Landscapism dispatch #1

Bloody hell! A PhD takes over your life. Expansive blog posts unrelated to my PhD research are probably going to be few and far between over these three years. So landscapism dispatches will have to be brief; no bad thing. 


A good number of interesting things have been kindly brought to my attention or stumbled across already this year, and here is something of a cartulary (damn, can't shake off my research head!).  

As soon as I finish reading Rob Cowan's excellent Common Ground (a distinctive voice in the somewhat crowded territory of 'New Nature' writing) I hope to plunge into From Hill to Sea; the work of the ever-engaging Fife Psychogeography Collective in book form. Those Fifers know how to find the strange brew that soaks the hills and flows to the sea in their kingdom above the bridge.

"And I rose up, and knew that I was tired, and continued my journey”. Artist and composer Martin A. Smith has produced a new film, Secretly sharing the landscape with the living, exploring part of the Icknield Way in Buckinghamshire, following in the fecund footsteps of Edward Thomas:



You can find out more about Martin's work here.

The daily on-line posts from A Year in the Country provided twelve months of eclectic imaginings on the unsettled bucolic a while back and in April comes an album of sonic accompaniment featuring a goodly mix of collaborators, The Quietened Village: "a study of and reflection on the lost, disappeared and once were homes and hamlets that have wandered off the maps or that have become shells of their former lives and times".

Further audio reports from the landscape edge come in the shape of Justin Hopper's poetry and sound project, I Made Some Low Enquiries, featuring none-other than folk legend Shirley Collins and available from the English Heretic website.

Radio has become my day-time company in recent months, through the fountainhead that is BBC iPlayer. Melvyn Bragg curating In Our Time, 6 Music's Freak Zone, Radio 4's aurally-charged production of The Stone Tape, Late Junction eclectica on Radio 3, The Children of Witchwood and old Sherlock Holmes episodes on Radio 4 Extra; the list goes on. Current enjoyment is provided by music journalist Laura Barton's exploration of the relationship between landscape and music across the British Isles in her Radio 4 documentary series, as described further here.

The music of the crags and cliffs of Red Daren and Black Daren is a song of stone. Here in the Olchon Valley is found the geological rim of England as western Herefordshire sheds its Anglo-Saxon facade and bleeds into the Black Mountains of Wales. A recent Sunday morning jaunt amongst the Old Red Sandstone passed through this hushed borderland, climbing to the Hatterall ridge; Hatterall, perhaps, bastardised from At y Heu: 'towards the sun'.   

And back home the summit of my books to read mountain has moved further out of reach with the addition of Time's Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination by Richard Morris, Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser, Anna Pavord's Landskipping, John Lewis-Stempel's Meadowland and The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Right, back on the Monk's Trod now for me.