Photo Essay: Nancekuke, by Michael Crocker

By Michael Crocker:

Nancekuke is situated on an isolated cliff top between the villages of Portreath and Porthtowan on the north coast of Cornwall. With uninterrupted horizons and far-reaching coastal views, it is an alluring and beautiful space to visit.

In the 1950’s, Nancekuke was the home of a British government chemical defence establishment where 20 tonnes of Sarin nerve gas were secretly manufactured. By the 1970’s, the site was cleared, with the toxic manufacturing facility being levelled and then buried on site in disused mine shafts. Today, the site continues to be the operated by the Ministry of Defence and is now known as Remote Radar Head Portreath. With a disturbing history, Nancekuke remains shrouded in relative secrecy.

The project documents Nancekuke and its surrounding area as it is found today. The rugged natural beauty of the coast is juxtaposed with a secretive and sinister past, leaving the informed visitor to contest opposing identities of place. The images offer the viewer conflicting interpretations of place; those of beauty, serenity and nature are challenged by remnants of a sinister past, where a human desire to kill and to harness science for widespread destruction remain ever present within the landscape.

The Nancekuke project records the rugged vistas and the ever-changing seascape of the area, whilst acknowledging it as a place with a destructive and unsettling history when viewed through a contemporary lens.

About the photographer: Michael Crocker’s creative practice is centred around photography of the landscape and the agency that can be formed between place, artist and visual outcome. His work creates a visual response to the phenomenological link between spatial experience and consciousness and is often informed by literary sources recording experiences of place. The notion of what we consider place to be within space is an area of interest within his image making.

From Dungeness – a letter to Derek Jarman

By Jen Green:

August 6th, 2021

Dear Derek

I thought I’d update you on your garden, as you often wondered what would become of the flowers you planted in the shifting shingle. I’m sure though, you know exactly what’s going on at Prospect Cottage because part of you is still there. 

I drove to Dungeness through the marshes, along roads with vast horizons that have the feel of dead-end tracks. After a seafood lunch at The Pilot and double checking the direction with the landlady, I walked up from there, battling blasts of wind. Trying to comprehend the basic elements of my surroundings; sky, sea, shingle, road, flatness, perceiving little more  until reaching Prospect Cottage. I too dislike rules and boundaries but in a landscape it’s a strange experience, questioning what is seashore, what is inland, where gardens begin and end. A fishing boat rides a wave of pebbles. If I’d turned back for home now, I’d say Dungeness was monochrome, exposed. But I’d seen it through your eyes and it was never bleak, there was a lifetime of curiosity.

Your house is well kept, yellow window and door frames are bright against uniform black wood. My visit feels intrusive as I approach, so I busy my eyes with plants at shingle level and avoid looking inside. Tall fennel and salty-green domes of santolina fly flags of dry flowerheads. The wild mint you found on the Ness is still here, flowering purple amongst a Mediterranean aroma – but one I can never place or track down to an individual herb. Dots of magenta from sweet pea to roses to knapweed. Low-growing plants in front of the house are well suited to winds, tiny sedum and silvery sea kale. Behind, a fig tree claims the inside corner, covering a wall, palms curling with each gust. Is this the fig you nurtured from a cutting taken on your way home? It’s flourishing. Elder trees still guard the house, their old growth a crown of sticks covered by mustard-yellow lichen, and new growth rising. Just a rose bush between you and the power station prospect; the other way, the sea. Garden and creativity unbound, like the fun you and your friends made in the freedom of these waves and levels.

