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).  

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.

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

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 Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Arrowhead

By Katherine Peters:

Arrowhead, named for the lake which lies at the heart of a nameless pinewood, was, for the first decade I lived there, a wilderness. We’d moved from the prairies, driving east until our endless views were obscured by a dark spray of pine. Within days my siblings and I had laid giddy claim. Though the wood was once leased by the Diamond Match Company and slated for development, no evidence existed to disrupt our explorations except the cant marks we came across now and then, a diamond-enclosed D burnt into bark. Cities a remote apparition, this wild tract uninterrupted except for a few hunting camps and peopled by eagle, moose, bear—the center of my world was, for most, the end of the world. 

My parents built our home just about from the ground up. Durable post-and-beam raised out of sixty-foot pines from our acreage; later, profusions of phlox, hydrangea, rose given their concentrated hue by acidic forest soil. From the safety of our cultivated lot, books in hand, woodfire blazing in an old stove, we listened to the loons sounding the dark. 

Over the next years the woods were measured, divided, clear-cut, cheap housing raised at regular intervals to accommodate Portland’s low-income surfeit. A different wilderness emerged, generated by reduced constructions: the effects of economic hardship and limited access to education compounded over generations, and the pain of societal indifference. Social illness could be read in the band-aid consumption and accumulating refuse that seemed to barricade many of the occupants in and the rest of the world out: foreclosures, empty swimming pools, plastic playhouses embrittled by the sun, cars run into the ground, rusty skidoos, powerless powerboats. In school, stories littered the daily periphery, whispered in lunch-lines and recess queues: abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction. My guerilla war with loggers and excavators converted to elaborate daydreams in which, by reconstructing each house I could transform the lives of its inhabitants. Darker moments found me lighting a Diamond match in mind’s-eye, rebuilding from the ground up. Even my daydreams of opulent elsewheres corroded under the glaring realities we encountered in wealthy coastal villages, where facades concealed the same spectrum of human health. 

I returned home last year after a long stint abroad, with an accumulated disarray of remembered objects collected over a decade of travel and curated within me by no order I could name. After years of remote horizons, I was confined suddenly to the network of unpaved paths that, labyrinth-like, encircle the lake through the thickest stands of remaining trees—roads for which no map exists, with street signs that echo and intersect each other in their attempt to bear witness to what they have displaced. Getting lost is a given. I walked the tracks relentlessly for months, in all weather. 

At the same time, my mother was sorting through the objects my grandmother had left behind after her death, reading the tags affixed to each on which she had written, in her close hand, a detailed account of the object’s history, care and storage instructions. The narratives of these travelling objects—paths extending over decades and thousands of miles—intersected largescale events with their keepers’ unseen emotional lives. Garden tools, well-used, in pristine condition; a level in sound working order; a passport for “no country”; a feather blanket filled with prewar down and carried through combat zones. They spoke the private register of political violence: lost homes, wartime flight, immigration, work camps, death camps, mass graves. If they spoke of being marked and hunted, they also spoke the hope of being free. Textually inscribed, each object posed a question. How—now, today—do we take symbols in hand: till an unspeakable past to cultivate our rocky lots. We understood, finally, that familiar stories, told and retold, had formed a set of care instructions for life: collect knowledge because it is priceless and weightless; live sparingly; love richly; conserve resources. The narrative instrumentality that moved compass needle cast its shadow, pointing us uncompromisingly onward, and also to invisible sites of trauma. Inherited texts marked us “From Away” in a community with their own sets of cultural blueprints. They also generated resonances I discovered on returning.  

On my walks, I travelled deeper into the cultural landscape. Unexpected encounters destabilized long-held notions. I met a pastor-turned-carpenter with nine children, the oldest of which had won an opera scholarship. A woman who lives in what she calls the “Keebler House” and edits the local Gazette, for whom Arrowhead is the center of the world in the way it is epicenter of the earthquakes that shake the state. There is the young boy who leapt, rope-swing in hand, from a giant pine by the lake, only to get tangled in the cable and plunged headfirst, arms bound, into the water. And there is the man, referred to distrustfully by many Arrowhead folk as “The Big Indian,” a six-foot-tall crippled war veteran, who dived in and cut him loose, then returned that night with an axe to cut down the pine and himself free of the stereotype. A pack of boys that had transformed the old tennis-court in the woods into a skate park with cement blocks and sheet-wood, for the sheer joy of movement. A little girl who fishes at dusk most evenings from the shore, catching sunfish mostly, scales glittering lilac and silver in the dying light, and kisses them each as they gape speechlessly at her before tossing them back. 

In quieter moments, flashes of returning wildness pierce: the sharp long calls of geese in storm darkness; an eagle diving from a great height over the lake to face me up-close, dark eye casting out his challenge; a hawk in hunt, lifting laboriously toward her shrieking nest, a squirrel dangling in her talons like a paraglider gone wrong; a cyclone of swallowtails drunk on magnesium; water-made diamonds—wind-cut, cloud-sieved. Permeating all, like insight, the clear scent of pine. Nature I had considered lost re-emerged on these walks, relocating me though I travelled the same paths. A world I thought gone—one unowned, fiercely free, writ with love and connection—I discovered displaced within. 

***

Katherine Peters recently completed a dissertation on landscape and literature called “Disruptive Geographies” and teaches at University of Southern Maine. She is currently at work on a series of essays about her travels, as well as a book project. Her work is forthcoming in Canary.

Between the villages

By Paul Scraton:

Tarmac becomes cobblestones becomes sandy soil as the old road leads out from the village towards the forest. At this end it is named for the village on the other side of the woods. Over there, it is named for this village. The way to… has linked the two communities for centuries, even if now the main road cuts through the forest away to the north and the railway to the south, leaving this track for those who travel by bicycle or those who make their way on foot, like in the old days.

At different points between the villages there has been artwork placed by the track, sharing the space with the pine and silver birch, oak and beech of the forest. They are sculptures of metal or plastic, glass or steel. They have been created to reflect the stories of this place, of this landscape. A pack of fake wolves, ghosts of the past to remind us of what was lost, placed in the woods only a few years before the real thing returned across the border to the east. A doorway to nowhere, to remind us of the lost villages of the region, abandoned to nature. Metal crates to remind us of… what? Of caged animals transported from shed to slaughter house? Or the way that dice falls, of how life changes. People move on. Others take their place. 

He rides his bike between the villages daily, ever since they closed the pub at the end of his street. Now, for his beer and schnapps, he has to ride the old way through the woods, past the fruit trees and the artworks, through the forest and across the fields. Tarmac and cobblestone. Sand to trap his tires. There’s always a stretch where he has to stop and push. He chooses not to ride on the road because it is too busy, with cars and farm vehicles, and the lorries that use this cut through between the motorways, shaking the village houses as they pass. It takes him about forty minutes on the track, often only meeting others within a short distance of each of the villages. He often has the section through the forest all to himself.

If he made the journey on weekends he would meet more walkers, out from the city to hike between train stations, ticking off the artworks as they go. Because he is elderly now, and wears his old working boots all year round, they look at him as if he is an exhibit himself, a bit of local colour, a genuine country dweller on his genuine country bicycle. They don’t know that he also came out from the city, all those years ago, to work in the brewery. That he found life so dull and strange in the country, a feeling that he never noticed leaving him until one day it was completely gone and he realised he was here to stay. He couldn’t have imagined it. 

How the dice fall. 

This has always been a land of exiles, a landscape of settlers. A thousand years ago they came from the west, possessors of the right religion and skills to work the sandy soil. Later, the refugees of war and the economies of elsewhere. He himself had come for work, for better prospects than in the city. After him came the hippies and back-to-the-land dreamers. And later still, sleeping five to a room in an old factory dormitory on the edge of town, those fleeing more modern wars. 

The pub in his village has closed. The brewery where he worked for thirty years, has long been abandoned. Now the beer is brought out from the city by lorry and the warehouse where he spent his days slowly crumbles, roof open to the elements and trees growing out of the brickwork. But he has to admit: the beer is better now, better than what they used to make. It wasn’t their fault. You can only work with what you’ve got. 

Those visitors, those weekend walkers, they like to think the countryside remains fixed, that while their city neighbourhoods shift on uneasy foundations, out here things stay the same. It is a comforting thought, but it has never been true. A thousand years of comings and goings. Villages that take their names from long forgotten languages, the traces of religions that have no more followers. He has lived it through his life since he left the city, and still it continues. In the pub he reads the local newspaper headlines. Old businesses fade into memory as new initiatives are launched in hope. Bands from a country that no longer exists get together for one last show. Beetles and fires ravage the forest. A new bridge is built to help the animals cross the motorway. He sees the changes on every ride between the villages. Trees are felled. The brewery crumbles. The wolves return. Only the the track stays the same. At some point, he always has to get off and push.

***

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

In Walthamstow Forest

By Dan Carney: 

Wide, flat dirt paths carving through lush woodland, open meadows flanked by wooded corridors and undulating, densely covered glades. Clusters of hornbeam, oak, and birch, many ancient, pollarded at the top to encourage further growth, presiding over hundreds of plant species; grass, herb, nettle, weed, fern, and wort. Underfoot, the fossil-rich London clay soil, hard and stiff but deceptively quick to churn during wet weather. Birdsong mingling with the low, umbilical hum of traffic on the A104, Epping to Islington, everywhere between, periodically suppressed by the sound of a plane or the sudden and invasive whooping of a siren. Bisected by both the Woodford New Road and the endless, disheveled North Circular, this is the beginning trickle, the tentative first stretch of the north-east London woodland panhandle which will open out into Epping Forest proper, and eventually creep, pleasingly, just beyond the confines of the M25. This part of the forest is a scruffy outpost, often overlooked in favour of its more storied and unbroken counterparts. There are no visitors’ centres, Iron Age settlements, or Grade II-listed timber hunting lodges here, but the paths lead, eventually, to all these things.

The first path, approaching the southernmost entrance to Rising Sun Wood, is inauspicious; a thin, dusty track, cracked and dry in the summer months, running through an open field, reassuringly parallel with the 1930s semis of Forest Rise opposite. The entrance is marked by a wooden post, painted white at the top, ground-secure in the shadow of the trees at the top of Greenway Avenue. Underneath the first flourish of woodland canopy, the path widens, becomes even and firm. The trees are tall, with dramatic branch formations exploring every possible angle. Some are hollowed out, exposing tender white bark. Dead trunk husks lie everywhere. A sparse glade foregrounds the wrought iron gate of the St. Peter’s-in-the-Forest graveyard, where the headstones are lopsided, covered in ivy, many rendered semi-legible by weather and time. The air is comfortable and still.   

Just to the north is an open, unkempt meadow. Large oaks guard secretive glades along one side, hash paraphernalia and half-empty chicken boxes strewn at the thresholds. Opposite, behind the incongruously shiny Empire Lounge on Woodford New Road (“Enjoy The Food, Enjoy The People, Enjoy The Vibe”), lays Bulrush Pond. Bog-like, derelict, murky water mostly obscured by large clumps of reeds. Once there were paddle-wheel boats, ice-cream kiosks, and deckchairs, before widespread car ownership enabled the leisure-seeking families who gathered here on bank holidays to travel further afield. It’s quieter now, but by no means deserted or bereft. Joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families on short-hop rambles, occasional equestrians, and groups of teenagers punctuate the calm, but now it’s less organized, no longer an end point but a backdrop, a surrounding, or a point on the journey. On a warm summer’s day, the meadow feels enveloping, hermetic, unconnected to anywhere else, only leading back to slightly differing iterations of itself, like a gently fluttering audio loop or blinking, cyclical visual display. Bucolic and restorative, a place to think things through, but always with something flickering away, faintly, off to the side. A made-for-TV fever dream poking through the idyll. Layers and stories just beyond the lens flare, unseen, unarticulated but ready to emerge and speak, when the wind rises and the nights draw down.

Back inside the forest cover, the track splits around a stubborn old hornbeam, its knotted roots securely encased under the top layer shingle. The route to Mill Plain is kinder here, on the west side of the A104, where there’s no need to engage with the fractured grimness of the Waterworks Corner pedestrian interchange. This is where the path breaks clear of the cover and ramps up, knobbly, cracked, onto a raised, open ridge, where the track bends gently through the long grass and willowherb. To the right is the Thames Water pumping station, its wonky rear steel fence offering negligible protection from anything with sufficient stature and determination, and the Waterworks Corner roundabout, only metres away. South Woodford to Redbridge, Barking, Beckton, Woodford Green, Loughton, Epping. To the left, the scoop of the Lea Valley. The atmosphere is sleepy and strange, ominously peaceful. Twin paths converge and slope down towards Forest Road, the occasional tent visible through the bushes, and the sharp tops of City of London buildings poke through the trees. Look into the valley-dip from the bridge adjacent and it’s Walthamstow, Tottenham Hale, Edmonton, Harringay, Alexandra Palace, Brent Cross. Stadiums, reservoirs, retail parks, antennae, the ever-present wash of the traffic, distant and interior.

On the other side, nestled behind the roundabout, is a raised, circular grass platform, flat, wide, and empty, aside from a shabby Thames Water brick hut at the edge. Marked, appropriately, as “The Circle” on Google Maps, it offers readymade laps for joggers, and numerous exits, down the tight, surrounding verge, back into the cover of the forest. Manmade and incongruent, barely visible from the road, it’s easily cast as the site for something more atavistic and obscure. A sacred place, where anonymous figures gather to offer up euphoric human sacrifices to a provincial woodland deity. A landing site for a small extra-terrestrial reconnaissance craft, carved out to order by devoted earthbound aides. A place to hide in the open. Stay too long and the joggers, smiling and efficient, assume – possibly through no fault of their own - a slightly sinister, collective aspect.

The path to the bridge over the A406, just beyond, is gravelly and uneven, bricks and slate pieces baked into the dirt, recalling the clay pits and brick kiln once residing nearby. A well-covered passage, accessible via a tight, cosy glade, runs parallel with the road, overlooking it. Thorny and narrow, discarded carrier bags hanging forlornly from bushes, a person-thin viewing corridor for the unending, thrusting snake of the daylight Walthamstow traffic. Crossing the bridge, to the South Woodford side, is a journey of metres but feels like an escape from this exhaust-choked claustrophobia into something wholesome, time-frozen, pastoral. The trackway widens, getting flatter and kinder underfoot. The canopy is less oppressive, offering a pleasing combination of light and shade. Patches of sunlight cast through the trees, dappling the floor. Little private clearings just off the main track lead into exquisite mini-mazes. To the left, an intricate branch structure built around a large horizontal trunk, and a carved stone memorial marking the birth site of a celebrated gypsy evangelist. Everything honeyed in yellows and browns. With minimal effort, you can block out the vehicle drone. Approaching the open field in front of Oak Hill, boundaries begin to dissolve; thoughts flicker and fade, hazy before they have fully formed. You start to feel drowsy, detached, separate, before the sudden rustle-rush of a small animal brings you back, sharply, to jittery alertness. You turn and hurry back the way you came. The sun hangs low and follows you, blinking and glinting through the gaps, and the temperature starts to drop.

***

Dan Carney is a musician and writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He also has a PhD in developmental psychology, and has authored a number of academic research papers on cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, writing, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur. Dan on Twitter.

Spring In This Place – a poem by Will Burns

I choose the bee-flies for company today.
Sunlight on beech leaves,
cool sweat in the warm wood,
the blue flowers of the season.
Not numerology or some old painting
I think you might like.
Not a poem I hope you read for signs of life.
I fall hard for this place every day
the way we do for people we shouldn’t.

***

As part of The People’s Forest project, the poet Will Burns is creating a series of new works inspired by Epping Forest. Over the year Burns is penning a collection of poems, one per season, in part reflecting on the unique nature of Epping intertwined with his own experience of the forest real and imagined – here we have had the pleasure and privilege to publish Will’s poem for spring.

Seven Days Walking by Ludovico Einaudi

Seven Days Walking is the title of the new album by Ludovico Einaudi Listen to it at https://lnk.to/Einaudi7DD1FP "I remember that in January 2018 I often went for long walks in the mountains, always following more or less the same trail.

"I remember that in January 2018 I often went for long walks in the mountains, always following more or less the same trail…”

Ludovico Einaudi is a prolific Italian composer and pianist, and has published 20 albums since 1988. In his work he is often influenced by the quotidian and nature: his album 'Una Mattina' is the perfect soundtrack for a lazy spring morning with a book and a good coffee, and in 2016 he recorded a heartbreaking 'Elegy for the Arctic' for Greenpeace. 

His latest project is 'Seven Days Walking', a series of seven albums that will be published in the next seven months; all focusing on a different day of the same walk in the Alps, and how the days change while walking, slowly but discernible. 

"The idea first came to me as I was listening to the recordings of the first sessions: each version seemed to me to have its own personality, with subtleties so distinct from one another that I was unable to choose which I preferred. I associated everything with walking, with the experience of following the same routes over and over, discovering new details each time. And so in the end I decided to thread them all together in a sort of musical labyrinth, a little like stepping inside the twists and turns of the creative process, to understand how a musical idea can develop in multiple directions, and changing once again at the moment in which it is heard."

You can listen to the album through a variety of different services here.