Pathways through long winter days until bright Phoebus shines down again

A quick ramble here through an assemblage of mid-winter cultural highlights. If record shops are a species indicator of a civilised polis (which they surely are), then it was good to have affirmation that the force remains strong in Bristol with the opening of a new Rough Trade store. A first wander around the racks yielded Bright Pheobus, songs by Lal and Mike Waterson, newly re-released on vinyl. Its 'lost folk-rock classic' story is unfurled in sleeve notes by Pete Paphides largely replicated in a Radio 4 documentary. Featuring Richard Thompson, Ashley Hutchings and a seemingly endless cast of early 70s electric folk, Bright Pheobus has joined the ever-replenished cast of misunderstood or under-marketed records of the time which have resurfaced, championed anew. A highlight for me is the track, Child Among the Weeds, featuring Lal Waterson and Bob Davenport's extraordinary, unrestrained vocals.



The post-war folk music revival is not covered by Steve Roud's magisterial (i.e. dauntingly massive) Folk Song In England, but I will try and persevere with this sweeping history of, well folk song in England. A chapter on sea shanties is included, a sound brought to vivid life by a communal sing-along with Halifax's finest renderers of whaling song, Kimber's Men, upstairs at The Greenbank, Easton in November. Other reading matter on 'the book pile' comes in the form of the multitude of pagan arcania found within the pages of Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies and the no-less fascinating A Natural History of the Hedgerow by John Wright. The 'folk horror' label perhaps encompasses Ben Myers The Gallows Pole, which I enthusiastically reviewed earlier in the year and remains a favourite recent fiction read.

Elsewhere on BBC radio, The Drover's Path fitted the bill as a suitably wintry Christmas Eve ghost story, Nick Luscombe presented Radio 3's Late Junction's favourite albums of 2017 and there was a gripping dramatisation of Neil Gaiman's refreshingly non-standard fantasy Anansi Boys, starring Jacob Anderson, Grey Worm from Game of Thrones; a Season Six box set of which was my Christmas guilty pleasure. Robert Macfarlane's #TheDarkIsRising Twitter-athon led to another gem from the BBC radio archive, a 1997 adaptation of Susan Cooper's midwinter classic chronicling a duel between the Dark and the Light across snowy Sussex downland. The ubiquitous (in a good way) Mr Macfarlane also brought forth his importantly beautiful collaborative work with artist Jackie Morris, The Lost Words; if ever there was an example of a Christmas present bought for your child that would give as much pleasure to the giver as the receiver, then this was it.

Fly bird fly on your raven wings
Take to the sky and sing for the love of wheeling and turning

These words, images and songs spun around my head as a post-Christmas walk around YGrib, Waun Fach and Pen Trumau in the post-snow, but still frozen, western Black Mountains literally blew the cobwebs away; awaiting the days when bright Phoebus will shine down again. 

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar

Cwm, corrie, cirque. Geography lesson rote learning that has stuck. The same etymology from different terrains - Wales, Scotland and France; combe is a south-west England variant - defines the amphitheatre-like landform that can be found at the head of a valley. Classically, U-shaped with a steepling mountain forming the headwall and arduous scree slopes topped by climbing ridges aside. But also equally arresting in more modest surroundings: the spring-line bowl of a chalk down, Iron Age hill-fort ramparts casting slanting shadows from above; or constructed in miniature in a dozen stream-fluted tributary gullies and hanging valleys indenting an upland river dale. These are the nooks, slacks, hollows and cloughs that form a sort of "invisible estate", to use Henry Vaughan's phrase, in hill and mountain country.   

Such places are often looked down upon, both literally, from a higher ridge or summit, and metaphorically because they are liminal backdrops to the landscape, away from the toiling tracks to the heights. Not most peoples idea of a destination, part of the scenic wash that accompanies an ascent to bag a peak or complete a horse-shoe circuit: integral but largely uncharted topography. And yet, as Nan Shepherd so compellingly shows in The Living Mountain, her antidote to shallow thrill-seeking, there is "wild enchantment" to be had in following a mountain stream to its airy source, in picking a route across a stony slope; in gladly going nowhere in such catchments. In Shepherd's words: "often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone our merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him".

