Minor Moorlands Roads – Part Two

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Stones Lane

We step into them every day – human remains. From the pavement underfoot to the paths we take, all are a past push… not a mere trace or fragment, but a site of sheer force and cold sweat. 

It is easy to package ‘the past’ as something abstract; an echo in what we say about a place, a sort of ether that runs between the fingers of a hand gesture. Over there. But man-moved stone serves up the past somehow even closer to the present, as presence, an almost-paradox that pulls us further towards it. 

This morning I take the lanes heading towards Stones, a scattering of farmsteads situated high on the hills above Todmorden, close to the dark clutch of Dobroyd Castle; a site of Victorian extravagance now scarred-black and haunted by its own intended splendour. So much moved stone still stirs here – from the weathered warp of the buildings I mention, to the lie of the lane. I scatter pebbles as I walk, dust dredging peat-pickled boots as I look at the dark hump of the hills towards Bacup. I wonder whose tread pressed form to fragments before me, who first laid the course, rolled the rock that now is the route. 

My musing is interrupted by the fourth tallest standing stone in Yorkshire. A looming bolt of blackened by time, it spears the edge of a farmer’s field –around 12-feet tall and bolstered at the base by a rough ring of hewn rocks. Blasted by factory fumes and the bitter bite of persistent Pennine winds, its dark edges give it the demeanour of a far-flung weathervane. A lightning rod. A question mark with no stop. 

But I stop. Perhaps there is an absence in us –an inherited ancestral ache –that angles us to the stance of certain standing stones, how the solo walker finds their body flexing slightly to match its bearing. Falling into those before us. For how many bodies bore this great rib of rock upright?

And when? Surprisingly little information arises about this stone, with no agreed date on when it was set up. Records exist of it being present by 1921, but no known reference before then. Not even a name. 

It is a tongue in the mouth of a time we have no words for. It may well have still been standing in previous centuries, erected as a monument  to the Great War, even the Battle of Waterloo. 

Or older.

Yet the implications of modernity could be seen to stain. Why is that? This stone waits, straddling the border between monument and monolith, track and field, logged and lost. Wavering.

And how when we waver, we reach for rock. The craving to stand in stone seems a human one, time-over: monoliths, buildings, byways, graves. Monuments not only of memory, but for memory. We all become it. I lean against the layers of touch, the sun-soaked rain-rinsed hours of finger-cracking contact, baked into the bulk of the drystone wall. I lean and lean, feel its unknown weight pushing my tissues closer to bone. And still I can’t reach the stone. No human armspan could from here. 

Perhaps it is this ungraspable intention, the tactile unknown, that draws us in particular to menhirs; standing stones. 

So we keep reaching.

And I keep walking. 

Doghouse Lane 

Steep slopes draw abandon to the surface. I think about it as I take on the tarmac of Doghouse Lane, a track arching up out of Todmorden and unspooling over the moors to Cornholme. The initial incline is unrelenting, the course quickly gaining ascent as it pushes above the town, as desperate as an outstretched arm. Get out.

Breath builds behind each footfall, arms loosen, and I feel the familiar angst under my ribs dissipate into something else. Each inhalation echoes through the body. I am drawn to walking these minor moorland roads – typically unfashionable and unpublicised routes, often overlooked as the territory of the occasional land-rover, nearby farmer and the lost. Here the walker encounters the road –a craft of human hardship and hiccup in the land simultaneously – alongside the pummelled patchwork of South Pennine moorland. We become the borders, occupy an edge.

Abandon. Mind and body orientate to the undulations of terrain, thoughts fuse. I quickly pass the florid green of cultivated trees above Centre Vale Park and push on amidst the unfolding brushwork of burgundy, brown and off-yellow moorland. Wind hits every exposed angle of my face. I find myself simultaneously an onlooker and an accomplice as the landscape loosens like a shaken sheet, moving with my grasping stare and eager tread.

A few scattered farms fleck the opening aspect of landscape, and the occasional large car passes – somehow cold and impersonal. I keep walking, the interlocking valleys of the Cliviger Gorge on one side and Walsden on the other opening up, spangled by interlocking sunlight and low-lying cloud. Inherited abandon. The very road beneath my feet is a flex of it, forged in a past where it meant more than just an occasional, isolated track. Its name darts between possibilities; Doghouse becoming Parkin Lane, then Flower Scar Road, then Tower Causeway, ending as Carr Road. Furrowed edges tell of agricultural attempts ages  back, now wandering half-shorn sheep occupy. They drift into the single-file road in the absence of any fence or wire.

