Landscapism dispatch #1

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


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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's joy in a simple place

Not that I need an excuse for a walk, but inspired by my current read - Rob Cowan's superb nature/landscape/memoir, Common Ground - and buoyed by the small victory of producing a first basic map in a new (to me) GIS package, I headed around my own patch of edge-land. Oldbury Court and Frenchay Moor might not exactly be terra neglectus, but away from the perpetual dog walkers there are many quiet nooks and acres here, part of Bristol's characteristically laid-back green drift into the surrounding countryside. 

This is a simple place, a minor place, but there's joy here in the cold January sun.

I've been to a minor place
and I can say I like its face,
If I am gone and with no trace

I will be in a minor place 

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - A Minor Place

New horizons on the Gwent Levels

Some images here from a preparatory field visit for my forthcoming PhD research. In looking for a contrasting case study to supplement the study of 'monastic' estates in the south-east Welsh Marches I have been drawn to what is for me a new landscape, both geographically and topographically: the Gwent Levels. This is reclaimed estuarine terrain, occupying a narrow band of coastal alluvium to the east and west of Newport, with much in common with the larger and more well known Somerset Levels across the Severn Estuary.

Unlike the more inaccessible and agriculturally marginal uplands of Wales the low-lying coastal plain of Gwent and Monmouthshire has been an open-door for incursions from the east, most notably by those masters of strategy and technology, the Romans and the Normans. It was during the period of Roman occupation that the first systematic drainage of the Levels began and sea-walls were constructed. This infrastructure having fallen into disuse, the powerful Norman Marcher Lords renewed the perpetual struggle to master the tides and exploit the hyper-fertile potential of reclaimed land in the twelfth century. 

In order to cement their hold on the area and provide compliant labour in a highly feudal period the Marcher Lords imported English settlers to work the land (yes, economic migrants have always been with us) and so, as with the coastal districts of southern Pembrokeshire and the Gower further west, there is a legacy of English place-names (Englishries), and indeed surnames, that remains to this day. The Marcher Lords also granted lands in the area to monastic houses and this is where my research comes in. The coastal wetland strip between Newport and Caldicot known as Caldicot Level was the location for a number of monastic holdings: the Benedictine Goldcliff Priory, of which nothing remains in its original location, occupied a low promontory at the water's edge and had extensive lands in the surrounding area, whilst the Cistercians of the nearby Llantarnam Abbey and Tintern Abbey operated large granges here. Monastic estates in and around Magor, Undy, Redwick, Porton, Goldcliff and Nash were thus key agents in the on-going reclamation and landscape development seen during the medieval period.

My introduction to this table-top flat watery landscape of marching pylons, vast skies, somnolent villages, meadows bounded by reens (drainage channels) and birdsong - hemmed in and encroached upon by the looming but strangely unseen urban edge of Newport and the Llanwern Steeworks complex - will be followed by further visits and discovery. I hope not only to provide further detail on the landscape history of the area, but also to apply a deep topography sensibility; providing some westward psychogeographical momentum, away from the equally estuarine and history-soaked flatlands of Essex and East Anglia. 






References

Rippon, S, 1996. The Gwent Levels: evolution of a wetland landscape. CBA.

Williams, D, 1976. White Monks in Gwent and the Border. Griffin Press.

Williams, M, 1975. The Making of the South Wales Landscape. Hodder and Stoughton.

       

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.    

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.

Deep topographers; quote, unquote

“We are surrounded by the greatest of free shows. Places. Most of them made by man, remade by man.”

Jonathan Meades

“The search for Utopian landscapes is probably an endless one, but I do know that by staying in one place I will never find them.”

Werner Herzog

“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 

“What I have tried to do is explore the natural history of this unofficial countryside, what it is, and how it works, not so much as an explorer as a curious passer-by. We begin again.”

Richard Mabey

"Take me back to beautiful England/ And the grey, damp filthiness of ages/ Fog rolling down behind the mountains/ And on the graveyards, and dead sea-captains."

Polly Harvey

“Higher worlds that you uncover/ Light the path you want to roam.”

Roky Erickson/ Tommy Hall

 

Kes: A Kestrel for a Knave

"The wood ended at a hawthorn hedge lining one side of a cart track. Across the track and beyond an orchard stood the Monastery Farm, and at the side of it, the ruins and one remaining wall of the monastery. Billy walked along the hedge bottom, searching for a way through. He found a hole, and as he crawled through a kestrel flew out of the monastery wall and veered away across the fields behind the farm. Billy knelt and watched it. In two blinks it was a speck in the distance; then it wheeled and began to return. Billy hadn’t moved a muscle before it was slipping back across the face of the wall towards the cart track.

Half-way across the orchard it started to glide upwards in a shallow curve and alighted neatly on a telegraph pole at the side of the cart track. It looked round, roused its feathers, then crossed its wings over its back and settled. Billy waited for it to turn away, then, watching it all the time, he carefully stretched full length in the hedge bottom. The hawk tensed and stood up straight, and stared past the monastery into the distance. Billy looked in the same direction. The sky was clear. A pair of magpies flew up from the orchard and crossed the wood, their quick wing beats seeming to just keep them airborne. They took stance in a tree close by and started to chatter, each sequence of chatterings sounding like one turn of a football rattle. The hawk ignored them and continued to stare into the distance. The sky was still clear. Then a speck appeared on the horizon. It held like a star, then fell and faded. Died. To re-appear a moment later further long the sky-line. Fading and re-forming, sometimes no more than a point in the texture of the sky. Billy squeezed his eyes and rubbed them. On the telegraph pole the hawk was sleek and still. The dot magnified slowly into its mate, circling and scanning the fields round the farm."

A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) Barry Hines

"You might think its funny

You might think he gets whats coming to him

You might be wrong"

Read full review of Kes - Original Soundtrack - JOHN CAMERON on Boomkat.com ©

Keatsian edgelands

Continuing the motorway-edgelands-psychogeographical theme of my last post, thank you to Christopher Ian Smith for alerting me to his short film, Arterial: an interpretation of John Keats poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci, transposed to a modern, edgeland setting.

ARTERIAL from Modern on Vimeo.

Looks like Modern Moving Images has some other intriguing projects in production.

And here is Keats’ original ballad, inspiration for many a Pre-Raphaelite painter, including Arthur Hughes (left), in full:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Soft Estate: Edgelands as wilderness, or the new Picturesque

M2 Medway Services Eastbound 2013

Oil on shellac on linen 180 × 140 cm; Edward Chell

Soft Estate is the title of a fascinating and handsomely produced new book by the artist Edward Chell, with other notable contributions, that adds to the growing corpus of writing, and artistic output, engaging with edgelands and other previously neglected liminal landscapes. The title derives from the Highways Agency description of the natural habitats on the edge of motorways and trunk roads. The book, distributed by Cornerhouse, looks at how these borders offer a refuge for wildlife and a modern form of wilderness. In the author's words:

“While 18th Century tourists travelled to areas such as the Lake District to capture images of wild places, in today’s countryside, uncontrolled wilderness only springs up in the margins of our transport networks and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. These soft estates invite a new kind of tourist, new ways of looking and new forms of visual representation.”

Of course, this is not completely new territory - Richard Mabey and Marion Shoard have long blazed a trail for a greater acknowledgement and understanding of new relationships between post-industrial society and tenacious natural environments - as Bryan Biggs points out in the book's foreword, and expanded on in my review of another recent book, Urban Wildscapes (Eds. Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan). Mabey, so adept at perceptive and well-rounded commentary on the ragged edges of the natural world, contributes to the book with his essay, Hidden Dips, which celebrates 'natures irrepressible inventiveness' in the seemingly hostile context of motorway topography; highlighting, for instance, the resemblance of the monumental Spaghetti Junction interchange near Birmingham ('a concrete village green') to 'a gigantic piece of Land Art', and the spread of hardy plant species such as Danish scurvy grass (which he dubs 'wayfrost') throughout the road network, attracted by the saltiness of its tarmacadam host. 

