A Drift in Eden

Photography by Julian Hyde

By Mark Valentine:

It was an iron bench on a country road, a bit dilapidated but still staunch. We were glad to take our rest there. The design was pleasing in a minor, unassertive sort of way: the arm-ends that stretched out like paws, the legs that might have been modelled on the lithe limbs of a wild cat. The narrow slats of the seat were now mostly innocent of paint, but still firm. From a few last flecks and scrapes, it looked as if they might once have been coated in the pale blue of winter sunsets. The backrest had an ornamental escutcheon and a date which seemed to be in the 1950s, and there was a Festival of Britain or Coronation feel to it.   

Set at an angle to things, and on its own tussocky plot, it had no significant view. Immediately opposite was a little lane between hedges, leading nowhere in particular. Above was rising ground but to no great height. The road it was on turned slightly away at this point so there was no line of sight there. Leading away from the bench was a drive that had once led to a railway halt, long since closed, though you could still see the remains of the platforms and the tracks. Like a lot of rural halts, there was a certain distance between it and the nearest village, and so we supposed that there must once have been a bus, or a taxi service, and the bench had been put there for passengers. There was something about the spot that seemed unusually restful, as if the patience of all those lost travellers had somehow seeped into the scene itself. You could imagine them sitting here in their long coats and hats, with their newspapers and cigarettes, looking out on pretty much the view we now had.  

If you turn to the left from the little bench, you pass Little Salkeld watermill and cafe, still grinding corn for wholegrain bread, and then at a green you come to a meeting of ways, and on the black and white signpost one of the arms has some of the oddest words ever seen on any signpost, even though there are many quaint and picturesque place names in England. It reads: Druids Circle. This is Long Meg & Her Daughters, who are not after all Druids, but witches turned to stone, at least for the time being and while you are there. The tallest of these, Long Meg herself, is adorned with grains of lichen of ochre and scarlet and evergreen, like some fine embroidered cloak not made by mortal fingers, and at her foot there are often offerings. The stones cannot be counted, it is said, perhaps because they do not quite stay still. 

Suppose, though, that you do not follow the road to the Druids’ Circle, but turn instead the other way at the green. You go under the high arches of a railway bridge and then follow a track above the river Eden, you keep on through the trees, and you come to the overgrown ruins of an abandoned gypsum mine, Long Meg Drift. It operated between 1880 and 1976 (with a gap during WW1), employing between 12 and 30 people. There was a short works railway, pretty much where the footpath now runs, which connected to the famous Settle-Carlisle line. It had its own signal box (demolished a few years ago) and a few steam locomotives, one now at the Bowes Museum, Co Durham. As for the works itself, this has gone back to nature: there are brick footings, stone steps, platforms, caved-in sheds, all now covered with nettles and brambles, ash saplings and moss. 

In a corner though, quite unexpectedly, there is an electricity installation that buzzes and crackles behind its high spear-shaped grey palings, and with red lightning-flash signs warning of danger. You are taken aback: it seems like some secret race of engineers has landed here from a distant star and put this here for inscrutable purposes. About this place, one day, there was once a great flickering array of amber butterflies, rising and tumbling and pausing only to drink their nectar, and it seemed as if the secret rays from the hidden sub-station had quickened their exultant spirits. The fierce machines and these frail beings, like torn-off pieces of old silk tapestry, made a startling contrast that seemed uncanny, a glimpse of a world where they will go on, with their whirring and their dancing, but we will be gone. 

On the way to the works you might have missed something, on a verge not far from the lodge house at the entrance. Embedded in the wild grass there was a long ripple of glazed clay tablets, each about as big as a playing card, and all carefully plotted together as a mosaic. And if you looked closer you might make out painted houses, a bridge, a boat, a horse, a church, a train, because this is a picture-book map, in bright colours, in speedwell blue and primrose yellow and rose and parsley green. It was made over 20 years ago by the children of the four primary schools of the area, High Hesket, Armathwaite, Culgaith and Langwathby, in an arts project led by the ceramicist Michael Eden, and the map is of their local world. The place where you are now standing is the fulcrum of an X shape connecting the four villages, in a flourish of secular magic. 

The bricks they made and laid here are chipped and cracked now, and the grasses and dandelions grow between them, and the red mud begins to congeal across them. The last I heard, because of landslips and heavy rain, the mosaic did not look like it would still be there much longer: its colourful little world was sliding away.  

***
Mark Valentine is originally from the radical shoemaking town of Northampton but now lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. His short stories and essays are published by the independent presses Tartarus (UK), The Swan River Press (Ireland), Sarob (France) and Zagava (Germany). His writing on landscape and lore has appeared in Reliquiae, Echtrai and Northern Earth.

The perks of being a suburban wallflower

Milton Keynes EKZ by Dr Ronald Kunze is licensed under CC BY 3.0

By David Stoker:

Milton Keynes, situated between London and Birmingham, is frequently a punchline of a town. MK, as locals call it, has the reputation for being a bit of an oddball - if not backwards exactly, merely parochial, where weird things happen through sheer boredom, like local newspaper headlines that occasionally go viral. Given the British custom of celebrating all that is shabby (a book entitled “Crap Towns” was a surprise hit in 2003, selling 120,000 copies) it earns a chuckle more than true derision. People who live in older towns or cities that grew more organically over time balk at it. Really? You built this - here? 

MK is famous for two things: roundabouts and concrete cows. Occasionally nausea-inducing to drive on, the 130 roundabouts punctuate the vertices of its grid squares, the town’s transport arteries designed with a ruler. Visiting “H6” may be less glamorous than New York’s “40th and 8,” but such is the power of movies to elevate mere digits. The cows: at first glance they seem to be a memento of an agricultural past, a lifesize version of the cheap fridge magnets you and I collect from a city break. Yet somehow the herd is celebrated: these hand-forged Fresians were long adopted as the unofficial town mascots. Amateurish yet undeniably cheerful, the cows express a kitsch naivety and as such have earned significant affection from locals.

Concrete Cows at CMK by Prioryman is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

My relationship to MK is like one has to a gawky high school photo of oneself - familiar, with a small grimace. Or perhaps the special blankness we reserve for people we have ghosted, or - morally and aesthetically - outgrown. Having spent some formative years there, I felt lucky to have got out. My memory is of what French philosopher Marc Augé has described as “non places”: corporate blandness of airport lobbies and drab, air-conditioned conference centres, devoid of character. I would joke that the town is a giant car park with shops and houses attached. But my mind was opened by Filmmaker Richard Macer’s recent BBC4 documentary Milton Keynes and Me, which showed the idealistic vision behind the project. Luxurious, quasi-socialist, grand meeting places were planned, open to all, flattening social hierarchies. So I got thinking about Milton Keynes and me - was it so terrible? How did it shape my character?

Britain’s newest town built from scratch was founded in 1967. But idealised urban planning has a long history: in the Renaissance, symmetrical, fortress-like, pentagonal cities were drafted, intended to represent the Platonic ideal of a city. Bauhaus pioneer Le Corbusier boldly described homes as ‘machines for living’ that he believed would eventually have a transformative effect on human behaviour. As their fame and reputation grew, Bauhaus visionaries were soon designing, if not whole cities, then large estates. Yet social problems soon emerged in these concrete palaces, from places like outer-Amsterdam estate De Biljmer; to Glasgow’s high-rises, and the housing ‘projects’ in the US. Many were torn down. One infamous block came down in only 20 years, such was the human misery its misguided design caused.

To ask whether MK’s design is equally misguided needs a caveat: it was softer from the start, more modest, less stark. MK, despite some brutalist centrepieces, didn’t go full modernist to its core - you might call it twee-modernist. From above, within each grid square, instead of a spray-painted, hatch grille of harsh hexagons, street designs look more like a doily dusted with icing sugar, relatively benign. No rows of communist-style blocks - though there are some foreboding low-rise 1970s estates - (round the corner from our house was a series of long, dark-chocolate-bricked, triangular prisms, twenty houses deep) - but from the 80s onwards house building was firmly conventional, even ‘checkbox’, what have been dismissively called ‘Noddy houses.’

