Saturday 26 December 2015

PhD research paper #1. Approaches to the study of landscape archaeology and history

From time to time I will post 'bite size' chunks of the material I am preparing for my PhD thesis: works in progress, but content which I feel may be of interest to a wider audience. All will be very much draft versions, not necessarily - probably not - reflecting the final wording that will eventually appear in the Thesis. In-text references are included but a full bibliography is not. This paper is based on a section of the initial literature review. 


Approaches to the study of landscape archaeology and history


Landscape archaeology in context


Figure 1: A landscape-scale view of medieval strip lynchets flanking an Iron Age hillfort with a post-medieval deer park in the background, Dyrham, Gloucestershire (Author).

In 1998 a collection of papers that examined the contemporary state of landscape archaeology was published in honour of one of the discipline’s key founding figures: Christopher Taylor. In his introductory chapter Tom Williamson (1998, 1) provided a lucid explanation of what archaeological research at a landscape scale encompasses (see Figure 1):

‘It is distinguished, not so much by a coherent body of applied technique or theory, but by subject-matter. In essence, landscape archaeologists are concerned with explaining how what we see today came to look the way it does, and with interpreting the spatial patterns and structures created in the past in terms of social and economic behaviour. In particular, landscape archaeology is characterised by an interest in scales of analysis wider than that of the ‘site’: it focusses on the broader matrices of settlement patterns, field systems, territories and communications. Lastly, its tools tend, for the most part, to be non-destructive – aerial photography, earthwork surveys and field walking’.

To this list we should now add Geographical Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, satellite imagery and other spatial computing technologies. Williamson goes on to point out that landscape archaeology and landscape history are to some extent interchangeable terms and many researchers who are involved in this area would be hard-pressed to confirm which of the two disciplines they fall into. I will make no distinction here and will use landscape archaeology, with an implied use of physical evidence alongside documentary sources, as short-hand for both terms from now on.     

The academic foundations and historiography of landscape archaeology will be touched on in due course but first it is instructive to briefly turn to the absence of theory touched on in Williamson’s quote. Theoretical context may not be thought to weigh heavily on contemporary landscape archaeology practice but is increasingly ingrained in academic discourse within the field, perhaps emblematical of a widening hinterland of complementary ideas and approaches that have the potential to converge around the concept of landscape. Two books which reflect on and aim to advance the relationship between landscape archaeology and theory provide examples of this.[1]

In the introduction to their edited volume Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives, Ashmore and Knapp (1999, 1) explicitly identify the move from landscape seen purely as passive backdrop, resource or object of gaze to an emphasis on its ‘socio-symbolic dimensions: landscape is an entity that exists by virtue of its being perceived, experienced, and contextualized by people’. In this sense they are acknowledging the increased importance of social theory in archaeological study of landscape: understanding how people interrelate with and imbue meaning to space and place through time. Foundational to this are the ideas of the pioneering American social geographer, Carl Sauer who first conceptualised the notion of cultural landscape, distinct from but interrelated to the natural landscape (Sauer 1963; Wylie 2007, 19). Building on this theoretical broadening Bender’s influential edited volume, Landscape: Politics and Perspective (1993), sought to bring together archaeological, anthropological and geographical perspectives on the cultural landscape (including phenomenological ideas of landscape as experience discussed later in this chapter), although with an emphasis on urban settlement and specific monuments. Ashmore and Knapp (1999, 4) sought to further embed a cross-cultural approach to the total landscape and therefore include a broad spectrum of contributors, in part to break-down the barriers between different academic traditions (e.g. American and British, processual and post-processual).

Of particular relevance to this Thesis are the ‘terms and themes’ that Ashmore and Knapp (1999, 8-19) identify for landscape. Building on UNESCO’s categorisation of cultural landscapes,[2] they provide a more nuanced triptych of interpretive descriptors: constructed landscapes, conceptualized landscapes, and ideational landscapes (the latter recognising imaginative and emotional ‘insider perspectives’). Within these categories they locate four often overlapping themes. Firstly, landscape as memory, where continuity (e.g. re-use, reinterpretation etc.) becomes an important consideration, and a key theme also examined at length by Shama (1995). Secondly landscape as identity, to help people self-locate the place they most identify with or that identifies them. Thirdly, landscape as social order: the role of place in cultural relationships, encompassing considerations of gender, class, race etc. And finally, landscape as transformation, recognising the interrelatedness of space and time and that: ‘Ancient sites, monuments and even entire landscapes may be transformed and re-used as people encounter and interact with particular places, as they re-create the past’ (Ashmore and Knapp 1999, 19). This will be a useful conceptual framework to return to in the interpretive and discursive sections of this Thesis.

