Seeing the River

By Nicholas Crane Moore: 

The first river I loved was the Truckee, which my family floated every summer for years. It spilled gently out of Lake Tahoe, clear and cold in the heat of August. From my uncle’s raft, much was visible to astound a little boy. I could see tiny pebbles on the bottom through four feet of water. And small fish, brown and rainbow trout, flitting in and out of the raft’s slowly moving shadow. I could see my feet, magnified somehow by the water as they dangled in the river. But there was much that I could not see. 

The river, then, was nothing more than a highway of water coursing through the mountains. It was just a current towing us across a summer afternoon. It was a feeling. A sensation of sun and water splashing on bare skin. A memory of joy with cousins. It was not yet the centerpiece of a watershed, a catchment for runoff and debris. It was not yet a reflection of the environmental conditions around it.

Even as a child, the presence of a road alongside portions of the river seemed strange, somehow out of place, though I was unaware that oil and particles of car exhaust make their way into the water. Or that the paved roadway increases erosion by transforming rainfall and snowmelt into fast flowing sheets. There was a road, and there was a river. They were separate things. The influence of humans on our habitat was not yet something I understood.

Sometimes I miss those days, when I knew less about the harm we inflict on the natural world. Sometimes I wish I did not know, for instance, that the EPA classifies the upper Truckee as impaired based on sediment volumes that degrade aquatic habitat, largely a result of development in the watershed. That the river’s endemic fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout, survives today in only a small remnant of its former range is something I have wished I could forget.

As an environmental lawyer, it is part of my job to know, and to learn. I have had to acquire a great deal of information that is painful for one who loves nature to bear. Knowledge is power, indeed, but it can come at a cost. Of this price the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” One lived alone because others, he sensed, did not share his understanding of what he called the land organism; ecology in the late 1940s was a burgeoning, niche field. That is no longer the case, but there is an enduring truth to the notion that most of us are not equipped to discern the subtle evidence of a compromised landscape. Quite simply, as Leopold wrote, “Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”

In many ways, the modern world is not arranged to promote a deeper understanding of human effects on the environment. Our economic system depends on a certain level of obliviousness to the byproducts of consumption. Businesses in the Lake Tahoe region, for instance, find it in their most immediate interest to speak of the lake and its outlet river solely in terms of their stunning clarity and hue, their restorative qualities. The EPA’s qualms about sediment do not find their way into the brochures of ski resorts and boat rental outfits. Given basin waters are safe for swimming and drinking, I cannot really blame them. It would detract from the tourists’ experience—and perhaps the amount they are willing to spend—to learn that in escaping the grime of Los Angeles or San Francisco they have fled not to some pristine vestige of Eden, but to a beautiful place in which human habitation has similarly altered, to a lesser but still significant degree, the delicate balance of life. To know that one is contributing to that disruption, however insubstantially, would presumably dampen the vacation mood, if only for a moment. I know at times it has for me.

One of life’s challenges, I have found, is accepting that we have hurt someone we love. There can be an instinct to look away, to deny, to assume that everything is fine. But I have learned the hard way that it is only through seeing the pain, understanding its causes, and acknowledging our role that we can begin to heal the wound. I think the same is true of the landscapes we explore and inhabit, which are as infinitely complex, and as sensitive, as any person.

Judging by trends in social media, advertising, and travel, it is a common desire today to find a connection with the natural world. If one is to develop a meaningful relationship with a mountain, or a valley, or a river, I believe it is imperative to engage with that place by learning more about it. Not only about the way it works, the way its dynamic balance is achieved (which can be immensely satisfying), but about the ways in which it has been degraded, and made susceptible to further harm (which can be sobering). By doing this one can begin to love a place in an active, real sense—not in the way we say we love a TV show or a restaurant, but in the way we love a friend. Because protecting ourselves from knowledge of the damage we have caused does not protect either the people or the places that we love. It only leaves them vulnerable.

This is not to say that every road near a river should be torn up, or that it’s reasonable to demand utter purity from every water body. Humankind cannot live on this earth—not in anywhere remotely close to the quality of life and health that we now enjoy—without substantial impacts on its lands and waters. But I think we should at least know what those impacts are. We should understand the trade-offs. Laws like the federal National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, which require disclosure and analysis of the environmental consequences of an array of public and private endeavors, embody this goal. If nothing else, they are triumphs of transparency in an opaque, often sugarcoated world. Combined with the amplifying power of the internet, each of us now has at our fingertips more information than Aldo Leopold could have ever imagined. One need not live alone.

Though my visits to the Truckee are rarer now, they still fill me with wonder. The rich blue of the deep pools, the grace of water as it slides over boulders, the pull of the current coaxing my body downstream—phenomena that can be explained in a scientific sense—evoke a mystery that no amount of scrutiny can dissolve. When I swim in that clear, cold water, I am still a little boy. And yet the river is more to me now than it once was, layered over with learning and meaning. It has become a reminder to look for what is not easily seen, and to accept whatever I find. I love the river more than ever.

***

Nicholas Crane Moore is a writer and public interest environmental attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. His writing on the environment has appeared in Edge Effects magazine, the Revelator, Environs, the Daily Journal, and the Daily Californian.

High Water

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?

***
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.

Sketches of China 03: River Scene, Qinhuai by Night

Illustration: Mark Doyle

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

The mother river, the artery around which the city’s historic heart once grew, its banks now thronging with crowds, an ancient temple from another time – all but forgotten – standing behind them, the reflections of a neon dragon shimmering on the murky olive waters, couples and families pausing for photographs on the bridge, feigning indifference to the smell of putrid waste hanging in the air, stopping to watch the pleasure boats as they pass below, all lit up in yellows and reds, swallowed by the darkness of an arch from which bats emerge, their wings tracing flights of Brownian motion in the night, crossing the bridge and turning off on the other side, off down a street lined with gift shops, running the gauntlet, avoiding eye contact and playing deaf to the hawkers’ cries as they echo off the walls, finding a moment’s respite from the humidity in the chill gust emerging from a department store before being enveloped again by the muggy air, leaving the water to drip steadily from the air conditioning unit as miles away a chimney belches out coal smoke, turning off down an alley leading to the metro, the street lined with counterfeit goods, the sound of raised voices, a slap ringing out in the night, descending the stairs, the dry click of the carriage doors, sterile, modern, and a lingering question as the train pulls away: the mother river, what will her children become?

***

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.

Beside and beneath the water, Hamburg

By Paul Scraton:

We walk through the Speicherstadt between red-brick warehouses, home to trading companies dealing in carpets and tea, as well as record labels, new media start-ups and advertising agencies. We are not alone. On the bridge a tour guide tells his group the story of this port city, and the outdoor cafes by the bridge linking the warehouse district with the city centre are packed with every table taken. In Berlin the return of visitors has been slow, and it appears they have all come to Hamburg. 

Socially distanced queues lead up to the entrance of the Elbphilharmonie… no concerts today but tours and visits to the terrace with its views of the Elbe and across to the cranes and ships of the port. On the raised promenade beside the elevated Baumwall U-Bahn station, hundreds of people move back and forth, in search of the perfect photograph of the new concert hall or perhaps a late morning fischbrötchen and an early glass of Astra beer. At the St Pauli Landungsbrücken the piers are also busy, as people move between ferries and trains, take their seat at a restaurant with a river view or find their land legs after disembarking from a harbour cruise. 

We escape the crowds by going underground, taking the stairs until we reach the bottom of an eighty foot high entrance hall. Somehow we missed the entrance to the lifts, manned by guards in facemasks, bringing the cyclists and pedestrians down to the start of the old Elbtunnel. No cars are allowed down here right now, as renovations continue, and there are not so many of us making the crossing to Steinwerder on foot or bike. It is cool and calm in the tunnel beneath the river, although hard to imagine that giant ocean-going vehicle transporter, bound for Morocco, that would have passed over our heads had we been down here just a few hours before.

At Steinwerder we take the lift back up to the surface, wandering around the building to a lookout point with its kiosk selling fish rolls and an ice cream van. People use the tunnel to go to work or get home, but on this Monday in July it felt like most had made the crossing for no other reason than its novelty value, to look at the city from across the water. And, perhaps, in these strange, distanced times, to get away from the crowds above. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Memories of Elsewhere: River Ogmore, by Tim Cooke

Photo: Dan Wood

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Tim Cooke:

If I try to think of my hometown objectively, images spring to mind one after another like a series of postcards. I see the old stone bridge, from which the town takes its name; I see the derelict bingo hall, a husk that was once a cinema, now a car park; I see the estate, much maligned but not so long ago an architectural vision of hope; I see the playing fields, the site of my worst childhood nightmares; and the dunes, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I see the castle, the woods, the supermarket, the dual-carriageway, the standing stones, and the recreation centre. 

Of course, I cannot think of these places without making connections, fitting them together and applying my own stories and others I’ve encountered; experience flows through each scene, as does the River Ogmore. 

The water rises at Craig Ogwr, in the Ogmore Valley, and runs down through Blackmill, Brynmenyn, Aberkenfig, Wildmill, Bridgend Town, Merthyr Mawr, Ogmore by Sea, and out into the Bristol Channel – I love the sounds these places make. There are parts I know intimately – from childhood and my teenage years – and those I’ve visited once or twice, like on school trips. There are huge sections I’ve not been anywhere near, which I find somehow exhilarating. The more I think about the river, the more I contemplate journeys I might make in the future, or should have made in the past, when I was there. 

My first experience of the river – in terms of place, not time (it runs from north to south and I track it geographically) – takes me all the way back to its starting point, up in the valley. At primary school, we spent a whole term on local waterways. We studied maps and diagrams, drew pictures and trekked out into the field. I recall a coach journey to the source, near Nant-y-moel, eating sweets and crisps and feeling sick. We stopped at a bend in the road, flanked by scarp and crag. Water poured from the mountaintop and slid away to our left, worksheets killing the mood. I did something wrong and was made to stand metres apart, listening alone to the babble and the noise of rolling pebbles.

*

I’m looking at a gallery online and the first image in the sequence is of that exact same spot. The grass is greener than I remember it, and the water is whiter. My first impression is that the photograph speaks more clearly of Wales than my recollections do. Maybe it’s in the detail, like the damp weather, or the colour of the soil – I’m not so sure. I move on. Next is a woman dressed in a dark-green coat, speckled with rain. Her expression is one of awe and wonder, or perhaps she’s been caught mid-sentence by the camera. Regardless, she’s part of the story now. 

I continue through pictures of two men on a bridge, a Welsh-flag towel pinned to a washing line, rows of almost identical flats, a war grave, a post-it note scribbled with ‘Donald Trump’, a swastika carved into a tree, and a schoolboy leaning on a wall with his arm in a pink cast, names signed in black pen. There’s a car, too, parked between lockups, a convertible BMW I think, that appears to have been pulled from the flow, the white paint covered in what looks like algae – a modern sort of river monster. It makes me think of the team of volunteers who dragged two-hundred tyres, five trollies, umpteen traffic cones and wheelbarrows, a large gas canister and a road barrier from the river one Saturday, plus fifty bags of smaller items – detritus dumped in the drift.

I keep going and, minutes later, stop to linger in a car park overlooking the bus station on the opposite side. The sun is about to disappear behind the hills in the distance. I walked not far from here, once, with the photographer, making a film about creativity in Bridgend; it was my response to the international press coverage of the spate of suicides that dubbed it ‘The Suicide Town’. As a child, I spent successive afternoons smoking cigarettes underneath a bridge just down from here, then hopped along a series of concrete platforms jutting out from the artificial banks. I have countless similar memories – I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one. 

*

Back in 1999, this stretch of river was central to a high-profile police investigation, into the murder of a young woman, who enjoyed writing songs and poetry. It was said there was no forensic evidence available, as the fast-flowing water had washed it away, but a hammer was discovered in a clump of trees a hundred yards from the cash and carry. Mud found in the boot of a car was thought to match that of the riverbank. 

*

I follow the river’s course through town, below the subway where, at fifteen, I spent a freezing cold night in a sleeping bag, and along the dirt track I’d take home after too many pints in the pub. I pass the recreation centre, where I played five-aside football and hung out with my first proper girlfriend. I can still smell the chlorine leaking from the vents that warmed our backs on winter evenings. There are no photos of these locations; in their place are images of redbrick housing, a man I vaguely know and a pile of chopped wood below broken glass – all effective in their way. I stop to linger on the sand at the bend in the river, referred to locally as just that, where I caught countless eels and my brother a sewin that tasted like shit. I lost a salmon once, I swear; that flash of iridescent silver.  

Across the rugby pitch, beyond the standing stones, I can see the steps. I was sixteen or so when three hooded figures asked for a fight. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice, as he paced back and forth. We ran and they chased us along the path by the playground, shrieking: Let’s drown them in the river. I was terrified, but they gave up pretty soon. That was the year I started bunking off school, spending hours in the strip of woodland that slopes down to the water’s edge. To get there you had to cross the huge metal pipe like a bridge, a post-apocalyptic leviathan, coated in graffiti and rust. I read a while back that a medieval pilgrimage route cut through this landscape. 

When I was twelve, my older brother and some friends made a raft out of tyres, which they strapped together with rolls of duct tape. I was the only one light enough not to sink and so sailed alone. I was basking in the glory of it, enjoying the scenery, until one of the boys began to hurl rocks from a thin bay of shingle. He had a crazed look in his eye. Dodging the missiles, I pleaded with him to stop. It was only when one struck my knee that I was given the time to disembark and sprint home.

*

One of the last pictures in the sequence is of a repeated curve not far from the estuary. The clouds are low above the ridge, and the river is a murky grey. There are thousands of shades of green and plenty of textures to explore. I see myself in a blue raincoat skimming stones, or trudging along the sand with friends after a beach party in the middle of the night. I’m jogging at the foot of the dunes. I twist my ankle and have to walk miles back to the car.

I’ve written about this place before, in a work of weird fiction based on real events. A child is fishing with his father. He’s being taught to hook ragworm, but is disturbed by their form, the writhe and slither. Shivering, he picks the least obscene specimen he can find from the parcel of paper, wrapped like a bag of chips, and holds it out in front of him, watching it curl around his thumb, turning itself inside out. Following his father’s instructions, he pinches it taut and presses the steel tip down until the skin punctures, or pops. At this point, the creature screams. The boy looks up to see a woman thrashing in the mist on the banking opposite. She’s a version of Jenny Greenteeth, or Wicked Jenny, a river hag from folktales who drags children to their deaths.

There’s a girl crouching on the shore, replaced in the following image by a large splash. There’s a coach parked by a bench on the cliff, and a person stares out to sea.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

Dan Wood is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Bridgend. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has featured in a wide range of publications. His books Suicide Machine and Gap in the Hedge are available with Another Place Press. He is currently working on a new book about the River Ogmore and was kind enough to share his current edit for this piece.

Nowhere else to go

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. 

***

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.

The Great Ruins of Love Lane

Image: David Lewis

By David Lewis:

Cities are in a permanent process of evolution, fast or slow, and districts within a city change at different speeds, depending on investment, need, attitude.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Liverpool, which is no longer the crumbling monochrome city of the early Beatles photographs, but a modern holiday and conference destination.  Confidence roared through the city again from the late 1980s, building luxury hotels and celebrity-chef restaurants, revamping museums, opening new visitor attractions and developing the huge Liverpool One shopping development complex, a shopping mall in the heart of the city. 

A slower, more varied pace of change can be seen in the 1840s docklands north of the city centre, which have evolved since 1945 through bomb damage, obsolescence and redundancy.  This has left a bruised landscape of old warehouses and railway yards, closed pubs and overgrown vacant lots.  There is silence here, and sunlight, and huge empty skies.  The Mersey is never far away.

It is precisely this neglect that makes the docklands vulnerable to development.  Slowly, with altered attitudes, the pace of change is quickening and the confidence is spreading northwards.  New uses have been found for giant survivors; Jesse Hartley’s Stanley Dock buildings have become the Titanic Hotel, and the hulking Tobacco Warehouse next door, once the largest brick building in the world, is being converted into urban apartments.  

Image: David Lewis

I walk these streets now with a new sense of urgency.  Blackstone Street, Cotton Street, Saltney Street, Dublin Street - I am at home here, clearing street dust to discover cobble or street railway, granite kerb, a softness of old sandstone.  These ground-level Victorian ruins add colour – rusts and steel blue-greys – to the streets.  Old Liverpool is a city of brick, and walls snake through the old districts; ubiquitous and invisible, shiny red or gleaming hard blue-grey; heavily sooted, organic, hand-made.  On the oldest warehouses the brick folds into narrow doorways and narrow barred windows capped with sandstone or rusted iron.  The bricks and mortar have flaked away after 170 years of river weather, but these structures add fluidity and definition to the city and warm colour – chalky reds, dark blues – to the streets.  Each brick was hand-laid decades ago, on bright days or damp days, sooted with river fogs and steam-smuts or laid in warm sunshine as the city roared north along the river; brick by brick, wall by wall, street by street.

This hinterland is full of oddity and unexpected glories.  Gateposts, fragments of walls, arches in stone or brick, monolithic survivors like ruined sandcastles left behind by the tide.  Some have found new uses and stand, silent and dominant, in new fences, new boundaries.  There are also ghost places, vacant lots full of buddleia and butterflies which once housed large railway yards or churches, their histories forgotten.  Nothing survives of the Martyrs’ Church, St. Augustine’s on Chadwick Street; nothing survives of the giant goods stations of Waterloo, Great Howard Street, or Canada Dock, apart from stumped walls and fragments of story. 

Ruins can be invisible here.  Love Lane lies beyond the huge railway arches carrying commuter trains up the coast, and is connected to whole streets of redundancy, truly empty places, scenes for a car chase or a clandestine meeting, film sets for unmade films.  Sprainger Street, Little Howard Street, streets of walls and graffiti, windows and doors bricked up, more buddleia and more grasses, silence, a beautiful decay.  Nobody seems to be here. The air smells of rotting rubbish, vegetation and illegally-dumped engine oil.  At night the few streetlights illuminate the darkness rather than dispel it, sending a weak light spilling across the cobbles to create great polygonal slabs of velvet darkness.  These lost streets are dominated by the amputated, hacked remains of another railway viaduct, overgrown and crumbling, a lost route to the lost station of Liverpool Exchange.  The bricklayers’ art has created great swirls of brick, smooth and close-fitting like dragon scales or armour.  These arches are muscular, seeming to crouch, tense and full of unexpressed energy.  They have the deep calm of gigantic Roman ruins, solid and seemingly permanent. 

Image: David Lewis

And yet these old walls, these folds of brick and obsolete arches, are increasingly vulnerable.  A grandiose, long-term plan called Liverpool Waters is promising apartment blocks, and open squares of bars, restaurants and shops along the waterfront.  Everton Football Club have confirmed a £300m move from Goodison Park to the Bramley-Moore Dock.  At ground level, the Ten Streets project will deliver new work/living spaces, renovated buildings, more public space. 

I believe that cities need dark streets and grey areas, places of awkward, disjointed history and ambivalence.  Cities need to regenerate periodically, but they also need the old, the quiet, the derelict, a sense of faded history.  Is it not possible to have rough edges to our cities, dark corners, un-developments?  We should be able to discover something of our cities for ourselves; not everything should be signposted.  Perhaps these old streets are where the city has most potential, perhaps these scraps of buildings and stumps of walls remind us that all things are possible within a city; perhaps without decay there can be no sense of potential, and ultimately no regeneration.  Our ruins should be left to their decay. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

In the village there is a river

IMAGE: Martin A. Smith

By Martin A. Smith:

In the village there is a river.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that along the edge of the river there is a village.

It is not a big river, or a grand river. It is a small river, alive with trout, which slowly, gently makes its way down from the hills and the mountains, skirts the four ruined castles that give this place its name and passes through to the world beyond.

As it approaches the village it first passes a couple of houses, both with chickens running around the garden, then a ruined factory full of broken windows and rusting machinery. This was a textile producing area and every town or village on a river had a mill. When the industry became too expensive the mills and factories were shut down and left to decay. Now all towns and villages with a river have a ruined factory.

A part of the factory in this village though has been turned into a visitor centre for the castles, another part into a restaurant that has a Michelin star, luxury out of decay.

The river continues past the restaurant, the town hall, the bakery (open every day except Tuesdays) and the post office (open Tuesday afternoons and usually runs out of stamps)

The post office used to be a night club and, rumour has it, a brothel.

The river runs past the car park and away.

It is a large car park for a small village. It is used by the tourists visiting the ruined chateaux on the top of the hill and is the site of the old station.

A village this size wouldn’t normally justify a station, let alone a nightclub, or indeed a brothel. But they were not for the village; they were for the goldmine further up the mountain.

But the mine didn’t last long, the station closed, the nightclub became a post office and the village returned to being a small quiet village with a large car park for the tourists.

Along the river’s edge running adjacent to the car park there are large sloping walls. Flood defences built with granite and concrete and cement. The gentle river seems trapped at this point, encased between the mountain on one side and these defences on the other. They seem incongruous, ugly, unnecessary.

I do not know if they were they built to protect and support the railway line, or built later as part of the car park. But I know that they are unforgiving and I wondered why they were built so.

Then it rained and we watched as the water rise.

And suddenly the walls looked small and insufficient. People ran to remove their cars and protect their homes from the onslaught.

It was only for two or three days but the rain was relentless, obliterating the view across the valley, shrinking the world to a few feet in front of the window.

Swept down from the mountains by the crying winds the rain and the river it fed brought whole trees past our doors, broke the banks upstream and some villages were evacuated.

But the walls were enough. The river was contained and the rain eventually stopped.

The water started to subside and the village could relax, this battle with the elements was over. The locals met and discussed the water, how many leaks their homes had, the after effects of the flooding, all thankful their homes remained intact. Because for a time it was not certain.

In the village there is a river, and there is still a river and there is still a village and the walls that seemed incongruous, ugly, unnecessary kept us safe.

Martin A. Smith is an artist and composer whose work is concerned with the emotional response to the nature of place, memory and environment.

This piece is part of a gently ongoing project to discover the story of a small village in France.