And misery, what misery exactly? In controlled, over-regular environments, we feel penned in and our senses dulled. One of the psychological imperatives of humans is to make their mark on things. Notably, entire sprawling MK estates of detached houses shared a common floor plan and exterior. I sometimes imagined locals would need to count the number of turns they make left or right upon driving home, such was the difficulty of recognising one’s own house. A car aerial, one can put a brightly coloured ball on - not so easy to festoon a house for distinctiveness, at least outside of the festive season.

Suburbia has its pains for any teenager and I was no different: I wanted ‘scenes’, a ferment, the accidental, to feel legitimately part of something bigger. Brought together by daily coach-rides to my high school, my teen friendships were a constellation of satellites and in the evenings we socialised on MSN Messenger, discussing how to impress girls without many opportunities to try it out. My mates had sports - MK has the national badminton centre - and I had my books and music. I organised my collections as an antidote to life’s anxieties and meaninglessness, self medication. It was my spiritual way out. Weekends saw us at Centre MK: Europe’s longest shopping centre was our temple, our promenade, our place to go. It wasn’t much: MK could be described as a sad Los Angeles without its Vegas. But it was ours.

Milton Keynes Centre Queens Court by Cnyborg is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

There is a real eeriness to MK. If you visit, you will feel it. Away from the roads it is quiet - too quiet. Early settlers had a counsellor appointed by the development company to make sure they weren’t going loopy. It was just a couple of streets at first. Coming from my current London neighbourhood I sometimes feel like I’ve wandered onto the Truman Show, but with no-one watching. Connection suffers in towns built at the scale of the car - the distances were just too far to allow chemical reaction. A social coarseness can easily creep in like bindweed when people don’t mix enough, aren’t given proper meeting places. To create chemical reactions in an area too big without enough particles, you must add heat.

Is it too harsh to say that planned towns are doomed to make life boring and lonely? It feels like one priority, living space and affordable home ownership (it was originally designed to alleviate urban crowding in London) was pursued above all others. The privacy of one’s tiny castle. And on one level, it succeeded fully in improving the material standards of its residents. Notably Milton Keynes’ original vision was only incompletely realised - a huge cultural district was planned and scrapped. 

And there was beauty amidst the boredom: cycling up to the concrete cows with a mate and sitting on them, off past ruins of an abbey, past lakes and past pub lunch denizens. In pre-teen years there were some local excitements: I remember being confronted by estate kids. These boys, though looking back, so obviously deplete of love, stability and material resources - had a physical rough and readiness that I found exhilarating. The adrenaline you feel when you might be put in a head-lock for no reason. Their desire to explore places we weren’t allowed to go. 

In some ways, MK occupies an “uncanny valley” between utopia and dystopia. But it was not all bad, a grey life. Actually it was quite green. Last time I went, MK felt slowly better - more ethnically diverse. There is a new art gallery, sheepishly hopeful, an outpost of bigger dreams. If I could write to myself aged fifteen, I would reassure my younger self that not all places suit all people. So don’t worry. Cultivate your own curriculum and throw yourself into connecting with people, even if it seems pointless. I wish MK’s current teenagers well. I hope souls’ wildflowers can grow on its roundabout verges. 

Timbold Roundabout, Milton Keynes by John Winfield, is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

***

David Stoker is a writer, facilitator, and communications specialist. He has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and now calls London home. He has worked as an analyst in the nonprofit and public sectors, a policy researcher and an educator of children. His writing has appeared on Citizens Advice and the UK Cohousing Network, and he has performed poetry to Sunday Assembly London. His other interests include accumulating more books than he could ever read, painting watercolours and building secular community.

Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast 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 has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

A Hidden Glen

By Ian Grosz:

We returned to a cottage we’d first rented twenty years before. Hardly anything had changed. There were a few modern scatter cushions on the same old armchair; a new washing machine and sink unit, but it was the same bowed, pinewood ceiling and the same, thick stone walls; the heavy lintel above the fireplace; the same broken clock and faded landscape pictures on the walls; the same, old map of the glen hanging by the stairs up to the mezzanine bedroom. On the shelf beneath the sash and case window looking out to the pines that line the rushing burn coming down from the hills, was a guest comments book still with our entries from twenty years previous. We sat there, reading messages from ourselves from another lifetime. 

The cottage was once the laundry for the main house of an estate belonging to the Ogilvy family, hidden away down Glen Prosen with the evocative name of Balnaboth. Like most Highland estates, with farming and shooting no longer bringing in the revenues they once had, many of the properties had been given over to holiday lets. Even the house itself was now on Airbnb; but when we had first come here the family still lived in one of the two main wings. Their dogs would come to the cottage and scratch at the glass panes of the door to take us for a walk in the mornings: an eager west highland terrier named Una and a low flying, long-haired dachshund whose backside was always tangled up with pine twigs and fir cones.  They’d take us on a tour of the grounds, chasing the resident peacocks and barking at the squirrels. The dogs are long-since gone, but the scratches from their morning wake-up call on the glass of the door are still there, revealing themselves when caught in the low autumn light filtering through the trees. 

There was a thick mist when we arrived, the estate’s trees materialising out of the landscape as we followed the long, single-track road that winds its way up the glen from Kirriemuir, a small country town of red sandstone and the birthplace of the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. Barrie had returned frequently to spend some of his holidays away from London in the glens, and was buried in the town’s cemetery. Arriving at the cottage we settled our things; the years rolling back with that curious feeling of never having left. We jammed our weeks’ worth of food into the small fridge and, remembering the dogs, we took a stroll around the grounds to re-familiarise ourselves; the mist clinging to our clothes as we walked back down the track, past the now empty main house with its bright orange-yellow wash of lime rendering and its accumulated memories.

There has been some form of house at Balnaboth since the thirteenth-century, its original name stemming from Baile nam Bochd – the Stead of the Poor – but in its present form is thought to date from 1815 when Donald Ogilvy made a series of improvements, conjoining and adding to earlier buildings after taking over from his father Walter, whose Jacobite brother was exiled in France after the defeat of 1746. Barrie spent time at the house on his retreats from London literary life, meeting here with his ill-fated friend Robert Falcon Scott and later, the Scottish politician Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was the first Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority labour government for a short term in 1924 and again at the turn of the decade. He later headed a coalition government with a conservative majority during the early thirties, leading to his dismissal from the Labour party.

It is odd to think of a socialist being entertained at the tucked-away grand houses of the landed gentry, with associations that included the writer and high society hostess Lady Londonderry, wife of conservative cabinet minister Viscount Castlereagh, Secretary of State for the Air during the nineteen-thirties. He was central to pushing through the iconic Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft to replace an outdated fleet in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming, but he had openly antisemitic leanings and known sympathies for a burgeoning Nazi Germany and was forced out of the cabinet in 1935. He died after a series of strokes in 1949, still with a porcelain figurine of an SS flag-bearer on the mantlepiece of his smoking room: a gift from Hermann Göring. 

MacDonald was demonised as something of a traitor due to these associations and in his role with the coalition government during the Great Depression; the government having pursued a policy that protected the currency over maintaining assistance to the poor and unemployed. He was seen to have put his career before his principals in aligning with the Tories, but in his own eyes was putting his personal politics aside for the national good at a time of crisis, holding the country together through a dark period in history. He was a founding member of the Labour Party, with a strong reform agenda, and for the time, held some radical socialist views that looked to redress the inequalities of British society. I wonder how much he might have confided in his friend Barrie in the years leading up to the difficult period of the Depression. 

Born out of wedlock to a farm labourer and housemaid at a farm in Lossiemouth and into a culture of strict nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, he got off to an inauspicious start. The prejudices of his religion would set tongues wagging, but the class system and the inequality of the British state was a very real barrier, there to keep folk in their place and the ruling classes in theirs. His parents never married and he was brought up in the Free Church, but became a teaching assistant, enabling him eventually to move to Bristol to take up a position with a philanthropic clergyman. He later moved to London where, after a period of unemployment, he took up a position as a clerk and deepened his interest and involvement in socialism. 