In Ideas of Landscape (2007a) Matthew Johnson adopts a more partisan approach via a clear and stated agenda to deconstruct the empirical English landscape tradition of landscape archaeology, historical geography and local history, as exemplified by the pioneering work of Hoskins, Beresford and others (Hoskins 1955; Beresford 1957; Beresford and St Joseph 1958), and contrasting it with the more theoretically grounded explorations of landscape found in anthropology, cultural geography and post-processual archaeology (see, for example, Bender 1993; Cosgrove 2008; Ucko and Layton 1999, Wylie 2007). Moreover his aim is to promote a new agenda that brings together the best of these different approaches. In contrast to the focus on ancient and prehistoric landscapes in Ashmore and Knapp’s work, Johnson (2007a, 201-2) is keen to advocate a new landscape approach for non-intrusive historical archaeology, a discipline which he feels has been marginalised (or has perhaps always been marginal), particularly in the ‘sharp, critical environments’ of Oxbridge.

Johnson articulates a perceptive description and critique of existing traditions that to some observers (particularly in a lively debate with Andrew Fleming in the pages of the Landscapes journal (Fleming 2007, 2008; Johnson 2007b)) is excessive in its attack on still vital and relevant fieldwork techniques and only sets out a new agenda in brief and rather vague terms (Fleming 2007, 97; Pryor 2010, 748; Rippon 2009, 244-45). However, the author does helpfully articulate a clear delineation (within the UK) between scholars and practitioners engaged in landscape archaeology research and interpretation, and those who consider landscape from a cultural geography perspective. This somewhat fractured approach to landscape study is a recurring theme when reviewing the literature of the past forty years or so and might explain, or be a symptom of, the fact that there is no tradition of a single, unified landscape discipline in British academia. This is an on-going disconnect and there would seem to be significant scope for greater cross-fertilisation of knowledge and ideas (Fairclough 2012; Schofield 2007). Johnson’s underlying call for combined methodologies is reflective of the direction of travel of academic discourse and one that is taken up in this research project.

The development of landscape archaeology

  
The antecedents of the fieldwork tradition that Johnson critiques and which remains very much part of contemporary British landscape archaeology can be found in antiquarianism but were particularly developed by O.G.S Crawford during his long term of office as Archaeology Officer for the Ordnance Survey in the inter-war period and up to 1946 (Hauser 2007, 155-161; Rippon 2009, 232). His ground-breaking combination of field archaeology, aerial photography and mapping to record and understand the landscape, for instance the distinction between what he termed Celtic fields and later Saxon or medieval field systems, laid the foundations for modern archaeological interpretation on a landscape scale (Bowden 2001, 29; Gardiner et al 2012, 3).[3]

In the early post-war period historical geography and economic history were the disciplines providing the impetus for later developments in landscape archaeology, through local studies (e.g. village plans) and the mapping of historical data at a regional and national scale (Baker 2003, 6-9; Rippon 2009, 230).[4] W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (1955) has, of course, to come into the picture here. Hoskins (see Figure 2) was an economic historian by background rather than a landscape archaeologist, and the book is now seen as very much of its time, outdated and open to criticism - for instance, acknowledgment of the role of monasteries in the landscape was limited (Bond 2000, 63; Fleming 2008, 74; Gardiner and Rippon 2007, 1; Jones 2015, 2-4). However, this remains a seminal empirical work that informed and inspired much of the later development of landscape archaeology, as well as setting the template for later widescreen landscape narratives at county, regional and national level.[5]


Figure 2: W.G. Hoskins, author of The Making of the English Landscape in the countryside of his native Devon (en.wikipedia.org).

