Alternative political cartography: a more rational union

Most of this piece was written in 2017 (probably after another soul-destroying election result) but left in draft and I just came across it again. Depressingly, it still resonates; only more so. Some musings from a politically angry but ever hopeful soul.

Is it just me or is it not blindingly obvious that a more rational, modern and fit-for-purpose political geography might mean the 'united kingdom' of these islands has a chance to survive and prosper? You wouldn't know it from the woeful lack of progressive political discourse in Parliament and the media, either hell-bent on a reckless charge towards a damaging Hard Brexit and the then seemingly inevitable break-up of Britain (oh the irony!) or unable to voice an alternative narrative. A sleep-walk into changes which do little to address the grievances, disillusionment and inequality that abound within society.

What if we had a more grown-up polity, reflecting the geo-political realities of the country along a more federalised model (you know, like those moderately successful countries Canada, Germany and Australia)? Maybe something like the arrangement mapped above? 

Without a seemingly permanent Tory hegemony, which really doesn't reflect our complex society, maybe we could even have a fighting chance of responding better to the pandemics, environmental changes and other challenges of the future? Some notes to flesh out this Utopian dreaming are presented at the end of this piece.

Well its an interesting exercise for those who want to imagine what a better country might look like; a future not dragged down by a backward-looking Little Englander memory of what never was, policy-making in the hands of Populist leaders in thrall to disaster capitalists, neo-fascists and libertarian Svengali figures, only interested in short-term headline grabbing. People will disagree, maybe because they feel the time has come for Scotland to break free, Ireland to unite or Wales to rise up - and who came blame them really; others who cannot see beyond the Mother of all Parliaments, 'first past the post gives us strong government', England is Britain mythology. But - to me - such a devolved federal structure, or something like it, is the only positive way forward for these islands.

Sadly, such ideas seem like so much pissing in the wind in the current stifling political climate, dominated by reactive and inadequate responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, the pettiness and division of Brexit, pressures for Scottish independence and so forth; all the time the climate emergency gathering pace. Let's hope the next generation are able to participate in more positive debates to discuss options for and the practicalities of democratic rebirth rather than the divisive and dispiriting cant that we are currently having to put up with. We want our country back? Too bloody right. 

And a name for this brave new vision: Federal Republic of Britain? Albion Unchained? Well I suppose we would have to have a referendum on that ...  

Notes 

This model essentially builds on the devolved system already in place across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales but, crucially, extends this to England. The idea is not to somehow extinguish England but to recognise that there is and always has been a strong regional element to its identity (which is a good thing!), it is by far the largest of the 'nations' within these islands and needs governance closer to the people but that does not dominate the other constituents of the union, and also a model that heads off the potential for 'anti-Celtic' English nationalism.

The English regions actually suggest themselves fairly easily: most have a deep historical resonance and unity, often stretching back to England's beginnings in the 'Anglo-Saxon' centuries, and provide fairly equal populations and diversity of cities/ towns/ country etc. The most obvious break from this is London. Large enough, confident enough, great enough to be a true city region - subsuming it in a 'South-east' region would do neither it or the surrounding shires any favours. This arrangement allows the Great Wen to punch its weight as a world city whilst remaining rooted in its British hinterland, its central government-Westminster village shackles and vices removed. And why Derby to take over the mantel for the National Parliament? Well it has to be out of London, the big cities wouldn't need it (they will be the heart of their own regions) and its somewhere central that needs a bit of a pick-me-up. 

There would be some debates to be had around the margins when drawing the boundaries of and naming these regions. I've put Northamptonshire in the East Midlands but it could be the included in Mercia or even the Home Counties. Hampshire is Home Counties but could be Wessex if history was the only consideration. Cumbria is usually lumped in with the north-west but seems to more naturally ally with the north-east. The North-west is a pretty uninspiring moniker but what's the alternative: Cheshire and Lancashire; Greater Mersey-Manchester? And so on.  

The 'Isles' get equal billing with Scotland as a nod to the feeling that they don't quite feel represented in such a geographically large domain (Scotland and the Isles looks huge in comparison to the English regions but its population is on a par with Yorkshire). Should/ would Northern Ireland sit well in this new arrangement or is it time for the island of Ireland to go its own way? This is still a raw and contentious issue. Some might even call for Ireland to be welcomed into a true British Isles model, but there is way too much baggage for that to seem anything but naive (and would, no doubt, seem deeply unappealing to the vast majority of Irish people). 

Some details:

• The nine English regional assemblies, Scottish Parliament and the Northern Irish and Welsh National Assemblies would have devolved responsibility for day-to-day public services and regional policy, with local tax-raising powers to fund them (including an adjusted redistributive element to ensure richer areas support those with lower tax income), i.e. 'Devomax'.

• Federal elections for all of the devolved bodies through proportional representation (with public funding for parties, groups and individuals who meet set criteria for participation). I make no secret of my dislike of the Conservative Party (not to mention UKIP/ Brexit Party) but in a grown-up system they deserve to have a voice - or even dominance - in areas where they have support: it would be up to the other representatives to work with them or win the argument.

• A small National Parliament and part elected Second Chamber for policy and legislative scrutiny to replace the Westminster Parliament and House of Lords (with no hereditary members). Representatives of the elected members of the devolved bodies would make up the Parliament, with a leader or managing team elected by this group via cross-party secret ballot (the broken model of 'winner takes all' first-past-the-post adversarial politics and all-powerful Prime Minister would be consigned to history). The role of the Parliament would be restricted to foreign policy, planning for a sustainable future, strategic national infrastructure concerns, allocating budgets to the devolved bodies (based on a redistributive formulae) and promoting best practice across regions. 

• The National Parliament would not be a full-time body but would meet regularly rotating its location, perhaps annually, between Cardiff, Edinburgh and Derby. Its reduced central civil service would be based in one location, probably Derby due to its geographic centrality. 

• Scotland and Wales (and for that matter any English region) could secede from the union where a super majority (60:40) of the voting population of that entity backed independence. The process for getting to this stage would need to be carefully constructed (as we are being Utopian here, political parties would not be able to campaign during the voting process and a road map spelling out how independence would be achieved and what it would look like would be produced by an independent commission, with no reference to 'cake', 'sun-kissed uplands', 'unicorns' or Braveheart). Arrangements for Northern Ireland to secede would be as per the Good Friday Agreement.

• Members of the European Parliament (yes, in this brave new world we have rejoined the EU!) would be elected through proportional representation (as now) but represent the same geographical region as the devolved bodies and work in partnership with their peers in the devolved body. 

• Oh, and the monarch would be replaced as head of state with a directly elected president (though what, if any, leadership role this figure-head would have in the National Parliament would need to be thought through). The royal retinue would be pensioned off and live out a peacefully extinction. Royal properties would be handed over to the National Trust. This is probably the least important element of the whole package. 

• A written constitution to enshrine the principles of these democratic processes in law.

On Arcadia

Hotfoot from viewing new documentary film Arcadia, some initial thoughts on what seems quite a zeitgeist-y piece of work for those in the landscape/ place bubble.

Directed by Paul Wright, the film is constructed from digitised footage in the BFI National Archive inter-cut with fictional excerpts from cinema and television.* An 'old-weird-Britain mash-up' of imagery swirling around the last hundred years that hangs on the directors wish to explore 'how we connect with the land around us and with each other'. Adrian Utley of Portishead and Goldfrapp's Will Gregory provide the soundtrack, pulsing audio-cue's amongst the visual montage, recalling British Sea Power's work for From the Sea to the Land Beyond. Here and there the spectral folk voice of Anne Briggs melts and distorts into the mix.

The narrative, such as it is, rests on a journey through the seasons; but this is a loose story, and all the better for it. A lack of intruding commentary also gives the footage space to tell a story, gifting the watcher's imagination permission to roam. Paul Wright has explained how atmospheres, ideas and themes for each 'season' underscored the search through the deep and rich archive sources, though the aim was often to seek out material 'that you wouldn't expect to be in a film about the British countryside.' This cut-up approach reflects the director's desire to create sensory experiences through image and sound rather than a straight-forward linear narrative progression. As such, comparisons have been made with Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi films scored by Philip Glass. Common ground can also be found with the Robinson films of Patrick Keiller. Political or politicised questions of society's relationship with the land and nature, of identity, of class are surfaced but this is no polemic, it is left to the viewer to piece together their own interpretation. A point to return to.

Arcadia has been positioned as a 'folk horror' artifact, part of a fecund wyrd Britain arcania that has come out of the long shadows to be part of the contemporary landscape vibe. Although the film has deliberately avoided using some of the more obvious and over-exposed reference points such as The Wicker Man, the folk horror genre is certainly well-represented through haunting imagery of bodies rising from the grave in Requiem for a Village and the like. Also present are snatches of the frankly strange folk rituals on display in a highly-recommended previous BFI crate-digging exercise, Here's a Health to the Barley Mow.   

As for my own feelings on viewing the film, an initial reaction was that it was following a rather hackneyed trope of contrasting modern dystopian imagery with a seemingly idyllic past, but as the temporal contrasts progressed and mingled a more nuanced and muddied picture emerged. All to the good. This is what history shows us. Processes and patterns of change - in life, society, the landscape - are complex, contradictory and unexpected, hard to pin down, especially when you are in the moment. Humanity may well be experiencing a long fall, unable now to stop a self-inflicted wrecking ball from wiping out civilisations and eco-systems. This may be already happening; we know we can do better. But we can't really know what the future holds: what great and terrible prospects and unforeseen technologies and events will come to pass. 

Many of the visions of sunlit unchanging rurality that front-load the film are pure mid-twentieth century propaganda. Much of it would surely have looked archaic (though perhaps reassuring) to contemporary viewers. Yes, those children playing cricket on the village green look innocently happy, but kids were still dying of TB and suffering from rickets; the coming welfare state desperately needed. The countryside looks ravishing and immutable, but it always does in sun-bleached black and white. Captured on these early reels was a receding world. The farm labourers were already a dying breed and, in truth, their forebears had suffered untold ructions and dislocations over centuries past. Things had been so stable and orderly in the Victorian English village that many could not wait to defect to the foul, teeming rising cities of wages and freedom or endure harsh journeys to the unknown potential of the colonies (or had no other choice).   

The juxtapose of old and new tempts another thought: that folk rituals, hippy happenings, raves, music festivals and other raged communions with nature all share a common wealth through the ages; psychic (or psychedelic) portals out of normality. Echoes of a Merrie England always on the margins, dangerous and under threat. The past may be gone but it can punch through time, revived or repurposed into something new but familiar, even if we don't realise it. That's how history rolls. Same old wyrd magic, same old shite.  

Many a paradox here, but then the English vision of arcadia was always conflicted. As Adam Nicholson has chronicled, Renaissance England 'dreamed of a lost world, an ideal and unapproachable realm of bliss and beauty'; a seeking of 'the perfect interfolding of the human and the natural' as perceived in Classical pastorals. Nicholson characterises this movement as at once a search for the simpler Golden Age of ancient Sicily and Greek Arcadia - a longing underpinning many subsequent counter-cultures - whilst also being inherently conservative and elitist, raging against the forces of modernity: 'a dream of nature' though one exclusive to a rich squirarchy, heavily mediated and manipulated. A forgotten idealism which flowered but was then crushed by a brutal civil war. 

The visceral sonic and visual representations crackling through this film aptly show how the search for Arcadia has always been mixed-up, conflicted and probably doomed. 

An afterword on the recent Twitter squall on the Paul Kingsnorth's essay written to accompany the release of Arcadia. The piece, criticised for pandering to re-emerging 'blood and soil' nationalism, seems to have disappeared from the web, but a couple of Twitter responses to it and the author's 'open letter' reply posted on his website can be seen below. My own initial take was that, having previously admired Paul's non-conformism (and writing), these are dangerous Brexit-cult times in which to express sentiments that could be interpreted as mystical English exceptionalism. This may be a bit alarmist (Hell, Gareth Southgate may even come riding over the hill to show us a new more-inclusive path to Eden!). Anyway, have a read of both sides of the story and see what you think ...

I wrote this for @NewHumanist before I saw Kingsnorth's latest essay, but it pretty much says what I want to say about it. Nature writing and fascist greenwash. Get stuck in. https://t.co/AyLIKRVa75

— Richard Smyth (@RSmythFreelance) June 20, 2018

After Kingsnorth's recent piece, which seemed to follow a deeply disturbing "blood and soil" narrative, it may be apt for me to retweet my Deep England articlehttps://t.co/hZaX2oJVO2

— Paul Watson (@lazcorp) June 20, 2018

Paul Kingsnorth's response to the Twitter squall re his essay on the new Arcadia film: https://t.co/TkC4kpoXkR

— Eddie Procter (@Landscapism) June 21, 2018

 * The archive films which are utilised are listed on the Arcadia website.  

Digging the English landscape of radicalism and rebellion

"The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility ... and it had been used with no moderate hand." Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott.

This was at one time to be a lengthy treatise on the noble tradition of English radicalism and rebellion woven into the history of the landscape in times past and still abroad. However, energy feeling diminished and lacklustre in the wake of the election result, it has become more of a modest poultice to salve the wounded progressive heart; a sketch of rememberings and reminders.

A wake indeed. In the afterword to his visceral story of doomed English resistance to the brutal annexation by William, Duke of Normandy (or rather Guillaume le Batard), The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth laments that "The Norman invasion and occupation of England was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history. It brought slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery and widespread land confiscation to the English population, along with a new ruling class who had, in many cases, little but contempt for their new subjects". And at times like these, as the Bullingdon Club cements its neo-Norman hold on the levers of power and influence, does it not feel as though we have been waking up to groundhog day ever since? Held in a constant state of arrested development by the descendants (both real and in spirit) of William's blood-soaked and avarice-filled retinue. Even now, we are unable to free ourselves from the Norman yoke; fighting amongst ourselves, bitterness endemic, hope shrinking. Farage and the UKippers as rebellion? What a fucking joke.

But there is a counterpoint to all this defeatism; to the passive-reactionary Little Englander 'musn't grumble' mind-set (and away from the heady but combustible mix of Scottish progressiveness and nationalism). Thankfully England, as a temporal, geographical and imaginative entity, is as awash with ragged energy and free-thinking as it is held back by a veneer of respectable timidity and dothing of its cap to those Norman shadow-walkers. Rebels with a cause, pioneers of social justice and artists with a conscience abound throughout history.

So harness the radical spirit of Englishness ...

Green men, wild men of the woods, silvitica,

Hereward the Wake,

Wat Tyler and the Peasant's Revolt,        Jack Cade,              John Dee,

The New Model Army,             Gerard Winstanley,

Tolpuddle Martyrs,      The Quakers,        Thomas Paine,           The Diggers,
          
                       John Clare,                      The Chartists,           

    William Cobbett,                                                       Charles Dickens,

William Blake and Jerusalem,

     William Morris,        Bertrand Russell,          The Independent Labour Party,

Aleister Crowley,                           Emily Pankhurst and the Suffragettes,

Trades Union Congress,              Peter Warlock,                        George Orwell,

                              The Kinder Scout Trespass,

Clement Attlee and 1945,       National Parks,                       CND,

E.P. Thompson,             Eric Hobsbawm,

            Lindsay Anderson,      Ken Loach,           Alan Clarke, 
                 
 David Rudkin,

     Billy Bragg,        Mark Thomas,                                 

Julian Cope,             

Colin Ward,                         Benjamin Zephaniah,  

The Poll Tax Riots,

                       
 'Rooster' Byron,    

                    Caroline Lucas,                  Common Ground,

         The Dark Mountain Project,                             Jeremy Deller,

PJ Harvey,          Owen Jones,

         (Who knows, maybe even) Russell 'don't vote' Brand ... 

This spirit, this genius rebellio, is esoteric, not always progressive; it waxes and wanes in the popular consciousness, but it's always there under the surface, ready to spring. In the words of David Horspool in his survey of The English Rebel: "Above all, English rebellion isn't exceptional. It is what has happened in this country for at least a thousand years, and we can safely predict that it will carry on happening." 

A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake

I've recently watched A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, Jeroen Berkvens' 2002 documentary that I came across via the Dangerous Minds web site. Like his music its gentle and melancholic, with contributions from his family, friends and fellow musicians. One key voice is Joe Boyd, who produced all three of Drake's albums, the meagre sales of which on release surely contributed to his untimely death at the age of 26. In his memoir of the folk-rock scene of the late 60s and 70s, White Bicycles, Boyd asks: "As the sixties drew to a close, who would have predicted that the end of the millennium would see Nick's music so much more prominent than that of the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, John Martyn or Sandy Denny?"    

I was particularly taken by the opening aerial footage of the countryside around his home village of Tanworth-in-Arden. For some reason it had not occurred to me before that this was only a few miles westwards across Warwickshire from Kenilworth, the town where I spent my childhood. Warwickshire is one of those Midland England counties that its easy to overlook: overawed and torn asunder by Birmingham and Coventry at its northern edge, in the shadow of Costwoldian Arcadia to the south. But linger along its tree lined lanes, forded streams, stout middling sort farmsteads and undulating fieldscapes and Warwickshire is quietly memorable and substantial, much like Nick Drake's music. This is, after all, the Forest of Arden of Shakespeare's As You Like It. Here is the full 48 minute film to enjoy:

Rob Young articulates well why Drake has such a hold on those of us (legion now, sadly pitifully few when he was alive) who find his music a particular touchstone for English pastoral melancholia in his treatise on Albion's soundscape, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music:

"A former friend and musical partner, Ross Grainger, described Drake as a 'modern pagan' long after his death, recalling conversations about Gaia theory, Stonehenge, ley lines and supernatural forces. Drake's songs may be full of natural images - rain, sun, moon, sky, ocean, sand, trees, roses, thorns etc. - but nature was no panacea either. For Drake, human fate was linked to the relentless round of the seasons - summer bliss must shade into autumnal age and regret; then comes the killing winter. His songs trace eternal cycles, natural revolutions, the turning of the year and the seasons, but with an awareness that repetitive motion can become a treadmill."  

At some stage, when I have managed to justify the outlay as necessary cultural enrichment, I hope to buy a copy of Nick Drake: Remembered For a While, the recently published Drake compendium and artifact. Andrew Ray provides a good flavour of the book on the Some Landscapes blog.

In the meantime, here's a mystical, bosky version of The Cello Song, recorded for the John Peel 'Night Ride' session in August 1969, in which to bask and be transported to the Forest of Arden at dusk, in the company of Orlando and Rosalind, Corin and Silvius:

Towards a new landscape aesthetic

"There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts.  ... my body has to be on the move to set my mind going ... to free my spirit, to lend a greater boldness to my thinking, to throw me, so to speak, into the vastness of things." Jean-Jacques Rousseau  

If I was to sketch out a day spent engaging with landscape and place to realise a wide range of phenomenological experiences and responses of mind, body and spirit - maximum topography - how would it look? Well, in the spirit of Rousseau, it would be an excursion on foot of course (if lacking the epicness of Werner Herzog's trek from Munich to Paris as chronicled in Of Walking in Ice, the ethos of letting oneself drift, 'a falling forward becomes a Walk', would be the same). But not just any walk, variety and unpredictability would be the key. So maybe it would commence in an urban setting; the grittier the better, with the right mix of post-industrial decay and renewal and diverse architectural styles, juxtaposed with a sheen of surface functional banality to expertly peel back, revealing the layered temporal stories behind the bland facade. A detour would be made into a stalwart and defiantly Amazon-baiting second-hand bookshop with a capacious 'topography' section and a number of musty volumes purchased, something antiquarian, something to saviour from the 60s or 70s and a long lost nature writing classic. City would morph into country as suburb, urban green space and anarchic edgeland are navigated - both a route-march along a harsh, litter-strewn and anti-pedestrian roadside and a meander through an oasis of unexpectedly lush and mysterious greenery would feature in this liminal, transitional phase.

As the countryside authentica is reached, guidebook spoon feeding would be disdained in favour of more spontaneous route-finding, perhaps using an antique Ordnance Survey map and attempting to trace nineteenth century topography on the ground. Along the way some reminders of harsh rural realities would no doubt be observed: a sighting of baseball-capped men digging for badgers, improbable fly-tipping, maybe a suspicion of dogging. But a number of viscerally profound moments would also be experienced. Catching the eye of a fox or deer and joining in a lingering stock-still stare. Sensing lives lived and gone whilst rooting around a ruined farmstead or water mill, where unidentifiable rusted ironware or the colours of a cracked tile become refracted relict reminders of the past. A feeling of magic in the air as wind and light switch and shift, changing the mood of the tree- and field-scape. As the gloaming hour approaches and fatigue sets in, having clambered up a rocky stream-bed and scrambled through holloway undergrowth in Rogue Male style, a hill-top clearing would be chanced upon with views over several counties as shadows lengthen across endless fields, as pylons and rail lines and infrastructure become magical objects of gaze. A good place for a night's wild camp. Sleep would be fitful, muffled nocturnal (spectral?) sounds invading thoughts of the day's encounters, accompanied by a soundtrack of wyrd-folk, pastoral electronica and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and readings from Reliquiae (a journal of old and new work spanning landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism). 

During the walk ambulatory clear-headedness would provide space for musing on a range of landscape-related topics whilst the miles were clocked-up: the links between the Parliamentary enclosure of common land and present day urban-rural division, how is an innate knowledge of fungi and wild flowers achieved, would Edward Thomas have favoured Nick Drake or the Incredible String Band, and such like. Along the way observations, smart phone photographs of arresting or unusual features and vistas and appropriate quotes from the landscape canon would be tweeted to an eclectic and discerning band of followers; observations and visual representations of the day to be later blogged or instagramed and debated on-line, perhaps included in a talk at a left-field festival, conference or pub social, or even forming part of the content of a crowd-funded book.
     
What would this mash-up journey into landscape immersion represent? Would it just be the ploughing of a mildly eccentric lone furrow? Creating an irrelevant line made by walking in the spirit of Richard Long, ephemeral self-indulgence whilst the real heft of landscape discourse and reality swells elsewhere: local campaigners mobilising against unbidden corporate uniformity or statist grand plans; photogenic academics revealing the results of their research through television series and tie-in book; exciting plans underway for the return of the wolf and rewilding nirvana; hip new ruralistas setting up boutique bunkhouses, offering foraging before breakfast, coasteering followed by artisan bread, craft ale and star gazing. Would this be just another example of a wannabe Self or Sinclair, strong on effort and perspiration but lacking their esoteric vocabulary or ecstatic sneer?

Or is there something in the wind, a fresh approach that this imaginary excursion partly encapsulates and, in fact, also links the other activities cited above. Perhaps not new ideas or concepts (the basics were all birthed in ancient Greece or long before), nothing that could be labelled a movement or a philosophy (the times are too post-modern for anything so quaint); but maybe an emerging coalescing - an alliance - of varied ways of thinking about, of looking at, of experiencing our spatial surroundings; their past, present and future. An antidote to the narrow focus that has often been the Achilles heel of much landscape discourse, characterised by a lack of cross-fertilisation between different disciplines and areas of interest (and often the absence of a feel for the range of emotions that being out in a landscape triggers). An echo of the view of Christopher Milne, searching for a personal philosophy and to find his own path away from his famous father’s shadow as outlined in The Hollow on the Hill, taking a lead from Richard Jefferies who “could be on one occasion the naturalist, observing and recording, and on another occasion the philosopher-poet, sensing and dreaming. One does indeed need to be both, for the one complements and enhances the other”. 

If there is the prospect here of a new aesthetic approach to landscape, then its worth pondering what components, however tangentially, combine to provide its origins, form and quintessence; to trace the foci and ley-line linkages (and talking of the ley, Alfred Watkin's The Old Straight Track (1925) is an example of what we are getting at here. The central ley lines theory of the book is eccentric, discredited, farcical - but that's not the point. As Robert Macfarlane's introduction to the 2014 edition unfurls "... the ley vision - with its mixture of mysticism, archaeology and sleuthing - re-enchanted the English landscape, investing it with fresh depth and detail, prompting new ways of looking and new reasons to walk").

“With this stone and this grass, with this red earth, this place was received and made and remade. Its generations are distinct but all suddenly present.” Raymond Williams

Interestingly, to discover this new vista it is necessary to go back, back to multiple pasts. Landscape as a mirror for reflecting on humanity's relationship with and manipulation of the natural world has deep antecedents; and its the mingling of these temporal layers of envisioning that is of interest here. The late 1960s and early 1970s seem to be a particular touchstone, a launching off point for a more eclectic approach to landscape; and not, I think, just thought of as such because I was born in the midst of this period and have nostalgia pangs for a time that never was as golden as it seems from this distance (my earliest memories of sitting in sunlit meadows are untroubled by the realities of Enoch Powell and industrial strife). Of course, this was a time of seismic societal change in culture, politics and economics, in the way people lived. And contemporary representations and responses to landscape and sense of place reflected this, though at the time without any conscious esprit de corps or awareness of common threads or interest. 

By way of illustration a seemingly amorphous and random collection of landscape aesthetics from the period might include: the sense and scenes of a decaying industrial infrastructure central to films such as Get Carter (1971) and Kes (1969); John Betjeman's televised elegies, in the teeth of the march of modernity, to disappearing or seemingly threatened features of England's architecture and landscape, typified by A Bird's Eye View (1964-1969) and Metro-land (1973); a triptych of cult folk-horror films, reinterpreting themes of a rural pagan past: Witchfinder General (1968), Blood On Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973); an empathetic, ecologically aware, less sentimental and more anthropomorphic engagement with nature as exemplified by the writings of Richard Mabey and J.A. Baker's book The Peregrine (1967); a new and more accessible discipline of landscape archaeology emerging from its high academia landscape history and historical geography roots, with practitioners such as Mick Aston and Christopher Taylor keen to range between study and field; the pastoral folk rock and psych-folk stylings of the likes of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, Waterson-Carthy, Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan; and, of course, foregrounded at this time was a general back to the land, 'good life' strand of counter-cultural hippiedom. All are examples of reinterpretation or reappropriation of the past in a time of great change, sometimes in a somewhat reactionary or idealistic way, often breaking new ground.

It is perhaps only with the passing of time that the paths between these varied perspectives can be navigated and identified as a loose network; a pattern that can be plotted and pieced to provide some kind of cohesive narrative. And a rich seam revealed at the heart of this new landscape vision is the heuristic weirdness just below the surface of even everyday and seemingly tamed terrain - Deep England (and Deep Wales, Deep Ireland, Deep Scotland, and, well, Deep anywhere). Back to the 70's polestar and two cultural artifacts, from many examples, serve to illustrate. The 1974 BBC Play For Today Penda's Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, is now much exalted, talked and written about; remarkably so given that it is not available on DVD and so rarely seen. A British Film Institute release with comprehensive and thoughtful accompanying booklet has become de rigueur for such treasures and will surely come. In the meantime impatience has been salved by the publication of a pamphlet, The Edge is Where the Centre Is, marking a rare screening of the film in 2014 on the anniversary of the death of the Ango-Saxon King Penda in AD 655. Found within is a synopsis of the story by Rudkin himself, which could serve to represent and encapsulate many of the themes essayed here:

"In the pastoral landscape of Three Choirs England, a clergyman's son, in his last days at school, has his idealistic value-system and the precious tokens of his self-image all broken away - his parentage, his nationality, his sexuality, his conventional patriotism and faith...

Below the slopes of the Malvern Hills, he has encounters with an angel, and with a demon, with the ghost of Elgar, the crucified Jesus, and with Penda, England's last pagan king. In the final image, he turns away from his idealised landscape, to go into a world and adulthood with a value-system more anarchistic now, and readier to integrate the contradictions of experience."

David Gladwell's film, Requiem For A Village (1975) has received the BFI treatment. As with Penda's Fen, and with echoes of William Blake and William Morris, Requiem is a meditation on societal change in the countryside that combines, in Rob Young's words, "the contradictions of an English radical tradition in which opposition to the encroachment of 'the scrape' (ie capitalistic development) is instinctively aligned with a more conservative will to preservation" with "an attempt ... to show the coexistence of all things in time". The images in the film of the bodies of villagers from previous generations rising from the grave, reawakening the village past, are a reminder of the supernatural and hauntological undercurrents that have always effected perceptions of the landscape: "we had eyes for phantoms then". A theme also taken up at the time in television productions such as The Owl Service (1969), based on Alan Garner's influential book of the same name, Robin Red Breast (1970) and Children of the Stones (1977).

Once this terrain has been surveyed and mapped, other features and relics that provide signal traces, from before and since, can be unearthed, excavated and added; the layers enriching the sense of commonality and communion. Who would be the historical Arch-Druids that have formulated this stratigraphy? An irrelgular yet inspiring collection of mystic topographers, antiquarians, Utopians, visionary poets, folklorists, landscape historians and archaeologists, and proto-psychogeographers; often linked by their divergence from accepted norms and doctrines. 

Musing on landscape is as old as humanity - countless un-named, unknown shamen and sears must have held their tribes in thrall with vivid stories and imagery inspired by the flora, fauna and topography of their surroundings long before even Vergil and the Classical poets came on the scene with their flourishing tales of magick, milieu and mind: "Happy too the man who knows the gods of the country, Pan, and old Silvanus, and the sister Nymphs". Through dark days and into the Renaissance the flame was carried by the likes of John Leland, driven to madness by his topographical quest; Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of St George's Hill, their doomed attempt to establish a 'Common Treasury' of land for all; and Sir Richard Colt Hoar and the empirical antiquaries "speaking from facts not theory", birthing archaeology whilst pillaging barrow and chapel.

Penda's Fen

Penda's Fen directed by Alan Clarke and written by David Rudkin (1974).

The Book Of The Lost

Find out more on The Rowan Amber Miller and The Book Of The Lost web sites.

'From Gardens Where We Feel Secure'

Music, like landscape, is an endless treasury, with new discoveries patiently awaiting happenstance. One of the blogs that I most look forward to viewing or reading, though I struggle to keep up with its prolific output, is A Year In The Country, which is a particularly rich source of new musical pathways.

Currently on my turntable (how archaic does that phrase now sound), following a recommendation in a post on the aforementioned blog, is From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, a beguiling piece of classical ambient English pastoral by Virigina Astley. As a newcomer to the album, I will not attempt to add to this lovingly crafted description of a "welcome old friend" or the brief mention in the definitive Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, in which Rob Young remarks on the "timeless, hovering sensation" of the music contained within it.

In fact, the track-listing and sleeve notes alone, reproduced below, deftly prefigure the sounds and ambiance that the record harvests; bringing to mind the elegiac yet beatific Just Another Diamond Day by Vashti Bunyan or John Martyn's Small Hours, the perfect accompaniment to a dreamy summer's day gloaming.

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

Morning

With My Eyes Wide Open In Dreaming

A Summer Long Since Past

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

Hiding in the Ha-Ha

Birds at dawn 5.30 am Sunday 25th April Moulsford Oxfordshire

Churchbells 9.45am Sunday May 2nd South Stoke Oxfordshire

Churchbells and children Sunday morning May 2nd Moulsford

'Lilac' Tuesday morning May 25th Moulsford

Afternoon

Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed

Too Bright For Peacocks

Summer Of Their Dreams

When The Fields Were On Fire

Its Too Hot To Sleep

Swing gate 2.30pm Sunday 25th April South Stoke

Lambs Sunday afteroon 25th Moulsford Downs

Rowing on the river Sunday afternoon 25th April The Thames Moulsford

Churchbells, children, birds singing late afternoon Sunday 6th June Moulsford

Owl, clock, night noises, Sunday night 16th May Moulsford.

      

The last field in England

"Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear."
The Habit of Perfection, Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Today I walked across the last field in England. A field that I had first wondered about as I viewed it from the high walls of Chepstow Castle, over on the western bank of the river Wye. This quiet pasture, Edward Thomas' archetypal "acre of land between shore and the hills", occupies a sloping promontory around which the tidal section of the river curves as it cuts through oolitic limestone before feeding the water hungry Severn estuary. Two miles to the south-east a still extant section of bank and ditch marks the southerly starting point of the eighth century Offa's Dyke, commencing its monumental 150 mile peregrination of the Welsh Marches to the banks of the Dee estuary in the north. The dyke formed an intermittent constructed boundary, a physical marking of territorial desire, between Anglo-Saxon Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms to the west. It can be traced again, on the map and ground, just north of the field. In parts of the southern Marches the Wye forms a proxy boundary, a more powerful line of division than any human construct. Perhaps the meander traversing the field of interest here fulfilled this role; or maybe the meadow's landward boundary is a ghost memory of a stretch of the dyke long levelled, marooning the field itself as a mini no-mans-land, neither Saxon nor Welsh? Today the middle of the Wye (more properly Gwy in Welsh) is decorated with alternate black dashes and spots on the Ordnance Survey map, marking the coming together of Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, of England and Wales.

There is something both inviting and slightly daunting in the thought of studying the micro-landscape of a single field. A small matter for a master such as Richard Jefferies who can devote a whole chapter to dwelling on the minutiae of the topography, flora and fauna of the 'homefield' in Wild Life in a Southern County, but more of a challenge to most of us, lacking the innate knowledge of the Victorian country-dwelling naturalist. Nevertheless, it is an approach that retains its appeal, witness Tim Dee's recent Four Fields, an expansive study of the geography, history, literature and ecology of varying, and admittedly atypical, areas of fields in the Fenland of Cambridgeshire, Zambia, Ukraine and Montana, USA; or The Plot by Madeleine Bunting, "a biography of an English acre", rooting a story of family history in a very particular place. A personal favourite is At The Water's Edge, John Lister-Kaye's journal of his observations on a daily circular walk to a modest Scottish hill loch; in the author's words, "turning its pages and dipping in, I realise it has taken me over thirty years to cover little more than a mile".

My intention here is less ambitious than the above tracts, but I do hope to give a voice to the overlooked places that are all around us: an on-going theme of this blog, but one that I feel has plenty more territory to explore. It is the limitless anonymous rural places that often seem absent from today's landscape discourse; lacking the profile of landmark and touristic countrysides, urban edgelands or even maligned agri-business prairie lands. John Clare knew and spoke for these unheralded places, for instance in his poem Stray Walks: "How pleasant are the fields to roam and think, whole sabbaths through unnoticed and alone". Such terrain forms the background montage for a thousand views, taken for granted; the landscape equivalent of the Jones-Bonham dependable rhythm section underpinning Page-Plant's front of stage howls and riffs. And therein lies the magic, far from the one-dimensional vision conjured by landscape platitudes: green and pleasant land, outstanding natural beauty, national treasures. Its the thrill of a spatial portal to new ways of seeing past, present and possible futures, in plain sight but obscured by ordinariness; an open invitation to new adventures in topography, accidentally esoteric: providing the opportunity to, in Phil Legard's words, take "a small step into the realms of psychegeographic reverie". Dozens of examples exist on any Ordnance Survey sheet or Google Earth view, waiting to be discovered, mapped but unknown: hedges, walls, fences, quarries, pits, fords, bridges, tracks, barns, streams, springs, wells, weirs, ditches, ponds, copses, brakes, lynchets, pylons, sewage plants, tumuli, windmills, dovecots, and on, and on.

Its through such a portal, a hedge, that the protagonists of Ben Wheatley's A Field In England enter the titular field in which the narrative of the whole film is set, seemingly entering a parallel universe a world away from the Civil War skirmish taking place on the other side of the bushes. There they seek arcane and possibly diabolical knowledge or treasure, we do not find out what. Magic mushrooms - psilocybin - abound in the host field, and help to fuel a psychedelic trip into madness and beyond; an original perspective on the upheavals of the English Civil War.

The historical setting here is Monmouthshire (which, administatively at least, had an ambiguous status at this time as to whether it was within England or Wales), on the western bank of the Wye. My field lies on the eastern side of the river in Gloucestershire, but mirrors something of the atmosphere of the film. It does not take much of a leap of the imagination to picture a rag-tag group of Civil War renegades passing through in search of an inn, a passage home or maybe some natural psychedelics to temporarily banish the horrors of the conflict.      

And so into the field, which frustratingly has to remain nameless until such time as I can pore over tithe or estate maps at the Gloucester Records Office (although my initial guess is that some variation on 'Chapelhouse' or 'Chapel field' may be a contender).

The field annotated in green on the modern Ordnance Survey map; extract from Digimap. 

Historically this promontory was within the bounds of Tidenham, a large royal manor occupying the land immediately south of the Forest of Dean between the Severn and the Wye. The manor was recorded in a tenth century charter, became part of the Marcher lordship of Striguil (Chepstow) and was turned into a hunting chase, separate from the Royal Forest of Dean, in the thirteenth century.

Ordnance Survey map extract, from Digimap.

The earliest Ordnance Survey 1880's map (above) shows the modern day single eight hectare field divided into five enclosures, with a brickyard where the residential road now runs and a small pond and heath occupying the site of today's larger pond in the south-western corner. From the gateway in the south-east corner a raised track follows the field boundary to a collection of brick buildings, concrete clad, corrugated iron roofed and now part overtaken by ivy and hawthorn; a fire-place and cattle stalls bearing witness to their original mid-twentieth century agricultural utility. The map evidence suggests that the topographical footprint achieved its current configuration during the 1960's. 

The line of the old boundary along the middle of the field mirrors the curve of the river and follows what, on the ground, is the visible edge of a natural river terrace. This morphological symmetry with the river is shared by a ditch along the western edge of the field, running into the pond and encased by a thick hawthorn hedge. Crossing the field I am naturally drawn to a single oak standard holding centre stage, its trunk surrounded by large limestone blocks and pieces of brickwork; what structure they have come from is not immediately obvious. Below the river terrace three ducks enjoy the last mud of winter flooding, the grass and clover of the water meadow providing rich grazing for the cattle occupying the field. The murky morning stillness is studded by the scat singing of great tits, and the echoing calls of seagulls and rooks. Perambulating the boggy perimeter and surveying the rising ground of the field I muse on the people who have toiled in these acres over centuries: what thoughts did they share on the Norman uber-hooligans who established the castle on the cliff opposite? Did they consider themselves to be Welsh, English or something in between? The Forest of Dean borderlands with Wales, in contrast to the Welsh Marches further north, are characterised by a marked absence of 'Welshness' in terms of surnames, place and field names, but this has always been a land apart from the more generally accepted norms of nationality.     

Eventually I reach the northern end of the field, with the muddy Wye beyond and the steeply wooded opposite bank just starting to come into leaf, vivid greens permeating the dull greys and browns of retreating winter austerity. Here is great potential for some landscape archaeology prospecting. For somewhere in this corner of the field lie the buried remains of the chapel of St David's, a few metres north of its boundary is the postulated river crossing of the Roman military road from Caerleon to Gloucester and a short way into the adjacent Chapelhouse Wood the bank and ditch fragment of Offa's Dyke. When, last summer, I originally noticed this large field from the castle and lodged a vague mental note to have a closer look sometime I had no knowledge of this archaeological treasury; another example of the extraordinary wealth of historical interest and local stories connecting with wider narratives seemingly to be found within any randomly selected part of the British landscape.

Map courtesy of Natural England, based on Ordnance Survey ST59SW map Crown Copyright

Prior to the visit I was aware that the line of the Roman road was in this vicinity, but had not appreciated that the accepted site for the crossing of the Wye (via a wooden bridge, the footings of which have been found at low tide and were observed by the nineteenth century antiquarian George Ormerod: "paralled lines of black remains of stakes are clearly seen at low tides crossing the bed of the river") was so close to the field (see photo above). The road ascended Alcove Wood (following the line of the Chepstow/ St. Arvans parish boundary) on the opposite side of the river and then ran uphill to Tutshill to join the present A48, which still follows the line of its Roman ancestor. The section from the river to the modern road is not visible on the ground, but appears as a track as recently as the 1920's Ordnance Survey map. This map also indicates Striguil Bridge (remains of) at the above location and site of St David's Chapel in the adjacent corner of the set of fields on the promontory.

The fantastically named Archaeologicia or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (Vol 29) published by the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1842 notes a thirteenth century reference to the chantry chapel of St David's "juxta potem de Strugell", which later became a possession of Striguil (Chepstow) Priory, and also that the remains of the ruined chapel were visible in 1814. The same book also seems to suggest that the antique wooden bridge was still extant, though ruinous, as mentioned in Leland's Itinerary of 1535-43 and quotes a later sixteenth century source for the bridge being "clean carried away"; although these references may be to an earlier bridge on the site of the current iron road bridge just downstream. A cursory examination of this section of the field yielded no visible 'humps and bumps' earthworks indicating the location of the chapel, and the whereabouts of Chapelhouse Farm, mentioned in some sources is not verified by any of the historical OS maps. 

However, the nearby Roman bridge site and surviving dyke were all the excuse I needed to duck through the barbed wire fence bounding the field and enter the briar and bramble of the liminal terrain beyond. Scrambling along the shoreline a rocky promontory looked a likely abutment for a bridge, the thick mud below perhaps hiding further evidence of Roman engineering below. The steep wooded river bank here was at once archetypal of the British Isles - carpeted by bluebell and anemone, ivy clad yews - but simultaneously, looking across the wide, brown river, a vision of riverine Amazonia; a place to inspire Fitzcarraldo dreaming. An informal path snaking through this rain forest facsimile is a reminder that such places are beyond the allegedly definitive truth of the Ordnance Survey map and the supposedly all seeing eye of Google Earth.

Having found the remnant bank of the Dyke, darkly entombed by towering and toppled larch, an excursion upriver was now in motion, following an old fisherman's path through a nature reserve at the foot of gigantic limestone cliffs. The scene here further evocative of South American sublime grandeur, particularly when crossing a rock fall, the black boulders stretching upwards into Andean infinity. The limestone from these now silent cliffs has in the past been heavily exploited for use as building material, the Wye providing a convenient route for transporting the heavy loads by boat to the Severn Estuary and beyond. A vernacular design of craft particular to the river was the flat-bottomed trow, many of which plied their trade between the Wye and Bristol; a historical memory kept alive through the name of a well-known Bristolian pub dating from 1664, the Llandoger Trow.   

Just around the next bend in the river lies the peninsula of Lancaut (from the Welsh, Llan Cewydd), a pulse of land cut-off by Offa's Dyke as it heads north with no time for diversion. The small parish of Lancaut within the manor of Tidenham was a settlement of some size by the fourteenth century, but progressively shrunk to its current single farmstead in the subsequent centuries to become one of countless examples of the deserted medieval village. Here was established an early British monastic settlement, named for St Cewydd (first reference c625). A ruined church named St James', its fabric dated to late 12th century, now stands on the site and may have served time as a leper colony for Chepstow Castle. In fact, this remote church seems to have had something of an itinerant and varied history of ownership, use and status and was ruinous by 1885.     

The church and its location are almost impossibly picturesque and atmospheric, though on a damp and misty April day a sense of Gothic melancholy is at large. In fact the roofless relic brings to mind the scenes set in ruined churches in The Wicker Man and the lesser known 'folk horror' offering Blood On Satan's Claw. Although a solitary visitor today, I am accompanied by the celluloid ghosts of Sergeant Howie and Angel Blake. If the recently revived Hammer Films are on the look out for suitable locations then here they have one that would admirably meet their needs. 

Still from The Wicker Man (from www.diaboliquemagazine.com)

Still from Blood On Satan's Claw (from www.hickeysonic.wordpress.com)

   

"The clifftop situation, the stern fortification of the earliest parts and the sumptuous enrichment of later ones, combined with the exceptional completeness of so much, make Chepstow Castle one of the most exhilarating and instructive castles in the whole of Britain" (The Buildings of Wales: Gwent/ Monmouthshire, Newman).

Back to the field: although it is the river that in many ways defines its topography, history and character, the dramatic backdrop of Chepstow Castle, a rock-bound menhir looming across the water, dominates the view from within its bounds. Chepstow and Monmouthshire, like Berwick on the English-Scottish border, have had a forced history of national schizophrenia, mostly Welsh in character and population but administratively a more unclear status. The castle has remained a constant, dominating the town since its foundation by the Norman lord William FitzOsbern in 1067 at the southern end of the chain of fortifications bestriding the Welsh Marches. 

The "steep and lofty cliffs" of the Wye that "connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky" made a lasting impression on Wordsworth during his visit in 1793, as recorded in Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey from Lyrical Ballads. At the same time the Wye was gaining popularity as part of the nascent touristic itinerary, with artists also drawn to its natural and historic wonders. The picturesque ruins of Chepstow castle high up on their limestone cliff particularly attracted the painterly gaze.

The field's position on the opposite bank of the river, with a clear view of the length of the castle's fortifications strung out along the cliff top, is an obvious vantage point for an artist to take up position. Below are a number of paintings of the castle that may have been painted from the field, or include it as part of the scene.

Chepstow Castle, 1905, Philip Wilson Steer (from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/steer-chepstow-castle-n02473)

River Wye ('Chepstow Castle'), c1806-07, Joseph Mallord William Turner (from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/steer-chepstow-castle-n02473)

View of Chepstow, c1750, artist unknown (from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/view-of-chepstow-159348)

Chepstow Castle belonging to his Grace the Duke of Beauford. (Monmuthshire), Joannes Kipp (from http://publicpleasuregarden.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/american-reaction-to-18th-century-grand.html)

Reflecting on the experiences of the day, my mind is taken back to the field of my childhood. We knew this place as the ‘Echo Meadows’, whether this was our made up name, local lore or a genuine field name I do not remember. Here the meadow abutted the massive sandstone outer walls of a Norman-medieval castle, and was bounded by the curve of a stream. Hours, days and weeks were spent roaming and lolling around this field, mapping on foot and on paper its everyday features, imbuing them with significance: ‘bully bridge’, the ruined sheep dip, the overgrown holloway – a hidden space for watching, like an apprentice rogue male. This is a place much like 'The Field', an area of old parkland adjacent to the 1950's Metroland suburban home that Richard Mabey describes in his extended essay, A Good Portion of English Soil; a wild playground for the local children in which "'Nature' was something we all took for granted, like an extra layer of skin".

But it is not just children who can enjoy playgrounds. We should all remember that the landscape is waiting for us to learn from it, to adventure into it. Go and find your field.   

References

Hammond, J (Ed.), 1965. Red Guide: The Wye Valley. Ward Lock.

Hart, C, 2000. Between Severn (Saefern) and Wye (Waege) in the Year 1000. Sutton.

Hill, D & Worthington, M, 2003. Offa's Dyke: History and Guide. Tempus.

Hopkins, G, 1966. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Vista.

Legard, P, 2011. Psychogeographia Ruralis: Observations concerning landscape and the imagination. The Larkfall Press.

Lister-Kaye, J, 2011. At the Water's Edge: A Walk in the Wild. Canongate.

Mabey, R, 2013. A Good Parcel of English Soil. Penguin.

Newman, J, 2000. The Buildings of Wales: Gwent/ Monmouthshire. Yale University Press.

Walters, B, 1992. The Archaeology and History of Ancient Dean and the Wye Valley. Thornhill.

Wordsworth, W and Coleridge, S, 1924. Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Oxford University Press.

Archaeologicia or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (Vol 29)

Gatehouse Gazetteer

Victoria County History: A History of the County of Gloucester