In 1887, he witnessed the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of Trafalgar Square, when marchers protesting against unemployment and coercion in Ireland clashed with the British Army, inspiring a later career as a freelance journalist that began with an article in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled ‘Remember Trafalgar Square: Tory Terrorism in 1887’. Throughout the late eighteen-hundreds he continued to educate himself at The Birkbeck Institute, now the University of London, and in 1888 took employment as private secretary to Thomas Lough, a wealthy tea-merchant and a radical Anglo-Irish politician, opening doors for MacDonald that would secure his own, later political career. 

In MacDonald’s early courting of celebrity and his frequenting of the grand houses of the Tory heirs, I saw perhaps more than a move to influence and maybe a lingering deference to the upper classes; a need in him to prove his ascendancy; to gain approval and validity from those in the very establishment he wished to reform. He was a supporter for Home Rule in Scotland, declaring in a paper published in 1921 that ‘the Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past.’ Wandering around the old estate grounds a hundred years on, his legacy felt increasingly present. 

We crossed a low wooden bridge spanning the burn, which was full and fast and courses its peaty way down from the hills like a torrent of frothy Coca-Cola. Following a muddy path through mixed woodland up a short rise into open ground again, we arrived at the old glass house that lies in ruin on a slope overlooking the burn, its timber frame mostly collapsed into its lower brickwork. A few panes of glass were still in place, but its interior was overgrown with tall ferns; a young tree reaching up through its roofless frame. An old wheelbarrow lay at rest under the shade of a nearby fir tree, as though the gardener who had once tended to the vegetables had simply downed tools and walked away. 

A sense of time and time’s passing was all around us; a sense of decay, and yet it was a comforting sort of sadness held within the crumbling walls of the garden and in the collapsed frame of the Victorian glass house. It felt deliberate, almost staged in its picturesqueness, as if arranged for the sentimental eye of the romantic; the grounds slowly but surely giving way to nature and its landowners democratising a once private estate. I felt it was part of the appeal of the place, this fading grandeur; a reminder of the inevitable certainty of time and change. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. Drawing largely from the landscape, he is published across a range of magazines and journals both in print and online. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in January 2022. Ian is currently working on a personal, narrative nonfiction book-project exploring the ways in which landscapes shape a sense of place and identity. 

Dispatch from Olsztyn: My Two Towers

By Marcel Krueger:

In 2019, I was selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and lived there for six months. I wrote about my experiences on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala) and also for the Elsewhere Journal. This November was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I made it back to the city. 

It is cold as I arrive under a low-hanging November sky. As I alight at Olsztyn Zachodni, the former Westbahnhof of Allenstein, the light over the city resembles dusk, despite the fact that it is 2pm. This is the first time since February 2020 that I'm visiting the capital of the Polish voivodeship Warmia-Masuria. But I know my way around, just like my family knew their way around before me. Up the road from the station is the red-brick Jerusalem Chapel from the 16th century, and a cross commemorating the 1866 cholera epidemic is set in front of the entrance. Opposite the chapel is the steep Królowej Jadwigi – Queen Jadwiga Street. Until 1945, this was Pfeifferstrasse, named after now-drained Pfeiffer Lake at its bottom. House number 10 was built in the late 1920s, an unassuming yellow building with two floors. This used to be the house and office of my grand-aunt Ottilie and her husband Emil Pomaska, who ran a haulage firm here. At this house in 1940 my grand-uncle Franz Nerowski, a spy for Poland, was arrested by the Gestapo and led away to incarceration and execution. But I’m not going there today, and instead shoulder my bag and set off down the street on the other side of the station, towards the city park and the ever-rushing Łyna river, the large red-brick castle from 1353 looming over it, and to my favourite building in Olsztyn: the Wysoka Brama.

What makes us haunt a place? A sense of familiarity, of knowing our way around? An extended network and community, the knowledge that we have friends in a place far from home? Or that a place is providing us with inspiration, with food for thought, and allows us to discover new aspects of it - and ourselves - every time we visit?

