Leaving Epping

By Michael Shann:

Entering the forest with your back 
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path, 
that path, it doesn’t really matter. 
The forest is a slender creature - 
you’ve stepped onto its tail and will follow 
the supple curve of its spine till you find 
its head fourteen miles away in Wanstead. 
You’ll cross fifteen roads and one meridian.

You might get lost. Enjoy getting lost.
It isn’t easy to get lost these days.
Keep the map in your bag and just keep going,
heading south with half an eye on the sun. 
If you see houses beyond the trees,
turn back and keep the trees about you.

When no one is looking, put your ear
to the rippled bark of a hornbeam.
This is what the past sounds like. And when
you can, dip your fingers in a stream.
Any stream. This is what the future feels like.
And listen: the green factories are working 
overtime. The pulse of the forest rhymes 
with your own pulse. The forest contains you.
You enter it as you enter a poem or prayer.
Read it like a poem, walk it like a prayer.

***

Michael Shann is a poet and printmaker based in Walthamstow, East London, and is a member of the Forest Poets stanza. He has had three poetry pamphlets published by the Paekakariki Press (Euphrasy, Walthamstow and To London) and has recently completed a collection of poems about Epping Forest. Michael works for the charity Carers UK.

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

A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10

Delamere Forest Midwinter

By David Lewis:

When I was a child in 1970s Liverpool we sometimes bought our Christmas tree from Delamere Forest, a commercial woodland in Cheshire and the remnant of a vast medieval hunting forest, a place of dense woods, open water, fens and bogs.  

I was a bookish child.  My reading was enriched by my experiences of landscape and my awareness of landscape was informed by my reading.  Delamere took me to a European forest-land of giants and ogres and child-eating witches, and on the maps the darkness was visible – Black Lake, Hunger Hill, Dead Lake.  I did not feel that other people took a pleasure in these connections.  

The Delamere visit was a day for heavy coats and wellington boots, because the forest car park was a muddy field and the sales area was just a clearing in the trees, ringed by coloured lights.  The frozen ground had been trampled to icy mush, and pine branches had been laid down to make the paths safer.  Chalk-red and powder-green huts, decked with pine branches and fir cones, were built in the trees for Father Christmas and the sale of trees, hot food and drinks.  Chestnuts roasted on a brazier, slightly-burned-sausage smoke drifted through the trees.   Shivery elves took donations for local good causes, and the Salvation Army brass band played carols from a wooden stage.    

And yet the visit to the Forest was a very different Christmas activity from the school Nativity play or the carol service.  The felled trees were arranged in flopped, loose rows on the ground, rough finger-jabbing, resin-scented spikes, sharp, unfriendly, essentially defeated, and the heavy twinkle of gaudy lights moving in the thin wind was unable to hold back the Forest’s innate gloom.  I half-knew that there was nothing Christian about visiting Delamere at midwinter, that it was a cold pagan celebration of muddy folk tales and encroaching darkness.

Northern England in December is grey if rarely bitterly cold, but one year, in the countryside outside the city, about two centimetres of snow fell.  Drained of colour, the Cheshire hills and fields were sharpened to blacks and whites and snow-greys.  Once we had bought the tree we chose to go for a walk, away from the lights into the sighing trees and crisp wind.  Here the year was dying, silently and without warmth or light - the gloom of mid-afternoon was shadowing the dusk, and it would be dark early.  And I loved it.  I loved the sharp wind on my face, the snowy tree-fields receding into the early dusk.  I loved the silence after the brash tinny music, the grey light after the gaudy bulbs, loved the fact that nobody had walked the paths since the snow had fallen overnight.  

There are moments in childhood when we catch a glimpse of those things which will enrich our adult lives.  The forest paths were deserted on that late afternoon because most people take no pleasure in cold and snow and darkness, but for the first time I realised that I did not share this opinion.   And more importantly at that time I began to realise that I had every right to think differently, about this and about many other things.  I was right to love the cold, right to connect storytelling with landscape, right to love maps and place-names.  My feelings about the forest walk on that long-ago afternoon were a step to creative adulthood, and ultimately a step towards my shadow-life as a writer.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Between the villages

By Paul Scraton:

Tarmac becomes cobblestones becomes sandy soil as the old road leads out from the village towards the forest. At this end it is named for the village on the other side of the woods. Over there, it is named for this village. The way to… has linked the two communities for centuries, even if now the main road cuts through the forest away to the north and the railway to the south, leaving this track for those who travel by bicycle or those who make their way on foot, like in the old days.

At different points between the villages there has been artwork placed by the track, sharing the space with the pine and silver birch, oak and beech of the forest. They are sculptures of metal or plastic, glass or steel. They have been created to reflect the stories of this place, of this landscape. A pack of fake wolves, ghosts of the past to remind us of what was lost, placed in the woods only a few years before the real thing returned across the border to the east. A doorway to nowhere, to remind us of the lost villages of the region, abandoned to nature. Metal crates to remind us of… what? Of caged animals transported from shed to slaughter house? Or the way that dice falls, of how life changes. People move on. Others take their place. 

He rides his bike between the villages daily, ever since they closed the pub at the end of his street. Now, for his beer and schnapps, he has to ride the old way through the woods, past the fruit trees and the artworks, through the forest and across the fields. Tarmac and cobblestone. Sand to trap his tires. There’s always a stretch where he has to stop and push. He chooses not to ride on the road because it is too busy, with cars and farm vehicles, and the lorries that use this cut through between the motorways, shaking the village houses as they pass. It takes him about forty minutes on the track, often only meeting others within a short distance of each of the villages. He often has the section through the forest all to himself.

If he made the journey on weekends he would meet more walkers, out from the city to hike between train stations, ticking off the artworks as they go. Because he is elderly now, and wears his old working boots all year round, they look at him as if he is an exhibit himself, a bit of local colour, a genuine country dweller on his genuine country bicycle. They don’t know that he also came out from the city, all those years ago, to work in the brewery. That he found life so dull and strange in the country, a feeling that he never noticed leaving him until one day it was completely gone and he realised he was here to stay. He couldn’t have imagined it. 

How the dice fall. 

This has always been a land of exiles, a landscape of settlers. A thousand years ago they came from the west, possessors of the right religion and skills to work the sandy soil. Later, the refugees of war and the economies of elsewhere. He himself had come for work, for better prospects than in the city. After him came the hippies and back-to-the-land dreamers. And later still, sleeping five to a room in an old factory dormitory on the edge of town, those fleeing more modern wars. 

The pub in his village has closed. The brewery where he worked for thirty years, has long been abandoned. Now the beer is brought out from the city by lorry and the warehouse where he spent his days slowly crumbles, roof open to the elements and trees growing out of the brickwork. But he has to admit: the beer is better now, better than what they used to make. It wasn’t their fault. You can only work with what you’ve got. 

Those visitors, those weekend walkers, they like to think the countryside remains fixed, that while their city neighbourhoods shift on uneasy foundations, out here things stay the same. It is a comforting thought, but it has never been true. A thousand years of comings and goings. Villages that take their names from long forgotten languages, the traces of religions that have no more followers. He has lived it through his life since he left the city, and still it continues. In the pub he reads the local newspaper headlines. Old businesses fade into memory as new initiatives are launched in hope. Bands from a country that no longer exists get together for one last show. Beetles and fires ravage the forest. A new bridge is built to help the animals cross the motorway. He sees the changes on every ride between the villages. Trees are felled. The brewery crumbles. The wolves return. Only the the track stays the same. At some point, he always has to get off and push.

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of two books published by Influx Press: Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (2017) and Built on Sand (2019), a novel set in Berlin and Brandenburg.

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.

Runcorn Wonderland

By David Lewis:

Note: Runcorn is an industrial town and port in Cheshire, England. The small old town was surrounded in the 1960s by huge housing estates to rehouse people from Liverpool. 

 It is the midwinter visits I remember the most, the hour’s journey on a half-empty bus – always, in memory, flooded with cold sunshine – to the cobbled, mutilated streets of old Runcorn.  As I walked to Windmill Hill along the Bridgewater Canal, the wind passing over the shadowed sweeps of canal ice would make a haunting, unearthly sound, a canal-song, a vague whoo-whoo; especially eerie at night, but fading as the water slowly froze.

My friend Iain was a yoga teacher with a gentle soul, passionate about walking.  We would walk for miles to discover and rediscover strange and unusual things – ice houses, walled gardens, spice factories.  We walked out to scuffed, eighteenth-century pubs, we watched giant container vessels on the Manchester Ship Canal, and often we walked at night.  Here I developed my love of midwinter pleasures – silence, darkness, cold – and it was with Iain in Runcorn that I learned to walk creatively.

On the short winter afternoons we often walked down from Windmill Hill through the edgelands, a silent, watchful place of abandoned fields and unused roads, ribboned by railway and canal; the smoke rising from distant farms added to the faint air of menace. Yet just over the hill was the pretty village of Daresbury, where Lewis Carroll’s church crouched in the yew trees, carved from thick chocolate-red blocks of Victorian sandstone. We often sat for a smoke or two in the cold gloom of the rear porch, staring out at the bare woods and fields, and once the curate showed us the Lewis Carroll window, a gentle riot of Turtles and Hatters and Alice. Afterwards, brandies and bitter beer in the Ring O’ Bells, a polished-wood-and-brass Victorian public house of stained glass windows and bright, cheerful ghosts. The cobbled car park smelled of long-gone horses, straw and flurries of snow.

As the light began to fail, we started the journey home over Keckwick Hill, a fragment of old rural darkness, silently overseeing the concrete tower of the particle accelerator and the industrial landscape beyond. No sunlight reached the woodland floor in midwinter; the frost bubbled and broke the footpath down to the canal.  After twenty minutes of towpath walking - the morose hunch of a fisherman, a startle of duck, the plopping of water rats into the silky blackness - the lights of Windmill Hill rippled on the dark waters.  Street lights appeared.  Stone bridges became concrete ones with Wonderland graffiti, ‘How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual.’  Daresbury’s English pastoral ran beneath the concrete.

Beyond the Wonderland bridge was the Barge, a pub converted from a canal warehouse, warm and inviting.  But we had spent most of the day as hedge-walkers, and were intimidated by the bright lights and the smart early evening drinkers.  One beer rarely led to a second, and with the darkness came an unease about last buses and cancelled buses, about timetables and homecomings, as if the outside world had woken in us once more.  We blinked in the harsh lights of the space-age Runcorn Shopping City, fumbled for the morning’s folded tickets, mumbled clumsy goodbyes; and I spent the long journey home thinking back along dark footpaths through muddy woodland.  

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter