Postcard from... the Concrete Footpath

It is like one of those riddles that begin something like this... There is a dead man, lying in the middle of the desert. Between his fingers is a broken match. What happened here?

On the concrete path, in the marshy, semi-cultivated edgeland, I come across this scene. Two pairs of wellington boots and a disassembled rake. No sign of the boot wearers, or indeed the owner of the rake. It was a moment to stir the imagination as I paused on the path and the question to the riddle came quickly to mind. 

What happened here?

Postcard from... Lake Mungo

By Nick Gadd:

The most immediately striking aspect of Lake Mungo is the dunes. At the eastern edge, on a crescent-shaped fringe of sand and clay called a ‘lunette’, extraordinary natural sculptures appear, carved by the wind and weather. Once they were covered with vegetation, but after European settlement sheep and rabbits quickly disposed of much of it, and these days only a few trees and bushes remain, clinging photogenically to dunes that resemble scenes from a fantasy landscape. 

There’s no visible water.  Before the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, this was part of a huge network of fertile lakes and rivers in the south-west corner of what is now New South Wales. Today it is a vast dry bowl, vegetated mainly by saltbush and criss-crossed by kangaroos, though Aboriginal oral history tells us that the lake filled again within the last few thousand years.

If that was all there was to Lake Mungo, it would be remarkable enough. But the really astonishing discoveries are below the surface. The wind is blowing the dunes eastward at a rate of three metres a year. As they move, the sands are giving up their secrets, including human skeletons, tens of thousands of years old.  

It was here, in 1969, that archaeologist Jim Bowler discovered the bones of ‘Mungo Lady’, followed a few years later by ‘Mungo Man’, the oldest human remains found in Australia. Both these bodies showed signs of sophisticated burial and cremation practices, pointing to at least 40,000 years of unbroken human occupation and culture at Mungo. Since then there have been many more discoveries: bodies, fireplaces, axes, mussel shells, the skeletons of megafauna – even, poignantly, a set of footprints, 20,000 years old, baked into the soft clay by a group of running men, walking women, and a wandering child. 

Walking across the dunes today, we leave our own footprints, the indentations of our boots intersecting with the tracks of a kangaroo that passed through a few hours ago. It inevitably leads us to wonder how many more ancient ancestors lie beneath our feet, and what might remain of the destructive culture of the West in 40,000 years.

You can read more from Nick on his website Melbourne Circle: Stories from the Suburbs and follow him on Twitter. Nick was a contributor to Elsewhere No.02 where he wrote an essay on the ghost signs of Melbourne.

Postcard from... A Rest Camp, 1918

By: JP Robinson

Feb 22 Friday
Dear loving wife just a short line to let you know… just… hoping you are… we are on our way to our destination. We are also at a rest camp and the weather is fine. … another long journey … we will … as soon as possible … your loving husband X X X This is the camp X X X

Most of the text on the postcard that James, my great-grandfather, sent to Lucy, my great-grandmother, is faded now, but the address and the censor’s counter-signature are still clear. Although he had no Scottish heritage, he was a private in the Liverpool Scottish, and he wore his battalion kilt as he wrote, from Le Preol, in northern France. There wasn’t much at Le Preol, aside from the well-established rest camp, with the corrugated iron buildings pictured on the postcard. Another Liverpool Scottish man remembered “a pretty little village set in low-lying wooded country close to the Aire-La Bassee Canal”, which “showed none of those jagged stumps of shell-riven trees that betoken counter-battery work”. The men didn’t stay for long. James wrote the card on a Friday, knowing they were leaving soon. On the Monday, they walked the two miles to the trenches, just as they had at the Somme and Ypres. 

There were vast craters at the front line, around the ruined villages of Givenchy and Festubert. One crater, known as Red Dragon, was one hundred yards long and fifty feet deep. A soldier who relieved the Liverpool Scottish recalled that, as he arrived, “dead men lay about”. There were “bloated trench rats”, he said, and scared soldiers in need of rum. The communication trench “was sickeningly yielding underfoot with the bodies of the buried men. Here and there a leg or an arm protruded from the trench side”. 

