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.