The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here. 

A Walk in the Mind

Photo by Rosie Dolan

By Heather Laird:

Third wave. My sister sends me a photo. 'Guess where?'. A muddy track. Two deep patterned lines made by tractor tyres. Straight initially and then a gentle bend. A slope down to the left and a low bank to the right. Twilight with orange light stark against black trees, one gloriously full, the others stunted or mere saplings. Light reflecting from a puddle. A nowhere, anywhere, for most. But not for me.

By the drain in the front yard and on towards the iron gate. In wellies of course. Past where the well once was on the right. My mother fetched water here when she first married into this Roscommon farm. Even when pregnant. The first of eight born nine months after the wedding. Reluctant to tell my father’s mother, the matriarch. There was no problem with dates, but perhaps a bit quick. Should one get the hang of it so soon? Eight children in quick succession in a house that my father grew up in as an only child. A sister’s too early birth brought on by a cow’s kick to my grandmother’s stomach. Not baptised but someone once told me that my grandfather and a neighbour buried her at night in a cardboard box in a local graveyard. Through the gate and on towards the stone drinking trough. Hours of fun while young watching the brother closest to me in age watch pond skaters walk on water. No, “watching” is too passive. There were experiments too, and I a willing assistant. A speck of dirt gently dropped on a skater, gradually increasing the weight to gauge the point at which its water-repellent feet would penetrate the surface, the point at which it would sink under its burden. Within sight of where the photo was taken and now I’m there. Pause briefly and breath. Wrong time of the year for primroses but the edge of the bank will burst with them in Spring. Then follow the track, but walk on the grass between the lines. Around the bend and out of the photo. 

Standing now where the same brother and I fell with the bales when the trailer tipped over. Remember exhilaration rather than pain so our landing must have been soft. Grab hold of a bale and ride it down if the load goes, we had been told. But if it had tipped the other way, it might have been different, over a hedge and down a hill, further to go. Up to the new hayshed. Heard a dog bark here once, from deep in the bales. Must have fallen through one of the gaps we were always warned about. Ran home sobbing. Farms are unsentimental places so was surprised that my father came back with me so quickly, pulling bale after bale away, curses more frequent with each one. So far down. I had time to make plans. What I would call the dog. Our future life together. Once released, we barely saw her. A flash of tawny-coloured hair and she was gone. From here, on out to the bog field. The edge of the farm. The thick brown black water in the drain. I think another brother fell in here once. One of the older ones I hardly knew growing up. 

Take another route back. Is this the spot where my father and eldest brother startled a hare and then crouched down in the grass to see if she would return, panting, “from whence at first she flew”? Or maybe it’s just where I saw a hare, much later. Cross wet fields, picking my steps to avoid the worst of the mud, until I come to the small hill topped with the fairy fort. Take in the view. My home town. The Shannon. Down the slope that is now planted with trees, through a gap and along a narrow path with a high bank to the right. We had a swing here once. Not a to and fro one. Circular. A stick tied in the middle by a rope to the branch of a tree on the bank. There was a knack to it. Putting too much weight on one side of the stick sent the other side up in the air. Once on, you reversed back up the bank as far as you could go and pushed off at an angle so that you swung out over the drop to the left of the path and back in to the other side of the tree. A horse. That’s what I pretended. Taking all the jumps. Winning the race. Go on Champion! You can do it, Beauty! 

Down a steep path to the back yard past where the dung hill was on the left. The old milking parlour is still here but now used for storage. An empty space where the creamery cans were kept. Cow manure, cheno unction and milk. The smells of childhood and home. And of my father’s jumpers. Once when travelling in Bavaria in my early twenties, I climbed over a fence into a field to sniff a cow pat. I was performing of course, doing mad stuff for others to see, but it was real – my pull to it. The day of my father’s funeral, I snuck away from the busy farmhouse and stood alone for a while in this yard with my eyes tightly shut, mooring myself. “Out beyond the iron gate on the way up to the new hayshed,” I message my sister.

***

Heather Laird is a lecturer in English at University College Cork. She was raised on a farm in Co. Roscommon, Ireland. She is the author of a number of scholarly publications, including Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 (2005) and Commemoration (2018). She is an editor of Síreacht: Longings for another Ireland, a series of short, topical and provocative texts that critique received wisdom and explore the potential of ideas commonly dismissed as utopian.

Rosie Dolan, née Laird, is a hotelier and part-time photographer based in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim, Ireland.

The day we met Dream Angus

By Mary Cane:

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,
Angus is here with dreams to sell. 
Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,
For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.             
– Scots Lullaby

Scotland had Dream Angus before Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Angus is the Celtic god of dreams who goes about the country with four birds flying around his head, delivering unsettling dreams of love. Most of us receive dreams that fly higher than our ability to wrestle them into reality. Leaving a rather large office and workroom-tidying job, we drove to Bennachie the other day for a spot of daytime dreaming. We hadn’t been there for a while. Normally as you know there is a breeze, at worst a cold driving drizzle but on that day we were lucky. 

There is a devotional aspect to a summit climb. On Mither Tap cloistered trees open up to a long pious walk. Then over the brow comes the reward of the high altar summit view. Then there is the submissive plod up the slope our heads bent in supplication. While I walked, I was thinking of a friend. From Australia, she came to stay with us along that well-trodden path of forbear searching. A keen reader at home, she like lots of other people, she had discovered the books by Nan Shepherd. She was captivated by those tales of grit and glitter up on the high plateau and dreamed of seeing the place where Nan Shepherd had walked and to feel in a poetic and lyrical way where she ‘entered into the hills’. When she arrived, our friend enjoyed seeing the new slippery five-pound note with Nan’s head on it, but that’s as close to Nan as she got. Knees that so enjoyed reading about the Cairngorms in Melbourne, were completely unable to climb any of the paths to the actual Cairngorms. She could not make her dream of Nan into a reality. Reaching the sanctuary of the barbican entrance to Mither Tap’s inner fortress, I looked back to the west. There was our home parish in the far distance, and if I squinted there were my overcrowded shelves and my worktable. The height gave a better perspective, so they didn’t look so cluttered from up there.  

Lately I have been outwitted by my own things. Travelling can muddle one’s memory and it can take a while to recalibrate. It’s hard to remember the location of the stapler/grater/leaf-blower or even recall what they look like after our long time away in America. This was witnessed by one of our children and I didn’t like the look I saw in his eyes, a mix of LOL and OMG as his mind jumped to a possible future unravelling all our stuff.

Maureen from the Balmedie library has found me a philosophy book where the ‘thingness’ of things is explained.  Things or ‘tings’ from the Scandinavian are what we can experience with our physical selves… a doorway we can go through, a spoon to be touched by hand and lip, or a Balmedie sand dune the grandchildren can slide down. Objects on the other hand, the book ever so quietly confided to me, are things that have ceased to be used. In my home surroundings, objects have accrued and accreted, on floors, on shelves and even in doorways. I leant closer to the book all the better to hear and understand. The ‘thing’ that once beckoned, the philosopher continued as an ‘object’ now blocks… Ah-ha. 

Sitting up there on the volcanic granite plug with tea and cake in the fresh air there was nothing that blocked.  

From that high vantage point none of the A.W.P.R. could be seen but there are stretches that are now linked into a curving pale gash across the county. On the way back down the Devil’s Causeway, I realised that we can be nourished by other people’s journeys so by Hosie’s Well I picked up a small stone to take with me to Melbourne next year. At that moment four black grouse whirred out of the heather, and that’s when we knew Dream Angus was near.

***

About Mary:

Sticks and stones have always held a poetic resonance for me. The first occasion I felt that cock's comb of interest we all have in our heads rise up, was when I was opening a gate. I was at home in Cornwall and helping to bring the cows in one afternoon. The prop I used was covered in dried accretions of small farm muck. 'That's a tine from your great grandfather's 'ay turner’. said Dad, 'It's made of Canadian Redwood’.  

'Goodness me' I thought to myself (or words to that effect) ‘things are not what they seem. They have history and character, a story even’. 

In a lifetime of creative work since, I have preferred the material to the flesh and blood…but shh, that’s a secret I don’t share with everyone. I am drawn to pathetic fallacy, to keeping things, to mending, to protecting the materiality of my world...  family things, tools, objects, furniture and their stories. Where was I? Ah yes the bio. Sixty years later, you find me living in Aberdeen, a PhD student at the Elphinstone Institute (Folklore and Ethnology) researching the part grandmothers play in the passing on of family story when their families live far away. That redwood tine back in Cornwall would be pleased.

Music and Place: ‘Surface Tension’ by Rob St John

By Paul Scraton:

In 2014 the musician, writer and artist Rob St John set off on a year of walking, recording and photographing the Lea Valley in East London. The project was commissioned by the Thames21 Love the Lea charity in order to document the pollution, life and biodiversity of the Lea Valley’s environment. Out of these explorations Rob took with him to his home studio a mix of field recordings, tape loops of guitar, cello and piano melodies – some even deliberately eroded in river water baths – to create an album of electric-pastoral sounds, haunting and melodic, and deeply rooted in place.

The album was called Surface Tension and it was released in 2015 to much acclaim and quickly sold out its original book and CD limited editions. We have long been fans of Rob’s work in general and Surface Tension in particular, and so we were really excited to hear that 2021 would see the re-release of Surface Tension by Blackford Hill in a limited-edition vinyl package including Rob’s 35mm and 120 film photographs and new sleeve notes by writer Richard King and conservationist Benjamin Fenton. 

Added to this is an essay by Rob on how art, ecology and sound were brought together to create Surface Tension. There are only 300 copies available and each record is pressed on eco-mix vinyl using plastic cut-offs from other pressings. This means that each copy is both visually unique and more environmentally friendly than classic record pressings.

You can find out more about Rob’s work and this special edition of Surface Tension, as well as listen to some of the tracks from the album, on the Blackford Hill website. This special edition was released on Friday 14 May and is sure to sell out quickly, so order your copy soon!

The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

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

Five Questions for... Tiina Törmänen

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

By Sara Bellini

During the polar night, the sun sets and doesn’t reappear on the horizon for days at end. At the poles this means complete darkness, but in subarctic regions closer to the polar circles it looks more like twilight. In northern Lapland the polar night lasts for almost two months, while in southern Lapland winter days can be as short as 3 hours. In these very short days the light changes fast and it’s quite magical to see the sky reflected in the snow in shades of pink, peach, powder blue, cotton candy, lilac, turquoise, apricot, amaranth, mauve, gold, lavender, cerulean, salmon, seashell... It’s these dreamy landscapes and snowy forests that drew attention to Tiina Törmänen’s photography.

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

Tiina first picked up a camera over twenty years ago, when she was working as a chef in Helsinki, instinctively attracted to documentary and street photography. She eventually went back to her native Lapland, in the north of Finland, and dedicated her artistic practice to the landscapes she had grown up with. Tiina’s creativity brought her to brave the weather conditions in order to capture the natural beauty that exists because them. In the past couple of years her attention has moved towards a different Nordic environment through underwater photography, exploring the abundance of lakes and ponds Finland is famous for and even diving into the Norwegian Sea.

We caught up with Tiina in between two group exhibitions, getting ready for the underwater season: “I got my camera gear updated from Canon 5D Mark IV to the new Canon R5 with Nauticam underwater housing [...] Of course it is always about the eye, not the gear, but at a certain point your skill level gets limited with limited gear. I had Olympus TG-5 and Sony A6500 with me on my underwater exploration so far, so it feels inspiring to have a pro camera with pro housing for my upcoming adventures!” 

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

What does home mean to you? 

It is where your heart is. For me, well... I feel at home almost everywhere if I have a safe and nice place to stay. I travel a lot, so I am used to just being in the moment. But of course, true home is a totally safe place to relax and reload batteries. I would say I have two homes. Our flat with my husband is like an everyday, normal home. Then my true home is our family place with all the land we own. That is a place where I can always return, a place in the middle of nowhere but surrounded with pure nature in the heart of Lapland.  

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I have a special connection to the north, where our home is. I love the nature, woods and waters. My main focus now is exploring northern waters: We have thousands of lakes, ponds and a lot of springs. There are so many underwater gems and I love being able to explore this unseen world. Most of us have seen coral reefs and the beauty of the oceans, but not many have seen the beauty of harsh arctic fresh waters.  

What is beyond your front door?

Forest. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’d really like to dive into the Arctic Ocean in Greenland. 

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

Things have escalated and I started investing into crypto currencies. I’m spending all my spare time reading and watching trading videos to learn how to become a good trader. I’ve also been learning about the NFT* space and minting my first NFT items.

Tiina Törmänen's Website
Tiina Törmänen's Instagram
Tiina Törmänen's Cryptoart

*Non-fungible tokens are unique digital assets that can be bought, sold and traded like other crypto currencies, but unlike those, they cannot be exchanged like-for-like. NFTs can be anything digital, including drawings, music and other art forms.