James’s life had been haunted by death. He was born in 1882, and was named after his six year old brother, who had died the year earlier. The family lived at 75 Cemetery Road, in Southport, Lancashire. Apart from his time in France, he lived all of his life within a hundred yards of the cemetery. There was a monument there, built when James was six, for the twenty seven men who’d died in the Great Lifeboat Disaster. Two of the dead were James’s cousins, who lived around the corner, on Boundary Street. 

Following the disaster, James’s grandfather took over as coxswain of the new lifeboat. There was a second, less famous, lifeboat disaster ten years later; James’s grandfather, his father and an uncle drowned when they were working on the lifeboat moorings off the pier. James’s mother died sixteen months later, when he was eighteen. They were living at 28 Warwick Street then, perpendicular to Cemetery Road. James became a market porter, and then drove a bread van, before going to war. He was the first man in his family not to make his living on the fishing boats.

When he married Lucy, after a short stay at Matlock Road, parallel to Cemetery Road, they moved back to Warwick Street, to a two-bedroom end terrace at number 5. They had two children: Eliza, named for James’ mother, and James, my grandfather, born the year before war was declared. They could see the tower of the cemetery chapel from their back bedroom window. Lucy would have first read the postcard from Le Preol in their dark front room. 

Lucy kept the postcard safe, of course. When she died, in 1979, thirty years after her husband, the children gathered the few pictures she’d had of him, the postcard, and James’ burial record. She’d been living in the nursing home that my grandmother ran, on the far side of the cemetery. One photograph had James in middle-age, standing proudly with his crown green bowling trophies in the back yard. Another had them both in front of their small bay window at Warwick Street. One, from the thirties, had them laughing as my grandfather acted up for the camera. There were two from a day out to Chester, with James in a smart suit. There were two others of him, from the war, in his Liverpool Scottish kilt. He posed formally in one, stiff-backed. In the other, he was with some friends beside a wooden hut, in the mud, smiling.

James had died in 1949, after his son had returned from fighting in Egypt in the Second World War. He was sixty seven, and had overdosed on barbiturates. Some in the family thought it was suicide. He was buried under a low headstone, in the cemetery behind his home, close to the lifeboat monument and the graves of the ninety seven men who had died in the Great War.

Postcard from... Jinja, Uganda

By Tim Woods:

For one of the country’s leading tourist sites, it’s a little unremarkable … a few gentle ripples in the middle an otherwise benign river. But this is not a place to gawp at nature’s splendour, rather somewhere to say you’ve been: this is the source of the Nile, where Lake Victoria becomes one of the world’s great rivers. This water will, perhaps, spill out into the Mediterranean, 6,500 km away. 
    
A wooden boat takes us from the western bank, near the town of Jinja, out to a small wooden sign that marks the ‘official’ start of the river. But first, we meander via the eastern shore, our guide perhaps trying to draw out the trip a little and give us our money’s worth. Fishermen paddle over and offer freshly caught tilapia for sale; egrets and cormorants swoop noisily overhead. There’s even a souvenir stall built on a wooden raft in the middle of the river – something you don’t see everywhere.

Our visit continues with a leisurely beer back on the shore, admiring the views – and with Uganda’s famously lush greenery framing this proud giant, it’s one to linger over – before returning to the main road back to Kampala and the bridge over the Nile.

And it’s near this bridge that the most interesting detail lies. An innocent-looking hut, located next to the dam on which the bridge is built, measures daily the water flowing through. But it’s not owned by Ugandans, rather by Egyptians – and, according to our guide, they have similar offices in every country that shares what they very much consider to be their river, checking that none of their upstream neighbours extracts more than (what Egypt considers is) their share. 

At present, Uganda is playing by the rules and everything is friendly. Who knows if that will change as climate change bites harder in East Africa in the coming years. But the reminder is there: those ripples that mark the beginning of the Nile are being counted, each and every one.

Postcard from... the A65

Words: JP Robinson

Not far from where I live, opposite a builders’ merchant and a private day nursery on the A65, there is a two-foot tall, cut and dressed gritstone prism, next to the front garden wall of a terraced house. On its triangular top, there are three carved, circular cups, each just a few inches across. The prism occupies two thirds of a narrow pavement, and it enjoys special protection as a prehistoric scheduled monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. Although it is sometimes known as a milestone or waymarker, very little is known about it, and there is no plaque or signage. Drivers rarely notice it and, without breaking conversation, young families wheel their pushchairs on to the road to get past, on their way to the Tesco Express or Costa or play centre over the level crossing nearby. 