Beresford, Crawford, Hoskins and their contemporaries provided the realisation that archaeology, particularly from the medieval and post-medieval periods, was not just buried in the ground but also all around as relict or still extant features in the modern countryside (Gardiner et al 2011, 4). It was on the shoulders of these pioneers of landscape history that the graduates of the new or expanding archaeology, geography and history departments of the 1960s, and the staff of the Royal Commissions on Ancient and Historical Monuments, helped refine and professionalise a distinctively British practice of landscape archaeology as a modern discipline, both in the field and in academia (Bowden and McOmish 2011, 21; Rippon 2009, 232). Within this tradition comes the large body of research and publications that spans the period from the 1970s up to the early years of this century.[6] Here is a legacy of immensely practical field guides to the analytical techniques of observing, interpreting and recording landscape features that are certainly not overburdened with theory. Innovation was, though, to the fore, for example: integrating New Archaeology agendas of spatial analysis adopted from geography; challenging the previously dominant invasion and migration paradigm to explain landscape development in the early Middle Ages; and placing a greater emphasis on studying the origins of the modern historic landscape and the largely anonymous ordinary lives of those who inhabited the villages, fields and farmsteads (Fowler 1988, 15; Rippon 2009, 233-4). Fowler and others also developed a new landscape-scale research agenda, combining traditional survey with aerial photo analysis, field-walking and paleo-environmental analysis (Rippon 2009, 232).

An important contribution to landscape archaeology from the same generation and one that brought valuable expertise from the fields of botany and ecological history was provided by Oliver Rackham (Rackham 1986; Rippon 2009, 230). His work helped to illuminate the distinction between the Planned and Ancient countryside of different English regions or pays, a general division that seems to have survived successive changes in land-use, settlement development etc. (Jones and Hooke 2011, 41; Rippon 2009, 228),[7] as well as demonstrating that woodland and other natural but managed vegetation could be just as indicative of the history of the landscape as more obviously man-made features (Gardiner et al 2011, 4). More recently, Rippon (Rippon 2012a, 240; Rippon et al 2013) has demonstrated a practical integration of ecological data into landscape archaeology through the use of paleo-environmental sequences from medieval sites (e.g. for preserved cereal remains and animal bones) to help provide evidence of changes in land-use over time.

Contemporary landscape archaeology research


In the context of the historic landscape, a number of key themes have been prominent in recent research activity that together help us understand many of the drivers and processes that saw the British landscape crystallise into the general character we still to a large extent see today (Gardiner and Rippon 2007, 2). Much of the rich and active research on medieval settlement and landscape is clustered around the membership and activities of the Medieval Settlement Research Group (Gardiner et al 2011, 6). A non-exhaustive and greatly simplified, but nevertheless indicative, list would include the following:
  •      Settlement evolution, including debates about the origins and development of the village (perhaps most extensively examined in Roberts and Wrathmell 2002; see also Jones and Page 2006; Lewis et al 2001; and contributions in Christie and Stamper  2011);
  •      Regional distributions of countryside typology, notably Woodland or Ancient and Champion landscapes (see Williamson 2003 for an outline of the different landscape types and debates around this subject; also Rippon 2004a, 2012b);
  •      The origins, development and workings of the manorial system and transition from feudalism to a market-based economy (Dyer 2000; Faith 1997; Johnson 1996);
  •      Elite landscapes of power and other designed landscapes (Creighton 2002, 2013; Finch and Giles 2007; Johnson 1996; Liddiard 2007).

