Recovered Landscapes

By RÁ Costello:

It is a Tuesday in December. The rain drifting off the Irish Sea washes Dublin in a briny, opaque silence and as I cross Dawson Street, a cyclist plummets past me, like a gannet headed towards the Liffey. I am on my way back again, to the glass case where the Gleninsheen gorget sits, glowing in the dust-heavy air of the national museum. A broad, oxbow-shaped collar made of gold. Hammered into being during the Bronze age, I have been visiting it for as long as I can remember. In Irish, you would say that I am 'gafa leis.’ That something in its form has snagged on my mind. I could not tell you what in it catches me. Except that it was pulled from the rock of my home county. That it is a tangible piece of a landscape I struggle to name. 

Our family home sits on a lip of rock, one of a string of houses perched on the faces of a long line of small mountains which plunge in swollen ripples of limestone into the toss of the Atlantic. ‘Folt fionn na farraige’ the white-crested mane of the ocean.

Arthur Conan Doyle said that limestone landscapes are hollow places, secretive, and this is the kind of landscape where things that do not belong manage to endure. Along the edges of this coast, from Ballyvaughan down through Gleninagh and Murrough to Fanore and Craggagh, up the valleys into Fermoyle and Caher. The Irish language held on. A tongue to itself in an area you could walk across in a day. Enduring in the small community that lived in these pockets of watery rock, where glaciers have stripped the soil away and left the grey limestone ribs of the land exposed. 

As you leave the soft fields of Galway, the first hills of this karst landscape begin to rise suddenly, at Boston – a place whose name is, perhaps, the Anglicised sounding of the Irish Bos Toinne, ‘the palm of the wave’ – named for the scalped shoreline nearby which legend says was stripped clean by a great tsunami. These first hills mark the boundary of the Burren, their peaks picked out against the sky by the lattice of dry-stone walls that run across their peaks.

These stones and fields and crested hills had names once. Not the English names we use now. Names all of their own, with stories to explain them, stories built over centuries as each generation placed their layer on what had been laid down before. These are names hardly anyone knows now. Stories people do not even know they have forgotten. There were once Irish names for the gentians that flower in the warm shadow of a limestone pavement here. Not Irish versions of English names but Irish names which had never heard how English named their flower. And did not care. There was a name for the local practice of wintering cows on the mountain and summering them by the sea. A name for the lakes that bloom, like mercury rising from the low fields, in bad weather. These places had names that told you their history and their nature – cluain, inse, léana. The water meadows, the low-lying grassy places.

National surveys record widespread use of Irish here in the 1930s, yet, two generations later, as I was speaking my first words of Irish, the language had already faded from the landscape of my home. I can count my summers on the rocks of these mountains, but the distancing lens of translation means the knowledge wrapped in its Irish names, is now mostly lost to me. And yet I find I can’t give up on it.  I spend time trying to hunt down scraps of what time has worn off our maps. ‘Sa tóir ar’ I would say in Irish. ‘Sa tóir ar’ - to pursue. Derived of, or maybe simply adjacent to, the middle Irish ‘tóraidhe,’ - a bandit, the pursued. The root from which Tory island off Ireland’s far North-West coast gets its name – the famous home of outlaw pirates, pursued across the sea. The name given to the bands of guerrilla fighters who opposed Cromwell's armies during the seventeenth-century invasion of Ireland, and, by a process of crude association, the political label given to those sympathetic to the Catholic Duke of York at the end of Charles II's reign – The Tories. This is what I am pursuing, I think - these shapeshifting insights that come from the intimacy of knowing a language beyond its constituent parts. The magic of familiarity which can, by a process of consubstantiation, turn a word from a label for those outside the law to the name for those who sought to eradicate the language the outlaws spoke. 

Language and landscape go together here. They hide each other. I find a field that has no English name. But it has an Irish one. Scribbled on the neat, lined pages of a child’s copybook in the national folklore collection is a list of places near the author’s home. Recorded in that golden window when Irish had not yet begun to fade off the landscape. The child’s name attaches her to a house where her family still live. I retrace the directions in her description.

It is late August. Marsh thistles worry my ankles as I cross the wall and into the long grass of a sloping field. Water seeps through my runners as a dun cow and her white calf watch me balefully. A month earlier and I would have been up to my waist in feileastram, the tall canary yellow Iris that grows in wet places around here. Talamh feagacha this kind of land – rushey. Wet footed, I crouch down – listening – because, in Irish, this field is called ‘Poll a’ ceoil.’ The hole of music. And as I squat there, in the silence between cars passing on the narrow road nearby -  I hear it. The rushing softness of water hurrying through some hidden path in a trickle of excited notes. Poll a’ ceoil.

Irish is not made for outsiders – the names it gives things are designed for those who are part of its landscape – internal references made of layers of locality that make them useless for a person who wants a precise co-ordinate, invaluable for those who seek a place. The language will exclude you if you let it but, in its strange acts of micro-identification it gives away the secrets of a landscape that run beneath the surface. Makes it difficult not to inhabit the place you describe.

The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to translate her work into English, offering the refusal as a small and deliberate challenge to those who “think everything can be harvested without loss.” So much is lost in harvesting this place as a map of English names. And yet the landscape is sometimes difficult to listen to. There is so much I cannot recover. More silences in the landscape than I will ever fully fill. I look at these hills now and they confront me with a language and a landscape I am clinging on to but know I can never quite claw back. Waving goodbye to the cows, and the field, I clamber back over the stone wall to my bike. Back North-East is Gleninsheen. Ghleann insín, the valley of the small, grassy grazing places. They seem like such small victories, but in each name is a history, a landscape recovered.

***

Róisín Costello is a bilingual writer and academic who lives and works between Dublin and County Clare, Ireland. Róisín writes about the connections between language and landscape, and how to recover feminist understandings of place. Her writing is forthcoming in The Hopper and has been shortlisted for the Bodley Head/ Financial Times essay competition.

Sketches of China 05: The Great Wall

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fifth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The graveyard shift, sitting alone in the candlelight as the clock strikes four, the night wearing on, surrounded by the room’s thick stone walls and the damp smell of the salt air, hearing the lullaby of the waves outside and sitting, key in hand, turning it over again and again, the key to a kingdom that lies in ruin, the barbarians camping outside, their advance checked – for now – by the wall, by that enormous structure built of human sweat and blood, marking out the northern frontier, a border running west from where the mountains meet the sea, tracing an improbable boundary across rocky limestone hills cloaked in rich verdure, joining the dots of torch-lit watchtowers burning in the night, a structure only as strong as its weakest link, plunging over the face of a cliff, down into the fast-flowing waters and foaming narrows of a ravine before resuming on the other side, continuing across the vast expanses of scrub and wilderness, across the steppe, before petering out somewhere far in the west, that tormented figure sitting alone in the candlelit room, the night wearing on, meditating on the territory guarded by that immense structure, only as strong as its weakest part, key in hand, turning it over and over, the wall marking out the space where the heavenly empire dwells, the self-sufficiency and sanctity of one kingdom above all, the barbarians waiting outside, key in hand, over and over again, mulling over the decision as Beijing lies sacked and smouldering, the tortured faces of a father and a lover, meditating on their fate, on the price of revenge, weighing up a choice between the lesser of two evils – treason or an empty throne – and intuiting that the decision is perhaps already made, the candles flickering in the damp salty air, the touch of the metal, a key, the key, the key to a future preordained, destiny – or so it would seem – in the palm of a hand.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

Soundmarks: Art and Archaeology

We were extremely interested to hear about ‘Soundmarks’, the new collaboration between the artist and archaeologist Dr Rose Ferraby and the artist Rob St John, which brought together art, sound and archaeology to explore and document the hidden sub-surface landscape of the village of Aldborough in North Yorkshire, England. 

Aldborough was an important town in the Roman north, one with a central forum, basilica and amphitheatre. But for anyone visiting the town today, this history is not immediately obvious. And so the Soundmarks project was born; an attempt to bring this landscape back to life again, through art exhibitions, sound installations, a book and audio art trail, as well as a documentary film and podcast.

“There is rich ground for creative exploration between art and archaeology, allowing new ways of exploring landscapes. So much of archaeology is about imagination: engaging with creative practice can open up new ways of thinking through archaeology and communicating it in interesting and exciting ways.” – Rose Ferraby.

On the Soundmarks website you can delve into more of this fascinating story through the different strands of the project, including the documentary film and audio trail (with accompanying town map). And if you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Aldborough, the English Heritage Museum in the village is providing a home to the visual and audio elements of the project.

To learn more about the project, have a listen to the Soundmarks Podcast, in which Rose and Rob sit down to talks about the process of research, making and exhibiting, interwoven with field recordings and music made for the project:

Soundmarks is an art/archaeology collaboration between Rose Ferraby and Rob St. John using sound and visual art to explore and animate the sub-surface landscape of Aldborough Roman Town in North Yorkshire, UK. This podcast, recorded in September 2019, features a conversation between Rose and Rob outlining their processes of research and making over six months in Soundmarks, resulting in an exhibition, sound installation, book, art trail and film. Their conversation covers themes around art, archaeology, sound and landscape, and is woven with field recordings and music created in the project. Find out more on the project website: https://soundmarks.co.uk/ Soundmarks was supported by funding from Arts Council England.

Soundmarks on Twitter

Music and place: Kitty Macfarlane's Namer of Clouds

Review and Interview by Paul Scraton:

I first heard the music of Kitty Macfarlane on her EP ‘Tide & Time’ a couple of years ago and was immediately struck by both the beauty of her voice and the spirit of place to be found within the lyrics. ‘Wrecking Days’ was the standout song, with its stories of beachcombers stalking the shore, and it was great to hear it again in a new arrangement on Macfarlane’s debut album ‘Namer of Clouds’, which is released by Navigator Records this week.

All the tracks on ‘Namer of Clouds’ speak to our relationship with landscape, place and the environment, whether it is Macfarlane’s native Somerset on ‘Man, Friendship’ or the story of the last of the Sardinian sea silk seamstresses on ‘Sea Silk’. This is an album of haunting, lyrical music that asks the listener to consider her place in the world, the beauty to be found there and the consequences of our negligence or disinterest. On ‘Wrecking Days,’ Macfarlane describes what is left behind by the tide, and if there is poetry in the image of cuttlefish bones, there is certainly a warning in what else can be found on the beach, from the discarded fishing tackle to the plastic bottle tops, resting among the seaweed and stones.

This is thoughtful songwriting, whether in the original compositions or new arrangements of traditional folk ballads. The album closes with an artistic collaboration across the ages: on Inversnaid Macfarlane reworks a 150 year-old poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins about the importance of preserving the wilderness for future generations, a task that is as important now as it ever was.

You can hear ‘Man, Friendship’ and see the official music video below, and we are extremely grateful to Kitty Macfarlane for answering some of our questions about the album, her songwriting in general, and the importance of place in her work:

From the moment I heard Wrecking Days on the Tide & Time EP, it seemed clear to me that there is a distinct sense of place in your songwriting. What role do you feel place has in your work, and which places most influenced the songs on the new album?

'Place' isn't just a geographical location. It's bound up in the stories that span hundreds of years, the changing face of a landscape over time (and our part in that), the traditions that tie people to the land, and the inexplicable way certain corners of the world can make you feel. At school we are taught geography, history, art, chemistry... as if they are separate things. For me, songwriting pulls it all together. My album couldn't help but be a bit of a tribute to Somerset, where I am from – the scenery creeps into my songs almost by accident, along with the stories of the people and creatures that live there. That said, there is also a song set on a small Mediterranean island off Sardinia, and another which is a song-setting of a poem by Manley Hopkins about a Scottish stream. I wanted it to be an album of songs loosely bound by mankind's relationship with the land.

Of all the places you have written about or the landscapes that have otherwise inspired your work, which is your favourite?

Again and again my songs return to the beautiful and ancient Somerset Levels. They are a large low-lying wetland area of peat and clay with an eerie timeless quality - perhaps something to do with their yearly renewal by ruthless flooding. The Levels hold stories of ancient people preserved in the peat; of wandering Neolithic people on their wooden trackways; of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, conquering the Danes against all odds from his hiding place on the isle of Athelney; of the disastrous floods of 1607 where thousands of people perished; of the basket-makers and thatchers, the elver fishermen and cider producers. Man, Friendship deals with our steadily changing climate, the cruel floods across Sedgemoor and what is left for humanity to cling to when all else is washed away.

In February this year I went down to Shapwick Heath nature reserve on the Levels to watch the starling murmurations at dusk. I was surprised to find hundreds of other people with the same idea, and there we all stood, wrapped up in coats and scarves, while a hundred thousand winged bodies swelled above us, bound by some magnetic tether, a pulsing leviathan in the sky. I wrote Starling Song about this uncanny phenomenon, but it was more than just a spectacle for me - it felt like a moment of immense connection with humanity.

Glass Eel is a on the surface a song about the eels that have historically filled Somerset's waterways. Their colossal, near 4000 mile migration from the Sargasso Sea to Europe is one of science's great mysteries, and there are many parts of their enigmatic life cycle that we still don't understand. The song is about the constant motion of the Earth and everything on it – how we are all compelled by the same centrifuge that drives the eel. But the European Eel is now critically endangered, due to a loss of intertidal and wetland habitats, overfishing, and man-made obstacles to their mammoth journey. I think the plight of the lowly eel is strangely metaphorical for the problems our own species faces – our fragmentation of the land with motorways, dams and weirs is like the international fissures wrought on a global scale, our gluttony and overfishing relates to our wider exploitation of the environment, and the eel's journey recalls our own questions of rights to land, migration, and belonging.

Do you find yourself most inspired by places you know well, or have travels - on tour for instance, or otherwise - given you new places to write about?

There's a definite appeal to writing about places that are familiar, as they become entwined with so many unaccountable emotions and memories. But there is inspiration everywhere and it's exciting to think of how open-ended songwriting can be. For one of the songs on the album, Sea Silk, I travelled to Sant'Antioco, a small island off Sardinia to meet and interview an elderly Italian lady who is one of the last remaining people to create 'sea silk' in the authentic and traditional way. Sea silk is a very fine thread spun from the filaments or 'byssus' of giant endangered clams that live in the Mediterranean. It has extraordinary qualities which turn it from a dull brown to a brilliant gold in sunlight. The art of spinning sea silk has been practised for centuries, and is passed down through generations of women in Sant'Antioco – traditionally, it cannot be sold for profit, but must only be given away. It crops up throughout history here and there – Nefertiti's bracelets, King Solomon's robes, even perhaps Jason's golden fleece... but is shrouded in mystery. Chiara Vigo is a remarkable woman who has devoted her life to this art form, and it was incredibly special to hear her talk about how she learnt it from her grandmother as a girl.

To me it spoke of the historical relationship between women and textiles and the land, and the important roles women throughout the world have quietly performed in the background that are rarely acknowledged by the history books. I love knitting, and part of that is the feeling of connection with generations of women before me. I don't actually speak Italian, and Chiara doesn't speak English, which made for an interesting interview (luckily I brought a friend who could translate!) but when we showed each other our own knitted creations, it felt like we shared a common tongue. A recording of Chiara's rich italian speaking voice opens the song, along with part of a soft chanting folk song that she sang to us, that coincidentally happened to be in the right key... it all felt spookily preordained!

In the album notes it says that "the album is augmented by all kinds of 'found' sound." Can you tell us a bit more about this, and how you think this helps route your songs in the places you are writing about?

I really wanted the album to feature little pieces of the places that inspired the songs. We borrowed a portable mic and took field recordings in various locations – the chaotic waterfowl recorded at dawn from a hide on the Avalon Marshes set behind Starling Song (I saw my first Bittern while recording this!), the babbling brook with its restful birdsong to accompany Inversnaid, the crash of Sardinian waves behind Sea Silk. Morgan's Pantry is a traditional song about the malicious 'Morgans' that live in the Bristol Channel, that allegedly come to the shore at the foot of a hidden waterfall on the North Coast. We set out to track down this waterfall, only accessible at low tide, from an Ordnance Survey map, and recorded the rush of water falling onto the rocks, which then formed part of the song's soundscape. Using found sound seemed to pay tribute to the people and places in the songs, and made the process feel like a sort of collaboration between myself and the wild.

What are your upcoming plans? Tour dates you'd like to tell us about... oh, and when will you be coming to play in Berlin?

I'm just about to set off on a big UK tour! It starts on the 4th October in the Lake District, then I'm off all over the country for 23 gigs in all. The two biggies though are my album launch shows in Bristol (10th November) and London Kings Cross (13th) – these will be really special evenings where I'll be playing with a full band with lots of treats and surprises... Unfortunately no European gigs yet, but I'd love to come and play in Berlin one day!

The Namer of Clouds by Kitty Macfarlane is released on 21 September 2018 by Navigator Records.

Printed Matters: The Line Between Two Towns

We are really excited about this place-related project from our friend and Elsewhere contributor Laura Harker. The Line Between Two Towns is a new zine that explored the Esk Valley line between Middlesborough and Whitby in northern England, bringing together writers, poets, artists and photographers who have all been inspired by the different destinations on the line between the two towns. Here is Laura's introduction to the zine, and you can order your copy online here.

The idea behind this zine came from wanting to explore the differences between Whitby and Middlesbrough, and all the unique nuances and cultures that set them apart from one another. Though there are such stark differences between the two towns, there is still one thing that brings them together: the Esk Valley Railway.

It clocks in at only 36 miles long, but the Middlesbrough and Whitby line was once part of a larger network of railways that covered the area until many lines were closed after Dr. Beeching’s cuts. Thankfully, the line remained open due to its popularity. Originally intended to serve the mines and quarries across the region, the Esk Valley line quickly became a hit with Teessiders who realised that it placed the North Yorkshire seaside just over an hour away.

Over the past few decades, the area’s industry has disappeared, Brits have set their sights on sunny European beaches, and the line is now rarely busy except for Bank Holiday weekends. But it continues to be an important lifeline for many in the villages it passes through, connecting them to Middlesbrough and Whitby.

I was born in Middlesbrough but we moved to Glaisdale, just outside Whitby, when I was 11. Carefully picked up from my urban childhood, I was transplanted to the countryside where most other kids were members of the Young Farmers and thought my Boro accent came from Ireland. Even though my childhood so far had been spent less than 30 miles from Whitby, I realised there was a large gulf between these two locations – industrially, culturally and aesthetically.

This isn’t something that bothered me that much until I moved to Berlin and I was constantly asked the same question: Where are you from? When Germans and other non-Brits asked, the answer was easy – I went with North Yorkshire. But when Brits asked, expecting a more specific pinpoint for their mental map, I couldn’t bring myself to give just one answer.

I couldn’t just say Whitby and ignore Middlesbrough or that would be turning my back on my first decade, family ties, and roots as a Teessider. But I couldn’t simply say Middlesbrough, as I’d spent 15 years on the moors by this point. My Boro accent is long gone and my Middlesbrough geography gets hazy whenever I step off Linthorpe Road in the centre of town – I can’t quite stomach saying I’m a true Teessider. And so I thought about writing a personal essay on this identity crisis and the towns that sparked it, using the Esk Valley Railway to bind it all together. When I realised there was just too much for me to say, I decided to make this zine and open it up to submissions to try and create something of a printed tapestry of the area.

The zine includes works from local writers, poets, artists and photographers, all of which have been inspired by stops along the line. Threading together their work along the context of the Esk Valley Line, I wanted the zine to explore the cultural and landscape shifts that can be found taking this particular train journey, from starting in Middlesbrough surrounded by tired factories and ending in Whitby just steps from the beach. And it might actually help me figure out what to say whenever someone asks me where I’m from.