Ultima Thule

'Concerning Thule, our historical information is still more uncertain, on account of its outside position; for Thule, of all the countries that are named, is set farthest north. 'Strabo, Geography, 1st century BC

The term 'Ultima Thule' was used in Classical and medieval geographical writing to describe mysterious places in the distant north beyond the known world of trade, empire and civilisation. Since the first use of the concept by the Greek explorer Pytheas debate has raged as to whether the phrase refers to Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Orkney, Shetland or, perhaps more likely, an amalgam of all dimly known northern climes. Having just spent several days in the unambiguously epic and often thrillingly peculiar landscapes of Iceland I can only back its candidature to be the very embodiment of Ultima Thule.

'It is no use trying to describe it, but it was quite up to my utmost expectations as to strangeness: it is just like nothing else in the world.' 

William Morris on his first visit to Iceland (1877)

As with Morris, my words can only pale in the face of a first sighting of Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, and the other wonders of the trip, so here is a visual montage of 'the place where the sun goes to rest.' (Geminus of Rhodes, 1st century BC).

'Thule; an island in the Ocean between the northern and western zone, beyond Britain, near Orkney and Ireland; in this Thule, when the sun is in Cancer, it is said that there are perpetual days without nights.'
Servius, 4th century AD

'By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright.
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule –
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space – out of Time.'

Extract from Edgar Allan Poe's poem Dream-Land (1844)

'(Auden) said that Iceland was like the sun that had set, (but) you could see the sunshine on the mountains: Iceland followed him like that - the colours of the setting sun on the mountains. He said that he was not always thinking about Iceland ... that he was never not thinking about Iceland.'

Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, Moon Country (1996)

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).

'And far away a mountain zone ...'

"And far away a mountain zone,

A cold white waste of snow-drifts lies"

Speak of the North, Charlotte Bronte

The new year's first encounter with a snowscape, and its the exceptional array of colour that fixes in the memory: the white and grey shades of the snow and sky a counterpoint to the tawny russet and sodden green of the hillsides. The winter sun seems to bring urgency to its brief displays and, filtered through cirrus and mist, its light pulls the life up out of a landscape that could otherwise appear drab and dormant at this time of year. 

Here in the Black Mountains the snow line is above about 300 metres; thick, dominant and drifting on the tops and slopes facing north and west into the weather front, more fleeting and peripheral on more sheltered ground. Long views become visions of coalescence: if not exactly the Antarctic vastness of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, there is the same "tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two".   

Up on the Pen Allt Mawr ridge, in Edward Thomas' 'great silence of snow', the whiteness is satisfyingly deep and proper; every footstep crunching in line with our childlike expectation of how snow should be, innocent of slush and dirt and imminent waning.

One of the many joys of a landscape visited by snow is the shape-shifting quality it can bring to familiar features.

The stone of a usually welcoming summit shelter, now a threatening ice-bound realm.  

  
A fallen tree cloaked in snow, with strangely human lines; from the mind of Andy Goldsworthy.

A trig point looming out of the cloud becomes a thing of ghostly sentinel reassurance amidst the enveloping whiteness.

  
Though walking in wintry conditions requires care and knowledge, in the words of R.S. Thomas snow feels no pity, it can also be a welcoming host; on heather uplands the thin dotted green or black path lines on the map become gleaming white high ways on the ground, illuminating the route ahead. This snowy benevolence enhanced by the boot tracks that give confidence of the right path taken (assuming a lost soul is not being followed). On this occasion the hard stamped marks of a fell runner anticipated my route, the same circuit completed in reverse.

   


























And, in this far away mountain zone, how does it feel? It feels like I don't ever want to come down.

Hill people and sites of misadventure in the mountains

If you find that landscape photography can often be quite formulaic and ever so slightly dull - despite the beauty of its subject matter and the technical excellence behind it - then its nice to come across something a bit different. Thanks to Henry Iddon for alerting me to his interesting work (images and words reproduced from Henry's site).

A place to go - sites of mountain misadventure

"A work in progress, shot on 5x4 large format, that aims to consider the mountain and wilderness landscape, and how the infinite power and scale of the natural environment dwarfs humanity.

What this work hopes to do is go beyond the barrier, that picture postcard one dimensionality that is often found when looking at a mountain landscape. To make images, with supporting text, that imbue a place with emotion. Mountain landscapes will not always be simple ‘places of delight’ - scenery as sedative, topography so arranged to feast the eye.

What we see with our eyes is influenced by what we know, however much that contradicts the way we have been taught to view the upland landscape as a place of benign beauty."

  

Go to the A Place to Go pages for further examples and a more detailed statement about the project.

Hill People

"A project to investigate the contemporary individuals who engage with the natural and upland environment." 

Go to the Hill People pages for further examples and a more detailed statement about the project. 

Navigating to a 'high forcing chamber of history'

The Chartist Cave:
Image from www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk 

"The union met in secret on the dark side of the hill, by the light of a thousand candles" Ironmasters, The Men They Couldn't Hang

Participation in a day-into-night navigation course on the edge of the Brecon Beacons has got me ruminating on two unrelated topics, both stimulated by spending a cold Friday night on a moor looking for a cave: the understated value of moving through terrain using the basic disciplines of route-finding with compass and map; and a visceral piece of radical landscape history. 

