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These hills don’t quite make sense. Three of them together, standing up from the lower land of the Scottish Borders, miles away from anything else on the landscape that might explain their origin. Other ranges of hills demonstrate the ancient folding of Earth’s crust or the gouging of high land in glacial ages past. These just stand there as though lost.
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By Fiona M Jones:
The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours.
History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away.
You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win.
St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals.
And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago.
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Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.
By Fiona M Jones:
I am underwater, give or take four days or maybe five. I stand below the ever-breaking surface of a galloping umbrous river: the Teviot carrying meltwater, silt and detritus down from the Cheviot Hills to the Tweed.
February, in Scotland, drops slow grey rain from low grey skies, then turns to sleet and stays there far too long. One night the distant hills turn white, the short grey daylight fails to break the frost, and snow finally advances down across the landscape.
It lingered this time for almost a week, reclaiming trodden tracks and drifting again over roads. On a brighter afternoon it began its thaw, icicles crashing from eaves and roadways turning to slush. The wind veered south-westerly; the rain arrived.
That’s when this happens: when rain and slush and sliding snow all hit the streams at the same time. The rivers rise, heavy with silt, heavier still with the debris they rip from their banks. Branches of deadwood and torn-up greenery/brownery. Charging like wild horses, the water loosens last year’s whitened reeds and sweeps them along until every obstacle gathers its own tangle of strawlike flotsam.
When the river subsides and the riverside walks re-emerge from water to mud, it’s the high-flung heaps of dead river-reed that mark where the water was: beside you, in the undergrowth; across glades of greening snowdrops and wild garlic; and, here and there, in the trees above your head. The Teviot has fallen back to a sedater cantering pace, still murky with silt, still covering more than its usual bounds. You can see where in its haste it has stripped away ground from under its nearest trees. You can see the broken stems of last season’s river-reeds, half-overlaid with mud now, ready for this year’s new spikes to take their place. And you can see new gravel-banks and newly-lodged fallen trees—things that will either wash away once more next time the river rises, or will gather enough grasping plantlife to grow into islands.
This high-water mark will fade out over the weeks, swamped not by water now but by new foliage; atrophied by decomposition; removed piecemeal by wind and nest-building birds. Only for now it sits above my path, in places higher than my head, a boast or maybe a threat: This is my river-bed, and I am not always quiet. Can you feel my speed and coldness flowing through you where you stand?
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Fiona M Jones writes short/flash/micro fiction and CNF. One of her stories gained a star rating on Tangent Online's "Recommended Reading" list for 2020. Fiona's published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.
By Fiona M Jones:
This is the biggest beach I have ever seen. We have driven miles along narrow winding roads, pausing to squeeze past the occasional vehicle coming the other way. We have parked by Goswick Golf Club and followed a path over two lines of dunes, and suddenly we are on flat sand.
Sand and sand and sand, miles of it, and somewhere in the distance the North Sea. We head towards it. If a piece had fallen off the coast of Norway a few hours ago, a tsunami would be on its way. We’d run and run and never make it. We would DIE, I tell my niece and nephew, widening my eyes to scare them, but their father assures them there’s no tsunami forecast. I try again as we walk uphill ever so slightly: this would be a sandbar we’re standing on now. When the tide sweeps in on a stormy day you can find yourself surrounded, cut off from land. You would DROWN in the swirling grey tide as you struggle for land and find yourself only going deeper. The tide is actually still going out, someone observes, and my nephew and niece settle down to digging drainage channels and river systems in the waterlogged sand near the water’s edge. One of my sons wades in the water, looking for jellyfish, but all he finds is a partially-deflated helium balloon dropped out of air, washed up by water. It looks like a Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish. Which can, of course, KILL you, probably with fear, if you were listening to the wisdom of your Aunty Fii, but nobody is.
In the sand I hollow out five oversized toe-holes and follow up with an enormous artificial sole-indentation: a giant’s footprint. An imaginary monster has walked out of the sea. It will probably EAT you. The longsuffering niece and nephew help to smooth the work of my hands until it looks almost plausible. My son takes out his phone to record the monstrous footprint. We build little hills of sand, mountains standing between mini-rivers running down to the sea. This sand we’re building mountains with is the accumulated product of eroded mountains, I tell the children, who are growing in skepticism by the minute. It’s time to head homeward, exploring driftwood and flotsam on the way. The nephew forms an emotional attachment to an abandoned buoy the size of a space-hopper. Can he take it home? Will it fit through the door of his home if he does? Will there be enough room to live there if he gets it indoors? In the end he must content himself with the scrap of rope that we cut off the buoy, fatally blunting Aunty Fii’s scissors in the process.
On the way back between the dunes, somebody stops to read the sign we passed earlier, half-obscured by dune-grasses. QUICKSAND, it tells us. And don’t touch any metal objects left over from the military training operations of yesteryear. Because they’ll EXPLODE.
Didn’t I tell you this was a dangerous place?
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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes short/flash/micro fiction, CNF and occasionally poetry. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.
By Fiona M Jones:
This is a mountain-range on Middle Earth. Twisted folds of rock, precipitous cliffs and narrow hidden glens. Deep caves below, where live the things that hide from the light of day. Confronted with this massif you must scale it or negotiate, at your peril, the subterranean pathways—
OK, it’s a tree stump in a cow field. It’s still epic. By its girth it must have been a giant, shrugging off the centuries, a thing that lived until it had forgotten how to die. This one’s the largest in a widely-spaced row just outside the southern boundary of the Pitfirrane golf course, along from the prisoner-of-war base.
Somebody, at some point in the mid-to-late 1900s, must have looked at these majestic trees and decided to cut them down. Every one of them, levelled to knee-height. I wonder where the hundred-tons of wood went—how much was burned, which gates and roof-beams came from these. And when. These tree-remains have stood for decades, rotting hollow and silvering, mossing on the outside, concealing who knows what of rodents and invertebrates.
Perhaps this row of giants would all have fallen by now anyway, succumbing one by one to wind or lightning, untidy in their dwindling. Trees should be tidy, someone must have said; and untidy trees are only worth their wood.
But how tidy do you need a muddy field, one you can’t even walk through except after weeks without rain? Even before it was a cows’ field it was only a prison camp. Before that it would have belonged to the original Pitfirrane estate. Someone two or three centuries ago planted a row of saplings for the edge of a road or the boundary of a vista. Most land in Britain has changed its use so many times you’ll find a king in a car park or a Roman bath under a shopping centre. I don’t know what this landscape was when these trees first came here.
Here were giants, at the edge of this boggy field churned deep with the hooves of cattle. Not much of each giant is left. Enough to house a few families of hedgehogs and mice, and a nation or two of woodlice. If you step on top of this tree stump you still stand upon the roof of a world.
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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.
By Fiona M Jones:
I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life.
I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies.
I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees.
And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss.
Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above.
If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline.
Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go.
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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.
By Fiona M Jones:
It was a long uphill walk to listen to a man talking, but maybe I would have gone there too. For this was centuries ago, long before information came to the fingertips and still before most of us could have read for ourselves, although the machine had been invented that would change all that by filling the world with books.
More than one place on the map of Scotland bears the name John Knox’s Pulpit, for Knox preached often outdoors—subversive to received dogma, avoiding the authorities who welcomed no second channel of religious thought to unsettle their status quo. This Pulpit is a spectacular sandstone outcrop, eroded into Golgothic formations of caving strata high above a hillside stream and the amphitheatric curve of it opposite bank.
In the age of microphones one wonders how a single voice could ever have addressed a crowd, outdoors in wind by water. Then one encounters a place like this, where the landscape itself conspires with the speaker, focusing and carrying his voice like the words of an epiphany. The world changed and changed again, picking up speed, momentum, noise.
If you go there today, you take the long uphill path for quietness, to gain distance between yourself and the multiple channels of information that pursue your fragmented attention. If you stand below John Knox’s Pulpit, and watch and listen, silence answers.
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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.
By Fiona M Jones:
I have seen these stairs in one of many dreams: old-carpeted and awkward, all in different directions and never a full flight together. Hardly a room shares floor with another as you climb a little, step down, turn to find yourself above an entryway or down in a strange narrow yard recently wooden-decked. You find yourself neither indoors nor outdoors between high white windowed walls, followed by an archway too low now for horse-drawn gig but surely never meant for a door.
In my dreams every building is like this: old and idiosyncratic, mazelike, defying rectangular expectation, atticked and cellared and easy to get lost in—as though in books or dreams or ancestry I lived in such places and can never quite get used to architecture that makes sense.
It comes almost as a surprise that the hotel rooms boast space and light and all mod cons, and ensuite shower and a huge TV. One single mid-ceiling beam leads me to wonder if this once stood as two smaller rooms. The corded-casement windows are the oldest feature inside, but younger than the building itself by two or three centuries at least.
Noise from the small hotel bar filters up through the floor, but Kelso is a quiet town and the mild revelry of its Saturday night dies down early. From the street below our casements the last late vehicles rattle over cobblestones before night deepens into peace. We are staying one night here in Kelso, and it is not enough. We have walked beside the river, visited one restaurant, sampled a local micro-bar—and already we start planning our return.
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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.