All of the above is true for me in the case of Olsztyn, but maybe the strongest allure of the city for me is the fact that I am forever drawn to places with multiple identities, where simple nationalistic stories and touristic whitewashing are absent. The port city of Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, is also a border town, called "El Paso" during the conflict in Northern Ireland as it had strong Republican ties and the IRA used it as an R&R area, but for centuries before that it was the last outpost of English might in Ireland, protecting the Pale from the Ulster Irish. Its colloquialisms and idioms are mostly of English nature, brought here by migrants from England who came to work as part of the military or for the administration. On my street in Dundalk is a reminder of that, so-called Seatown Castle, which is actually the tower of a Franciscan abbey founded around 1240. The abbey was ransacked by invading Scots in 1315, and the majority of what remained of its buildings were destroyed in the early 17th century. The grey-green, lichen-covered tower of Seatown Castle is the only remnant of that abbey, today looked after by Dundalk City Council. Whenever I want to be reminded of the fractures and fault lines of Irish history, I take my tea mug to my back garden and look at it. 

Just like in Dundalk, I have a tower in Olsztyn. During my time as writer-in-residence I lived in an apartment in the old town, and from my living room window I was greeted every morning by the red brick gate of the city. The Wysoka Brama or Hohes Tor or High Gate is the only remaining gate of the three medieval city gates, originally built in 1378 and brought into its current form in the 15th century. In 1788, it became an armory, in 1858 it was converted into a prison, and in 1898 became a police station. Until 1960, one of the tram lines of the city passed through it. Today it also has a glass mosaic of the Mother of God facing the old town, given to Olsztyn by pope John Paul II when he visited in 1991. And just like Seatown Castle, it has lost its original purpose - there is no city wall any more, and you can even walk around the gate to get into the old town. 

But like Seatown Castle, for me it represents the many layers of history here: Olsztyn was founded by Teutonic Knights in 1349 on the hills above the Łyna, became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 and, after the first partition in 1772, part of Prussia. The French defeated a Russian army in and around the city in 1807 and Napoleon paid a visit to the old town, and in 1871 it became part of the German Reich and the province of East Prussia. It was home to a multicultural community of Germans, Poles, Jews, Warmians, one with its minor conflicts of course, but one where the divisions of nationalism were maybe not as acutely felt as elsewhere. That all changed with the Nazis in 1933, and ended with a half-destroyed city and the flight and expulsion of many Germans in 1945. Today however, the city is a pleasant place, and I feel a sense of familiarity and, yes, joy, as I walk to my holiday apartment that coincidentally also has a view of the High Gate. I feel that Olsztyn, a place that was a military and working class city when it was Allenstein in East Prussia, a place that did not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretended to be more important or better than, say, Danzig or Königsberg, is again an administrative and working class city today, one that does not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretends to be more important or better than, say, Gdańsk or Warsaw.  

In my garden in Dundalk, I can smell the ocean and feel the weather coming in from the Irish Sea. The fact that I live on an island is then often extremely clear to me, and with it comes a sense of security and detachment, a feeling that I am in a good place that is somewhat benevolent towards me and keeps the worries of the world at bay, for the moment. Dundalk lies on an old flood plain and will not fare well in the future floods of the climate catastrophe that seem to be almost certain at this moment. From my holiday apartment in Olsztyn, I looked out at the Wysoka Brama on the night of my arrival. It was illuminated by spotlights, but the cold fog of November crawled in over the old town down from the Łyna and diluted the brightness, made the rest of the world seem detached from the place I was in. There and then, in the old medieval town on a hill and in the shadow of its tower, I felt the same insularity as I do in my old town by the sea in Ireland. I was safe up there, for the moment. 

***

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.

Canal walk, reflections

By Anna Evans:

The canal is a great mirror. The stillness of the water reflecting the landscape, with barely a ripple or movement. The trees and the hills are echoed in the water. The clouds are a floating canopy, creating another dimension, a sense of the infinite, a continuous merging of land and sky. 

It is an idyllic day in early summer as we embark on a walk along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. The sky is a carefree blue, the clouds dance through it. Along the towpath, dappled light and shade falling from the trees, stretching onwards and ahead in measured distances, marked for walking. Looking back towards Marsden village, to the backdrop of the moors, wanting to absorb, not to miss a single view. The houses and hillsides framed serenely, with wildflowers and thickets, patches of heather on the moors. The colour of the stone always feels like coming home. 

