Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

I'm standing on Beachy Head, a chalk headland rising to 531 feet/162 metres above sea level and despite intermittent spring sunshine, there's a sharp wind coursing over the wide open space. Beachy Head is known as the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. It's found west of Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the south-east coast of England. The name originates from the corrupted French beau chef meaning 'beautiful headland.' The writer and walker Richard Jefferies wrote about the place in 1883 in an article aptly named The Breeze on Beachy Head. 'The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.' I agree. I too am wind-swept and washed with air. The headland is visited and walked on all year round, more in good weather than in bad, but even in November mists or strong February winds, the site can make you refocus on yourself and your sense of existence. It can turn you inside out.

Local inhabitants and visitors from all over the globe are attracted to the area for its space, height and the views: to gaze out across the light of the English Channel with a post-Brexit vision, to imagine the land mass of Europe beyond the horizon. It's a place of meeting and transience, evocation and conversation. It's also a darker place given the number of people who come here to end their lives. On average twenty people a year throw themselves over the edge. On one of my previous walks up here a man with tears in his years walked past me and muttered that someone had gone over. Division of land masses, division of existence.

The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, set up in 2004, is a volunteer led organisation whose members are trained in skilled crisis intervention support. Members take regular patrols along the length of this coastline ready to save lives and help anyone in need. I often see them on their walks dressed in their high-viz jackets. The headland is an 'edge place', physically and psychologically, signified by the number of wooden signs conspicuously announcing in stark white lettering 'Cliff Edge'. In the past, friends and relatives used to leave bunches of flowers with written card notes attached to the thin wire fence which runs at intervals alongside the cliff edge. Sometimes, small crosses have been placed in the ground near to the spot from where the deceased person jumped. In 2018, Eastbourne Borough Council decided in its wisdom to remove these memory tokens and shrines, no doubt in a move to counter a site favoured for suicide in favour of encouraging more positive tourism. 

On this Sunday afternoon I feel pivoted between air, land and sea, and I think of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for not only seeing what's around me but also what's within me. Admittedly there's no fog to be seen, but the vast sky with its scudding clouds makes me feel insignificant on the land's design.

A road not far away runs past the Beachy Head public house, the Countryside Centre with its shop and rotating exhibitions and a large car park. A public telephone box bears a prominent sign stating that the Samaritans are always there, night and day, to receive your call. They are there to listen. Listening. At the beginning of the Cold War, Beachy Head was chosen as a strategic site for a government radar installation. An underground bunker was built and by 1954 the 'looking and listening' site was fully operational. It was only around 1960 when decisions were made to wind down the activity that the complex was eventually demolished.

Although concrete slabs and grass have now covered over most of the surface evidence, traces of the operation are still around if you know what to look for. As I walk around I notice a ring of metal barriers with Keep Out notices has been erected around a grassy mound, part of which has been ripped apart exposing smashed concrete slabs. I go closer to investigate and can just make out a narrow flight of rusty metal rung steps leading down into an underground darkness, no doubt once an entrance to an operations room monitoring codes and signals. It's not only the height I must be aware of, but also what's under my feet.

There's more to the breeze on Beachy Head than is realized, as it's one of the prevailing natural forces which continue to batter and pummel at the chalk cliff, wearing away half a metre of land a year. Regular news reports in the local press announce alarming splits near to the cliff edge, followed later by reports of large rock falls onto the beach below. Emergency barriers are then erected and the Cliff Edge signs are moved once again. The visitors walk around and the land moves. All notions of stability are questioned on this 'edge place.'

During WWII, Beachy Head was the last land formation many aircrews saw on their missions to occupied Europe. To mark their operations a large memorial block of granite has been placed on the headland with images and inscriptions relating to the work of the squadrons. Now, in place of aircraft, there are regular meetings of a paragliding club whose members are often seen exploiting thermals, floating and soaring above a once defensive landscape, attached to their curled coloured fabric wings like surreal insects. I've often heard their 'music' as they swished above me.

I'm not tempted today by the ice-cream van parked strategically in one corner of the car park. It has a small queue of customers desirous of icy satisfaction. I turn away and start on my walk back home. On the way down I spot a discarded plastic printed arrow, black on yellow, a reminder of last year's annual autumn Beachy Head Marathon. Yes, add runners to the mix. All is movement, all is flux.

***

Julius Smit is a photographer, poet, zine maker and a member of the Walking Artists Network - Website

Photo Essay: Fancy Hill, by Rob McDonald

by Rob McDonald:

Though I have lived here thirty years, I have never felt settled in Southwest Virginia. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but my home, where my sensibilities were formed, will always be the sandy coastal plains of South Carolina. Winding roads and deep-green hollows may appear picturesque in some light, but for someone like me, they mostly feel claustrophobic, isolating, unsettling. Whenever my wife, driving to the store in our first months living here, would round a curve and mistake a distant mountain range for a looming storm, I understood.

There’s one spot nearby that has always felt different, however. I noticed it when I visited for the job interview that brought me to the area in 1992, and I have indulged something close to an obsession with it ever since.  Fancy Hill, as it is known, is listed on the Register of Historic Places because of its inclusion in a group of important 19th-century farms known collectively the “Seven Hills of Rockbridge County.” A roadside marker noting its prominence focuses on the main house, a three-story treasure of 18th-century Federal architecture. But what I love is the field: a 21-acre parcel that rolls beautifully down from the house, then up and off toward a high horizon.

Records suggest the topography is virtually unchanged from when Fancy Hill was claimed, mapped, and cleared by Anglo settlers of the region more than two hundred years ago. In this otherwise craggy valley, it’s an especially open and stirring expanse.  From various points outside the post-and-wire boundary fence, the entire landscape is visible, swelling, stretching and dipping, displaying itself. It undulates, almost musically. I have studied it in different seasons and times of day. I believe I could sketch its contours with my eyes closed.  

One day, I looked up the name of the farm’s current owner and called to explain that I wanted to walk out into the field with my camera, to explore a place I’d thought about and imagined for so long. He was receptive, even understanding. He’d inherited the land and decided to protect it with a conservation easement so, unlike adjacent farms of similar beauty that have been subdivided into mini-estates for the new country gentry, it can never be developed. The whole parcel was leased for hay-making, keeping it arable, but I had permission to come and go as I wished.

With that opening, I spent whole mornings and afternoons traipsing up, down, and across Fancy Hill, making photographs in an attempt to represent the experience.  In the process, I learned some things that had been imperceptible from the periphery.

I found very quickly, for example, that the lay of the land at Fancy Hill is neither as gentle nor as comprehensible as it appears. There are demanding grades and dramatic drops. You walk a distance and grow breathless. There are spots where the rest of the world disappears and you’re upright in a cradle of earth, with only the sky for orientation.  

Also, the ground is surprisingly rocky, sheer stone in spots. The vegetation, a uniform and mesmerizing seasonal green or gold from the fence line, is often a frustrating tangle of grasses, weeds, and briars underfoot.  Walking unsettles all manner of flying, hopping, and crawling creatures, some seen, some heard and reasonably surmised. Droppings and tracks suggest regular visitors to a stream that originates in a cinderblock well-house, runs a bit, then disappears.

Another note:  There’s a stand of trees along the high north boundary that I’d not taken into account in all my years of looking from the fence. My eye had always stopped where the grasses end, but right there stands a broad thicket with impressive oaks that must have been seedlings when Fancy Hill was established.  

I discovered that the finest view of the property is under that tree line. Each peak and trough of the landscape is visible, where it originates and how it plays out.  Mirroring the view from below, the wide field appears to flow outward and down toward the enormous main house, which from that spot looks for all the world like a miniature version of itself.

The perspective is clarifying, like the view from a watch tower.

Fancy Hill, it turns out, is most beautiful in context of this whole place, encircled, defined, and clarified by a dark line running in the distance—not a storm, but the ancient rambling range of the Blue Ridge.

***

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. He was awarded a Professional Fellowship (Photography) from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and was a residential fellow in the Visual Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Find him online at robmcdonaldphotography.com. Connect with him on Twitter at @RobMcDonaldVA.

Five Questions for... John Rooney

By Sara Bellini

One of our favourite Berlin bookshops has recently reopened its doors - with a new look, in a new location - and we couldn’t be more thrilled. After the non renewal of their rental contract back in August, Curious Fox. had been absent from the Berlin map until this February, when it moved to Lausitzer Platz in Kreuzberg. While walking down the stairs that lead you to the bookshop, you step under a beautiful black and white mural depicting the new neighbourhood, the nearby overground train, and of course a fox.

The hand behind the artwork is that of Derry-born illustrator John Rooney. “The owners Orla & Dave are good friends of mine and asked me to work on a larger mural on the exterior of the new shop. Unfortunately I had just decided to leave Berlin at the time and thought a smaller mural inside would be more feasible. Myself and Orla are keen bird enthusiasts so I included a kestrel and a jay (which live in the trees opposite the shop). I drew some buildings from the neighbourhood too. It was a very fun way to spend my last week in Berlin.” 

You might have seen some of his works in Standart magazine or on windows and walls across Berlin - and Ireland. Drawing inspiration from pop culture (cult movies, sci-fi and literature), nature (he has a dog collage series) and architecture (check out his cityscapes), each composition strikes us for its dynamicity and layers of details, perfectly balanced between accuracy and artistry. If you are curious about the aesthetic potential of the garden spider, the common pipistrelle bat or the Portuguese man o’ war, have a look at his wildlife map of Ireland. No snakes obviously. 

In his hand-drawn bird collages and wildlife maps, John Rooney presents a place through its fauna, giving equal importance to the tiny creatures and the majestic ones. The latest addition to its portfolio is the wildlife map of Canada, with over 480 species checked by experts at the Biodôme in Montréal. 

According to his bio, “John has not stopped drawing things ever since he was the age of three”, and we are glad to hear he has no plan to stop any time soon. We caught up with him just before he left Berlin, where he had been based for the past four years, to embark on adventures around the world.

What does home mean to you?

A place where you feel at peace and have people around you that you care about. Cliched, I know, but it's that simple for me.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I'm not sure if you'll accept a place that doesn't exist anymore but I'd have to say a pub called the 'Bound for Boston' in Derry where I spent most of my late teens / early twenties. It was always full of sound people and had great bands playing every week. I have a lot of great memories there. I do love Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin too. 

What is beyond your front door?

Not much right now to be honest. I'm living in the suburbs of Derry and the nearest pub is 15 minutes away and it's dodgy as fuck. Although there's some football pitches behind my house that have a lot of nice trees with bullfinches and siskins flying around the place.

What place would you most like to visit?

I'd love to just stand at the foot of Mount Everest just to see it and take it in.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I'm currently reading a comedy book called Mickey Doc by a Derry author called Fintan Harvey. I'm watching the Kanye documentary and also Lovecraft Country. I'm listening to some Junior Brother and a lot of Kylie, who I rediscovered after watching an episode of 'Reeling in the Years' on RTE.

John Rooney's Website
John Rooney on Instagram

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Film: Rights of Nature

Watched by Phil Scraton:

Narrated by Ireland's fine singer-songwriter, poet, story-teller, and environmental activist John Spillane, Rights of Nature is a fine short film proposing the necessity of taking a 'journey of unlearning' to develop and progress a 'dialogue with nature'. It envisions a new socio-economic narrative for Ireland that resonates well beyond its shores.

It is self-evident that living beings are subjects despite consistent attempts to objectify the human experience, limit potential and impose restrictions on freedoms of thought, association and movement. We live in environments alongside non-human subjects consistently objectified as property to be used and discarded. Land is owned, enclosed, exploited and changed forever without consideration of long-term consequences for the future of life in its broadest definition.

The film asks what it means to claim ownership, to 'belong' within place, exploring the significance of cultural and spiritual inheritance and their connection to identity. It considers the destruction of culture, language and community through colonisation and its invidious political-economic exploitation and cultural subjugation; the objectification of place and the control of land through property law; the denial of access and the right of commons. It proposes a new dimension in approaching democratic rights.

The narrative challenges the assumption that nature is nothing more than property to be owned, developed, laid waste and destroyed by private interests but is essential to the construction and maintenance of communities through time. It calls for the defence of our environments against commercial exploitation and the clear evidence of harm. Only through personal engagement and collective activism, committed to challenging the short-termism of that commercial exploitation, will the health of communities, the land and seascapes be protected and advanced.

Together with the depth of his narration, John Spillane's music is woven into the film's dialogue.

Filmed and edited by Simon Wood
Directed by Peter Doran

Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. 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 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65 

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.

Nothing to see here

Illustration by Karen Joyce

By Jane Hughes:

Going back to Mum’s house after she died was always going to be traumatic. But nearly a month had passed. I’d had time to prepare for it. Looking at photos of Mum, sorting through her belongings, remembering old times, these all came with a mournful, aching sadness for something that was gone. It went through me in sickening, oily waves, but it was something you could get used to. What threw me utterly was not her empty house. Not her empty wheelchair. It was something unbearable about the landscape that I used to call home.

The day before the funeral, I took a taxi from the station, along narrowing roads on the edges of damp, stubbly fields, and I felt viscerally distressed by the place. But I couldn’t see what it was that was so hard to look at. In the months that followed, I found myself grasping for it. 

I scrolled through photographs of the area, trying to find whatever it was that kept making me cry. I’m continually struck by the emptiness of the place – is that it? The feeling that something used to be there, but has gone now? People and places from long ago whose stories have been lost. I’m here too late. Roman villas, iron age forts, the people who carved the White Horse on the chalk downs above my home town, the lively communities who planted the hedges and farmed the fields that no longer require labour - is that what makes me sad? That something I can’t understand was once there, but all I can see is the empty space where it was, and I’ll never get a connection? That would make sense. I try it on for size. No, it doesn’t make me cry.

The landscape is so featureless that it is hard to define, but I recognise it immediately, and the recognition feels physical. I tried to find a landmark to anchor a memory. Some local artists fixate on the White Horse, or return repeatedly to Wittenham Clumps as a subject, like the crazed man in Close Encounters sculpting an oddly-shaped hill out of mashed potato.

But I don’t think I ever went to Wittenham Clumps, why would we? Especially since Mum couldn’t walk far, and certainly not on rough ground. I realised that, as a family, we had never really explored on foot. Everything I had seen had been through a car window. Dad used to point out groups of trees on small hills on the horizon, and say ‘wittnum clumps!’. I thought that all small thickets on small hills surrounded by the more or less flat fields of the rest of the landscape were wittnum clumps. Recently, I sent Dad a photo of a painting that looked like a wittnum clump to me, and he replied wistfully that those were the days, when we still had Elm trees. I remembered Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s, and the big tree dying at the front of the house that Mum had named Elmwater. Dad didn’t know that the old trees at Wittenham Clumps were Beeches, not Elms – and so, why would I? 

I remember walking up to the White Horse with my Dad, mainly to show it to some Swiss visitors. There’s not much to see up there. I couldn’t not stand in the horse’s eye and make a wish, because I knew that every chance I got to make a wish, I should use towards trying to make Mum better, but the eye of the White Horse was a deep, milky puddle. My memory of the White Horse is of grabbing a private moment, when the Swiss and Dad were heading back down to the car park, to do something that would have looked idiotic if there had been anyone else up there to see it. 

(As I write, another memory that’s recent enough to be raw – of taking Mum out in the car so that she might be able to see the White Horse again, and not being able to find it at all, and then glimpsing it, but never being able to find a place where the car could go where Mum could see the horse, because by that time she couldn’t turn her head.)

I bought a map. It upset me. Despite having spent my whole childhood and adolescence in the Vale of the White Horse, I couldn’t find my way around it. I had no idea what was where. How could I call it my home? I felt embarrassed. And I couldn’t locate places of importance because, it turned out, I couldn’t think of any.

I bought some local history books. They upset me. Despite having (etc etc) I didn’t know most of the stories - or else, it turned out that what I thought I knew was all wrong. I knew that King Alfred burnt the cakes at Wantage, because my parents told me, but it turned out that they weren’t cakes, and that anyway, he didn’t. 

The more I looked, the more it seemed that there was no actual place for me to attach my grief to. I was not crying over my old school, or any of the houses where my family had once lived. I thought I was upset about the cherry orchards being grubbed up – could I cry about that? Not really. I had no right. I was one of those kids who grew up on the brand new housing estates and never gave a thought to whatever was there before them. In the middle of one of those estates, there was a nice patch of green where we had a party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and I ate a fish paste sandwich for the first time. I think that that patch of ground had some interesting bits of broken masonry on it, a sort of a ruin, and at the time I think I thought it was something to do with Abingdon Abbey. But it looks as if it might just have been an artful attempt to repurpose some of the more interesting lumps of rubble that came from demolishing an old children’s home. Once or twice I went with schoolfriends to the Abbey Meadows and hopped about on the ruins there, but they weren’t the ruins of the abbey either, just a Victorian folly. Everything I thought was wrong, and my memories are just loose rubbish blowing about like tumbleweed.

The place has changed. Is that the problem? Chagrin: I have to admit, the change that hurt me most was the brutal demolition of Didcot power station! I cried over that. But it’s not the sense of things changing that hurts me. It’s something about being disconnected, about not belonging there any more, and about not having anything to hold onto. My attachment seems to be to a landscape that is mostly empty. The pictures that feel most like home to me are the ones without landmarks. Pictures of empty fields. Nothing there, nothing at all. Just something so familiar about the shape, and the lines of the plough furrows. The feeling I get is of a landscape that doesn’t feel any need to connect with me. 

The last time I went to the place that used to be home, I felt lost and rejected. I recognise the place, but it doesn’t seem to recognise me. From now on, I’m just a visitor. I have no reason to go back there unless to visit a grave or two. 

August 1, 1978
Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

***

Jane Hughes is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her work is currently focusing on bereavement, attachment to place, and life writing around loss. Her essay, ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, appears in Essays in Life Writing published by Routledge in 2021.

Illustration is by Karen Joyce and is used with permission. You can find Karen’s website here.