Monuments like this are odd, of course, but surprisingly commonplace. There are over 10,000 prehistoric scheduled monuments in England: barrows and tumuli, stone circles, ancient pathways and carved stones. This compares to around 1300 A roads: multi-lane highways, suburban shopping streets, irregular cross-country routes and modern access roads for out of town industrial complexes. Numerically at least, a prehistoric monument is about seven and a half times more common than an A road. 

The A65, which runs next to the prism, starts in Leeds and tracks the river, the canal and the railway, north and west out of the city. It passes industrial units at first, and back to backs, and the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey. At one time, it ran directly through the abbey nave, but it now just separates the main abbey buildings from their gatehouse. There is a stone in the grounds, carved with prehistoric cups and grooves. As the road leaves the city, it passes more cup stone carvings, high on a famous outcrop near Ilkley, and the earthworks and Round Dikes on the moor. The road continues, skirting the Dales and the Moors, past a circular enclosure, into Lancashire and, officially, the A65 ends as it crosses the M6, sixty five miles from Leeds. 

On a map, A roads suggest something - cutting from town to city, circling larger settlements - but there appears to be little order, without their numbers. The numbers form spiralling, concentric, circular patterns, similar to the carved prehistoric markings, or the alignments of stones and mounds and ditches. Although many of the roads are ancient themselves, the numbering system was designed in the mid-fifties, and has been added to since. Developing on a system that had been used since before the First World War, a committee of men at the Ministry of Transport divided England and Wales into six sections, and Scotland into three. They numbered the English and Welsh sections clockwise, centred on London. The eight single-digit A roads formed the boundaries to the sections, and the names of the zones came from the road on its highest numbered border. Zone 6, the largest section, is bordered by the A6 in the west, and the A1 in the east, and extends from London to the Scotland.

In each zone, the double-digit roads were then numbered sequentially, and clockwise: the A60 is the first double-digit A road clockwise from the A6, the A61 is the next. If a road crosses into another zone, its number comes from the furthest anti-clockwise zone it enters. The triple and quadruple digit roads, and the B roads, were numbered next, according to their distance from London, rippling out from the capital. The spokes of the single and double-digit roads are patterned with radiating triple and quadruple digit numbers. Originally, the double-digit roads were more significant than the triple and quadruple digits, though the plan has been eroded gradually, as roads have been rebuilt or repurposed. 

The numbering system creates an obscure pattern, either too large in scale or too humdrum to make out easily. Like many large, humdrum things, and like the prehistoric monuments that the roads pass, the pattern reveals something ineffable about the society that created it, this society that numbers the streets where its children walk, making unnecessary patterns across the land, orbiting its larger settlements, a society that affords special status to certain roads and certain stones, carved for long forgotten reasons.

Postcard from... Białowieża

By Daniel Greenwood:

Białowieża is somewhere I have wanted to visit for several years after reading about it and hearing from friends (especially Poles) who had been there. It is described as Europe’s last remnant of primeval woodland (12-10,000 years old), a slight exaggeration recycled on social media and subsequently in news items. The Czech Republic has numerous stands of ‘virgin’ forest or woodland though not on the scale of Białowieża, which is probably the largest remaining tract of ancient European woodland due to the 5,000 hectare strict reserve which is said never to have been logged. But it is not the largest woodland in Europe, that accolade belongs to the Bavarian and Bohemian Forest complex on the border with the Czech Republic and Germany.

We went to Białowieża at a time when the Polish government were rubber-stamping plans to increase forestry activity in the National Park and outlying woods, resulting in much opposition from environmentalists in the west and large demonstrations in Poland. The premise for increasing logging is to combat the spread of spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) which is currently impacting on Norway spruce trees (Picea abies) in the National Park. Those opposed to the plans argue that this is a natural process and that the beetle is a key species, a ‘forest engineer’. I agree, having seen the same impact in the Bavarian Forest National Park where some intervention does take place. I would argue that the impact of 20th century forestry practice has led to a proliferation of Norway spruce where there should be a more ‘natural’ balance of other species.

Białowieża National Park has key designations to protect its natural heritage. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve. The National Park was established in 1921 to offer protection to the herds of wild bison (Bison bisonus). Today Białowieża National Park is crucial because it has much of its original large fauna which can help ‘manage’ the landscape without any need for human intervention, i.e. logging. One theory of virgin woodland, established by Franz Vera in 1996, is that the dominant idea of endless trees covering northern Europe before humans arrived (we’ve been in Europe for over 40,000 years) is a myth. In fact wind blew holes in the wildwood and these glades were kept open by large grazing animals like elk, bison, deer and aurochs, meaning that the landscape was more like savannah or wood pasture – grassland dotted with trees. Vera argued that it was the human-enforced reduction and extinction of many of these large herbivores that led to the more dense woodland of the recent imagination. It also meant the larger clearings became towns and villages, settlements which were once established next to woodland (this is what ‘ley’ or ‘hurst’ means at the end of English place names). In Białowieża human intervention is evident in the landscape and has been for over 600 years.

Postcard from... the Marginal Way

It is barely two kilometres long, this path along the low cliffs and shoreline in Ogunquit on the Maine coast, and yet the Marginal Way is so popular, has become so many people’s “favourite spot”, that the local authorities have had to limit the number of memorial benches erected above the bayberry bushes, the rocky outcrops and the surf. In summertime it must be a procession, a stream of slowly moving sandals and shorts from the beach to the harbour at Perkin’s Cove and back again, but over Easter weekend it still feels decidedly off season. Many of the hotels and guesthouses remain shuttered and closed, and the wide expanse of Ogunquit beach was empty this morning save for a couple of hardy strollers and some cold-resistant surfers clad in black wetsuits from head to toe. 

Up on the path our fellow walkers are enjoying the early spring sunshine, but the dresscode is decidedly more Gore-Tex than Gap beachwear, as the wind blows in off the ocean and the swell breaks on the rocks down beneath where we walk. The houses whose gardens run down to the path and the edge of the cliffs are grand, picturesque piles that must have cost piles, and there is a pleasure in knowing these views out across the Atlantic cannot be completely bought and are available to all via the Marginal Way. 

We pause on a memorial bench – one that got past the waiting list currently pushing 100 – and then press on to Perkin’s Cove. There is some signs of life here. Shops selling overpriced, nautical souvenirs are open, as are the galleries of average but well-positioned local artists. Lobster rolls cost 20 dollars, but on the quay car parking spaces are still reserved for local fishermen and the small print of the menu tells us the shellfish in the roll was brought ashore by the owner himself. In a month or so we could catch the trolley train home, but it remains locked away in its whitewashed, clapboard garage, so we head back the way we came, along the Marginal Way, hugging the Atlantic shore.

The latest edition of Elsewhere is out now. You can order Elsewhere No.03 for €12 including worldwide shipping via our online shop.

Postcard from... Parkgate

By Paul Scraton:

On the promenade we squeezed past our fellow strollers as we made our way down between the row of parked cars and the sea wall towards the famous ice cream shop. Outside the chippy lads poked at polystyrene trays with wooden forks and through the window of the tea room it was possible to imagine the sound of a tiny spoon landing on china. It was a typical scene at a genteel seaside village, with a view out across the water to the Welsh coast and a hint of the mountains in the clouds beyond. But Parkgate is a little bit different, as seaside villages go, because – despite the fish and chips and the ice cream, and the call of the gulls circling in search of scraps – when you look out from the promenade it is not across an expanse of golden sands, but of waving grass and glassy ponds.

From the 18th century until the 1920s, Parkgate was a popular port – for travellers aiming for Ireland – and seaside resort. Photographs in the ice cream shop showed bathers stepping down from the promenade and onto the sands. But change was coming. As the River Dee silted up, Parkgate became unusable as a port and then, with the spread of colonising grass, the beach became overgrown, gradually transforming into the expanse of marshland between the river and dry land that is what visitors look out across today. Still, the seaside strollers in search of ice cream and chips still make their way to Parkgate, joined by the birdwatchers who come to catch a glimpse of the species that live or pass through the Dee Estuary Nature Reserve.

We stood in a queue for our cones of vanilla or mint choc chip, and then crossed back over the street to the place where passengers were once ferried out to deeper water for the boat to Ireland. Whatever future changes will come to Parkgate, you somehow get the feeling that the ice cream will remain.

Elsewhere No.03, featuring great writing on place, illustration, photography and reviews, is out now and available via our online shop.