The work of medieval historians such as Dyer has also emphasised the centrality of the activities, needs and interests of the, often unnamed and therefore unheralded, people of town, village and field in the dynamics of shaping the landscape (Dyer 2000, 2009; Whittock 2009). This self-evident relationship between common people and the land has become more embedded in landscape study (see, as illustration, contributions in Turner and Silvester 2012). Whilst much of this research is of relevance to the Welsh Marches landscapes of this study, the importance of regional and local variation also needs to be acknowledged. As Gardiner et al (2011, 7) stress, it is often difficult to discern clear patterns in research outcomes across this plethora of activity, in many ways the picture has become increasingly complex and locally nuanced. The body of research work in Wales (and Scotland) has tended to be less well developed than for many of the English regions with a focus on upland contexts and a reliance on empirical approaches (Austin 2006, 193).[8]

There is much evidence of a broadening of landscape archaeology research techniques and application across a wider spectrum of spatial and temporal contexts in recent years, together with an evolution from the largely descriptive to a focus on interpretation and explanation (Gardiner and Rippon 2007, 8). In Making Sense of an Historic Landscape (2012, 4) Rippon provides a particularly useful synthesis of the approaches that can now be used to study an historic landscape (in this case the Blackdown Hills), integrating traditional landscape archaeology methodologies with the study of other elements that can contribute to the understanding of local and regional landscape character variation, such as how landscape was perceived and the expression of identity through vernacular architecture and naming in the landscape. Other examples would include: the wide application of Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC), witness the county-level HLC’s sponsored by Historic England and other public bodies, though with a different approach adopted in Wales, where the focus has been on landscapes defined as of specific or outstanding interest rather than systematic mapping of the whole landscape (Fairclough 2013a; Rippon 2004a) (see Figure 3); the Whittlewood project applying integrated archaeological and historical research to examine in detail how villages developed (Jones and Page 2006); Partida et al’s (2013) reconstruction and mapping of the medieval landscape of Northamptonshire; the Fields of Britannia Project addressing continuity and discontinuity in the rural landscapes of Roman Britain (Rippon et al 2013); and the EngLaId project analysing mapping and artefact data on a national scale to help calibrate understanding of how the English landscape developed from the Bronze Age until the Domesday survey (http://englaid.com/about/ accessed 8/10/15).


Figure 3: The first HLC in England – carried out in Cornwall (© Cornwall County Council 2007 and ©Crown Copyright. All rights reserved. 100019590. 2007).

One important driver for such innovative landscape-framed approaches has been the opportunities presented by new technologies in terms of surveying, remote sensing, satellite imagery, data analysis, mapping and modelling, which is particularly apposite in the context of the harnessing of GIS to develop digital HLC mapping and to digitise modern and historic Ordnance Survey maps and some Historic Environment Records (HERs). Primarily developed to inform the planning process, HLC is not without its critics as comparatively broad-brush and one-dimensional in its reliance on field morphology and lines on the map in conveying landscape character (Rippon 2013, 180; Williamson 2007, 67-70). Nevertheless, its comprehensive application has led to some significant discoveries and provided a large resource of accessible data (Rippon 2009, 242). HLC data can also be integrated with other data layers in GIS as part of a broader process of historic landscape analysis (as espoused in Rippon 2004a). The use of GIS has enabled a move towards larger scale studies both regionally and thematically in the work of bodies such as Historic England’s Survey Team and the Royal Commissions in Scotland and Wales (Rippon 2009, 238). Verhagen (2012) provides further examples of the embedding of innovative practice in mainstream landscape archaeology at an international level (ranging from the detection of new features through the use of LiDAR to digital terrain modelling and the GIS application of cost surface and viewshed analysis), but also explores the challenges arising from the limitations of particular technologies, faddism, keeping pace with technological development and ensuring new tools are used in an appropriate and focussed way.

Connecting with other approaches to landscape


The brief overview provided here has identified that the study of the history of landscape is approached from a number of different traditions (empirical archaeological fieldwork, historical geography, cultural geography and so on). Mention has also been made of the historical lack of a clear body of ingrained and underpinning theoretical concepts within landscape archaeology in Britain. Some have proposed that any relative lack of engagement with theory is strongly counter-weighted by the establishment of well-developed and innovative methodologies for field work and the integration of new technologies (Jones and Hooke 2011, 31-5). Moreover, as Gilchrist (2009, 386, 397) has argued, the dichotomy between scientific, empirical data and theoretical approaches is largely a false one: theory has often reframed the types of research questions and methodologies used within landscape archaeology, theoretical developments across the humanities have been implicitly assimilated and, in any case, all methods of empirical data-collection are socially constructed and therefore intrinsically theoretical (Gardiner and Rippon 2009, 70).

