Postcard from... the A65

Words: JP Robinson

Not far from where I live, opposite a builders’ merchant and a private day nursery on the A65, there is a two-foot tall, cut and dressed gritstone prism, next to the front garden wall of a terraced house. On its triangular top, there are three carved, circular cups, each just a few inches across. The prism occupies two thirds of a narrow pavement, and it enjoys special protection as a prehistoric scheduled monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. Although it is sometimes known as a milestone or waymarker, very little is known about it, and there is no plaque or signage. Drivers rarely notice it and, without breaking conversation, young families wheel their pushchairs on to the road to get past, on their way to the Tesco Express or Costa or play centre over the level crossing nearby. 

Monuments like this are odd, of course, but surprisingly commonplace. There are over 10,000 prehistoric scheduled monuments in England: barrows and tumuli, stone circles, ancient pathways and carved stones. This compares to around 1300 A roads: multi-lane highways, suburban shopping streets, irregular cross-country routes and modern access roads for out of town industrial complexes. Numerically at least, a prehistoric monument is about seven and a half times more common than an A road. 

The A65, which runs next to the prism, starts in Leeds and tracks the river, the canal and the railway, north and west out of the city. It passes industrial units at first, and back to backs, and the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey. At one time, it ran directly through the abbey nave, but it now just separates the main abbey buildings from their gatehouse. There is a stone in the grounds, carved with prehistoric cups and grooves. As the road leaves the city, it passes more cup stone carvings, high on a famous outcrop near Ilkley, and the earthworks and Round Dikes on the moor. The road continues, skirting the Dales and the Moors, past a circular enclosure, into Lancashire and, officially, the A65 ends as it crosses the M6, sixty five miles from Leeds. 

On a map, A roads suggest something - cutting from town to city, circling larger settlements - but there appears to be little order, without their numbers. The numbers form spiralling, concentric, circular patterns, similar to the carved prehistoric markings, or the alignments of stones and mounds and ditches. Although many of the roads are ancient themselves, the numbering system was designed in the mid-fifties, and has been added to since. Developing on a system that had been used since before the First World War, a committee of men at the Ministry of Transport divided England and Wales into six sections, and Scotland into three. They numbered the English and Welsh sections clockwise, centred on London. The eight single-digit A roads formed the boundaries to the sections, and the names of the zones came from the road on its highest numbered border. Zone 6, the largest section, is bordered by the A6 in the west, and the A1 in the east, and extends from London to the Scotland.

In each zone, the double-digit roads were then numbered sequentially, and clockwise: the A60 is the first double-digit A road clockwise from the A6, the A61 is the next. If a road crosses into another zone, its number comes from the furthest anti-clockwise zone it enters. The triple and quadruple digit roads, and the B roads, were numbered next, according to their distance from London, rippling out from the capital. The spokes of the single and double-digit roads are patterned with radiating triple and quadruple digit numbers. Originally, the double-digit roads were more significant than the triple and quadruple digits, though the plan has been eroded gradually, as roads have been rebuilt or repurposed. 

The numbering system creates an obscure pattern, either too large in scale or too humdrum to make out easily. Like many large, humdrum things, and like the prehistoric monuments that the roads pass, the pattern reveals something ineffable about the society that created it, this society that numbers the streets where its children walk, making unnecessary patterns across the land, orbiting its larger settlements, a society that affords special status to certain roads and certain stones, carved for long forgotten reasons.

The Library: Climbing Days, by Dan Richards – Review and Extract

Read by Paul Scraton:

We are extremely pleased to be adding to the Elsewhere Library on the blog not only a review of Climbing Days by Dan Richards but also an extract from the book. The co-author of Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, published in 2012, in writing Climbing Days Dan Richards has been on the trail of his great-great-aunt Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman mountaineer and author of a 1935 memoir about her adventures in the hills with her husband I.A. Richards that shares a title with this book. Using the memoir as a starting point and a destination list, Dan Richards heads off on a journey of discovery, as he writes a portrait of a remarkable woman and the places she has guided him to, as well as a book which also asks of us the question: why do people climb mountains?

