Not a Victorian orchard tree

which ladders wobbled round,

no rose-red pippin, whose veined flesh

old men in Kent once found,

not Evesham’s young grafts, weighed by fruit

a tractor’s grab from ground.

A tree not quite as old as us,

not damson or true plum,

it straggles down our garden’s end

where only wild bees come,

sucker from market garden trees

above the railway’s hum.

With blossoms fat as newborn’s fists

it sails into the sky,

blind white on blue, before late hail,

squirrels or frost come by.

It bears sour fruit. Yet every March

it seizes, stuns the eye.

SUTTON HOO

Since it had always puzzled her

what her lands brooded in green mounds

in empty days before the war

she wrote her brisk list: Mr Brown,

hired expert; her own gardener;

the gamekeeper, between his rounds.

‘Dig the first trench,’ called Mr Brown,

‘until you reach the bed of sand.’

The gardener nodded. So the tomb

had grown from his fine silts? Unplanned,

he laid his best spade slowly down,

turned an iron rivet in his hand.

It was a ship. King Radwold slept

with his fine swordbelt on his back,

a gold clasp on his treetrunk chest,

his silver plates, for feasting, stacked.

Cleaned by the gardener’s rags, they pressed

in moss, like perfect peaches, packed.

The scholars came in chugging cars.

This was the King who left Christ’s fold.

The keeper left, to sink his jars,

hoped for his cut if plate was sold.

The mound rose silent, carved by scars.

The landowner felt briefly old.

The gardener scraped both workboots clean,

surveyed the jobs which lay before.

Unpruned buds weighed her favourite vine.

Six dozen leeks? He stretched up, sore,

watched sun join King; then, perfectly,

in fluent Anglo-Saxon, swore.

UNDER THE VAULT

(THE MASON’S BRACKET, GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL)

Because we both sit here alone,

she speaks, lips broad unmodish red,

by pinnacles of fretted stone.

‘How did they build this, then?’ she says.

‘Barrows?’ I guess. Pulleys’ long jolt –

From blinding glass, spears glare by kings,

Christ’s thin bared face crowns ranks of wings.

But where a lesser light is thrown

one ledge, hacked from rough limestone, shows

a boy, who tumbles down the vault.

Apprentice, he hangs from his stone.

His arms are spread, his legs are curled.

Did drink or dizziness descend,

too long a night with his first girl?

High on a platform, weighed by sky,

his master stretches helpless hands

to boy, hair like an angel’s, streamed.

Unskilled in suffering, alone,

he crouches on unsoftened stone.

His God is dead. He carves our cry.
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953, and is descended from many generations of skilled farm workers. She is or has been a metal finisher, Oxford student, technical librarian, parent, impoverished horse owner and grassroots political activist. Alison has published nine poetry collections, won an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondeley Award and has had many poems broadcast on BBC Radio. Her latest collection, Skies, is published by Carcanet in March.

RESEARCH DIARY: 10 APRIL

So much for Fenland’s flawless provision plan.

My train has been delayed by 2 hours and I’m on the platform at Peterborough station. I can see what I assume to be an unauthorised encampment in an old disused car park. A dozen or so white caravans are sprawled across it, each with a tall orange cylinder propped up outside. People are coming and going in cars and vans, children are running around playfully – being called by their mothers. Black bin-bags rustle in the breeze.

I want to capture this, but realise with horror that I’ve packed my camera in my suitcase. I throw my case on the ground, rip it open and start pulling things out to find the little black case. I begin clicking, trying not to zoom in too much – I don’t want to invade the families’ privacy, but I do want the people who will see my photos to see the conditions clearly. The sparse, gritty environment; the hard concrete almost glimmering in the heat; the dull industrial backdrop. When I think I have intruded enough, I look away and see a lady waiting on a bench wink at me. I half smile back, do up my suitcase and make my way to the train. She says: ‘Not a pretty picture is it?’

A friend recently told me about a dispute his parents had with the local authority over the building of a new house along their street. His parents enjoyed a view over the meadow, which the new home would obscure, so they asked if it could be built a few metres back. Their request was contested, the local authority claiming that if the house was built any further back, the old barn across the meadow would no longer be visible from the village. Thus it was agreed the house should be built in the original location as planned and my friend’s parents made peace with the idea that they would lose their view of the meadow. However, shortly after the completion of the new house, the local authority had the old barn torn down.

My friend told me this story in response to one of my own, from my fieldwork days, about a caravan-dwelling Romani family who were not granted planning permission to extend the living space on their own property due to fears they would ruin the rural view from a nearby village. I can understand how this friend found the two incidents relatable, but they are not exactly the same. In the barn dispute, the new neighbours were always going to be allowed to live in a location of their choosing. The same cannot be said for Traveller Gypsies.

While conducting my fieldwork between 2009 and 2011 on caravan site policy implementation in the English countryside, I found that other caravan-dwelling families had also been denied permission to build homes for themselves in ‘rural’ settings, often given the explanation that their developments would create an obstruction to the land or to a view of the countryside.

Popular thinking about Gypsies might conjure romantic images of sunny days and bow-topped caravans drawn by horses, ladies with wavy dark hair, golden jewellery and full skirts, reading cards or making stew. These women might have tall, swarthy husbands seasonally picking fruit or dancing and singing in the streets, or, even better, in a clearing in the woods. Jennifer Lopez, in her 2001 music video for ‘Ain’t it Funy’, uses all of these tropes:

These fantasies are further elaborated in novels, such as Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which features the enigmatic Gypsy Esmeralda and has been adapted numerous times for film. Additionally, this Disneyfication of Roma life has been exploited as real history for the tourism industry. You can now rent traditional wagons from companies like Gypsy Caravan Holiday Breaks, offering an experience ‘lost to the modern world. Tucked away in the tranquility of the beautiful Somerset countryside’. Similar ‘childhood fantasies’ are offered ‘in the middle of lovely Monmouthshire countryside’ as well as ‘in the peaceful hills of South Shropshire’.

From Gypsy Caravan Holiday website

Yet caravan-dwelling lifestyles in Britain, Ireland and other parts of Western Europe are not as hedonistic as they are made to seem.  These are harsh lives, built upon a long history of oppression and violence, exclusion and expulsion, although the romanticism of caravan-dwelling – in particular, Roma – groups serves to obscure this history, while at the same time demonizing and ridiculing families in the present-day. Take, for instance, Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding:

Caravan site allocation in the UK is one of the most contentious areas of planning policymaking. While town and village growth is acceptable to a certain degree, it is directly related to who is believed to belong to the community. Gypsies and Travellers are viewed as outsiders, making their inclusion in local communities through the provision of caravan-sites an emotive topic. Moreover, as rural villages are forced to become towns, there is a worry that so-called natural characteristics of the landscape – such as meadows – will be lost. The provision of caravan sites on the fringes of already stretched towns and villages troubles those who feel their new neighbours are invading a threatened and scarce pleasure. This anxiety is also evident in distant cities whereby the policymakers (such as the former Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and David Cameron), who are charged with deciding how land should be constructed as either urban or rural. Planning officials talk about ‘challenges’ and ‘complexities’ associated with this sensitive area of policymaking, especially when they are being pushed to find solutions. The great preoccupations over the last 10 years within caravan policy documents have been the management of unauthorised developments and encampments, and the preservation of green-belt land. According to numerous planning strategies, green-belt land can be used for caravan sites when there is no other local alternative, although this has not necessarily deterred certain practitioners from preventing access. In 2011, 80 families were evicted from Dale Farm (an unauthorised development in Essex) by the local authority, after 10 years of living there. The local authority argued the land was green-belt. Eric Pickles was found to be illegally discriminating against Gypsies and Travellers by the High Court earlier this year due to his use of the ‘calling in’ policy in 2013, which concerned precisely this – denying planning permission for sites on green belt land. Most notably, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) recommended last year that the official definition of Travellers and Gypsies should be changed to only reflect those with regular nomadic habits. Current policies include families who have settled within an area permanently (for various personal reasons) in their strategies. Although this plan has recently been abandoned by the government, one cannot help but ponder the implications of such an amendment to caravan site provision. This change in policy would have excluded any and all permanently settled caravan-dwelling families of Romani and Pavee descent from future site provision considerations.

The announcement of these policy plans was originally published in September 2014, causing a serious backlash from within Traveller Gypsy communities as well as among activists. However, the reality is that certain political representatives have been calling for this shift for several years. Caroline Spelman served as the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs between 2010 and 2012. During this period she commented on disputes between house-dwellers and caravan-dwelling Traveller Gyspies, stating at a conference in her West Midlands constituency: ‘We need more authorised sites. The travelling community should be indeed travelling. The problem with our authorised sites is people come and they stay, so it fills up the site’. So, on the one hand Spelman seems to acknowledge the need for more site provision, while on the other she blames this need on caravan-dwelling families not being mobile enough.

Incidentally, protesters in the village of Meriden (in Spelman’s constituency) demonstrated against the establishment of a new caravan site, with the Daily Express’s Fiona Webster reporting:

Patsy is part of a group of villagers trying to stop a gypsy development on a beautiful meadow in the once peaceful community of Meriden […] ‘There seems to be one law for them and another for us,’ says Patsy […] ‘We also handed in a letter of protest signed by West Midlands MEP Nikki Sinclaire.’ Ms Sinclaire said: ‘It is obvious to everyone that in this instance the settled community of Meriden has had its right to a private and family life fundamentally breached by this unethical attempt at development. Not only that but the planning system and laws put in place leave people feeling powerless and frustrated.’

This illustrates for readers a typically ‘beautiful’ and ‘peaceful’ rural image, which is under threat of being destroyed by wandering undesirables. The caravan-site in the village, especially in the meadow, is clearly considered to be a deviation from the natural order, from the nostalgic, bucolic vision of how things should remain, or revert, in that ‘beautiful meadow in the once peaceful community’.

Deviating from this vision of how things ‘should’ be is an ‘unethical development’, and the rights of the house-dwellers are being ‘breached’. Noticeably absent from Webster’s article is any discussion about the rights or experiences of the caravan-dwelling families who were evicted from their unauthorised encampment after a near three-year stand-off with the villagers of Meriden. Instead, the demonstrators are framed as the vulnerable victims: ‘[T]his used to be a beautiful, peaceful part of the village. Now they’re taking that away from us’. Similarly, in an article about Dale Farm the following year, by Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail, attention is drawn to the apparent strain Traveller Gypsy children have put on rural infrastructures:

Today, the 110-strong school register is made up almost entirely of travellers, with the exception of three pupils […] The tragedy is that while the gipsy children have been given their precious ‘human right’ to an education, the children of Basildon tax- payers have scandalously been denied their right to one.

Platell’s statements show the NIMBYism inherent in the protests against the settlement of caravan-dwellers. Where planning officials and politicians may argue for fairness in the planning system, they either fail or do not wish to engage with the possibility of active social-exclusion tactics being targeted at Traveller Gypsies. We could ask ourselves, as environmentally minded as we might each be, when do we stop caring about the fate of families and their human rights in order to preserve a piece of land?

Throughout her article, Webster echoes the protesters’ outrage, openly identifying with their mission. ‘It’s not hard to see why the protesters feel so protective. Meriden is set against the rolling countryside in the exact centre of England […]’, she says. Of course, if local authorities provided sufficient and acceptable caravan-site spaces for their Traveller Gypsy populations and/or if families were able to secure planning permission for private sites without facing discrimination, there would not be a need for such disputes within communities. I couldn’t help feeling as I read these articles that the writers and protesters could not have visited one of these local authority caravan sites recently or spent time with families living in unauthorised sites.

The first thing one notices when one enters an English caravan site is the concrete. They are (in my experience) overwhelmingly grey. Many are hidden away down long and seemingly inaccessible lanes, behind rubbish tips, abandoned car yards or sewage sites, or amongst the hedgerows of busy bypasses.

The first time I visited a local authority caravan site was in the summer of 2007, when I was an undergraduate. I had chosen to investigate something close to home and something I could relate to personally for my dissertation. The local caravan-dwelling community of the small rural town where I grew up provoked reactions of racism, nostalgia and ignorance from the majority population. I was made aware of the local site, but warned by friends that no ‘real Gypsies’ lived there because they did not exist anymore, and that it would be dangerous to go on my own. I began walking towards the site on the narrow, uneven footpath along a busy bypass. On the other side of the road I could see a new housing estate backing onto the grounds of one of the local primary schools. The high fences and lack of footpath denied all access to the estate and school from the bypass. Walking on my side of the road was the only safe way to journey by foot along the bypass at all, and I would notice later on another trip that one could only walk as far as the site anyway, meaning a pedestrian cannot reach it from any other direction.

On my right, there was a shallow ditch, strewn with litter, and through the bushes I could make out that I was passing a mass scrap-yard and wondered if it just happened to be next to a ‘Traveller’ caravan site, or if the residents themselves were responsible for the pile of metal waste. I still remember my knees almost giving way as I turned the corner and saw the first caravans. Before me were two rows of six modestly sized plots, enclosed by a cul-de-sac of tall, thick bushes, hiding the site from peripheral view. The plots each had small, redbrick huts off to one side. I would learn later that they provide families with shower and toilet facilities. Every plot was occupied, several holding up to three caravans and several cars were parked in the road, which I remember made the place seem overpopulated, and there were a few trucks parked along the rough concrete road that lay between the two rows of plots. At the end of the site was a large grass field with horses. It seemed to me, on that first trip, a rather bleak place leading to what must be a grim existence.

Local Authority caravan site

Sometime later I paid a visit to a friend and research contact at her privately owned caravan site. As we discussed the specific plight of families living on unauthorised developments in the countryside, she took me across the road to a clearing in the hedgerows where there were three small caravan plots, tucked away behind tall yet frail wooden fences. Two of the caravans could be found to the right as you entered along a small road, and the third faced you straight ahead. There was rubbish in the ditch running along the left side of the clearing and the small road was – like the lane leading to the caravan sites – a bumpy mess due to pot-holes. I noticed large puddles along the road and on the ground within the plots, but paid little attention to them. At some point as we were leaving, my friend asked me if I could see anything that indicated the caravans were “plumbed” into the land. I could not. She then asked me where I thought all the water went when someone went to the toilet or emptied the kitchen sink. Slowly, my eyes traced the puddles of murky water near my feet and around the base of the caravan in front of me. The image of grey liquid floating like a moat around the trailer, where children probably traipsed through it carelessly, every day, immediately disgusted me. I asked my friend then and many times since why the family did not have plumbing for their caravans. She explains patiently each time that you need permanent planning permission and the council had only granted temporary permission. This means the family can receive electricity and heating, but cannot build a sewage system. Planning permission in these instances is often withheld because the changes to the land for plumbing to be installed would have to be permanent. It would be near-impossible to return the land to green belt afterwards. On top of this, a family would have more reason to remain in a community rather than moving on later.

The Traveller Gypsy community in the UK is viewed as deliberately attempting to blight community life by destroying green belt and flouting planning laws through the occupation of unauthorised developments and encampments.  However, unauthorised developments and encampments are in many cases a direct result of insufficient allocations by the government for caravan-dwellers.  The sad irony is that while an estimated 3-4000 caravans are occupied on unauthorized land, making their occupants effectively homeless, we continue to believe in a false and romanticized historical concept of the rural nomad. Simultaneously, there is a political preoccupation with a perceived Traveller Gypsy threat to green belt, conservation projects and to the community at large, contributing towards the construction of an identity very different from the romantic image. Worse still, land allocation and accommodation standards and conditions reflect the fears and concerns for land and nature conservation, thereby becoming the basis upon which planning policies are built and the quality of life for certain members of our society is decided. The pastoralists point to the ugliness of  caravan sites, low school attendance and high levels of illness within Traveller Gypsy communities as proof of a backward way of life that will infect and infest their precious country living. Conveniently, it is very rarely publicly addressed that Travellers’ access to stable homes, education, medical care and a whole host of other basic public services, is being directly blocked by rural NIMBYism.

Now the train is pulling away slowly from the platform and I can see the site stretches further back. There are more caravans than I had thought. I will call Thomas in the morning and ask about the families, ask where they came from and where they will go. I will ask if he is still so confident that Fenland  has the best provision in the country. And if this is indeed the best provision, we really do have cause for concern.

Bel Parnell-Berry received her PhD from the University of Hull in 2013 for a thesis on caravan site policy and local authority ethical decision-making in England. A somewhat reluctant academic, Bel is passionate about accommodation policy, land rights and race relations within Europe. She currently lives with her husband in the Netherlands and when she isn’t analysing policy she is travelling, cooking or drinking cava with her mum.

[11.09 am]

path up through windclipped gorse, wind in the eye

& such yellow splashes through the heather

sheep-cropped mounds & sink-holes of the mines

all smooth as china cups & saucers stacked up

at the table edge

& shelved up there, the purple hills,

here, bilberries & our purple fingers.

[12.23pm]

share coffee from the Thermos.  Perch

on springy bones of heather root & watch

across the gorge, a nursery

of dark firs gathered quiet

& good by the cliff’s white knee

we listen to the shush

of a sheep through whinberries

oooooooooooo & hum of a bee-line into warm air.

[1.53pm]

path divides into 2 green trails.  We know

we have chosen the right way when

we can look down on the other as it narrows to a thread,

full-stopped at a brink by a sleeping sheep.

Berries are red-dangled, plumping above pale screes.

We halt by a jut of stones

where a twist of swallows dives & feasts

on insect-clouds blown

oooooooooooooo from Eglwyseg’s lips.

[2.45pm]

beyond: raised tide of Llantysilio’s hills

& near, like a minute adder striped & scaled,

a brown caterpillar inches in the dust.  Thistles

are spent, dying in their upright stalks

& at our backs the moor rolls up to Ruabon,

above an oblique shine

oooooooooooo of thistledown, loose cloak of looms & riddles.

[3.03pm]

fresh gulley water bubbles in a sink

of stone, then falls & empties back

inside the hollow hill.  It leaves no sound.

We walk past a vole passage drilled through dung.

A fence-line stitches the grouse moor.  Eye catches

on a fencepost with tilted crow.

oooooooooooo Bronze Age burial kist, mapped once, gone now.

[3.56pm]

spreadeagled by the wall, a dead sheep, chalky

porous vertebrae in rainwashed fleece

we pass 3 daisies low along the path, like dropped

white pebbles from children’s pockets

& the mountain rears & grins,

shows all its caried limestone teeth.

Jean Atkin lives in Shropshire. Her first collection Not Lost Since Last Time is published by Oversteps Books. She has also published five poetry pamphlets and a children’s novel, The Crow House.  Her recent work has been published in The North, Earthlines, Island Review, Under the Radar and Dark Mountain. She has held residencies and worked on projects in both Scotland and England.  She is currently Poet in Residence for Wenlock Poetry Festival.  www.jeanatkin.com

Congratulations on the success of Rising Ground. It follows nicely from your last book, also based in Cornwall, The Levelling Sea. But this is a bit of a departure from your previous travel books, isn’t it? This is ‘A Search for the Spirit of Place’. Not ‘a place’, but place itself. Is this a concern that comes from your life as a travel writer?

I have never seen myself as a ‘travel writer’. I have written travel books certainly, but have come to each subject fresh – explored it, researched it, teased it out and tried to unravel its attraction. Only then do I assemble the form that it requires to tell. I have written a novel, books of history and a hybrid fusion of fiction, memoir, history and travel (The Bronski House). In The Levelling Sea, I began with the idea of the sea as an obsessive and transforming element in people’s lives and it became a series of biographical studies, telling the parallel stories of Falmouth’s rise and fall, and of Britain’s rise as a maritime power. Rising Ground ended up as a travel book and it’s inevitable I suppose that a book about ‘place’ should involve moving through the land. I do believe in the travel book as a great and revealing literary form, the journey being a mythic narrative structure of fabulous antiquity. Walking in particular offers not only footloose and fluent passage through the world, but also the slow pace with which to be fully attentive, to notice.  As for the notion itself, of place and its meaning – yes, I found that it did involve many of the regions and peoples I’ve travelled among over the past couple of decades.  In this way, it was a very satisfying book to write as it brought together ideas that had been quietly gathering shape for most of my working life.

It’s interesting that you call Rising Ground a ‘travel book’, as it feels like someone settling, almost marking out a territory.

Well, it combines two things. What was happening in my life was moving house – falling for a slightly run-down old farmhouse at the end of a long track, but falling for it so completely that for a time it became slightly unhealthy. When we finally managed to get it, I was able to reflect on what I’d felt and thus opened up the whole notion of place and how powerful an effect it can have on us. But at the same time I’d been itching to write about landscape. I was interested in how certain shapes of the land, certain natural features, certain places have the capacity to generate story and myth, and how they build over the years to create traditions that lie at the heart of most cultures. It was natural I suppose that these two closely related themes should coalesce.

In terms of the house, the story is less one of settling or marking out a territory than of discovery, that wonderful unfolding of a place that you know will become your life, sensing all the people that have been there before, seeing what grows, what lies half-hidden. But most of the book is about a walk westward through Cornwall, seeing many places for the first time, describing them, conjuring up their particular spirit both through personal impression and historical research. Each aspect of the book – the new house (new to us) and the walk are alike in a very particular way – they rely on that freshness of vision that comes from seeing somewhere for the first time. That is what has always appealed to me about travel writing – the tabula rasa. Reader and writer share that innocence.

Perhaps you could say more about that ‘particular spirit’. Putting it crudely, what’s the nature of this ‘spirit’? I mean, there’s a sense of loss in some of the language you use and in your process of deep mapping. Using a word like spirit suggests longevity, even immortality. Do you think the spirit of the place survives regardless? Or is it under threat of exorcism?

Behind the book is the idea that our reaction to places, to certain landscapes, lies at the heart of both our personal lives and our collective lives, our culture and traditions. Put crudely, landscape is inanimate, a random combination of geology and fluvial or glacial processes. It is us who imbue it with spirit and meaning. What is interesting to me is that it is precisely that randomness and lack of meaning that appears to bring out our most creative impulses. Something in our make-up drives us to animate the world around us, to fill it with significance. In terms of landscape it is traditionally the world we have known – the shapes of hills for instance – a constant presence in the daily lives of those unused to moving the huge distances that we do. Over time, those shapes began to be infused with responses, with memories and stories, and those traditions themselves draw other people to them, to respond and embellish them. Therefore you get places like Tintagel or Glastonbury whose stories and associations draw large numbers of pilgrims and visitors, each deepening the site’s significance.

Anthropologists identify animism as the most basic form of belief system in which stones and trees and places are filled with ancestral spirits. You can detect traces of this impulse still in the mythology of places, and in the latest interpretation of Neolithic monuments in which stone circles, standing stones etc are believed now to have been erected with reference to particular features in the landscape.

All that might sound very prosaic and relativist, a rational wrapping up of the notion of spirit. But I still believe that our response to landscape is a mysterious and beautiful thing, and one of the most powerful and revealing ways in which we engage with the world.

As to the sense of loss and sadness, well, it just seems the right register in which to write about these subjects. It’s why they call Blues the ‘truth’.

I like that you put people at the centre of your narrative, and that as well as walking and writing the Blues, you touch on the living life of places. I think you do this more than many people writing about place and landscape at the moment. It is one of the attractive qualities of Rising Ground that it’s full of people. 

Well, again that comes out of my background in writing travel books. I love the describing of exotic places, and the shadowy backways of history – but it’s always the people I enjoy writing about most. Those chance encounters that fall upon you when you’re on the road, the sudden glimpses of whole lives – in an exchange that might last only a few minutes, the tiniest mannerism or a throwaway comment. In my book The Bronski House, a more sustained account of one woman’s life in Russia and Poland in the early twentieth century, I had access to personal papers and letters that enabled a much fuller portrait. That was a huge lesson for me. We are used to people being ciphers for history, biographies of the great and good who somehow embody their age. But that’s not how lives work. They’re much more chaotic, much more driven by the tangle of half-understood motives and attractions, and of luck. In The Bronski House I was interested in the way that the Russian Revolution, the Civil War could tell us about a young woman’s life, rather than the other way round. It’s the same thing with landscape – all that you can really say about landscape itself is geology, geomorphology, ecology. But the effect it has on us, as individuals or collectively, is infinitely rich. I didn’t realise quite how rich at the beginning of the project. It allowed not just a different view of historical periods – and prehistoric – but the examination of people’s lives (at least more recently) – Jack Clemo, John Whitaker, Charles Henderson and Peter Lanyon among others.

When you’re writing about the differences between those historical people dwelling in a place, you start to use some Heideggerian language. I’m thinking in particular of the passage in which you talk about ‘those who’d “dwelt” here truly and authentically’. I wonder whether you could say a little about that. I mean, for example, how do the people who live in these places now contrast with those ‘authentic dwellers’ of the past, do you think?

It was slightly tongue-in-cheek – there’s something rather schoolmasterly about Heidegger, and his notion that there is a true way of living in an old house. But I do think that behind the pomposity there is an important idea. I was constantly intrigued in the writing of this book, and contemplating the notion of place and what distinguishes one place from another, how often the past came to the fore. Faced with the blankness of a landscape and an awareness of its power and mystique, I found myself invariably trying to people it, to understand how it looked before and how it was worked and perceived. The same thing happens in an old house. The idea of one age living more authentically than another is dodgy thinking, to my mind. But in a pre-fast transport, pre-fast communication age, the relationship to place was inevitably different, more concentrated. Perhaps that lies behind the renewed interest in place, as a response to the loss of connection to one particular place.

Do you think that pre-fast transport, pre-fast communication connection to a place is better, or more healthy, or more attractive?

It’s certainly different. It’s one of those impossible ethical questions about whether things were actually ‘better’ in the old days. All I can say is that the speed of life, and of communication, must be affecting our relationship to place, and that if we want to understand how, and whether it matters all we have to go on is what went before. It’s instructive to examine how smaller-scale societies engage with the topography around them. Perhaps something in the urgency that the questions create, that I felt very strongly in writing about place, comes from a collective concern about what we’re losing.

With this in mind, what do you see as the role of this writing about about nature and place? Or its value?

Well that, I suppose – a focus on what we are in danger of losing, a celebration of it. There’s a lot of talk about the new nature writing and the nature writing boom but when you come to a subject it is not with a particular genre in mind. You simply follow by instinct, an idea, a story or series of stories that have particular appeal and watch them grow and the book take its own form. Later, you can say – OK, that’s where it goes in the bookshop. At least that’s how it is for me.

Philip, thank you very much for your time. Before you go, could you tell us what you’re working on at the moment?

I’m going back to sea. I have some unfinished business from my work on my previous book, The Levelling Sea. You never quite know where a subject’s going to take you when you begin – or at least I don’t. That book took me deep into maritime history, and the story of Falmouth as a port and the examination of a series of sea-soaked characters. But I didn’t get a chance to explore the phenomenon of sea voyages, or to describe the sea directly, and to spend time on it. So I’m now in the process of buying a boat to sail up the western seaboard – Wales, Ireland, the Hebrides. I want to explore the idea of imaginary places. It’s early days yet…

The paintings in this interview are from a sequence entitled ‘Minescapes’, by Jonathan Hayter. Jonathan is a CMR artist, an AIR resident at Falmouth University and an associate member of the Penwith Society. He has a forthcoming exhibition at the Maritime House Art Space in Falmouth from 27 July to 3 August, and another at the Fish Factory in Penryn, entitled ‘The Lake, the Wood and the Deathless Path’, from 11 – 27 September. He has provided workshops for schools and theatre groups, including ‘Wildworks’ and ‘The Story Republic’. Jonathan’s ‘Minescapes’ sequence was exhibited at Heartlands in 2013 and is a response to Cornwall’s post-industrial mining landscapes.

We met on a frosty and chilly evening in January, ten years ago, in Kilburn. You looked suspiciously toward me. I was wearing a thin black coat and carrying a suitcase. Your voice was so low I couldn’t hear you clearly. I didn’t really know how to talk to you back then. I was shy and inarticulate, I suppose. You seemed to dismiss me quickly, after nodding slightly to acknowledge I had arrived.

I started to learn how to speak to you. Most of the students at the language centre don’t speak English very well, so I learned quickly how to communicate with gestures and invited people for food. Friendship with broken language is great. You get to be real. Telling lies in a foreign language is so hard. Learning someone’s language is also learning their strategy for lying. Once you learn how they lie, then you learn what they are.

Hi Jane – How are you?

I am fine, thank you, John. And you?

I am fine too. Good to see you.

There are other versions too, such as “Oh! How interesting!” or, “We really must catch up soon!” Once I memorise what to say properly, then I can put on a clear voice.

Learning a phrase is one thing. But learning a tone is something else entirely. I guess tone relates to the materiality of the voice. But it is not exactly the same thing. Tone signals the physicality of the voice, vocal cords, oral cavity, tongue and teeth. In speech, it is easier to sense this by facial expression, gesture, pitch and choice of words. Tone is the point of engagement with a sentence in speech. Tone shapes space differently. Sometimes tone itself becomes the message. For example when you say, “mind the gap” – it feels as if you are holding and slightly squeezing my shoulder at the yellow line on the platform.

Tone is like a container; it can hold emotion or feeling and sensation, because it suggests an emotional positioning, personal attitude. It brings a situated condition. Tone can be also misunderstood, especially if there is distortion or an unusual accent.

Certainly you have animated accents and lots of tones. Putney has a cranky grandmother’s voice; she is always wearing garden gloves. Haringey seems downbeat continually. Mayfair is unnecessarily pompous, spoiled child that it is. Then Brixton and Hackney seem to have a bad temper, and an unpredictable frame of mind. They are lonely in bed, but trying to give off an attitude on the street.

Camberwell sounds sniffly, he might need some morning coffee. Victoria seems to have a personality disorder; I hope she calms down soon. Dalston hiccups all the time. Shadwell is a bit awkward and has bouts of stammering. You are a complex and peculiar being indeed. Little alleys, dark corners, nameless underground clubs, wet sofas on the street, a poet’s secret society, abandoned land, unspoken populations, well-turned out chancers and scruffy clients, swooping birds, lost tourists, so many writers, painters and criminals; I have loved and hated you for a long time.

Taey Iohe is an artist and writer based in London, Seoul and Dublin. Her creative work engages with socio-cultural memories through languages, moving images and the space of migration. She has received her PhD at the School of English, Drama and Film at the University College Dublin (2014); her research discusses a creative way of understanding migratory aesthetics, and builds an imaginary architecture to bring together the critical concepts and the practical tools of the artist in her art making. 

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.

Cyfarthfa Castle, Merthyr Tydfil

It’s hot and Taking Flight Theatre Company is leading us into Merthyr Tydfil’s Arden, in a promenade production of As You Like It. High up out of the town, the leafy clearing where we’re gathered says nothing of industry, a castle built on mining; success, decline and depression. The actors have been rehearsing here for weeks. They know the park, as do all the people I speak to. Walking dogs. Walking children. What’s my accent, they want to know? Ice-creamy kids in swimsuits join our small group of adventurers and we set off. When we go into Arden, we’re all explorers together.

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court? (2, 1, 1-4)

Jacques sings under a tree and Orlando enters through the brambles. A silver Honda ignores the traffic cones and interrupts. We smirk, wait and speak to strangers. Splash pools, burger vans, squirrels and Shakespeare.

Did you dare to sit in the forest? What kind of ground did you sit on? So many gnats under the trees. I never have a picnic chair. Twigs, pebbles and bits of plastic stick to my sticky legs sticking out of shorts.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me.

Thompson’s Park, Cardiff

A week later, Arden is in Thompson’s Park, Cardiff. The summer is still hot and the audience assembles inside the gates around a fountain. Someone tells me that she has lived in Cardiff all her life but has never been in this park. We start near the bandstand, on theatre seats that are bouncy, short and neat with heaps of legroom. A man points to a frog hopping from his sandal. ‘Cool’, says the boy with him, chasing after it with a phone camera.

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head (2, 1, 12-14)

Now we’re up and off into Arden via a path through the woods. I spy love-letters tacked to trees. Actors’ voices echo back from the terraced houses beyond the railings. The city isn’t far away. Merthyr prepared me but Arden is new again in Cardiff. I don’t know this park and I don’t know where we’re going. Not even the lady that runs through this park every morning knows where we’re going.

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character;
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness’d every where (3, 2, 5-8)

We stop for the Duke’s feast and I crouch in the long grass behind the park bench where it’s all happening. Sinking in, I’m comfortable in the give of this bit of wildness in a city park. The audience spreads in front of the bench and, though I think I’m safe behind, watching, Orlando careers over the hill, carving a path and taking me by surprise. I remove a bug from my hair, leave it in the grass and we’re off exploring the forest again.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me here too.

Blaise Castle, Bristol Shakespeare Festival

It is the end of July and Arden has come to the gardens of Blaise for the last performance of the tour. The cast are more weather-worn than they were at Cyfarthfa, and I need a jumper. An administrative glitch means that our journey is stalled for fellow travellers returning from faraway toilets.

We’re in a small, walled amphitheatre. It’s dry and comfortable and we sit together on steps carved from earth and planted with grass. This feels formal, structured and a bit like a theatre – a court even. What kind of adventure can happen here, I wonder? And where is Arden?

Orlando escapes, Rosalind is banished, disguised, and off we go through wrought-iron gates into a landscaped garden, into the woods; strangers, visitors and audience members; temporary dwellers in our temporary Arden. We’re all explorers together.

And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing. (2, 1, 15-17)

Some of the people I speak to afterwards walk, run and play at Blaise on other days.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me.

Luke Thompson: You went to the BBC to become a radio producer and have said that you tend to make programmes on poetry and nature together. I wonder whether you could say something about your early agenda in radio production and how this has developed. 

Tim Dee: I’ve been a producer now for twenty-five years.  I joined the BBC as a radio production trainee.  In many ways working as a radio producer on mostly arts programmes (poetry, some history, some radio drama) was a way to follow a line of least resistance for me.  I’d done an English degree and could have gone on to do academic research but felt that taking creative books into the academy wasn’t especially good for them or their readers.  After my degree I continued to live in Cambridge where I’d signed on the dole and was claiming housing benefit.  At the same time, as was possible in those days, I began to work unpaid (at first) for a bird conservation organisation.   My boss there, Nigel Collar, had also done an English degree and indeed a PhD (on George Orwell), but had ended up working as a conservation researcher.  He wrote about threatened birds in the Red Data Books – the monumental catalogues of the dead and the near-dead.   He had found a way to bring together his dual interests in birds and words.  I liked him and I liked that.   In my time there I wrote a short and worthy (but tremendously dull) book called The Endemic Birds of Madagascar.  To do so I toured the corridors of the Natural History Museum bird collection and noted down the bald factual details that were written on the labels attached to the legs of the skins of the dead endemic species: couas, vangas, ground rollers, mesites.   I never went to Madagascar.  Nor was I an ecologist and my under-developed understanding of ornithology and conservation science brought me up short.  I needed to know more or to get out and do something else.

LT: This was when you visited Hungary.

TD: I was curious to see the communist east of Europe and I knew it had some good birds.  I had a great holiday there and found myself, on my return to the UK, applying for a British Council postgraduate scholarship to study at Budapest University.  I’d devised a plan to learn enough Hungarian to make my way through its twentieth century poetry.  The British Council, who must have been short of real scholars at that time, said yes.  I had another (mostly) great year in Hungary (I wrote a little about this for The Clearing).   I might have stayed in the east and I might have become a writer of sorts in those years at the end of the 1980s.  If the New Statesman had taken a piece about life in Budapest that they half-liked, my working life might have taken off in a new direction.  But I came back to Britain, moved back in with my parents, and applied for various jobs including, because it was there, the BBC production trainee scheme.  The application process took some time and in the meantime I was offered a job as the photographic librarian at Save the Children.  This was interesting.  I had to commission photographers to take pictures both of Princess Anne (the charity’s patron) and of Save the Children’s work in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and the derelict badlands of Glasgow.  The mix was tough and provoking.  But not long after I started the BBC called.  And I went.  The trainee scheme there allowed for a series of attachments to various parts of radio production.   The collapse of communism was under way and I thought I should make programmes about that, which would draw on my experiences in Hungary.   But I had a good and happy three months on Kaleidoscope, the Radio 4 arts programme.  A proper job on the programme came up not long after I had finished.  I applied for it and so found myself fundamentally back in the land of words – making speech programmes of commentary and illustration about the arts.  I was paid to go to the theatre and the cinema and to read books.  All I had to do was make some account (always others talking and with me behind the scenes) of those activities into a few audible minutes each week.  I felt I had capitulated in some ways.  My grappling with geopolitics on the one hand and the ecology of extinction on the other had finished.  I’d defaulted to a version of an arts or media life.  I remained keen on birds.  Once learned you cannot unlearn your knowledge nor the love that goes in step with it.  I remember walking to Broadcasting House in the centre of London on a snowy day and looking up to see cold weather flights of lapwings above Trafalgar Square.  The outside, as it were, knocking on the inside.  And my first longer feature at Kaleidoscope was, perhaps significantly, about the nightingale as a natural artist.   But words on birds were mostly for me only and not for broadcast.  Nature writing was something I read and enjoyed as I always had (not that there was much of it about in the 1980-1990s), but I didn’t make programmes about it.  When I was seven my father had a printer-friend make up some headed letter paper for a Christmas present.  Above my address it read: ‘Tim Dee: ornithological, zoological and travel consultant’.  I loved it, of course, but was too embarrassed to use it. I still would be.

LT: Your writing suggests a purpose – I think you said in Archipelago that ‘Nature Writing is not what it was and my books are announcing this’. I was wondering whether the same sense of purpose is shown in your radio work.

TD: That remark was not about the books I have written or might write.  It was part of an attempt to describe the mix of impulses, including new ones, behind the proliferation of writing about nature these days.  Nature writing is not the same now as it was, as I said in that essay, when it walked a thin green line between science on one side and poetry on the other.  The borders have bled.  My radio work is drawn to this bleeding.  I like taking truths about nature and exporting them into places that previously have been sniffy or unconcerned or careless about it.  In this way I am the ornithological consultant as advertised on my childhood letter-head.  It’s important for me when making a play to get the bird song right.  And I rebuke my colleagues when they don’t. But it’s a little more than that too.  I think the noticing that must go into good nature writing is really worth hanging onto.  Acuity of vision, depth of purchase, paddling of fingers into the world, Thoreau’s contact with the hard matter, all of that which comes from wanting to see and know nature are qualities of attention that take the attender close to love and we need these as much as ever, even more so now with the outside world being increasingly offered to us as a simulacrum of itself, screened and digitised.

My radio work has mostly been about making versions of things that belong – broadly – outside (this could include a poem as well as a peregrine) and bringing them inside.  I work with news from elsewhere.   By outside I don’t mean simply out of doors, I mean that stuff which hasn’t surrendered to whatever inside might mean (a simulacrum, or central heating, or complacency, or shopping, or superiority).  My writing is drawn to the same.  I want it to make less of me.

LT: Perhaps you could say more about that ‘less of me’. What do you mean exactly?

TD: It sounds odd, I agree, and it is a tough order for a book with a writer’s name on its cover and a writer’s life splashed and dragged through all of its pages, but what I have in mind is something adjacent to Keats’ remark in his magnificent and famous letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22^nd November 1817, where among much else (the truth of the imagination, etc), he talks about how ‘the setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’  Taking part in existence was always what I was after in my bird love, my pond dipping, my nature table, and the same driver has operated on me all the way down to trying to remake (or give an equivalent of) those things, and the power of those things, in writing.  There is a paradox here of course: this extension of self, the joining to the world, that enlarges the self and makes us feel ‘more alive’ and ‘more ourselves’, occurs (most commonly) at the moment it is announcing our separation from the rest of life.  We cannot fly or grow leaves but having that pointed out to us takes place most often when we are watching birds or botanising.  The separation is declared at the very moment we reach furthest across the gap.

LT: Is this something you’ve been aware of in all of your books? There seems less of you in your most recent book, Four Fields, than in your first, The Running Sky. Does Four Fields have a different purpose or approach? (I haven’t read The Endemic Birds of Madagascar to compare it.)

TD: The Running Sky was about the air in this way – a place we cannot go to as birds can.  Four Fields was about the earth – the place of common origin and destination.  My next book will be about time – the Spring, nature’s and Earth’s that comes around, ours that doesn’t.  The Endemic Birds was just a list of dead birds and dead words.

LT: So would you say the books are all different aspects of the same perspective?

TD: In some ways they must be. They are all about our fall, our separation from the run of life and how our knowing this marks the barrier between us and Thoreau’s hard matter. Human history is a story of severance. We are cut off from the world. And in our mastery and ruination of it even more. The cave paintings say this, J.A. Baker says it, the Proceedings of the Royal Society do too. There is no document of civilisation that is not also a document of loss. We have been making elegies for ourselves as long as we have known ourselves as ourselves.

LT: You’ve mentioned Thoreau’s ‘hard matter’ previously, and seem to parallel him with your desire to ‘take part in existence’. Several contemporary nature writers talk about the restorative power of this taking part. I wonder whether you could give a hint how far you follow Thoreau, and whether you consider your writing to have a spiritual purpose?

TD: When I hear the word spiritual I reach for my gun.  Or rather my wife’s.  She is South African and studied sociable weavers for her PhD in a shifty place.  The gun was to defend herself if need be, to shoot the snakes that were eating her experimental subjects, and (when required) to shoot those birds as well for laboratory investigations.  All these actions seem to me as eligible versions of ‘nature writing’ as anything else made out of the living not-us.  They are secondary marks made on the surface of the earth.  The commentary that we live by.

I don’t feel that nature observation is necessarily restorative: that implies there is something to be restored to and I think we lost that possibility in evolutionary time when we stepped away from the wild flux of life into consciousness.  Everything since then has been about the gap between us and all the rest.  It is this I keep banging on about.   I like books like David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous and I like the idea of our species negotiating our relationship with others as, to steal Jerome Rothenberg’s phrase, technicians of the sacred. But we are far away from the continuities celebrated or adumbrated in those books and terms.  Thoreau was a great writer, but his cabin and the words he made from his stays there (we remember he didn’t need to live like that, we remember he was the heir to a fortune made from a factory making pencils) were thoroughly modern, a lifestyle choice that might have featured in Country Life magazine as much as in Resurgence or Earthlines.  He is great because his writing knows this and captures the awkwardness attendant upon that knowledge.

God is long gone where we live.  Pantheism would be silly.  My writing is about this and about what remains.

LT: You say ‘My writing is about this’, but it’s that ‘this’ I’m trying to get clear. You seem to be saying your writing is about the loss of something which, as a species, we never had and cannot have. The fall from something which, as a species, we were never balanced upon. So what does remain? Is your writing a literary licking of honey as the branch beneath us breaks? 

TD: What remains are the animals, plants and landscapes that we write about.  We have mostly destroyed them.  But we have brought them into meaning by doing so.  To turn back is no easier than to go on.  The old is dying and the new cannot yet be born (may never be able to be born).  In the gap is a space filled with morbid symptoms.   This is Gramsci on politics but I find it helpful for thinking about agriculture, forestry, mining, human-created climate change, species  loss.  It is the writer’s job to notice these and to bring the subject freshly (the fresh hell) to our attention.  What we have made nature be and what nature is are not the same.  Nature’s writing is not nature writing.  See Aldo Leopold on the yellowlegs walking a poem.  I am interested in, and sustained by, the multifarious ways we have spoken to nature and have thought that nature speaks to us.  It is an ever-renewing golden bough in that way, even though it is, as you suggest, breaking beneath our weight.  Drawing attention to this has kept me going for the last ten years.  Knowing it or feeling it has kept me going for fifty.  I like honey but I try not to lick it too obviously in public.  I also know the life-cycle of the honeyguide.  The bird’s farming skill, another way of entering the earth, was the kick starter for a chapter of Four Fields.  It is good to see other ways of living.  And dying.

LT: The honeyguide section is one of my favourite parts of Four Fields. That was in Zambia, and your other foreign fields are equally spectacular – a field in Chernobyl, another at the site of Custer’s Last Stand. But running through them is this pulse of the familiar fens, to which you return, your first field and your final one. Can you say something about your intimacy with this place, and how that is different from the other sites?

TD: I’ve known three of the four fields in my book more than once, at more than one season, in more than one mood.  I only went to Chernobyl for a single visit – for a week – but I brought to that chapter something of my experiences in, and understanding of, the fields and steppe along the edge of Europe, where the west meets the east in our minds if not in the soil.  I walked and birdwatched those fields, in Hungary, Crimea, and further north in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, over twenty years of travels.  I can only write about a place that I have known for a while and crucially, it seems, have known for purposes other than prose.  Too many writers among us these days are turning every walk they go on into words.  It was important for me to have been in those places at a time when I wasn’t thinking of making a book out of them.  Purposeless sojourning.  The humus of memory.  These experiences accrue value.   So the fens, yes, I have known for ages and I have lived with them in all sorts of ways.  But they are not a home landscape, though I do now live on their edge, and indeed their continuing unhomelyness is the best engine in my book.  Their restless, unlovely, unsurrendered acres repeatedly hammered to within an inch of their lives got me going somehow.  They made me think about what farming means to me imaginatively.  That is where that book resides.  The turning of the soil in our minds.

LT: The paperback of Four Fields is out soon, I believe, and you say you’re working on a book about ‘time’. How far along is that?

TD: Slow I’d have to say.  I want to write about the spring and about passages and migrations and to move through a few seasons in step with them, whilst thinking about ways we are not and cannot be.  It is just possible to walk with spring – it moves up the northern latitudes at about human walking pace, so that you should be able to hike a breaking green wave from North Africa to the Arctic Circle between midwinter and midsummer and be, in effect, in or at the same season each day.  This is almost too delicious an idea to contemplate.  So, I have found various reasons not to begin this properly.  One was that a trip I had planned to the Sahara in Northern Sudan had to be abandoned.  Human traffic there has become dangerous, putting me in mind of – but not able to witness – the struggles of birds, our summer visitors, as they cross the sand.  Something will happen soon enough.  I am interested in human exits out of Africa too.  Toumani and Sidiki Diabate (father and son) have a marvellous double kora tune called Lampedusa which touches on this and which I am listening to right now.   I think the great exchange of sunlight that the tilting globe allows the world each year is my favourite thing.  And the fact that we as individuals are allowed only one go at spring – would you agree? – makes it all the more poignant.  Then there is the further fact that we have – having burned our own springs – found, in what seems like the late middle age of our species, a way to so mess with the planet that we can screw up its own seasons.  There are things to try to say, I hope.  And I hope I’ll get round to them.

LT: A final question, if you don’t mind. I loved the book you edited with Simon Armitage, The Poetry of Birds. It’s a real rattlebag of material, with centuries-worth of poetry arranged by species. So you might find Ivor Gurney and Sylvia Plath side-by-side, John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, or Edward Lear and Michael Longley. But there’s a question posed in your foreword: who was the first nature poet to use binoculars?

TD: I think, but I cannot prove it of course, that it was Edward Thomas.  Isn’t there a photo somewhere of him with a pair slung around his neck?  Or am I making that up?  Military technology certainly helped out (even my first pair in the late 60s were ex-army) and I wonder if he wouldn’t have been issued with a pair of spotting glasses or somesuch. As far as binoculars actually changing what was written, the impact of field magnification on perception, I think we have to wait a few decades after Thomas (there again, bird poetry went into a embarrassed hiatus between World War One and the 1960s anyway).  Ted Hughes is the most obvious reveller in the optical close up.  His thrushes, I am sure, wouldn’t have looked so menacing without a pair of bins bigging up the drama.

Tim Dee is the author of Four Fields (Jonathan Cape).  He also wrote The Running Sky a memoir of his life as a birdwatcher and is the co-editor (with Simon Armitage) of The Poetry of Birds.  He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty-five years.  He is at work on a book about the Spring.

Bristol-born artist Greg Poole studied zoology at Cardiff and has been a friend of Tim Dee’s since their schooldays. Greg has a solo exhibition at Muchelney Pottery from early September 2014. www.gregpoole.co.uk

David Crouch is a dad and husband; an exhibiting artist, gardener and a Professor of Cultural Geography, Humanities Department, Arts and Design, University of Derby. His first book, with Colin Ward, The Allotment: its landscape and culture, was published by Faber and Faber [currently with Five Leaves], followed by The Art of Allotments. After numerous essays, articles, book chapters and five edited books, his most recent book, Flirting with Space: journeys and creativity was published by Ashgate in 2010. His writing ranges from things we do in our everyday lives to the making of art and our encounters with it.

When I was in Iceland in 2008 I felt that as a place it was the bleak side of awe. Getting over a bad cold and throat did not help, nor the October weather. My first time in the country. I guess I was uncomfortably surprised at my reaction. Having visited the Nordic countries over fifteen years, I was familiar with the sites and did not expect such a feeling of detachment. The advertisements and the literature welcome one to the wonder, diversity and superb vistas that are this country. I am sure in many ways they have a point. Over the years I had grown to feel close to the sites, the settings, landshapes and light, colours, vegetation, and just occasionally in Sweden, wonderful moose, even a couple of white ‘elks’ as they are known in Europe.

A friend talks to me about ‘place’, as though a place has a distinctive feel that is almost primordial and reliable, a genius loci or underlying spirit, its depth radiating out, or perhaps even tangible. That feel seems to be something inevitably, endurably of the site, prefigured and unavoidable, and advertised in the travel material. Iceland does seem to be multiply endowed with an almost spiritual power; in its grand landshapes; its steam clouds that rise from its very rock, that I found mysterious, leading me back to fairy stories and old descriptions and venerations in its sagas. Being there certainly included a grasp of the awesome: I was closely aware of the large spaces of suppressed vegetation, once the result of grazing reindeer, though now the wind and cold do the job. Yet, across the western third of the country, I continued to feel alien and detached.

The philosophical writer on mid-twentieth century art and education, Herbert Read, found deeply-embedded significance in a place he walked as a child. Walking there, his place, decades later he wrote that he felt wholly back ‘there’, engaged in its enduring moment. The moment is accentuated by the sound of a bird calling, a signal to re-enliven the depth of his connection. There is a kindly warmth unavoidably felt as I read his account. His feeling in the writing, the way he engages a place, comes across so intimately that I felt as though I must know it too. This is his heritage of a very personal kind. Read wrote with deep feeling; his place, his moment of complete connectedness. There, in the upper valleys on the east side of the Pennines he found it possible to recover a moment fixed in memory, an arrival habitually made; recovered and revivified in moments felt refreshed. He was exercising a ritual, treading the place in an atmosphere entirely his own. This was his place, his heritage from boyhood; borne by and coated, soaked in his doings and memories. Gently drenched in welcome feelings he knew so intimately, a need to remember, to recall it as it was, or as he had come to remember and feel it.

Yet feelings for familiar somewheres we encounter can be suddenly very different, surprising, disorientating. It was the unexpected that caused the mid twentieth century abstraction artist Peter Lanyon to feel a deep admiration in disorientation. He discovered a deep reviving emotion as he visited places he knew very well, had walked from childhood, finding home-places vibrate in him in a very different way. He visited and revisited a series of his familiar haunts in Cornwall’s western tip. Sometimes the change of colour and register in his encounter owed something to the weather, an intense wetting of the ground interrupting footfall or a momentary swerve of the wind. It would occur also due to a change of his own temperament. The old haunts he now came across ‘unawares’, as though he had never been there before, never sketched them endlessly: they were no longer secure in the feelings he found. He produced some of his most stirring images in this way, from these feelings. I don’t think that it is duration of immersion or repetition of visit that sculpts the security of an embedded retrospective encounter.

In Iceland I was left with detachment. As open as I am, mind and body, to where I am, connection never happened for me there; there was and is no ‘my Iceland’. Many places I have visited, in southwest Donegal, a particular area of Andalucía, southern Sweden, Berkeley California and central New York, I have found myself engaged immediately. Having a personal feel and attachment to Scandinavia, I was aware of its general cultural and land configuration. Sometimes those stories, films and pictures, either promoting a place or merely featuring it in another narrative, can fool me with skewed anticipation. In what they show and in the way they do so, they don’t show this place on this day, or this weather. Nor do they convey ‘it’ through how I feel this moment: they do not connive with my feeling on this day.

Cold, claustrophobia, isolation, loss and absence: emptiness and vulnerability. The middle of October. In Iceland I was in a group of colleagues, friends. We stepped around together, exchanging curiosities, interests and observation; feelings of cold, wonderful light; extreme drama of the spaces around us. The hosting Icelanders acted as though proud to show us around and expectant of resonance; those from the UK eager for the positive side of awe.

After a good conference day, an outdoor swim had been organised for the evening in a manmade pool that taps into warming geyser groundwater and wells up in an adjacent, small dug circle: the real thing: warm, tiny and deep, with soft, muddy, slightly welcoming ground. Outside the water the air was thick, heavy, cold and dark. Harsh winds pulled down directly from the almost vertical and treeless slope that commenced only a few metres from the pool’s edge. Looking like mountain and cold enough this high slope of rock and low grasses lent a sharp and cutting edge to our scene – and to my feeling. After all, I know from my friend’s climbing magazines how driven and engaged the climber’s encounter is with excitement, achievement, drama; perhaps above all with wonder. That collision of steep uncertain rockface and his own strenuous yet highly tactical movement and quest.

Following watery amusements we were taken back to a typically Scandinavian dinner of good food, laughter and singing some distance from our lodgings and not far from the pool. Such enjoyments mingled a little, warming into and slightly melting my flecks of connection with where we had been. We returned to the bar adjacent to our dwelling-place in the nearby village. In the morning a severe wind blew in from the north, straight up the nearby fjord and amongst the few buildings: ‘our’ tired bar and conference venue; our house of bedrooms; on the opposite side of the track a house converted to tell the seventeenth century Iceland witches’ story, itself full of cold detachments.

Next day after calling at the witches’ venue I was driven by a Swedish friend along the north coast, eastwards to a huddle of houses and an aged church, and the apartment where I would stay for three days. Everything seemed to me to be stronger, more severe than other lands of Scandinavia. In my new venue, each morning before breakfast I walked outside my lodging. The wind seared my wakefulness and my feet studied the damp and slippery ground. Yet the sky was friendly, blue-cool; smiling with me. Being surrounded by thick-bodied slabs of rock on almost three sides crowded me in, half blocked out the austere beauty of their steep slopes; with their three strip colours helped by the sunshine: grey-brown, yellow and white at the top. I felt strangely in the presence of broad spaces, but still hemmed in.

Where I walked on lower slopes I felt I must be already at the top of the bald and bleak hill that looked and felt like a mountain, the whole atmosphere just right for it except the accelerated wind funnelled through the alleys of those lumpen hills. I did find something quietly dramatic here, almost elating: an accentuated sense of being on the cold edge of the world. This I felt more so here than ever I have been on the end of Cornwall or the south-westernmost cliffs of Donegal. I think that in Iceland I was propelled by the abrupt configuration of the land in the determination of the wind, but also in my handling of it all.

Whatever was, or is ‘there’ I didn’t get it. I didn’t connect. ‘It’ didn’t reach me; or I was not rightly open to its vibes, those underwritten essences. I regret this. I realise I felt disoriented yet reckon it unlikely that with any longer immersion there my feeling would have changed. I doubt it is merely an effect of time. Other sites I have experienced for equally short times across Scandinavia. One January in Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle through Finland, or on the walks on the low rises above the sea south of Kalmar in Sweden’s Smaland, I have engaged, felt resonance.

Ironically, amidst all of this I enjoyed the stay in Iceland: familiar colleagues, talk and jokes, new people, glimpses of wonderful land and sky. These mingled with and becalmed a little the resisting, pioneering feel of the rock, damp, relentless and exaggerated relief and weather; a distinct edginess. Of course Iceland is not ‘a’ place, but a series of sites, locations, multiples; each with diverse yet distinct appeals. Each component, in its distinctive features, broods with the potential of feeling ravishing. Yet each refuses me – or I am insensitive to, or self-protective of its poetics.

I came away with fragments of feeling: impressions, recollections, but little elation. Those sites I had visited do not ‘come to life’ in my memory. No heightened awareness that might be called spiritual, no stirring energy. I didn’t leave a sense of place behind, or carry one with me; just some rather quiet flecks that seem further away from me than places I sojourned twice or three times as many years ago. I can ‘set’ a place for once and for all, coloured in feelings and depth. Yet even the ‘for all’ can be agitated. Once calm, almost avuncular, it can become unsettled in my mood. The sought after memories shuffled. I can lay it back into its familiarity and suspect secure repetition. This ‘laying to rest’ in Iceland did happen in little moments, as in my early morning walks near the north coast. Yet to recall that is difficult. I work at it; agitation and that sense of bleakness return and almost overwhelm it. Those flickers turn out to be unreliable: a landfold, reverberations of life, stumpy trees, grass blowing, awareness of gentle movement. No, I haven’t been back… yet.