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.