This week we present a short film exploring the watery landscape of Dartmoor, scripted and narrated by Clearing editor Ben Smith, filmed by his brother Max Smith and produced by FatSand films.

Here, Max and Ben explain a little about the inspiration and thinking behind the project: 

“In the U.K. we often regard moorland landscapes, such as the Highlands of Scotland, The Lake District and Dartmoor, as symbols of wilderness. However, these places have been farmed, mined and inhabited by people for millennia, and have felt the presence of humans longer than many of our urban centres.

The ecologist Frank Fraser Darling coined the phrase “wet desert” to describe the landscape of Dartmoor, such was the lack of biodiversity that he found there. But in hidden corners of the moor, relics of its past cling on – stands of trees coated in moss and fern, supporting a range of plant and animal life – relics that point to the bizarre fact that when humans first arrived here, these open landscapes were temperate rainforests.”

Max Smith is a freelance filmmaker and motion graphic designer based in Brighton. Since Graduating in Graphic Design & Visual Communication from the University of Brighton in 2012, he has worked as a Motion Designer, Camera Operator, Camera Assistant and Editor on a range of projects for clients including the BBC, Discovery Channel, Canal+ & London Fashion Week. He was shortlisted for a British Wildlife Photography Award in the Wildlife in HD Video Category in 2014 for his film A Sense of Place.

Ben Smith is on the editorial team of The Clearing and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Plymouth University. His first chapbook of poems, Sky Burials, is published by Worple Press. He lives in North Cornwall.

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

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

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

Geology is history

Spirit, source and sign

A story of origins inscribed

And still ongoing

In the stone

Each bench and ledge

A hammer blow

Each scree the debitage

Of work that makes the world.

There is stone

At the river’s edge,

In the throw of an oak,

Where the sea sifts shingle

On the final cast of the tide.

Weathered eggs to crack and hatch

The magpie mottled flint.

You take what is given,

Grateful for the gift.

But some gifts carry weight.

They dictate

Where stone is won,

How things are done and

What they mean.

This is how it is.

How it has always been.

The cloud comes down,

The world beyond the work

Withdrawn from view,

Nothing now but close attention,

A truth to material.

Tap, strike, tap, strike, tap

The work is soon a rhythm,

Hammers dancing on the edge

Between each blow,

Roughouts turning in the hand

Each time the hammer rises,

The scar of each removal

Marking time along the stone

Strike, tap, strike, tap, strike

The hammers fall together,

Against one another, then

Together again, percussion

Moving in and out of phase

As the old men rise and fall to the task.

It takes time

To move around the work,

To take your place in it for granted,

But as you do it finds you.

A relationship begins,

The line between hand and material

Losing its sharpness.

And for all that is inscribed on stone

Much is also written in the body,

Scars of service, build and heft

The body falling into certain shapes,

Like a hammer that drops

Without thinking,

In just the right place.

In cloud country.

The path from the coast

Now tangled with others,

The trails of distant kin

Who trace their story

To the same sharp skyline.

There are camps already set,

Smoke visible on the climb.

Hammers bounce back

Upon themselves

Around the crags,

A different kind of time.

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

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

Stonework is available to buy online as a book here.

These poems by Penelope Shuttle and John Greening respond to Hounslow Heath. From seventeenth-century paper mills and Chamberlain’s more recent ‘Munich Agreement’, to the Ordnance Survey map of 1921 and Southall’s cultural diversity, these poems from Heath (forthcoming this summer) traverse ideas of landscape and time and, in doing so, tread new paths across the urban environment.

ALONG AN OLD TRACK, OR,
AN ENCOUNTER ON THE HEATH

The unhappy man laughs,
tells me about his hobby
of making stained-glass lamps
as we walk the trackway
skirting Heston or Hounslow,
stepping over ghost-sleepers
of a long-disused branch –
not the Feltham Curve
but along those lines –
then he says,
you can make wine from gorse,
he has done it –
A sharp wine that would be,
I say, made from startles
of yellow prickly furze
no champagne for sure –
wine of the humble heathland
says the unhappy man
who has added his pain
to its thorny bouquet,
taking my hand
as we tramp the old track
near where the old-time travellers
rode their slowcoach huffing train.

– Penelope Shuttle

HEATH XXIX

Waist-high mist, the White Lady of the moor is rising to a roar
as he descends, the man in black, on the far side of the Heath.

And here is the paper... She knows too well what led her to this haunting,
her sole flight path once she’d stumbled home from Bushee’s mill

while he, with his black necktie like a noose, and his scowling moustache,
smiling, smiling, will never admit a misjudgment but goes on waving

his foolscap to the future … settlement … prelude … symbolic … The crowd cheers,
but here on blind Staines Moor she can see the other side

of that same precious sheet. She knows it is made from rags, rags
brought like refugees to the moorland mill by their tyrant owner

to be ground and pulped … Some of you here perhaps have already heard
what it contains … A plane’s wing hangs above the head

of the talking man. It brings the plague. From the White Lady’s page
back in the story, a wind (clearing her infected mist) reaches Heston

and – in front of buttons, peaked caps, marching uniforms, behind
ranked microphones, the silent camera – flutters his flimsy piece.

– John Greening

PLACE NAMES. THE PLACE.

Sparrow Farm
oooooLook-Blank Farm
ooooooooooLockglenk Farm

Viola House
oooooThe River Crane
ooooooooooValve House

Floodgates
oooooSand and Ballast Pit
ooooooooooFootball Ground

Chemical Works
oooooTile Works
ooooooooooNursery

Posts
oooooAir Shaft
ooooooooooPosts

Miniature Rifle Range
oooooBrazil Wood
ooooooooooMortuary Chapel (C of E)

Mortuary Chapel
ooooo(Non-Conformist)
ooooooooooGreyhound Racing Stadium

Railway Cottages
oooooYew Tree Walk
ooooooooooMunster Avenue

Feltham Curve
oooooHeathfield Farm
ooooooooooIsolation Hospital

Pigeon Lofts
oooooCircular Earthwork (site of)
ooooooooooAllotment Garden

Bishopsgate Candle Factory
oooooWagon Repair Shed
ooooooooooPowder Mill Lane

Engine Repair Shed
oooooInverness Works
ooooooooooSluice

Baber Bridge
oooooBog
ooooooooooNorfolk Gardens

Donkey Wood
oooooHounslow Junction
ooooooooooLeat

Weir
oooooMillpond
ooooooooooGuide Post

– Penelope Shuttle

HEATH XXII

No genesis without destruction; no order without confusion.
Shiva is gliding above West Middlesex. No rebirth without death.
The shattering groan of power reversing. In a landfill site
near Hayes, the single groove of every obsolete record
breathes a sigh of release. The Lord of the Dance plays on
across Norwood Green. In Southall, a great White Elephant
stalks the high street, ridden by Indra. In the windows, seated
on lotus flowers, the many gods. Cross legged. Hands clasped.
The thunderbolt strikes on either side. Serpents and demons cower.
Converted Baptist chapels don’t even bother to shut their eyes.
It rains and rains and Indra relishes what he slurps from the gutter.

Behind the last May bush in North Hyde a Jainist sits
counting the five thorns, ensuring no stray creature ever
tries to pass. Only truth from the insects round his azzy-tree.
A condom, a tampon, fleshpots, and chicken skin but never a woman.
His detachment is complete. Ignoring him to approach and cross the approach
road to the perimeter, I see what I know at once to be my Shakti
coming directly towards me, a mirror image, clutching her carry-out
PG Tips as she steps on to the zebra crossing, reducing me
to fingers and thumbs until I spot, mid-step in a red
grove of willow by a bookmaker’s shop, Kali, like a lollipop lady
holding in one hand the head of a giant, and blessing me with the others.

– John Greening

LITTLE SILENCES

Little silences
of the Heath
lasting so short a time
the ear thinks
it dreamed the silence
that left its blessing
in the tender labyrinth
of hearing

Then out of the sky
noise grinds back
a million travelling voices
cussing through Security
a million
police sirens
and a million fuck-you’s

Then again
a little silence from the Heath
breaks the evil spell
and now the ear
thinks this quiet
is an olive branch
offered to the rage
and roar of everything
but who will take it?

– Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, and is a founder member of The Falmouth Poetry Group, set up by Peter Redgrove in 1972. She is a tutor and mentor for a number of organisations, including The Poetry School, and is reading this summer/autumn from Heath, with John Greening, at The Ledbury Poetry Festival The South Downs Festival, and at The Bristol Poetry Festival. A pamphlet, Four Portions Of Everything On The Menu For M’sieur Monet, appears from Indigo Dreams Publications in August 2016. Her twelfth collection, Will You Walk A Little Faster? is published in May 2017, from Bloodaxe Books.

John Greening was brought up under the main flightpath to Heathrow, but now he and his wife live in Cambridgeshire.Two years with VSO in Upper Egypt resulted in Westerners. The Tutankhamun Variations (Bloodaxe) and a dozen further collections followed, notably To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013). There have also been plays and several books about poetry. His edition of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (OUP) appeared in 2015, along with Accompanied Voices, an anthology of composer poems. TLS reviewer and Eric Gregory judge, John Greening’s awards include the Bridport Prize and a Cholmondeley. He is RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College. www.johngreening.co.uk

Since the medieval period, rivers in counties Dublin and Wicklow have been diverted to feed the city’s ever-growing needs. Between 1937 and 1947, the Poulaphouca reservoir was created by damming the River Liffey and flooding the valley of the King’s River, its small, acid-water tributary. Farms, woods and Ballinahown village were all submerged. Freed from the confines of the riverbed to range over fields and woods, small trout gorged themselves till they grew bloated and diseased. In 1978, when the water levels dropped to an all-time low, submerged rooftops appeared above the surface of the lake.

oooooooooooooogreylag geese graze
ooooooooooooooas the bog road reappears –
oooooooooooooofloating thatch reeds

SEAWARDS

My neighbourhood is suspended like a hammock over the River Swan, all seventeen kilometers of whose convoluted course have been culverted and converted into storm drains and sewers. Walking past the Swan Centre, Swan Leisure, Swan Cinema, Swanville Place, it is possible to remain completely unaware of the river network weaving its way mere feet beneath us. But sometimes the river will reveal itself, by sudden subsidence, or geysers of drain water erupting up through shores.

oooooooooooooohome from work –
oooooooooooooowelcoming committee
ooooooooooooooof floating chairs

The main branch of the Swan rises near Kimmage Manor, and flows past Hazelbrook Farm, site of the original HB Ice-cream, and the former home of Miss North, the well-known water-diviner.

ooooooooooooootwitching branches  –
oooooooooooooothe weight of catkins
ooooooooooooooin the breeze

As it makes its way towards the sea the Swan is joined by four contributing branches whose names are redolent of local history: the Roundtown Stream, the Blackberry Brook, Bloody Fields Water, and Baggotrath Brook. All five branches discharge into the Dodder Estuary near Ringsend. It may be that the river was named for swans nesting along the sloblands here before the land was reclaimed from the sea.

ooooooooooooootidal water
oooooooooooooofeathered with grey light –
oooooooooooooocygnets hatching

FLOTSAM

The Poddle is the best-known of Dublin’s hidden rivers. It flows beneath Tallaght, Kimmage, Harold’s Cross and Blackpitts before entering the River Liffey close to Dublin City Centre. On its way, the river emerges from culverts to flow overground at Mount Argus, where the waters are split by a piece of masonry known as the Stone Boat or Tongue, built in the 13^th century to divert a water supply for the Mayor’s citizens.

oooooooooooooothis stone tongue
oooooooooooooosplicing the water course –
ooooooooooooooriver maw

The park at Mount Argus includes a flood storage pond to help reduce the risk of downstream flooding when the river has resumed its underground route. The grounds have an air of neglect; the water is littered and noisome in warm weather. The drive up to the church is lined by copper beeches, which cast deep shadows; and overlooked by the imposing Lourdes Grotto. The presiding spirit is that of St Charles, who joined the Passionist monastery there in 1847. He is remembered for his gift of healing the sick.

Last year a homeless man was found dead in the undergrowth. Rumour had it that the deceased was a character well-known locally for his foul-mouthed verbal assaults and early morning arson attacks. Reaction to his death was muted. When the arson resumed, it was assumed to be a case of mistaken identity.

oooooooooooooowakened
ooooooooooooooby crackling skip-fires –
oooooooooooooohydrants gush

From late medieval times, the Patrick Street area was regularly flooded by disease-carrying water from the Poddle, damaging the vaults of St Patrick’s Cathedral and prompting Dean Jonathan Swift to take remedial action. In 1835, during the course of further flood repairs to the vaults, the Dean’s coffin was opened. His skull was removed for examination by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Details of the examination were recorded by Sir William Wilde, in an effort to determine the cause of the deafness and vertigo suffered by the Dean throughout his life.

oooooooooooooowater courses
ooooooooooooooroaring underground –
oooooooooooooobelow hearing

The periodic flooding of the Poddle continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In late October 2011, the equivalent of one month’s rain fell in twenty-four hours. A malfunction at the tidal floodgates meant that the floodwater could not escape out to sea, and erupted upwards through drains. The Poddle burst its banks and cascaded downhill from Harold’s Cross onto Parnell Road, while the canal in front spilled over its containing wall. Hospice nurse Cecilia de Jesus, unable to force open the door of her apartment against the rising water, was drowned.

ooooooooooooooswelling brown water
ooooooooooooooinundates basements –
oooooooooooooorags snag on branches

Amanda Bell is a freelance editor and award-winning poet. Publications include Maurice Craig: Photographs (Lilliput, 2011) and The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work: An Anthology of Poetry by the Hibernian Writers (Alba Publishing, 2015). In 2016 she was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and the Munster Literature Centre’s Prebooked Readings for Emerging Writers. Undercurrents is her first solo collection. ‘This stone tongue’ was previously published in Presence 52.

The Longhouse

Backlit by a flickering hearth

each room is a stage

applauding its audience.

Silence twines speech

into smoke-threads

the talk of wool and milk

twin whitenesses spinning

days into decades. Time

passes like a finger sliding

along a grained surface.

A pony returns riderless

snow coming down

warm bread in the panniers.

Everything unchanged

for a few more moments

the time it takes for the

snowflakes to fill footprints

coals to cool in the grate

oak beams to soften

leaving the roof nothing

for support but the attic’s dust

the house’s adumbrations.

Golden Plovers

He does not know the names

of the trees hooked into the sky

but their twisted forms are familiar

drawn by gales on the days that didn’t arrive

burned up in their own sunrise like golden plovers.

Now just the weightlessness of things

walls tumbled, the livestock all gone,

leaving only the torn edges of the fields

his square mile a sail ripped from its mast

left to billow overhead like golden plovers.

As he passes the twmp’s open mouth

he tries to answer his fathers’ questions,

tell them of seas beyond the whalebacks.

But, like them, he knows only long winters

and life concealed like golden plovers.

What remains as he is washed away

are the long days where he disappeared,

flowed out into the hill with the bracken roots,

his hours still there, waiting for the last light

to catch, when they’ll glow like golden plovers.

Across the Sound

Here is a gathering of those things

that constitute seabirds

the pipes, reeds, frets and strings,

and the notes produced – all westerlies.

From the cliffs you can hear spaces

in their music, narrow and infinite,

silences that draw voices in tides.

Now the white notes are blown

from the page, they wheel endlessly

suspended above this egressing sea.

And where next?

To the places not in need of names,

the blue isles merging into others,

adrift on a gyre, dragged by rivers

that flow from pole to pole.

Like us, once out of site

of the overwintered world,

they will dive into the dark

and feed.

James Roberts lives in the Black Mountains. He co-edits Zoomorphic magazine. Recent poetry has been published by Agenda and Cinnamon Press. A novella “The Man in the Mountain.” was published in 2015.

APRIL: ALDEBURGH: WOODCUTS

by Simon Turner

i

———– (the eye un-

oooooo hitched in the fog

at the marsh’s edge where

the tide’s peeled back

a fossil giant’s dis-

junct lower jaw’s

leering through the Alde’s silt

oooooo the light un-

oooooo strung in the fog

a jetty’s uprights whittled

back to blackened stumps

arrayed to form a heart-

shaped harbour round a row-

boat’s charcoal carcass

oooooo the land un-

oooooo hinged in the fog)

ii

the boatshed’s hollowed out:

a Mondrian ghost of

salt-fried timber &

bare-knuckle brick, the

ground reclaimed

by buddleia, bramble,

dark billows of gorse,

remorseless squalls

like long-range wave crests

collapsing in the shallows

oooooo (a raw wind seethes

oooooo in the hip-high grass;

oooooo the larks unleash

oooooo their arcade chatter)

&the roof-beam jutting

like a petulant razzing tongue

from its northwest wall

concludes the structure

abruptly in a fog-blind

vacancy of air –

o

o

o

THE LEVELS

by Tony D’Arpino

wrist sinuous drainage rhynes

droveways and scattered farms

the ancient wooden tracks

preserved by mother peat

jeweled jaws of the sea

settlements called ‘huish’

a family holding or ‘worth’

enclosing oval infields

seahenge causeways

burrow wall beer wall

linked the islands

otters herons curlews

new rhynes and ditches

crack willows pollarded for hurdles

thatching spars

hay meadows

when the moon grew in the water

osier beds coppiced for wands

basketwork and fishtraps

alder beds and turbaries

the peat cut by hand

with the long-handled

square-bladed turf spade

the turves dried in cones and domes

the mouths of all the rivers

sealed by clyses

tidal sluices

closed against high tides

ley lines notched woodlands

ridge and furrow strip lynchets

the shapes of terraced farms

lines in an open hand

 o

o

o

BLURRED EDGES

by David Woolley

The end of  a week of storms,

the calm after what will come again,

the world soggy with rain.

I read ‘American Painters’, think

of you, how your dead husband’s

crazy family stole all your

Winslow Homer posters.

Henry James thought Homer’s work

‘hopelessly unfinished’, but he missed

the point –  those figures rising

blurrily from the landscape, the ocean,

thumbed to mist, fighting for light.

At Seaton, Porthcothan, beaches

we walk are smashed.

The rural idyll, like

the Cornish sea-walls, fell,

but Homer’s world’s not one

of harsh, straight lines.

His people, live, like us,

like his fisherman, edges blurred,

backs bending to the swell.

o

o

o

Simon Turner was born in Birmingham in 1980, and currently lives in Warwickshire.  He has published two full collections, most recently Difficult Second Album (Nine Arches Press, 2010); a pamphlet, Works on Paper, was published by Seren in 2015.  His poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Poetry Wales, Tears in the Fence and PN Review, and the anthologies Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012), and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe, 2013).  He is currently working towards a third collection.

Tony D’Arpino’s most recent book of poetry is Floating Harbour (Redcliffe Press). His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Echoing Gallery: Bristol Poets on Art in the City and The Other Side of The Postcard (City Lights). Magazine credits include Agenda, Barrow Street, and Poetry East. His most recent nonfiction book, Trees of Bristol, explores the natural history and legacy of the ancient forests of the West Country, local tree lore, and the bio-diversity of the urban forest.

David Woolley was born in Plymouth, has lived in Cornwall, Essex and Wales, and is now back in Cornwall. He has worked in literature development for 30 years, chiefly as a festival organiser.  He ran the events and festivals at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea for 15 years, and has published four collections of poetry, most recently Pursued by a Bear (Headland, 2010). He now directs the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival (27 – 29 May – www.bodminmoorpoetryfestival.co.uk).

These four poems are from the clearing a forthcoming pamphlet written by LukeThompson, illustrated by Mairead Dunne and published by Atlantic Press. The pamphlet will be released May 2016. To see how to pre-order a copy, or to donate to the crowd funding campaign, please visit here.

In 2016, as well as the clearing, Luke will be publishing Clay Phoenix, his biography of the poet Jack Clemo on Ally Press, and a collection of illustrated flash fiction with John Kilburn. He is currently working on a non-fiction piece for Little Toller Books and is a founding editor of The Clearing magazine.

Mairead has exhibited her work internationally, as well as throughout the UK and Ireland. She received an MFA from the University of Ulster, Belfast, where she became co-director of the artist-run collective Platform Arts. Mairead has held a number of international residencies, including in Ireland, France, Cyprus and Beijing, and she is currently enrolled on the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice programme in Falmouth.

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.

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

Ash Disease

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

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

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

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

Emerald Ash Borer

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

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

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

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

Globalisation of pests and diseases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can trade kill trees?

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

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

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

Can’t introduced tree diseases be controlled?

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

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

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

What can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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