Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

The Dangerous Beach

By Fiona M Jones:

This is the biggest beach I have ever seen. We have driven miles along narrow winding roads, pausing to squeeze past the occasional vehicle coming the other way. We have parked by Goswick Golf Club and followed a path over two lines of dunes, and suddenly we are on flat sand. 

Sand and sand and sand, miles of it, and somewhere in the distance the North Sea. We head towards it. If a piece had fallen off the coast of Norway a few hours ago, a tsunami would be on its way. We’d run and run and never make it. We would DIE, I tell my niece and nephew, widening my eyes to scare them, but their father assures them there’s no tsunami forecast. I try again as we walk uphill ever so slightly: this would be a sandbar we’re standing on now. When the tide sweeps in on a stormy day you can find yourself surrounded, cut off from land. You would DROWN in the swirling grey tide as you struggle for land and find yourself only going deeper. The tide is actually still going out, someone observes, and my nephew and niece settle down to digging drainage channels and river systems in the waterlogged sand near the water’s edge. One of my sons wades in the water, looking for jellyfish, but all he finds is a partially-deflated helium balloon dropped out of air, washed up by water. It looks like a Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish. Which can, of course, KILL you, probably with fear, if you were listening to the wisdom of your Aunty Fii, but nobody is. 

In the sand I hollow out five oversized toe-holes and follow up with an enormous artificial sole-indentation: a giant’s footprint. An imaginary monster has walked out of the sea. It will probably EAT you. The longsuffering niece and nephew help to smooth the work of my hands until it looks almost plausible. My son takes out his phone to record the monstrous footprint. We build little hills of sand, mountains standing between mini-rivers running down to the sea. This sand we’re building mountains with is the accumulated product of eroded mountains, I tell the children, who are growing in skepticism by the minute. It’s time to head homeward, exploring driftwood and flotsam on the way. The nephew forms an emotional attachment to an abandoned buoy the size of a space-hopper. Can he take it home? Will it fit through the door of his home if he does? Will there be enough room to live there if he gets it indoors? In the end he must content himself with the scrap of rope that we cut off the buoy, fatally blunting Aunty Fii’s scissors in the process. 

On the way back between the dunes, somebody stops to read the sign we passed earlier, half-obscured by dune-grasses. QUICKSAND, it tells us. And don’t touch any metal objects left over from the military training operations of yesteryear. Because they’ll EXPLODE. 

Didn’t I tell you this was a dangerous place? 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes short/flash/micro fiction, CNF and occasionally poetry. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Skytrails

By Leonard Yip:

Kruger National Park, South Africa
June 2019

We spend the day in search of lionesses – all afternoon in the jeep, through the golden dust clouds of the Sabi Sands, out onto the low bareness of the bushveldt at the height of its winter. 

Jess, our ranger at the wheel of the jeep, tears off-road across brambles and dirt ditches, stopping every so often where bush gives way to sand. The Shangaan tracker with us, aptly named Advice, dismounts here: tracing the padded footfalls of the big cats in that pliant, wind-dusted earth, ghosting into the acacias and re-appearing again with a new set of directions in which to chase.

We never do see the lionesses that day, but the journey back to the lodge is marked with a quieter wonder. The sun sets and sinks and kisses the earth in fire, composing the leafless branches of fever trees into sharp silhouettes. Dark shapes of elephant herds in the distance move along the horizon line. In between the cold clarity of moonrise and the sun’s final dip beneath the Drakensberg mountains, there is a moment that seems to hang long and suspended in the clear air. Unprepared for the quickness of nightfall in the bush, I crane my neck upwards and the oncoming dark smothers me in its sudden descent: an entire sky dissolving to black.

Staring into its enormity, I lose my sense of perspective as it settles across the ends of the veldt. I sit in mute, fearful mesmerisation, this vast and unknowable thing erasing scale and obliterating our field of vision. Landmarks disappear and the roads before us are swallowed up into an inky chasm. My stomach lurches and I feel like I’m falling, leaping upwards into the infinity of everything I do not know. I reach reflexively for the guardrails of the jeep.

This uncanny, reversed vertigo clears only when the stars wink themselves into existence. The shapes of the veldt resolve themselves again faintly by the pinpricks of light. Cloud-like, the galaxy begins to pattern itself across the sky, looking for all the world like a rippling reflection of the road below us. Jess slows the jeep and leaves the lights dead. She and Advice teach us to navigate by the stars, locating the Southern Cross, mapping a southward bearing from where its lines bisect along the axis. They tell us the stories and folktales of the Shangaan bushmen – that the Milky Way is thought to be the trail walked by the spirits of their ancestors, and how a girl once threw the sparks from an ember’s core deep into the night sky, where they gathered into the constellations that guide the sojourner and the wayfarer home. 

Sat there listening, I am amazed at how acts of imagination become so closely tied to acts of pathfinding. I think of how writers and etymologists have followed the origins of the word ‘learn’ to the Old English ‘leornian’, meaning ‘to get knowledge’. The imprint of its lilting consonants and rolling vowels on our tongues trails even further back to the Proto-Germanic ‘liznojan’; to find a track. Learning, then, carries the same sense as following a track, making known the unknown through the tracing of one sand-swept footprint at a time. Even across cultures, how we make meaning of the world so often finds its way back to the very act of finding a way – galaxies becoming ground, stars turning to soil, walking and tracking as learning and understanding. Garnette Cardogan once wrote that ‘walking is, after all, interrupted falling.’ His words spring back to my mind as Jess and Advice map out the night sky for me, the resonance of trailblazing disrupting my sensation of upwards descent.

Advice turns on the searchlight, and the beam lances hot and bright ahead of us. The jeep trundles along the trail home. The air goes wild with the noise of the bush coming to life, and hyenas navigate by lone stars rising to their shadowed kills. Somewhere, lions roar into the night.

***

Leonard Yip is a Singaporean writer with an interest in landscape, people, place and faith - and often the intersections where these meet. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, and his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com. 

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz. 

Akinbode Akinbiyi at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

By Sara Bellini

In The Language of Cities Deyan Sudjic writes“A city is made by its people, within the bounds of the possibilities that it can offer them: it has a distinctive identity that makes it much more than an agglomeration of buildings”. Akinbode Akinbiyi’s pictures are portraits of a street, a corner, a moment. He captures the soul of a place through its inhabitants and the social texture that binds them to their cityscape.

“What I’m doing is observing, taking part in this urban phenomenon and trying to record documents. It is a kind of fine sensibility of understanding the passageways within the city.” In his psychogeography of the image on film Akinbode Akinbiyi explores the particular and the everyday, achieving a universal representation of what makes up collective life and how people experience their shared environment.

Akinbiyi is a photographer and artist that has walked and documented the streets of cities and coastlines of Europe, Africa and America. He has lived in England, Nigeria and Germany and is now based in Berlin. His collection of works reflects his wanderings and includes series like African Quarter (Berlin 1990s–today) and Lagos: All Roads (1980s–today). Selected pieces from his long-term projects will be on display at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin from today until 17 May. The exhibition is called Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air and is curated by Natasha Ginwala.

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air
Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
07th February 2020 - 17th May 2020

Film: Ness, by Adam Scovell

Image: A still from ‘Ness’ by Adam Scovell, an adaptation of the book by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood

We have long been fans of the writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell here at Elsewhere, from his wonderful debut novel Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019) to his regular contributions on place, landscape, cities and film for a variety of outlets including Caught by the River, Little White Lies and the BFI. So when we heard that Adam was making a film adaptation of the book Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood (Penguin, 2019), we were interested indeed.

The setting for the book and the film is the evocative landscape of Orford Ness in England, something which the film completely captures. Adam shot the film on a variety of different Super-8 stocks which, in his words, “is an enjoyably organic patchwork suitable for Robert’s porous prose, Stanley’s grainy illustrations and the landscape as a whole.” We wholeheartedly recommend you head over to Adam’s website Celluloid Wickerman to read more about the process of making this wonderful and atmospheric film, and we are really pleased and proud that Adam has given us his blessing to share it here on Elsewhere.

Adam’s second novel How Pale The Winter Has Made Us will be published by Influx Press in 2020, and you can find him on Twitter here.

Podcast: Trees a Crowd

By Sara Bellini:

Trees a Crowd is a podcast that celebrates nature, people that love nature and the relationship between human beings and the natural realm. If you appreciate when someone can identify a wren rather than just calling it a bird, and your eyes light up at the thought of Yorkshire national parks, this is the podcast for you. Think David Attenborough without the telly but available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In and Overcast.

From February 2019 actor and artist David Oakes has been interviewing people whose job is “inspired by or devoted to the natural world”: scientists, creatives, environmentalists, conservationists, gardeners and sometimes nature itself. “Everyone is working for the natural world but everyone’s agenda is completely different.” 

Why is nature so fascinating and how does it benefit us? How do human beings relate to their ecosystem? Why is it so important to protect the wildlife? David Oakes and his guests discuss these questions during one-hour-long episodes, twice to four times a month, mostly but not exclusively in the UK. Featured topics are: the dawn chorus, horticulture, carbon footprint, Yorkshire sheep, Inga alley cropping in Sierra Leone, Manta Rays in the Maldives, agricultural laws and Extinction Rebellion. 

“Perspective is increasingly key to all aspects of life, but perhaps never has it been more important in terms of our interaction with nature. With our society and technology growing so rapidly, we are capable of causing a huge amount of destruction, but we also now have the technology to limit, or even reverse, the damage it has caused. As Harry* suggests, running up a Devonian Tor or being penned in by trees or mountains helps us reimagine ourselves not purely as a construct of a human society, but as a continuing part of a natural ecosystem, of a natural justice.”

Have a listen, go for a walk, plant a tree.

*Harry Barton, chief executive of the Devon Wildlife Trust (Trees a Crowd, 07th October 2019)

Snaresbrook Road

By Dan Carney: 

Snaresbrook Road is a perfectly straight 800-metre stretch, bisected by the border separating the outer London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Redbridge. At the road’s western end, there’s the scruffy ambiguity of Walthamstow Forest, alternately idyllic and unsettling, the start of a narrow passage of woodland that leads to the widening of Epping Forest at Chingford Plain. To the east lies the suburban village of Wanstead. An affluent and comfortable place, but also one with a recent history of radicalism and subversion, the location of a series of noisy public protests in the mid-1990s against the construction of the nearby M11 link road. Now, however – at a glance, anyway – Wanstead is all boutiques, tasteful cafes, and posh second hand shops. A place of satisfaction and prosperity, tethered and tiled, declared one of the capital’s top ten places to live by The Sunday Times in 2018.

This contrast between the two ends of Snaresbrook Road, between unpredictability and conformity, also runs side-to-side. There’s regimentation and structure, represented by the public school Forest, Snaresbrook Crown Court (housed in an imposing Elizabethan-style mansion designed by the famous Victorian Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott), and the concentric functionality of the adjacent Hermitage housing estate. On the other hand, the numerous woodland paths leading to Hollow Ponds, as well as the debris-strewn Eagle Pond - which separates the eastern end of the road from the court building on its oak-lined southern bank - embody nature, improvisation, and secrecy. The area directly behind the pond is Epping Forest’s most active homosexual cruising site, an eastern Hampstead Heath analogue, where tissues, used condoms, and other sexual debris can be found strewn in thorny undergrowth. It’s played host to these activities since before World War II, when gay sex was yet to be legalized, and the existence of homosexuality yet to be acknowledged in any widespread form. Now, the forest authorities accept that it happens here, with keepers working alongside LGBTQI organisations in order to promote good littering practice.

Snaresbrook Road thus takes you from the panoptical to the concealed, from the administrative to the unrecorded, in the space of a few dozen strides. It’s a syncretic centre line, a starting point for any possible tangent, where high court judges deliver verdicts of public record a few yards away from furtive, fleeting woodland liaisons. Footfall is, however, sparse, and even with the opulence of the court building, as well as Eagle Pond’s considerable size and appeal, Snaresbrook Road’s in-between status ensures it never quite feels like an actual place. Semi-fluorescent joggers, returning dog walkers, and waterfowl enthusiasts – the latter eager to inspect the mute swans, moorhens, tufted ducks, and Canada geese that gather at the water - trudge a thoroughfare that seems to have been implemented only as an afterthought. A connective in search of a destination; a lonely, infinite corridor, laid in the absence of other planning initiatives. 

This unreality frequently induces a dreamlike lull through which thoughts emerge unhindered and unanticipated, free to idly swirl and reform, fluid and spontaneous. This fuzzy ambience can, however, quickly harden into something sharper and more hostile. Sometimes, in the half-light of dusk, when the clouds hang low and still, and there is a lull in the traffic hum, the fronts of the flats and retirement homes opposite the water can appear as two-dimensional facades, fabricated or adapted for the concealment of something undesirable behind. Flattened imitations intended to mask and deceive, like the two “houses” comprising 23-24 Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, which hide an uncovered section of railway line, or the brownstone-cum-subway vent on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The fact that there is nothing which might need concealing, or ventilating, behind the buildings here does very little to lessen the paranoia. When it hits, one is left disconcerted, keen to wander around the backs of the buildings to seek reassurance amidst the car parks and the gardens. 

Eagle Pond, unprotected from the road by railing or wall, stands as testament to our relentless appetite for the arbitrary division and allocation of land. Its banks are owned by different entities, with the City of London Corporation, Her Majesty’s Court Service, and the London Borough of Redbridge each responsible for a particular section of the surrounding grass or concrete. The water body itself, which has likely existed in some form since the eighteenth century, was adjudged part of Epping Forest, and thus the responsibility of the Corporation, in 1882. When you stare across it as you walk, it’s not hard to conjure the sensation of floating serenely across the surface, like an overfed waterfowl or even a piece of fetch-driven litter. Sometimes, even on an overcast, uninviting afternoon, the urge to dive gleefully into the water can be momentarily overwhelming. Although the pond is covered in islets of green algae, it would likely provide an excellent place to float or wade, separate from everything but still visible and contactable from the pavement twenty metres away. This may be the standpoint from which Snaresbrook Road is best experienced; present but not completely involved, removed but vigilant, with a watchful eye on all sides. Even if the buildings don’t quite feel real, the birds seem happy enough. You’d probably get used it as well, given time.

***

Dan Carney is a musician/writer 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 authored a number of academic research papers 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 far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Dan on Twitter

In Walthamstow Forest

By Dan Carney: 

Wide, flat dirt paths carving through lush woodland, open meadows flanked by wooded corridors and undulating, densely covered glades. Clusters of hornbeam, oak, and birch, many ancient, pollarded at the top to encourage further growth, presiding over hundreds of plant species; grass, herb, nettle, weed, fern, and wort. Underfoot, the fossil-rich London clay soil, hard and stiff but deceptively quick to churn during wet weather. Birdsong mingling with the low, umbilical hum of traffic on the A104, Epping to Islington, everywhere between, periodically suppressed by the sound of a plane or the sudden and invasive whooping of a siren. Bisected by both the Woodford New Road and the endless, disheveled North Circular, this is the beginning trickle, the tentative first stretch of the north-east London woodland panhandle which will open out into Epping Forest proper, and eventually creep, pleasingly, just beyond the confines of the M25. This part of the forest is a scruffy outpost, often overlooked in favour of its more storied and unbroken counterparts. There are no visitors’ centres, Iron Age settlements, or Grade II-listed timber hunting lodges here, but the paths lead, eventually, to all these things.

The first path, approaching the southernmost entrance to Rising Sun Wood, is inauspicious; a thin, dusty track, cracked and dry in the summer months, running through an open field, reassuringly parallel with the 1930s semis of Forest Rise opposite. The entrance is marked by a wooden post, painted white at the top, ground-secure in the shadow of the trees at the top of Greenway Avenue. Underneath the first flourish of woodland canopy, the path widens, becomes even and firm. The trees are tall, with dramatic branch formations exploring every possible angle. Some are hollowed out, exposing tender white bark. Dead trunk husks lie everywhere. A sparse glade foregrounds the wrought iron gate of the St. Peter’s-in-the-Forest graveyard, where the headstones are lopsided, covered in ivy, many rendered semi-legible by weather and time. The air is comfortable and still.   

Just to the north is an open, unkempt meadow. Large oaks guard secretive glades along one side, hash paraphernalia and half-empty chicken boxes strewn at the thresholds. Opposite, behind the incongruously shiny Empire Lounge on Woodford New Road (“Enjoy The Food, Enjoy The People, Enjoy The Vibe”), lays Bulrush Pond. Bog-like, derelict, murky water mostly obscured by large clumps of reeds. Once there were paddle-wheel boats, ice-cream kiosks, and deckchairs, before widespread car ownership enabled the leisure-seeking families who gathered here on bank holidays to travel further afield. It’s quieter now, but by no means deserted or bereft. Joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families on short-hop rambles, occasional equestrians, and groups of teenagers punctuate the calm, but now it’s less organized, no longer an end point but a backdrop, a surrounding, or a point on the journey. On a warm summer’s day, the meadow feels enveloping, hermetic, unconnected to anywhere else, only leading back to slightly differing iterations of itself, like a gently fluttering audio loop or blinking, cyclical visual display. Bucolic and restorative, a place to think things through, but always with something flickering away, faintly, off to the side. A made-for-TV fever dream poking through the idyll. Layers and stories just beyond the lens flare, unseen, unarticulated but ready to emerge and speak, when the wind rises and the nights draw down.

Back inside the forest cover, the track splits around a stubborn old hornbeam, its knotted roots securely encased under the top layer shingle. The route to Mill Plain is kinder here, on the west side of the A104, where there’s no need to engage with the fractured grimness of the Waterworks Corner pedestrian interchange. This is where the path breaks clear of the cover and ramps up, knobbly, cracked, onto a raised, open ridge, where the track bends gently through the long grass and willowherb. To the right is the Thames Water pumping station, its wonky rear steel fence offering negligible protection from anything with sufficient stature and determination, and the Waterworks Corner roundabout, only metres away. South Woodford to Redbridge, Barking, Beckton, Woodford Green, Loughton, Epping. To the left, the scoop of the Lea Valley. The atmosphere is sleepy and strange, ominously peaceful. Twin paths converge and slope down towards Forest Road, the occasional tent visible through the bushes, and the sharp tops of City of London buildings poke through the trees. Look into the valley-dip from the bridge adjacent and it’s Walthamstow, Tottenham Hale, Edmonton, Harringay, Alexandra Palace, Brent Cross. Stadiums, reservoirs, retail parks, antennae, the ever-present wash of the traffic, distant and interior.

On the other side, nestled behind the roundabout, is a raised, circular grass platform, flat, wide, and empty, aside from a shabby Thames Water brick hut at the edge. Marked, appropriately, as “The Circle” on Google Maps, it offers readymade laps for joggers, and numerous exits, down the tight, surrounding verge, back into the cover of the forest. Manmade and incongruent, barely visible from the road, it’s easily cast as the site for something more atavistic and obscure. A sacred place, where anonymous figures gather to offer up euphoric human sacrifices to a provincial woodland deity. A landing site for a small extra-terrestrial reconnaissance craft, carved out to order by devoted earthbound aides. A place to hide in the open. Stay too long and the joggers, smiling and efficient, assume – possibly through no fault of their own - a slightly sinister, collective aspect.

The path to the bridge over the A406, just beyond, is gravelly and uneven, bricks and slate pieces baked into the dirt, recalling the clay pits and brick kiln once residing nearby. A well-covered passage, accessible via a tight, cosy glade, runs parallel with the road, overlooking it. Thorny and narrow, discarded carrier bags hanging forlornly from bushes, a person-thin viewing corridor for the unending, thrusting snake of the daylight Walthamstow traffic. Crossing the bridge, to the South Woodford side, is a journey of metres but feels like an escape from this exhaust-choked claustrophobia into something wholesome, time-frozen, pastoral. The trackway widens, getting flatter and kinder underfoot. The canopy is less oppressive, offering a pleasing combination of light and shade. Patches of sunlight cast through the trees, dappling the floor. Little private clearings just off the main track lead into exquisite mini-mazes. To the left, an intricate branch structure built around a large horizontal trunk, and a carved stone memorial marking the birth site of a celebrated gypsy evangelist. Everything honeyed in yellows and browns. With minimal effort, you can block out the vehicle drone. Approaching the open field in front of Oak Hill, boundaries begin to dissolve; thoughts flicker and fade, hazy before they have fully formed. You start to feel drowsy, detached, separate, before the sudden rustle-rush of a small animal brings you back, sharply, to jittery alertness. You turn and hurry back the way you came. The sun hangs low and follows you, blinking and glinting through the gaps, and the temperature starts to drop.

***

Dan Carney is a musician and writer from north-east 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 also has a PhD in developmental psychology, and has authored a number of academic research papers on cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, writing, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur. Dan on Twitter.

Postcard from… Szent Mihály, Balaton

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

From the bike path that was leading us around Lake Balaton, a small track led up through the trees, winding its way around a couple of tight hairpins until it reached the top. There were picnic tables up there and a clearing in the woods that clung to the hillside, offering views across the curve of the lake’s western shore, back to Keszthely where we had started out that morning and across to Fonyód where, the previous day, we stopped to watch a congregation of egrets as they stalked along the pebbled shore.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

Also atop the hill was a white chapel, bright against the blue sky, and a series of crucified figures, carved out of wood and looking sorrowfully down towards the picnic tables and the views belong. The chapel was dedicated to Szent Mihály, and St Michael’s chapel had been built on this promontory above the lake for a very specific reason. The chapel was there to remember a day almost three hundred years before; a day very different to the one we experienced beneath a hot, June sun.

Over the winter of 1739, a group of fishermen walked out onto the ice on the edge of the partially frozen lake. As they worked, lifting fish from the cold waters, the ice they were standing on broke free and began to float off into the lake. The waters were so cold it was impossible for them to swim for safety. Six died, from the cold or from falling into the water. The other forty were left, floating on the lake, waiting to meet a similar fate.

That the forty fishermen survived was thanks to a shift in the wind, which began to move the ice floe back towards the shore. Once back on dry land the fisherman decided to build a chapel in thanks to their miraculous survival, and they built it on the hill that looked down on where they had returned to shore, so that it could continue to watch over the fishermen of the Balaton from that point on.

It was hard to imagine the lake frozen as we sat there on the picnic table beneath Christ on the cross and the tower of St Michael’s chapel. There seemed little movement on the lake as the sun rose higher in the late morning sky. But the church on the hill stood there as a reminder, not only of those who survived that winter’s day, but those that hadn’t been so lucky to be saved by the changing wind.

About the author:
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Paul’s book Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast is out now, published by Influx Press.