While debates such as the Johnson-Fleming exchange mentioned above are generally a sign of a vibrant and healthy research environment, lack of communication between disciplines is not (Rippon 2009, 245). In part given impetus by pan-European convergences in the wake of the European Landscape Convention, there are perhaps the stirrings of a greater degree of coalescence around the concept of landscape across academic and professional boundaries, as evidenced by the complementary contributions from a wide range of disciplines in Howard et al’s The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies (2013). An incisive and thought-provoking identification of the opportunities for landscape archaeology to become a central element in an emerging ‘super-discipline’ is provided by Fairclough’s (2012) paper presented at LAC2010, the first international conference devoted to landscape archaeology. Fairclough (2012, 472-5) proposes that landscape archaeology can occupy the middle ground, a bridge between scientific approaches to landscape and cultural geography and social science perspectives, suggesting that ‘the underlying question is whether Landscape Archaeology exists to use the idea of landscape only to study the past (which will mainly interest historical disciplines) or also (or mainly) to use archaeology to study the landscape of the present-day, in both its materiality and mentality, and thus to connect to all landscape disciplines and to a wider public’. This idea of connectivity with approaches from other branches of landscape study will be explored further in my next PhD research post.









[1] Muir (1999) has also provided a more conventional historiographical perspective, exploring the key concepts, theories and philosophies of landscape study and surveying the various strands that encompass the landscape corpus in Western thought.

[2]Clearly defined’, ‘Organically evolved’ and ‘Associative cultural’.

[3] Work that was brought to a wider audience with the publication in 1953 of his book Archaeology in the Field (Johnson 2007, 55; Muir 1999, 33).

[4] In particular, the regional Domesday Geography and Agrarian History of England and Wales series’. The historical geography tradition has also continued to be closely aligned with landscape archaeology, through the work of Darby, Hooke (see, for instance, her edited volume Landscape: The Richest Historical Resource (2000)), Thirsk and others (Baker 2003; Thirsk 2000).

[5] See, for instance: Hodder and Stoughton’s The Making of county series of the late 1960s and early 1970s; Collins England’s Landscape regional guides (2006-7); and Pryor (2010).

[6] Key examples include: Aston and Rowley’s Landscape Archaeology: An introduction to Fieldwork Techniques on Post-Roman Landscapes (1974); Aston’s Interpreting the Landscape: Landscape Archaeology in Local Studies (1985); Brown’s Fieldwork for Archaeologists and Local Historians (1987); The New Reading the Landscape (2000) and Landscape Encyclopaedia: A Reference Guide to the Historic Landscape (2004) by Muir; Fowler’s Archaeology and the Landscape (1972) and Landscape Plotted and Pieced: Landscape History and Local Archaeology in Fyfield and Overton, Wiltshire (2000) and the prodigious output of Taylor, including his handbook on Fieldwork in Medieval Archaeology (1974).

[7] A pattern also reflected in other categorisations of landscape character, such as the Highland and Lowland Zones identified in Fox’s Identity of Britain as far back as 1932, Roberts and Wrathmell’s (2002) settlement research, Phythian-Adams (1999) Cultural Provinces and HLC mapping.

[8] Volumes edited by Edwards (1997) and Roberts (2006) provide a useful overview, see also Leighton and Silvester (2003). 