In between pebbles and plants are your markers of flotsam, driftwood, scrap metal triangles, hoops and spirals, all rusted. I imagined it as if you were a giant turnstone on the shore, gathering the best of Dungeness; armfuls of stones and pockets of shoots from rubbish tips and roadsides, for restoration back in the garden microcosm. Shells and stones elevated on sticks furnish the land with shape and relief. I can see how gardening gave you hope, taking action with tangible results, of some kind. Like an alchemist planting prescriptions with the guidance of Culpeper, for protection, for healing, for sleep. A guardian creating a living, vibrant memorial, each oval flint stone a friend, a life, standing in shingle as dolmen circles of moon and sun, with the resonance of being adjusted by your hands. As dragon’s teeth they deter a foot from stepping inside the jaws, defending sedum and poppies. Sempervivums live on. With sadness I see many stones, for friends who died young. Revolutionaries like yourself braved the wilderness of a new virus. Did you imagine that people living with HIV live full, long lives and with medication, HIV is untransmissible? Perhaps you did, as 30 years on is a long time. There’s one red hot poker, encircled by a rusted chain. When asked in an interview how you’d want to be remembered, you said a flower - a red hot poker so perhaps HB kept this one for you. 

Climate change is a climate crisis, the years were getting hotter like your sunny, sweater-free birthday in January 1989. Nuclear power was not the answer and Dungeness B is now decommissioned.

Leaning to look into raised beds where terracotta pots are stacked, I find a musty but purposeful smell that could be my grandad’s shed. He kept a straight-lined, weed free vegetable garden, the kind that were common in suburbs but now replaced by driveways for cars that bring home vegetables from seasonless supermarkets. 

Other uninvited visitors nose about and sneak between plants but don’t stay for long. Four children shelter from the wind by the house, pushing each other into the gusts where they struggle to stay upright, stomping in the pebbles. I worry about the proximity of a pink mallow at foot height, but it survives their game. Wind, with free rein over flat terrain, howls in telephone wires that cross to all the houses, reminding me of the Kansas tornado that lifted Dorothy’s house. I’m not sure I could live here, but you described so much beauty over the years. Sparkling dew on shingle, the theatre of a landscape with unimpeded sunrises and sunsets, where scenes can change with just one cloud. 

When I left, with ears cold from the ceaseless blow, I snapped a poppy head and put it in my pocket. All the seeds fell out on the way home. My partner hasn’t tidied our garden since I’ve been away. July’s growth is too much to keep up with so Augusts are scruffy - ragged plants with dead sticks - out of proportion without foliage, overblown fluff, flattened long grass, half-eaten leaves and withered flowers. There is green but it’s tired. In the spring my neighbours shared their excess of spring shoots, of borage, nasturtiums and jasmine. Borage raised blue stars skywards one by one, raining seeds which I saved. Nasturtiums were quick to bloom and curl all over the hanging basket, but by late summer, their leaves and flowers are deformed and nibbled. What did you do about slugs? I tried Vaseline around the plant pot lip. One snail tried to cross but stopped, turned eyes inward, processing the gunk. The sunflower prematurely soured anyway, perhaps the pot was finally too small. It had been a seedling I’d saved from grass under the bird feeder, cupped in my hands like an ember to rekindle. Now, I’ve noticed seeds dislodged by chewing snails were caught by bare soil in a pot below, and summer’s flames are refuelled. The rose bush blooms regardless, sending out fast, straight limbs and as many bunches of fuchsia-pink roses as it can, long after all other flowers are over.  

Oh I almost forgot, Prospect Cottage has been saved from private buyers, by friends and an organisation who will dedicate it to public interest. Seeds from your garden are free, germinating in all kinds of unusual places.

Yours,

Jen

***

Jen Green is a writer based in Bristol, UK. With a Masters in Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University, she explores the role that nature plays in people’s lives; of trees, parks and a view of the sky. Jen has a portfolio website at jencgreen.com

On Barra Hill

By Ian Grosz:

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.  
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.

I have lived in northeast Scotland now for many years. It is home, and yet always seems to remain at arm’s length; never quite a place in which I feel I truly belong. I grew up in the northwest of England and spent my early childhood playing in the back alleys of the tightly packed terraced housing of our town; on family days out to Southport and Blackpool; and soggy summer camping holidays in the Lake District. Later we moved to the suburbs where I roamed the playing fields and neighbouring farmland with my friends, taking our BMX bikes far beyond where we were allowed. We knew every patch of ground within a ten-mile radius as intimately as our own homes; named trees and hiding places; invented our own legends and hauntings. Our places lived within us: every track and shortcut; every park and empty house; every field, brook, hill, dip and hollow. No map could be as richly textured as those that we embodied in the landscapes of our young lives. 

Perhaps the need to somehow make a deeper connection with where I live now – to understand and fully realise that connection – is through the lack of this intimate knowing of place that comes from childhood, and born of the experience of being an outsider in a place that I consider to be home. It is home, but I know deep down that I am not from here, not of the place. My connections to it come from circumstance, and my roots go back for only as long as I have lived here; no further. 

Rising up above the village where I live, is Barra Hill; its flattened dome presiding over the immediate landscape.  I have walked the hill many times; have become familiar with its landmarks filled with their hidden histories. In an attempt to get under the skin of the place, I’ve explored these histories; delved into the time held by the hill. 

Close by is the fourteenth-century battle site of Robert the Bruce and his rival John Comyn, part of a bitter fight for the Scottish Crown which led to the formation of a medieval independent Scotland. ‘The Bruce’, as he was known, is said to have directed the proceedings of this battle from a chair-shaped boulder once sited somewhere on the hill’s slopes. This is known as Bruce’s seat, and now sits by the roundabout on the road leading out of the village, complete with a small plaque: a site of half-forgotten story and remembrance; but still reminding us of the long and troubled history between the two nations. 

Earthen walls on the hill’s summit form part of an old fort, built in three phases from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Neolithic stone circles ring the hill’s flanks, while remnant undulations from medieval rig and furrow cultivation give its upper slopes the appearance of a crumpled, grassy carpet. On its far side, an old church houses a seventh-century Pictish symbol stone. The hill tells the story of this small corner of northeast Scotland stretching back to the last Ice Age, but holds much more personal histories too. 

I set off early not long after sunrise to make my way up to the hill through a short section of woodland at its base. Gorse laced with spiders’ webs glisten with dew. Cow parsley and nettles fill the woodland floor and a wren darts amongst the brambles that line the path. The trees of the woods seem to hold the morning: imbue it with a spirit of place and time as I walk beneath their high, heavy branches. A small burn gurgles contentedly through a narrow gulley, running down toward the village where it empties into the larger Meadow Burn. The name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is likely drawn from this burn and the prominent flattened dome of the hill. 

Meldrum is an anglicised conflation of the old Irish meall-droma and the old Scots Gaelic mealldruim, both of which mean ridge of the hill. The ‘Old’ is likely to have a phonetic, elided origin in the Gaelic ‘Alt’ which means the burn, or stream, possibly referencing the Meadow Burn running from the hill toward the edge of the modern village before draining into the nearby River Ury.  Alt Mealldroma therefore appears to be a geographic signifier for the beginnings of what became the modern-day settlement, its literal translation a direct reference to the burn of the ridge of the hill. Learning of this brings the village and its context within the landscape closer to a truer understanding. But it also signals my outsideness, my Englishness: reminds me that the people who named this place so long ago were somehow foreign to me; or rather, coming from a place outside of it, I am in some way foreign to this landscape.

The air is still cold as I emerge onto the open hillside, my breath billowing out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. My eyes seek out a line of trees along a ridge leading to the hill’s summit, silhouetted now against the skyline. I have always been drawn to these trees. Their rootedness reinforces my own sense of place here, brings me closer to a sense of belonging. 

Their silhouettes have seemed familiar since moving here over a decade ago, take me back to my childhood in the northwest of England. They remind me of trees my eye sought out on the bus journey home from school as a boy; a secret marker in the landscape between the school and home known only to me, I imagined; something I held within me that brought me home ahead of the bus. Seeing them after the regimentation and continual tussle of the school day was a signal that home was drawing near. Recognising them in the trees along the ridge leading to the hill now, fills me with nostalgia; a sense of both reassurance and loss. I am simultaneously here and there: where I live now and where I have come from; transported by the ghosting of trees from my childhood.

Finally reaching the summit, there is a definite sense of trespass as I enter the old enclosure, as if the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard against intrusion. The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side, down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now peaceful looking fields filled with ripening crops. The village is visible below, with its old centre dating back to the seventeenth-century; the new houses at its outskirts and the small, modern industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the village by-pass and a passenger-jet traverses the sky in a wide circuit for the airport to the south, as if in slow motion. 

A group of swifts have begun darting and swooping across the open enclosure around me, catching midges and flies on the wing. The orchestra of their flight is a language without words, communicating with a deeper sense within me. It is something that is in me rather than in them; something within me that I recognise in them. It seems connected to the landscape; to the trees along the ridge; the morning light now brightening the fields. Everything around me feels perfectly a part of this place, bound up with the language of the swifts. I am just as much part of this landscape as the swifts are now; as much as the people who once occupied this fort; part of the endless narrative thread of life woven through the land and time, and yet I remain somehow outside of its slow unravelling. 

***

Notes: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (1995, repr. London, Harper Press, 2004), p. 7

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

The holinight

By Frances Jackson:

There is nowhere
to go
on holiday,
so they swap
which side 
of the bed
they sleep on.

It is his idea,
but she has
the better night's sleep.

The pillows 
on the left
are,
it transpires,
superior to the right.

She may
refuse 
to leave.

***

Frances Jackson is originally from the UK, but now lives in Bavaria. Her translations and poetry have appeared in places such as Asymptote, London Grip, Panel and Your Impossible Voice.

A Small French Town at Dusk

By David Lewis:

Our kitchen is full of family, cooking and laughter, and I can slip away. The door closes behind me, the garden gate clangs and I am on the narrow green lane connecting the town’s heart with the riverside vegetable gardens. Stone walls and dark houses rise on either side. Our town, St Hilaire, stands on an outcrop of rock in a heavily-wooded river valley, and the green lane runs over the town’s softened ramparts, built in the 1300s against the English troops of the Hundred Years’ War. Our house perches on the memory of the battlements. There is a cool wind from the river, but the bedroom windows are soft and golden in the grey-blue light. It is starting to get dark. 

French dusks are uniquely melancholy. The decaying grey-blue light holds a memory of summer skies, and Emil Zola called it ‘the emotional hour of twilight’ and noted the ‘quiet voluptuous moments’ and ‘delicate shadows’. The grey sky is fading to a pale gold over the woods in the west and soon a shadow-river of bats will appear between the dark houses. The green lane leads me to the smallest of the town’s squares, a mere widening of pavement to create urban dignity. The lamps are being lit on iron scrolls fixed to the wall, that illuminate the streets without sacrificing pavement space or dark sky. Once we met our neighbour reading quietly beneath a scroll light, but tonight the wind is brisk and the streets are empty.

I walk into the Place St Hilaire, dominated by the Mairie and the church. The heart of the town is an irregular space for public assembly, hacked from medieval lanes and passageways. Scroll lamps illuminate the streets gently, as if afraid to disturb the darkness, but the scrubbed stone on the church glows even in this weak light. New floodlights will soon pour white light up the ancient tower, glorifying every carved face and capital, silhouetting the pollarded trees around the war memorial like defiant fists - but the twilight magic will be lost. Around the square the houses are shuttered, some closed, stony-faced and silent. But in the big house, empty for so long, the young couple are working with their friends, paintbrushes, glasses, laughter, with the tall windows wide open – they do not feel the cold. Sometimes we see their cycling daughters on the green lane, small dark girls with solemn faces and immaculate hair. 

On the medieval streets there are glimpses of warmth and a whiff of slow-pot cooking even through the shutters. There are no people on the streets and no traffic. Dark steps take me down to the deep-blue silver of the weir, where the river doubles back on itself and blue-black bats are reflected in the gunmetal water. The old town is silhouetted above me, blunt roofs, a slab of streetlight. Stars are starting to appear. I climb slowly for home and rejoin the church road, past iron crucifixes dark against the pale cemetery sky. A cat runs through a soft pool of streetlamp, one of Zola’s quiet voluptuous moments. The cemetery stands as an unofficial city wall, and beyond it the forestry tracks run off into the woods. A late car sweeps the grey trunks with light and is gone. I am above the allotments now, climbing slowly over the slumped and overgrown battlements and back onto the green lane. I can hear laughter from our kitchen and imagine I can already smell the evening meal. Someone from our family is always here, and this is our home. 

My French is slow and awkward, but I make an effort. I am European, proud of my melting pot British family, still hoping for a French retirement and the dream of thinking in French. And yet, since the cynicism and racist stupidity of Brexit, Zola’s delicate shadows have fallen over our relationships with our neighbours and it is harder to celebrate being European and British. It is many years since I have seen the bats over the green lane or watched the sunset over the valley, yet once loved a place does not leave us. In these strange days, when to declare yourself European on your census form is an act of defiance, cherishing European dreams is a form of rebellion.

***
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

Cragg Vale

Photo: Helen Oldfield

By Emily Oldfield:

The Cragg Vale Incline has become the site of excited spatterings of conversation, speculation… Climbing 968 feet over 5 and a half miles, it is said to be the longest continuous road ascent in England. An endurance. But what about the descent? 

Descent. A word weighted with downhill draw – the airflow of the ‘d’ angling the tongue against top teeth, the breath cast outwards, the body downwards. When we walk downhill, extrinsic muscles stretch, and the dorsum of the foot flexes open. Suspension into a kind of surrender? Descent – a word working back into our origins: where do you come from? What did you leave to be here? 

Hence, we descend. We drop down through Cragg Vale largely at the roadside, having climbed out of the valley bottom – a fertile slit of land lashed in Silver Birch, Beech and Sycamore. The black mud of Withens Clough still slicks our boots, the souvenir of  a walk over the moors from Walsden; at some point brushing between postcodes, the angry acronyms of OL and HX. Here on the West Yorkshire-Lancashire border, a bristling blend of wood-rush and cotton grass seem caught in the stupor of a wind that can settle on no one direction for more than a few minutes.

Distinct snapshots of the journey jolt through the mind like its chill - skin under a cold wind. The startled shrill of a pheasant tucked under a tumbledown wall, the farmhouse picked to ruins around her. I imagine her eggs, still intact, olive-coloured; their secret yellow only the bounty of stoppered life. 

Here, there isn’t so much a ripening as a weathering, enduring. So much potential colour we never see. Plenty is on the edge – birth, bloom, kingdom. The bluebells wait close to the water, their buds weighted with the prospect of purple, like youth hangs at the edge of adulthood in a tender, tremulous body. Coveted, craved. 

There are other edges. Stream surging on the edge of river. The steep valley side as we descend the road. A dip where mills once worked cotton and coyed young, agile bodies into early graves. Bound in their beauty. Perhaps like the chicks, still egg-wet and ordered in their thousands from the valley’s hatchery at the turn of the 20th century. The semi-ripeness of youth becomes an industry. Or fashion. Or art. 

Today the air seems tempered with a semi-stickiness, a temperate sheen over skin. The sun’s light is beginning to warm. It works its curious fingers through the open beaks of young daffodils, their flowers mouth-like and hungry as they shuffle in series at the side of the road. A confetti for the coming season. Then suddenly, to the left, a field that seems suspended before the valley; a glut of manicured green against a shock of white geese. 

It is the field of geese that stops us. Perhaps it is something about the manicured enclosure being rendered futile by their presence, their capacity to fly. And yet, they seem to busy themselves within the field; sure-footed, coral-coloured steps only interrupted by their own unpredictable shadows; the sashaying groundsheet of reflection rendered by swivelling necks and flexing wings. 

Geese take so many of us back to youth; even an angry hiss at the river or canal-side enough to evoke that hot flush of muted panic often at its ripest in childhood. The child-like fear and fascination at ‘the other’. I think back to the tales of Old Mother Goose, The Golden Goose: birds basted in expectation, fattened by projected hope of fortune and learning. Now I look at the geese in the field and feel a kind of resignation – the body muted and limited by its enclosures. 

Human enclosures. We see them as we pass by road signs, door fronts; names twisting through Turvin, Elphin Brook, Castle, Paper, Cragg. A geography lesson gone wild.

Wild too, somehow, is the impulse that arises – and opens those extrinsic muscles of the foot outwards, downwards. We find ourselves taking a sharp turn away from the waymarked road and down towards the valley bottom, encouraged by the occasional flash of brook like a wet cobweb caught in light. Cool wind tussles with spools of sun, our tread is tentative, not sure of our destination, yet committed. 

This is a valley where concealment is part of the course… transgression touching its growth. I notice it in the tongues of wild garlic that lash many a thicket-floor, fragrancing the air with their bulb-heavy, bursting perfume. Although we have been on roadside and track for a good half an hour, I still feel the allium heat from an earlier stretch of woodland. The same heat that would have once stifled the raw rot of mill water, human sweat, hacked stone, bird shit, broken hands. Where industry clawed at contours, chewed terminology up to the point that Elphin, Cragg, Turvin – all became an interchangeable word for the water. A trickling childspeak. 

Water. I feel it in the currents of your hand – skin itself a simmering breathing tide that sheds its cells not just with season-shift, but endlessly. Now we choose our own deviation from the incline, toes feeling the tip of anticipation as we head downwards and over a bridge. 

And then, the sudden combination of stream-rush and a slight sulphur hits me. Brings to mind the air of an egg brought to boiling point: perhaps the goose egg we wrapped in tissue paper and had carried home just weeks earlier, as excited as children. 

We have reached Cragg Spa – a site celebrated for centuries – its underbridge pool offering not only its own shimmering yolk of sky, but stirring that reflection with a drapework of greenery surging over the stone arch. The determination of young growth, despite the odds. It is here after all where eager opening hands would have snatched for Spanish water – what I remember my own grandmother calling sugarelly – a liquorice-smothered liquid weighted with sweetshop smell and the rumour of health. Here Spaw Sunday saw not just the youth, but bursts of locals and visitors alike visiting the Spa, some steeping the nearby well-water with liquorice to mask the eggwash. Others took to its waters, its spill over skin the same surge that brought life and death to this valley, woodlands and waterwheels, radicals and riches, youth and age. 

And as we watch the pool, its patina of bluegreen like the gloss of a pupil or the pattern of eggshell – I think then, of an egg, its precarious potential for life, its closeness to death – and how to clasp it, tip to tip, yields a strength that never ceases to take us by surprise. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She was the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life. 

The Library: The Heeding, by Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes

Read by Marcel Krueger:

One and a half years into the current global pandemic, and we now see the first publications of what you could call “Coronavirus Lit”. After a run on Camus' The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year when it all started, now contemporary writers have begun to engage with the pandemic itself, with quarantine, isolation and living through it - with a varying degree of success. One the one hand there are inspiring projects like the online and offline The Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine, which brings together such diverse writers like Rivka Galchen, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, on the other German novelist Thea Dorn's whiny Trost. Briefe an Max (Confort. Letter to Max) which barely misses becoming an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination manifest while pretending to be highbrow literature. 

The Heeding, a collaboration between writer Rob Cowen and illustrator and graphic artist Nick Hayes can definitely be considered Corona Lit, and is thankfully of the inspiring variety. The book contains 35 wonderfully illustrated poems and spans the pandemic from spring 2020 to spring 2021, but this is not a lockdown diary (even though it picks up contemporary themes like the Black Lives Matter movement), but a book about the world as a whole and our place in it. As Cowen says in the introduction, when referring to the trauma World War II his grandfather lived through:

"This book is born out of a different time and trauma, but perhaps it might likewise be thought of as a collection of things, of findings and workings out - if not conclusions - around our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other at another moment of profound change."

The theme of the poems varies immensely, from moors and allotments to living in quarantine with children, family grief, isolation and loneliness to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and drinking songs, nicely bookended by two poems about duels between hawks and their prey. Nick Hayes' illustrations complement the poems perfectly: the first image the reader encounters before said first poem is a hawk in flight that practically explodes from the page, and really gave me pause. 

The only weak point of this wonderful book is the – for me – sometimes too widely meandering subject matter of the poems. While this wide-angled approach is something that definitely works in Rob Cowen's prose work Common Ground, where walking a part of the edgelands makes the protagonist explore all sorts of interconnections and layers of history, the poems in The Heeding sometimes feel disjointed. But then, is disjointed not what we all felt at some point in the last twelve months? 

What I like about this beautiful book is that it treats the Covid-19 pandemic not as a once-in-a-lifetime event that we all have to make it through to get back to like everyone was before. It references extreme heatwaves and human failure to show humility in the face of nature, and that makes it more an example of the first contemporary plague literature than a look back at a unique event. As I write this the plague is still ongoing, and there are countries on the planet that have not even seen one single vaccine dose making its way there. And as things stand, this will not have been the last global pandemic in our lifetime - it's just a question if we can learn to better tackle these in the future. There will be more floods and droughts and heatwaves and fires and bumbling politicians failing, but maybe we can find hope and inspiration to face and change these in books like The Heeding. Or if not hope, then at least compassion for our fellow man and nature. It is sure needed. As Rob Cowen says in his poem ‘The End of This (Drinking Poem)’:

Pass me a glass. Give me courage
to start over. And be better.  

***

The Heeding is published by Elliott & Thompson.

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

Between the Forest and the Sea

By Sara Bellini:

I don’t know why the sea. I like expanding my gaze, following the waves in reverse until they reach the horizon and the water dissolves into the sky. It must be this idea of infinity - the line you can never reach, the water you cannot quantify - and of all the things that exist beyond the horizon and that I hold in my gaze without seeing them; another coast; another country; people and birds and trees. And while I contemplate these transcendental thoughts, I hear the waves in the background, repetitive and calming, always the same and always different.

When I was a child, we’d have a seaside holiday every year, and yet the sea of my childhood is different than that of my adulthood. The first one symbolised summer, ice-cream, playing and swimming, while the latter is more often a place of cold wind, of fish and chips, of walking and healing. This new relationship was forged around a decade ago, when I was living in London and unhappily so. Work was stressful and I needed to slow down. The lack of time, money and energy dictated my escape route: a Southern Railway train to Brighton. Every few months I would spend a day there, more rarely a night or two. I didn’t do anything special. I just wandered for hours and stared at the sea. 

When I found myself in a similarly strenuous situation a couple of years ago, with no possibility of taking significant time off work, I thought of the sea again. The closest option from Berlin was the Baltic. My friend K. also needed to step out of her life for a moment, so we stepped out of our lives together, at the same time anchoring each other in order to avoid drifting away. 

The trip itself was serendipitous, but the reason behind it was rooted in our existential impasse and the tiredness of not being able to find a way out. In our perception we were akin to severely ill pious women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Our Lourdes was nature. It was the sea.

If you take a train from Berlin up to what the Germans call the Ostsee, you reach a city called Stralsund. But the railway doesn’t stop there - it arches over the water to land again on Rügen. The island is connected to the mainland via a bridge, it’s that close. And yet, like every island, it is its own world. 