Perhaps it is my own bias of place shining through, but if you start a book with a description of Llyn Idwal in Snowdonia – one of my favourite places in the world – then you have got off to a good start, and the book continues to fascinate throughout thanks some great descriptive writing about people and places; along the way Richards heads off to Cambridge, Wales, Scotland, Catalonia, the Alps and the Lake District. He interviews people who knew her, learns about his own family, and writes a convincing portrait not only of his great-great-aunt but also the society in which she operated, all with a wonderful turn of phrase and a dry sense of humour that you need if you are going to spend a considerable amount of time on the footpaths, hillsides and slabs of British mountains.

One of the strongest elements of the book is the exploration of the position of women, both in Dorothy Pilley’s class and era, but also in the mountains themselves. As Pilley herself wrote: “One had really done something drastic by becoming a climber.” Women such as Pilley were, in Richards’ memorable phrase “stabled more like horses than people,” and in one of the digressions that makes Climbing Days such an enjoyable read, Richards explores the life of Edwardian women and how, if escape for Pilley meant heading for the hills, for one of her friends it meant the Left Bank in Paris and modernist literature. The destination might be different, as well as the means of getting there, but the result was the same: Escape. 

All the while Richards makes use not only of Pilley’s published memoir but also letters and diaries, and it is through these writings that he begins to get towards an answer of the key question of the book – if not, at first, “why do people climb mountains” but “why did she?”:

“Reading Dorothea’s letters and diaries, mountains are always framed as free egalitarian space, territories unencumbered by the ho-hum regimes or social baggage.”

Now, I did not grow up in the same class as Dorothy Pilley, in the same era or of the same gender, but I can recognise what Richards is getting at here. Why do we climb mountains? Walk the hills? Explore the clifftops? What is it about landscape that draws us there, to follow the trodden path or the empty shore? Reading Climbing Days I was provoked into asking these questions of myself, which is a great credit to the book. In the process of that journey, of Richards’ journey and of Pilley’s as well, I was also entertained along the way. Enjoyable, funny and thought-provoking. What more could you want from your mountain literature, or any other book for that matter?

Extract from Climbing Days by Dan Richards:

The Pinnacle Club is a women’s mountaineering club founded in 1921 and of which Dorothy Pilley was one of the first members. In an early chapter, Dan Richards heads to the club’s hut in Wales to meet present-day members, climb with them, and explore the pioneering role of the Pinnacle Club in the years between the wars:

We arrived at Ogwen car park in light drizzle. It was good to be back but the sky looked foreboding so we hastily unloaded our kit from the boot and regrouped in the shiny new visitor centre.

Left alone in the atrium whilst the others went to the loo, I began to mull the coming hours, automatically picking up Hazel’s rope, which she’d earlier noted was badly wound. Rewinding it about my neck, I drifted off, pondering how the slopes above would be, whether the weather would clear up, how dark the valley would be this time, should I put my over-trousers on?

I came to with a jolt to find Hazel returned and staring at me with a face like thunder. She blinked and, raking me a look somewhere between revulsion and pity, advanced and took her rope from around my shoulders, before rapidly relooping the line with the deft automatic movements of a seasoned pro. In no time at all she’d formed a neat, symmetrical, unkinked spool devoid of twists – the opposite of what I’d done. Her idea of ‘badly wound’ I now realised would have been a major accomplishment for my ham hands.

The silence that followed was loud.

Emily and Margaret had now returned too – mourners at the wake of my self-respect. Even the day trippers inspecting the scale models and video displays around us seemed to be holding their breath.

Rain spat on the roof.

‘Shall we go?’ suggested Margaret.

#

The four of us walked out from the tourist centre into strengthening, blustery rain.
I carried some kit in a nylon bag which got steadily saturated and heavier as we went. Margaret had already raised the question of whether I was going to carry my kit in ‘that bag, like that’ and I had replied cheerily that ‘yes, yes I was’. Now it was becoming clear that I had made a bit of an error but, determined to brazen it out, I strode on, arm aching, implausibly jaunty.