The telegraph wires suspended across the sky in lines. Ferns overhang the water, their elegant fronds distinctive, along with the branches, the dark shadows of trees. A tree spills its branches across the surface of the water, its reflection blurring impressionistically, ending there in the clarity of white clouds. The textures of the landscape layered in brushstrokes, like stepping through a painting. A picture framed in a pool of water below, dark hills above, a scattering of leaves and of light, propelled in a drift, into layers of colours. The pretty tree admires its image in the water.

A few narrowboats are moored, their coloured reflections surrounded by the trees; gypsy caravans on the water, landlocked but ready to move again. Here there are meadows and flowering trees, the scenic pause of a lock, painted black and white. A beautifully restored stone bridge, a cobbled lane leading away. I like these crossings, these intersections preserved in time. Each lock is numbered, and each bridge across. The sunken towpath passes underneath. It is damp under there and we bend our heads and lean towards the water.

The canal opens out wide, almost circular, before narrowing again into a lock entrance, towards which the water funnels. In this basin, the water reflects the clouds, the trees, the gates of the lock. The water level plunges so that it is like peering down into the depths of a dark well walled by stone. It is almost a surprise to see the water flowing, its force and light and movement. These locks of wood and iron turning cogs, using the measured weight of the water, to propel, to lift, to move. 

The path bends under trees, casting their shadows, leaning across and straying into the territory of the canal, as if swaying, bending, walking towards the water. The water has another quality to it, dark ripples shroud the reflections of the trees in mystery. They trail their leaves and branches through the mirror pool mingling with what is unsettled in the water, with a certain unexplained murkiness fragmented and immersed, stilled and agitated. 

Like much of the canal this stretch is wooded and the walls are mossy. A stream runs alongside. There are fallen leaves and hidden paths, the ground saturated by the recent rainfall. The trees bend gently obscuring the light and making it feel damper, the kind of mud that never dries out fully, dark with disintegrating leaves. Reeds and rushes grow thickly, and reflections of the trees make it almost impossible to see what’s below the surface. 

The water is densely covered to saturation with flying particles, seeds dispersed by the wind, blown across in sparkles of light and dark; a silver coated pathway travels onwards. A bright patch of light leading out into the dark canal, like a forest shaded in dark patterns of trees and light. The clouds darken again, shift their shapes in silhouetted, weighted light, outlined by the bright lines of sunlight emerging, changing the view. 

We emerge into the outskirts of Slaithwaite, a thriving Pennine village where people sit outside in cafés and bars near the waterside. The canal is a snapshot, like the cobbled streets and preserved architecture, a remnant of another time. Everywhere there are adaptations, an old mill building converted into modern apartments. Passing through the village, the towpath continues. The day has shifted and become more changeable as we cross into a part of the canal with a more industrial feel. The parts I remember most, that are indented on my memory. 

*

It is a walk I have been wanting to take for some time, to connect with my memories, with the impressions I carried with me. The canals were stilled space where once there was movement. A turbulent history mapped across the hillsides. A landscape reined in and tamed, saddened by overwork; lying forlorn and forgotten, waiting for a time when it might heal its scars. The spinning mills that were emptied and slowly given new life. Standing at the canal’s edge they overhang and overshadow; large windows in rows, reflecting the light.

I always wondered at the empty buildings left there, abandoned, derelict. The windows covered over, places of loss, places to avoid. I grew up around these buildings with their patched over windows and doorways. They followed me like shadows. Across these valleys they were everywhere. Desolate ruins blocking out the light and casting a reminder. When I close my eyes, what I picture are the shells of dark stone lying forlorn and forgotten, empty buildings and broken windows reflected in the dank still water. The shadow always remaining, the ghosts of what has gone before. 

The canal was always there in my memory. Sometimes a lonely desolate place, sometimes the sunny light feeling of walking along by the water. You could walk for miles of changing landscape, along its edges and lost waterways, crossing countryside and the hidden parts of the town. From the windows of a train travelling across the valley to Manchester. From the window of my school bus, as it wound its way through the outskirts of the town. Where the chimneys remain, when the clouds hang across the Colne Valley, the canal looks back at me.

*

The day has shifted, and the quietness is palpable. Each corner, each bend, each stretch of the canal seems to bring a new feeling, a difference to the walk. The canal becomes narrower here and the trees start to feel like they’re concealing something. There are high walls, moss-covered, ferns grow along the banks, and the trees bend closer over the water looking down on their reflections. I turn my camera towards the water and the sky lengthens out into a narrow passage of light, pulling towards the edges of the frame, a tunnel of soft, white light. 

The water feels closer, it is eerily quiet in some places. A sense of neglect, broken windows, barbed wire, and corrugated iron. The bank of clouds darker, overhanging. An abandoned building by the water’s edge, the dark symmetry of the windows reflected, slightly distorted by the water, deep and unbending, unmoving. The texture mimics a solidity the water cannot have, so that I start to wonder what it is about that part of the water that sets it apart?

The trees start to ascend the side of the building, its solid walls refuse to yield. Inside, its empty frame, the windows bricked over to conceal what lies discarded within. Through a web of tree branches, another empty structure, broken windows, semi-hidden. The trees beginning to cover the frame in shadow. Its empty soul lies reflected in the water. 

The canal feels like an intruder into the landscape, that many years later is starting to be claimed back. Over time to reflect and to blend with its surroundings, its edges to soften and become less clear cut, less distinct or separate. Blurring its lines, the hard edges cut from the land are overrun with ferns, with dandelions and grasses. Where the seeds, the falling leaves, and trailing branches corrupt the surface of the water.

Yet I think it always resisted, always retained its other quality. The one that is given away by that tendency of the water: to stand still, to resist the inevitable movement of wind and currents. There is something vacant and still, another quality to this water, as if it had a presence. In some places it looks like another surface, no longer water, lying still and undisturbed. 

We are approaching the outskirts of the town and the towpath seems endless. There is something concealed and desolate about these parts of the canal that intrigued me, that I remember. I am trying to work out where we are, where we will emerge when we leave the canal. The water churned and disconsolate from this angle. Empty buildings reflected in the water. Dark bridges and hidden pathways. In the windows, reflections of other ruins. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blogThe Street Walks In.

Epilogue

By Ian C Smith:

Walking in early light, wetlands a short drive from home, where, like the rest of the world, all is quietly closing due to this ravening plague, part of my way parallel to a usually busy highway. I think of another road, traffic-choked, in my distant past. Figuring the year I last drove it those miles ago, I reach back, meet my younger self who casts several glances at my now thin hair, assessing the ruin.

His surprise at where I live now sweetened knowing how long he shall last, he thinks the nearby gas fields recently discovered that he read about must be the reason: employment. All he has known so far is an expectation of work. I paraphrase how, why, I landed here, both linked to my late education, love, work, try to explain about these three life effects felt by most. Stunned, even excited, by where his life leads, he now wants to hear of my health, journey. Happiness.

He knows about the Spanish ‘flu, read that, too, seems more fascinated than horror-stricken by brief news of today’s scourge, but he is young. His skin fascinates me. I tell him everybody would be relieved if this present canker’s naked statistics we absorb like poison, minus the personal misery, grief, and despair, doesn’t exceed that post-WW1 mortality rate. He mentions being concerned for nothing about the nukes, thinks self-isolation, overrun intensive-care facilities, the end of sport, non-electric entertainment, connection – this propels his interest into overdrive – sounds like a fantastic movie script. He loves dystopian themes. I tell him there are more coming. I know from inside knowledge he prefers damaging news told straight, yet want to protect him, protect hope, that lifeblood. Is he too young to be thinking of worldwide virulence?

I cross the highway listening for the odd vehicle, move deeper into the salutary peace of the natural world, but see few birds. Even they seem to have shut up shop, except for a lone pelican, its exquisite wake. Cheer up, my young companion urges, slowing for me, you did so much, although it sounds like you stuffed up a lot. Ah, the chirpy ignorance of youth. How should this end? Endings trouble me.

***

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.