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