Photo Essay: Fancy Hill, by Rob McDonald

by Rob McDonald:

Though I have lived here thirty years, I have never felt settled in Southwest Virginia. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but my home, where my sensibilities were formed, will always be the sandy coastal plains of South Carolina. Winding roads and deep-green hollows may appear picturesque in some light, but for someone like me, they mostly feel claustrophobic, isolating, unsettling. Whenever my wife, driving to the store in our first months living here, would round a curve and mistake a distant mountain range for a looming storm, I understood.

There’s one spot nearby that has always felt different, however. I noticed it when I visited for the job interview that brought me to the area in 1992, and I have indulged something close to an obsession with it ever since.  Fancy Hill, as it is known, is listed on the Register of Historic Places because of its inclusion in a group of important 19th-century farms known collectively the “Seven Hills of Rockbridge County.” A roadside marker noting its prominence focuses on the main house, a three-story treasure of 18th-century Federal architecture. But what I love is the field: a 21-acre parcel that rolls beautifully down from the house, then up and off toward a high horizon.

Records suggest the topography is virtually unchanged from when Fancy Hill was claimed, mapped, and cleared by Anglo settlers of the region more than two hundred years ago. In this otherwise craggy valley, it’s an especially open and stirring expanse.  From various points outside the post-and-wire boundary fence, the entire landscape is visible, swelling, stretching and dipping, displaying itself. It undulates, almost musically. I have studied it in different seasons and times of day. I believe I could sketch its contours with my eyes closed.  

One day, I looked up the name of the farm’s current owner and called to explain that I wanted to walk out into the field with my camera, to explore a place I’d thought about and imagined for so long. He was receptive, even understanding. He’d inherited the land and decided to protect it with a conservation easement so, unlike adjacent farms of similar beauty that have been subdivided into mini-estates for the new country gentry, it can never be developed. The whole parcel was leased for hay-making, keeping it arable, but I had permission to come and go as I wished.

With that opening, I spent whole mornings and afternoons traipsing up, down, and across Fancy Hill, making photographs in an attempt to represent the experience.  In the process, I learned some things that had been imperceptible from the periphery.

I found very quickly, for example, that the lay of the land at Fancy Hill is neither as gentle nor as comprehensible as it appears. There are demanding grades and dramatic drops. You walk a distance and grow breathless. There are spots where the rest of the world disappears and you’re upright in a cradle of earth, with only the sky for orientation.  

Also, the ground is surprisingly rocky, sheer stone in spots. The vegetation, a uniform and mesmerizing seasonal green or gold from the fence line, is often a frustrating tangle of grasses, weeds, and briars underfoot.  Walking unsettles all manner of flying, hopping, and crawling creatures, some seen, some heard and reasonably surmised. Droppings and tracks suggest regular visitors to a stream that originates in a cinderblock well-house, runs a bit, then disappears.

Another note:  There’s a stand of trees along the high north boundary that I’d not taken into account in all my years of looking from the fence. My eye had always stopped where the grasses end, but right there stands a broad thicket with impressive oaks that must have been seedlings when Fancy Hill was established.  

I discovered that the finest view of the property is under that tree line. Each peak and trough of the landscape is visible, where it originates and how it plays out.  Mirroring the view from below, the wide field appears to flow outward and down toward the enormous main house, which from that spot looks for all the world like a miniature version of itself.

The perspective is clarifying, like the view from a watch tower.

Fancy Hill, it turns out, is most beautiful in context of this whole place, encircled, defined, and clarified by a dark line running in the distance—not a storm, but the ancient rambling range of the Blue Ridge.

***

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. He was awarded a Professional Fellowship (Photography) from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and was a residential fellow in the Visual Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Find him online at robmcdonaldphotography.com. Connect with him on Twitter at @RobMcDonaldVA.

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.

Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65 

A Drift in Eden

Photography by Julian Hyde

By Mark Valentine:

It was an iron bench on a country road, a bit dilapidated but still staunch. We were glad to take our rest there. The design was pleasing in a minor, unassertive sort of way: the arm-ends that stretched out like paws, the legs that might have been modelled on the lithe limbs of a wild cat. The narrow slats of the seat were now mostly innocent of paint, but still firm. From a few last flecks and scrapes, it looked as if they might once have been coated in the pale blue of winter sunsets. The backrest had an ornamental escutcheon and a date which seemed to be in the 1950s, and there was a Festival of Britain or Coronation feel to it.   

Set at an angle to things, and on its own tussocky plot, it had no significant view. Immediately opposite was a little lane between hedges, leading nowhere in particular. Above was rising ground but to no great height. The road it was on turned slightly away at this point so there was no line of sight there. Leading away from the bench was a drive that had once led to a railway halt, long since closed, though you could still see the remains of the platforms and the tracks. Like a lot of rural halts, there was a certain distance between it and the nearest village, and so we supposed that there must once have been a bus, or a taxi service, and the bench had been put there for passengers. There was something about the spot that seemed unusually restful, as if the patience of all those lost travellers had somehow seeped into the scene itself. You could imagine them sitting here in their long coats and hats, with their newspapers and cigarettes, looking out on pretty much the view we now had.  

If you turn to the left from the little bench, you pass Little Salkeld watermill and cafe, still grinding corn for wholegrain bread, and then at a green you come to a meeting of ways, and on the black and white signpost one of the arms has some of the oddest words ever seen on any signpost, even though there are many quaint and picturesque place names in England. It reads: Druids Circle. This is Long Meg & Her Daughters, who are not after all Druids, but witches turned to stone, at least for the time being and while you are there. The tallest of these, Long Meg herself, is adorned with grains of lichen of ochre and scarlet and evergreen, like some fine embroidered cloak not made by mortal fingers, and at her foot there are often offerings. The stones cannot be counted, it is said, perhaps because they do not quite stay still. 

Suppose, though, that you do not follow the road to the Druids’ Circle, but turn instead the other way at the green. You go under the high arches of a railway bridge and then follow a track above the river Eden, you keep on through the trees, and you come to the overgrown ruins of an abandoned gypsum mine, Long Meg Drift. It operated between 1880 and 1976 (with a gap during WW1), employing between 12 and 30 people. There was a short works railway, pretty much where the footpath now runs, which connected to the famous Settle-Carlisle line. It had its own signal box (demolished a few years ago) and a few steam locomotives, one now at the Bowes Museum, Co Durham. As for the works itself, this has gone back to nature: there are brick footings, stone steps, platforms, caved-in sheds, all now covered with nettles and brambles, ash saplings and moss. 

In a corner though, quite unexpectedly, there is an electricity installation that buzzes and crackles behind its high spear-shaped grey palings, and with red lightning-flash signs warning of danger. You are taken aback: it seems like some secret race of engineers has landed here from a distant star and put this here for inscrutable purposes. About this place, one day, there was once a great flickering array of amber butterflies, rising and tumbling and pausing only to drink their nectar, and it seemed as if the secret rays from the hidden sub-station had quickened their exultant spirits. The fierce machines and these frail beings, like torn-off pieces of old silk tapestry, made a startling contrast that seemed uncanny, a glimpse of a world where they will go on, with their whirring and their dancing, but we will be gone. 

On the way to the works you might have missed something, on a verge not far from the lodge house at the entrance. Embedded in the wild grass there was a long ripple of glazed clay tablets, each about as big as a playing card, and all carefully plotted together as a mosaic. And if you looked closer you might make out painted houses, a bridge, a boat, a horse, a church, a train, because this is a picture-book map, in bright colours, in speedwell blue and primrose yellow and rose and parsley green. It was made over 20 years ago by the children of the four primary schools of the area, High Hesket, Armathwaite, Culgaith and Langwathby, in an arts project led by the ceramicist Michael Eden, and the map is of their local world. The place where you are now standing is the fulcrum of an X shape connecting the four villages, in a flourish of secular magic. 

The bricks they made and laid here are chipped and cracked now, and the grasses and dandelions grow between them, and the red mud begins to congeal across them. The last I heard, because of landslips and heavy rain, the mosaic did not look like it would still be there much longer: its colourful little world was sliding away.  