The central argument of the book is that there is a 'connective visual experience' between the Picturesque designed landscapes of the eighteenth century and the modern motorway infrastructure, which both acts as a network to visit the fossilised National Trust world of stately homes and deer parks and also mimics the use of reveals, curves, inclines and other architectural conceits to mediate the relationship with, and views of, the surrounding environment. Moreover, the inclusion of ruins and follies as a key component of the Picturesque view is today replicated by the scenes of ruination and dereliction in the edgelands through which trunk roads, bypasses and motorways often pass. 

The parallel between the designed landscapes of the Picturesque, commissioned by an elite for their own pleasure and as symbols of status and refinement, and the functional infrastructure of modern communication networks is, perhaps, a little over-stated. However, this is a compelling and well-articulated case. In some respects, it is self-evident that the shadow of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and the other titan's of the age who re-imagined the vast grounds of the gentry 250 years ago looms large, overtly or subliminally, over the work of modern landscape designers, developers and planners. The use of tree planting, lakes and water features, bridges and carefully planned vegetation to 'soften' transport infrastructure and other new build developments is the result of this legacy, and plain to see. Whether you think this is a necessary process to help create a connection with the wider historic landscape or unimaginative, derivative and mass-produced sops to a backward-looking view of the countryside depends on your perception; and, when it comes to landscape of course, perception is all.

It is certainly interesting to see the well presented images of examples of landscape features from both forms of designed landscapes side by side, challenging my initial view that they were unlikely bed-fellows. For instance, the complex set of water features developed by Brown at Croome Court Park, Worcestershire in 1760, which do bring to mind the latter-day carefully constructed 'naturalness' of lakes and ponds that are so often used to soften (as well as providing flood control for) the commercial functionality of motorways, trunk roads, and their adjacent hinterland of business parks and retail complexes. As the author states, despite their inspiration in the imagery of Classical antiquity,

"The industrial dimensions of some of these artificial retreats (of the eighteenth century), where history, dreams and money collided, have more in common with Meadow Hall or Bluewater than with Epidaurus or Paestum".      

It is also the case that these two landscape types have a shared sense of year zero and dislocation from what went before, which separates them from much landscape development, characterised by evolution and adaptation. In the same way that the designers of the Picturesque and their patrons had no qualms about re-engineering natural morphology or demolishing or moving inconveniently situated buildings, so the motorway and its infrastructure often obliterates and destroys the existing terrain through which it passes. Palimpsest is an overused trope when it comes to landscape, but the overlay of what went before with a new canvas is exactly what we can see here.  

As this conjoining of apparently binary era's and aesthetics filters into your perception, the other parallels that the book travels through (literally, along the M4 as it traverses 'a golden triangle' of great houses and their parks) come into clearer sight: mock Chinese bridges and concrete flyovers, the carefully managed access routes and viewpoints around country estates and food distribution complexes, and the tedium through time of long-distance travel stop-offs at both coaching inns and motorway service stations. It can, though, often take something of a leap of the imagination to view contemporary utilitarian blandness on a par with architecture that has had the luxury of time to bed into its landscape. Much fits with Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts melancholy description: "Nameless bridge, its cast concrete walls and pillars are dark with run-off stains and vertical deltas of algae ... It is a barely registered, blink-of-an-eye place" (from Edgelands: Journeys into England's true wilderness). However, in some instances, the functional modern out-performs the historic in terms of grandeur. The M40 cutting through the Chilterns at Stockenchurch is described here in poetic terms:

"As the motorway begins to descend to the west, the cutting is heralded and framed by a high-arched single-span bridge. Progressing through what is a sculpted and gradual transition curve, the view beyond towards Oxford is revealed and, despite what is coming already being known, always has an element of visual catharsis". 

A personal favourite motorway landscape, connecting the ancient to the modern, is the windswept section of the M62 that traverses the high moorland of the mid-Pennines Lancashire-Yorkshire border at its bleakest; Stott Hall Farm a particular highlight, a Yorkshire yeoman's farmstead standing firm and unwilling to budge as the east and westward carriageways part to go round it. This is a different take on the territory that Iain Sinclair explores in his epic tramp around the M25, as described in London Orbital. To Sinclair the motorway was "...a conceptual ha-ha (marking) the boundary of whatever could be called London". But you sense that the road is there to be used as a devise for meditations on the places and histories through which it passes, rather than explored as part of the landscape itself. 

