Book extract: For the Safety of All – A Story of Scotland's Lighthouses

Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, Na h-Eileanan Siar 

The view from the Butt – the gleam from the lighthouse once cast its glow on the crofthouses and croftland, moorland and machair, sand and shore from its stance on Rubha Robhanais, illuminating the waves of lazy beds as well as those found on the surface of the sea.

We are extremely pleased to be publishing this extract from For the Safety of All: A Story of Scotland’s Lighthouses. In this new book, Donald S Murray explores Scotland’s lighthouses through history, storytelling and the voices of the lighthouse keepers.

By Donald S Murray

Frequently, during my childhood and teenage years in Ness, on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, there were reminders of the depth of darkness that existed for centuries around the coastline of this country. 

At night or early evening, a storm might rattle windows, a gust of wind puff above chimney tops. The lights across the house would falter and flicker before disappearing. After that, there would be a scramble for matches and candles, a torch if there was one to be found. A Tilley lamp would be lit, taking a moment or two to ignite and burn before its warm glow added intricacies of light and shade to a room which seconds earlier had been illuminated only by the flame of a peat fire. It was as if we had stepped back in history, into the period before electricity had come to our homes, the ages swirling into reverse for a moment or two. 

And that change was most apparent when we peered out of the window at the rest of the village and the broad stretch of the moor. Apart from the spin and eddy of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, the stillness of the red light above the Decca Station and the rare sweep of a set of car headlights, all was in darkness. We could imagine the householders performing the same rituals we did – scuttling through the kitchen cabinet or chest of drawers for matches, looking in the understairs cupboard among sheets and blankets for the lamp – before they restored muted light to their homes. This was what might have been seen in these houses if a passer-by had peeked in. The faint glimmer of firelight. The subdued flame of a Tilley lamp. Or perhaps even more dim and pale than any of these lanterns – a wick dipped in the oil of a seabird, seal or whale. An unsteady flicker casting more shade than light into the room. 

The scale of this darkness was one of the factors that made travel around the British Isles difficult for centuries. Difficult enough on land, this was especially the case when boats were the main mode of transport. Until the expansion of road and rail, after all, the seas and waterways were Scotland’s main highways. The seasons intensified travel problems, especially during late autumn and winter. In many ways, the sailors and travellers of these early times lived the opposite kind of lives to the modern city dweller. The latter’s constant use of electric light, whether found in the streets they walk and drive through or within their homes, prevents them seeing the moon and stars above their heads. For those who made journeys either on shore or at sea in the past, there were sometimes contrary issues. The need to observe and navigate by the stars made them focus overhead, leading – occasionally – to failure to see the rocks and skerries that loomed out of the ocean, the unpredictable nature of both depths and shoreline. 

And then there was the unreliable character of light before the arrival of the lighthouse to these shores, a process that began in earnest around the commencement of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, when a storm buffeted their boat, the glow of fire on the coastline meant safety and security for sailors, a harbour where a vessel could be tied up and fastened until that night’s tempest passed. However, there were occasions when their need for shelter and protection made mariners too easily deceived. Allegedly wreckers on the coastline of these islands took advantage of their desperation, ushering them to a shore where the consignment of goods aboard would be plundered, their lives lost. Fires would be lit, and signals flashed, but their boats were ushered only in the direction of danger. Over the course of the nineteenth century and later, the Stevenson family and the Northern Lighthouse Board put an end to these practices. Their lighthouses were charted and mapped. If anything flickered elsewhere, as it sometimes had in the past, it would most likely be a trick or a ruse, a deadly trap. 

There were other hazards in the northern edge of the world in summer. During this season, those of us who live in places like the north of Scotland have the sun as an almost constant companion. Its presence, in some shape or form, rarely leaves the sky, creating a continual twilight, blurring at most to a shade of ochre in the sky. The persistent lack of rhythm of light and dark has its effect on people, making some edgy and ill-at-ease. Insomnia abounds: attention wanders. Storm-clouds and dangers on the horizon can fail to be seen. Mist, particularly on Scotland’s east coast, prone to haar, can obscure and conceal the risks ahead. 

It was this – their awareness of the constant threat of terrors posed by both human actions and seaborne life – that made men begin to build lighthouses, a way of making the existence of both ship and crew more secure and safe. 

***

Donald S Murray grew up under the gleam of Butt of Lewis lighthouse, and lighthouses have remained a continual presence in his life. He is the author of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Scotland’s islands.  His books include the acclaimed As the Women Lay Dreaming, In a Veil of Mist, The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and The Guga Hunters.

For the Safety of All is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland.

Printed Matters: Point.51

By Sara Bellini 

The 51st parallel north is the point where continental Europe and the UK meet, halfway between Dover and Calais in the English Channel. This meeting point also inspired the name of Point.51, a London-based magazine of slow journalism and documentary photography.

The look is simple and effective: a red matte cover, a full-page portrait, one word that identifies the theme of the issue and a phrase to invite you in. The content requires time, a comfortable armchair and a cup of tea: Don’t flip through the pages, linger, take everything in. This is what I immediately loved about this new publication, the slow and in-depth approach to stories, narrated equally through words and images. 

We all consume the news, or more often than not, news headlines, and their abundance and speed detach us from the content and from the people the headlines are about. Point.51 gives you the opportunity to explore significant news topics through personal stories, focusing on ordinary people and how they relate to the bigger narratives of our multi-layered present. It gives you time to empathise, reflect and form an informed opinion, which is crucial in shaping contemporary conversations.

Issue 4 will hit the shelves in May, and meanwhile we caught up with editor Rob Pinney:

What was the inspiration behind Point.51 and what drives you?

We wanted to do something that gave us the space and time to really dig into complex stories – both in the writing and in the photography – without having to strip them down. We want to work on stories that challenge us, and challenge our readers, and I think that curiosity is really what drives Point.51 forward. 

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

I think we knew that Point.51 was going to be a print magazine from the outset. In fact, I don't think I can remember us having a conversation about the possibility of doing it any other way. But as we've grown, I think it's now clearer than ever that print is the right format for us.

I like to think about it by flipping the question on its head: how would we want to read these stories? For me, it is undoubtedly in print. I want to sit with them and read them through, following the story as it unfolds, without distractions.

Point.51 comes out twice a year, and so the stories we work on for the magazine are usually put together over fairly long periods of time. They're designed to last – we want them to feel just as relevant in five years time as they do today – and there's a permanence to pulling them together in a printed magazine that reflects that.

Then it's also important for the photography. My background is as a photographer, and we pride ourselves on commissioning and publishing really great documentary photography that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our journalism. There are 102 images in our latest issue, and without wanting to sound too old fashioned, I think that work really is at its best when seen in print.

At the core of your magazine are a strong sense of place and a genuine interest in people, what’s the relationship between these two elements?

Definitely. Both people and place are essential to the stories we work on. But they come up in different ways, and I think the relationship between them changes from story to story.

People are at the forefront of all of our stories – that has been a constant throughout. But place comes up in different ways. To give a couple of examples: there is a story in our first issue about Cuban asylum seekers arriving in Serbia to make use of visa-free entry for Cuban passport holders, which exists as a legacy of the Cold War. In that case, place plays a very specific and explicit role in the story. Then there's a story in our second issue about Port Talbot, an industrial town in north Wales known for steel production. When the steelworks opened there in the 1950s, it employed 18,000 people – literally half the town – but today that number has fallen to just 4,000. At the centre of the story are multiple generations of a family with a long-standing connection to the steelworks, and you get to see how those different generations – with different experiences – relate to their town. Bringing those different perspectives into our stories is really important.

So I don't think you can say that there's a fixed or static relationship between people and place in the magazine, but the stories are definitely concerned with the way the two inform and shape each other.

How has Point.51 changed since Issue 1 and what are your plans for Issue 4?

When we started out, lots of friends and colleagues thought we were crazy trying to start a print magazine for long-form journalism and documentary photography when other publications were disappearing left, right, and centre. They were probably right – it's certainly not easy. But we've seen the magazine go from being just an idea to an established title with a solid and growing reputation.

Issue 4 is well underway, and should hit the shelves in May. The theme for the next issue is Nations and Nationalism, but as with all of our issues, we're coming at it from a variety of angles – from the story of a "micronation" in Italy to the relationship between people living in Gibraltar and La Linea de Concepción, the towns on either side of the border.

The team of people working on Point.51 has also grown – Nick, Sara, and Meg have joined us, and their knowledge and hard work is already showing. So yes, there have been lots of changes.

But I also think that, in a fairly fundamental way, it hasn't changed at all. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Point.51 to be when we started it: a straightforward magazine for considered long-form journalism and original photography. I think we've stuck to that pretty doggedly, and I think it's what a lot of our readers really like about it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of little story/big story behind Point.51?

Yes certainly! "Big story/little story" is an approach we use when working on stories for Point.51. We can't claim it as an original concept – it has been put to use (and written about) widely – but it's something we try to put into practice wherever possible.

Essentially it comes down to the choice between doing something that is wide but shallow or narrow but deep, and deciding where you think the real value is. The stories we like to work on for Point.51 are usually concerned with pretty big topics: we've reported stories about migration and asylum, the climate crisis, mental health, Brexit, and the Irish border, to name a few. But in each case we're zooming right in to tell a smaller story within that, concentrating on just a few individuals, or a single place, or maybe both.

The small stories are the ones we can really relate to, and that stay with us. And I think that if you tell the small story really well – bringing in all the detail and complexity that exists in real life, and which often gets cut out – then you're also providing a much richer perspective on the big story too.

We're not trying to tell readers what to think or to persuade them to see something in a particular way. We want to bring people great stories that are told thoroughly and faithfully, but ultimately it's for them to engage with them on their own terms.

As usual, Berliners can find Point.51 at do you read me?!? and Rosa Wolf. Check out the website for online shopping and a free newsletter with more articles and photography.

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Podcast: The Adventure Podcast

By Paul Scraton:

There are many ways to have an adventure. For some of us, it means climbing to the top of a mountain or exploring a remote island. For others it means pushing ourselves to our physical and mental limits. For yet others, it means challenging our perspectives or our beliefs through learning and discovery, by searching out the stories of people and places, and sharing them with others. All of these forms of adventure are the subject of The Adventure Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by the filmmaker Matt Pycroft.

Many of the interviews are with people who might fit your preconception of what an “adventurer” is. These are men and women who have done things that are barely imaginable to most of us, people who have travelled to extreme places. They are mountaineers who have summited K2 or crossed Antarctica, people who have climbed trees in the Amazon or trekked the desert. I discovered The Adventure Podcast through the edition featuring Chris Bonington, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. The next I listened to featured Dee Caffari, the first woman to sail solo, non-stop around the world in both directions. These are the type of people whose stories have long fascinated me, precisely because they set out do those very things I would never be able to do myself.

As I listened on, getting deeper into the archive – 62 editions at the time of writing – I saw that Pycroft’s understanding of adventure was as broad as the range of guests he invited to speak to him. In a two-part interview, Sophy Roberts spoke eloquently about how, over the course of six trips and many thousands of miles, she gathered the material to write her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. I listened to the absolutely fascinating tale of Emma Crone as she tracked down the father and son who were known as the ‘last poachers’ in England – and a reminder that distance, when it comes to adventure and discovery, can be as much a matter of time, place, culture and class as it is miles or kilometres. And I found myself stopping on a walk to scribble down some notes as Michael Turek reflected on how a deep personal connection to place informed his photography, and why photographs are perhaps the closest thing we have to time travel. 

Recent editions of the podcast have included Ed Caesar, a writer of long-form essays that has taken him to the DR Congo, a Russian prison camp and on frequent deep explorations of libraries and archives in search of stories, and Cal Flyn, whose book Islands of the Abandonment led her to all manner of abandoned places around the world and discussion that included the appeal of ruins and the dangers of Ruinenlust, the many conceptions of re-wilding, and why places and their stories speak to us and can really matter. 

What all these editions and conversations have in common is that Matt Pycroft has found conversation partners who have not only done extraordinary things, but people who have thought long and hard about the places they inhabit, whether for a short period or a long while, and who have something truly interesting and thought-provoking to say. And they have found, in Pycroft, an interviewer who is skilled in asking the right questions, who knows when to challenge or discuss, but who also knows – crucially – when to stay quiet and let his guest tell the story at their own pace and the way that works most naturally for them. The result is a podcast that is a form of exploration and discovery in its own right, especially for us – the listeners. Highly recommended. 

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The Banshee and the Roundabout - Online talk with Helena Byrne and Gareth E. Rees

This coming Sunday, November 8th, Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger will be talking with Irish seanchaí (storyteller) Helena Byrne and writer Gareth E. Rees (who has just released the wonderful "Unofficial Britain", you can read our review here about the importance of scary/unnerving/bizarre stories and folklore today, and what makes a place "haunted". They will also talk about the importance of urban legends in comparison between Ireland and the UK, a fitting theme for a gloomy November Sunday. The talk will take place on Zoom and is free to join, details below:

Sunday 8 November
5pm UTC

https://zoom.us/j/97900297948
Meeting ID: 979 0029 7948

Helena Byrne is a singer, storyteller, actress and songwriter, and for the past ten years has combined her passion of music and singing with her love of Irish folklore, performing as a seanchaí (storyteller) and singer for audiences of all ages across Ireland and further afield. Akin to the travelling seanchaí of times past, Helena performs regularly in the US and interweaves tales of Irish folklore and history with traditional Irish songs and wonderful insights into an Ireland of days gone by.

Gareth E. Rees is the founder of the Unofficial Britain website and author of Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). His weird fiction and horror have been published in Best of British Fantasy 2019, An Invite to Eternity, This Dreaming Isle, The Shadow Booth: Vol. 2, Unthology 10 and The Lonely Crowd. His essays have appeared in Mount London, An Unreliable Guide to London and The Quietus.

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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. 

It chimes in your chest like a bell

By Emma Venables:

It’s November 2013 and I’m on a plane, scared. I’m not scared because of all the things that could go wrong with the plane. I’m scared because we’re circling, preparing to land in the city that has occupied my mind for the past four years: Berlin. What if the Berlin I’m about to land upon isn’t the Berlin that’s consumed my thoughts, my research, my writing all this time? I’ve been so focused on the Berlin of the twenties, thirties and forties, what if this Berlin shows no traces of its past? What if I can’t compute 2013 Berlin with my version of Berlin?  What if we just don’t get on? 

Oh, Berlin. Beatrice Colin’s novel The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, starts with this sentence: ‘Berlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell.’ And oh, it does. My chest aches with the chiming of Berlin. Let’s sit in this feeling for a bit longer, think of the Berlin I’ve read about – of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, of Hans Fallada’s Berlin – and my own picture of Berlin. 

Eva Braun first brought my imagination to Berlin, down into its claggy depths with little time to explore its surface. I followed her around the Führerbunker, watched her apply her lipstick, marry the Führer, crack the capsule between her teeth. Magda Goebbels caught my eye, we backtracked, went out into the open, into the bombed-out wreck of a city and my attention turned to the women beyond Hitler’s inner circle, to the Frau Müllers and Frau Schmidts, to the women living and dying in the ruins – what were their lives like before and after National Socialism, before and after war? 

My curiosity about these women transferred into a Creative Writing PhD project and this is why I’m now on a plane, gliding down through the Berliner Luft, staring hard at the clouds, trying to get my first glimpse of real Berlin. It’s a grey day, a cold day, not the kind of day for first meetings, but it’s all we’ve got. Hallo, Berlin. I see you. I see your apartment blocks and courtyards, your lakes and open spaces, your roads and your railway lines. I see your runways, feel the bump of your tarmac meeting the aircraft wheels. 

Once off the plane, my fiancé and I go to buy travel cards to get into the city. We’re asked where we’re from. ‘Near Liverpool,’ my fiancé replies. ‘Liverpool? Ah, Sonia.’ SONIA. My childhood heart. I’m transported back to the early nineties. I’m wearing a pink and black party dress from Woolworths and Polly Pocket clip-on earrings and it’s my birthday party. Sonia’s album is the soundtrack to Musical Statues and Pass the Parcel. She’s currently the soundtrack to the writing of this piece. That boy was sent for me, that boy was meant for me…

Berlin, I feel at home already and I’ve not even left the airport, caught a bendy bus, experienced that special smell of the U-bahn (which I refuse to try and break down into its components for fear of undermining its magical effect), checked into my hotel room which has a Marilyn Monroe-shaped mirror in the bathroom and a photographic portrait of Andy Warhol above the bed. 

Over the next few days, notebook crumpling more and more as I retrieve and return it to my pocket, I wander around, researching, thinking, experiencing. The Brandenburg Gate. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Topography of Terrors. The German Resistance Memorial Centre. The Jewish Museum. The German History Museum. A Third Reich walking tour. On one particularly bleak day we catch a regional train out to Fürstenberg/Havel, walking the same path through the quiet residential streets as the thousands of women destined for Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. I stand in the vast open space that was once crammed with barracks and bodies, living and dead, and wonder how I’ll ever manage to stitch history into fiction, how I’ll ever manage to communicate how such ugliness occurred in an area of such beauty. 

But my first experience of Berlin is not all research-related. On our way back to the train station from Ravensbrück we stop in a café and I get my first ever taste of German apple cake. We go in search of Christopher Isherwood’s residence on Nollendorfstrasse and when casually looking down, I spot a window and through that window: the office of Boner magazine. I smile to myself. Christopher would have loved that, wouldn’t he? We go to the zoo and I learn I’m more scared of a mouse rummaging through the straw than the rhinoceros it rummages around. I walk through the Tiergarten and experience the special shade of auburn that the tree leaves turn in autumn. I sit in restaurants by the Spree and discover I’m rather partial to a Berliner Weisse mit Himbeeren. 

I have been back to Berlin many times since that first foray in November 2013, and one thing remains: Berlin does not separate itself from its past, its neighbours, its visitors. Berlin is inclusive, reflective. Her streets have been shattered and separated by war and politics. You can still put your fingers in the World War Two bullet-holes in her facades, tread the path of the Berlin Wall. You can marvel at the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, and then turn right around and find yourself faced with the concrete blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the stark reminder of what happens when humanity attacks humanity, when we conveniently forget out similarities and propagandise our differences. Berlin’s history is our history. We share wars. We share peace. We share Sonia and Christopher. Wir sind Berlin. Berlin ist uns.

I’m no longer scared when hovering over Berlin Tegel on a plane, ready to land. In fact, I’m scared to leave and return to a divided United Kingdom, one that is all too ready to scratch out inclusivity, to erase its shared history, to pretend, like a petulant child, that it doesn’t need help from anyone, least of all its European siblings.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

What's On: Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place, London

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

By Sara Bellini

This month, London’s own King’s Place launched Nature Unwrapped, twelve months of events revolving around the topic of nature and our interaction with it. The first evening saw artist-in-residence Chris Watson and activist George Monbiot comparing the soundscapes of healthy and suffering ecosystems, featuring music by Ewan McLennan.

The programme encompasses contemporary, classical and folk music, as well as storytelling, screenings and illustrated talks. Some musicians previously featured on Elsewhere will be there, namely Cosmo Sheldrake in February as well as Kitty Macfarlane during the Wild Singing weekend in March, in collaboration with the podcast Folk on Foot. A few events are already sold out, so you might want to book your tickets soon!

King’s Place is a multi-arts venue in King’s Cross dedicated to music, comedy and talks. They host various festivals, such as the London Podcast Festival and The Politics Festival, and their year-long flagship series Unwrapped, which last year was dedicated to women and music.

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Sound of the times: Chalk Hill Blue by Will Burns & Hannah Peel

Directed by Kieran Evans Artwork by Chris Turner 'Summer Blues' is taken from new Will Burns & Hannah Peel album, Chalk Hill Blue. Released Friday 22nd March 2019 on Rivertones. Pre-order the record here: http://smarturl.it/WB_HP_CHB Please visit www.hannahpeel.com/live for info about shows. www.willburns.co.uk

By Paul Scraton:

The final track reaches an end and the record stops. I pick it up and turn it over. Start again from the beginning. The music comes in waves, a fragmented, crackling, sweeping electronica that brings first to mind a desire path close to my mum’s in Yorkshire, where it passes beneath a huge, humming electricity pylon in the grounds of an old asylum transformed into a whole new village on the edge of the moors. But then I am taken, via a gentle voice, to the chalk landscapes of the south, and the stories to be found if we only “look beyond the intensive agriculture, the lookalike market towns, the wealth, the gold course and the four-wheel drive cars…”

Chalk Hill Blue is the name of a butterfly that can be found in those chalk landscapes around Wendover in Buckinghamshire, where the poet Will Burns lives and writes. It is also the name of the album Burns has created with the artist, producer and composer Hannah Peel, with his words and her music coming together to create a haunting, unsettling and strangely beautiful portrait of a place and its stories. Burns and Peel met in 2016 and two years later began working on the album. Sometimes the music came first, with Burns then selecting the poem that fit best with the sounds Peel was composing. Sometimes it was the poem that inspired the composition. The result was this album, released by Rivertones label of Caught by the River.

In a way this album is specific, telling as it does the stories of a particular place and of particular moments in time. The track titles themselves are rooted in location (Ridgeway), season (Spring Dawn On Mad Mile, Summer Blues), date (May 9th, February) and, of course, the local wildlife (Chalk Hill Blue). It is an attempt, as has already been mentioned, to look beyond the identikit everywhere of the 21st century world and find the real place that lies within or beneath. And it is a recognition that there are elements that have been lost. This might be true of the stories, which are now half-remembered, or the routines, work lives and traditions of the people. This loss it is most definitely felt when the album considers those other lives, the non-human lives, with which a place is shared. There is, Burns writes in the sleeve notes, “not as much as there should be, no, we must admit that.”

If stories, of people and other living things, of places and what they contain, exist only in memory then they become by nature fragmented and infused with loss. This atmosphere of change, melancholy and absence permeates Chalk Hill Blue and is perhaps why, on the second and third listen, I am taken away from Wendover once more and back to my mum’s Yorkshire village and then on, to the flat landscapes around Berlin or an empty square in a crumbling French market town. For while the album tells the fragmented stories of a particular place, it resonates because of the questions it poses for places far beyond:

What role does place play in our identity?
What does belonging mean?
How do we find our feet in an ever-shifting world?
How do we make sense of what has been lost?

There is a danger in these questions, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asked. Questions of home and belonging, of the lost stories of place and an impending environmental catastrophe are key questions of our time. It is not possible to observe the movements that gave us Brexit, the rise of the AfD in Germany or the Gilets Jaunes of the French periphery without understanding how these questions link in. As we mop out our flooded towns and we try to protect our villages from raging forest fires, as we wonder where the bees have gone or why the cranes are staying through the winter, these questions return to us time and again.

These are uncomfortable questions, and it is to Will Burns’ and Hannah Peel’s credit that Chalk Hill Blue provokes us to ask them. We cannot ignore them. We have to find the answers to these questions and find the answers that are not rooted in nostalgia or the exclusion of others. There is no going back. However we find a answer, and one which rejects the dead ends of nationalism and nativism, the first step is to tell the stories. The first step is to know what is happening. How did we get here? It can be the role of music, of poetry and of art, to bring those stories to light. Through its thoughtful, thought-provoking poetry and beautiful, atmospheric music, Chalk Hill Blue does just that.

***

Will Burns & Hannah Peel will be performing Chalk Hill Blue live at dates around the UK. More info on Caught by the River here. The album is released by Rivertones and is available on CD or 12” Vinyl here.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His debut novel Built on Sand is published by Influx Press in April 2019.