***
Mark Valentine is originally from the radical shoemaking town of Northampton but now lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. His short stories and essays are published by the independent presses Tartarus (UK), The Swan River Press (Ireland), Sarob (France) and Zagava (Germany). His writing on landscape and lore has appeared in Reliquiae, Echtrai and Northern Earth.

Nothing to see here

Illustration by Karen Joyce

By Jane Hughes:

Going back to Mum’s house after she died was always going to be traumatic. But nearly a month had passed. I’d had time to prepare for it. Looking at photos of Mum, sorting through her belongings, remembering old times, these all came with a mournful, aching sadness for something that was gone. It went through me in sickening, oily waves, but it was something you could get used to. What threw me utterly was not her empty house. Not her empty wheelchair. It was something unbearable about the landscape that I used to call home.

The day before the funeral, I took a taxi from the station, along narrowing roads on the edges of damp, stubbly fields, and I felt viscerally distressed by the place. But I couldn’t see what it was that was so hard to look at. In the months that followed, I found myself grasping for it. 

I scrolled through photographs of the area, trying to find whatever it was that kept making me cry. I’m continually struck by the emptiness of the place – is that it? The feeling that something used to be there, but has gone now? People and places from long ago whose stories have been lost. I’m here too late. Roman villas, iron age forts, the people who carved the White Horse on the chalk downs above my home town, the lively communities who planted the hedges and farmed the fields that no longer require labour - is that what makes me sad? That something I can’t understand was once there, but all I can see is the empty space where it was, and I’ll never get a connection? That would make sense. I try it on for size. No, it doesn’t make me cry.

The landscape is so featureless that it is hard to define, but I recognise it immediately, and the recognition feels physical. I tried to find a landmark to anchor a memory. Some local artists fixate on the White Horse, or return repeatedly to Wittenham Clumps as a subject, like the crazed man in Close Encounters sculpting an oddly-shaped hill out of mashed potato.

But I don’t think I ever went to Wittenham Clumps, why would we? Especially since Mum couldn’t walk far, and certainly not on rough ground. I realised that, as a family, we had never really explored on foot. Everything I had seen had been through a car window. Dad used to point out groups of trees on small hills on the horizon, and say ‘wittnum clumps!’. I thought that all small thickets on small hills surrounded by the more or less flat fields of the rest of the landscape were wittnum clumps. Recently, I sent Dad a photo of a painting that looked like a wittnum clump to me, and he replied wistfully that those were the days, when we still had Elm trees. I remembered Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s, and the big tree dying at the front of the house that Mum had named Elmwater. Dad didn’t know that the old trees at Wittenham Clumps were Beeches, not Elms – and so, why would I? 

I remember walking up to the White Horse with my Dad, mainly to show it to some Swiss visitors. There’s not much to see up there. I couldn’t not stand in the horse’s eye and make a wish, because I knew that every chance I got to make a wish, I should use towards trying to make Mum better, but the eye of the White Horse was a deep, milky puddle. My memory of the White Horse is of grabbing a private moment, when the Swiss and Dad were heading back down to the car park, to do something that would have looked idiotic if there had been anyone else up there to see it. 

(As I write, another memory that’s recent enough to be raw – of taking Mum out in the car so that she might be able to see the White Horse again, and not being able to find it at all, and then glimpsing it, but never being able to find a place where the car could go where Mum could see the horse, because by that time she couldn’t turn her head.)

I bought a map. It upset me. Despite having spent my whole childhood and adolescence in the Vale of the White Horse, I couldn’t find my way around it. I had no idea what was where. How could I call it my home? I felt embarrassed. And I couldn’t locate places of importance because, it turned out, I couldn’t think of any.

I bought some local history books. They upset me. Despite having (etc etc) I didn’t know most of the stories - or else, it turned out that what I thought I knew was all wrong. I knew that King Alfred burnt the cakes at Wantage, because my parents told me, but it turned out that they weren’t cakes, and that anyway, he didn’t. 