Sunday 20 December 2015

Reliquiae Journal - Volume Three



Reliquiæ is an annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art. Each issue collects together both old and new work from a diverse range of writers and artists with common interests spanning landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism.
In the latest volume (three) can be found:
New work:
Hans Brückner: Writing on the gaze, non-looking and language's 'cloak of invisibility' /  Angus Carlyle: Excerpts from Silent Mountain, reflecting on perception and altitude in the Picentini mountains /  Thomas A Clark: A poetic meditation on the colour yellow, from gorse, pollen and saffron to the 'yellow palace' at the centre of the world /  Ken Cockburn: Eight topographical poem-miniatures /  Alec Finlay: Excerpts from Gathering, a wide-ranging poetic exploration of the place-names of the Cairngorm region of Scotland /  Ross Hair: An exploration of the visionary work of Ronald Johnson, Geoffrey Grigson and Samuel Palmer /  Gerry Loose: Five gnomic, poetic Cantations for Endangered Species /  Rob St. John: Writing on nocturnal rivers, Salmo trutta and the well-weighted line /  Richard Skelton: An elegy for the badger, from his forthcoming book, Beyond the Fell Wall /  Mark Valentine: An enigmatic found-object poem entitled Properties /  Chris Watson: A fascinating account of making field recordings of ravens in Anglesey and Northumberland, interwoven with Norse folklore.
Archive work:
Four esoteric poems from Ã† (George William Russell); a selection of Aino folktales and myths, translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain; writings on Ossian, his mother and the occult power of the Fath Fith by Alexander Carmichael; The Blue of Flax,a poetic reverie on perception and memory, by Thomas A. Clark; an essay on Earth-Mother cults by Edward CloddField Notes, a poignant nocturne by Don Domanski; a fragment from the Poetic Edda on the suffering of Yggdrasil, the 'world tree', translated by Olive Bray; a hermetic fragment from Goethe, translated by Hans Brückner & Richard Skelton; a selection from the mystical poetry of Kabir; three poems from Tim Lilburn's revelatory collection, Moosewood Sandhills, along with his contemplative essay How to be Here?; writing on the sadness of thrushes by E.J. Moor; the beautiful ornithological illustrations of F.O. Morris; the spiritual aphorisms of Rabindranath Tagore; some wildwood fragments from E. Tickner EdwardesBaltersan's Third Edition, an evocative short story on the lost words by Mark Valentine; some visionary fragments from Jürgen von der Wense; a selection from the journals of Gilbert White; some luminous excerpts from the writing of W.B. Yeats
I could write at length about the wealth of audio recordings, texts and art produced by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, the editors of Reliquiae, through their self-run Corbel Stone Press, but really don't have the words to do it all justice. Information on their richly abundant and diverse output can be found on their website. I would unconditionally recommend this wellspring for anyone with an interest in artistic responses to place, nature and landscape.


You can order the 2015 issue of Reliquiae here and see information on the first two issues here and here.

Richard also has a new book, Beyond the Fell Wall, published by the equally magnificent Little Toller Books




Wednesday 16 December 2015

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).


Tuesday 27 October 2015

Songs of runaway dreams miles away


Directionless wandering reveals another street of once-red brick terraced houses. Its not raining, exactly; but it has been. This could be Middlesbrough or Rugby or Dumbarton or Edmonton, could be Derby or Barrow or Kilmarnock, Pontypool or Bridgewater. The vociferous industry and municipal certainty that paved the fields and marshes over has drifted away. People round here are dispersed. These streets seem tired now, stranded.

Stranded.

Seven long years since I passed these gates/
Fighting for our king, don't know why, couldn't say/
And you don't want to cross me, I'm here to stay/
I'm going back to Hocken's Hey

Sometimes I think about the world/
Sometimes I think about the world outside

The world outside.

By Los Angeles standards West Adams is old, an antique neighbourhood. Mostly shabby now, hemmed in by freeways; but Little Richard was a resident, so too Ray Charles and Joe Louis. Back in the day. Arthur Taylor Lee and Johnny Echols met at high school here, formed a band. 1965 and The Grass Roots become Love. 1967 and hardly anyone buys Forever Changes; its a masterpiece.

This is the time and life that I am living/
And I'll face each day with a smile/
For the time that I've been given's such a little while/
And the things that I must do consist of more than style/
There are places that I am going

Places that I am going.

Sometimes I think about the world outside.

Michael Head is thinking about the world outside. He's on a different West Coast, but he gets Arthur Lee and he gets Love. His town has those murky red brick streets but it can also be technicolour: ask John Lennon, ask Julian Cope, ask Lee Mavers, ask Michael Head.



1997 and Michael makes a record with his brother John. The result is an alchemistic soundscape, juxtaposing inner-city drug dependency with pastoral folk that conjures visions of Middle Age sail-makers, travelling knights and harvest workers; mining the spirit of Arthur Lee and Love. Its awash with hope and melancholy. Hardly anyone buys The Magical World of the Strands; its a masterpiece.

Our village has seen your village from a distance/ 
Travelling through the waves/ 
Through fields of uncertainty/ 
Runaway dreams miles away



Runaway dreams miles away.

There are places that I am going.

Stranded? This record has always taken me away, in times when I was walking those red brick streets, metaphorically or in reality. It takes me to the greenwood and the old world, takes me to Mojave and Sierra Nevada in the new world; to wherever I want to be. Its as English as oak, as Californian as Laurel Canyon; its as urban as the decaying brick walls of terraced streets, as bucolic as dusk on a summers day.



These have been some hasty reflections on a record that is particularly important to me; a welcome distraction from the structured reading, writing and thinking of my PhD literature review.

The Magical World of the Strands has recently been re-released and you can find out more about it on the Shacknet web site. An album of outakes and demos, The Olde World is due for release soon.

My advice is to seek out both and anything else by Michael Head's other bands, The Pale Fountains, Shack and The Red Elastic Band. And, of course, the records of Arthur Lee and Love.



Monday 28 September 2015

Unseen Places: Exploring ‘hidden’ topography in a historic upland landscape

Procter1


I recently gave a talk as part of the Tertulia: Radical Pastoral event at the Arnolfini in Bristol on the subject of unseen places and hidden topography. The piece brought together themes and content explored in a number of posts on this site and has kindly been reproduced in full on the Unofficial Britain web site here

Tuesday 8 September 2015

Richard Long: 'Time passes. A place remains.'

"A good work is the right thing in the right place at the right time. A crossing place."
Richard Long, 1980

The Arnolfini gallery in Bristol is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Richard Long, entitled Time and Space. As a native Bristolian, works from the city and the South West are well-represented as are those from further afield, from all seven continents in fact.

His, often ephemeral, sculptures, photographs, textworks and other creations could be classified as land art or art made by walking or even (God forbid) psychogeographical art. As with other artists who use landscape as a touchstone and a material, such as Andy Goldsworthy, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Jeremy Deller and Richard Skelton, his output seems refreshingly straight-forward and free of dogma, unnecessary theorising and cant. It has a felt and intelligent simplicity. However, I will leave it to the words and work of Richard Long himself to convey how he uses materials in the landscape, walking and place itself to create his art.

"They are a sort of simple celebration of place, like its stones, or the horizon, or the mist, and of me being there, at that particular time, possibly never to pass that way again. I sometimes think of these works as songs."    
Richard Long, 2014


I like simple, practical, emotional,
quiet, vigorous art.

I like the simplicity of walking,
the simplicity of stones.

I like common materials, whatever is to hand,
but especially stones, I like the idea that stones
are what the world is made of.

I like common means given
the simple twist of art...

...I choose lines and circles because they do the job.

My art is about working in the wide world,
wherever, on the surface of the earth...

...I use the world as I find it...

...My outdoor sculptures and walking locations
are not subject to possession and ownership, I like the fact
that roads and mountains are common, public land.

My outdoor sculptures are places.
The materials and the idea are of the place...

...A walk expresses space and freedom
and the knowledge of it can live
in the imagination of anyone, and that
is another space too.

Extracts from:
'Five, six, pick up sticks
Seven, eight, lay them straight' (1980)





A footpath is a place.
It also goes from place to place, from here to there, and back again.
Any place along it is a stopping place...

...There is an infinite and cosmic variety of journeys, at all scales...

Notes on Paths, 1999



Art is a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.

Royal West of England Academy, 2000


A text is a description, or story, of a work in the landscape. It is the simplest and most elegant way to present a particular idea, which could be a walk, or a sculpture, or both.
Extract from Notes on Works, 2000



References

Lailach, Michael, 2007. Land Art. Cologne: Taschen.

Long, Richard, 1997. A Walk Across England. London: Thames & Hudson.

Roelstrate, Dieter, 2010. Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking. London: Afterall.

Tufnell, Ben (Ed.), 2007. Richard Long: Selected Statements & Interviews. London: Haunch of Venison.

Richard Long: Time and Space. Exhibition guide, 2015.