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

The unfinished business of the Right to Roam Act, 2004 - an addendum to the progressive public access legislation that saw the introduction of National Parks in England and Wales in 1949 - has provided the opportunity to freely wander across vast tracts of previously off-limits open, uncultivated mountain, moor, heath, and downland. Ordnance Survey maps clearly demarcate land where this freedom can be exercised, and many lonely valley heads are now legally open to anyone to explore. And yet, and quite rationally, most people stick to the known paths when in this opened up country. Veer off to find your own personal wildness and you will soon be quite alone.

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots and rabbit holes for steps

The attraction here is the feeling not just of in-the-moment aloneness but of new frontiers. In The Wild Places Robert Macfarlane rightly, and cheerfully, points out that "the human and the wild cannot be partitioned"; that even seemingly remote places have been dwelt in, worked in and visited at some point. But walking or scrambling a steep slope at a valley fountainhead, well away from any path or right of way, and you may be the first human breath, touch, sight within that micro trajectory for what: a year? a decade? a century? The particular ground you are covering may have seen few, if any, people traverse the exactitude of its quiet terrain over several millennia. In a sense you may very well have entered a version of the "chaste land" that many would agree with Macfarlane is a mythical concept.

I have pondered finding wildness in out-of-the-way nooks at length in a previous post and won't dwell on this further. It is though interesting to reflect upon who might have been here before you? A fellow Gore-Tex clad roamer, a field archaeologist or botanist, a gaggle of bereft Duke of Edinburgh teenagers, an OS surveyor, a shepherd, a downed German pilot, a sorrowful Romantic poet, another shepherd - maybe benighted, a poacher, a gamekeeper, a deserting soldier, a determined tinker, a pair of clandestine lovers, a party beating the bounds, gambolling children from a summer sheiling, an army scout, a searcher of new territory, a hunter, a gatherer. Some of these perhaps, but probably no-one has ever stroked that rock, slaked from that point in the stream, gripped that tree root, slipped on that patch of scree. You are a momentary pioneer.  

The Sun of Winter, the Moon of Summer and all the singing birds

Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out

Writing now my mind is drawn to an array of valley heads, fell sides and steep gullies: some monumental, others with a gentler force of wildness. Ponden Kirk, the rain-lashed millstone grit venue for my first childhood hillside adventuring, the springs and hanging woods of the western Cotswold scarp combes, and the ice-scraped bowls of the upper valleys of western Lakeland: Ennerdale, Eskdale, Mosedale. Student hangovers blown away dropping off the monk trods of the North York Moors into the beginnings of Great and Little Fry-up Dales (in search of breakfast?). Regular haunts amongst the darren, pant and ffridd of the less-frequented valleys of the Black Mountains: Cwm lau, Olchon, Nant Bwlch and Grwyne Fechan; places unburdened by topographical complexity or any hint of being a final destination. Further afield and a memorable day scrambling around a corrie in the bowels of the southern-most Andes of Tierra del Fuego, falling asleep with tired feet in the cool mountain water freed from the glacier above. And I can picture many more, often with a clarity that escapes memories of the summits and ridges with which they share topological space. 

As often with landscape, it is the poet who best captures the words for this terrain. In The Cataract of Lodore Robert Southey vigorously brings to life the darting, roaring, guggling, brawling, sheeting passage of mountain becks and burns as they proceed downward from their springs, tarns and bogs "under the mountain's head of rush and stone" as Edward Thomas would have it. These watery starting lines disguised as cul-de-sacs are a gift to the rural flâneur; sheep tracks, streams, crags, ruined sheep folds - all encourage the curious visitor to roam hither and thither rather than plod a linear course. To seek a path in this domain of the mountain hare, red kite and curlew, petrified hawthorn and blackthorn, lichen-taken crag and scree: "scanning the close at hand for interest, or at least a place to crouch in out of the wind while the others scramble up" (Hilles Edge, Glyn Maxwell).

The title and extracts here are from Edward Thomas poetic paean to these unsought commons, The Combe, published in 1917:

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
and rabbit holes for steps. The Sun of Winter,
the Moon of Summer and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

References

Macfarlane, Robert (2007) The Wild Places (Granta).

Maxwell, Glyn (2000) 'Hilles Edge' in Baker, Kenneth (ed.), The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry (Faber and Faber).

Shepherd, Nan (2011) The Living Mountain (Canongate).

Southey, Robert (1988) 'The Cataract of Lodore' in Cotter, Gerry (ed.), Natural History Verse: An Anthology (Christopher Helm).

Thomas, Edward (2004) 'The Combe' and 'Over the Hills' in Edward Thomas: Collected Poems (Faber and Faber).

Vaughan, Henry (1988) 'The Waterfall' in Cotter, Gerry (ed.), Natural History Verse: An Anthology (Christopher Helm).

The Way of the Hollow

The work of something of a topographical supergroup, Holloway, is a collaboration between Adam Scovell (film and direction), Robert Macfarlane (words and voice-over), Richard Skelton (music) and Stanley Donwood (artwork).

Robert Macfarlane describes the films genesis and production on the Caught By The River website; its stylistic debt to Derek Jarman's 1971 Journey to Avebury Super-8 short acknowledged and plain to see.

The film moves across many of the touchstones of the re-imagined sense of landscape and place outlined in my recent Towards a new landscape aesthetic essay. And chances are there will be such a holloway - a secret sunken path - within a few miles of where you are sitting right now, so away into the gloaming and find your own layered and folded place...

 

Catch Me Daddy - Moorland Gothic

Catch Me Daddy is the rough-edged but searingly memorable debut feature film from music video director Daniel Wolfe, name-checked in Robert Macfarlane's recent Guardian article on The eeriness of the English countryside. In common with other recent hard-hitting 'Brit-grit' films most of the characters are played by non-professional actors, a lineage established by Ken Loach and perhaps an antidote to the high-end thesping of much British input into contemporary cinematic culture.

The naturalistic performances certainly give the work authentic impact, as does the spare and economical dialogue - a mixture of sub-titled Urdu and sometimes abstruse Yorkshire and Scottish accented English. There is also an interesting motif running through the film of narcotic stupefaction: every character has their own constantly consumed opiate, whether that be cannabis, tobacco, cocaine, gin, prescription drugs, high sugar fizzy drinks or a mixture thereof. 

As you may gather, this is a film for which 'not for the faint hearted' is an apt description. In this respect there is a sense of slightly one-dimensional grimness. The remorseless pursuit that is the central narrative has seen the film dubbed a 'Yorkshire Western' but it lacks the light and shade of, say, Shane Meadow's East Midland's revenge-noir Dead Man's Shoes.

What I found most arresting in viewing the film was its acute sense of place. This particularity ensures that it will resonate with anyone familiar with the bleak beauty of the moorlands that encircle the West Yorkshire conurbation of Leeds-Bradford and its satellite (ex) mill towns like a ready made folk-horror film set. The peaty heights of Calderdale and the Dark Peak easily inspire dread and are at once both closely juxtaposed to the towns and cities that their fast-flowing waters created but also in possession of a forbidding otherness that belies their location a few minutes and miles from urban centres. In a post on the nearby Worth valley, I expanded on the regional genius loci: "Its a landscape in which dispersed farmsteads, miles of dry stone walling and pack-horse tracks across the high heather moors share space and time with woollen mill towns and villages battered by the elements and economic decline, and narrow valley floors often crowded with two centuries of communications networks: canal, railway and road".

As essayed in William Atkin's book The Moor (2014), these landscapes have borne witness to dark crimes, uprisings and lawlessness. With these stories and with this character, they have also darkened the topographical exactitude of the writings of the Bronte sisters, of Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage. This specificity of location brings to mind Pawel Pawlikowski's 2004 film My Summer of Love, which also utilises the South Pennines uplands as the setting for an - ultimately doomed - sense of freedom and fleeting enchantment for its young lead characters. Both films have refreshingly strong female leads; an all-too-rare trait shared with West Yorkshire-based Benjamin Myers novel Beastings (2014) which centres on the pursuit of a young women and a baby by a psychotic priest and a mercenary, dead-eyed poacher across the Lakeland fells.   

     

With a finale that is left tantalisingly open and unfinished, yet without compromise or cop-out, Catch Me Daddy packs a punch. It also admirably underscores the reality of inter-racial and inter-cultural interactions - whether positive, everyday mundane or more malevolent - that gives a lie to the rhetoric of irrevocably divided communities in Northern towns and cities.    

Of idle days afoot in England and Patagonia

A new addition to my reading pile is Afoot in England by W.H. Hudson, perhaps the least heralded member of a loose triumvirate of pioneering writers on the natural history, landscape and rural way of life of Southern England alongside Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas; influential ever since, particularly on the work of Robert Macfarlane who provides a foreword to the book that has whetted my appetite with its talk of the ‘deep-English supernaturalism’ and ‘pastoral psychogeography’ contained within.

Little Toller Books have re-published A Shepherd's Life, Hudson's story of a shepherd grazing his flocks on the borders of Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset. Here is their summary of his life and work:

"W.H. HUDSON (1841 – 1922) William Henry Hudson was born in Argentina, son of Anglo-American settlers. As a youth he spent much time wandering alone in the Pampas, studying its wildlife and encountering gauchos, whose nomadic, shepherding life left a deep impression. In 1869 he moved to England, settling first in London where he lived in poverty until the award of a Civil List pension in 1901. Success finally came with a novel, Green Mansions (1904), but he is best known for A Shepherd’s Life (1910), his ornithological writings, and an autobiographical memoir, Far Away and Long Ago (1918). He was also a pioneering conservationist and a founding member of the RSPB. He is buried in Worthing, West Sussex, in the same cemetery as Richard Jefferies. He is a national literary treasure in Argentina, where several public institutions and a town are named after him."

I first came across Hudson whilst looking for local writings in a bookshop in Ushuaia, the southern-most city of Argentina, where I happened upon the superbly named Idle Days In Patagonia in which the author describes the minutiae of the natural history encountered during his wanderings across the vast expanses of the Patagonian plains and Andean foothills. It was captivating reading whilst travelling across this landscape, but little did I then know of his prodigious output of novels and non-fiction and closer to home observations. A pioneer walker-philosopher chronicling a world and a landscape that now seem distant beyond years.  

The last words to Hudson from Afoot in England: "In walking ... there are alleviations which may be more to us than positive pleasures, and scenes to delight the eye that are missed by the wheelman in his haste, or but dimly seen or vaguely surmised in passing - green refreshing nooks and crystal streamlets, and shadowey woodland depths with glimpses of a blue sky beyond - all in the wilderness of the human heart".

The Epic of Everest: 'Still climbing - and then, no more'

Image courtesy of www.bfi.org.uk

I have finally found time to watch the BFI’s new release of The Epic of Everest, the contemporary film of the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition, directed by Captain John Noel, who accompanied George Mallory, Andrew Irvine and the rest of the party on their – ultimately doomed – third attempt to scale the world’s highest peak. Appropriately, it is a breath-taking piece of work.

This is a fairly instantaneous reflection, which will hopefully inspire anyone who has not seen it to seek out this ninety minute masterpiece. Once again, BFI have done a superlative job of restoring, packaging and sound-tracking this, now ninety year old, artifact of another era. They seem to have an endless conveyor belt of such gems: Here's a Health to the Barley Mow, BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, From the Sea to the Land Beyond, Robinson in Ruins ... the list goes on.

The initial scene-setting intertitles of the film are 'of their time' in conjuring up a context for the expedition based not just on the mountaineering challenge, but articulated through the language of empire and conquest, of battling against nature to subdue it. This was a time when the conceit that the natural world was something to be tamed was at its zenith; we now kid ourselves that we know better, whilst seemingly unable to pull back from this (unstoppable?) sham. However, as the film progresses, the original on screen commentary, written by the director, becomes more impressive, substantial and somewhat spiritual; the words of someone who bore direct witness to the events as they unfolded, sparsely dramatic and often poetic: "Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely - into a fairyland of ice". 