The session was part of on-going training for the Black Mountains Upland Volunteers scheme that I have previously posted about.  At 4pm our small group ascended a track above the village of Trefil, just north of Tredegar on the high ground of Mynydd Llangynidr above the heads of the Ebbw and Sirhowy valleys; an area known with etymological accuracy as Blaenau, meaning 'heights, uplands, headwaters'. Before us stretched what would normally be a boggy morass of rough limestone moorland, but the ground was bone-hard on account of a lack of recent precipitation and the chill wind that whipped into our faces, like a perpetual slap. The temperature had remained resolutely low all day and, in R.S. Thomas' words, "the cold landscape returned my stare".

Jan Morris aptly describes the unusual feeling and topography of this transitional space between the, once mighty now post-industrial, valleys of Gwent and Glamorgan to the south and the majestic hill country of the Brecon Beacons National Park to the north:

"This is country unlike any other in Wales, partly because of its terrain, partly because of its fateful associations, and coming to it is like entering some high forcing chamber of history. Up your road goes, up the steep limestone ridge, pocked with caves and old workings and the remains of tramways, until crossing the ridge of the escarpment you find the harsh expanse of the Blaenau stretching there before you. Across it runs the cruel Heads of the Valleys highway, cars, trucks and motor-bikes crawling through the wind, and there are the remains of long-abandoned workings, and half-obliterated tips. It is colourless but compelling - the air rasping, the moorland glowering, and on the south side of the road the industrial valleys suddenly plunging away with their mines and chapels and railway tracks jam-packed and canyon-like towards the sea."

At first sight, our surroundings seemed unpromising country for navigating around: sink holes, cairns, springs, small pools and narrow water-courses the only features amongst the washed-out winter monotony of heather, course grass and sedge; the lazy meanders of the contours on the map mirroring the relative lack of variation in elevation on the ground. Slowly but surely we found our 'bearings', becoming accustomed to the coming dusky gloom; the relative sparseness of features actually sharpening our ability to match map with fact. And realising that small sink hole symbols on paper translate into mightily deep depressions in reality, literally swallowing up the ground. We were soon in our stride, communicating in the vocabulary of navigation, which has to be learnt like an esoteric code: magnetic North, back bearings, catch-points, hand rails, aiming off, Eastings and Northings.

Image from www.newportgwentdcs.org.uk

And so, like a team of worker ants, and repeating our mantra of calculations -  bearing, distance and estimated time - we worked our way from feature to feature to the half way point, a limestone cavern known as the Chartist Cave. With a bit of help from our instructor to locate the entrance to the cave in the now pitch darkness, we encamped in the chamber to refuel before plotting a course back to our start point. 

And the cave is also the entry point to the second theme of this post. It is named for its use, according to local folklore, as a secret meeting place and arms factory for Chartists from the area in the 1830's. Chartism was "...the first independent working-class movement in the world, a snow-ball movement of social protest..." (Briggs). Although some Chartists took a moral stance against violence others were less idealistic, including those who used the caves around Blaenau to help prepare for a semi-military campaign of social disobedience and insurrection.   

In  1839 several thousand working men marched on Newport from the area and other locations across the South Wales valleys in protest at the imprisonment in Monmouth of a number of prominent English Chartists. On the morning of 5th November the 'Battle of Newport' took place, but it was an inglorious defeat for the by now undisciplined and drunken Chartist 'army' who were no match for the professional soldiery who had been stationed in the town to quell the uprising. Nine of the protesters were killed, most quickly fled back to their valley communities and their ring-leaders received predictably harsh sentences for their crimes of treason; reprieved from execution but transported to Australia for life.

On returning home, and with thoughts of this piece of history  brought vividly to life on a chill winters night, I was reminded of a lustily sung favourite song of old, Ironmasters by The Men They Couldn't Hang; a hymn to the radical uprisings of the era against the ironmasters and coal magnets of South Wales, "...from the smoky stacks of Merthyr to the hills of Ebbw Vale".

Although the Chartists ultimately failed in their own time, the rights for which they protested, including universal suffrage, would later become corner-stones of democratic systems around the world. In the words of E.P. Thompson, "we may thank them for these years of heroic culture". And yet, pondering the ruthless, exploitative industrialists of mid-nineteenth century South Wales and the modern day hegemony of global capitalism, I can't help thinking that The Men They Couldn't Hang were right: "Ironmasters, they always get their way".

References

Birkett, Bill, 2002. The Hillwalker's Manual. Milnthorpe: Cicerone.

Briggs, Asa, 1991. A Social History of England. London: Penguin.

Morris, Jan, 1998. Wales: Epic views of a small country. London: Penguin. 

Owen, Hywel Wyn, 1998. A Pocket Guide to the Place-Names of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Thomas, R.S., 1996. Amen in Selected Poems. London: Dent.

Thompson, E.P., 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.

Blaenau-Gwent County Borough Council web site:
http://www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk/8042.asp

On landscape: finding the connections across the landscape divides

My own interest in landscape was sparked by childhood visits to my grand-parents farm in the South Pennines; tramping across the Yorkshire moors, wondering about the evocative ruined farmsteads and rocky outcrops, and imagining what was over the next hill. In recent years I've explored the subject more formally through an MSc in Landscape Archaeology. As enjoyable and rewarding as this was, I've often been struck by the narrow focus of much of writing on landscape themes, the lack of cross-fertilisation between different disciplines and areas of interest, and the absence of a feel for the range of emotions that being out in a landscape triggers. Music, visual art, poetry and non-technical prose seem sadly neglected in many of the 'landscape' books on my shelves.