaise Kielar believes that even the most expressive music sometimes cannot say what is lurking to be said. Well-chosen words create a soulful rhythm of their own. He’s been writing poetry and creative non-fiction since 1991.    

Studying the Universe from Blackford Hill

Photo: Macumba, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain – Link

By Pippa Goldschmidt: 

Blackford Hill is one of the seven hills of Edinburgh, situated a couple of miles due south of the city centre. The hill seems to mark a boundary of the city, on its north side are the city’s suburbs, arrays of tenement buildings as evenly spaced as any mathematical grid. To the south, the artifice of a golf course soon gives way to fields and moorland. If you travel up the main road to the top of the hill you must first pass under an ornate sandstone arch with a florid inscription and medallion so typical of Edinburgh Victorian architecture. An arch that could be a portal in a Scottish science fiction novel, acting as a gateway to an earlier time or place. Perhaps it also does so in real life, because the hill is host to one of the largest astronomical observatories in the UK, internationally renowned for research on objects in the early Universe.

So far in my life, I must have walked up and down this hill around a thousand times. Very few of these individual journeys have created their own distinct memories, other than the first one. I had been invited to an interview for a PhD place at the Observatory, and even though I had already looked at the route in an A to Z, I was not prepared for the experience of walking up a hill that becomes steeper as you approach its summit. By the time I finally reached the entrance, I was sweating profusely in my smart interview suit and already regretting my journey, my application for the PhD and the whole endeavour. 

However, I was successful and spent the next four years studying at the Observatory. My project was concerned with quasars, incredibly luminous centres of galaxies. Because they emit so much light we can see them from billions of lightyears away, in fact they are the most distant objects known in the Universe. At the time I was studying them, they were comparatively rare; thousands of galaxies had been detected but only a few hundred quasars were known. My job was to find more of them, determine their distances, and try and understand how they were connected to their surroundings – both their underlying ‘host’ galaxy and the wider environment. 

My experience of quasars was formed almost entirely through measuring the numbers attached to them. First, I knew them by their coordinates on the sky. Then they became redshifts, luminosities at different wavelengths and distances. I found that this tendency in the Observatory to experience physical objects through quantitative information started to spill over into the surroundings; as my studies progressed I couldn’t help transforming the hill into data such as the numbers of the houses, and the length of time it took me to reach the summit. (Seven minutes on a good day.) Studying this part of Edinburgh on an old Ordnance Survey map told me that the hill was 1/3 of a mile long. Contour lines centre on the summit like a fingerprint, the bottom of the hill corresponding to 200 feet altitude above sea level, while the Observatory is at 475 feet. 

With time, the hill’s intangible aspects started to become both smaller and more precious: the coconut-almond smell of the flowering gorse bushes in summer, the jagged-tooth view of the castle and the Royal Mile to the north, and the sparkle of the sea to the north-east. The few days each spring when all the frogs in that part of Scotland travelled to the hill to mate and I couldn’t walk more than a few metres in any direction without encountering a gravity-defying tower of them. The oddity that I couldn’t actually see my destination as I walked up the hill, the road rises to meet an open area of scrub land and the Observatory is situated off to one side. The abrupt transition between that scrub land of gorse bushes and thin birch trees, and the estate of the Observatory which is boundaried by a handsome stone wall. The  dichotomy between standing outside on a clear winter evening and gazing up at the anonymous stars, and studying quasars which are all invisible to the naked eye. 

The distinction between the hill and its representation on the map seems straightforward; the hill itself is real rocks, soil, trees and buildings whereas the map is a symbol of the hill on paper or screen. This relationship between the two must be one-sided, the map can’t exist without the reality and many things are present on the hill that are not (yet) mapped. Yet I realised from my work at the Observatory that maps and their corresponding realities are not so easily divided into two separate categories. All we can know of the Universe beyond the solar system is derived from maps. We have constructed maps of the stars in Milky Way, of surrounding galaxies in the Local Group, and of more distant galaxies. Furthermore, these maps don’t have to be of specific objects, like charting the seas on Earth we can plot diffuse gas. We can even map an entity we have not yet directly detected, such as dark matter. We can never hope to know or experience anything other than the maps, so they must always stand in for the reality. In the absence of any other knowledge, perhaps eventually they become that reality. 

*

The Observatory is not the only structure on the hill, about a hundred metres from it is a radio transmission tower used by the police. In the same way that the two poles of a bar magnet oppose each other, these two structures are apparent opposites; the tower is responsible for sending out invisible waves while the Observatory’s purpose is to receive waves from the sky above. Although it does this more indirectly than it used to, its two copper-topped domes (aligned along an East-West axis) each used to house a large telescope but these have long since been mothballed; two mechanical eyes blinded by obsolescence. Many astronomers who work there either travel to telescopes in other locations with better weather and less light pollution, such as Chile or Hawaii, or – increasingly – observe remotely. Telescopes in these places are sent instructions, carry out the observations in an automated fashion and transmit the data back to the Observatory.

I was always aware of a special irony in analysing images taken of the night sky during a Scottish winter day so full of cloud and mist that the Universe seemed like nothing more than a fantastical story written in numbers and graphs.

*

The map of the hill also has an iron age fort marked on it, although I’ve never managed to find it. On the other side of the hill is an eighteenth century house called the Hermitage which stands in a grass clearing, and now functions as the headquarters of a nature reserve. The Observatory, the radio transmission tower, the Hermitage and the fort all can be seen as emblems of specific eras, reminding us that each instance of time must carry along with it earlier times. 

Similarly, we tend to think of places as static and fixed, but one of the first things I learned was that the map of the Universe itself is expanding outwards with almost every galaxy moving away from each other, continuously adjusting their relationships with each other.

The walk at the beginning and end of each working day separated me not just physically, but also psychologically, from the rest of my life in Edinburgh. Its role as a ritual and a boundary was reinforced by the substantial wall surrounding the Observatory. All observatories are inherently not quite of their surroundings, constructed from metal and stone and grounded in the earth, their purpose is to study distant light. Walking up the hill towards the sky was a symbol of my efforts to understand what was far above me. 

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books). Her work has been broadcast and published in a variety of places, most recently in Litro, Mslexia, the Times Literary Supplement and on Radio 4. Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

Memories of Elsewhere: River Ogmore, by Tim Cooke

Photo: Dan Wood

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Tim Cooke:

If I try to think of my hometown objectively, images spring to mind one after another like a series of postcards. I see the old stone bridge, from which the town takes its name; I see the derelict bingo hall, a husk that was once a cinema, now a car park; I see the estate, much maligned but not so long ago an architectural vision of hope; I see the playing fields, the site of my worst childhood nightmares; and the dunes, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I see the castle, the woods, the supermarket, the dual-carriageway, the standing stones, and the recreation centre. 

Of course, I cannot think of these places without making connections, fitting them together and applying my own stories and others I’ve encountered; experience flows through each scene, as does the River Ogmore. 

The water rises at Craig Ogwr, in the Ogmore Valley, and runs down through Blackmill, Brynmenyn, Aberkenfig, Wildmill, Bridgend Town, Merthyr Mawr, Ogmore by Sea, and out into the Bristol Channel – I love the sounds these places make. There are parts I know intimately – from childhood and my teenage years – and those I’ve visited once or twice, like on school trips. There are huge sections I’ve not been anywhere near, which I find somehow exhilarating. The more I think about the river, the more I contemplate journeys I might make in the future, or should have made in the past, when I was there. 

My first experience of the river – in terms of place, not time (it runs from north to south and I track it geographically) – takes me all the way back to its starting point, up in the valley. At primary school, we spent a whole term on local waterways. We studied maps and diagrams, drew pictures and trekked out into the field. I recall a coach journey to the source, near Nant-y-moel, eating sweets and crisps and feeling sick. We stopped at a bend in the road, flanked by scarp and crag. Water poured from the mountaintop and slid away to our left, worksheets killing the mood. I did something wrong and was made to stand metres apart, listening alone to the babble and the noise of rolling pebbles.