I drift too, body buffeted by wind and warm coils of temperamental sunshine. In these moorlands, the breeze breathes through industrial remains as much as it rolls the cry of the curlew, the pheasants trembling trill. On my left, the hills bordering the East Lancashire town of Bacup push up, their blown-brown backs intersected by turbines, pylons and brooding pine plantations. 

And then I stumble into Sourhall. An old row of terraced cottages marks the site of something so much bigger. A public information board tells me of this later on the route, far-flung and stark like the most melancholy of memorials. Out of place. For the cottages, and a rather uncanny estate of half-finished new-builds behind them, tell  little themselves of a former factory (Peel Mill), later to become a Smallpox Isolation Hospital in 1874. Industry becomes illness. Exposure becomes isolation.

Inherited abandon. The surge within myself I meet in walking the weave of these moorland roads. And when I wonder of how the ill would have watched the thrashing, flexing moor arch around them, I pull my coat closer and keep the route. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

Minor Moorlands Roads – Part One

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Todmorden Old Road

It starts out as reach into the hills, around the back of a housing estate in Bacup. Known in my childhood as ‘Back Lane’ or ‘Dark Lane’, idioms abound suggesting a push to the edges. Todmorden Old Road rises as a single-file flex of rough tarmac, initially bordered by brambles on one side, a stretch of wall weathered into various states of moss-strewn disrepair on the other. There is the perpetual tang of wet bark and wood rot, exploded open through summer and into autumn by the florid fizz of somehow never-quite-healthy blackberries and a density of dandelions. 

Follow the road up far out of Bacup enough and a walker can reach the crest at Sharneyford where Lancashire slumps down on one side whilst West Yorkshire arches up on the other. I stand at that intersection now, the personal points of childhood and adulthood split by a glistening grey belt of hills and the ripped-up course of the road. This is a route rarely travelled by vehicles now  – other than the occasional shuddering tractor and red shock of the mail van – and yet once was a key link between two counties; though the county boundary itself a contentious blur of argument, artifice and echo. I imagine it hovering and drifting like a buzzard buoyed by the muffled prospect of prey, now fought over by public propaganda and irregular footfall. 

These minor moorland highways are alive with prospect and past potential. On Todmorden Old Road, I’m walking through what could have been, as someone now. There’s that wrench in the chest, a burn that the books of both childhood and adulthood would have a word for. A whole genre. A human heave I can feel at the edge of my eyes, in the skittering beat behind ribs and the roll of cold sweat between fabric and skin as I walk. 

Yet part of me doesn’t want to write about walking these roads at all. For in the aftermath of personal pain, why don’t I push off through wild upland and well beyond the mundane, the mechanical? Reflect on fumbling away from the footpaths and meeting the bite of bogland between my toes? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my own assumption that the landscape equates to escape. Ashamed of my tendency to want to fall into the revered narrative of walker meets wildness. Ashamed too, of the hurt I have caused and the ways I have reacted, acted, reacted.

And I’m coming to terms with, as readily as I will wander over hill and dale… most of all, I am drawn to these minor moorland roads; a place where the pedestrian seems seldom, their hard and their hold. 

Here, language lies in the cut and thrust of the route, how it writhes through stone and sediment in a surge of gradient that can be felt under foot. A force that seems to take on the lie of the land with a trodden truth.  

So much still does. Close by,  bumping the edge of my vision on the left is Tooter Hill – a site of ancient field systems, a possible ring cairn burial and traces thought to date as far back as the Neolithic. Touch upon touch upon touch. Now mine pits and pock-marked mounds stubble the escarpment, the bulge of earth enmeshed in yellow-green grass, the picked-out course of a footpath and the marks of a search. 

Searching for a hold.

In discussions of loss and heartbreak, John Bowlby posits the concept of ‘searching for the lost object’ as the state of angst and upset the individual goes through, sifting through fragments of the departed, fumbling over a promised future.

 Walking these roads has become my way of stepping into that promise, feeing it shift and crack as I tread. Here a sense  of place comes through a throb – a heart, a hurt, the human intent that still hums in the course of the route. The lost object forever lies in these roads. And to step out is to hold on in the only way I can. 

Allescholes Road

I step into a former thoroughfare, a channel of change and industry, blown by time to a track. The dialectical drawl of ‘the back of beyond’ is a mere breath away – and indeed, this a place now behind the routes we recognise, yet still reaching for something, fumbling further into a time we can’t quite fathom. 

Allescholes Road pushes into the Western hills above Walsden, and I stumble onto it as I make my way down from the moorland, having joined a friend for the first leg of the Todmorden Boundary Way. The area where the minor road intersects the sogged strip of footpath is still ripe with the reek of bogland. It is a particular Pennine flavour – peaty loam pummelled through with weeks-old water and sheep shit split open with rain. 

Beaten-grey clouds hang low and clot across the land, any hope of horizon blunted by swirling bouts of mist. Moisture moves over my face like a shroud and my chest heaves. The surrounding steep benchwork of hills throw their shadows through the fray; though what initially seems like a landscape drained of its colour, is punctured by the occasional stark shout of a foxglove. Swollen cyan trumpets laugh their colour in a wind that offers no regularity, captures breath with no answer. These plants point to our deficiencies, stirring as a reminder that all personal projections in this place are the past. The present is coarse and hard and rips off any romanticised attachment with the wrench of the wind. It catches in my throat with foam, phlegm and a click. 

I crave to locate to Todmorden somewhere to my left, Littleborough to the right, but direction drains away and my body, still hungering for traces, fixes on finding the road from the path. One hand still clutches a found clot of moss like wet hair. Absence arises as an angular feeling under the skin and I snort, sending more water skittering over my face. 

Then my foot meets the rubble of the roadway with a shudder. Semi-solidity after miles of ambiguous, uncompromising moor comes as a shock. And yet there is almost an urgency as to how the road – Allescholes Road–  takes on the topography of the valley, arching and unfurling with tactile intent. For how many people took to build this, whose hands, and when? I wonder– almost crouching in the body’s coil of relief – over what love and hate, what impatience and angst, what boredom and bitterness and sheer brute force did human hands drive this stone into place? Questions are quashed as the sound of each sogged footfall rises as a shh, shh, shhh. 

I drag my feet against saturated stone and look at how the route pushes parallel to the valley bottom, merging into Reddishore Scout. This was once the well-worn packhorse trail linking Walsden with Calderbrook (then towards Summit and Littleborough), and beyond, a linkage forged with prospect and promise, steering clear of the swampy valley base. It was only when the turnpike road was cut through the bottom in the early nineteenth century, that Allescholes Road became optional, then occasional… and now, touched with an air of abandon. 

I feel it too. I watch the straggle of settlements below me busy with human hum and bustle, and the raw roll under my ribs rises to meet them. Falls. Rises. Falls. On these minor moorland roads we find the hurt of ourselves in the hills, we trace back to feelings buried and impulses dashed. It is here I walk with a heart soaked open, and as the horizon hazes into the hill – I stop, reach out and watch the wave of my hand become a blur. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

Crookes

By Sarah Alwin:

A gentle tug of nostalgia helps me up the hill to Crookes, a place I have not been for about fifteen years despite still only living less than two miles away. I stride up purposefully, eyes stinging from the robust breeze and high pollen count, camera at the ready to contain those recalcitrant memories. Sheffield is a city of seven hills, like Rome, as everyone says gleefully, citing strong calf muscles as a prerequisite or maybe even benefit of settling here.

Today, artisan coffee shops like Whaletown Coffee Co. that would sit quite comfortably in Notting Hill instead jostle by the Londis convenience and Barnardo’s charity shop. I had forgotten how much my weeks had been punctuated by the pub and I had really forgotten quite how many of them there actually were in the short walk from Broomhill to Crookes. All the pubs now serve food. This would have been inconceivable, sacrilegious even, when I lived here in 1998. They all retain their original names: The Grindstone, The Ball, The Punchbowl, and The Noah’s Ark; but have a quietly different aesthetic. Outside The Ball, hungover hipsters tuck into avocado and poached egg crumpets. I remember taking over pitchers of lager from The Ball to the unlicensed Indian Chef across the road on a Friday night, careful not to slosh any over the zebra crossing.

It is when I turn onto Loxley View Road that I remember moving in at number 9 in July 1998, having just graduated and about to embark on a PGCE. I was earnest and a deep believer in my own edginess, and together with my housemate (also confusingly named Sarah – at one time it was a fashionable one) constructed a self-consciously adult domestic formula at Loxley View. In reality we were simply play acting.

Over the summer I turned 21 and four awkward boys moved into number 7. Sarah announced with disgust one afternoon that one of them had moved in early and wanted to get to know us. She said this as if he’d been a fungal infection. I was of course smitten with them. I had a battered Citroen AX and gave them lifts to work and to town in between my school placements, and the six of us eventually fell into comfortable, genial companionship, revolving around the pub in the main. The boys used to distinguish between me and the other Sarah by calling me Chicken. Ironically this was because they were too chicken to give her the nickname, probably sensing that underneath it all she thought they were fungal. One of the lads was a little feral, that much was true. But whenever his dad came to visit he would put on a shirt and tie, which we all found miserable.

Over the road from us, on the other corner of Loxley View, was an Indian and Bangladeshi restaurant called Jaflong. The lads next door were frequent visitors, as were our two cats. Today Jaflong is in bigger premises further down Crookes, and its original site looks worse for wear. 

I take this photograph to corroborate my presence there today. I kind of like the washing machine in there next to the rubble and my almost ghostly reflected squint into the murk.

In reality, my time at Loxley View Road was sometimes extremely painful. That winter I embarked on a difficult relationship with a much older, already attached man. It was part of that carefully constructed growing up that I had prepared for myself: ostensibly marginal in a nonchalant way but in reality quite difficult to navigate and more of a cliché than I could admit to myself.

Some afternoons I would walk to the end of Loxley View and look out over the view it was named for. 

Some nights I would go there if I couldn’t sleep, staring into the twinkle of lives across the valley. The view there today is as stunning and the stiff breeze throws up this crow who seems to fit in well with my walk. I am still moved by this beauty. It is so simple and so true.

I still know one of the boys next door though he doesn’t call me Chicken any more. We don’t see each other too often but he is steadfast and good, and I am glad that he got to know us. It was camaraderie and curry that got me through that time, that chastened me out of wanting to grow up sophisticated so fast. It was this vista too that stilled me and took me back to myself. 

***
Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

A Drift in Eden

Photography by Julian Hyde

By Mark Valentine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing to see here

Illustration by Karen Joyce

By Jane Hughes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Searching for home beneath the horse chestnut

By Jennifer Carter:

I smelt my success before I saw it. It was the smell of the demise of fresh green leaves into brittle, curled objects that just about resembled their original shape. They were scattered across the ground. Some were almost completely rotted, whilst others lay proudly, showing off the intricate veins where their rich colours seep into one another. A paint palette of mahogany, rust, and amber.

It was the smell of Autumn.

One of my big ambitions whilst away, inland, was to collect conkers for my four-year-old daughter. I was elated to find them within only a few hours of arriving. Scrabbling around the damp, leaf littered ground, I tried to find the biggest, smallest, and smoothest. My hands were numb with cold as I unzipped the bag to place them all safely inside.

I heard a familiar thud. A conker, still in its shell, fell from the branches which leaned over me and hit the ground. That blunt, seemingly insignificant sound threw me straight into a vivid memory.

The memory of traipsing around the dell, at least that’s what we called it: a small valley in an area of parkland behind my childhood home in the Midlands. There was a mysterious old brick building there, surrounding a deep hole shut off by a metal grate, and one of the biggest horse chestnut trees I have ever seen. My mother, father, brother and I would go there every autumn, looking for conkers. I remember fondly the moments of finding a whole one, still in its shell. I would proudly squash it between my shoe and a bit of hard ground, cracking it so I could reveal the rich, dark brown fruit, fresh enough to still glow where the golden pattern adorned it.

Every year in Falmouth I look for conkers, but the sea air prevents them from developing. I moved there from the midlands 10 or so years ago, and at the time I couldn’t resist the sandy beaches, warm microclimate and laid back inhabitants of the transitional student and holiday town. But the place I had started to call home didn’t excite me anymore. The coastal environments which are so sought after, so popular for holidays, praised so highly every time mentioned, I found dull and expired.

Standing in a field surrounded by towering trees, it made sense why. I was exhilarated by being in a place where the seasons were true to how I remembered experiencing them as a child. A place where I could hear birdsong which wasn’t drowned out by the harsh calls of Herring Gulls. A place where the air wasn’t so thick with salt that chestnut trees couldn’t bear fruit.

Suddenly I noticed the distinct call of a nuthatch. I found it straight away, making its way up one of the vast trunks behind me, flying into a neighbouring tree, and continuing its journey upwards. I cherished the still, cold air, the silence, and the time to reflect on where I belonged.

***
Jennifer is a writer and photographer based in Falmouth, Cornwall. Combining a love of wildlife with her passion for life writing, Jennifer’s work often reflects on how our environment can impact the way we think and feel. She is currently studying towards an MA in Travel & Nature Writing. You can find more of her work on her website.

The rhythm and movement of place: an interview with Jack Cooper

By Dan Carney:

Anyone familiar with Modern Nature’s compelling blend of psych, folk, prog, and pop will know that the band’s main songwriter Jack Cooper draws plenty of inspiration from the rhythms and movements of the places around him. Debut collection ‘How to Live’ explored the transition between the urban and the rural, while last year’s ‘Annual’ beautifully evoked the seasonal cycle. Forthcoming album ‘Island Of Noise’, available via the Bella Union label from November 19th, tells the story of an imagined island; its evolving landscapes, mysteries, and customs, as experienced by an outsider.  

‘Tributaries’, Jack’s recent guitar/saxophone collaboration with band mate Jeff Tobias, consists of two unhurried, minimal pieces inspired by Wicken and Debden Waters, streams that meet the River Cam near his home in Newport, Essex. Spidery note clusters and playful, conversational phrases give way to smooth harmonics and hanging, resonant silences, alternately restless then still. Instruments and melodies unite, separate, and then rejoin, perfectly capturing the babble, flow, and meander of natural streams. The result is one of the most beguiling and vital British experimental/improv releases of recent times. I was lucky enough to ask Jack all about it…

How did ‘Tributaries’ come about?

Over the last few years, I've become more interested in figuring out a language for making music like this - things accelerated when I started to play the trumpet and involve myself more in theory and notating for other musicians. My working relationship and friendship with Jeff has really given me a lot of confidence. His enthusiasm and openness has been inspiring and key to me exploring these different routes.

What did you set out to capture on the record?

It's difficult to explain, but more than anything I've written before, I feel it has achieved something that I'm not really able to articulate with words. I've had some nice messages from people conveying back to me what I think I intended, which is interesting. The intention behind the systems and score is very different from the finished pieces, because the intention there was to capture a conversation between myself and Jeff.

What was it about Wicken Water and Debden Water that inspired the two pieces?

On a surface level, these two bodies of water are fundamentally the same; two streams that feed the River Cam. But they are completely different in every way from one day to the next - depth, speed, the various life contained within - the molecules will probably never pass here again. So these pieces of music are similar in that they're never the same twice, but on a surface level they're the same. I've been making a film, a visual accompaniment to the new Modern Nature record and that's based around shots that highlight order or symmetry within the chaos of the natural world. I think that's something I'm trying to find - order within the chaos.

Jeff has said that the record is “based on systems written by Jack melding composition and improvisation”…

The systems have more in common with geometric patterns, based around what I consider to be a more logical tuning of the guitar. I improvise around them and from that a score is composed over a period of time. The performers devise an interpretation of the score and that's what you're hearing here. For these recordings the systems and then the score are really secondary to our interpretation, in that the aim is exploring a sort of melodic collectivism. The main consideration when performing the score and contributing to the overall work is to consider your own personal interpretation of what 'collectivism' means. If the foundation of the piece and its purpose is the 'main melodic theme' or the 'score', then how does your own interpretation of collectivism fit in with that and what can you contribute towards the end goal? What aspects of the score can your performance highlight, support or compliment and how can your use of rhythm, timbre, harmony and intent serve it best?

It’s evident on this record that you’re influenced by 1960s/70s left-of-centre British jazz/improvised music. Which of these artists are worth checking out, for people who may love Tributaries but not be familiar with them?

The music that has got me the most over the last couple of years is Philip Thomas' collection of Morton Feldman's piano music which came out via Another Timbre. I think the pace of the music made me realise how context is everything. With enough space between them, any two sounds can make sense. They've also just released a collection of John Cage's Number Pieces by Apartment House, which has a similar clarity. 

Are there plans to do more?

Absolutely, this is just the beginning really. First steps perhaps, but I'm currently working on a piece that's more involved in its composition so I'm getting to grips with how best to realise that and where to take it. I'm also working on new Modern Nature music as well and I think the lines between these two strands will probably blur a lot more over time.

How would you compare where you live now to where you were before, around the Wanstead Flats part of Epping Forest? 

It's easier to ignore the city here.

***

‘Tributaries’ album on Bandcamp: https://astributaries.bandcamp.com/album/tributaries 

Pre-order the forthcoming Modern Nature album ‘Island Of Noise’:
https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/250629-modern-nature-island-of-noise 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychology research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Fossil-Chained Grounds

By R. M. Francis:

In July 2020 I took up an 18 month post as Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society (BCGS). A role enabled by the University of Wolverhampton Doctoral College’s Early Research Award Scheme. Exploring the UNESCO Black Country Geopark I’ve written poems inspired by and set in these wonderful places.  The poems are creative responses to the environment, considering how the geological make-up of the land impacts, connects and clashes with the overlooked cultures of the region. 

The Black Country is famous for its role in the Industrial Revolution. Its industrial heritage forged unique and important communities and cultures. This, in many ways, was connected to the grounds that gave life to these cultures - the fossil and mineral rich grounds dating back to the Silurian era. One such fossil is Chain Coral; a now extinct form of colonising coral. Single cells branch off, forming helix, webs or chain patterns. This species colonised the area that was to become known as the Black Country. These fossil-chained grounds gave rise to the chainmakers, steelers and miners - the chain continues to be an important symbol of the region’s heritage, representing strong communal / cultural links. Chains run deep in the region’s cultural psyche - they run deep in the deep time soils.

These poems re-figure our relationship with the local environment; both in its surfaces and depths, the building materials and the forces that create them. This project considers these issues in an overlooked region, famed for its  'dark satanic mills', considering this in conjunction with conservation, ecology, sustainability, and new ways of experiencing place in the anthropocene.

The Mind Seemed to Grow Giddy By Looking So Far Into The Abyss of Time

This quotation is from John Playfair's observation of James Hutton's work and echoes the sublime experience of geopoetic travel and perception. The Black Country Geopark is a group of rich, lush and mysterious places; drifting through them with a geopoetic lens has profoundly impacted my own sense of place and heightened my passion for this region's history and culture. There is something special and astonishing in the experience of getting lost and being awestruck in sites that are just outside or on the edges of our everyday realms. 

Take West Park in Wolverhampton - here you'll find huge glacial erratics pitched in the park grounds like ancient totems. They travelled hundreds of miles during the glacial epoch, and are older still. A poignant reminder of the toddlerdom of humanity on Earth. You can touch this piece of ancient movements where kids play football, where dog walkers and joggers circulate, just minutes from Wolverhampton's bustle. The same can be said of Hayes Cutting; a fascinating dipping sequence tucked behind a rusted rail on the Industrial Estates of The Lye. Commuters, deliveries, school runs zip passed as it sits in almost invisibility.   

There is something atavistic in these sites, or something that summons and imbues atavism. I don't mean this in any negative way; I see it as a touchstone for reconnecting with our locales, lands and the Earth in a deep time context and with the tactile knowledge that runs down to the oldest parts of our biology. Alyson Hallett recognises this in her evaluations of human cultures' relationship to stones; “Since we’ve been on this planet, as humans, we’ve paid attention to the patterns of stars and the spirits that live in stones”.[1] Kenneth White talks about this, saying: "The geopoeticist is immediately placed in the enormous".[2] Francis Ponge stated "they sink into the night of logos - until finally they find themselves at the ROOT level, where things and formulations merge".[3] George Amar thinks about the embodied knowledge of reading the land "reading is like swimming or dancing [...] eskimos can read snow and nomads desert sand".[4] These are things that we can walk through, touch, see and smell, and in that, connect us to our region and our land in ways that are both intellectual and visceral. It is, like ancient wayfinding skills, embodied and physical wisdom.

Robert Brechon discuses the relationship between cognition and feeling and between self and landscape in context to the work of Fernando Pessoa:

[...] something shatters in the vision of the landscape. The exaltation of color, light and night turns against itself and falls back into the abyss of self-awareness. Intelligence takes over from emotion, which it unmasked after having caught it in the act of posing and imposture. All the symbols that the landscape suggests to the mind of the walker, far from filling it, complete the disenchantment. He can neither absorb the landscape nor let himself be absorbed by it. His conscience overflows the landscape on all sides, as the landscape overflows from his consciousness. There is no possible identification or consubstantiality between the mind and the world.[5] 

It seems Totem is exactly the right word for West Park's erratics, and I'd use it for the geological cuttings and other features across the region too: that which, with a strange sense of animism, calls and connects people and place.

*** 

Errare

They know their address, they don’t know where they are.
Kenneth White

West Park wanderer,
erratic and stiff,
exforms in shades
cast over pathways:
Eros pole, glacially 
guided from Arenig -
an arrow rebinding space.

Fred and Ken err perma-trias
tracks, check the state of chestnuts
and their own scape. Iss too icy still,
ay it, me mon. Them ay ripe. Shrug.

On to bowling green 
and their own Aegil, 
but never without a slight 
palm pat against wet Felsite - 
cosmos-pointing and terrafirmed,
enforming in firm attention - 
a honing farewell.

***

Thursday: Beacon Hill Quarry 

Our Roy said iss scarred - 
beautymarked by beacon fires,
Wrottersley’s luna scopings. 
He shepherds limestone ways,
lighting lens on knapweed, carline
ox-tongue, heeding optic glares
against hairstreak flutterings. 
Roy said, they’m rare, our kid,
rare beauts on beautmarked mount.
Thass why Sedgley Morrismen come
circlin’ among whitsun flames. 
Yo’ cor ave a beacon wi’out watchmen.
He lays the ley’s spine, supporting
steep steps. Sunrays make dirt glimmer,
magnifies silty mudstone and brown lime, 
lagoon shallowed in Gorstian days (if earth bones
know what days mean) and further to skeletal
stems of sea lily, bryophyte, velvet worm. Concestors,
hand holding, forward facing, tracing and traced in
Thunor’s forge, like me and my shepherd.

On Wolverhampton Road, we stop for fags at the BP
and sup a pint at the Mount Pleasant. He grandads me.
Reaches into pocket, hands me three black 
bubbled bibbles of clinker. Tarra’abbit he says.  

***

Lindworm

Lindworm under Leasowes
muddied brooke bank, tracking 
tended greens and walkways;
Shenstone etched in delicate circuit
where flow, rush, plunge quilts 
slow steps passed urn, bench, footbridge:
Soft drone of petrichor.

In calm it makes its goblin market,
unnoticed, unheard. Set in vermi-
oubliettes as Halesowen bypasses
flood engines on routes to Brum. 
Their own flow, rush, plunge. They
used to come 'ere, but they doh come
'ere no more. Lindworm under Leasowes
leaks its mulching bites under A458, no.9,
Whittington Road and Hawne Basin ...

… turning scoop wheel under lapal tunnel
its half-sleep churning grumble-growls
in Murder Ballad rhythm out to Dudley
and the leisure steps of Leasowes’ ramblers
feel skinshedding of lindworm mercy.

***

Overhanging

Olistoliths slump-slide
as resisting stresses buckle
and atavistic avalanches - submarine, 
like hangover guilt: 
that dew-drenched dawn 
when we grazed feet
along New Year frosts 
and we didn’t speak a word 
and we didn't hold hands 
and we didn't see anyone
and badgers were hibernating 
just like the trees - seem unstill. 
Up Dolerite dyke, the Heathen Coal 
underhung in extract where brittle 
bramble waits dusk-strike. She says, 
there's something in the extraction,
something seeding, imbedding, gulfing us.

***

R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, was published with Wild Pressed Books and his poetry collection, Subsidence, is out with Smokestack Books. Wild Pressed Books recently published his second novel, The Wrenna and he co-edited the book Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave). He is currently the Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society.

***

Notes:

[1] Hallett, A., Stone Talks (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2019) p. 13
[2] White, K., ‘The Great Field of Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Founding Texts, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/textes-fondateurs/8-le-grand-champ-de-la-geopoetique 
[3] Amar, G., ‘The Meaning of the Earth’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics:Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/24-le-sens-de-la-terre  
[4] Amar, G., ‘From Surrealism to Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/118-du-surrealisme-a-la-geopoetique
[5] Brechon, R., ‘Landscapes by Fernando Pessoa’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/28-paysages-de-fernando-pessoa

The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here.