The more I looked, the more it seemed that there was no actual place for me to attach my grief to. I was not crying over my old school, or any of the houses where my family had once lived. I thought I was upset about the cherry orchards being grubbed up – could I cry about that? Not really. I had no right. I was one of those kids who grew up on the brand new housing estates and never gave a thought to whatever was there before them. In the middle of one of those estates, there was a nice patch of green where we had a party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and I ate a fish paste sandwich for the first time. I think that that patch of ground had some interesting bits of broken masonry on it, a sort of a ruin, and at the time I think I thought it was something to do with Abingdon Abbey. But it looks as if it might just have been an artful attempt to repurpose some of the more interesting lumps of rubble that came from demolishing an old children’s home. Once or twice I went with schoolfriends to the Abbey Meadows and hopped about on the ruins there, but they weren’t the ruins of the abbey either, just a Victorian folly. Everything I thought was wrong, and my memories are just loose rubbish blowing about like tumbleweed.

The place has changed. Is that the problem? Chagrin: I have to admit, the change that hurt me most was the brutal demolition of Didcot power station! I cried over that. But it’s not the sense of things changing that hurts me. It’s something about being disconnected, about not belonging there any more, and about not having anything to hold onto. My attachment seems to be to a landscape that is mostly empty. The pictures that feel most like home to me are the ones without landmarks. Pictures of empty fields. Nothing there, nothing at all. Just something so familiar about the shape, and the lines of the plough furrows. The feeling I get is of a landscape that doesn’t feel any need to connect with me. 

The last time I went to the place that used to be home, I felt lost and rejected. I recognise the place, but it doesn’t seem to recognise me. From now on, I’m just a visitor. I have no reason to go back there unless to visit a grave or two. 

August 1, 1978
Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

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Jane Hughes is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her work is currently focusing on bereavement, attachment to place, and life writing around loss. Her essay, ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, appears in Essays in Life Writing published by Routledge in 2021.

Illustration is by Karen Joyce and is used with permission. You can find Karen’s website here.

Vulcan Street (On the Docks with my Grandfather, Seventy Years Apart)

By David Lewis:

The road along the Liverpool docks used to flow with the loading and unloading of great cargoes, noisy with the constant bustle of wagons, horses, steam lorries and the trains that ran from the enormous goods stations to the docks.  The streets behind held pubs, churches, engineering companies, shipping offices, workshops, forges.  Over all hung a pall of soots and smokes from steam engines and roaring chimneys.  On weekdays at least it was never silent, never still.  

Today the docks are neglected and vulnerable.  The goods stations have been demolished, leaving weedy cobbled footprints and buried rails.  The Dock Road is a boundary between redundant docks and streets of crumbling, derelict warehouses, each one a poem, an essay in brick, soot and obsolescence.  There are small businesses here, music spaces and hipster cafes, green shoots growing up between the cracks; but this is largely a place of ruined beauty and lost purpose, of silted iron doorways, towering brick walls, silences.  I have been alone here many times, walking the wind through rust, the rain through windows, walking sunlight on stone; walking the iron whispers, the lost stations of the Overhead Railway.  To walk these old places is to remember, and walking the visual memories of the city is inevitably an act of commemoration.  

At the dust and ghosts of the Canada Dock Station I imagine my grandfather Vincent walking down the wide steps to the crowded noisy street one day in 1952.  He is 48, ten years younger than I am now.  He shifts his brown canvas tool bag from hand to hand and turns through the working, shouting bustle of the dock gates out onto the quayside.  He worked all his life with wood.  Out on the dock there is a hut to be repaired, or a fallen beam to be cut or moved, given a new purpose.  Or perhaps he walks up a gangplank to a broken door or smashed panelling, maybe there are salt-warped frames to be straightened as a ship is loaded.  I imagine a careful unpacking of clamps and gluepot, a canvas fold of nails and screws, valuable and counted against the day’s work.  Vincent never lost his appreciation of wood and in old age he would run his hands gently over unworked timbers, unconsciously, the woodworker’s caress.  His hands were like warm sandpaper.  

On the Dock Road this grey day I am walking the wind through broken glass, meandering through a clatter and a scattering of pigeons.  All day the road is silent.  In his day the noise is unrelenting as he stops for some bread and cheese, an apple, a hand-rolled cigarette. Seventy years apart I eat a sandwich on the stump of an oily wooden beam on Vulcan Street, opposite the lost dock church of St Matthias.  It is now a petrol station.  Street cobbles are disappearing beneath sandy dust and fleshy wildflowers.  His river city is fading beneath tyre graveyards and taxi-cab workshops, and yet the massive ruins have a smashed grandeur, a solid, precarious dignity.  My grandfather lives on in my heart, but only as a smile, a face, as the memory of laughter, this man dead these forty years; in the ghost signs of lost businesses on the cold miles of these streets – importers, chandlers, engineers - I catch a glimpse into his world.  

The light is failing, perhaps it is November.  The air is thick with grease and smuts, the streets busy with cargoes loaded and unloaded, slow heavy trains, patient horses and their wagons.  My city too is darkening, the light is closing these old streets down, and it is time to head back to the present day.  In 1952 the golden pubs are roaring but through sirens and endings Vincent turns for home. He carries his canvas bag up the wooden steps to the station platform and waits for the train, dreaming of potatoes, sausages, a steamed pudding. Turns for home as the ship, warped panels straightened, slips from the river on the evening tide.

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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  

The perks of being a suburban wallflower

Milton Keynes EKZ by Dr Ronald Kunze is licensed under CC BY 3.0

By David Stoker:

Milton Keynes, situated between London and Birmingham, is frequently a punchline of a town. MK, as locals call it, has the reputation for being a bit of an oddball - if not backwards exactly, merely parochial, where weird things happen through sheer boredom, like local newspaper headlines that occasionally go viral. Given the British custom of celebrating all that is shabby (a book entitled “Crap Towns” was a surprise hit in 2003, selling 120,000 copies) it earns a chuckle more than true derision. People who live in older towns or cities that grew more organically over time balk at it. Really? You built this - here? 

MK is famous for two things: roundabouts and concrete cows. Occasionally nausea-inducing to drive on, the 130 roundabouts punctuate the vertices of its grid squares, the town’s transport arteries designed with a ruler. Visiting “H6” may be less glamorous than New York’s “40th and 8,” but such is the power of movies to elevate mere digits. The cows: at first glance they seem to be a memento of an agricultural past, a lifesize version of the cheap fridge magnets you and I collect from a city break. Yet somehow the herd is celebrated: these hand-forged Fresians were long adopted as the unofficial town mascots. Amateurish yet undeniably cheerful, the cows express a kitsch naivety and as such have earned significant affection from locals.

Concrete Cows at CMK by Prioryman is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

My relationship to MK is like one has to a gawky high school photo of oneself - familiar, with a small grimace. Or perhaps the special blankness we reserve for people we have ghosted, or - morally and aesthetically - outgrown. Having spent some formative years there, I felt lucky to have got out. My memory is of what French philosopher Marc Augé has described as “non places”: corporate blandness of airport lobbies and drab, air-conditioned conference centres, devoid of character. I would joke that the town is a giant car park with shops and houses attached. But my mind was opened by Filmmaker Richard Macer’s recent BBC4 documentary Milton Keynes and Me, which showed the idealistic vision behind the project. Luxurious, quasi-socialist, grand meeting places were planned, open to all, flattening social hierarchies. So I got thinking about Milton Keynes and me - was it so terrible? How did it shape my character?

Britain’s newest town built from scratch was founded in 1967. But idealised urban planning has a long history: in the Renaissance, symmetrical, fortress-like, pentagonal cities were drafted, intended to represent the Platonic ideal of a city. Bauhaus pioneer Le Corbusier boldly described homes as ‘machines for living’ that he believed would eventually have a transformative effect on human behaviour. As their fame and reputation grew, Bauhaus visionaries were soon designing, if not whole cities, then large estates. Yet social problems soon emerged in these concrete palaces, from places like outer-Amsterdam estate De Biljmer; to Glasgow’s high-rises, and the housing ‘projects’ in the US. Many were torn down. One infamous block came down in only 20 years, such was the human misery its misguided design caused.

To ask whether MK’s design is equally misguided needs a caveat: it was softer from the start, more modest, less stark. MK, despite some brutalist centrepieces, didn’t go full modernist to its core - you might call it twee-modernist. From above, within each grid square, instead of a spray-painted, hatch grille of harsh hexagons, street designs look more like a doily dusted with icing sugar, relatively benign. No rows of communist-style blocks - though there are some foreboding low-rise 1970s estates - (round the corner from our house was a series of long, dark-chocolate-bricked, triangular prisms, twenty houses deep) - but from the 80s onwards house building was firmly conventional, even ‘checkbox’, what have been dismissively called ‘Noddy houses.’

And misery, what misery exactly? In controlled, over-regular environments, we feel penned in and our senses dulled. One of the psychological imperatives of humans is to make their mark on things. Notably, entire sprawling MK estates of detached houses shared a common floor plan and exterior. I sometimes imagined locals would need to count the number of turns they make left or right upon driving home, such was the difficulty of recognising one’s own house. A car aerial, one can put a brightly coloured ball on - not so easy to festoon a house for distinctiveness, at least outside of the festive season.

Suburbia has its pains for any teenager and I was no different: I wanted ‘scenes’, a ferment, the accidental, to feel legitimately part of something bigger. Brought together by daily coach-rides to my high school, my teen friendships were a constellation of satellites and in the evenings we socialised on MSN Messenger, discussing how to impress girls without many opportunities to try it out. My mates had sports - MK has the national badminton centre - and I had my books and music. I organised my collections as an antidote to life’s anxieties and meaninglessness, self medication. It was my spiritual way out. Weekends saw us at Centre MK: Europe’s longest shopping centre was our temple, our promenade, our place to go. It wasn’t much: MK could be described as a sad Los Angeles without its Vegas. But it was ours.

Milton Keynes Centre Queens Court by Cnyborg is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

There is a real eeriness to MK. If you visit, you will feel it. Away from the roads it is quiet - too quiet. Early settlers had a counsellor appointed by the development company to make sure they weren’t going loopy. It was just a couple of streets at first. Coming from my current London neighbourhood I sometimes feel like I’ve wandered onto the Truman Show, but with no-one watching. Connection suffers in towns built at the scale of the car - the distances were just too far to allow chemical reaction. A social coarseness can easily creep in like bindweed when people don’t mix enough, aren’t given proper meeting places. To create chemical reactions in an area too big without enough particles, you must add heat.

Is it too harsh to say that planned towns are doomed to make life boring and lonely? It feels like one priority, living space and affordable home ownership (it was originally designed to alleviate urban crowding in London) was pursued above all others. The privacy of one’s tiny castle. And on one level, it succeeded fully in improving the material standards of its residents. Notably Milton Keynes’ original vision was only incompletely realised - a huge cultural district was planned and scrapped. 

And there was beauty amidst the boredom: cycling up to the concrete cows with a mate and sitting on them, off past ruins of an abbey, past lakes and past pub lunch denizens. In pre-teen years there were some local excitements: I remember being confronted by estate kids. These boys, though looking back, so obviously deplete of love, stability and material resources - had a physical rough and readiness that I found exhilarating. The adrenaline you feel when you might be put in a head-lock for no reason. Their desire to explore places we weren’t allowed to go. 

In some ways, MK occupies an “uncanny valley” between utopia and dystopia. But it was not all bad, a grey life. Actually it was quite green. Last time I went, MK felt slowly better - more ethnically diverse. There is a new art gallery, sheepishly hopeful, an outpost of bigger dreams. If I could write to myself aged fifteen, I would reassure my younger self that not all places suit all people. So don’t worry. Cultivate your own curriculum and throw yourself into connecting with people, even if it seems pointless. I wish MK’s current teenagers well. I hope souls’ wildflowers can grow on its roundabout verges. 

Timbold Roundabout, Milton Keynes by John Winfield, is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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David Stoker is a writer, facilitator, and communications specialist. He has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and now calls London home. He has worked as an analyst in the nonprofit and public sectors, a policy researcher and an educator of children. His writing has appeared on Citizens Advice and the UK Cohousing Network, and he has performed poetry to Sunday Assembly London. His other interests include accumulating more books than he could ever read, painting watercolours and building secular community.