*

I’m looking at a gallery online and the first image in the sequence is of that exact same spot. The grass is greener than I remember it, and the water is whiter. My first impression is that the photograph speaks more clearly of Wales than my recollections do. Maybe it’s in the detail, like the damp weather, or the colour of the soil – I’m not so sure. I move on. Next is a woman dressed in a dark-green coat, speckled with rain. Her expression is one of awe and wonder, or perhaps she’s been caught mid-sentence by the camera. Regardless, she’s part of the story now. 

I continue through pictures of two men on a bridge, a Welsh-flag towel pinned to a washing line, rows of almost identical flats, a war grave, a post-it note scribbled with ‘Donald Trump’, a swastika carved into a tree, and a schoolboy leaning on a wall with his arm in a pink cast, names signed in black pen. There’s a car, too, parked between lockups, a convertible BMW I think, that appears to have been pulled from the flow, the white paint covered in what looks like algae – a modern sort of river monster. It makes me think of the team of volunteers who dragged two-hundred tyres, five trollies, umpteen traffic cones and wheelbarrows, a large gas canister and a road barrier from the river one Saturday, plus fifty bags of smaller items – detritus dumped in the drift.

I keep going and, minutes later, stop to linger in a car park overlooking the bus station on the opposite side. The sun is about to disappear behind the hills in the distance. I walked not far from here, once, with the photographer, making a film about creativity in Bridgend; it was my response to the international press coverage of the spate of suicides that dubbed it ‘The Suicide Town’. As a child, I spent successive afternoons smoking cigarettes underneath a bridge just down from here, then hopped along a series of concrete platforms jutting out from the artificial banks. I have countless similar memories – I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one. 

*

Back in 1999, this stretch of river was central to a high-profile police investigation, into the murder of a young woman, who enjoyed writing songs and poetry. It was said there was no forensic evidence available, as the fast-flowing water had washed it away, but a hammer was discovered in a clump of trees a hundred yards from the cash and carry. Mud found in the boot of a car was thought to match that of the riverbank. 

*

I follow the river’s course through town, below the subway where, at fifteen, I spent a freezing cold night in a sleeping bag, and along the dirt track I’d take home after too many pints in the pub. I pass the recreation centre, where I played five-aside football and hung out with my first proper girlfriend. I can still smell the chlorine leaking from the vents that warmed our backs on winter evenings. There are no photos of these locations; in their place are images of redbrick housing, a man I vaguely know and a pile of chopped wood below broken glass – all effective in their way. I stop to linger on the sand at the bend in the river, referred to locally as just that, where I caught countless eels and my brother a sewin that tasted like shit. I lost a salmon once, I swear; that flash of iridescent silver.  

Across the rugby pitch, beyond the standing stones, I can see the steps. I was sixteen or so when three hooded figures asked for a fight. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice, as he paced back and forth. We ran and they chased us along the path by the playground, shrieking: Let’s drown them in the river. I was terrified, but they gave up pretty soon. That was the year I started bunking off school, spending hours in the strip of woodland that slopes down to the water’s edge. To get there you had to cross the huge metal pipe like a bridge, a post-apocalyptic leviathan, coated in graffiti and rust. I read a while back that a medieval pilgrimage route cut through this landscape. 

When I was twelve, my older brother and some friends made a raft out of tyres, which they strapped together with rolls of duct tape. I was the only one light enough not to sink and so sailed alone. I was basking in the glory of it, enjoying the scenery, until one of the boys began to hurl rocks from a thin bay of shingle. He had a crazed look in his eye. Dodging the missiles, I pleaded with him to stop. It was only when one struck my knee that I was given the time to disembark and sprint home.

*

One of the last pictures in the sequence is of a repeated curve not far from the estuary. The clouds are low above the ridge, and the river is a murky grey. There are thousands of shades of green and plenty of textures to explore. I see myself in a blue raincoat skimming stones, or trudging along the sand with friends after a beach party in the middle of the night. I’m jogging at the foot of the dunes. I twist my ankle and have to walk miles back to the car.

I’ve written about this place before, in a work of weird fiction based on real events. A child is fishing with his father. He’s being taught to hook ragworm, but is disturbed by their form, the writhe and slither. Shivering, he picks the least obscene specimen he can find from the parcel of paper, wrapped like a bag of chips, and holds it out in front of him, watching it curl around his thumb, turning itself inside out. Following his father’s instructions, he pinches it taut and presses the steel tip down until the skin punctures, or pops. At this point, the creature screams. The boy looks up to see a woman thrashing in the mist on the banking opposite. She’s a version of Jenny Greenteeth, or Wicked Jenny, a river hag from folktales who drags children to their deaths.

There’s a girl crouching on the shore, replaced in the following image by a large splash. There’s a coach parked by a bench on the cliff, and a person stares out to sea.

***

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

Dan Wood is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Bridgend. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has featured in a wide range of publications. His books Suicide Machine and Gap in the Hedge are available with Another Place Press. He is currently working on a new book about the River Ogmore and was kind enough to share his current edit for this piece.

Yukon Dreaming

Photo: Tagish Road by TravelingOtter; Licensed by CC-BY-SA 2.0

By Ian C Smith:

Packs against a roadwork sign, Danger, shoulder soft,
A tableau vivant: a tent, all they have inside them.
They argue, rehearsal for unimagined waning days.
He holds up their Rand McNally with his sketch,
a black-outlined big red kangaroo taped to the back,
lure for lonely drivers vectoring British Columbia
to screech to a pine-scented stop for hitch-hikers
who can’t foresee what loss the rush of years holds.
He wants to claim reaching the Klondike, or Alaska,
Amundsen planting his flag beneath heaven’s vault.
A Winnebago with Texas plates cruises by,
brakes lighting up their immediate hours,
conifer mileage, big sky, postcard outpost names.
They climb aboard into blessed cool luxury.
The woman passenger swivels her seat,
rotating 180 as if in an office movie.
Her man driving, she asks, Where y’all from?
He almost wiggles his marsupial mutely as a joke,
but realising she is serious, starts babbling
about the baleful beauty of this craving for quests,
weeks of risky responsibility, short-term relief.
His wife irrupts, reprising her summer of discontent.
He bites back, all shred of manners jettisoned.
Their benefactors’ pregnant silence pulls them up.
Chagrined, he apologises, love’s nuances complex.
Oh no, the woman protests.  That was wonderful.
Your accents.  Hearing you just the way you are.   

***

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Memories of Elsewhere: Tre Cime di Lavaredo, by Steve Himmer

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Steve Himmer:

There are better hikes. Hikes where you don't wait in a long line of cars and coaches to pay admission. Hikes that don't begin at a trailhead with three terraced levels of parking and tour buses spilling groggy riders by the hundreds. I've spilled from those buses myself in each of the past three years, bringing successive groups of college students to Italy's Dolomites as part of a course.

The trail, reached after a long walk on pavement, remains crowded as it departs the Refugio Auronzo, your last chance for snacks and souvenirs until the next thirty minutes away. It's entirely flat though there are numerous spots at which enthusiasts might veer off to inspect pale rock formations above or green meadows below. There's as much shuffling between oncoming walkers and getting ahead of slow moving clusters as on any Venetian sidewalk (which my students encounter soon after), with the same risk of selfie sticks swung at eye height. Last summer a drone buzzed overhead the whole route and I found myself uncharitably wishing for the invisible pilot to twist an ankle or crash the contraption or both.

There is no reason, in other words, no reason at all, for any person who enjoys hiking or mountains or being able to hear their own thoughts to visit Tre Cime di Lavaredo in summer. I bring my students up other trails in the region, like the exposed, narrow spine designed to cause vertigo at Cinque Torri. But of all the more meditative, more challenging, wilder places I've walked it's Tre Cime I'm thinking of lately, with its trio of spires in pale lunar stone.

That flat, gravel trail hangs on the rim of a valley, offering sustained views toward a far away lake so blue it can't be described without risking cliché. Overhead, set into the faces of the three peaks themselves, are the shadowed mouths of caves left by soldiers who endured the fierce fighting and vertical living of World War I along that contested border between Austria and Italy. The meadows call out for singing — my students reliably belt selections from The Sound of Music — then stretching out among flowers to bathe in high altitude sun and forget, for a while, that the trail a few meters above remains packed with people watching their phones as much as their feet or their world. The longest downward digression reaches a memorial statue to honor the marksmen of the 8th Bersaglieri regiment: a tall angel standing wings folded with one hand pressed to the pommel of his sword and the other holding a wreath as he keeps watch over the towns of the valley below.

After all that, beyond the memorial or at least where its steep path departs from the trail if you choose not to take it, past the rugged Cappella degli Alpini with its steeple low enough to stay out of the wind, you'll arrive at the trail's second chance for food and trinkets, Refugio Lavaredo. The outdoor patio will be crowded and you'll jockey for space at a table — a large group will most likely be scattered — but the polenta and sauerkraut and venison and boar, not to mention the beer, will achieve depths of flavor and satisfaction they never would at sea level with better prices but without the view. All those other day hikers, marvelling in languages from all over the world, are there for the same reasons you are and so what if it's at the same time.

The trail carries on past that second refuge. All told it's a six mile loop that climbs more aggressively after Refugio Lavaredo to reach a plateau with views across the Austrian border. It swings around the far side of the peaks to reclaim the parking lot from the opposite end. But most of those having lunch won't go up, or if they do it will be a short scramble to take in the view and to see what remains of some World War I bunkers before coming back down to return to their coaches the way they arrived.

The way we arrived, I should say, because with my students it's always like that, not enough time to complete the full loop.

What I miss, what I long for right now, are the things that annoy me on that trail: the people, the jostling, the cacophony of human voices and dogs greeting each other, the elbows-in space of the refugio's terrace, and more than anything else the fresh awe of my students each summer through whose eyes that crowded, unwelcoming, less than wild trail and valley and ancient rock face could never grow old. I've watched one of them spring hircine up a steep slope only a day after facing down her fierce fear of heights on another peak. I've seen a sprained ankle risk ruining the day for the group but result instead in a ride back to the coach clinging to the waist of a refugio host straight off the bodice-ripped cover of a romance novel. I've had the privilege and pleasure of introducing that mob scene to new students each year, along with annual guilty grappling with my own conflicted emotions about our contribution to its overcrowding, and I've read what they've written about it.

This year's course is in jeopardy while that region of Italy suffers as badly as any place does, but I daydream of summers and students to come when the world has found its new normal. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo have seen centuries of avalanches and harsh winters and soldiers lost where they can't be recovered, and every hike there, however constrained, is undertaken in the shadow of those many deaths. So the more legs out on the trail walking, the more voices raised and the more elbows bumped while hoisting a beer, the greater the celebration of being there against odds.

***

Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram and Scratch, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in the US and the Netherlands.

In Search of High Ground

By Ian S. Grosz:

The car climbed steeply up the narrow roads of Cleeve Hill, at just over a thousand feet the highest point in both the Cotswolds and Gloucestershire as a whole. The hill forms the high point of Cleeve Common, a site of Special Scientific Interest due to the bird, insect and plant species found there. Most famously it is the home of three wonderfully named, rare orchid varieties. Known as the bee, frog and musk orchids, they thrive in the unique soil found on the common; a product of thousands of years of grazing and the spoil and scree from centuries of limestone quarrying.

But rather than hunt for rare orchids, I have come to find the trace of our earliest presence in this landscape: the descendants of the people who first cleared the land of its forest and began farming here more than 6000 years ago. Belas Knap – its name possibly derived from the Old English words bel, meaning beacon, or the Latin word bellus, meaning beautiful, and cnaepp, meaning the top, or crest, of a hill – is one of the best examples of a Neolithic Long Barrow found in the River Severn-Cotswolds landscape. A barrow is the genus name for a type of stone and earthwork burial chamber in use in the early Neolithic. As a group of structures – found across Atlantic Europe from SE Spain right up to NW Sweden – they represent the oldest surviving buildings with a recognisable common form in widespread use. This particular long barrow is found on the slope of Cleeve Hill itself, above the village of Winchcombe with its Medieval Anglo-Saxon castle, Sudeley, and is part of a group of structures known as the Cotswolds-Severn Group, being made distinctive by their regional distribution and common building material.  

I parked at a layby on the road, the village and the wide expanse of the Severn Valley stretched out below me like a pale watercolour in the diffuse light, distant scattered settlements appearing as though islands in a mythic sea amongst recently flooded fields, confusing the usual geography. The weak February sunlight glistened invitingly in the floodwaters around Tewksbury, the worst affected town in a Severn River landscape that was shifting and changing almost before everyone’s eyes. Worcester cathedral in the far distance was just visible against an anaemic sky. I recalled the recent news footage: the water that almost surrounded the cathedral, the pipes coming out of local resident basements pumping out the mud and silt, the racecourse a lake. It reminded me how closely tied our lives are to rivers, to once sacred courses of water worshipped as deities, and how precarious our existence can be. The world seemed to be giving us a taste of things to come. I wondered why the early people of this region buried their dead so far from the banks of the Severn, up on the high ground above the valley, whether they had known similar flooding.  

Across Britain, these tomb-come-shrines built to house the bones of the ancestors are typically located on high ground: prominent hills or slopes overlooking the wider local landscape. The use of locally harvested limestone, collected and piled into distinctive structures, would have been in stark contrast to the surrounding cleared land. It is thought that, along with the confluences of rivers and other prominent features in the landscape, these ancestral resting places marked so clearly may have helped to form territory boundaries. This is our place, they tell us.

Seeking out the high ground may have been a way to get the message out there without any ambiguity, but others have argued that they mark seasonal pastoral grounds, or the inherited sacred sites of the earlier, mostly nomadic Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In a landscape covered by forest, any high point would become a natural place to gather and remember, overlooking the hunting grounds and the sacred rivers that forged their way through them. I wondered if the importance of high ground had been retained in folk memory after the rise in sea level associated with the end of the last great Ice Age, when the low ground and ice-free valleys, coastal caves and estuaries, would have all become flooded: whether the high places would be revered as a safe place not only for the living, but also for the dead. To reach and toil upward feels a natural human impulse and, following the path of the Cotswolds Way, my footsteps trod a well-worn route through both time and place, away from the floodwaters below. 

I made my way up a steep and muddy track through still winter-bare woodland toward the more open slope of the hill. Emerging breathless from the trees, a swift, dark arrow above caught my eye: a small bird of prey in silhouette against the sky. It remained with me, calling now and then across the open hillside, its dark shape patrolling the edge of the treeline. Likely a merlin, it is Britain’s smallest bird of prey and widespread in the winter months, feeding on small birds and larger insects. It led me on, out from under the trees and across a steep, grassy slope along the edge of a dry-stone wall, upward toward where the long barrow was hidden beyond more trees further on. I crossed through another short section of woodland and emerging briefly into a clearing, the merlin flashed again above me. Following the arc of its flight, my eyes found the low mound of the barrow surrounded by a stone wall on the next rise. With its long lozenge-like shape and its mysterious entrances, it seemed other-worldly to me: a man in the twenty-first century. To the people of the Neolithic it must have had a profound impact: a portal to another realm, another, hidden layer of existence. It is aligned almost exactly north-south, hinting at an already important relationship with the sun and the seasons that would be evident in the later practice of building stone circles.

How would the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have explained the great floods following the last ice age? Perhaps then, seeking out the high ground, they first looked to the heavens and began to speculate, began to observe the stars and other celestial bodies more closely, formed the beginnings of a cosmology as they gathered at these high places to bury their dead and tell their life-stories: not only as individuals within a group, but as people within a much greater, grander story that encompassed the cosmos. 

To find the high ground – that shift in perspective that it offers us, lifting us above the narrow confines of our daily lives, expanding our view, our horizons – is something we have always found compelling. With the threat posed by climate change and habitat loss, I wondered what new stories we might begin to tell of our place in the world. I took a last look along the low, curving spine of the barrow, this ancient house of the dead, and made my way back toward the floodwaters below. 

*** 

Ian S. Grosz holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Aberdeen. With a deep interest in landscape and place, he is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. Most recently, his work has been accepted by The Writer’s Cafe magazine, published in Causeway Magazine and The Lighthouse Journal. In 2019 he worked on a collaborative Deep Mapping project focusing on the rivers of SW Australia and NE Scotland, currently being taken to publication by the editors.