Expertly restored, the antique frames - seemingly, like their subject matter, antediluvian - have an otherworldly quality entirely suiting the epic images of ice and cordillera on screen, surely more so than the technically superior results of modern day filming. This feeling is enhanced by the colour washes (blue, purple, red) applied to some of the frames. The hues producing a dream-like sense that evokes the Antarctic Gothic of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, as well as the imagery from the pioneering days of Victorian Alpinism reproduced in Fergus Fleming's Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps and Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: haunting precipices, corniced ridges, looming towers of ice, endless glaciers.

Still from The Epic of Everest (Image courtesy of www.bfi.org.uk)

Noel, in the words of Wade Davis in the film's accompanying booklet: "a soldier by profession, but an artist in spirit", was a pioneering and highly innovative photographer and film-maker. The technology and equipment utilised to produce the film was both state-of-the-art and ingeniously deployed, enabling footage of unprecedented clarity to be shot from up to three miles away. Particularly striking are the circular telescopic stills that intersperse the film. These were created using a powerful telescope clipped to his camera and synchronised with the lens so that the image of the telescope appeared in the aperture. The imagery that these frames bring to mind is of an even higher realm than the five and a half miles that Everest stands proud of sea level; we could be looking at the lines etched into the moon seen through a high powered telescope gazing out to space.

The film would be spell-binding enough if silent but is brought to life ever more vividly by the new score composed by Simon Fisher Turner. Perfectly pitched, the soundtrack lithely shape-shifts from sparsely beatific piano-led sections to appropriately ominous strings (like Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their most portentous) mirroring the epic build of the images; whilst at times melting into a drone-like murmur of echoing sound-effects: creaking ice, the noise of ropes secured and pitons hammered home, yak bells. Musically the film takes a startling turn as it tracks Mallory and Irvine's ill-fated attempt on the summit; reaching 28,000 feet they attain the outer limit of human breathing and reluctantly resort to oxygen gas. At this point we hear the heavy, laboured breathing of oxygen masks, the sound of pioneers of a different frontier in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Human breath then mutates into emerging elemental tumult: a sonic apotheosis reached in a roaring crescendo evoking a soundscape of avalanche and approaching storm, constructed by multi-tracking internet storm recordings from Everest and elsewhere; a fitting coda to, in the words of John Noel's on screen commentary,: "The historic climax of our adventure - glorious because of the marvel of attainment - sad because of the tragedy of death".

Mallory and Irvine were last seen by fellow climber Noel Odell, who placed them at 28,400 feet, above the Second Step - a 40 metre wall of exposed rock and the most technically difficult barrier before reaching the summit. "Still climbing - and then, no more" reads the commentary. The last shots of the mountain are red tinted as cloud shadow slowly envelopes the immensity of the rock and ice; darkness overcoming the light.  

The cult of Mallory and Irvine has continued to inhabit our imagination ever since, an endless expedition into the mountains of our mind; ironically in many ways eclipsing the evidenced first ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay thirty years later (not helped by the pragmatic New Zealand persona of Hillary; his prosaic account of the record-breaking ascent, High Adventure, makes it seem anything but). The most intriguing mystery in mountaineering history remains: did they fall or collapse before reaching the summit or after it was attained? Tantalising evidence of the possibility that the climbers of 1924 had reached the summit was found during the 1999 Mallory and Irvine expedition, which – sensationally – found Mallory’s body within hours of its commencement. Jake Norton, the American mountaineer who was part of that and subsequent research expeditions believes that they probably did reach the summit before, in unimaginable exhaustion, they followed the wrong gully and Mallory fell to his death, leaving Irvine alone and stranded to perish in the impossible cold during the night. Norton's fascinating theory (and he admits it can only be guesswork) on what may have happened can be found on his The MountainWorld blog site.  

The expedition party: Irvine, first left on back row, and Mallory, second left (Image courtesy of blog.mountainworldproductions.com)

Although the futility of the deaths of the two climbers (and others who also died during the expedition), particularly so soon after the horrors of the Great War, is hard to comprehend there is, when following the party's progress on screen, an aura of residual nobility; surely the incendiary spark for the Everest fever that has grown ever since. All we see here contrasts quite strikingly with the current commercial imperatives that dominate activity around Everest, which seems to revolve around enabling appropriately rich, though often inappropriately skilled or fit clients, to 'reach their goals'; sucking away at the mystique of this sacred landscape, filling it with both real and metaphysical pollutants. All the while risking death and disfigurement. 'Because its there' sounds a hollower call to arms by the year. But perhaps this is over romanticising. The 1924 attempt was supported by a huge logistical effort, with over 500 people involved and camps strung out along fifteen miles of glacier above the base camp at 17,000 feet (the limit of the range of the main means of transportation, the yak). All this enormous effort cost money and a large part of the process of getting to the mountain, as now, was raising funds from wealthy sponsors and backers. It is also difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mallory in particular had become so obsessional about reaching the summit that he had drifted into a form of madness in which all else, including his family, was disregarded. In his history of the often fatal fascination that mountaineering can weave, Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane poignantly recounts the moment that Mallory's wife and three young children received the telegram of his death.   

The film also stands as an ethnographical record of the peoples of Tibet and Nepal and their way of life before outside influences started to seep across the scene. Here we see monks, sherpas and nomad shepherd communities, their dress and customs, and dependence on the yak. A patronising tone occasionally creeps into the commentary ("We cannot call them a musical race...") but generally the footage is left to speak for itself. Most striking is the image of the fortress monastery of Kampa Dzong ('The Shining Crystal Monastery', surely a psych-rock album title in waiting), looming into shot like a Crusader castle in the twelfth century Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Llama from the monastery had wished the expedition well but predicted that the spirits guarding the mountain (known as Chomo-Lung-Ma in Tibet: 'Goddess Mother of the World') would oppose their endeavour, and by the end Noel wondered whether this had come to pass.

The combination of ground-breaking use of film and photography - both still in their infancy as art forms, the unrivalled drama of the setting and the multiple narratives culminating in tragic yet heroic death make this an unmissable document of modern humanity's long climb to, what - conquer? understand? meet with? nature at its most raw and unforgiving. After the climactic last view of Mallory and Irvine before they disappear from view and in one of his final sections of on screen commentary, we get the feeling that Noel has left behind the bombast of imperial conquest as he muses: "We must think of ourselves and of nature. We spring from nature. In life we defy her, at death we return to her. We, who are so little, and nature who is so immense!".    

The last shot of Mallory, Irvine and the summit party from The Epic of Everest before they disappear from view (Image courtesy of www.bfi.org.uk)

References

Davis, W, 2011. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Vintage. 

Fleming, F, 2000. Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps. Granta.

Hillary, E, 1956. High Adventure. The Companion Book Club.

Macfarlane, R, 2003. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. Granta.

Nelsson, R (Ed.), 2007. The Guardian Book of Mountains. Guardian Books.

Tyndall, J, 1906. The Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in 1861. Dent.

Norton, J. What really happened to Mallory & Irvine Pts 1-111 http://blog.mountainworldproductions.com/2010/05/what-really-happened-to-mallory-irvine-part-iii.html

Traer, M. A tale of two men and geology on the roof of the world. http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/the-naked-elements/

The Crossing: Heroic endeavour and a guilty pleasure

After watching Adam Nicholson’s excellent recent two-part exploration of the history of the British whaling industry, I felt suddenly impelled to dig out an artifact of my musical past: a slightly dog-eared vinyl copy of The Crossing, Big Country’s debut album of 1983. Now this record, this band has to be seen as something of a guilty secret. I generally take unspoken and surely pointless pride in what I would like to see as the discerningly eclectic composition of my record collection. But Big Country were not, and are not, in any way cool or leftfield, and still await any retrospective reappraisal. They are lumped together with the bombastic, anthem-fixated, Celtic-tinged serious rock that was a musical flavour of the month during the mid-eighties; briefly in the commercial slip-stream of the bigger beasts of Simple Minds and U2 before the latter went stratospheric and Bono began his one man mission to save the world. The apotheosis, or rather nadir, of this ‘big music’ being Simple Minds ridiculously po-faced single Belfast Child, Jim Kerr’s attempt to solve the Northern Ireland conflict through seven minutes of over-emoted platitudes backed by long-coated fiddle players.

And yet, I still have a lot of time for plaid-shirted Big Country and this album in particular. It speaks of a yearning for a vaguely heroic view of landscape and the great outdoors which I have never really shaken off since childhood tales of daring-do, hard though it is to reconcile with the liberal, progressive mind-set with which I generally try and approach the world. It is there in the name of the band and album – ‘Big Country’ and ‘The Crossing’ – conjuring visions of stoical pioneers crossing new frontiers and vast unexplored lands. It is there in the music: chiming, bag-pipe echoing guitars; a muscular, martial rhythm section; and Stuart Adamson’s gruff yet plaintive vocals and lyrics. Also the cover art, with Boy’s Own-like images adorning the sleeve: polar explorers raising the flag, stern and weary men around a camp fire, a great-coated hero fleeing rocks falling from a cliff. These images and the musical motifs contained within the songs call to mind the escapist backwoods adventure within the pages of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands or Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male; not to mention South, Ernest Shackleton's account of the gritty real life drama surrounding the 1914-17 'Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition' to reach the South Pole in the ice-bound Endeavour. Although more nuanced, layered and contemporary in approach, there are even echoes of this spirit in the content and tone of the Mountains of the Mind/ The Wild Places/ The Old Ways trilogy that Robert Macfarlane (himself a fan of Rogue Male) has so expertly put together in recent years.

Now, if this is all feeling a little testosterone-fuelled, please feel free to switch to something more well-balanced; I look forward to putting on some Patti Smith or PJ Harvey as an antidote as soon as I finish typing.

There was clearly something in the Fife water inspiring this post-imperial landscape-scale machismo as Stuart Adamson's previous band, the more credibly post-punk outfit The Skids were also at it, with their best-known single, Into The Valley, lyrically anti-war but sonically anthemic; taking the listener soaring above the mountain-sides. A melancholy strain seemed to increasingly pervade Adamson's lyrics and Big Country's second album, Steeltown, chronicled landscapes and communities suffering industrial decline, again in heroic and semi-mystical everyman terms: 'All the landscape was the mill/ Grim as the reaper with a heart like hell/ With a river of bodies/ Flowing with the bell/ Here was the future for hands of skill'. The band carried on touring and recording long after their brief period of commercial success, supported by a loyal cult following. As a sad post-script, Adamson committed suicide whilst on tour in 2001.

The link with the whaling documentary is somewhat tangential, but bear with me. As Nicholson's documentary illustrated, by the mid-twentieth century the large-scale whaling industry was essentially the mechanised destruction of huge numbers of blue and humpback whales for the sake of the production of margarine; an unsustainable, morally bankrupt and eventually unprofitable pursuit, which led to the near extinction of some of the worlds greatest mammals. There is really nothing noble or heroic about this; just another example of the exploitation of nature for crass commercial gain. However, this is not the whole picture. One thinks of the crews who set sail from whaling ports around the British coast and pursued their catch to the extremities of the oceans, uncertain as to whether they would return; or of the now perpetually rusting and rotting remains of the unimaginably remote Leith Harbour whaling station in South Georgia, from where the waters of the Antarctic were trawled: here there are the ghosts of the endeavour and ingenuity of the ordinary whalermen who sought their livelihoods in this harsh world. This is the very stuff that The Crossing feeds on; elegiac, unspecific evocations of the toil of the common man against a back-drop of unforgiving nature, social injustice and doomed chance, as a sample of the albums lyrics attests: Harvest Home ('Who leads the mayday feasting/ Who saw the harvest home/ Who left the future wasting/ Who watched the families go'); Lost Patrol ('There is no beauty here friends/ Just death and rank decay'); Close Action ('The continents will fly apart/ The oceans scream and never part/ Divided souls can never rest/ Must join the nations break the test').

The disused whaling station at Leith Harbour, Stromness Bay, South Georgia (image from www.guardian.com)

The whaling station when active (image from photos.shetland-museum.org.uk)

An even clearer musical connection with the whalers comes from another album of the same period that I also still treasure: The Pogues debut Red Roses For Me, released in 1984. Shane McGowan's renegade Anglo-Irish rabble provide an edgier, rebel-folk angle on some of the same themes as The Crossing. Here there are beer-soaked stories of outsiders, exiles and navvies, making good or going to bad in their rough-hewn landscapes. In amongst the streams of whiskey and dark streets of London can be found The Greenland Whale Fishery, an old sea shanty (English rather than Irish as it happens) which appeared in print as far back as 1725 and chronicles a whale ships journey to 'a barren place ... where there's ice and snow and the whale-fish blow, and the daylights seldom seen'. As Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd state in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959): "Until 1830, the whaling ships put out each spring from London, King's Lynn, Hull, Whitby, bound for the right-whale grounds of Greenland. The best of our whaling ballads are about the Greenland fishery. After 1830, the fleets moved to Baffin Bay, and subsequently to the grounds off Hawaii and Peru, but still most of the songs the whalermen sang were of the Greenland days."

So, with a head full of paradoxical thoughts of noble industrial labour, Edwardian adventurers and whale ships in the heavy seas of Antarctica and Greenland, I'm sure I will continue to wear out the grooves of The Crossing; a guilty pleasure, a little piece of escapist nonsense hidden in the folds of my rational landscape. 

"400 miles, on fields of fire!"

Finding wildness: places to be left alone with yourself

A common leitmotif of writings and commentary on landscapes - both urban and rural - is that wildness, and nature itself, is on the retreat; clinging on in only a few hard to find redoubts. Received wisdom has it that in crowded overdeveloped Britain, and particularly in England, wild, little visited places are 'increasingly' hard to find: there is no escape from the all-pervasive noise, speed and stress of the man-made technologies that we have created. We are now enslaved by the forces that have also impoverished our environment. Rachel Carson's prophecy of a Silent Spring has come to pass, with absent natural sound replaced by the pandaemonium of the machine age.

"Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation, science lent her aid, and the wildness of these islands, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no cave in which to curl up, and no deserted valley." E.M. Forster

"...that cavernous, deadened heart of south England which now runs more or less uninterrupted from Norwich all the way to Bristol." Mark Cocker

"This is one of the few places left in England where you can actually open your ears and listen. Everyday we are bombarded by sound and noise, but so rarely have the opportunity of really listening." Chris Watson

Even Robert Macfarlane, in his generally uplifting paean to The Wild Places, gives the impression that only a skilled landscape horse-whisperer such as he is able to locate special places of wildness:

"The losses to the wild places of Britain and Ireland were unignorable, and the threats that they faced - pollution, climate change - appeared greater in number and vigour than ever before. But I knew that the wildness had not entirely vanished."

The credo of exclusivity and a diminishing stock of remote places is taken up by Christopher Walton:

"Even in England there are still places where it is possible to feel as if you are the first to stand there. These places are few and far between, lost deep in the hills where nobody ever goes, or hemmed in by humming railway lines; but if you look hard...you will find them."

What puzzles me about much fine writing on landscape, as illustrated above, is that it seems to ignore or be in denial of a simple truth: remote places are all around and do not require arcane or esoteric knowledge in order to be enjoyed; just a map and a bit of curiosity. Maybe celebrating the remarkable, diverse and accessible geography within our midst is too far from the overriding narrative of shrinking biodiversity, ruptured ecosystems, climate change and urbanisation; fiddling while Rome burns.

My contention would be that if people feel that wildness has gone, been corralled into carefully stage managed nature ghetto's or is simply out of bounds, then how can we ever expect them to feel a sense of value for the areas of natural tranquility and beauty that surround them? And, by extension, feel a personal - rather than abstract - stake in pulling back from the pillage of the planet's natural resources? 

So here is a gently dissenting voice; a hosanna to exploring and revisiting special places:

"On springy heath, along the hill-top edge/ Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance/ To that still roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep/ And only speckled by the midday sun." This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Samuel Taylor Coleridge