  

Image from www.thebluecoat.org.uk

Imagery and illustrations are often regrettably absent or of poor quality in books on landscape themes. This is emphastically not the case with Soft Estate, which is stacked full of high quality photographs of landscaped parkland, wild flowers and motorway topography. The most impressive are the images of the author's own artistic work - paintings, prints, and objects, made using a variety of materials including road dust and etched car parts (see examples above and below). His work takes part inspiration from the vibrant plates displaying exotic flora of the New World found within Victorian natural history compendium's, but also plays with notions of the 'carbon footprint' of the subject matter of the book by literally being composed of the pollutants - oil and dust - that our motorised society exhales. The prominence of wild flowers and plants in this work articulates another theme of the book, the quite staggering (and heartening) volume and diversity of vegetation that inhabits the soft estate, particularly now that the agencies responsible for this terrain seem to have moved to a more enlightened and naturalistic vision of landscape management: the near 10 million trees planted in the 1960's and early 70's alone; the vast colonies of crocus, columbine, Jacob's ladder, wild tulips, daffodils, foxglove, fritillary, primrose and more that have found a safe haven from habitat loss.

Creeping buttercup Ranunculus repens 2013
Acrylic on lacquer on gesso panel 28 x 23cm; Edward Chell

Partical 10 Mantel Stick (one of a pair) 2013
Laser etched stainless steel middle box silencer on stand
40.75 x 25.5 x 11.5 cm; Edward Chell

Where I would take issue with the books narrative, is the claim (oft repeated elsewhere) that the verges and unmanaged spaces that make up the 'soft estate' provide a last refuge for wildlife; a wilderness in the midst of harsh urbanisation juxtaposed with industrialised agriculture. Of course, intensification of agriculture and increased urban development, and the attendant degradation of natural ecosystems, have been a feature of Britain and the developed world (and increasingly, developing societies) since the agrarian and industrial revolutions that picked up pace in the mid nineteenth century. However, the picture is complex and multi-layered, with ebbs and flows in the health and wealth of the landscape, both spatial and temporal. The idea that a sense of wildness and engagement with the natural world can only now be found in these limited and often relatively uninspiring places (and in some cases, non-places) is, in my view, misguided; an idea that I have expanded upon in my blog post, Finding wildness: places to be left alone with yourself.  

The book, in emphasising the beauty and interest that can undoubtably be found in what could be called 'motorscapes' also has one curious omission. There is limited mention, and visual imagery, of the fuel, litter and noise pollution that is a significant element of the motorway and road network, perhaps even its defining feature. I have no doubt that a journey in the eighteenth century would have also included plenty of unpleasant sights (and smells), a fact we are shielded from by the pristine televisual imagery of costume drama's. However, it is certainly hard to separate out the aesthetic pleasures that a motorway journey provides from the pervasive acrid smell of petrol, plastic detritus of overblown consumerism and metronomic roar of engine and rubber on tarmac. Of course it could be argued that such associations already dominate mainstream perceptions (in as much as they exist in the popular consciousness) and there is, therefore, value in counter-balancing this with the positivity and novel viewpoint that the book provides.

Long journeys on motorways have always been an opportunity to glimpse into the half-scenes which you pass, to wonder about what lies beyond. Reading and viewing this book has also made me look at the more immediate surroundings in a new way. So next time you are stuck in a tedious traffic jam on a motorway, you have a choice. To either feel trapped - dislocated and shielded from the outside world - only able to experience the road, in Iain Sinclair's words as a "...dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape"; or you can realise that around you is a new world of visual stimuli, designed and sculptured by rational hands, but also strangely wild and unsurveyed. 

Alongside the publication of the book, the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool has recently held a Soft Estate exhibition featuring the work of Edward and a number of other artists presenting work on a similar theme, which has now moved on to Spacex in Exeter. A description of the exhibition and further musings on the subject matter can be found on Gerry Cordon's always thought-provoking That's how the light gets in blog. An interesting short review of the book can also be found on The New English Landscape blog.

Here is a preview of the Soft Estate exhibition: