Fron Bache

Llangollen in cool rain; a stone and red brick town, squeezed by steep wooded hills, so that the houses seem pushed to the river and the famous bridge seems like an arm from either side stretched across to stabilise the houses. The drizzle of water on old stone.

The first time I have driven here, the steep pull up out of the town to the graveyard at the top of the hill, yet a route familiar, brain-etched from a hundred visits; the English names fading as we turn from the guest houses lining the road to Plas Newydd onto the tiny road of Fron Bache, a sunny silent place of 1930s respectability, pebble-dashing and bay windows, the feeling of an endless afternoon. Dorothy and Gwynneth used to walk up here with the Llangollen family, Auntie Bessie and the boys, Arthur and Ernest and Glynne. The road is rough and feels more like a farm road, a hill-road, a rough Welsh hill man in town for the market; but now the modern houses are creeping up the side, Llangollen’s anywhere suburbs, modern raw houses on what was a shaggy, gloomy playing field, hill-fields, openness; as they were when Dorothy first walked up this lane, this slow spread of the town, a rural speed of encroachment; new houses have even swallowed the kink in the road where the family used to rest on the bench with the view back down the hill, the road lined with poppies and escaped garden flowers.

The cemetery on Fron Bache is on the hillside, the fron bache, corrupted, fading Welsh, next to an allotment, with a tumble of town roofs below it, the pinned curve of the permanent Eisteddfod stage, a harsh redbrick row of houses slammed unsympathetically into the hillside. And a wary ring of more new houses, pebble-dashed and hanging-basketed, a riot of Georgian lamps and security lights; but it is still a place of yews and damp grass, wild flowers and benign neglect. Ilid and Bessie’s gravestone has fallen over or been laid to rest, lead letters scattered, dates difficult to make out. Lost afternoons in the 1960s, family events, funerals, weddings, small parties; why was I here, asks Reg, did I come to… As if the dates only existed to support a funeral, a party, a birth.

Further down the hill, right at the last yew, the path uneven and overgrown, dotted with wildflowers, lie William Eyton Jones and his wife Janet, my grandparents, the Welsh grandfather I never knew; and his parents David and Ann, an English inscription despite their Welsh language, a fading of national identity behind a British mask. A peaceful quiet place, somewhere I have never seen another soul, a place of pheasants, silence, wild flowers, grasses, the distant steam whistle urgent from the railway.

Back in the town, a pattern of streets and awkward conversations with curious bystanders, an occupational hazard. Market Street and West Street, the undiscovered site of Cambrian Cottages; addresses for David Jones, my great-grandfather, this census migration through the town, a journey plotted at ten-yearly intervals. Decades walked through or past, addresses known and unknown; the history of streets, the shifts of buildings. Chapel Street in the 1870s, the tantalising possibility of ‘Oak Street’ in the 1840s; lunch in the Hand to take stock and curb our enthusiasm.

Llangollen Stories

The only certain address was 1 Berwyn Street, David Jones’ home and possibly his greengrocer’s shop. A family memory restored; this shop had been pointed out to Dorothy and Gwynneth long before by William Eyton, after the family had moved on, but the location had been forgotten. The recovery of story, even in some way possession. And still a shop, empty but refurbished, clean of association; impossible to imagine this Welsh family living and working here. Family history as less a journey of names and dates and more a search for houses, graves, commercial premises.

The only other certain address we did not revisit. Pen y Bedw, the house on Birch Street where Arthur Thomas used to live, my mother’s cousin. Even after retirement, Arthur used to cycle down from the house every morning at 4am to work in the newsagent’s shop snuggled into the belly of the Royal Hotel, where Nana Jones and Gwynneth used to stay. It is now a smart coffee shop with lightweight metal chairs outside, the illusion of Italy.

Saltney on the other hand was unknown territory, a land on no known map. A strange turn from a familiar roundabout near Chester and the road ran away with us, through suburbia of expected hotels and giant redbrick houses; but under the railway the land seemed to sink towards the unseen river, a place eternally curving towards the water. A place indeed born from the water, a place of reclaimed land, ground hard-won from marsh and water. A border town, a town not water and not land, a town bilingual in street name, unable to decide whether it was English or Welsh, land or water, or perhaps proud of being both. A poor town of straight roads and decades of Council building from the 1920s onwards, a town without focus, without heart, long streets of hard concrete buildings softened by occupation. Here we rejoined the Lewises, Joseph Lewis being born here in 1815; but there was nothing here from before the twentieth century, and we felt that above ground and in solid buildings the trail was cold.

Underground Walking: Bold Street Journey 2007

Rotting wall, broken glass foot-grill, Bold Street, 2007

An invitation to participate in FACT's Bold Street Project in 2007 resulted in a walk through the street's closed spaces with researcher Laura Yates.

Bold Street in warm sunshine and hard shadows. A piece of found text on my way to the railway station set the tone for the walk; WHAT WAS PAST IS NOW. A touchstone, a mantra, a remembered line for the exploration of dead bank vaults, a burned out church, the dressing rooms of a Georgian concert hall, the soft cellar of a car showroom long concreted into shopped oblivion. Gloomy capitals and refurbished shops, a parade of shops and changing tenants, the gentle subtleties of change over two centuries. I stood in the FACT reception space and looked at old slate roofs, higgledy-piggledy chimneys, windows into empty rooms and attic flats, cool spaces and dead spaces. The newness of street art, Metroscopes; civic furniture, in a new urban space, Ropewalks Square; the pomposity of explanation derided by SK8BD graffiti, club stickers, underground movements, pictures of a leering Tony Benn advertising a Socialist rally, a discussion of democracy or a club night stealing the clothes of revolution.

The journey was to be from top to bottom or bottom to top. The buildings that would give us access to their hidden spaces and unknown floors visited in series as if on a journey, as if paralleling the street we would smash our way from one building to the next through a hundred first floor rooms; empty store room, office, unexpected bedroom, night club, bar, clothes shop, bathroom, brothel, concert room, classroom, hairdressers’; to emerge panting on Berry Street in a cloud of dust and falling brick, still twenty feet above the ground. Walking, the reality is always different. We saw more pigeon-spattered smokers’ haunts than I had expected. Met more people with stories, stoked more interest in unexpected people, broke the work crust to find interest and warmth beneath.

We began in the massive banking hall and redundant vaults of a dead bank that still gets customers; fine wooden doors, rich tiling, high plaster coving. Edwardian dignity broken now into cubicles, workstations, seating areas. Sunlight through dusty glass impossible to clean behind grilles, bars, mesh, the abandoned security apparatus of a building that stored gold bullion. The vaults were heavy, old fashioned, solid solid. Impossibly heavy doors that swung at a finger’s touch and had bolts the thickness of a man’s arm, open now and used for storing files. And behind the vaults, a second skin, brick walls and exposed pipework grimly suggestive of gas chambers. Walls that seemed to grow and shift in their subterranean darkness. They left grey corridors narrowing to nothingness, swallowed brick staircases, made spaces too small for live people and created overlooked rooms full of 1950s accounts, trade descriptions and arrangements with newly free African states; this on a street named after the slave-trading family that owned the land. (Distant earth-memories in damp and gloom, earth-memories of fields and trees and hedge-boundaries, rope walks and country lanes on the edge of the town.) Pale brickwork grey with moss, like a man-made world at the bottom of the sea, a place of endless darkness and soft strange creatures. The first of our ghost stories, a myth sprung to scare the young female office clerks, an erotic frisson connected to darkness and unexpected presence. Or the need to familiarise and populate that dead darkness, those indifferent shifting walls.

Underground Walking 2

Staircase squashed by underground rooms

And then chance intervened, or the street decided we should see what we came to see. We took a chance and dived into Bar L1, that used to be Edward’s, that used to be Waterstone’s the bookshop, that used to be Macmillan’s nightclub, that used to be an exclusive clothes shop and a concert room. It was built from the 1770s, the earliest incarnation of the street, and sits on three sides of Bold Street, Concert Street (an unrelated echo of performance, this one commemorating outdoor music for the urban poor) and Wood Street. An iced wedding cake of a building, solid, square, punched windows crusted with sooty plasterwork. I was last in there when it was a bookshop, a quiet set of cream rooms lined with bookcases and collections of chairs, thoughtful emaciated readers and chubby girls in frayed jeans behind the counters. Today it is decorated like a jazzy gentleman’s club, a cross between deep leather elegance and glitter, a long sticky bar of granite resin. Upstairs the second floor of books had tall windows and was flooded with light like a piano nobile, a slower place than the ground floor, a place of reference books and classical music. It has become a 1980s club, a vivid swirl of a nightmare of epileptic glitter balls, electro-posters, drinks promotions, a giant’s causeway of platforms and raised dance floors under massive black walls. It felt as though, with difficulty, I had broken in to something that had slipped away through time, reclaimed a room that was no longer a part of my world, like revisiting the first house I lived in. But the elegant plaster ceiling has survived, painted a deep matt black, and the magnificent sweep of the staircase still takes dancers from the ground floor to the dance floor, as it always has. The tall windows are still there behind thick curtains, and the huge staircase windows, richly-painted rococo gold and orange swirls on great sweeps of leaded glass, have also survived; perhaps as garish to some as the glitter balls and 80s tat is to me. We were guided through a maze of rooms and staircases and corridors, bunches of keys and members of staff coming in the opposite direction. The last of our ghost stories, a woman called Mary alleged to haunt the upper floors; another myth of the upper floors occupied by prostitutes. Upstairs again to a tiny roof space, more pigeons and air-conditioning, and gazed up at walls towering another two floors above us. Hidden windows and unused roofs.

Underground Walking 3

Bank vault by flash, Bold Street

The street seems different once you start seeing its secret places; it feels tilted, insubstantial. Back on Bold Street we found a narrow Georgian corridor, surviving plasterwork and heavily repainted doorframes; a tilt to the building as if the ground had shifted, unsettling staircases and joints, realigning floorboards. A hairdresser’s shop above the street, a great invisible dome of glass leaping out into space above the pedestrians, a woman full of stories and untold ghosts. Yet more support and interest, yet more unexpected enthusiasm. And yet stopping to stare you become an object of curiosity, an oddity. Who stops and stares on city streets? Who examines kerbstones and metal grilles, flagstones and drainpipes? Mad men and poets, thieves, drunks, charlatans. Who stops and stares at those already stopped? Bored secretaries, office staff, lonely men in dark flats, invisible yet aware of our presence, our analysis, our disruption of the street’s lack of self-knowledge or awareness.

The magnificence of the Oxfam building, built as a car showroom with a gigantic lift that took cars from ground floor to basement and back up to showroom. The slow soft bounce of rubber on smooth concrete, the smell of upholstery and leather, walnut and teak, the gentle purr of gigantic engines. An incarnation of the street as a place of commerce, a place to sell; in this instance luxury cars. Impossible to imagine the gleam of Armstrong-Siddeleys and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces in these tight, functional underground rooms, cluttered with boxes of books and rails of clothes. Only the brightness and sense of purpose survive, the hard work, the invisible energies. And yet the new electricity substation, installed this year by hacking a hole in the floor above – how useful the old lift would have been – is one of a series on the street whose smooth energy flow seems constantly disrupted, by power cuts, unexpected fusings, the sudden plunge into darkness. Stories of hidden rivers, lost power sources, perhaps of the street’s energy lines, the pull from top to bottom. As if the installation of underground boxes to channel electricity had jolted older power lines out of synchronicity, out of balance, and the power cuts were a result of this; or even as if the street itself, woken Quatermass-like by the digging, resented the intrusion. But these bright functional cellars held no stories, no mystery.

Underground Walking 4

Bank vaults, Bold Street, Liverpool

The street after such encounters seemed bright, temporary and fragile, a plane between worlds; the reaching walls and the attics and the gloom beneath the flags, the hopeless glass blocks, windows in the pavement, to allow some light into vault and cellar, as if they could stem the darkness, civilise the sheer underneathness. Another bank, large windows and tall iron columns hammered into a showroom for cheap furniture; stern glances and the lemon faces – Laura’s phrase – of disapproval. The street seemed warmer after that chilly room.

The unexpected pleasure of St Luke’s church, the crowning glory of Bold Street, visible the entire length. I have written about the church and explored its history but have never been inside. On this sunny day it was opened to the public by an alternative dance and workshop group, who had researched old photographs and commissioned new artwork. These stood at the base of the walls like abandoned placards from a demonstration. The open space, once aisle and chancel and organ loft, dominated still by the soaring reach of the Gothic tower. The walls were tall, proud, naked; amalgams of brick and stone and charred wood, the occasional tablet still smoke-blackened after fifty years of city rain, the occasional piece of stained glass that survived the bombing, as if the only glass to survive had been that which crept into the smallest niches. And an angel, a rare clear image, a face unaware of the incendiary device, a face still singing praises to God, a face alone in the walls of glass and colour; perhaps the second of our ghosts. A strangely unLiverpool experience, the inside of the bombed-out church. More European, or a London thing; in either it would have been celebrated many years ago, opened to the public, planted as a garden, a celebration of peace; here it has been shut away for half a century as if we are ashamed of this event, this scar on our history, shut away like the mad child in the attic. On this mild and sunny day the ground was covered with slow wild flowers and creeping plants but the crunch of glass and dust beneath, the iron window frames kicked up easily by our boots, they seemed to suggest that the building was only just safe to revisit, safe to walk in again, that the ground had only just cooled and that the charred wood was still dangerous, that walls might still fall.

The Footsteps of Sarah Murphy

Old routes into Ormskirk from Birkdale, familial Norse settlements; routes across the old Moss, old Catholic trails marked by sandstone crosses; places of weeping and pilgrimage, modern bus routes. Winter trees, thin sunlight, low skies. The four streets of the old town, four cardinal points marking the junction of roads to Burscough, Wigan, Preston and Southport. Buried Catholic histories – the Thursday market charter was granted by Edward I to the monks of Burscough Priory in 1256, who also approved a great yearly market of five days, beginning on the Vigil for the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist; invented stories, the turnings of the Church year. The Priory fell and was pillaged for its stone at the Reformation and is now just two lumpen pillars in a field, the remains of a cross-arch, an inner junction of walls, of rooms. An echo of Ozymandias, and a further Ormskirk story; Sean was given a volume of Shelley and Keats that had belonged to a girl called Alice Hurst in the 1920s, who lived on a farm outside Aughton; there were Hursts at farms in the library’s Ormskirk censuses from 1851 and 1890, but Alice would be too young, time jumps too quickly, she was buried too deeply in the archives; we ran out of research-time.

Ormskirk is a Norse name, the church of Orme, a semi-mythical Norse settler of the tenth century; imagined farms, possible histories. Orm’s Kirk. The market cross stands at a cross-roads, a meeting of hearts, a place for trade. This was a walking-day of hidden Irish stories, of the Gael settling into the British mentality, names softening into the present day; Hegarty and Kennedy, the names of women running bars in the town, an Irish lament being played on a penny whistle at the crossroads, even the curl of silver of a broken chain found and placed with reverence on a broken wall, its soft coils resembling an illustration from the Book of Kells. And in the library the names of the market traders a century ago were all Irish; Coyne, Hanlon, O’Dowd.

Sean is a good friend and an artist; photographer, writer, performer, raconteur. Sarah Murphy was Sean’s great-grandmother. He has memories of her from his childhood, when she visited the house in Ackers Road in Woodchurch. He has heard stories of her visiting the large houses in Oxton to buy or ask for old clothes, unwanted cloth; these she took apart, collecting stays and buttons, and recycled them into children’s clothes, which she sold at the market; Birkenhead, perhaps Liverpool, Ormskirk.

The station was much the same, although now is not as important; no lines any more to Southport or even Burscough. How did she get here? Changing at Liverpool Exchange for the Ormskirk line? Did she carry her wares with her, a tight roll of new-old children’s clothes, tiny coats, waistcoats for Sundays, short tweed trousers? Perhaps she rented a part of a barrow, a fifth of a stall, perhaps she had a lock-up nearby or rented an attic in the town to store her clothes. These details, this history, is lost; only the folk-memory remains of Sarah Murphy working at remodelling cloth and selling clothes on Ormskirk Market.

Sarah Murphy's Ormskirk

And yet there are echoes of past lives that we can still hear, still see. Sarah would have known the clocktower, erected in 1876 perhaps to replace a lost Market cross. There were buildings and narrow cobbled places that she would have known, tiny private streets become alleyways, become unexpectedly sunny on this bright winter day, unexpectedly sunny with the demolition of yards and houses, tanners’ yards and breweries behind the Four Streets, the medieval streetscape swept away with the need for bigger wagons and then motor vehicles. Roads disappear, alleyways become carparks, maps become false; but a thread of cobble remains across the tarmac, an unexpected heavy curve of dark wood still supports a medieval arch between a shoe shop and a place selling sandwiches. A drifting, hacked roasting meat smell rolls through the town; a suggestion of rendering or cooking on a vast scale, it followed us down to the old town boundary and stayed in our nostrils like smoke, an old smell, a violent, earthy smell. Sarah would have known the chimes of the bells in the ancient parish church, perhaps the market itself ran to the bells from the church; perhaps that was why the court leet of the Earl of Derby erected a clock tower, some thirty, forty years before she first walked up from the station with a bundle of clothes.

Her great-grandson and I trailed down Aughton Street, with its vast flower-bins illustrated with bulls’ heads, tanners’ knives, pelts, market symbols. A quote from Nathanial Hawthorne; ‘I found a throng of men and women, it being market day; wares of various kinds, tin, earthen and cloth, set out on the pavement; droves of pigs, ducks and fowls; baskets of eggs, and a man selling quack medicines.’ (Hawthorne was too early to see Sarah Murphy, but Ormskirk legend has it that Beecham once sold his pills on the market.) Aughton Street has old inns, Georgian barns converted to old people’s homes; the brook that once formed the boundary of the civic authority, a tiny grand Roman bridge half buried in bushes and mud. Along Dyers’ Lane, once home perhaps to the dying industry with its need for vast quantities of water; underneath the railway line through a brick tube and the tiny settlement of Elm Place, still a street, names chipped into hard terracotta capstones, forgotten initials of grandparents loitering on streetcorners and whistling at girls.

Dyers’ Lane becomes Brook Lane and the boundary curves uphill, a false boundary now as the town has expanded and the old maps only show what has been buried in modernity; farm tracks, field boundaries, cottages. The noise of the St Helens Road and the neat topiary and idleness of a triangular park, with a war memorial to the local dead of the Boer War; a death by drowning whilst on patrol, a soldier killed at the Spion Kop; echoes of Afrikaans names and everyday Imperial history. And a local soldier named as ‘one of the Six Hundred’; a hussar, who charged with the Light Brigade in the Crimea in 1854 yet survived the Russian guns and returned to Ormskirk, dying over fifty years later in 1905.

The noise of traffic and roads carved through the urban fabric to take pressure from narrow streets, a river of cars and unceasing noise. An afternoon of exploring histories; the cottage hospital now part of Ormskirk College, a huddle of buildings designed to resemble a line of houses; reassuring perhaps to the sick, an urban map-ghost laid for Sean. A school building now used as a timber yard, high rooms and steep roofs, the ornate cross-plates of lost door-handles still in place. Green Street, the street to the green in front of the church, one side thunderingly busy, the road polished by the rubber tyres and glinting in the low light, a soft burnish to the camber as we risk life and limb to cross into the churchyard. Local placenames as family names, Halsall, Aughton, Scarisbrick, the halves of stories and lives, the richness of lives reduced to dates and places and the accident of names. Crisp initials, low sunlight, intense cold.

After warming in the library – surprised by the bustle, the warmth, our voices oddly loud as if we are too used to speaking against the traffic – we retraced Sarah’s walk down to the Market cross for the last time, a route she could have walked from the station, the steepness of the old road up the gentle hill towards Burscough. Walks need an end, a formality; so we officially finished at the Buck i’the Vine, an old coaching inn, a loose connection with Shakespeare and further buried Catholic rebellion. (And earlier we had seen an ornamental plate for sale, Shakespeare as the Official English Great Artist, the Swan of Avon, staring mutely from the ceramic towards the wall of the barn where his makeshift company may have performed. Paths cross and recross in a small town, backtracking and sidestepping; urban exploration.)

And finally the route to the station as Sarah would have walked to catch the train, as her great grandson did, past the gentle coil of silver Kells chain on the wall, still unclaimed, unrecognised. In dark and cold we separated.

Hliterland

Litherland mural, painted by Steve des Landes, 2005

I wrote this in response to the landscapes of Litherland on Merseyside, a modern suburb with Norse roots. I ran a series of workshops to come up with ideas for the mural.

What is here today? A grey winter landscape, a tenacious urban suburb clinging to the swell of the docks, the thunder of road traffic, lorries, vans, a London landscape. Dusty concrete, litter, amputated and terraced streets, unexpected avenues of semis. Yet from the train there are trees and woods – overgrown nature parks, flooded allotments – abandoned attempts at leisure woodland, wild green space. And in the abandonment grand ideas are fulfilled; left alone nature creates a grey wooded landscape that cannot be radically dissimilar to the one that the Vikings saw from the river.

The Norse called it Hliterland, this fall of land from Hatton Hill. Did it then have an older name, a Gaelic name, unrecorded, forgotten? Were they watched from the trees, the newcomers with their dragon-ships – a grey morning, a sunny afternoon – when the Norse arrived for the first time and waded ashore, beaching the longboats for repairs? Unanswerable questions. Hliterland, the sloping place; the slope cut now, built over and sliced by docks, road, railway, canal, a crust of brick and concrete; but walkable still, this muscle-pulling hillside, up from the docks, the station, the lost shoreline. The road long-lost, if there ever was a path through trees to the hilltop. Today the path must be recut across tarmac and isolated cobbles, through an underpass, past too much dead land, land with no value. Tattersall and Seymour Streets, forgotten dignitaries with the names of disgraced conjurors. The Victorian suburb has in turn been hacked into chunks by roads for lorries heading for the docks; the walker comes across becalmed, silting stretches of respectable terraced housing, isolated from other streets by 1960s concrete. The unexpected majesty of the Red Lion public house, like a liner run ashore, well-maintained plaster ornament, crisp detail. The graffiti and indefinable menace of the canal. The ceaseless thunder of the road, like a mechanised Niagara.

Until the canal and the railway this was farming country, and after a thousand years the farms and cottages survived to be photographed on Moss Lane before falling, gently useless, to Victorian progress. Stone walls and stables survive on Field Lane, a path through the trees into Hatton Hill Park and the view back downhill to the river, a horizon of grain towers, cranes, wind turbines, tower blocks. The village survives in an echo, a row of shops on Sefton Street. And in place names; Field Lane, Wilson’s Lane, memories of fields and farms - and Moss Lane, the lane to the moss, the vast expanse of mere and fen covering much of southern Lancashire. A pattern of Norse settlers desperate for land, a pattern of villages that survives. Birkdale, Ormskirk, Toxteth. Are they here still? Are there sifts of Norse blood in these paint-spattered anxious children with their Irish names – Kara, Brendan, Caitlin, Kyle?

A different route down the hillside to the station, different cobbles, different tarmac. A small cluster of rusted street signs - Beach, Marina, Ocean – a yearning for the sea; as if the beaching of the dragon-ship was a regretted thing, that what should have been temporary became wrongly permanent, sea-warriors become farmers, settlers. A scattering of shell-names if this buried Norse village has been ashore too long, and longs once again for the open sea.

Hall Road II

Battered by the sea it is tempting to think of these ruins as the remains of a lost Roman port, a Caesarea or a Tyre, a great town defeated by the sea and rebuilt in a safer harbour. They are more the ruins of Pompeii, overtaken by a disaster, a rain of fire falling from the sky, the ruins cleared from the streets in the rebuilding and hauled away to this desolate coastline, away from the people, away from sight. New uses for lost buildings pounded to rubble. The different stones weather differently. Half a century on the beach has worn the granite not one jot, crisp edges, smooth sides, the sharp edges of window frames. The sandstone carvings are returning to the sea, being broken down and smoothed, each year adding a millimetre to the sand. Marble is blasted by the sand and the wind, turns chalky. Half man-made half stone, concrete is more ambivalent and giant lumps age slowly, trailing old mesh-wires like the legs of octopuses, concrete and rusted iron sculptures of dead sea creatures, unwilling to decay as if still needed. The scale of these ruins is awe-inspiring. Happily now we can skip across rooflines, gigantic pieces of stone designed to be seen from below and from fifty feet below, carvings only visible from the top floor, from the highest offices. Local children are awed by these ruins, this city from before their parents were born, this lost city that their great-grandparents knew; they make small towers of stones and brick, assemble small offerings of marble tiles, glass, brick, and leave them on giant flat shards of city, tilted tables, smashed altars. Here the city is returning to the sea.

Yet this is more than a dumping ground for lost buildings. Four thousand people died in Liverpool in the Blitz, and these bones of the city are a secular shrine to them, a monument to the lost traveller, the ARP warden, the unknown civilian. The heat cooled by years of the tides, their memories soothed by the water, the wind; each year the carving is less crisp, is less visible. In a century it will be gone, this beach of stones, the memories washed away by the sea.

Twentieth-Century Ruins II: Hall Road, Crosby

The beach at Hall Road, Crosby, Merseyside, July 5th 2005

A stumble across the boulders near the car park, the wind cold and unexpectedly fierce. Giant white boulders, sharp this far from the sea, surrounded by a carpet of red bricks, smoothed by the sea into round lumps, corners chipped then sanded by the sea. Red eggs, the remains of whole streets of houses, gardens, out door toilets, sheds. A smashed beach of floor tiles, iron drainpipes, electrical fittings, bakelite, china, roof tile, a sea of smoothed red brick; a broken city brought here after the war and dumped on the beach to strengthen the coastline. The whole crumbling now, returning to the elements. A small stretch of hard clean sand, dotted with worn-smooth tiles and tiny pieces of sanded glass, hard beneath our boots on this raw day; a grey sky, the sea muddied, the horizon lined with ships. The crash and foam of the waves. The endless wind on our faces, more like cold October than July.

Further along the shore the remains are bigger. Fragments of wall appear, six or eight courses of brick still bonded together, pounded for fifty years by the sea, scoured with salt, untouched by lichen or weed. They are slumped in the rubble of brick and stones, giant fallen walls, rubbed and caressed into organic shapes, sleek and sinuous, boundaries shifting, shapes of brick seeming to swell and stretch, move and turn, twisted walls still eight or ten tons in weight. Here too are the edges of buildings, gigantic pieces of column and architrave, capital and frieze, hauled from the wreckage of bank or insurance office and dumped to protect the coast; today they might be rescued and sold to architectural salvage men, to find new homes as relics and garden ornament. Porticos and window frames, steps and the bases of columns.

Runcorn Wildwood

A recent journey through Runcorn, where I used to go walking with friends. The long roads were landscaped 30 or 40 years ago and many of the trees are now mature. The autumn colour on the chestnuts and especially the beech and maple were astonishing; it has been a good year for colour. Extending the urban wildwood idea, I was reminded of the alternative routes across this 'new town' landscape. Runcorn New Town seemed to be criss-crossed by a series of unofficial paths between the bus routes and walkways that residents had made to make their lives easier; short cuts. They were used by all ages and it was not surprising to see a pensioner slip out of the bushes with her shopping. Once past the boundary hedges, the undergrowth was often surprisingly thin and the spaces under the trees were open - and so safe. These paths extended across the whole new town landscape, or seemed to. They made the town seem imposed on older patterns of landscape and land use, and also indicated the futility of town planning that ignored residents' needs and usage. We often followed them at night and slipped past houses and bus lanes and through business parks and small industrial estates, a linked network of paths. More about this if I get to visit Runcorn again. My only other observation was the creep of new business parks and houses out towards Daresbury; when I walked there it was fields.

Urban Wildwood

Derelict school site, Liverpool, October 31st 2008

What does a landscape need to make it wild? These unvisited places fascinate me and link these urban landscapes to my recurrent autumnal interest in the Blair Witch Project and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon; woods as places of ancient danger, almost prehistoric menace. I suppose the Founding Fathers took this European sense of wildwood with them to the New World.

I seem to have walked such derelict landscapes many times; the airfield at Burscough for the Southport book, for example, or long Railway Club walks in the late 1970s. These twentieth-century ruins seem a background to urban walking; and the idea of wildness and wildwood is absorbed/inherited by derelict built environments. There is a lot in this.

Twentieth-Century Ruins I

Redundant school sign, Liverpool, October 31st 2008

I am fascinated by the overlooked places in a city, the unvisited places. On a recent visit to Liverpool I found a demolished school slowly reverting to nature, the school buildings long demolished, the sweep of tarmac road way being slowly cracked and heaved by roots and grasses. There were still roadsigns warning drivers of crossing children and even a pale blue Liverpool Education board deterring intruders. (Reminding me of the old school exercise books with the city's coat of arms on them.) The kerbstones in the grounds were slowly disappearing under a year or two's leaf litter and there were still old lamp-posts with broken lamps on them. The hedge has gone shaggy and unkempt but is still recognisable as a hedge; the trees have been left to their own devices and at least one of the beech trees is enormous.

A snapshot into the light; old road patterns and new fences, October 31st 2008

From outside the fence (or what was left of it) the grounds looked like part of the neighbouring gardens, which themselves are a wild space, unmanaged woodland. Part of the school site has been sold off to a healthcare company, and these grounds are slightly better managed, but are still largely a wild space. Dog walkers use these places during the day but at night they revert to wildwood, full of perceived dangers; not bears or wolves but druggies and rapists. This sense of dangerous wilderness in the heart of the urban landscape, this 'otherness', seemed a redefinition of the urban landscape; how much of this overlooked and unvisited wildwood is there in a big city? How much unseen and neglected landscaping, abandoned garden space, even the unreachable and invisible space at the back of a border?

And beyond this exciting idea of wildwood there was the sense of a future gone awry. The school looked as though it was built after 1945 - greenfield site, modern roads and walls - but the future it was part of didn't happen. Instead the school was closed and half the site sold to a private healthcare company. An optimistic post-war landscape that didn't last.

A sign for a school that is no longer there...

Cities and History II

The Beatles in the early 1960s, a fifteen-foot-high image in HMV, Liverpool One

Walking through Liverpool One I saw this astonishing image of the Beatles in (I guess) about 1964 walking through somewhere that looks like Liverpool. The overlap of time and place I found fascinating; to their left are three-storey Georgian houses whilst behind George on the right is a modern concrete-pebble wall and a low railing; I find this juxtaposition of old and new in one photograph - connected by the Beatles with all those connotations of modernity - beautiful. And now Liverpool One is reflected in the windows of the image , a further layering of time and place, a vision of the city two of them did not live to see and none of them understand; the city trades on them mercilessly but has moved forward without them.

Cities and History

The past as a different world; Liverpool's Old Dock wall, October 2008

Liverpool One is built on what used to be the City of Liverpool Building, Canning Place, South John Street and the land between these and Paradise Street. Before 1974 the old Sailor's Home stood on the corner of Hanover/Paradise streets and before 1945 the gigantic Customs House - huge and neoclassical, echoing Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, one of John Foster's contributions to the cityscape - stood on the City of Liverpool Building site. These are two of the great losses to the city's architecture. And before this the Old Dock was here, the world's first commercial dock, built in 1715 by Thomas Steers on land reclaimed from the Pool. When the twentieth century buildings were cleared from the site the archaeologists found the dock in a reasonable state of repair despite being buried and infilled and used as the foundations of large buildings for nearly two hundred years. I deplore the decision not to open the channel with Canning Dock again and restore the Old Dock - where Liverpool's prosperity began - to the streets of the city. My ideal would be a warren of narrow pedestrian streets filled with quirky shops and small restaurants, small parks and a mix of apartments and houses above. Maybe one day. The decision to build Liverpool One instead is like Nice clearing the old town for a car park and a shopping mall.

BUT some of the Old Dock survives; a small viewing disc has been left in the pavement outside te new shops, and a space age rail protects shoppers from history. The dock wall can just be seen to the left of the inner disc, illuminated from below.

Cityscape II

Chavasse Park and the Albert Dock in the distance

Some more views of Liverpool One. I don't think that the buildings are particularly exciting but they have a bright modern energy which the city has found attractive; my concern is that the whole project will date very quickly and that beneath it all nothing of substance has been achieved for the city.

The distant dome of the old - currently empty - Royal Insurance Building and a ventilation tower for the old tunnel

Cityscape

Chavasse Park and One Park West, Liverpool One, 3rd October 2008

Last Friday we were in Liverpool and took the chance to explore the huge Livepool One development, the new shopping heart of the city. Old streets have been cleared and even newish buildings demolished to make way for the colossal regeneration of this underused area of the city. It is bright and clean and will soon blend seamlessly into the surviving pattern of streets between Paradise Street and Lord Street. But I am uneasy. I think that there should be more to city life than shopping, more to streets than a way of getting from one shop to the next. The space between the shops has been largely ignored; the space rises through three floors - so the old South Castle Street is now a three-tier shopping arcade open to the sky - and is crowned with an open space that I think has been called Chavasse Park. But it does not feel like a real city park; it feels like landscaping designed to show off the new buildings.

My gut instinct is to rebuild city life - the lives of cities - from the street up. I feel that cities are tinkered with endlessly, so that they become a mish-mash of half-baked plans. Liverpool One ends abruptly and the streets beyond are as scruffy and potholed as ever and there is no understanding of street life - buskers, benches, conversations, statues, smokers - on these sterile new streets. And then I wonder if I am being curmudgeonly, whether my vision of cities is old-fashioned. But cities are more than shops and more than money; there is more to urban life than consumption.

Knighton Landscapes

A morning visit to Knighton to see some of the h.Art exhibitions - a strange town, it reminds me of 1950s Ireland with its stone walls, people on the streets and old shopfronts, but is also strangely Alpine, surrounded as it is by steep hills of pine forest - and Victorian, with a fine town clock and a bank building with an Eastern solid cupola, strange things to see against pine forest and sheep fields. My mother's cousin raised his family in Knighton and I always wonder if I pass second cousins unknowingly; their presence haunts the town for me, their everyday walks, their ordinary journeys; my mother and aunt walking with their mother from the railway station in about 1955, walking through this Irish Victorian Alpine town that is half-Welsh and half-English on their way to see Ernest and the family. I took some abstract stone pictures of the school building today, which their children might have attended. It is now artists' studios, but the scuffed floors are the same, the heavy Gothic woodwork, the sunlight.

A Landscape of Small Illness

A light cold over the last few days has unexpectedly knocked me sideways, sending me back to bed with books and tea. For the best part of two days I was in bed reading, sneezing etc. It reminded me that fortunately I have not had long periods of illness, no more than a day or so, and that the 'light-headedness' or vagueness that comes with blocked sinuses etc can make what has been read flow together. And I always look back on the time of illness as a short journey, the more so when reading, as if the reading keeps pace with the illness in some way. Keeps step. So I am left with confused, fused memories of Peter Levi and Bruce Chatwin's travels in Afghanistan and Frodo Baggins' journey to the Prancing Pony at Bree; as if a single journey or strands of one, a journey that began at daybreak and ended with dusk; a day's travel through a landscape of small illness.

Beechwoods

Beech tree, Coombes Moor, October 2007

I always thought that if I ever came into a huge amount of money I would buy or create a beech wood. Beech woods more than any othr type of tree seem to have been a recurrent element in my love of woods and forests. South Liverpool's derelict and overgrown big estates, turned into parks or 1930s housing estates, leaving patches - copses, spinneys, even plantations - of beeches behind; giant beech trees in 1930s gardens, the remains of careful landscape planting a century and a half ago - Menlove Avenue's giant beeches, smooth grey stems and branches thirty feet above the ground. Childwall Woods, with its overgrown Georgian planting schemes and wild rhododendron forests, dotted with very tall, graceful beeches. Woolton had patches of beeches left - the junction with the short dual carriageway going up to Reynold's Park and the carriageway itself; 1970s NHS buildings in Victorian parklands left to run riot. Camp Hill, gnarled beech roots and packed soil. The lost sandstone war memorial bench. Black Woods, that I used to walk through to see Auntie Gwynneth, shuffling piles of gold and brown-to-rotting leaves, the clarity of the forest floor compared to Childwall Woods' brambles and rhododendrons; the beeches in BW seemed calm and elegant, woodland as meditative space.

Very tall beech trees along Woolton Road, the border of the large park-space surounding the old Childwall CE school and kept when the land was used for new houses; beeches in Calderstones Park, another south Liverpool estate saved for parkland, and all the way over to the golf course in Woolton; narrow beech-muddy lanes, a place I went alone to be alone, a long thoughtful walk from Cromptons Lane to Woolton pubs in the dusk and the bus home - beeches on the golf course, almost a badge of an old Victorian semi-urban/sub-urban estate; perhaps the classical estates had beech trees and the Gothic had yews and holly. Giant beeches in Allerton Manor, the spring of moss-grass underfoot, distant views of Wales. The trees almost hiding the tall sandstone column which marked seven miles from Exchange, a column erected by an earlier estate; overlapping parks and history.

More abandoned/recycled Victorian estates and neglected parkland near Chris and Rob's in Cressington, giant beech trees, their ground above the level of the road behind a low sandstone wall; sandstone and beeches, the defining symbols of south Liverpool. The edge of the wood and the shaved grass of the Prom, that peculiar autumnal memory/visual trick of golden leaves dropping onto carefully mown football pitches. The woods are overgrown and trailed by children and dog-walkers hunting for wild space in the city; the lane to the prom has an ancient gloom at dusk that I love.

The Stiperstones Notes

Here are the unedited notes I made on the Stiperstones last Monday.

'Up at 4.30am and out for just after 5am to meet AT.

Autumn up here, a cold wind and sleet - hills of broken stones, rabbit turf, sheep grass - the cool heat of the wind - receding hills of mist - wind in grass - breathing - sunlight on page and face - sheep bleating - blaeberry - low cloud - distant car a half-mile away, noises travel - sheep in lines - cold of hand, veils of rain, golden disc of sun, brightening - rocks sharp-edged, GROUND - similarities with Devon esp Dartmoor - heather - the artist soft-coiled for work - the roll of the hills, a surge of tors, like knuckles/spines/teeth - bones - broken in squares - abstract/landscape - lichen and heather - building stones dropped (Devil story) - golden grasses - see landscape as colour

Kestrel over thorn bush - clatter of pots and brushes behind me - pencils - the spattered folds of paper, a cold rising - sunlight in the valley, thick golden light, sheep in lines, reluctant, mournful - concert smoke mist - colours in sunlight - layers in mist, solidities, wispy solidities - how quickly the light changes - crows in pairs, families, parliaments - smokes of mist 'as if a great fire has been lit somewhere' (AT) - a silent fire - rain in the wind, a thickening of the air - a path of stones, merely the absence of soil, the absence of ground cover - and then in a blinking the mist descends and cuts us off from daylight

Layered mists turn on us, become solid - only sheep's bleats can penetrate

Cairns and field systems - Cranberry Rock (?bilberry)

A thickness of mist descending, as if curious

A fall of stones like a shipwreck, listing, grown from bedrock, shattered

Faces appear in the rock, rocks disappear in the mist. Lines of stone grown like ancient roads. A clatter of grouse, wing-folded. Crows cawing. Pipits. A lone bee.

Cranbrry Rock/Devil's Chair/Manstone/Shepherd's Rock

Slab-faced Aztecs, Mount Rushmore - chiselled shadow faces, wind-hammered.

Dark peat, root-bound turf, rabbit-cropped, sheep-bit. The wind in the heather. Skull stones. The cold wind.

A shower of sleet.

Distant countryside, fields and woods, golden with wheat. Smooth clouds passing the fields. Sheep lit by the sun, alone. (Lights pass softly through the sleeping house, the creak of a chair, and I am gone.) An image of my leaving.

We are nothing to these stones. Dragon spines, rising/sliding through the ground like whales surfacing, water-gleams on hard muscle-flesh, an exhalation lasting half a billion years. How long can they stay submerged?A deep slow dive, a gleam of water and sunlight on rough stone-flesh-flank, and they will be gone. Below ground they are nothing (perhaps this accounts for their reluctance.)

The colours of clouds - black, hard, grey, wisped.

An endless rolling, folding of hills, a sighing returning to underground (stone as exhalation, a breath lost) Hills swimming underground, rock is their element, their home. They breathe deeply and gigantic hill lungs fill with life-giving rock as they disappear

Impossible distance, chimneys, smokes, towns. Lines on the landscape - quartz in rock (still sharp, mist-slippy). Black paths on hills, spattered with white stones, brown roots of heather. A world of its own, separate, distant, immediate. Wildness as a state of mind or conditions.

Sleet again. Rock and sky, change and stasis. Spines within spines. Dragons. dinosaurs.

I am not easy on these suspicious stones, sharp and greasy; wary of ankles, shins, even necks.

Assaulted ramparts, shattered castles, surrounded by rubble. Sharp still, crisp. (The stones should still be warm, the rubble smouldering)

Lichen

Colours of stones - grey and lichened - only where the bracken has been cleared are they white, for a short season. They resemble fallen tombstones, clan markers, I am reminded of Culloden.

Wind history; smoke-mist curls around the tors. What does Stiper mean?

Deep forests of bilberry six inches high. Tiny wildnesses.

Peregrine

Light and cloud moving on the heathered paper - cold pages - the hill's cold trapped in my notebook (aeroplane baggage impossibly cold from unheated storage, with occasional deep nuggets of Greek heat)

The fields around the Stiperstones vaguely Scottish; hard-won from marsh and gorse, distant conifer hills.'

Stiperstones, Shropshire, 6am - 11.30am, 1st September 2008

Land Art, rootscapes and holloways

A stuffy, foggy morning, up at 5.30 to travel through Liverpool in memory. Very foggy. We went to see the 'land art' piece that Justine worked on in the woods at the Rodd on a sculpture course run by Richard Harris. Two felled hazel trees, woven into a bow and tied with willow whips, strung like a taut bow over an old ditch. Almost invisible in the green gloom and mist, it looked as if it had grown there. The ditch (one of a pair in parallel) is a listed ancient monument and was apparently once used to store wood, although we couldn't work out how this would work as surely it would flood; the bottom was boggy and full of mud and stream sticks.

The ditch leads down to the small stream where Justine showed me a landscape of bare roots, mainly oak and hazel I think, worn smooth by the sheep. A very Welsh wild place, overlooked and everyday. Snags of wool, fleece, on sharp twigs. Bare of earth, roots like stone, gnarled knuckles of living wood. Everything the same old cream colour of the dry ground. A rootscape.

The ditches reminded me of holloways, prehistoric roadways cut by usage into soft rocks. A southern British phenomenon, northern counties have too hard a stone. I have been reading about them in R MacFarlane's book 'The Wild Places' and was reminded of the holloway I found on the western slopes of Shobdon Hill. Eight or ten feet below the surrounding fields, choked with brambles and tons of rubbish (including what looked like a demolished house) and not used as a road for decades if not longer. But it still hugs the hill on the way to the summit. I was there for the possibility of a Bronze Age religious site which I had thought was more likely to be on the valley foor; there were two possibilities for the site of a sacred spring. But I wonder now if the holloway originally led up the hill to the sacred site. I will go and try and see this again.

August's Last Weekend

A consequence of writing about cities is dreaming of them - last night I dreamed I was alone in a nameless Russian city of tall gilt glass cafes, wide streets, rivers, grey distances. A city of building sites and confusion in which my friends were just out of reach.

The wind in the hill trees here sounds like rain every morning because the leaves are drying out.

A drive in late afternoon yesterday - Stonewall Hill and long views into the hazy, sunny Radnor Hills, endless distances of hills and woods and fields. Dust from wheatfields being harvested, huge combined harvesters on the roads. A strange, rich, back-of-the-throat catching smell, which we can't place or trace. Burning stubble? Chemicals? Fertiliser? Dried mud-trails on the roads, swerves out of the fields where the harvesters have turned back onto the lanes. They are working mad hours to get the harvest in; they drive past, lights flashing, long after dusk, and we can see them over by Kinsham, using lights to work in the fields.

This morning we hope to see the wood-piece that Justine worked on last weekend.

August

There are signs of autumn starting to appear. Turning from the garden wall yesterday, I could see that the wooded hillside above the house is splashed with yellow and faded browns. And this seemed to be the case wherever we went today. The swallows are gathering on the wires above the paddock. It is dark by 9pm and now, at 8.30, it is heavy dusk. Everybody is talking about the summer we didn't have.

Landscape and Memory I

Associations of Sunday - Dublin with my brother on an empty morning - breakfast in the huge empty dining hall of the Clarence Hotel, being waited on by about five smiling staff - bags packed and dumped and off through the city still smelling of sunlight and vomit and seagulls to the railway station at ? Tara Street - the half-empty train to Blackrock, tired homegoing partygoers half sleep or looking out of the window swinging dancing pumps from tired stockinged feet - alone at Blackrock station, the hour still too early, a mist hanging over the sea and nowhere open - a town of grey stone, sea-washed, strangely hardened - the market unpeeling itself, opening bleary shutters, brewing coffee - I found a flyleaf autographed by Brendan Kenneally from his poems 'Shelley in Dublin', my favourite souvenir - and then away again to the city waking and slightly noisier, recovering the bags and then the walk and an empty bus to the airport, stretching our feet across the seats as the bus lurched through north Dublin, dreaming of Guinness and tomorrows and my forthcoming wedding....

Contrasts

I have been up writing at 5.30am for most of this week, in order to squeeze some writing time into our busy days. The Liverpool Light collaboration with Alan McKernan is looking good; his strong dark images and my doubting - doubtful - and unsettled texts. We are self-publishing and so there are no barriers to free expression, and I have allowed my understanding of the urban landscape and its stories free rein. I especially like the idea of tracing my old journeys across the city in my head and on paper, a virtual flaneur, watching myself as a teenager getting off the bus and walking across to the Central Library and the layer upon layer of history - my history and the city's histories -I cross. And I look up from these nostalgic anxious journeys and I see the sunlight on Shobdon hill, or the mist lying across the valley being dispersed by the early sun, and sometimes I cannot understand why I cannot see the city.

Wild Places

I have been reading Robert MacFarlane's book 'The Wild Places', accounts of his explorations and journeys through wild and remote Britain. Each chapter relates to a wild place and so an element of wildness - forest, mountain, moor etc. As he gets more confident he talks of a map of these places, partly geographical and partly emotional, and the endpapers are printed with such an imaginary map of his wildness. His confidence allows him to broaden his search from geographical wildness to exploring our relationship with what 'wild' means. He is an interesting and quite open writer; even so the notes for his books must be considerably longer than the books themselves.

Next Monday, 1st September, I am climbing the Stiperstones in Shropshire with Alistair Tucker. This is the first collaboration between us. I will write and he will paint, and together we will produce responses to the same landscape at the same time. I am delighted to say that Alistair has also agreed to come on board the Wordsworth project, so he will be down here later in the year when we start walking. I think that RM's book will add to the background of the Stiperstones day, focussing my mind on elements of wildness in the landscape.

Virtual Landscapes

Over the last few years I have collected a 'favourites' file of favourite urban exploration websites. There are thousands of these in America, where the sheer size of some of the ruined buildings is incredible. Asylums, hospitals, prisons, old cemeteries, railway stations and lots of stuff on old factories. I am currently writing about Liverpool - dark, poetic ramblings through a city changing before my eyes - for a book with Alan McKernan; hopefully his dark, disjointed images and my text will work well together. So I thought I would chase up some of these urban exploration websites. And bizarrely some of them have disappeared; as if visited once long ago they have since closed down and been demolished. It conjured an image of endless virtual landscapes, website architecture become traceless, website archaeology, endless virtual Chinese boxes. I found it haunting.

A Turn on the Stairs

An end of summer moment; a turn on the stairs and the house smelled of holiday cottages, damp and breakfasts and sand and unused winters. I was reminded of long-ago holidays and hot days when the nights were already drawing in and the evenings were colder. A strange thing, holidays in August; seeing the season in its entirety summer starts in late May or early June, rumbles through July and August and peters out in September or even these days in early October.

Signs that the season is fading; squashes in the shops, hazelnuts in the lane, swallows feeding frantically and meeting on the telegraph cables over the paddock. It is starting to get dark from about 8pm. It has been wet and unsettled for about a fortnight, but I am hoping for a return to sunny days and a warm dry September.

Landscape and memory note: Pere La Chaise cemetery in late September nearly twenty years ago, a picnic lunch from a Tunisian place in Belleville, eaten just inside the cemetery. My first visit, a dry dusty day, the trees exhausted, dusty, fading. The sense of heat and dust. Dry ground and leaves crumbling to nothing. Blue sky and a sense of silence among the tombs.

derelict.london.com

A new discovery thanks to the London Review of Books. This website is amazing, page after page of derelict and overlooked London, the city I have always seen but never observed. It makes you realise how much dereliction you see all the time; I was astonished to think that Paul Talling (I think that's his name) has found derelict buildings in even central London. But more than this his pictures show an eye for the odd and the magically beautiful, the magically ordinary. And it reminded me of old Liverpool, the city I knew, which also made me realise how much the city has been tidied up in the last ten or fifteen years.

Chance landscapes I

I will write more on the strange survivors of Georgian landscapes - south Liverpool, south east London, etc. Sydenham, Forest Hill, Allerton/Garston.

This morning I opened the window to grey skies, not very bright. But there was a chance reflection on the window which made the landscape look Alpine. The normal fields and low hills with trees and brown cattle seemed suddenly to have grown a wall of steep wooded hillside, dark green, with a spiky crown of fir trees. It was clear enough to loook real, but half an hour later the light had changed and it had gone.

Cities in embryo

And what Kington made me think of was the evolution of cities. Kington, like our nearest town Presteigne, is an old town with modern elements. Kington I think is medieval - lots of narrow sunny alleyways and bulging old wooden buildings - which was modernised in the Georgian era - 1700 - 1850, say - by slapping classical facades on medieval townhouses. And then the modernisation stopped, so although there are twentieth century houses and new buildings, the town centre feels stopped in time. This is its appeal to visitors, of course, especially Presteigne which is much quieter than Kington.

This north Herefordshire area is famous for the 'black and white villages', where the modernisation or rejuventation of the villages stopped even longer ago. Somewhere like Pembridge is essentially a whole town built between 1350 and 1600 with newer infills. The Georgians/Victorians didn't modernise it as by then it was no longer important, so these beautiful villages look much as they did five or six centuries ago. It occurred to me that not only villages looked like this, so that these places are 'cities in embryo'; Liverpool looked like this, so did Manchester, so did London, before streets were widened and straightened and old houses demolished for newer ones. These small towns show an urban progression stopped at some point, in the Middle Ages in the case of Pembridge, the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in the case of Kington and Presteigne. Had they stayed important they would have grown, their medieval buildings would have become Georgianised then demolished or Victorianised and only odd survivors would still be around. Fossilised towns, cities in embryo...

Rural urban

I suppose inevitably writings like this become a journal or have journal elements. A week of warm sunny weather broke tonight with a crashing thunderstorm that blew up out of nowhere; the sunlight failed and there were strong winds and then torrential rain, and thunder and lightning. And then of course it is gone, the air fresher, the garden saturated, the rainwater dripping off the trees. Now it is mistier, the trees disappearing into a fine rain/haze.

To Kington this morning to collect some advertising leaflets for h.Art week in September. I sat in the car and looked at a small Georgian cottage and thought about the connections between landscape and association. The cottage was on the main road through the small town, with a very small front garden and an ornate porch, cast iron with a tent-like roof. Sash windows, old brick, slightly shabby and overgrown. I'd hazard a guess that it was built between about 1780 and 1820. Such places remind me of the Romantics, especially Keats; there seems something domestic and settled about these buildings, the setting for firelight and conversation and creativity, like Leigh Hunt's house on Hampstead Heath. I can imagine wild travellers being dropped off by the stage coach or a carter, open top coat bulging with poems and journals, the knock-knock-knock at the door, the golden light spilling out into the dusk. My romanticism! Today they are the epitome of the English country cottage, and yet when Keats was alive they would have been brand new and would not have had these associations. Is it the association of creativity and domesticity that I like? The visible landscape of another time? It occurred to me that the lives of famous people are a way into their time for us, their stories become a way of understanding their history. So Wordsworth's time on the Hindwell becaomes a method of examining the history of that valley. It's vague, this and I'm getting off the point. But the rediscovery of historic landscape through the lives of famous people I find interesting.

July

A warm and sunny day, after a week of grey days and cool nights. Today was how July should be. The landscape around here is subtly changing colour, the softer greens looking washed out and the wheat ripening to gold. Against the thick green of hedgerow trees, the fields look totally bleached out, like sand or dust, so it looks hotter and drier than it really is.

One thing I should think about is landscapes of time. I have no real awareness of the turning of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the days. Moon phases pass me by. Living out of the city has subtly shifted that but I should still be more aware. I am as unaware of this as I was of tides when I lived in Liverpool.

Edmund Blunden

'So November is at an end, and I discover that I have been quite outrun by this aged month...'

Edmund Blunden is an undeservedly forgotten Great War poet and writer, who wrote some excellent landscape books. His war memoirs 'Undertones of War' are superb. 'Cricket Country' is a slow journey around fields and pitches and cricketing stories which even I enjoyed - like Arthur Ransome's 'Rod & Line' which is about angling it is more about the mood, the landscapes and the participants than the sport itself. He lived until the early 1970s and had a successful literary career, publishing, editing, producing anthologies and teaching for many years in Tokyo. His book 'The Face of England' is an account of a series of journeys through England in the 1920s, a country he revels in for its gentle pastoral landscapes but a country he feels is irreparably scarred by the Great War; gradually of course the reader realises it is the author who is most affected by the recent war. I found this passage recently which made me think I should re-read the whole book.

The pale light of a mild winter afternoon, which touches a forlorn scene so aptly in its true condition, has rested on many ruins, and identified them with us in a strange degree. It may be merely fancy, or an accident of associations; but I would trace a relation between this spirit, rather than light, and the decline of places. In this sympathetic crystal, so transient, I look at this grove that was once a house, and naturally find the scene transformed into far-off wounded towers, and ramparts, and colonnades of trees, and red loopholed roofs, standing alone aong unpeopled marshy plains, towards the winter evening of their friendly and intimate lives.

Perspectives

I read an article recently where a painter was talking about 'assembling' landscapes, something I have heard before with relation to painters. They manipulate landscape - move bushes or trees, shift a spire - to heighten drama and perspective, to make the painting stronger than the real landscape.

Her approach was to consider foreground, middle ground and background or distance, in layers perhaps like the old 18th century landscape painters who had rules for the drama of paintings. I have found it interesting when photographing cities how much of the city is relegated to the middle of the picture, so that the foreground is occupied by river or road and the top half by sky; the complexities of urban life are squeezed into the middle third of the picture. But this artist was talking about depth of image, not vertical structure. It has always intrigued me how a picture can only record what is seen, not what is felt or heard or smelled, or even tasted. Writing about Liverpool recently I remembered the salt-grease-varnish taste of the thick wooden handrails of the old ferry boats; memory and landscape intertwined.

But beyond this is a different approcah to landscape. My landscape ideas are inevitably associated with memory and memory of place, especially with my urban work where the physical presence of the city IS the landscape, and so are far more abstract in mood than a physical representation of a landscape. They are both more and less 'representational'. And I suppose that a writer is far more a part of a landscape than a painter/photographer; the landscape is seen far more through the writer's eyes, so perhaps I manipulate as much as the painter does.

The Bald Hills

A drive over the Radnor hills from Presteigne to Knighton. Mostly we spend our time in the valleys here as this tends to be where the towns and villages are. And the tops of the hills here are often forested, so the views are restricted. Over towards Knighton the landscape - the hillscape - opens up and the forests are dark patches of dense trees on the sheep fields and fields of wheat. The sheep grass is clipped short and the hills look like velvet, a real 'patchwork' of greens and black-green forests. And the clouds up there are amazing, huge tumbling shapes on a high silent wind, patches of unexpected blue, I could lie on those fields forever watching the clouds. It has been a week of grey days and grey rain clouds, so the blue and white clouds are all the more welcome.

Hindwell Thoughts

I am putting together an idea for a performance/exhibition about William Wordsworth. His cousin/brother in law Tom Hutchinson rented farms here for twenty odd years, and William and his sister Dorothy came here many times.

Wordsworth was a great walker and I am intrigued by the idea of shadowing him on possible walks from the farm at Hindwell, which is still a working farm. One idea is to follow the Hindwell river from its source at the farm to another Hutchinson farm at Broadheath, and maybe on to the confluence of rivers in this valley, where the Hindwell joins the Lugg. This would mean walking the whole river.

The point of the project is to try and see the landscape as Wordsworth saw it nearly two centuries ago; Tom H first rented Hindwell in 1809, so if we try and make it happen next year it will celebrate two centuries since their involvement began. Some walks are obvious, such as the Hindwell walk, or the walk to Old Radnor church, where the family worshipped. There are other Wordsworth sites in herefordshire/Powys which could be visited to ground the project in a broader 'Wordsworth landscape', as if his vanished presence can still influence life today. As it does for me, of course.

An Archive of German Cities

A recent article in the paper about a large archive of photographs of German cities, taken on Hitler's orders in 1942/43. They show the centres of many German cities, ancient medieval streets clustered around town hall or cathedral, essentially landscapes three or four centuries old in cities that are a thousand years old. The idea was to document how the cities appeared so that after Germany won the war they could be rebuilt as they were. The photographs show Leipzig, Stuttgart etc - and most poignantly Dresden - as they were after a 'small' amount of bombing. They show cities with cleared districts, small 'patches' of streetscape near to the centre having been flattened and then cleared. They show a city landscape and a country at a time of transition, when German cities were being bombed but the authorities could still assemble gangs - often slave labourers of course - to clear the rubble and the streets. The photographs are snapshots, slices of history, landscapes in the process of being transformed. They are photographs of a present looking back into a past, as if (because the assumption is they are doomed) they are already slipping irrterievably backwards into history. Hitler tried to record the present already becoming the past.



They reminded me of a similar German book I bought many years ago, a collection of photographs of German cities before the First World War, another time of enormous civilian upheaval and change. They show elegant men and women promenading on the wide empty boulevards of Munich or Berlin, the dusty streets next to them only occupied by a few horse-drawn carriages and wagons. The text is in German and written in Gothic, which I think was banned for a time after 1945.



These images of essentially vanished landscapes remind me of similar images I have seen many ties of Liverpool; lost streets and horse-carriages, Victorian and Edwardian street scenes, commonplace city-memory. This seems like a Sebaldian curiosity, this awareness of history and time, especially with regard to the melancholy history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. I found looking at the 1942 photographs a sad experience, fraught with the knowledge of immediate destruction. We bring too much weight to landscapes and they can seem to produce all sorts of emotion.

Rainclouds in the Valley

A number of jobs to do in the early evening and then I hoped to sit outside with a drink. But I could see the rain clouds moving down the valley, first obscuring the Radnor hills, then a general haziness in the air, then large drops of rain on the bins and the car. But it is warm so they fade/evaporate almost immediately. Then the rainclouds pass over into England and the sun comes out. This is a good place for clouds as we can see a mile across the valley and so we have a mile of sky above us, going up as far as we can see. One of the gardening presenters once said that with gardens you can always go up, grow things vertically; and it is also true of bigger landscapes. Cloudscapes and the journeys of clouds would be a lifetime's study on their own; but not meteorology, more a poetic sense of size and insubstantiality and fragility. They look so solid, so angry, yet they move with the slightest breeze.

First Thoughts

I suppose this work carries on from my Spring Journal but is less of a diary and more focused on writing about landscape; the words we use, the meanings we draw from it, the weight of association we bring to it. I feel that my written work is moving further away from pure history and towards a poetic appreciation of urban and rural landscapes, and want to experiment with ways to describe landscape and talk about it. Some of it will be diary entries, descriptions, observations. It will have no ending but there will be times when I won't write, as I have nothing to say or no time to work. If/when it finishes I hope to be left with a body of work that explores ways of writing about landscape.