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...