“Beyond their actual geographical coordinates, islands will always be places we project onto, places which we cannot get a hold on through scientific methods but through literature.”*

Rügen became famous during the 18th century, when the Romantics made art of nature and in nature itself found the sublime. It was the painter Caspar David Friedrich who showed the world the charm of the island, its stunning white cliffs covered in leafy trees on a background of cobalt and till sea. The Romantics had good taste and heavy moods, and we followed in their steps with a ravenous hunger for the sublime, looking for something that would overwhelm us with beauty and shake us out of our skin.

The core of our stay on the island was an excursion to Jasmund National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in the north-eastern part of Rügen. To be precise, UNESCO granted the title to the primeval beech forests in Germany, which shaped the whole continent after the last Ice Age, and have been severely damaged by human intervention. The title is there to keep these ecosystems intact, to protect them from us.

Tourists visit the park every year, mainly to see the impressive chalk cliff known as Königsstuhl. K. and I found it rather curious how people would pay to step on a platform on the cliff, rather than admiring it for free from an adjacent cliff. This is named for Victoria of Prussia (daughter of the English Queen Victoria) by her father-in-law Kaiser Wilhelm I, because she loved that spot. We thought about how the fact that someone once found that particular cliff so lovely brought someone with temporal power to give it a name and put it on a map, initiating a process of conservation and meaning-giving. It reminded us of the many ways in which human and natural history were intertwined, and how the former - shorter and more insignificant - has so often tried to claim the latter.

From the Victoria-Sicht we walked along the Hochufer - the path following the shoreline down below - dipping in and out of the woodland. It looked like some trees were growing from the rock walls, almost parallel to the sea underneath. A sign told us that the cliffs were made of chalk, which has the property of freezing during the winter and then thawing once more in spring. When that happens, the cliffs crumble down, taking pieces of the forest with them. This process is called natural erosion and it made me muse on the idea that the island we were on was the same island of Friedrich’s, but also significantly different. If I go back to Rügen every year, I thought, it will always be a geologically altered place, where the cliffs scratch and reshape themselves ever so slightly each spring: an island of entropy.

That was the first time I’ve walked in a forest on a cliff, and it was sensorially baffling. The smell of the wet ground and understory mixed up with the saltiness, whose scent was coming in waves, mirroring the water that generated it. On our right slugs and mushrooms, and on our left swans and a lonely red sail. 

All of a sudden we had to stop, stupefied and awed, on a man-made path descending towards the sea. The dappled light made everything look green: our hands, our faces, the ground. The phenomenon appeared almost fairy-like, and we felt like we were about to metamorphose into sylvan creatures. The light seemed to possess a tangible quality, a volume, a physical presence. A few steps away, everything looked normal, and wooden stairs led us down to a pebbled beach.

We sat in the sun, enjoying the marine breeze and the glistening depth of the Baltic. We had swum the day before and we would swim again the day after, allowing the cold water to remodel our skin and turn us into marine creatures, dissolving the distance between us and the natural world where we craved to belong.

Walking in the woods was a richly immersive experience and we felt we were part of our surroundings, just like the birches and the chaffinches, the fungi and the mosses. Our minds were too busy processing all these inputs, in being present, that we didn’t have the time to get caught up in anxious thoughts about the future and the lives we had briefly put on hold. Wasn’t that what we were looking for - a reminder that we were made of the same matter of the sea and the forest? The cliffs themselves didn’t worry about anything, including their own demise, so it felt silly to do anything other than simply being.

The trees suddenly ended at the outskirts of the village of Sassnitz. We walked silently under the sun to reach the station, barely meeting any other people. As our bodies moved from nature to tarmac interspersed with rose-studded gardens, our headspace shifted from a present mode to our city-life mode, at the same time leaning forward towards the future while looking backward at the past. And yet we knew we had left some of our worries back in Jasmund National Park, perhaps lifted up by the birch branches while we were staring at the green light.

We started and ended our stay on the island in the same way, with fish and chips and a cup of coffee from a stand near the beach in Binz. At that moment, it was the best fish and chips we had ever had.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

* Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands