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: 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.

Nowhere else to go

By Fiona M Jones:

I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life. 

I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies. 

I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees. 

And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss. 

Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above. 

If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline. 

Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

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).  

Memories of Elsewhere: The King of Rome, by David Lewis

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

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 David Lewis:

The corona virus has made it impossible to travel, but in memory we can revisit places we have not seen for many years. This morning cypress trees against a blue sky reminded me of Rome, before Easter 1995.

We had a strange, confusing night high above the harsh floodlights of Santa Maria Maggiore and were delayed, directed, and redirected, until eventually we washed up at Salvatore's crumbling palazzo on Via del Clementino. A soft midday light fell down the stairwell onto the palazzo’s blood-brown walls, protected by a small Madonna and Child with a flickering electric candle. Salvatore welcomed us with a roar. 'You have the Queen in England,' he bellowed, 'but I am the King of Rome!' The palazzo was being restored. Thick plastic sheeting instead of walls, staircases without hand-rails, rubble. Our rooms had a lopped square of blue sky, three storeys of families, a courtyard of scooters and a solitary battered Fiat. Every morning I ate alone in a tall grey room, the windows open to the clatters of the street below. Billowing muslin curtains, iced croissants and coffee, but I remember no other guests.  

We had no money. Warm days carved the city into slabs of chocolate-black shade and fierce sunlight and we walked everywhere, saw broken arches, crowds, Lambrettas, tombs. The light fell from a strip of blue above the ochre streets, from the oculus of the Pantheon or from a high unseen window, showering dusty light onto angel and cherub - the huge Roman churches were cool and gloomy, as if we walked a cold marble pavement on the floor of the sea.  

Lunch was usually small tubs of olives, fish, tomatoes and rice from Piazza Nicosia near the palazzo, picnics on the dry grass of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Palatine Hill, the old street market in pre-hipster Trastevere; but I also remember lunches in the flower market of Campo de' Fiori, a table for two in the cool gloom, the long tables outside taken by the flower sellers' families.  

And the great ruins - we crept around the giant silences of the Colosseum, the shaggy remnants of the Forum, isolated fragments of towering wall. We saw gold and silver foil eggs in shop windows; sunlight on book spines and vine trellis in the Keats-Shelley House; gleams from golden icons in the Vatican, after emerging blinking from the cold graves of the Catacombs.  

Salvatore's Madonna welcomed us home as the scooter kids roared in from college. An irregular flag of sunlight played on the wall opposite, a cracked fresco of brown-red and cream plaster. As the light darkened, we finished the crumpled tubs of lunch, drank flasks of Orvieto, read Byron’s journals. Sometimes we walked the streets as the soft darkness and jagged splinters of light divided the city, as a door was opened and closed like a lantern veiled and unveiled, a Caravaggio moment when hooded spies were revealed as students turning to laugh at a shout from a passing Vespa. I remember moments – footsteps echoing on snakeskin cobbles, floodlit churches, a night in the bars around Piazza Navona.  On our last night, a Chinese meal near the Oratory of St Philip Neri, where the Saint broke out of the solemn procession of consecration to play football with local boys.  

Memory is as slippery as fishes. How many days were we there? Were we really the only guests in the palazzo? It does not matter. In memory we can revisit lost places, and strengthen our recollections of time and place. In times of quarantine, I find this a comfort.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

A Quiet Edge of England

By Alex Gray

I’m in England for the first time in a couple of years. I had only planned to spend a few weeks here visiting family, but then the corona virus swept its way across Europe and my plans, like everyone else’s, changed.  

Suffolk, on the east coast of England, is only a couple of hours from London by train, but it feels a world away. Here you can find the last lingering remnants of that English idyll where village traditions follow the seasons. It’s a land of farms, scattered woodlands and slow WiFi. At different stages of my life its remoteness has felt like both a prison and a refuge. Now it’s a combination of both.  

During most of February and early March I spent hours sitting at my laptop, refreshing maps tracking the spread of the virus and calling friends in other parts of the world to compare the situation. Almost all of them were in the same predicament as me, stuck at home and waiting for normality to resume. I video called my girlfriend and she said, “It feels like I’m waiting for you to come back from a war.”  

I laughed and told her, “It’s a very boring war.” 

But for a lot of us it’s true that so far this ‘war’ has been defined by an underlying unease and anxiety as we brace for an invisible wave that we know is coming and have little control over.   

As March continues winter eases into spring and better weather. I take the dog for long walks across the open countryside and begin to rediscover this quiet edge of England. There’s not much breath-taking about the Suffolk landscape. There are no spectacular mountains or waterfalls. Instead the beauty here is mostly subtle and undemanding of attention, in a way that I realise makes me love it all the more. A herd of deer on a distant field. Ancient twisted oak trees creaking in the wind. Waves of the North Sea lapping softly against the beaches. 

The ghostly shape of a barn owl at dusk. A gentle wildness. 

My parents get the local newspaper each morning and between the headlines about the coronavirus there are smaller articles, often about Suffolk’s vanishing coastline. The county has always been badly effected by coastal erosion and over centuries in certain places has literally disappeared into the sea.  

During my newly found free time I visit some of these places, defined by what has is no longer there. Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages was a bustling international port, is now a small village with a few ruins of an abbey on the cliffs. The subject of folktales and songs:  

“By the lost town of Dunwich 

The shore was washed away 

They say you hear the church bells still 

As they toll beneath the waves” 

The coast at Covehithe also has one of the highest rates of erosion in the whole of the UK. Fallen trees scatter the beach, one road simply drops away from the cliffs, and only a cluster of houses remain. But it’s also a great spot to walk and look for sea glass, twinkling like gem stones on the beach.  

The church here is another oddity. It sits within the ruined walls of a larger medieval church. Walking around this half destroyed structure, and with the sound of the nearby sea in my ears, I difficult not to think about the impermanence of our ways of living. Maybe it’s because everything suddenly seems so fragile.   

And perhaps for the first time I feel very lucky to have this place at all, even if it won’t be here forever. What I’m feeling is probably familiar to anyone like me who has grown up knowing only one home. A place to return to, and keep returning, to gather thoughts, and take shelter in troubling times.  

***

Alex Gray is a writer and teacher of English literature from Suffolk, England. He is a former sub-editor of 52 Insights Magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing. Since 2017 he has been based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His most recent writing focuses on travel and issues affecting indigenous communities. Website.

Memories of Elsewhere: Krobo, by Tim Woods

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 Woods:

It didn’t take self-isolation to transport me back to Ghana; I’ve been visiting regularly in the seven years since I left. And more often than not, my memory dumps me on the scrubby slopes of Krobo.

At 345 metres, Krobo is far from the highest mountain in the country. Nor is it the most spectacular, a title belonging to the peaks further north in the Volta Region. There isn’t much in the way of wildlife to draw your gaze: the resident troop of baboons are the only mammals likely to be spotted, although the birds are, as throughout Ghana, spectacular. But one thing Krobo has in its favour is accessibility. In under two hours, you can escape the sweaty chaos of Accra and be out in the wild. Somewhere open. Somewhere green.

And escape I did, as often as possible during my two-year stay in the country. Along with the other Ghana Mountaineers, I spent every second Sunday hiking up the inselbergs south of the Volta River. Iogaga and Osoduku were more challenging, but Krobo was my first hike in the country and remained throughout my favourite. A short, steep scramble through sharp-bladed grass and over dry streambeds takes you onto the summit plateau, where you will find a giant metal cross, a bizarrely located family of terrapins and hazy views south towards the Shai Hills. Coffee too, if you remembered to bring some.

There are more obvious places for my absent mind to wander. England is one, being the country I called home for thirty years longer than I did Ghana. Yet despite the relative brevity of my time there, the country got under my skin with an urgency that hasn’t dulled with absence. Almost as soon as I left, I vowed to return. 

It’s not proven as easy as expected. Two children have complicated all travel plans, even those that only extend as far as the other side of Berlin. Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, that swiftly forgotten existential threat to our species that was demanding that we curb our habits long before some uppity virus turned up. I have long since felt a responsibility to tame my wanderlust, to fly far less often. Travelling to another continent just because I’d quite like to now seems an extraordinary indulgence. It will happen, because my principles aren’t as robust as I’d like. But I’m not yet sure when. 

If, when, I do go back, Ghana won’t be as good as it is in my memory. One advantage of exploring places through reminiscence is the chance to apply filters. From the comfort of my sofa, I can overlook Ghana’s traffic, dust and poverty; tune out the biting insects, the regular sickness, the power cuts. Even hiking virtually up Krobo, it’s easy to eradicate the dust in the throat, the cuts and scratches covering legs and hands, the perspiration stinging eyes. 

It will be different, too; places change when we’re not there. Accra will be shinier, busier, not quite how I left it. Will Krobo also have altered? There was talk of making proper paths up its slopes to attract more visitors, and of introducing a hiking fee to benefit the local community. Noble ideas, but they haven’t happened in my memory. Like many people’s favourite places, I want it to remain exactly as it was when I first encountered it.

But that’s the whole point of memory: to enjoy the good stuff while ignoring the different or uncomfortable or forgettable. Now, when thoughts of happier, freer times are more vital distractions than ever, or in better times when I simply fancy idling, I can relive those Sunday mornings out in the bush. Climbing with friends and catching up on our expat lives. Hoping to spot the baboons before they spot us and scarper. The crisp taste of fresh watermelon on the drive home, and the splash of chilled beer on a burning throat. Thankfully, Krobo will never be too far away for a quick visit. 

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

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… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz.