Stonework grew out of a conversation between archaeologists Rose Ferraby and Mark Edmonds. We asked them to tell us a little about the thinking behind the project: “There is a particular elevated volcanic outcrop that meanders through the central Fells of Cumbria. The rock goes by many names; hornstone, greenstone, tuff and others long forgotten. It is dense and fine-grained, shifting between green and grey and blue depending on the light and where you are. At various places along this outcrop, particularly around the Langdales, a scramble brings you to quarries that are as much as 6000 years old. Littered with screes of working debris, the benches and ledges that break up the crags bear the scars of extensive working, most of it directed towards the making of stone axe blades.

Back then, in the Neolithic, these axes mattered. Most saw use as tools and, from time to time, as weapons. But they were more than just hardware. The skilful making and using of blades said something about people, about the places they occupied in their communities and in the broader world. Axes also built up biographies as they moved from hand to hand, circulating in exchanges that defined bonds between people. Some probably had names.

Archaeologists have written about this material many times. What interested us was finding a new way to explore the work that has left such an abiding mark upon the crags. We wanted to better understand what the experience of visiting and working the outcrop involved; what the work, and the axe, meant to people at the time. How was the stone understood? What did it mean to take on skills with hammer and stone? This led us to experiment with a different way of telling that, to paraphrase Henry Moore, offered a more appropriate truth to materials. A use of words and images that was responsive to the nature of the work, to the qualities that people recognised in the stone and the values that they realised, unspoken, through their bodies.”

Geology is history

Spirit, source and sign

A story of origins inscribed

And still ongoing

In the stone

Each bench and ledge

A hammer blow

Each scree the debitage

Of work that makes the world.

There is stone

At the river’s edge,

In the throw of an oak,

Where the sea sifts shingle

On the final cast of the tide.

Weathered eggs to crack and hatch

The magpie mottled flint.

You take what is given,

Grateful for the gift.

But some gifts carry weight.

They dictate

Where stone is won,

How things are done and

What they mean.

This is how it is.

How it has always been.

The cloud comes down,

The world beyond the work

Withdrawn from view,

Nothing now but close attention,

A truth to material.

Tap, strike, tap, strike, tap

The work is soon a rhythm,

Hammers dancing on the edge

Between each blow,

Roughouts turning in the hand

Each time the hammer rises,

The scar of each removal

Marking time along the stone

Strike, tap, strike, tap, strike

The hammers fall together,

Against one another, then

Together again, percussion

Moving in and out of phase

As the old men rise and fall to the task.

It takes time

To move around the work,

To take your place in it for granted,

But as you do it finds you.

A relationship begins,

The line between hand and material

Losing its sharpness.

And for all that is inscribed on stone

Much is also written in the body,

Scars of service, build and heft

The body falling into certain shapes,

Like a hammer that drops

Without thinking,

In just the right place.

In cloud country.

The path from the coast

Now tangled with others,

The trails of distant kin

Who trace their story

To the same sharp skyline.

There are camps already set,

Smoke visible on the climb.

Hammers bounce back

Upon themselves

Around the crags,

A different kind of time.

Rose Ferraby is an archaeologist and cultural geographer focusing on our cultural relationships with landscape. She is interested in the ways in which we story and narrate the landscape, particularly through authorial illustration. She currently works for Exmoor National Park, and is co-director of the Aldborough Roman Town Project.  @roseferraby

Mark Edmonds is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of York. He has published a number of books on prehistory and on the archaeology of landscape, and has a particular interest in arts-based approaches to interpretation. His most recent book,The Beauty Things, is a collaboration with the writer Alan Garner. He lives in Orkney.

Stonework is available to buy online as a book here.

What might replace ash? Hazel and oak no longer reproduce in existing woodland owing to introduced pests: grey squirrel for hazel, and for oak probably oak mildew. Birch is a likely replacement, considering how readily it replaced planted trees (of whatever species) in the twentieth century. Maple, hornbeam, hawthorn and sycamore are alternatives. But before we think about how to replace the ash tree in our landscape, much more needs to be understood about plant disease and our role in exacerbating the problem of how disease moves around the planet.

Ash Disease

Ash Disease is caused by the microscopic fungus Chalara fraxinea, which I have not seen. It inhabits leaves and twigs, which it damages by making a chemical called viridiol that is very toxic to ash. In summer it attacks leaves and produces spores called conidia, which form sticky masses and may be spread around the tree by rain to start more infections.

In 2009, the Horticultural Trades Association, representing responsible nurserymen, warned the Forestry Commission about the threat of Ash Disease; the Commission cited excellent legalistic reasons for doing nothing. Not until Ash Disease was noticed in England itself did the Forestry Commission react with belated promptitude. A great survey was got up, aided by new technology for rapidly matching the DNA of samples and thus distinguishing Ash Disease from similar but unrelated conditions. This revealed that H. pseudoalbidus was already present throughout Britain and Northern Ireland. Because of bureaucratic parochialism the survey was not continued into the rest of Ireland, although the fungus was there too.

By July 2013 the fungus – or, rather, something with DNA indistinguishable from that of the fungus – had been found in 549 sites. Of these, 24 were tree nurseries, 336 were in ‘recently planted’ ash (how recently is not stated), and 189 were in established ash trees in woods and in non-woodland sites. These have very different distributions. Recent plantings were randomly scattered through the area surveyed. Finds in established trees were concentrated in East Anglia and Kent, with a few near the east coast into Scotland. Some of these were in ancient woodland, where ash shoots coppiced two to four years ago seemed to attract the disease.

A simple explanation is that nurseries inadvertently imported infected plants from the Continent and spread them all over Great Britain and (at least Northern) Ireland; this agrees with reports of nurseries spreading the disease in other countries. The tree-planting fashion has brought Ash Disease throughout England, far into Wales and the Scottish Highlands, and very efficiently into Ireland.

Emerald Ash Borer

This is ‘one of the most feared beetles on earth’, but not in these islands, where British parochialism ignores pests and diseases until they have got here and the battle to contain them has been lost. Agrilus planipennis, a pretty little insect, about 8 mm long and iridescent green, is said to come from the Far East and to have got into North America in a shipment of Japanese car parts. It is a bark beetle: it lays its eggs on the tree; the grubs tunnel prodigiously between bark and wood, killing the tree.

Presumably in its East Asian home it came to terms, over millions of years of evolution, with the local species of ash, as Hylesinus has done in Europe. In America, Agrilus meets unfamiliar, susceptible species of ash and escapes the predators of its homeland – within 11 years of arriving in an area, the beetle’s population explodes and kills all the ash trees. Ash being one of the commonest remaining trees, the result is whole landscapes of dead ashes, especially in towns. The dead trees, too many for tree-fellers to get round to them, fall on cars and people’s heads. Human health is affected as people are suddenly deprived of their favourite trees and exposed to high temperatures and air pollution.

Emerald Ash Borer was first noticed in 2002. The authorities imposed quarantine, but to little effect. The nursery and firewood trades are said to have spread it to fresh areas; it has already killed more ashes than there are in the whole of Britain and Ireland. An industry has grown up for injecting or spraying ash trees with insecticide. This can probably save only a few specially significant trees, but gains time to work out a policy. Bee-keepers complain of insecticides getting into bees as they gather ash pollen. It is proposed to try biological control by introducing Chinese predators and parasites of the insect.

At the time of writing the beetle had jumped west to Kansas and east to New Hampshire. It seems only a matter of time before it jumps the Atlantic. There are already reports that it has reached Moscow westward through Siberia. What happens when Emerald Ash Borer reaches Britain?

Globalisation of pests and diseases

Plant diseases are not new. The ancient Romans sacrificed puppies to propitiate Robigo, the god or goddess of wheat rust. Much earlier, the Elm Decline in the early Neolithic was apparently due to Dutch Elm Disease. Was this related to the beginnings of agriculture? Did Neolithic people introduce the disease? Did agriculture help it to spread? Conversely, did farmers spread into north Europe because a disease had cleared land for them? Did Elm Disease trigger the Neolithic Revolution?

For thousands of years people have been moving plants around the globe. In 1787 William Bligh of the Bounty was sent to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants to take to the Caribbean to feed slaves, but something nasty happened to him and the plants were thrown overboard. Four years later he tried again – successfully, until the slaves refused to eat the breadfruit. On voyages round Cape Horn, any parasites would probably die out or kill their hosts on the way.

After 1833, live plants were taken more securely in Wardian cases. With steamships, globalisation went up a gear as parasites survived faster ocean crossings. Three American grape parasites ‒ phylloxera, downy and powdery mildew ‒ came in the nineteenth century, and many others in the early to mid-twentieth.

There were even deliberate introductions. In 1868–9, Monsieur   Trouvelot, a French dissident living in Massachusetts, imported gypsy moths from Europe to teach them to be silkworms. He got no silk out of them, but let some escape: they got into the woods and now defoliate the trees on an 11-year cycle. The caterpillars are hated by foresters and gardeners, but they probably do less ecological damage than the succession of frantic and futile attempts that the authorities have made to ‘control’ them.

Who remembers the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? What happened to all the trees planted in 1973? How many are still alive 40 years on? I was suspicious at the time: was all that planting really necessary? Was it really a substitute for conserving native trees? As one forester, Richard Pawsey, writing in New Scientist, said at the time:

“The present enthusiasm for tree-planting . . . masks an almost total ignorance of how to keep them alive.”

Peter Sell, plant taxonomist, pointed out that what were sold as ‘native’ trees were often lookalikes from anywhere between here and Japan. Until recently, gardeners made it a point of honour not to grow native plants: bluebells in one’s garden must not be the beautiful and romantic native bluebell, but Spanish Bluebell, which gets into native woods via garden throwouts and displaces the native bluebell. Tree-planting, like muntjac deer and grey squirrels, was another aspect of Homo sapiens’s tendency to mix up all the world’s plants and animals regardless of consequences.

Planting went industrial. It entered a world of grants and tenders and contracts and subcontracts and work to be finished on time and money to be spent before the financial year’s end: an environment geared to the anthropology of bureaucrats and at odds with the ‘real’ world of trees and parasites. A subcontractor, required to produce so many oak seedlings and finding oaks did not bear acorns this season, goes to another country with more reliable acorns and cheaper labour: he brings in the oaks and any disease on them that is not too obtrusive. As if the depths of commercial frivolity had still not been plumbed, one hears of collecting seed in Britain, sending it to be germinated on the Continent, bringing back the seedlings (and any disease they may have picked up), and selling them as of ‘local provenance’!

Timber merchants’ websites reveal the same ‘coals-to-Newcastle’ attitude. Although log prices for ash in Britain are at a historic low, much of the ash timber sold in Britain is brought from America, and some from the Continent. (And much of the ash timber grown in Britain is sent to the Continent.) This exchange would not have contributed to the coming of Ash Disease, which begins on leaves, but it could easily let in Emerald Ash Borer. No doubt the regulations impose precautions, but they are unlikely to be completely effective. The future of ash in Europe ought not to depend on an American inspector being willing to stay on an extra half-hour on a Friday afternoon to finish the job.

Can trade kill trees?

Globalisation of diseases has become the top threat to the world’s trees and forests. Exotic diseases subtract ‘keystone’ species one by one from ecosystems, sometimes almost overnight, more efficiently than deer and much more efficiently than climate change. People are being urged to plant trees to store carbon dioxide. Why bother, if they succumb to disease, rot, and let the CO2 back into the atmosphere?

Intercontinental trade takes pests and diseases which had come to terms with their hosts through co-adaptation over millions of years, and introduces them to new, unadapted hosts. There is also the prospect, especially with Phytophthoras, that separated pathogenic species are brought together and hybridise to create new and aggressive pathogens.

There is an analogy with bees. Reader, you may think the humble bumblebee is indigenous, bumbling away to provide what scholastic writers call ‘ecosystem services’ for the human lords of creation, like a labourer earning the National Minimum Wage. In reality, she is imported from God knows where to pollinate tomato and strawberry crops. The volume of trade in bumblebees defeats the regulations that are supposed to keep out diseases, some of which affect hive-bees too. A recent investigation reports that most of the officially ‘parasite-free’ imported colonies carry parasites. This never-ending import of parasites appears to be a factor in the general decline of bees in Britain.

Can’t introduced tree diseases be controlled?

In the nineteenth century the three American vine diseases came within an inch of abolishing wine, anticipating the American Prohibitionists. Wine-growing survived, but in a permanently more complex and expensive form: grafting and chemical spraying are necessary to get a crop at all. Plant diseases affecting crops are dealt with by a combination of chemicals and plant breeding, neither of which works well with trees, especially wild trees. English Elm was a supertree, cloned by people for centuries – until it proved super-susceptible to the 1970s strain of Elm Disease.

Concerning Ash Disease, a report by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in 2013 proposes ‘developing resistance to the disease in the ash population’. This is not quite as absurd as it seems. Although plants do not have the immune system that enables vertebrate animals to acquire resistance to foot-and-mouth or leprosy, ash’s damage-limitation mechanism determines how far a Chalara infection progresses in the tree. However, to suggest that a Ministry, or any other human institution, can influence this process is a vain aspiration. (If it can be done, why didn’t East Europeans do it ten years ago?) Trees have a generation time of tens or hundreds of years: pathogens can run rings round them in evolutionary terms. The government, in its ill-informed optimism, expects the present ash trees somehow to be replaced by a new generation that is resistant to Chalara. Even if deer hold off, long before that happens the Emerald Ash Borer will have arrived and eaten whatever ash trees survive Chalara.

There is only half an instance in Europe of a disease of wild trees being controlled, let alone exterminated. Chestnut blight almost destroyed the chestnut trees (Castanea sativa) which had been a major food source in southern Europe. In the 1960s it ceased to be a problem, not because anyone did anything, but because God raised up a fungal virus which crippled the fungus and made it incapable of damaging the tree. The Apennines are full of huge trees that once were five-sixths dead. On Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain in north Greece, the monasteries depend for their livelihood on coppiced chestnut woods, an isolated population of chestnut only recently reached by the disease. In 2001, the monks (who are keen on technology) were busy inoculating their trees with virus-infected fungus. This is half an instance, because all attempts to get the virus going in North America have failed.

What can be done?

1.   Recognise the problem. Whether or not Ash Disease turns out to be quite as bad as was anticipated in 2012, it is not an isolated problem. Tree disease has struck half-a-dozen times, and each time is still treated as happenstance, rather than as part of a wider pattern, as enemy action. Governments throw a little money at each separate disease after it has arrived. They are ill-suited to deal with the wider problem, because each government encounters only one new tree disease; when the next disease arrives it will be a new government which will treat it as a new problem and will not learn from last time or look forward to next time. The public, faced with a depleting landscape, regards depletion as normal. Since the last Elm Disease a new generation has grown up to accept the absence of big elms as normal – even ecologists fail to notice or study places where big elms survive or are returning.

2.  As John Gibbs, the great tree pathologist, has pointed out, it is no good reacting to known plant diseases: that battle has already been fought and mostly lost. What is needed is to forestall diseases that have not yet got here or are still unknown. For ash trees, the latest year in which to react to Chalara was 1995. The real threat is now not Chalara but the Emerald Ash Borer.

3. Don’t use climate change as a let-out for inaction. If global warming were the underlying cause, then each hot summer would see tree diseases from the south extending their range northward. That is not the pattern: unknown diseases suddenly appear, usually from west to east or east to west, regardless of weather or climate.

4.  Make use of being an island. The Isles of Scilly out in the Atlantic still have a full complement of great elms. Banning imports before the event might not have kept Ash Disease out of Britain, but probably would have kept it out of Ireland. Chile is, in effect, an island, isolated by the ocean, the Andes, and the Atacama Desert, and (I am told) is determined to remain so: it stringently forbids commercial imports of plants and soil, especially in order to protect its pre-phylloxera grapevines.

5. Get real. Stop letting the anthropology of commerce overrule the practical world. Stop treating plants (and bees) as mere articles of trade, like cars or tins of paint, to be made and brought in industrial quantities from anywhere. Importing a million cars does not imperil the cars that are already here, but trees are different. Nobody has to import trees commercially: it is only an artefact of how business happens to be conducted. What matters is volume. My little Christmas tree from an Alpine holiday will not do much harm. But a commercial supplier, importing a million container-grown hawthorns from Ruritania (as though there were no hawthorns in Britain!), inevitably imports a thousand tons of Ruritanian soil and whatever is in it. However thoroughly the Customs, or a responsible nurseryman, inspect the consignment, they cannot detect a microscopic pathogen when they do not know in advance what to look for. If it is ash trees, imported in winter, they will not detect all Chalara even if they do know what to look for. Trees should be imported only in small numbers for special reasons, with precautions that are impractical with commercial shipments.

6.  Plant fewer trees, more expensive trees, wider apart, and take proper care of them. Stop making tree-planting a default option, as in the Scots proverb: ‘Ye may be aye stickin’ in a tree; it’ll be growin’ while ye’re sleepin’. This casual mindset needs to be changed. It would be disastrous if the death of ashes were made the pretext for a massive replanting, bringing in more foreign stock and more foreign diseases. The pros and cons of every planting need to be formally assessed, including the risk that planting trees will kill existing trees. Tree-planting, like chemicals, is not risk-free: if not used sparingly it will lose its effectiveness.

7. Revive the science of tree pathology. Although the underlying problem belongs to anthropology rather than science, the understanding of tree diseases has been scandalously neglected in Britain. (I except the recent revival at Bangor University.) I was taught tree diseases in Cambridge Botany School by Denis Garrett and John Rishbeth. I read research papers and passed examinations; although my career has been in other directions I have maintained a lifelong interest. Times have changed. Garrett and Rishbeth retired, Cambridge University failed to replace them, and their expertise was lost. My contemporary was John Gibbs OBE, who became head of the Forestry Commission’s pathology department and retired in 2001. Botany turned into Plant Sciences, of which tree pathology was not one. I understand there are about a dozen of us left in Britain. I am one of the last survivors of a Critically Endangered Species. I belong in the Zoo.

Oliver Rackham died in February 2015, a year after publishing The Ash Tree, from which this article is abridged.

Edward Thomas went out in March 1913 to look for Spring. He set out from his parents’ house at Balham in the suburbs of South London, and travelled, ‘on or with a bicycle’, through Surrey and Hampshire, towards the Somerset coast. From their different directions they would converge, he hoped, among the Quantock hills: Spring from the west meeting a man of thirty-five, a literary critic and country writer, a lover of books and places, a husband and father, a man on the road after a long winter’s pressure and melancholy. Since boyhood he had watched for the first hedgerow flowers and noted the date when he heard the chiffchaff. Always, even when tied to deadlines and the city, he had a barometric sensitivity to changes in the air and in the light at dusk. He could detect the turn of the year before it became visible to other eyes, when it was only a moment of ‘lucidity in the arms of gloom’, a fleeting window, ‘a pane of light in the western sky’.

Now he had a commission from his publisher to make the struggle between seasons his narrative. It would not be a simple movement into warmth; he could not write ‘sumer is icumen in’ with the confidence of the old reverdies, or re-greening songs. He would listen in on the conversation of winds, as the balance of power shifted, ‘very meekly’ or in quarrelling flights, from north-easterlies to southerlies. In Pursuit of Spring would be about long, uncertain transitions, returning storms, and human moods which fluctuate as much as the weather.

Thomas chose to perform his spring ritual at Easter time. He started out in lowering storm clouds and a black mood on Good Friday, and his journey was a form of uneasy ascent from this low point. It was his agnostic alternative to the Christian ceremonies taking place in the village churches past which he cycled. Out on the road, while others gathered together as families and congregations, he knowingly weighed up his search for natural renewal with the Christian story of death and resurrection. Easter was very early that year: Good Friday was March 21. It was ambitious to expect Spring so soon. But Thomas caught the song of the chiffchaff as he crossed into Hampshire, and primroses grew thicker on the banks as he proceeded, glimmering in the shadows of roadside trees.

Thomas’ precisely evocative prose carries us from London through the Home Counties, into open country, and across Salisbury Plain. Town by town we go, then village by village. Morden, Epsom, Guildford. West Lavington, Steeple Ashton, Cutteridge (where cows stand quietly in what used to be the manor house chapel, ‘an excellent congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing, or wanting to believe, in the immortality of the soul’). If I were any kind of cyclist I would follow him, but I abandoned my bicycle years ago after a few uncertain outings, and now follow in imagination through places I know a little but not well. Reading Thomas, I can feel the cushioned ground of the North Downs, where shallow pine roots trip up walkers on sandy commons, where rhododendrons grow dark and glossy at the ends of private gardens, and paths lead up through gorse and bracken onto heaths. I have never been through Bishop’s Sutton but when Thomas describes the shrubberies by which ‘the village hushes the road’, I am vividly aware of laurel hedges and can hear the quality of the quiet.

It matters that Thomas is as good on shrubberies as on open country, and as good on village ponds as ancient houses. This is a kind of place-writing very different from most guidebooks or gazetteers, and indeed as a tour guide Thomas is audaciously remiss. He has little to say about Winchester, and speeds straight past established beauty spots. When a famous building appeals to him, it is more likely to be as an organic landscape than as a fine example of Early English style. Salisbury Cathedral in the early morning holds him enraptured because it seems ‘struck out of glaucous rock at one divine stroke’, a cliff or mountain habitat for the doves cooing among carved saints.

Most of all, Thomas writes about the road, the verges, the light and the sky; wet-worn flagstones as they ‘answer the returning sun’. He writes about nature tensing and relaxing, as here, on Saturday evening in the Test Valley: ‘The earth was quiet, dark and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song.’ Such moments of calm orderliness expand suddenly from between the press of doubts and intermittent rain. Calm and anxiety live together in the same scene and the same sentence. Above the quiet earth, ‘Venus glared like a madman’s eye’.

The American poet Robert Frost, whose friendship would change Thomas’ life in the year after the Easter journey, thought this ‘the loveliest book on Spring in England’, and it convinced him that Thomas should write poetry. ‘I referred him to paragraphs in In The Pursuit of Spring,’ Frost recalled, ‘and told him to write it in verse form in exactly the same cadence.’ Thomas took the advice and began to write poems in late 1914. Among the first was ‘March’, and the whole of Spring seems to be there in the concentration of those thrity-two lines which find ‘tenderness, almost warmth, where the hail dripped.’ The following March, 1915, Thomas wrote of ‘All the white things a man mistakes / For earliest violets’, and honoured these things (a chip of flint, a mite of chalk) as genuinely Spring’s, not merely the stuff of illusions and false hopes. They belong to both Spring and Winter, which co-exist.

In the short period between receiving encouragement from Frost and his death at the Battle of Arras in March 1917 – at Easter, exactly four years after his Spring pilgrimage – Thomas wrote an extraordinary body of lyric poetry. It endures while much of the prose lies unread. For many readers, then, In Pursuit of Spring will be fascinating as a work in progress, the material from which poetry emerged. Thomas the poet is already present in it, like the face in stone that is revealed by a sculptor’s chipping away of what surrounds it. But I wouldn’t want to chip away anything too soon. What seems to me so beguilingly strange in the book is its mixture of poetry and prosiness. It moves between passages so condensed one has to read them four times, and others which loiter in redundancy. Leaving Shepton Mallet Thomas pays ‘the usual bill’ for his accommodation, and then, he writes, ‘I tried to get into the churchyard again; but it was locked.’

The expansiveness of his book is part of its point. It is his habit, at almost every village, to read the inscriptions on the graves. He is a collector of epitaphs, and he finds room in his text for an improbable number of them. The long-forgotten rhyme on a stranger’s tomb can prompt wry inventions of unknown lives, or the recollection and recital of some story remembered by chance, inserted in the book as if for safekeeping. Wandering between grand tombs and meagre crosses, he conjures the sounds of a village through its families. At Holybourne there are ‘Lillywhites, Warners, Mays, Fidlers, Knights, Inwoods and Burninghams’, which makes this a different world from Stapleford, where the names are ‘Goodfellow, Pavie, Barnett, Brown, Rowden, Gamlen, Leversuch’. These family names make up the language of the book as much as the place names which announce each stop along the way. We are with the writer who would remember Adlestrop, ‘only the name / And willows, willow-herb, and grass’.

There is nothing morbid in his graveyard visiting. There’s even a touch of the farcical: at Berwick St James there are ‘ivy-covered box tombs lying around . . . like unclaimed luggage on a railway platform’. The luggage may be unclaimed, but Thomas remembers without fail that it once belonged to real people with loves, hopes, scores to settle. He smiles sadly at the epitaphs of those ‘awaiting the resurrection of the just’, fairly sure that they are waiting in vain. He cannot feel in these churchyards what Stanley Spencer would feel when he showed in Resurrection at Cookham generations of people waking and stretching into eternal life. All the more important, then, that Thomas should say over their names. It is a way of honouring all that continuity of past life in the places he passes. And it is also a way of putting into longer perspective his own solitary struggles.

The Mays, Fidlers, Knights and Inwoods of the old villages might well have been surprised to find a solitary Spring pilgrim standing alone in quiet churchyards. It seems out of step with the chatty, boisterous mood established by so much Spring writing through the centuries. It is nearly April after all, the time when Chaucer’s travellers crowd together, shouting and laughing at each other. Spring is a social time after winter isolation, and Spring is a time for lovers. ‘Lenten is come with love to towne’ sang the poets in fourteenth-century March and every March since then. Thomas’ Lent passes into Easter with no word of love, except for love of the earth and the road.

In the agricultural year, March is a time of intense busyness. Medieval and renaissance almanacs list the daunting tasks of preparation for the new growing season: ploughing and sowing, hedging, ditching and pruning. All that industry still shaped country life in the 1820s. John Clare’s poem for March in his Shepherd’s Calendar is all action, both for the elements and for living things – from the ‘headlong hurry’ of late-Winter floods to the sower whose ankles sink in ‘pudgy sloughs and clay’; it’s a poem of stooping, splashing, chopping, leaping, striding, slinging, strewing, in which hands and feet are constantly moving through the ‘many weathers’ of the season. Early primroses are crushed under the boot of the hurrying woodsman – unless he catches sight of the cheering flowers in time.

Thomas’ book is meditative by contrast; its action is the psychological movement of the spirit in response to the sky. Thomas is all receptive eye and nerves. If Clare’s workers are an integral part of the Spring, defining the season as much as the nesting rooks and ragged clouds, Thomas is a visitor riding through it, feeling his way into its secret life and at the mercy of its moods. Those who are not farmers, and that’s most of us now, admire the Georgic songs of practical labour, but cannot write them for ourselves and must acknowledge different kinds of Spring experience. As he rides through countryside which is not his home, Thomas gives little attention to what needs to be banked or pruned, but looks for the unspoken life of plants, birds and winds which know nothing of him and require no intervention.

Those in the twenty-first century who watch for the first March flowers often feel differently again. The average date for the first oak leaves is earlier and earlier; bluebells now are common in March where in 1913 they were rare; in some years chiffchaffs have overwintered in the new warmth of Hampshire. (These ‘Indications of Spring’ are registered and made available in a survey called Nature’s Calendar, which observes the unfolding of the season very much as Robert Marsham observed it for more than sixty years in the eighteenth century, and as naturalists have done ever since.) There have been some very backward Springs, Aprils deep in snow, but these too seem to indicate a shifting climate, more liable to extremes. The age-old joy in first flowerings and first bird-calls is now mixed up with anxiety; the old signs of repetition and return are now also registered as signs of change. There will be new forms of Spring writing to come.

Thomas carried a camera in his pannier, probably the one he had been given in 1911 when he told his friend Edward Garnett that it would save him from the need to make memory-jogging sketches on his travels. And so, more than a century later, we can peer into sepia images and make out the first leaves forming on the winter branches of 1913.

There are photographs of dishevelled-looking orchards, and nests in the high trees above Wells Cathedral; photographs of hedges, and field boundaries, and fenced avenues and wide bare views over Salisbury Plain. There are a few landmark buildings like the ruins at Glastonbury, and a few curiosities – like Turner’s Tower near Radstock, which is odd-looking, attenuated, a cross between a church belfry and a castle turret tacked on to a row of workers’ houses. It had been built to rival a neighbour’s tower, but had lost its top in a lightning strike by the time Thomas saw it – and has now been demolished altogether.

The most beautiful and unusual photographs are those of the road: that ‘majestic road’ called the Hog’s Back running high on the ridge of the North Downs, the road as it bends into Rudge near Frome, the smartly tree-lined road near Shapwick. Thomas kept noticing the fall of light on different road surfaces: the patchy damp of paving after rain, or the glint in the puddles between muddy tyre tracks. He loved to see the sheen of a wet road curving ahead of him. It flickers in the distance between bare trees at Nettlebridge. In the photograph he took near Croscombe, the road looks so fluid and smoothly reflective that it might be a narrow river. In his happiest moments, Thomas felt more as if he were floating or sailing rather than cycling on solid ground.

A cyclist on a dark afternoon today will see taillights and headlights negotiating between cars double-parked along tight village streets. The tarmac is painted with give-ways and speed-hump warnings. These roads in the 1910s were plain and open, appearing fluid to the eye. The photographs are so empty of cars and people that this England looks deserted. But Thomas’ text suggests all the lively sounds the camera could not record. There are rooks cawing all along the route from rookeries now lost, often in elm trees. There are the chiffchaffs, marsh-tits, and blackbirds. There is the sound, too, of the telegraph wires, humming and whining, Aeolian harps in the wind above the road.

Only one of the pictures (of Turner’s Tower) reveals that Thomas was not alone on his travels. His younger brother Julian had accompanied him on preparatory research trips through Wiltshire, and his friend Jesse Berridge was at his side into Somerset. Had we passed some village pond that March, we might have glimpsed them smiling and talking. Long after Thomas’ death, when Berridge remembered him, it was as a life-giving companion who made the sights and sounds of an English journey seem luminous. He even dreamed of Thomas: ‘in my dream he was coming down a road, in loose dark clothes, to meet me, with his long purposeful stride and his face alight with pleasure and gaiety.’ Berridge treasured up memories from their joint pursuit of Spring. There was the moment, for example, when they were both lying on the beach at Kilve. Thomas spotted a meadow pipit swooping over the sands, ‘and the moment became unforgettable’.

The mysterious ‘Other Man’ who appears in the book is quite different from the friendly and appreciative Berridge. He is both a complete stranger and a part of Thomas himself. We meet him first when Thomas takes shelter outside a bird shop. Another man goes in, buys a chaffinch, cycles a little way with it in a paper bag, and then releases it. Thomas follows, for it appears that they are set on the same route. Again and again these two cyclists converge, noticing different features of the places they pass, swapping notes. There can be no final summing up of the relationship between them. Did Thomas release a bird from a paper bag in Wimbledon? Perhaps he did and partly mocked himself, or perhaps he didn’t and partly wished he had. The bird flies off into the open, but Thomas cannot get free of the other man who persists in travelling the same way.

If he is haunted by this second self, it is not a very elegiac kind of haunting. It is more an oppression or an irritation. The Other Man appears when it would be more peaceful to be alone on the road, and at night in the inns he is frankly a bore, talking on and on about subjects that obsessed Edward Thomas. He has a taste for pub signs and weathervanes, of which he makes drawings in his notebook. He is a perfectionist, like Thomas, in the matter of clay pipes. He is an inner voice externalised, and will not easily let up. When Thomas wrote his poem ‘The Other’ in December 1914 he was still caught in this long, exhausting negotiation, and had lost hope of ever freeing himself: ‘He goes: I follow: no release / Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.’

Thomas preferred, and depended upon, the company of writers who had lived in England before him. He had a head full of other people’s words and rhythms, and they were associated in his mind with distinctive landscapes. Wherever he travelled, he was on a literary pilgrimage, and indeed much of what he saw at Easter 1913 went into the book he finished the following summer, A Literary Pilgrim in England. He was the most topographically alert of readers, and the most readerly of topographers, so that in cycling through different landscapes he was aware of crossing from one writer’s imaginative territory into another’s. He never found for himself a satisfactory home in which he could feel permanent, but these wide literary allegiances gave him a sense of company and belonging in the places he passed.

We are dealing here with a pilgrim who needs no recourse to reference books to know what John Skelton wrote in Leatherhead and who can quote John Helston as he looks into the River Mole. George Meredith is the poet most in Thomas’ mind as he cycles through Surrey: ‘Meredith of Box Hill’, both earthly and swift-winged, whose poems were ‘saturated with English sun and wind’. On Salisbury Plain he feels for lines of connection back to Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia was both Wiltshire and nowhere. And he comes at times so close to W.H. Hudson it is as if the elder and the younger naturalist are travelling together. Hudson often set out on his long (sometimes months-long) walks at Eastertime, listening for the first of the migrant birds. At Easter 1903 he had waited in Salisbury for late arrivals in a cold spring, and what cheered him most in the city were the thrushes calling across the cathedral green, and stock-doves on the West Front, as on ‘the ledges of some ocean-fronting cliff’. When Thomas hears those doves’ descendants a decade on, he is in Hudson’s company.

Thomas’ goal is the author of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. His route is towards the Quantocks, which is Coleridge’s country. He suggested in A Literary Pilgrim in England that the Mariner comes home to somewhere near East Quantoxhead, and he felt that in describing the landscape between Stowey and the Quantocks he was also evoking the imaginative topography of Coleridge’s poems: ‘the rocks, the firs and slender oaks and birches, the whortle-berries, the waterfall, the spring’. The spring? It is a freshwater spring he means: ‘that beautiful fountain at Upper Stowey’, one of the secret springs, overhung with vegetation, welling up between cleft rocks in this country of woods and coombes and caverns measureless to man. Coleridge soon went with Wordsworth north to Cumbria, but Thomas does not read him as a Lake Poet. In the mountains he was ‘a man in exile, and had been once he decided to follow Wordsworth out of the West’. For Thomas he is always among the mossy outcrops of the Somerset coast, with their fusion of the mild and the wild, their nooks of domesticity and their places of austere exposure.

So Thomas goes west to Coleridge and to Spring, an odd doubling since Coleridge’s Springs are darkly uncertain times. Thomas has the ghostly ballad ‘Christabel’ in mind, a poem set in April, but an April so ominous it cannot be named and is not yet Spring. ‘Tis a month before the month of May / And the Spring comes slowly up this way.’ In the dark windless night of ‘Christabel’, the revenants of winter hang on in the woods. What moves is not alive: ‘The one red leaf, the last of its clan / That dances as often as dance it can.’ It must be the most vivid dead leaf in literature, twirling on its thread, suspended between seasons.

Coleridge’s ode ‘Dejection’ is also a Spring poem, written in April 1802, but its subjects are storm and numbness, night and pain. Thomas, too, feels something uncanny in the suspension between seasons, and responds with all his body and mind to the quarrelling winds and the earth’s tense negotiation between death and life. ‘I had a wish of a mildly imperative nature’, he explains at the outset, ‘that Spring should be arriving among the Quantocks at the same time as myself.’ The whole journey is undertaken in this ‘mildly imperative’ way, at a pace not too hurried (there are all those epitaphs to read), but with a certain urgency – like the steady, addictive pace of Coleridge’s ballads themselves.

Will it spoil the reader’s pursuit if I say that Thomas gets his wish? I don’t think so. We have to travel with him in order to enjoy what he finds in Somerset, in the deep lanes where ‘the exuberant young herbage, the pure flowers such as stitchwort and the pink and silver white cuckoo flowers, but above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness, so vivid that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge.’ Once we are embarked on the journey, and caught in the insistent Good Friday rain, the movement towards those cuckoo flowers may well start to feel mildly imperative. With a little urgency in the pace, we follow him west.

Alexandra Harris wrote this piece for Little Toller’s new edition of Edward Thomas’ In Pursuit of Spring.

Easter. A rainy spring; larks sizzling in Dartmoor’s long brown grass. I set off on the military track near Okehampton towards the source of the Taw, where something unexpected lies couched amid thick tussocks: a memorial stone to Ted Hughes. The exact locality of the stone was kept secret when it was placed there in 2001, until press reports of 2003 revealed its whereabouts.

The granite slab that bears Hughes’s name was placed in the area where Dartmoor’s rivers rise: the Taw, Dart, East Okement and Teign. This region of high moorland where many of Devon’s major watercourses begin has fascinated several of the county’s writers. Hughes settled in Devon for nearly forty years, farming, fishing and writing. He loved this landscape: Devon was his ‘land of totems’, as he called it in Birthday Letters.[1] The moorland where the rivers have their sources was also a sacred place for Henry Williamson, a Devon author whose nature-writing Hughes read and re-read during his boyhood. ‘There in the fen five rivers began’, wrote Williamson in his 1927 classic Tarka the Otter, noting that these were the Taw, Torridge, Teign, Tavy and Dart.[2] ‘Taw simply meant water’ wrote Hughes in his poem ‘1984 on ‘The Tarka Trail’’.[3] The Celtic ta- prefix of so many river-names and place-names here suggests a landscape marked, named and worn by water.

Hughes grew up fascinated by landscape and wild creatures. As a young boy, he hunted, fished and came face to face with animals, often in the company of his older brother. His obsession with animals bordered on the shamanic: early one morning, he and a fox came face to face with each other on the banks of the River Don. Both of them were out hunting rabbits. Each stared at each other for a moment, amazed;[4] the fox would become the tutelary spirit of poems such as ‘The Thought-Fox’. Yet he also witnessed silage pollution killing fish at Old Denaby, near his West Yorkshire home.[5] In adulthood, he became increasingly concerned about the damage that human beings inflict on the environment. He and his first wife Sylvia Plath were alerted to the perils of nuclear waste in the 1960s, when they lived in the USA. The mackerel that they had caught in Cape Cod Bay were made radioactive by a nearby nuclear waste dump. Hughes’s reading of Silent Spring brought him to a shocked awareness of the dangers of pesticides and insecticides to both wildlife and human beings.[6] Later in life, Hughes settled permanently in Devon and married Carol Orchard, the daughter of a local farmer. He became rooted in the landscape: farming reconnected him to the wild life of his childhood among the animals, ‘the only world I belong to in any way’, as he called it.[7] He became determined to protect waterways, woodlands and wildlife. In 1970, he wrote a letter to a national newspaper, outlining a plan for schoolchildren to repopulate Britain’s decimated hardwood forests by planting trees.[8] The idea was so popular that Devon people started offering to send him their spare saplings. Yet Hughes was also aware of environmental issues on a global scale. In an open letter of 1990, he advised the Prime Minister to treat the ‘Environmental cataclysm’ as a ‘War’ and an ‘Emergency’.[9] The same year, he wrote to the rockstar Sting to congratulate him on his campaign to defend the Amazon rainforest, and enclosed a book about Hawaii’s imperilled forests.[10] He was concerned about global environmental issues, such as climate change and the exporting of waste to ‘far-off countries, where nobody protested’.[11] But above all, Hughes’s writing speaks of the Devon landscape, and the trout and salmon rivers where he fished.

I was curious to find out more about the places that meant so much to Hughes, and to which he felt deeply connected. Although he never forgot his Yorkshire origins, he felt earthed by the ‘undateable cob-walled farms’ and ‘inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked, deep-cut lanes’.[12] There, in this secluded semi-wilderness, he could go to ground and hide from the prying eyes of journalists and critics hounding him because of Sylvia Plath’s death. My own poems were becoming increasingly haunted by objects and locations associated with Hughes: his notebooks full of astrological symbols; his sculpture of a jaguar; the path that leads from his boyhood home in West Yorkshire, to hanging wood and windy moor. I wanted to see, touch, smell and dwell a while in the moorlands that became so important to him towards the middle and at the end of his life, and see if they would help to shape my own writing.

Beginning in the village of Belstone, I started walking southwards and soon reached the moor. Low-hanging clouds, but no rain. I’ve noticed a strange mirage on overcast days in the Cairngorms and elsewhere: the clouds seem to be dropping downwards, even when it’s not raining and they are moving with the wind overhead. I noticed it here. Perhaps it’s due to drops of water vapour being blown by the wind. The effect is uncanny, and makes you think that you’re about to have to run for cover to shelter from heavy weather. Gorse grew everywhere, its roots in sandy soil, some of it burnt to charcoal scribbles. Strange plastic devices – probably bits of ordnance from Dartmoor’s military live-firing zone – lined the track. I couldn’t see exactly what they were, and didn’t want to get close enough to find out. I wondered what Hughes would have thought of this scattering of military litter.

The track climbed southwards into the high hill-country. The moor was to my east, a ridge with three tors skylined on it. Tor – an old Cornish word for hill, with living relatives in Gaelic and Welsh. Tors are the remains of a granite pluton, a rock that welled up deep below the earth 280 million years ago. It is as though they rose from the realm of Pluto, the Roman god of the dead, as the name pluton suggests. Today these relics from a magma-filled underworld stubbornly hold out against erosion, even though the softer deposits that once overlaid them have long succumbed to weather, rain and scouring ice during the last ice age. They form hilltop beacons of pale grey, deeply fissured. Slowly they crumble to slabs, or clitters as they are locally known, and their granular crystals erode to gravel, or growan. Ice and acid in rainwater are eroding them, drop by drop. Tors dissolve and their minerals are washed away to become part of the rivers, such as the Taw.

On the right, to the west, I passed close by sharp-sided Steeperton Tor, which has a military hut crouched in its lee. I headed south, past the aptly-named Hangingstone Hill, and forded the infant Taw in its loops and windings. It was a slender eel-river, twining in delicate meanders, swiftly hurrying over the stones. Alice Oswald might call it ‘a foal of a river’[13] – her description of the nascent River Dart, which, like the Taw, rises near the marshy depression of Cranmere Pool. Ted Hughes loved to fish the Taw, although he witnessed a shocking decline in its fish population. He set out to catch his first Taw trout at 6 a.m. on the 15^th of March 1962, at Bondleigh. He was not the only fisher on the river that morning: an otter ‘galloped’ ahead of him, indicating a thriving ecosystem. Many of the trout that lived in bankside hollows and castles of roots were known to him ‘almost by name’. April 1966 saw him catch six trout of a pound each in a hundred-yard stretch of river – although a local fisherman told him that the fish had once been even more plentiful, before the water level had dropped by ten inches. That was only the beginning of the river’s decline. In 1969, he was shocked to catch a Taw trout afflicted by the epidemic of ulcerative dermal necrosis, a fish disease that had arrived from Ireland. By 1973, he reported that the river was polluted with ‘white threads’ of waste from a local cheese factory. A year later, the trout were nearly gone.[14]

Hughes’s environmentalism was far more than the greenwashed piety of a successful writer eager to be seen supporting good causes. He was ‘in grief’ for Britain’s damaged watercourses.[15] An adage that I have read time after time in his published work and in his unpublished manuscripts, is the idea that ‘everything pitched in the ditch | Comes back into the cup’.[16] He was haunted by the knowledge that polluting our environment means poisoning ourselves. In 1986, Hughes heard that otters in East Anglia had died of ulcers and tumors, caused by pesticides. He wrote a letter to a national newspaper in which he stated that humans might also be affected. It was some years before farm workers in East Anglia would be hospitalised, ‘poisoned by agricultural chemicals’.[17] The sick, dying fish in a filthy pool in the poem ‘October Salmon’ resembles Hughes’s elderly father, who was ailing at the time when Hughes wrote the poem.[18] Hughes felt the effects of pollution on aquatic life as keenly as if they had afflicted a loved one. As well he might: for Hughes’s writing presents nature as man’s lover, mother, benevolent creatress and vengeful goddess. He imagined the Earth as a ‘great archaic Goddess’, a ‘half-dark, many-breasted, precarious miracle’.[19] He is guilty of stereotyping the ‘artificial’ as masculine and the ‘natural’ as feminine – but there is a heartfelt and deeply personal reason for this. Hughes endured terrible criticism from feminists who accused him of driving first Sylvia Plath, then his partner Assia Wevill, to suicide. He spent over thirty years[20] writing about his private grief for Plath, and these poems would not be published until the year of his death, in Birthday Letters. Yet he had long been writing about man’s crimes against a feminised nature, and taking practical steps to atone for them. As one critic put it, Hughes sought ‘re-establish a right relation with the source, that is, with Nature and the female’.[21]

Hughes was determined to mend mankind’s broken relationship with ‘the source’. He founded the South West Rivers Trust, later the Westcountry Rivers Trust, in 1983 and would eventually become its President. He gave evidence at a public inquiry in 1985 about raw sewage contaminating the Torridge and Taw estuary. He wrote about endangered fish populations in national newspapers in the 1980s. In 1990 he called for the local riparian association to ‘get a JCB’ and dig over clogged gravels in the Taw, which had once been a prolific spawning ground.[22] The 1990s saw him support a friend’s court case to defend his stretch of river from pollution, and research the link between river pollution in the South West and human cancers. But while the Taw roused Hughes to activism, it also inspired his poetry. He described fishing the Taw in a draft poem called ‘March 9 78 At the hidden long bend on Taw Dimits’.[23] He later removed the reference to the location that inspired this poem, calling it ‘Four March Watercolours’ in its published form. He described the ‘twistings and self-wrestlings’ of the river, its ‘intricate engine’ that it begins to rev ‘full-bore’ in spring.[24] Now, in early April 2012, thirty-four years later, I watched the tiny river gathering its strength, preparing to roar full-throttle as it rushed over the smooth stones, heading towards the coast.

To find Hughes’s memorial stone, I walked over grass-tussocks, hanks of pale hair dead after months of cold. The ground was full of hummocks and hollows, with occasional scrubby patches of ling. My right ankle, injured years ago in a bouldering accident, began to burn faintly as the tussocked ground made my footing unstable.

The memorial stone was a great oblong of granite. It read simply, ‘Ted Hughes, O.M., 1930-1998’. The grass surrounding the stone was a little shorter and flatter than everywhere else, as though it had been tended. I could see the remains of someone’s picnic. A Tetley teabag had been dumped in the grass on the stone’s eastern side. A couple of pioneer lichens had begun to take root: soon the stone would be colonised and Hughes’s name might even be worn away, if no-one looked after it. This is all part of the weathering and the wearing that happen to everything in this waterworn landscape. I wondered if such a poignant reminder of human mortality ought to make me feel mournful. Instead, I was moved to pensive meditation. The stone made me reflect on the passage of time, and to recall that however much I might mark the land, my traces on it would one day be erased by decay, growth, erosion. Looking southwards into the gentle valley where the Taw rises, I could see the interlocking spurs of the land where the river had carved its path through softer rock than the tough Dartmoor granite.

I turned back, heading north into the rain. On the way back, I stopped for a while at Steeperton Tor, and decided to investigate it more closely. From the ground, it looked like an impenetrable fortress. Nearer to its grey flank, I noticed that it was full of tiny cracks and hidden passages. Runnels crisscrossed its body, dividing it vertically into lobes. Rough crystals of quartz provided a purchase for palms and feet. I could fit comfortably into one of the runnels and heave myself up with both arms. There were plenty of the horizontal cracks for footholds. Stacks of granite were segmented by horizontal fissures. The stacks were grey, hard-crystalled, solid masses. I reflected that the tors would probably look like the feet of hippos from above: a grey, tough hide, with lobed toes. From the side, they looked more like the flanks of elephants or whales. I climbed up onto one of the high points of the tor and looked northeast to a valley fledged with a small dark copse. Pinnacles of granite to the east stood alone like watchtowers.

At the pass between Steeperton Tor and the next hill, I met a couple of wild-looking ponies with tangled manes, the adult with a piebald hide, the foal grey. I tried to approach them, but they were not interested in me, nor in the apple core I offered to them. Dartmoor is famed for its ‘wild’ ponies, all of which in fact have their owners. Sheep dotted the flanks of the hills. They had skull-white heads with thick grey fleeces, or heavy salt-and-pepper fleeces streaked with green dye. One had a brownish-cream fleece and one red horn, probably dyed. An ewe had a grey fleece and white face, and her lamb had a black face and a white fleece: a strange inversion, one of nature’s more harmonious quirks.

The bones of sheep lay scattered all along the path: mostly the limb-bones of very young ones. They fractured on a slant, and the hollow insides were visible. White bone, tainted with algae in the cavity where the marrow once was. I was reminded of Hughes’s descriptions of newborn lambs that died in Moortown Diary: casualties are part of the life of a working farm. I wondered if hungry predators had cracked the bones for their nutritious marrow in a harsh spring.

I headed northwards, back to the gorse with its vivid yellow flowers. A small bird I couldn’t identify was singing on one of the thorns. It sang a frenzied song, like a madman babbling to himself; or perhaps a girl gossiping and talking so fast that you couldn’t get a word in. The birdsong, the path and the slender river began weaving themselves into a poem that was shaping itself my head.

Walking back to Belstone, I reflected that the stone that memorialised Hughes had been placed at one of the sources of his poetry. A simple tribute to him had been inscribed into the land whose waterways he had fought to protect, and that had inspired so much of his writing. I wondered what he would be campaigning about now if he were alive today, and what he would have thought of contemporary nature-writing.

Hughes would probably have shared Mark Cocker’s concern that some forms of ‘new nature writing’ have become ‘tame’.[25] He would have sympathised with the idea that the landscape provides a ‘nature cure’ for the individual, but his work suggests that ‘curing’ damaged environments is far more urgent. Nevertheless, wilder strains of anger and grief lurk beneath the pastoral surface of recent nature-writing. Robert Macfarlane has launched a diatribe against 4x4s in The Guardian,[26] while David Harsent has elegised the endangered hen harrier in The New Statesman.[27] George Monbiot is a more radical environmentalist than Hughes, but his impassioned call to ‘re-wild’ Britain shares common ground with Hughes’s campaign to re-wood it. Robert Macfarlane’s stirring assertion that ‘Literature has the ability to change us for good […] Powerful writing can revise our ethical relations with the natural world’[28] is anticipated by Hughes’s activities. The Laureate and Prince Philip founded Arts for Nature, whose Sacred Earth Drama competition encouraged young people to write their way into damaged environments and imagine how they could be healed. Hughes would pour scorn on Richard Smyth’s assertion that ‘where there is poetry, there is danger’ in lyrical nature-writing,[29] and point to his own poem ‘The Black Rhino’, sold to The Telegraph to raise funds for rhino conservation.

If Hughes were alive today, he would spur Britain’s nature writers on to defend Britain’s persecuted predators and dwindling forests. He would lobby to restore Dartmoor’s extinct black grouse. He would be delighted to hear that the River Dart, which gives its name to the moor, has its estuary protected by a new environmental plan. He would be less pleased to find out that the same project promotes the estuary as a yachting destination too.[30]

Hughes’s legacy also lives on in the environmental organisations that he established. He would have been thrilled to hear that the West Country Rivers Trust, which he co-founded, is leading a new conservation project on the Taw. Wetlands are being restored, pollution reduced, and weirs replaced with pools and riffles for fish. The Rivers Trust protects the Taw from its headwaters on Dartmoor to its meanders at North Tawton,[31] where Hughes once lived. There have been ‘record breaking’ salmon and trout catches on one of its tributaries.[32] Over fifty years after Hughes caught his first Taw trout, the river is once again home to otters.[33] Hughes’s inspiring legacy shows how we can find our ‘nature-cure’ not through personal quests, but by profoundly changing the way we treat ‘the source’.

[1] Ted Hughes. Collected Poems. Ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber & Faber 2003 1121. Print.

[2] Henry Williamson. Tarka the Otter. London: Penguin 2009 [1927] 95. Print.

[3] Hughes, Collected Poems 843. Print.

[4] Ted Hughes. British Library Additional Manuscripts 88918/7/2, manuscript notes 13-14. Manuscript.

[5] Hughes, Collected Poems 1211. Print.

[6] Terry Gifford. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge 2009 14. Print.

[7] Ted Hughes. Letters of Ted Hughes. Ed. Christopher Reid. London: Faber & Faber 2009 365. Print.

[8] Ted Hughes. Letter. ‘Children plant trees for tomorrow’. Times Educational Supplement Leaders/Letters sec., 17 Nov. 1972: 2. Print.

[9] Ted Hughes. ‘Dear Premier.’ Dear Next Prime Minister: Open Letters to Margaret Thatcher & Neil Kinnock. Ed. Neil Astley. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990 96. Print.

[10] Ted Hughes. Emory MARBL archive, Collection 644, Box 53, Folder 9, ‘Dear Sting’. Typescript letter.

[11] Ted Hughes. The Iron Woman. London: Faber & Faber 1993 61. Print.

[12] Hughes. Collected Poems, 1203. Print.

[13] Alice Oswald. Dart. London: Faber & Faber 2002 2. Print.

[14] Ted Hughes. ‘Trout on the Upper Taw.’ Taw Fisheries Association News Letter. (Summer 1990): 6. Print.

[15] Ed Douglas. ‘Portrait of a poet as eco warrior’. Observer. 4 Nov. 2007, Features and Reviews sec.: 10. Print.

[16] Hughes, Collected Poems 731. Print.

[17] Ted Hughes, ‘If’. Observer, 29^th Nov. 1992: 31-35 (33). Print.

[18] Thomas R. Pero. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, Wild Steelhead and Salmon (Winter 1999): 50-57 (57). Print.

[19] Hughes, ‘If’. 35. Print.

[20] Hughes told the critic Keith Sagar that he had been working on elegies for Plath since 1972, and had finished them in 1997. Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar. London: British Library Publishing, 2012 260. Print.

[21] Keith Sagar. Ted Hughes and Nature: ‘Terror and Exultation.’ Peterborough: Fastprint 2009, xiv.

[22] Hughes, ‘Trout on the Upper Taw.’ Taw Fisheries Association News Letter. (Summer 1990): 6.

[23] Ted Hughes. Emory MARBL archive, Collection 644, Box 74, Folder 18 ‘March 9 78 At the hidden long bend on Taw Dimits’.

[24] Hughes, Collected Poems 644.

[25] Mark Cocker, ‘Death of the naturalist: why is the “new nature writing” so tame? New Statesman, 17 June 2015. Web. 5 July 2015.

[26] Robert Macfarlane, ‘4x4s are killing my planet’. Guardian Review sec. 4 June 2005. Web. 8 July 2015.

[27] David Harsent, ‘ ‘Bowland Beth’: A poem by David Harsent’. New Statesman, 15 August 2013. Web. 8 July 2015.

[28] Robert Macfarlane, ‘Why we need nature writing’. 2 Sept. 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

[29] Richard Smyth, ‘The limits of nature writing’, 6 May 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

[30] South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. ‘Dart Estuary Environmental Management Plan Periodic Review 2006-2011.’ 2011.Web. 12, 10. 9 July 2015.

[31] Devon Wildlife Trust, ‘Taw River Improvement Project.’ 2010-2015. Web. 8 July 2015.

[32] Westcountry Rivers Trust, ‘Media Release: Bumper Year for Fish in the River Mole’. 2013. Web. 9 July 2015.

[33] Devon Mammal Group, ‘Otter’. 2015. Web. 9 July 2015.

Nick Hogue met his girlfriend on the day the Oregonian reported a grizzly inside the miniature golf course.  Apparently the bear had climbed a covered bridge over the third hole, bathed in a water hazard, and snapped off an enormous rotating windmill with a single swat of its paw.  While the golfers stared with their putters frozen, the grizzly ambled behind a trailer park and disappeared.

That evening, at Alcoholics Anonymous, Nick met Angie.  They broke AA’s rule against relationships.  For fifteen weeks straight, they hadn’t spent a night apart.  It was a cold Saturday morning in October when he was the first to wake up.  He lay flat on his back with his face turned toward her, and he watched Angie sleep in the early light.  She had her arm thrown across his chest, and her hand twitched along the base of his neck.  The fingers were nicked with the blades of carving implements.

Her hips rose under the sheet, as if she’d been stirred by his staring.  Angie was Cayuse.  She had a wide smooth forehead and eyes set far apart.  She sat up naked in front of him with her long black hair forming a curtain across her face.

“I like you like that,” she said, as he lay motionless under her.  “Cowering.”

She got out of bed.  His tee shirt hung off the back of a chair and she laughed as she pulled it on, stretching it tight over her broad shoulders and breasts.  “This is made for a child,” she said, taking it off again and flinging it into the corner.  “You need to eat more.”

He joined her at the full-length mirror while she combed out her hair.  Nick was forty and looked too scrawny beside her, too old.  His face was a collection of sharp bones drawn in against a small mouth.  He didn’t eat much, it was true—a self-deprivation she threatened.  At thirty-two, Angie suffered few of his blemishes.

“I want a drink,” she said.

He took her hand and brought her back to bed.  He made love to her with all the vigor he could muster, as if to convince her that he was the bear.  Then he went to the window over Moore Park and kept his face turned.  He dreaded the inevitable point when their long courtship was over and their natures became exposed.

Down in the park, a boy ran across the grass, his arms stretched out like wings.  Not long ago Nick had all the basics in order—his job teaching English at Silt High School, his books, his daily tally of sobriety nearing nine years.  He hadn’t minded spending evenings alone.  He survived the weekends by taking long walks and cultivating azaleas.

“I want a drink,” she said again.

“Think of what you can do if you don’t.”

“If I don’t get drunk I can collect a tamarack,” Angie said.  “Tonight, up on Kettleman Point.”

He could tell she was watching him from the bed.  He kept looking out the window at the boy running across the grass.  “Only Douglas fir up on that hill.”

“I’ve already spotted it.  Come with me tonight and see for yourself.”

Angie coated slices of tree trunks in lacquer and sold them as coffee table art.  She ran a studio out of her house on Highway 24, just outside of Silt.  She was a chain saw artist and had recently taken first place in the “Animals” category of the semi-pro carving championships in Reedsport.  Nick had watched her compete.  The only woman in the field, she’d entered the sawdust pit in overalls with her hair coiled inside her hardhat.  In a little under four minutes, she’d turned a chunk of Sitka spruce into an osprey catching a salmon.

They dressed and went downstairs.  Nick had filled his house with books from the various clearance sales across the Willamette Valley.  Everything decent was closing, it seemed—the public libraries, the bookstores—and he’d been snapping up what he could.  Boxes of books lined the staircase and covered the living room floor.

A breakfast bar divided the kitchen from the living room, and Nick sat on the stool so he could watch Angie cook.  She took a carton of eggs out of the fridge and started cracking them into a mixing bowl.

“I could use a Bloody Mary,” she said.  “Real spicy, lots of horseradish.”

“I used to have beer for breakfast.”

“Beer?  I want vodka.  Or wine.”

She’d only been sober for as long as they’d been seeing each other—one of the many red flags he’d chosen to ignore.  “What I used to do, to take my mind off of it, was exercise.”

She gave him a look.  Her hands, thick and strong, were shaking a little.  “Save the advice.”

“Okay.”

“Just one morning,” she said, “I’d like to wake up thinking of something else.”  Egg whites dangled from her fingertips.  “Something other than the Bloody Mary I want.”

“Wait it out,” Nick said.  She’d had moments like this before.  He reached for her arm, but Angie pulled away and knocked the bowl to the floor.

“Fuck!”  On the linoleum, the eggs lay in a puddle amidst broken shards of glass.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nick said.  “I’ll clean it up.”

“I’m not worried.  I want a fucking drink!”

“Deep breaths,” Nick said.  He left the bar and went into the kitchen.

Angie grabbed the dishtowel that hung from the oven.  She got down on her knees and wiped up the eggs and glass using slow, circular motions. “This is bullshit,” she said.

Nick stayed where he was, reluctant to come nearer.  He remembered the episodes she described in AA, the arrests she’d had for assault.

“I’m done,” Angie said.  She stood up and opened a cabinet.  She swept aside the spices and reached toward the back.  When she turned around, she held a bottle of wine.

“When did you bring that into my house?”

“What does it matter?”

“Don’t do this,” Nick said.  “Not here.”

“You want to try and stop me?”  With her teeth, she unpeeled the plastic around the bottle’s neck.

Nick backed away.  He stared at the cracks in the floorboards where the spiders lived.  When he heard the cork pop he bolted out the front door.  No way was he going to watch the drink happen, even if it had been inevitable.  He crossed the park with no direction in mind and landed on the dirt logging road that circled behind town.

Split wood lay scattered amongst the weeds.  On both sides of the road, mounds of sawdust rose like anthills.  It was an unnamed access road where Silt’s garbage got dumped and drifters sometimes turned up dead.  In the distance, Nick spotted two of his ninth-graders.  They were sitting on their skateboards smoking cigarettes.  When he passed, he pretended not to see them and they did the same.

Kettleman Point loomed above the valley, half bald.  The lumber outfits had been hustling to get the old growth off the mountain before the state’s new restrictions went into effect.  The summit wasn’t that high, but you felt like you were flying when you got up there at night in the blowing wind.  Back in high school, Nick used to drive to the top with Ellen, the woman who became his wife.  They’d park off the road in the shadows of the trees, get drunk, and have sex among the wolves.

A branch of the logging road turned north, winding above the valley to the high timber.  Nick didn’t feel like climbing.  He paralleled Main Street toward a derelict bridge and landed in the dry riverbed underneath.  It was the lowest point in Silt.  Under the cement archway, surrounded by graffiti and empty beer cans, he squatted in the shadows and cursed himself for falling for someone so volatile.  It was why there was a rule against it—addicts were even more dysfunctional in love.

Against the horizon, two grain silos glinted in the sun.  If not for the dam upstream in McMinnville, a river would have been swirling around his ankles.  A river would have meant homes along the waterway and money for the schools.  A place like that wouldn’t have been called Silt.

Nick scrambled up the bank.  It was time to go home and face what he’d brought into it.  He surfaced at the tail end of Main Street and headed home through town to avoid running into his students again.  He walked by Matt Stinson’s Tire Extravaganza and the Lucky J Convenience Mart with its drunks half asleep outside the door.  He passed the gray, rain-battered Vista Apartments.  Behind the door at the top of the stairs, in the middle of his divorce, he’d taken a room there with only a bottle of gin.

Across the street from The Harvester, Nick stopped.  The bar had been converted from a grain depot, and it still had the original corrugated metal roof and grain chute.  The door was open, and he could hear the clink of bottles inside.

On the sidewalk he stood motionless.  It had been a long time since he’d felt this ruptured and uncertain, needing a drink to fill the gap.  He’d wasted his twenties to alcohol, then after his parents died, his early thirties went the same way—in a continuous sinking, an immersion.  There were nightly sessions in The Harvester, The Green Frog, The Alibi.  He drank his inheritance from the family wheat farm, followed by Ellen’s savings, then gnawed at the scraps of her love until nothing was left.

In the street a logging truck loaded with timber drew up and aired its brakes.  The chains under the chassis jangled, the front wheels turned, and the driver started backing into Stucky’s Lumber.

Wait, Nick thought as the driver nodded hello, just wait.  His face burned red hot.  He gazed vaguely into the lumber yard, disoriented by the whine of the cutting blades, the flying splinters, the hills of pulp.  He wished the dam would break and flood Silt to the rooftops.

The man in Moore Park looked like a drifter.  He stood by the rusty child’s roundabout in heavy boots, a backpack, and a raincoat zipped to the neck.  Nick threw up his hand and hurried over.  It was Tom, his son.

The near miss at The Harvester had left Nick ragged and raw, unprepared for this visit.  Tom wasn’t due for another month, when high school broke up for Thanksgiving.  He usually took the Greyhound to McMinnville and walked.  After the divorce, Ellen had resettled in Phoenix. She was supposedly seeing an air-conditioning salesman.

“Aren’t you missing classes?” Nick asked.

“I’m homesick,” Tom said.  He was seventeen and had a habit of flinching after he spoke.

Nick had lost control with Tom twice when he’d been drinking.  He’d thrown him to the ground for talking back.  The second time he’d slammed the boy’s head into a wall, and there had been blood.  It was the shame of this that had eventually made him stop drinking, but the guilt had never completely gone away.  Nick gave him a hug and held him out.  Tom had grown in the past year—for the first time, Nick had to look up.

“You want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

They started off in the direction of the house.  “I had to get out of the heat,” Tom said.  “Hundred-degrees in Phoenix, and everyone’s crammed inside the malls to keep cool.”

On his last visit, Tom was panicking about the end of the world.  He insisted he needed to see Oregon right away before something dropped from the sky and flattened it.  Nick never discouraged the boy from coming home, but lately Tom had been using it as an excuse to get out of schoolwork.  They came to the edge of the park and stopped in view of the house.

“You’ve got company,” Tom said.

Across the road, Angie’s truck stood in the driveway.  “There’s this woman,” Nick said.  “We’re sort of on an extended first date.”

Nick opened the gate and walked past his azaleas in their white painted boxes.  He rang the doorbell.  “She might not be presentable,” he explained to Tom, and he opened the door slowly and peered inside.  Facing them, Angie lay reclined on the sofa with a glass of wine in her hand, her bare feet hanging off the armrest.

“Afternoon,” Nick said.  He put his arm around Tom’s shoulder and brought him inside.

Angie passed the glass under her nose.  “Thanksgiving come early?”

Tom shifted in his boots.  He wandered the living room, as if trying to claim a place in it.  “Been buying more books,” he said, half-heartedly opening one of the boxes.  He took out a novel and put it back.

“You like art?” Angie asked.  She pointed at one of her pieces, a massive slab of varnished walnut on the coffee table, the stumps of its branches curled inward like broken arms.

Tom blinked at it.  He picked up the wine bottle by the sofa and took a swig.  “I wonder what Mom would think of this arrangement,” he said.

Nick noticed the bottle was practically full.  “She might actually be happy for me,” he said.  Ellen was about as different from Angie as any woman could be—dyed-blonde, thin as a human nerve.

“Tell me what you’ve been learning in school,” Angie asked Tom.

“Not a lot.”  Tom sat in the armchair.  He took another swig of wine and stared at Angie while he drank.  It was the kind of look a man gave a woman before sex.

“That’s enough,” Nick said.  He went over and took the bottle out of Tom’s hands.  Then he took Angie’s glass away.

“I only wanted to smell it,” she said.

In the kitchen he poured the wine into the sink.  It glugged down the drain with a heady aroma.  When he returned to the living room he had nowhere to sit.  “You should be concentrating on your grades, Tom,” he said.  “Call your mother, too.  She’ll be worried.”

Tom picked up a book from the coffee table and pretended to read.  Nick drifted to the sofa.  He perched on the armrest next to Angie’s feet.

“You have a girlfriend, Tom?” Angie asked.

“That’d be a nice trick,” Tom said.  “You ever spend much time in Phoenix?”

“No.  You ever been up to Kettleman Point?”

“Once when I was a kid.  With Mom.”

“Sounds romantic,” Angie said.

“We had to get out of the house for a while.  It was somewhere to go.”

Nick kept his eyes on the wall as Angie kept trying out topics of conversation—sports, the history of the Cayuse people, the debatable upsides to Greyhound bus travel.  There was a framed photo on the wall.  It showed Tom fishing, no taller than his pole.  The photo was taken before the apologies for drinking began, followed by the busted therapy sessions and divorce proceedings.  Each year, even after Ellen took Tom to Phoenix, the boy kept coming back for his scheduled visits.  There was no way to understand it, no way to explain Tom’s faith in him.

Empty cans of lacquer littered the floor of the pickup.  Angie had the heat blasting.  As she drove, she used a rag to keep the windshield from fogging up.  They left the outskirts of town, and wheat fields appeared on both sides of the road.  As they approached the site of the old family farm, Tom sat forward in the middle seat.  The sun had begun to set.

Nick knew the boy still held the farmhouse in his mind as an anchor.  Each time he visited, they would drive out into the country to see the property owned by Hogues for over a century.  Tom would ask about the days they lived on the farm, the days before he could quite remember.  They’d eat their sandwiches inside the car and stare at the house as if hoping the new owners would pity them and give it back.

Angie swung around the bend, and they came up along the old property line. Grapevines stretched across the fields where their wheat used to grow.

“What the hell?”  Tom’s voice cracked.  “Where’s our house?”

A vineyard ran right over their former land—where the house and barn had been, and the combine shed, and Grandpa Hogue’s cherry trees.  “Pinot noir is worth more than wheat these days,” Nick said.  “A couple from California came and razed the whole thing.”

Even in the dusk, Nick could see traces of Ellen in Tom’s stricken face.  He remembered how shocked she’d been when he said he wanted to abandon the farm for good, to sell it along with the house, to cash out.  All across Oregon it was the same—wheat turned into wine, and families gave way to imposters, tourists, Californians.

Angie laughed.  “You guys think you lost your land?  One farm?”

She gunned the pickup out of the farmlands, and they rose above the valley.  They climbed into the high trees as the night came and the temperature fell.

“You only have a year of high school left,” Nick said, wanting to regain some vestige of authority.  “If you study hard…”  The smell of whiskey made him turn.  Tom was holding a flask.

“I got expelled, Dad,” Tom said, unscrewing the cap.

Nick’s voice dropped almost down to nothing.  “How long ago?”

“Couple of weeks.  They said it was drinking.”

Angie’s eyes darted sideways.  The boy took a long pull.  He stopped to get a little air and went back for a second drink.  Nick seized the flask and rolled down the window.

“That’s all I got left,” Tom cried.  He tried to grab the flask back, but Nick elbowed him hard against the seat.  The windshield steamed.

“You’re no drinker,” Nick said.  He flung the flask into the dark.  There wasn’t any sound—the whiskey simply got swallowed by the woods.  Nick rolled up the window and tried to calm down.  He hadn’t been too rough with the boy, but the heat of it lingered.  He could hear Tom breathing hard, almost victoriously, as if he’d come all this way just for this.

“Expelled?  And nobody thought to let me know?”

“What do you want to know, Dad?  You’re here, I’m in Phoenix.”

Angie floored the truck to make the steep grade.  “No more liquor,” Nick said, shaking his head.  “You can’t be an alcoholic at seventeen.”  Nick squeezed the bridge of his nose.  There would be other schools, he told himself, other opportunities.  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’re going to call your mother and go over your options.  You might have to move to another school district for a year, you might have to move back to Silt.  And another thing.  Stay sober as long as you’re in my house, or I’ll put you on the next bus to Arizona.”

They approached the top of Kettleman Point.  They were on the green half of the world, with a sliver of moon and plenty of starlight.  Angie came through a couple of switchbacks then swung off the road without warning.  She pulled in front of a metal gate, left the engine running, and jumped out.

“What’s going on?” Tom asked.

“She’s taking us up that fire road.”

Angie untied a heavy chain from the gate.  Her shirtsleeves were rolled above her elbows, and she handled the chain like a piece of twine.  She dragged the gate toward them.  Then she got back in the pickup and began slowly up the fire road, leaning over the dashboard to see what the headlights revealed.  The road was scattered with limbs.  Douglas fir rose high around them.  They went banging along until the truck felt like it was breaking into pieces.

“There,” Angie said, stopping.  She pointed up the mountain and cut the engine.  “On that ridge is where I saw my tamarack.”

They piled out of the truck and confronted the wall of wind.  Angie headed into the woods.  Nick and Tom continued up the road until they reached a shelter.  The only sound came from their boots crunching the gravel.  Trees swayed overhead with their branches colliding.  There were bears up on Kettleman Point, and Nick wondered if the golf course grizzly had family.

“Back in Phoenix,” Tom said, “I always pass these old guys outside the bars.  Fighting each other, fighting themselves.  Each time I see them I think of you, Dad.”

“Hell.”  Nick laughed nervously.  Tom stood only a few feet away, and his outline was a smudge.  “I still have my moments, I admit it.”  He kicked at the ground.  “Angie had me turned around this morning…”

Tom wasn’t listening.  He was facing the ridge.  “I thought she only cut pieces out of the fallen trees.  She’s bringing that one down, Dad.”

The roar of a chainsaw filled the canyon.  Nick searched the woods along the side of the mountain.  Angie stood on the lowest ridge in her hardhat and headlamp, beneath a tree maybe twenty feet high.  It was a tamarack all right—its gold leaves flashed in the starlight.

Nick hurried Tom back to the truck.  They ducked under the open tailgate, just as the chain saw cut out.  There was a sharp crack and the golden tamarack floated across the sky like a wand.

The road filled with dust.  Damp clouds rose up and down the length of the tree like dying gasps.  Soon Angie’s headlamp came bobbing down the ridge.  They stood and watched as she made a second cut on the trunk.  Then she dragged the piece over by one of its branches.  She lifted with both hands and heaved it over the tailgate.

“You just cut down the only tamarack in this valley,” Tom said.  In the bed of the truck, the slice of the tree looked like road kill.

Angie took off her hardhat.  Sweat beaded on her temples and little gold leaves circled her neck.  “This area’s zoned for logging.  Next month, the whole canopy will be gone.  If people want to see a tamarack, they can come to my studio.”

She kicked the tailgate shut and shone her headlamp at Tom’s face.  He was shuddering and pale in the cold.  “Check it out, Nick,” she said.  “He’s scared sober.”

Nick put his arm around Tom and turned toward the mountain.  The boy was where he belonged now, back in Oregon.  Up on the ridge where the tamarack had grown, the surrounding trees lifted their branches in the wind, filling the gap.

Rob Magnuson Smith’s debut novel The Gravedigger (UNO Press) won Gold Medal in the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Award. A dual citizen of the US and the UK, his short fiction has been published most recently in Poor Yorick, Fiction International, the Literarian, and The Guardian. His second novel Scorper (Granta Books) appeared in February. “Kettleman Point” is an extract from a novel tentatively titled Oregon Silt. A contributing editor at Playboy, Rob lives in Cornwall.

The images come from Matthew Crabbe, a chainsaw artist based on Exmoor. Matthew has won the English Chainsaw Carving Championships, as well as the Sandringham Cup. For more information about his work visit his website, and to see more images of his extraordinary carvings take a look at his Facebook page.

Characters (in order of appearance):

Otus scops
Turdus obscurus
Passenger Pigeon
Red Dragon
River Phoenix Bird
The Red Baron (Wrathchild)
The Conservatories
Doctor Fox
Wild Bore
Shag
Swallow
The Mild Englishman
Trai Anfield
Pomeranian Pom Pom
Der Rotmilan Raptoresearcher
The Missing Lynx
Yellow Green 23
White Pink Kimberly-Clark 15
Orange Blue 9
Mute Swan

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Act I Scene I

The Middle Ages, London

Otus scops:

In the Middle, Med-eeeevil, there were skies of Red Kytes, Gleads, wafting above the Miasmas stench. Milvus milvus were common, crowned, widespread and supreme. They cleaned. Protected by a Royal decree. They were the alley sanitisers and the street machines. Scoffing the turned out pottage and bloated lice. They taloned the rats and pecked the mice. These talonted litter pickers worked for free, gorging on offal and entrails for tea. The lazy predators rarely killed, no need for hunting, Red Kyte dustbins reduced human disease.

They were rubbish reliers and vultures; under the stalls in Smithfield’s, in the yard, waste disposal specialists, they refused, collected, kept Britain tidy, were tame Hoovers hovering at large.

Then, they were royally deceased.

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Scene II

19th Century, London

Turdus obscurus:

As always a scapegoat was in need. The ‘vermyn’ were blamed for murdering chickens and bleating lambs. But the lambs they ate didn’t bleat. Those sickos only liked dead meat.

Bang bang the farmers didn’t care. Bang bang gamekeepers kept their Red-legged partridge fair. Shooting estates reared their game birds and released, entertaining aristocracy with the shooting of quarry. Milvus milvus became the same as what they ate. Dead. What a mistake, what a carry-on. Bang bang those poachers ignored evidence of carrion.

‘We are not buzzards, you great bastards,’ they cried. But the huntsmen wanted reparations for all the livestock that had died. The Grouse Games were more important reckoned the fitter of the species. Man decided this was ‘natural’ and what survived and what depleted.

1900. The Red Kite population bottlenecked. Five pairs remained, taking refuge in Cymru. Europe only had a few.

Weeee-oo, ee oo, ee oo, ee oo

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Scene III

19th Century, Cymru

Passenger Pigeon:

The ‘Boda Wennol,’ as the locals called them, began to disappear. The Valleys survivors were on high aware. The relict’s eggs were pinched by collectors, rocketing in value as preciously rare. Not even poached to eat. Thieves would flog un-incubated fossils to dealers in the streets.

Bounty Hunters shot Red Kites, gutted marrow and stuffed them with cotton wool. Their eyes were glazed with teddy bear stares and their plumage caked in tanning goo. They were mounted statically on logs. Their feathers faded in the light. Their tarsus wired and creaked with brittleness. Their wings poised mid-flight.

No Red Kites remained across English vistas. Extinct. No ‘Chicken-Hawks’ in Scotland. Extirpated. Exterminated. With Great Auk-wardness, I anticipated meeting them up here.

[A harp sounds]

They were always playing dead.

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Act II Scene I

1903, Cymru

Red Dragon:

The guilt crept in.

The nests became guarded in Wales with high-security surveillance. The Army were drafted in. I breathed fire on intruders. Yet still the Welsh Red Kite population didn’t grow or spread. It was too damp. The rest of Europe was scarcely better. Habits and habitats had changed. New agricultural methods meant less uncultivated land, increase in afforestation meant the 5 ft winged Milvus milvus couldn’t land.

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Scene II

1949, Westminster, London

River Phoenix Bird:

Shame. Remorse. Regret. Looking up, cries of ‘what have we done?’ The Wing Collared Williams’ met. Commissions, Councils, Committees. They took it I N T E R N A T I O N A L. They all winced. They felt obliged to put things right: ‘let us get Milvus milvus back from the brink and re-watch their gliding flight.’

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Scene III

1984, Tring, Herfordshire

The Red Baron (Wrathchild):

Long consultations were had. The Guidelines for Reintroduction were read and re-read. A license application was made. Requirements were fully met. Criteria was criss-cross-spot-checked. Elected members all said ‘yes’. Evidence, ticked. Impact, good. Feasibility, unanimous. Agreed. It was deduced that no threat persisted anymore for Milvus milvus species. Persecution was in the past. Things had changed. The incoming birds would almost be genetically the same. Where those coverts came from, nothing would change. Red Kites were native to the UK. They were indigenous fauna, essential to the active culture bio pot. They were top of the food chain, bottom feeders for Twitchers to spot. They were globally threatened, we had to intervene. Red Kites could just slip back in.

[Aside]

Plus, how spectacular to restore them? The publicity. The fame. We’ll lure in cash cow tourists on eco trains. Bird safaris will be arranged. We’ll get sponsored with large sums. Water companies will flood us with funds. Local areas will thrive, as an iconic apex species on the precipice will survive! The headlines will chant ‘Enraptured by the Raptors: A Bird of Prey was Seen.’ Cue applause. We’ll get promoted, Knighted, praisers will buckle their rears and bend down on all fours. We’ll feature on the New Year’s Honours List. We’ll replace our wives with cooing models and file for divorce. Yes, yes, the White-tailed eagle was first, but England also needs a keystone gizzard to pause the chasing hearse.

[Enter The Conservatories]

It was a moral responsibility. We needed to put things right. Red Kites were supposed to be here, their aboriginal right. We could invest in the humble bumblebee (bit titchy) but a big sexy Bird of Prey will highlight British Conservation [nods to The Conservatories] and bolster diversity. The Red Kites could resolve overflowing landfill sites?

Meetings. Papers. Assessments. Documents. Reports. The Conservatories found some Red Kites similar to the native ones, taxonomically sound. An assisted translocation holiday was planned. To remedy the grossness of the past, to repair, a trip to Navarra, Spain was booked, to replenish, relocate and reintroduce the Red Kite to the UK.

The Conservatories:

The eventual aim was to ensure that the Red Kite breeding population expanded to colonise all suitable habitat. We’ll welcome them land.

Exeunt

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Scene IV

1987, Gigrin Farm, Feeding Station, Cymru

Doctor Fox:

I thought I would craftily help the plan, so instead of abducting Red Kites from Aragon, Navarra or Castilla y León that were genetically varied, I would use autochthonous Welsh eggs that were struggling to hatch and trick a surrogate mother to brood on the batch. Genius.

I artificially incubated Welsh eggs, cross-fostering the clutch to keep them warm. I would have sat on them myself, but Lorenz’s imprinting would suggest I’d find nestlings on my lawn.

However, it was impossible to apply this method for the entire operation. Restocking wasn’t an option. Instead, I experimented with adoption, transgenic contortion, insemination, embryo transfer, DNA, cloning. I resurrected the Pyrenean ibex for 7 minutes and fertilised future omens.

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Scene V

1989, Navarra, Spain

Wild Bore:

The birds The Conservatories snatched were aged 5 weeks old. Milano real juveniles and soon to be Spanish exiles. ¡Hasta luego! to mamá y papá.

The birds were packed and crammed in crates like tins of Portuguese sardines. They were quarantined. Crushed cargo in the aircraft hold. No in-flight meal from British Airways, ‘Assisting Nature Conservation.’ They were vaccinated on arrival at Heathrow. Customs was hell. The queues. They were manhandled, yellow wing-tagged and chipped, fondled with rubber gloves, screened, scanned and quizzed. They didn’t know where they were going. There was no interpreter, nor translation. They were detained for days in the bowels of bureaucratic immigration.

They arrived in Stokenchurch, the Chilterns. Where? They spent 8 weeks in captivity. Four Red Kites to one aviary section, squabbling for rancid muntjac.

These aliens were far from the sun, their Cousin Black Kites, chorizo scraps and ibérico jamón. Once released, they danced in thermals to keep warm.

Food was still left outside the coops for a month. Milvus milvus returned to find manky Myxomatosis bits and leathery moles. So instead they went hunting for huevos revueltos, fajitas and frijoles.

The displaced Red Kites nabbed from Sweden were forced onto RAF Kinloss and deported to the Black Isle, farmland of the Scots. Poor sods. Some tried to leave, seeking asylum and escape, one managed to take refuge in Iceland, others smuggled warning messages to the Verde Cape.

[All characters yawn offstage]

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Act III Scene I

1993, M40 Flyover

Shag:

The reintroduced Red Kite foreigners, reluctant expats, grew rapidly. They bred and bred and bred. They copulated in beech woods, communal roosts, astride the privet hedge. They cloacal kissed along the motorway, on top of Ladbrokes, they vögeln-ed on the library fence. They mated with their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, became a superior race of inbreds. Even when knackered, they bred. Their nests were strewn with Ann Summer’s lingerie, to fork-play the males in the mood and get them twiggy in their beds.

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Scene II

1997, Cryers Hill, Buckinghamshire

Swallow:

Despite the shouts of ‘go back to where you are from’ (usual hysteria over jobs) the Red Kites became strong. Superior. In the Chilterns, after too many pints, drivers would skid their Land Rovers over all manner of delights. The Road Kill menu spoilt Milvus milvus rotten. Their guts coped with Salmonella and E. coli bacteria and their crops bulged, stuffed full of mangled pheasants chewed and dissolved.

Glis glis who awoke from their long slumber, wobbled dreamily, yawning onto the hard shoulder. These fat dormice were a tender treat, plump and juicier than a woodpigeon’s crippled feet.

The Red Kites spread and spread and spread. Their range stretched for miles. They saturated the skies. They colonised. The Conservatories decided to reintroduce them to new lowlands. It was a success.

This time however, the Red Kites did not object. They went willingly to Rockingham to star on CCTV, obediently to West Yorkshire and Gateshead’s Derwent Valley. Milvus milvus had decided to hook The Conservatories in a game, of product monopoly, corporate chains, business takeovers, commercial gain.

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Scene III

1999, Harewood House & Estate, West Yorkshire

The Mild Englishman:

Those Red Kite opportunists were brought to Harewood in brand new 4 x 4s, from Christmas Common in the Chiltern Hills. They arrived with plans and maps and strange tools. Lord knows what for? They foraged in the fiefdom becoming quite a visitor lure. I watched them as I sipped my Earl Grey from the Palladian Terrace Café. Careful not to chip the Sèvres porcelain.

Milvus milvus circled above Turner’s landscape, seemingly on reconnaissance flights. They enjoyed Capability Brown’s gardens, swooping down for melted choc ice. They pouted for photos, the birding paparazzi snapped, they performed mid-air trickery, mocked fights, forged sparring, played cheeky chase and catch.

I would drink half a mild of Samuel Smiths in the Harewood Arms (before all the pubs got renamed), after watching cricket in the grounds. Sometimes there would be a motor show or the Countess would play Baroque opera on the analogue radio.

Harewood Estate security seemed a bit over zealous, perhaps paranoid for the Chippendale? Those birds could pirate anything. The priceless works of Art and first editions in the library could feed their birdbrains with knowledge I suppose, although it seemed unlikely.

Thinking of it now, I did see one Red Kite peering through the window, eagle-eyed at Lysaght’s ‘The Book of Birds,’ maybe hoping to indulge in those narcissistic words?

Well, it turns out the Red Kites were planning to destroy the ornate fans belonging to the Princess. Superb artisanship, radiating finesse, in tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl and lace, with ostrich, peacock and egret feathers. Of course Milvus milvus objected to these objets d’art and sunk them in Eccup reservoir.

Another source of tension were the owls collected by the Earl. He was President of Leeds United Football Club, but Milvus milvus feared those big eyed, head swiveling freaks getting all the admiration. So they took precautions and fleeced the entire collection, sold them at Sotheby’s, using the library books as guides in DIY auction.

[Otus scops shrieks offstage]

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Scene IV

2004, Whickham, Gateshead

Trai Anfield:

The forecast wasn’t good.

Milvus milvus were still persecuted, exterminated. Nothing had changed. Poisoned baits on carcasses were laid. Pesticides carelessly sprinkled. Post-mortems showed lethal doses of toxicade: Alphachloralose, Strychnine, Fenthion and Mevinphos. Rodenticides were sloshed and spilt. Accidental secondary killing it was claimed for other pests. The shootings were no accidents. The Wildlife Incident Investigation team led raids. But shot bodies were removed. Fatal cocktails hidden. All evidence was gotten ridden. Milvus milvus fell from the sky, a hailstorm of scavengers, for scavengers to try. Why?

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Scene V

2012, Black Isle, Scotland

Pomeranian Pom Pom:

Milvus milvus did consume the deceased and loiter at the abattoir. They exploited carcasses and corpses. They also preyed on the living. I had to move swiftly to prove I was free of rigor mortis. They flittered above my head inhaling and checking for signs of breath. I wanted to return to Pomerania before they mistook my short-legged sluggishness for the creeping in of death.

MPs were lobbied to act. Dog owners conducted petitions. Forums were created on the net. Radio programmes riled up this turning point as the mascot of Conservation was no longer a trophy for celebration. Red Kites lived too long. There was no ecological benefit. They left half mangled sheep scrota in maggot-infested nests. They wouldn’t stop their syrinx whining for one minute’s rest. And lastly, they started moving to the cities, into Newcastle, over Leeds. Their numbers had to recede.

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Scene VI

2013, Hakel Forest, Germany

Der Rotmilan Raptoresearcher:

It had been expensive to reintroduce Red Kites to the UK. Then there was the Credit Crunch. Luckily we already had der Rotmilan in Germany and a robust deficit plan. In England, to keep the shopping bills trim Milvus milvus became a form of free meat, free lunch. Red Kite burgers, kebabs and Milvus milvus in a tin. Whole families of Red Kites were triple cooked, sautéed, wings reduced at Lidl. They were braised on Master Chef demos, plucked breasts charred on the griddle.

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Act IV Scene I

2014, Scottish Highlands

The Missing Lynx:

Milvus milvus planned revenge for this new insult, attack. Despite being fully protected by some meaningless 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act.

The Conservatories presumed the distribution in the Western Palearctic was shrinking. Instead, flocks of Milvus milvus were secretly immigrating. Cousin Black Kites from Morocco became UK summer visitors and (despite their migraines) mated and mongrelled with their relatives to keep it in the genus. The Cape Verde Kite Hybrids also crossed the border carrying Avian Flu in their hand luggage, reprisal for the Diaspora.

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Scene II

2015, High Wycombe, the Chilterns

Yellow Green 23:

When the first brood of us Red Kites arrived in High Wycombe, they were strapped with altimeters and antennas on their backs. The Conservatories tracked their routines and flight paths, monitored their territories, longitudes and latitudes charted and mapped. They plotted their geo-locations systematically and surveyed them telemetrically.

Thanks to the evolution of technology, the radio trackers adapted and fused with our physiology. We grew GPS biologically. We had KiwiSat 303 Transmitters when hatched. We were automaton, mutating and guided through in-wing-built Sat Nav. We faked it on BirdCam, simulated stupidity, broadcast ‘normal’ avian behaviour and cranked up the duplicity. We tipped the mercury on our devices and pretended to be dead. The radio waves flatlined. We triggered diversions and misdirected signs.

We caused distractions and ploys; we dressed mechanical spy drones in feathered costumes. We hired our neighbour buzzards as body doubles and decoys. We disguised ourselves as unmanned aerial vehicles to espionage overland. We schemed, scammed and planned. We were the conquistadors again. It was time to make atonement for the interference of Man.

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Scene III

2017, @Rockingham, Northamptonshire

White Pink Kimberly-Clark 15:

We started businesses. MailChimped press releases. We orchestrated publicity stunts. We milked sympathy for being hunted. We were PR savvy. Led a smear campaign. We vectored the Red Kite brand, designed the concept and franchised England. We christened roads, a housing association, renamed pubs (got rid of all those Eagle Taverns, White Swans), we sponsored football clubs. We logoed driving schools, a waste management service (our specialty) and steered a tweeting media circus. We set up B2B marketing, telesales, launched the 45/46 Red Kite bus, we brewed our own ruby ales, we changed the Key Stage syllabus. We trademarked golf stores, redesigned school uniforms, funded half marathons, car rallies, health walks and of course got Tesco on board. Our taglines were everywhere and as our stocks soared, the FTSE and Dow Jones, the Nikkei and NASDAQ crashed through the market floor.

We designed a high-speed network to rip through the English fields, providing us with plentiful rail-kill, as convenience ready meals. HS2 would be our pantry and screw the locals with their trifling over spoilt country, carbon emissions, scorched ecosystems, up yours landowners with your nostalgic traditions.

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Scene IV

2020, Emmerdale, West Yorkshire

Orange Blue 9:

We reverted EU farming regs on the disposal of animal remains. We lifted the lids on slaughterhouses, unburied stiffs, picnicked on cadavers openly in fields. We stuck mobster corvids behind bars and pickled grouse in whisky jars.

Our entrepreneurialism meant we now governed every UK industry sector and every agro-techno hectare. Universities preached the Post-Milvus milvus Lecture. We rewrote graduate degrees, radicalised the course structure, Conservation modules were amended, workshops renamed. The research project on Reintroduction was suspended.

Finally, we bought exclusive rights to ‘Emmerdale.’ We were the cast and produced it. We shifted the location, twisted characters and plot. We televised episodes on every channel, every device, to excruciate, 24 hours every day, all prime time slots, omnibus, on catch up, until we drove The Conservatories to resignation and voluntary emigration.

Brown bears, beavers and bison are now creating their own returning Apps. The ideal candidate for The Conservatories’ position is via the wolf coming back.

[Enter Mute Swan]

Mute Swan:

I have little to say about this.

Exeunt

Rachel Magdeburg is a visual artist based in Gateshead. Milvus Milvus: The reCAPTURE was performed at the interdisciplinary conference  ‘Landscape, Wilderness and The Wild’ at the University of Newcastle in March 2015.

Yesterday, months into a rather poor fishing season, my nephew caught a trout, dapping hoppers at Cornacille on Lough Conn. His keen just-turned-nine-year-old eyes caught the fish’s mouth as it sucked the tangled insect-bundle down. A pause of three long-counted seconds, and he lifted the pole sharply to strike, driving the barb clean through the trout’s jaw. The brittle-limbed insect impaled on the lure shattered with the force of the strike. Forgotten motes drifted down through green water to rest eventually on the bottom, where once snail-shells and, increasingly, zebra mussels build up in shaley banks. Meanwhile, in the boat, coshed on the poll, the trout, dulling beneath its mucal coat, is dead. It is a present for me.

Once, it would have been brought ashore and gutted in the shallows, a knife point used to grate off its scales like shards of mica, each one reflecting the scudding sky over Nephin as it drifted on the water lapping around the boat.  A fire of dried gorse and driftwood would have been lit, a black kettle filled with lake water for tea, a blacker, battered frying pan produced, and the trout sizzled in butter, its flesh transforming into rose-pink flakes, its glinting skin into a crisp, brown wrapper. Portioned out on the flat of knives, its twisted skeleton would have been thrown back into the water, its fins picked over by gulls.

But not this trout. Today, they are fewer, and the moment of triumph must be prolonged. Weighed, measured, gutted, the little headless vessel is wrapped in damp newspaper and rushed home to the freezer. Once he is in there, safe, definitely not going anywhere, his fate can be deliberated. He can be defrosted and smoked, or lined with lemon-slices and baked, served cold, his striations the ribs of a discarded feather on the plate. He can be gifted, he is an offering, a totem, a sign that all is well, that fish are caught, that people eat, that we can provide.

For most of the twentieth-century, the sister lakes of Conn and Cullin were internationally renowned trout fisheries. Up to my childhood in the 1970s, a large salmon was a trophy to be shown off in the local hotel, a specimen pike might be stuffed and mounted, but trout made a good lunch, perch a good breakfast.

Today, due to a sharp decline in fish stocks, local tourism initiatives promote golf, cycling and walking holidays rather than angling, there are fewer professional ghillies, demand for boat hire has plummeted, and of the two local fishing hotels, one is closed due to fire, the other in receivership. All evidence connects the decline in fishing stocks to human intervention: rising phosphate levels due to unregulated agricultural run-off, eutrophication caused by overloading of local sewage plants and unregulated septic tanks, and the introduction of the invasive zebra mussel in the early 1990s, a development which has fundamentally affected the ecology of the lake, and changed fish feeding patterns from taking flies on the water-surface to increased bottom feeding. As fish-takes have now been reduced to less than a third of mid-twentieth-century levels, the question arises as to whether the trout are feeding on the bottom or whether they are actually there at all.

So a Lough Conn trout is not such a common thing. In the age of the supermarket and convenience store, domestic food preservation has ceased to be a necessity, and become a symptom of a need to possess, a fear of the ephemeral. Every trout might just be the last one, and freezing in some way prolongs the appreciation of the catch, becoming another link in the chain of human intervention which simultaneously disrupts the balance of nature and tries vainly to arrest the course of change. In much the same way as I am trying to preserve something of the trout myself in writing. If you can see, or smell, or taste my trout, then these words are my salt, my ice, and the trout is swimming in a virtual lake now, a watery repository from which it can be lured over and over again.

Amanda Bell works as a freelance editor and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in UCD. Her poetry has been published in print and online journals, and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and the Strokestown International Poetry Competition.

Both of your books are very place specific. What was it that attracted you to writing about these particular landscapes?

My collection of short stories is set in Cornwall, which is where I grew up. I think I had probably always taken the landscape around me for granted, but when I came to write my MA dissertation (which became three of the stories in Diving Belles) I realized that all my ideas for stories were linked to the landscape that I knew best. I seemed to have a store of images and ideas that I hadn’t really known about before. I’d been reading a lot of poetry about landscape and place, poets such as Alice Oswald and Jen Hadfield, and they inspired me to think about bringing in more magical, uncanny elements into my fiction – which quickly led me to the idea of basing the collection on Cornish folklore. The folklore is intricately connected to the landscape – stories about giants come directly from shapes in the granite, and mermaids from treacherous stretches of the coastline where people drowned – so I became interested in exploring how the stories emerged from the place.

For my novel, it was almost chance that I ended up in the landscape that inspired it. I was moving around quite a lot, renting in different places and generally being unsettled, and I ended up in a wooded river valley near Dartmoor. I found the landscape interesting because it was so different to the coastlines I had written about before – the woods changed so much with each season, and the river changed all the time depending on the weather, the light, or whatever suddenly washed down it. I thought the river valley would be an interesting place to set a novel, and I also wanted to challenge myself to write about a place that I didn’t know quite so well.

We tend to think about place as something stable and grounded and yet water seems to be fundamental to your writing. Could you say a little about the relationship between water and place in your work?

I tend to feel landlocked if I am not living near a wide stretch of water, so I guess that I find water an essential part of feeling inspired and at home in a place. I think the tension you’ve asked about, between what is stable and what is constantly in flux, is the very reason why water features so much in my fiction – it’s that conflict between stability and change that drives narratives and creates characters. I’m interested in the ways that people often resist change but how we slowly, incrementally change anyway, without really noticing it. Water is a good symbol for these kinds of ideas – and both the river and the sea offer up really interesting contrasts. The river is a constant feature of the landscape but it is also changing moment by moment: small changes such as flipping over small stones and flashing in the light, and big changes, like biting away at the bank and changing its own shape. I am also fascinated by the way the sea can wash things up out of nowhere and then cover them over again.

When you started writing Weathering, did you have the idea for the story first, and then fit that into the setting, or did the landscape influence the story?

I think I have a set of overall ideas that I will probably always come back to in my writing – ideas about home and belonging and family – but the actual story itself pretty much came out of the landscape. The river valley offered a lot in the way of dramatic tension; it is a beautiful place, with fascinating birds and plants, but it’s also isolated, very cold and damp in winter, and it’s difficult to get around. The contrast between the different aspects of the place and the landscape gave me the idea of writing from three different perspectives – playing around with the conflicting versions and experiences there are of a place. It was easy to imagine someone who loved living there, someone else who was forced to live there and desperate to get out, and someone else who had become stuck there and let the years pass by before they really knew it. These became the outlines for the three interconnected narratives that made up the novel.

Can you say a bit more about how you used these three different narratives to explore the landscape?

Each chapter in the novel follows the story from one of the three main characters’ point of view. All of their concerns and perspectives collide and contrast, but also sometimes overlap and mirror each other. They all have very different perspectives on the place they have found themselves in, based on their past and present experiences of it. But equally, their perspectives tend to colour or distort how they view the place too – so because Ada, one of the main characters, doesn’t want to be there, she notices grey skies and gloomy weather and the constant thump of the river, whereas Pepper, her young daughter, who is fascinated by the place, notices the colour of mushrooms and the flash of a kingfisher. Each of the characters can’t help but bring their own baggage along, which influences how they view the landscape.

Both your books draw on particular places, but there aren’t any specific place names or locations mentioned. Why did you make this decision?

I decided when I first started to write Diving Belles, that although I was writing about a specific place, ie. Cornwall, I didn’t want to use specific place names, or real towns or anything like that. Partly it is to do with the fact that, as soon as you say, ‘this story is set here’ then there is a chance you will have got it wrong in some way, some minor detail will inevitably not be quite plausible in your story (at least, I imagine that would be what would happen in my stories!). Also, everyone’s perceptions of place are different, and I wanted to draw on this and try to create a sort of patchwork effect, an overall impression of a place, which people can then situate as they want. I hope it allows the reader to draw more on their own imaginations and perceptions. Places are a combination of detail, imagination, and personal experience, and I draw more on that idea in my writing I think.

How different was it trying to evoke a sense of place in a novel compared to short stories?

It was quite a different experience. In the short stories I think I used broader bush strokes in lots of ways, because the place had to be captured quickly to get each story going. I probably conjured up a more general and less specific landscape than the one I created in my novel. Partly this is to do with the sheer amount of time and space spent in the one small setting of the novel, and maybe partly to do with having more experience this time around.

However, writing about a place in the novel presented difficulties, because there are certain things you categorically have to talk about, and you can’t gloss over and use sleight of hand in the same way as you can in short stories. For example, in the novel, I suddenly had to think about things like, ‘where is the nearest petrol pump?’ ‘Does it actually make sense that this particular bird would be around at this exact time of year?’ ‘I need there to be bright colour in the landscape for the main character to notice and wonder at, but apart from maroon bracken what else is there in early winter?’ (Lots of things, including spindle fruits and gorse!) In lots of ways the narrative forced me to create a more detailed picture.

You have described your writing as magical realist; is this style/technique particularly useful for evoking landscape and place?

Magical realism can offer a different perspective on a place and a landscape. By slightly skewing our perceptions of the everyday, it can more strongly evoke the beauty, the wonder and the strangeness that is already inherently there. In Cornish folklore for example, the buccas, or wind-spirits, draw our attention to the ferocity and temperament of the Cornish weather. Mermaids evoke the beauty and danger of the sea. In stories of mermaids luring men out to sea, there is the whole history of drownings in a community lurking under the surface.

I find ghosts a particularly interesting way of exploring landscape and place. In my novel, one of the three main characters is a ghost who is stuck in the river because her ashes have been scattered there. I hoped that the ghost would add another layer to the evocation of the place. She is suddenly a part of the river, and a part of the landscape; she experiences the tiny details of the landscape, but also gains a sense of its vast scale. Magical realism highlights the richness of the places we find ourselves in, and encourages us to wonder at things – the magic is already there.

You mentioned before about being inspired by poetry, how exactly does this kind of writing feed into your fiction?

I definitely read more poetry than fiction while I am in the depths of a project. I find it useful to read from different genres to the ones that I’m working in. I enjoy poetry that is very rich in images and description and which uses unexpected, startling language. As I mentioned earlier, I found that magical elements in poetry such as Alice Oswald’s Dart and the strange, uncanny glimpses in John Burnside’s poetry, helped inspire me to bring these elements into my fiction. I think reading poetry also encourages me to make sure I’m always searching for the best word to use when describing something, and not to just go for the easy option.

Do you see yourself continuing to write about the South West in the future?

I hope so! Partly it depends on practicalities, such as where I will find myself living. But I am keen to go back to writing about the sea and the coastline next. I think that a river worked well in the novel because it twined right through its length, whereas the sea has made me think again about a short story collection – the small things that are washed up and taken away, the ebb and flow of the tides suggest small surges of stories. I would like to be more specific place-wise with these short stories, and set them in North Cornwall perhaps, which is near where I grew up. And I would like to carry on exploring the idea of ghosts – I am really interested in the idea of haunted landscapes.

I was shocked when it went. Why, when clearance must be hard-wired into our psyche? The Green three streets away is a product of it.  When the cypress went I could, for the first time, just see, over the jumble of roofs and aerials, the bare lopsided crowns of the lime trees which march along its western edge. It’s not actually a village green, but a scrap of the great heath which curved down from the north between two rivers, the Crane and the Thames. The woody plants on this alluvial soil would have been birch and gorse. Archaeologists say that back in a warm period between the Ice Ages, this mound between the rivers was treeless tundra or steppe. Then, after the ice, came the trees. And then came humans and millennia of tree clearance and grazing, and the mound between the rivers evolved into lowland heath, that enigmatic ecosystem of southern England.

The heath was vast. Four thousand acres stretching from the hunting forest of Windsor to the west, north of Staines moor, bound by the Thames to the east. Follow the Crane north west from here through soggy woods of oak and ash and you reach the remaining fragment, a patchwork of acid grassland, reed bed, poor pasture and – yes, even now – heather, the dull low scrub that spills violet pools of flower in the bleached brittle straw of the long grass of late summer.

It’s no wonder that Shakespeare took King Lear to a heath to lose his marbles. Even this small remnant meddles with your wits. In spite of the sun and the tower blocks and the  planes lumbering down to ‘Heath’row (only the name now – the place lost under tarmac), you quickly lose your bearings among the scrappy birches and hawthorns, between the dense mounding brambles. The tattooed sunburnt couple, their flimsy polythene bags still straining with unopened cans of beer, can’t tell you how to get out, even though they try, blearily. It’s disorientating. I push my bike three times past the same young oak before I realise I’m going round in circles. Parallax lost. Unmappable. No wonder that in the fifteenth century the value of Hounslow Heath was not weighed by the acre but by the number of swine it could support. Despite being the basis for the Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, from which the whole of the British Isles would be mapped, the Heath is just an irregular white space on the map.  The Romans ignored it too. Set a straight road across it, the fastest point from A to B, taking them to richer lands out west. The Roundheads garrisoned their Model Army here in the civil war.  Then the highwaymen came later.

In the last three hundred years the Heath has been tamed, reclaimed, ‘improved.’ London’s  nineteenth century market garden spread, brought order and straight lines to the land, new technology detaching farming from the soil it worked, from the subtle waves of geology that express themselves in floristic gradations and disjunctions. The folk memory of flooding and drought in this place or that seeped away.  My bit of the Heath, the southern curve between the rivers, has been drained, levelled, enclosed and divided. First came estates for grand houses – weekend retreats for wealthy Londoners. Then, divided again for worker’s cottages, divided again by the five ‘Cross Roads’, running north-south between the old thoroughfares to Staines and Hampton Hill. The workhouse, stables, Regency villas, Victorian terraces, small factories here and there, Edwardian maisonettes, ‘thirties apartment blocks,  ‘fifties council houses backing onto the allotments: every building has its bit of land.

In spite of this, things still grow. Substantial trees, shrubs, herbs and bulbs. The garden I look onto is boxed in by others of the same size and shape, long and thin. The area of back gardens between our road and the next must add up to three acres, disputed territory for the cats and foxes that scale the wooden fences without effort. The great British passion for gardening has brought in cedars from the Levant, maples from Japan, magnolias from Sichuan, gum trees from Australia, cabbage palms from New Zealand, conifers from North America, figs from the Caucasus. Looking from my window over this suburban cornucopia, there are such textures and colours, such diversity of flower and form, so far from the simple palette, the limited variety of the Heath. You might think that these back gardens together make a thriving natural oasis of abundant biodiversity. And that this must be replicated in suburbs all over London. But they are no more than the sum of their parts. The false and Monterey cypresses may approximate to our native conifers – yew, Scots pine and juniper. It is a poor approximation though. They are good enough for birds to land on, nest and shelter in but further down the food chain, not much cop. I planted a ninebark, a suckering shrub from North America. I love it for its graceful arching habit, its corymbs of creamy flowers, the glossy deep red composite heads of fruit that come afterwards and the way the mature stems shed their skin in coppery ribbons. This is just decoration. The ninebark co-evolved with two moths and a handful of insects of other orders, indigenous to its native land. Now, somehow, it seems to me to be a lesser thing, growing here in southern England, without its dependants. Our two native oaks support more than two hundred species of invertebrate. If they grow for even a fraction of their nine hundred allotted years, imagine the bird life their teeming ecosystem can support. Lowland heath is the dwindling refuge of the Dartford warbler, woodlark and nightjar, of the rare sand lizard and the smooth snake, of the ladybird spider and the southern damselfly and the black bog ant. Where will they go when all the Heath becomes a golf course?

The people who chopped down the false cypress in my neighbour’s garden did it carelessly, violently. Afterwards the silhouette of the tree persisted like a ghost image on my retina. Parallax suspended. Over the days that followed, the birds made sense of the new view, cross hatching the space, rebuilding the three dimensions with movement and sound. The lilting flight of the goldfinches led my eye past the Indian tree of heaven to fruit trees in a neighbouring garden that I had never known were there. I caught the stop-start of the rowdy gang of long tailed tits in the shifting Australian eucalyptus several houses away before they burst through the lilac under my window. I could see for the first time, five doors down, behind the old tyre business, the dark stand of Monterey cypress – another American west-coaster –  alive with fieldfares, feeding on the red fruits of the cotoneaster below. I hung out of the window to listen to their dense communal chatter. But it’s the flaring crowns of the lime trees over the Green that have drawn my focus beyond the Disneyland concoction laid out under my window, drawn me up and over and back and through to an older man-made landscape, a monument to a time when we were precariously close to the land, now supplanted by the relentless expansion of the megacity.

I can admire all these exotics, enjoy their exuberance, their beauty, their vitality in spite of their displacement. But as the earth tilts on its axis and we hurtle towards Spring I have made resolutions. Here’s what I will do. I will make sure that the council has a tree preservation order on the big old ash several gardens north. And alongside the fig and the coral bark maple, the mock Orange and the ninebark, I will grow holly, hawthorn and birch, closing the gap between the handsome, sterile treescape and the ancient heathland whose rhythms still pulse in the river gravels beneath us.

Katherine Price wrote the Kew Guide (2014) for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and her writing about plants, gardens and natural habitats has been published in Litro, The Plantsman, The Alpine Gardener and The English Garden. Her first novel, The Greening of Louise Long, is being represented by agents Richford Becklow. She worked as a horticulturist at Kew for ten years and is now in the comms team at SOAS, University of London.

Last year The Clearing visited Morecambe Bay in a provoking and memorable essay by Paul Kingsnorth. We are very pleased this week to be returning with a fresh pair of eyes. Karen Lloyd has lived for most of her life near the bay and in what follows she visits this strange and challenging landscape with Cedric Robinson, the ‘Queen’s Guide to the Sands’.

On that day, after weeks of mild weather and hardly any rain, the Kent looked nothing like a river. How different its character from the clear, voluble stretches that tumbled and splashed down from the Kentmere hills, passing through the valley and woods close to our house in Kendal. It was the same element but there the comparison stopped. The river was wide and glossy, more a shallow, sky-reflecting lake than a flowing body of water as it arced towards the south on a lazy journey, passing Silverdale, Carnforth and Morecambe. The tractor pulled up at the rivers’ edge and we climbed down, then rolled our trouser legs high. Barry handed us each a sturdy wooden stick and each of us carried a bundle of brobs, hoisting them onto our shoulders. I left my brand new camera in the trailer. Andy was made of sterner stuff and took his along.

The men analysed the condition of the river, and from their talk it was as if it was a living being to them.

‘A wind from the north-west like today pushes the river slow and wide,’ Cedric said, ‘but a big wind and heavy rain makes it cut a direct path, and it’ll move at speed – much deeper too.’

I’ve spent significant periods of time walking alone in the mountains. I’ve been lost and disorientated in mists, but this was something new, this sense of flat space where distances are difficult. We were about four miles out on the bay, halfway between Humphrey Head and White Creek at Arnside. I wasn’t alone and of course I couldn’t have been in safer hands, but there was something about this landscape and our remoteness from land that made me uneasy; it was a new sensation for me. Cedric climbed back in the tractor, shouting as he did.

‘I don’t like this bloody tractor one bit. I don’t trust it either,’ and he headed away, leaving the three of us behind in the middle of that expanse of sand.

Image © Karen Lloyd

I’d planned an early morning rendezvous with Cedric Robinson, the nation’s only ‘Queen’s Guide to the Sands.’ We’d talked on the phone the evening before, and I found him still giddy, fizzing even, from having lunch with the Queen and Princess Anne on their official visit to South Cumbria that day.

‘We were asked to go into the dining room and find our place names. Well, I found two! One next to Princess Anne, and the other next to the Queen! So I went to find a steward and I told him and do you know what he said? He said “well, Cedric, it looks as if you will just have to choose for yourself who you sit next to.”

‘So,’ Cedric said, ‘I chose Princess Anne. And she was absolutely lovely, and do you know she was a very good conversationalist.’ I told him he’s a great one for hob-knobbing with royalty.

Cedric’s status in the Morecambe Bay area is legendary. His knowledge of the tides and the rivers that shift their route through the sands sometimes by a mile or more in one night is unsurpassed. He’s the fifty-fifth Guide to the Sands and has been in the job for fifty years. At eighty, he has the physique of a man half his age; he’s tall, tanned, (or weathered), big- chested and upright, a man in his element and comfortable in his own skin.

Cedric was going out to test the sands and the state of the river Kent ahead of two crossings later that week, one for a group of horse and carriage enthusiasts and then a weekend cross-bay walk. Any crossing depends on the weather, but more than that on the amount of rain that’s fallen on higher ground. In a bad summer like the previous four or five, more walks are cancelled than take place.

We planned to meet at Humphrey Head, a whale-backed, limestone outcrop projecting into the bay from the low lying fields of the Cartmel peninsula. Here, local legend would have you believe, the last wolf in England was pursued and killed.

Image © Karen Lloyd

Early the next morning I drove over from Kendal and into the small lanes that lead to the headland. Rounding a bend a young leveret was sitting mid-road, warming itself up in the sun. It moved off distractedly, lolloping ahead with black-tipped, pale-edged ears like vertical radar, switching direction continuously. Articulating its powerful hind legs, slowly it began to jig from side to side like a wind-up toy, all eyes, ears and legs and then disappeared under the shelter of a hawthorn hedge.

In the small car park under the cliff face the quality of silence was immediate; a rare moment. The engine ticked as it cooled and a wren chit-chitted in amongst young hazel and hawthorn on the cliff face, otherwise all was utterly still. Poking above the marsh grass to the south west, the turbines of Walney Wind Farm were illuminated by the low sun, glimmering like a row of distant candles. Standing beside Humphrey Head there’s an illusion that the surface of the bay slopes upwards, rising higher than the land around it. It’s a trick of the light and the land and the vast, flat distances. A woodpecker called from the scrub close by. I could see Hoad Monument, the hilltop lighthouse folly at Ulverston, standing out from the shadowed hills behind it. I’d learned the word ‘glas’ from the Welsh poet, Gillian Clarke, a potent word for the particular blue-green of hills. There it was, defining the white monument, the glas of Kirby Moor.

Forty five minutes after our agreed meeting time, a spindly, aged tractor bounced into view with Cedric at the driver’s seat, pulling an eccentric-looking jalopy, part child-catchers wagon from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and part ancient farm wagon. It was all patched ply-wood and weather-blasted Perspex.

‘Sorry we’re late’ Cedric said ‘I had to borrow a tractor. Mine’s gone in for a service.’

I told him not to worry, and climbed up into the trailer where his two assistants, Andy and Barry sat on a row of back-to-back benches. The floor was strewn with laurel branches. We set off. Within seconds, Cedric stopped and was down on the ground checking the best route across a deep gully, and then the same a second time. With a large shovel he dug out a smoother path, but we still held on tight as the tractor and trailer plunged into and out of each one, bucking and bouncing, before the tractor reached smoother ground.

I looked up above the cliffs of Humphrey Head and saw there, swivelling on the air, a peregrine. It folded its wings, dropped a distance, then rose up again on the morning thermals.

‘They’re doing well here,’ Barry said. ‘The young have fledged; we saw them a few weeks back.’

Travelling out onto the bay there was a new sightline of the headland. The rocks rose out of the sand, then continued upwards in folded waves of limestone. With a row of fence posts like tiny spines along the ridge it reminded me of a sea creature emerging out of, or plunging underneath the bay.

The tide had been out for hours but a layer of water remained like a second skin over the sands and in places there were deeper pockets and shallow lakes of standing water. The trailer rode into and out of channels like a ship ploughing the ocean. In the lee of the headland, a solitary egret stood white and motionless, like marble. Further out the surface of the sands changed and became smoother. We made a wide curving entrance to the bay.

Another shift in terrain and the trailer began to bounce up and down. We held on to the seats again, passing small cliff edges that had formed and collapsed again as big waves had washed against them. After that an area where the sands had formed into mounds, like the glacial moraine of a retreating glacier.

‘I call this the Somme’ Barry said, ‘These mounds come from the weight of the tide passing over areas of softer or more compressed sand.’

I saw cockles heaped up within the mounds, their edges semi-exposed like treasure.

‘The past few cold winters have finished them off. They’re mostly dead, no good to anyone’ he’d said. The beds had been closed since the cockling disaster in 2004; the echoes keep travelling.

The surface changed again and we moved on over a skin of perfectly becalmed water that reflected the sky, so that as I looked down we drove over intense cobalt-blue and cumulus cloud streets. The tyre marks fractured the surface, distances elided and light spooled on the sinuous ground like heavy white blossom. I remarked on the way the surface changes from one area to the next and Andy said ‘It does, all the time; every day sometimes. Over at Arnside the sands are as smooth as glass-paper just now.’

The guides have used laurel branches for centuries for marking the safe crossing routes over the sands. Their thick leaves stay on the branches even when submerged daily by the tide. They’re known as ‘brobs’. They’re there in the paintings of the bay that Turner made. We drove past brobs that had been put in position on previous visits.  From a distance they resembled people who had somehow been left behind, lone figures adrift on the empty bay.

‘That one; the one all on its own’ Barry said. ‘We call it the “man brob”’, as if he’d read my mind.

Image © Karen Lloyd

The three of us were standing at the edge of the river in the middle of the bay. Further downstream where Cedric had stopped the tractor, I watched as he wandered, looking, stopping, and setting new brobs. I began to wonder what time the tide was due in and how long we would be out there.

A helicopter droned in from the east and swung in closer to have a look at us. Resisting the temptation to wave I wondered what the people inside thought of us, standing at the edge of a river in the middle of the bay, miles away from land.

Barry and I paddled into the river. Andy was already mid way across and taking photographs. The waters changed gradually from shallow and clear to grainy, textured water that came above our knees. I stopped to hoist my trousers higher, then taking slow steps in the cloudy water, I let out a cry of surprise.

‘What’s up?’ Barry asked.

‘A fluke!’ I said, ‘I stood on a fluke.’

The squirming sensation had caught me unawares. The fluke was the flounder commonly found in Morecambe Bay.

‘Last time that happened I was about eight years old. My pal’s dad took us out to tread for them, but I remember I didn’t fancy the idea of standing on any.’ The traditional way of catching flounder is to feel for them with the feet, then reach in and under the water to pick out the fish before it had a chance to wriggle away.

A moment later there was the distinctive bounce of a fish on my leg. I wondered what, if anything, the fish thought about it.

Twice in the crossing Barry stopped to test the flow-rate with his low tech device. He simply watched the speed of the water pushing past his stick. We waded further and after some minutes came to the other side, throwing the brobs down in a heap. Andy arrived alongside us, and working together the two of them began setting the brobs into place. Andy pushed and wound his stick far down into the mud.

‘Are you ready?’ he said, then pulled out the stick as Barry pushed a brob down into the loosened sand, securing it as the mud and water closed the hole again.

Over our heads a small group of young gulls had come winging. They flew as if intoxicated, directionless, mob-handed, adolescent, their cries argumentative against the complete silence of the bay. They flittered down onto the sands and joined a long line of birds that had settled in to feed on the surface a distance away. Looking through the binoculars I saw that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of oystercatchers. I’d never seen so many in one place before.

I’d visited Cedric at home on a freezing February afternoon, and sitting in front of the banked up fire, my cheeks growing hotter by the minute, he’d told me his name for oystercatchers.

‘I call them “sea-pie”. They’re wonderful birds. I’ve watched them riding the bow wave when the bore comes in. Fifty years ago the bore was a very different kind of a beast. You could hear it coming a mile off, with a three foot standing wave at the front and sea-pie skimming the top of it. What a sight that was.’

Stitched in amongst the oystercatchers were countless gulls. Out there on the bay, it was the undisputed kingdom of birds.

Cedric drove back towards us. He climbed down and left the engine sputtering. ‘It’s changed its course again; do you think?’ he called across the river. Barry and Andy shouted agreement. ‘Significantly. Moved about half a mile I think.’

‘What’s that sticking out of the water? Is it a bird?’ Cedric asked.

‘I’ll go and have a look’ Andy said, and began walking downriver towards a dark object at the river’s edge. It didn’t fly away.

‘It’s a brob alright’ he shouted back to us. He pulled it out and re-set it on the river-bank.

‘We set them in pairs’ Barry said as we watched. ‘They’re like channel markers for shipping, so it’s clear where to cross the river.’

A dark rain cloud came close, pushed along by the westerly wind. We wondered if it would release its load onto us as we felt the first large splots of rain. But it skimmed past and headed Morecambe way. As it moved it grew darker and moments later bands of heavy rain fell from it. I could imagine tourists on the imported sand beaches at Morecambe stuffing towels into bags and rushing off to the cafés until it passed.

Cedric came wading back across the river towards us, and singing at the top of his voice. If Cedric formed a religion, I might be tempted to follow.

With the four of us together again, Cedric marked the time and the men made calculations about the tide times for the coming days. It’s crucial, of course, to get it right. That’s part of the reason the men were there; not just to test the riverbed for quicksand and mark safe crossings away from it, but also to mark the time and to know when to be back on dry land again. It was eleven thirty. In another four hours the place we stood would be submerged beneath ten metres of water.

Andy Mortimer FRSA ‘bayscapes’

Barry’s a blow-in of eleven years from Manchester. He wanted to know the names of the mountains that framed the view at the back of the bay. I named them for him.

‘That’s Fairfield, Red Screes, then the gap of Kirkstone Pass, then Caudale Moor and the hills of Kentmere; Froswick, Ill Bell and Yolk.’ Cedric overheard and said: ‘I’ve never heard of any of them.’ I wondered if he was having a joke. But maybe not, after all the bay is his territory; he’s on intimate terms with one hundred and twenty square miles of tidal estuary. I said ‘I like the fact that you can see the source of this river, the mountains of Kentmere, just there.’

Cedric pointed to a wide bend in the river a distance away. ‘See the way light sparkles on that stretch of water? That shows the river’s moving much faster down there.’ And I did, but a question formed itself, of how Cedric’s knowledge can be kept going into the future. You can’t archive this stuff, nor create a websites for it. You can’t communicate about this place by email; it has to be experienced.

Andy and Barry continued setting brobs. Cedric and I began to wade back across the river towards the idling tractor and we talked about the continuation of the over-sands route that crosses between Flookburgh and Ulverston. It involves the crossing of two more rivers, the Leven and the Crake. We’d stopped to talk mid river, and as we talked I found that my unease and that sense of unfamiliarity had all evaporated, moved away like the dark cloud, and all the while the river pushed on, pressing gently against our legs.

Oystercatchers slung past us in arrowhead formation. Nodding in their direction of travel Cedric said, ‘We’ll head over to that bank for our coffee.’ From a high vantage point and with the tide out the bay may appear to be one continuous stretch of sand. I couldn’t see a bank, but I knew that the bay was anything but flat. More pictures came to me from the winters’ afternoon by Cedric’s fire.

‘There are banks and gullies out there; great holes big enough to swallow a tractor, a double-decker bus even. We’d go night fishing, with tractors, depending on the state of the tides, fishing for shrimps. One night we were driving along in the moonlight and all of a sudden matey on my right disappeared, tractor and all. He’d gone straight into a massive gully. A ‘melgrave’ we call these big holes. Anyway, he managed to climb out alright but the tractor was another story. We never saw it again.’

He described too how, after yet another episode of unnervingly heavy rains that we’ve had over these past few years, he’d gone out to assess the state of the river. He said he’d been left almost without speech, and that’s something.

‘The river had cut a new channel overnight, six miles away from its previous course.’ He described the river that day as being ‘like a roaring sea.’

The tang of coffee filled the trailer and Cedric held court, telling us tale after tale. His is a rich, deep seam of powerful memories, and he offered them up with generosity, for our entertainment and I thought, for himself, for the vigour of remembering.

‘I’d gone out shrimping at night with our Jean. She was about twelve then I think. It was as clear as a bell when we set off; the stars were all out, and the moon, and you could see the lights of all the villages around the bay. It was a good night for navigation. We were miles out, and busy with the fishing, then when we came to go home I looked up and the fog had rolled in. We couldn’t see a thing. Well that night I navigated home by listening for the sound of the river. That did the trick. Anyway, we lived to tell the tale.’

Immense cumulus clouds streets had continued to form around the edge of the Bay. They built height over the land, leaving the sky above the bay a clear and potent blue. I’ve seen this so often, the sky clearing, as if putting itself in order ready for the approach of the tide. As we set off for Humphrey Head again, the headland appeared like a wave swelling out of the sands, and in the distance Peel Castle shimmered above translucent air. In the heat haze the hills of Furness were breaking up into segments that moved and danced.

On the journey back to land we passed close to the Man Brob, and as we drove past Barry said ‘A few weeks ago we came out and I could see something odd about the shape of it. As we got closer whatever it was took off. It was a peregrine. He’d been sitting there in splendid isolation until we came along.’

We were back, rolling over the saltmarsh and bumping into and out of the two gullies. Underneath the limestone cliffs, I climbed down. We said our farewells and the tractor disappeared up the lane. I listened as the hum of its engine faded off into the countryside until all was quiet again. I had a sense that those hours out on the bay would stay with me for a long time, glimmering like the river as it moved by degrees further and further into the distance.

Karen Lloyd lives in Kendal, Cumbria, and has lived for most of her life within a stone’s throw of Morecambe Bay. In November she was awarded a Distinction for her MLitt at Stirling University where her tutor was  Kathleen Jamie, and is working on a book, The Gathering Tide, about a journey around the edgelands of the bay.

With special thanks to Cendric Robinson, Andy Mortimer and Barry Kieran.