We stepped up our pace along the stone path which follows round the lake. Wind swept past like buses, pushing us off balance. It became obvious to me that, after the rope incident, someone was now going to fall into the lake and die. Probably Margaret. That was all I needed.

First the rope debacle, now a death.

Hazel would never forgive me. It would be written up in the Pinnacle journal and I would not be allowed back to the hut, or Wales, ever again.

I walked on in resigned dudgeon and drizzle.

Earlier on our group had passed a man coming down the path who knew Hazel and Margaret. Wherever were we going? he asked, bemused. ‘To climb the slabs!’ we’d chorused, brightly . . . over-brightly perhaps. ‘It’s good practice to carry the kit up and back anyway,’ said Hazel with a tight smile.

That’s it, I thought to myself as we stumped wretchedly on, that’s what they’ll write: ‘Humouring the idiot who’d already destroyed a perfectly serviceable rope, the put-upon representatives of the Pinnacle Club carried all their kit up to Hope in a monsoon, during which fool’s errand Margaret drowned, Emily froze to death from shame and only Hazel’s volcanic rage spared her serious injury . . .’

#

At the slabs the weather was horrendous. The wind was blasting a vuvuzela cacophony. The rain thumped about and water sluiced down the sliding face. The rocks looked slick and soapy. We were not climbing here, that was clear. Yet we still stopped and took in the scene rather than turning on our heels and I was suddenly grateful for everyone’s forbearance. Emily took a hopeful stance upon a low flake pitch but the sodden ropes stayed bagged and looped about shoulders. A Promethean Joe Brown might have shinned up the glassy rock in socks without a backwards glance, but he was not around so, stopped, we stood. Too wet to sit down, we huddled to discuss how one might have gone about the slabs on another day – were the day a better day; were the day not bloody awful. Then we turned and started down, back the way we’d come. It was too miserable for the scenic route – a bloody awful day to be out.

Climbing Days by Dan Richards, is published on 16 June by Faber & Faber (£16.99)

The Joy of Bookshops: News from Nowhere, Liverpool

For the second in our series of profiles of some of our favourite places – bookshops – we head to the port city of Liverpool and bustling Bold Street. As a kid growing up in West Lancashire, our shopping trips were more often than not into Liverpool and if there are two things I remember about those Saturdays to get shirts for school or a new pair of shoes, they are baked potatoes in a cafe near the station and News from Nowhere. Named for the William Morris book, it was then as it is now, representative of everything a radical bookshop should be: driven by passion, committed to society and its community, and filled from floor to ceiling with words on paper; words to inspire, inform and entertain.

News from Nowhere was founded in 1974 and since 1981 has been run by a women’s collective, a workers cooperative that runs the shop as a not-for-profit community business. Their philosophy of bookselling is apparent from the moment you walk in through the door of this friendly, welcoming space, browse the shelves of books and magazines, or read what they say about themselves on their website:

“We hope that the literature we stock empowers & inspires people to make positive changes to the world – from challenging the power of corporate capitalism to breaking down prejudiced attitudes to others & ourselves.”

This is not only about what books you will find but also how the shop works as a collective, about the campaigns the shop actively supports, and the numerous local initiatives they have partnered with over the years. The campaigns have included the Stop the War campaign and support for the Liverpool Dockers, they have been involved with local refugee and asylum-seeker groups as well as hosting events to mark Chinese New Year, Martin Luther King Day, International Women’s Day, Jewish Book Week, Pride Week and World Aids Day among many, many others.

In the past couple of months I have had the pleasure of returning to Liverpool a couple of times for my first visits in over half a decade. The city has changed a lot since those childhood shopping trips but it was a great pleasure to been welcomed into News from Nowhere once more, and I was very proud to spy Elsewhere on their rack of journals, magazines and periodicals.

As I write these words we are trying to comprehend events in Florida and the political response to hate crime, while thugs are fighting on French streets under national flags and refugees across Europe are targeted with words and sometimes fists and firebombs. Now, as much as ever, we need places like News from Nowhere to remind us that there is an alternative and to provide us with the words of inspiration, information and encouragement to help us believe we can get there:

“In our 21st Century that means publicising that there is a large and growing peace movement in Israel, that there is always an alternative to war, that white people can work alongside black for racial justice, that globalisation can be countered by grassroots movements, that realising our personal power can empower us to change the world and that books are, as ever, crucial in that path to empowerment and justice.”

If you are ever in Liverpool there are plenty of things you really should see. And News from Nowhere is right at the top of the list.

News from Nowhere (website)
96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY (googlemaps)

The Library: The Wander Society, by Keri Smith

Review: Marcel Krueger:

I chanced upon the sturdy yellow-and-grey cover of The Wander Society in the too-small English section of a German chain bookstore in a shiny suburban mall. It almost looked like an anachronism in between the Tom Clancy and Cecilia Ahern novels, and as I opened it and found a picture of Fernando Pessoa overlaid with a Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, it intrigued me even more. I also followed the instructions on the back, which talked about a secret underground movement dedicated to conducting research 'on your immediate surroundings' and 'complete a variety of assignments'.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal, that mainstay of countless Urban Outfitter accessory tables around the globe. In my opinion there are better and less forced ways of making a book interactive, to entice creativity. As Tim Parks puts it in his essay 'A Weapon for Readers' where he defends the use of pencils and annotations: “We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us.” And deliberately dropping a notebook in the bath or smearing it with dirt does little for that awareness, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, following Wreck This Journal, I also purchased Smith's How to be an Explorer of the World, a book of assignments meant to stir up interest and exploration of everyday urban surroundings and found it much more to my liking - after all, I love to walk around with my eyes open and some of the exercises in here I was already undertaking, sometimes involuntarily. So I first perceived The Wander Society as a continuation of that idea, albeit one with a new visual approach, less colorful than 'How to be…', with a distinct retro touch to it: all seemingly pasted and glued-together pages and images in brown and black and white. The Wander Society is an approach to the fictional (?) Wander Society, a “nascent and continually growing group with its own aesthetics, values, art, literature, and even its own dialectic language”, as the equally fictional (?) professor J. Tindlebaum states in his introduction. Smith states that all material in the book is based on existing literature found relating to the group. Here's what I found on the first page, where the instructions on the back led me:

The book then goes on and charts the history and philosophy of the group, and also contains assignments and ideas for field research related to deceleration and exploration of what may at first seem dull and uninteresting neighbourhood areas. There is no need to follow all the assignments and activities in here, and some can be somewhat cheesy, for example 'How to Invoke the Inner Wanderer in Any Situation' or 'Create a Temenos', but then there also also many practical activities like 'How to Knit a Wrist Cuff' or 'How to Sew a Neck Pouch', things intended to help group members while exploring and something that might appeal to all those who are more versed in handicraft than I am.

But maybe it is that somewhat simple and playful approach to walking/wandering that I like most about the Wander Society and their ideas and manifestos. While key flaneurs, psychogeographers and deep topographers like Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Will Self are mentioned throughout the book, there is never any academic approach to these themes. The Wander Society truly is for everyone, and I have the feeling everyone can do with it what they want and as they please. Maybe it is fitting then that the patron saint of the Wander Society is not an academic and critic, but a poet instead: Walt Whitman and his ‘Leaves of Grass’ are among the key works used by the society to explore our direct surroundings and guide them on their wanderings.

I tend to forget that walking and wandering in our capitalist societies around the world often is an activity no longer encouraged or even accepted. As Rebecca Solnit points out in Wanderlust, her history of walking, referring to gyms and treadmills: "In those buildings abandoned because goods are made elsewhere and First World work grows ever more cerebral, people now go for recreation, reversing the inclinations of their factory-worker predecessors to go out - to the outskirts of town or at least out-of-doors - in their free time."  So any book that encourages a reader not only to interact with the physical item ‘book’ but also with their surroundings in a playful and creative way while walking is a good book; of which too few are being published at the moment.  It is good to know that the Wander Society is out there.  

Solvitur ambulando.

The Wander Society by Keri Smith published by Penguin.