A temporal space: channeling the Knights Templars, an exorcism and the Blitz

 



It may be due to the fact that I had just left the pub, but I think these images capture some of the mysterious, dare I say it, 'energy' that places with a long and eventful history seem to have; temporal layers interacting with spatial permanence.

This is Temple Church in central Bristol, now half-hidden in a somewhat bland and nondescript commercial district, its riverside location was one of the first areas of settlement during the city's earliest phase of development. Built in the late fourteenth century on the site of an earlier Knights Templar church it was bombed to its current shell in the Blitz of 1940, and was the scene of a famous eighteenth century exorcism.

Rural rides

I don't know why this image particularly appeals to me, but it does. 

Taken today in the deer park of Dyrham Park, a National Trust property a few miles outside Bath, this is the shuttle bus that trundles all day up and down the hill from the car park to the main house.

What interests me is how this landscape of Arcadian perfection has been so thoroughly designed and redesigned over the last few centuries.

Originally a wooded combe cut into the southern-most extremity of the Cotswold scarp slope, this steep sided valley became part of the emparked hunting grounds of a medieval manor house. In an act of deliberate dislocation with the past the house was demolished in the late seventeenth century and replaced with a baroque mansion complete with ornate formal gardens, re-imagined in the fashionable Versailles style of the period and almost impossible to imagine on the site now (see image below). By the later eighteenth century the lavishly ornamental grounds had fallen out of style and were overlain with a 'naturalistic' designed park laid out by Humphrey Repton. This is largely the landscape that we can see today, possibly now fossilised into perpetuity by the National Trust, the stream issuing from the springs at the head of the valley long since buried underground.

And so back to our bus, following the course of medieval hunting parties and carriages transporting the Georgian and Victorian gentry through their contemporary visions of the ideal landscape, to be eventually replaced by who knows what.  

View of Dyrham Park by Johannes Kip (1712)

Sustainable transport v biodiversity and community food production: case study of a landscape dilemma

An interesting case currently bubbling up on my doorstep in East Bristol that highlights the difficulties created when competing demands, each with their own merits, are placed on the landscape.

For a city that prides itself on being progressively 'green', Bristol has been slow off the mark in addressing car dependency and the city council is seeking to address this with its Bus Rapid Transit Scheme, a major infrastructure project in partnership with adjoining local authorities to connect employment and transport hubs with residential districts via upgraded or new dedicated bus routes. The scheme includes a proposed new 'bus-only' junction at Stapleton giving access to the M32 motorway into the city centre. The council has put the plans out to consultation with a formal planning application later in the year.

This is a worthy and progressive scheme to try and put Bristol's transport infrastructure on a more sustainable footing. The problem is that the site adjacent to the motorway earmarked for the development is part of a 'green finger' of open land that extends well into the urban suburbs of the city. Under threat is a belt of overgrown but well-loved fields and old market-garden allotments, mostly held by local tenants; grade 1 agricultural land under-utilised in recent times but of high value in terms of potential productivity, biodiversity, habitat and the aesthetics of urban open space. Furthermore, the lands premature early retirement into ragged nature has been partially halted by a Lottery-funded Avon Wildlife Trust initiative called Feed Bristol, which has recently seen 7 acres at the heart of the area in question given over to a community food growing project. Many people, myself included, are now advocating that such traditionally overlooked and neglected edgelands should be utilised much more for crop and livestock production through community schemes like this with the multiple social and environmental advantages that accrue, rather than facing incremental loss at the hands of commercial development with often dubious local benefit.

And there is the rub. If this was a rapacious multi-national predator threatening green space then how much more straight-forward the case for opposition would be to construct, albeit not necessarily more likely to succeed. However, if you are concerned with environmental impact both locally and more widely (and there are many who do not see this as a concern, whether due to apathy or the perceived automatic primacy of 'the economy'), where does your support lie in a case like this? In defence of the local green space or the, perhaps, wider social good of the rapid transport scheme?

Robert Macfarlane: holloways, old ways and wild places

Illustration from Holloway

Robert Macfarlane is busy at the moment; he writes about Holloway, his collaboration with artist Stanley Donwood and the writer Dan Richards on the Caught by the River blog. And his new book meditating on pathways across Britain and beyond, The Old Ways, is also now out. I'm halfway through reading this and, as expected, it is an inspiring and lyrical collection, although I dont think the chapter on walking in Palestine with have people rushing to explore the paths of that blighted land! I may get round to writing a proper review at some stage, although I'm not sure there is much I can add to the effusive praise the book has already had. In the meantime, here is Macfarlane with an expansive and fluid definition of 'landscape' to blow away the cobwebs of received wisdom and tired orthodoxy:

"landscape is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant - a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us...it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take 'landscape' as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds, the scents and uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the brisling presence of a particular place at a particular moment."

His new book is the final part of a loose trilogy that also includes The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. The three books are generally categorised as 'nature', 'landscape' or 'travel' writing but are really much broader in scope than these labels can adequately convey. If you have not read his work, I would highly recommend that you do so.

There are many reference points in his books, but three acknowledged major influences are John Clare, Roger Deakin and Edward Thomas.

Landscape in particular 4: Worth Valley

View of Oldfield in the Worth Valley

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes that mean a lot to me, or are new discoveries; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

 

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts:
Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle
Bolton Abbey

The Worth is much like any of the other green valleys that snake through the Millstone Grit uplands of the South Pennines, a transition zone between the more venerated and celebrated landscapes of the Peak District to the south and the Yorkshire Dales to the north: here is a heady mix of 'dark satanic mills', non-conformity, rugged beauty and often harsh weather; the topography seeming to embody the very essence of the cussed independent spirit that Yorkshire folk (because that is how we must refer to them) are so stubbornly proud of. 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. In his classic study of the region, Millstone Grit, Glynn Hughes captures the essence of the place thus: 

"Those towns whose lights at night dance in little cups and hollows between peninsulas of the moors, from which they look like safe little harbours." 

The Worth valley is, though, different because embedded on its slopes is the small town of Haworth, once home to the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily, and its fields, farmsteads and moors were the inspiration for their brief but astonishingly creative burst of Gothic Victorian writing. It is by no means the only locality in the area that has significant literal or artistic associations: Ted Hughes hailed from nearby Mytholmroyd and much of his poetry was rooted in the hills and towns he grew up in ("The valleys went out, the moorland broke loose" Heptonstall Old Church); Simon Armitage's contemporary poetry is similarly influenced by his Marsden base, a little to the south; David Hockney and JB Priestley are sons of nearby Bradford; and the town of Hebden Bridge is awash with galleries, artists and generic northern bohemia. However, the Brontë's are on a different plane of international recognition and canonisation, up there with Jane Austin and Charles Dickens.

On paths and trackways

Offa's Dyke footpath, Black Mountains

"There's something rich and joyful to the mind to view through close and field those crooked shreds of footpaths." (John Clare)

The publication of Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways will no doubt inspire a well-spring of eulogies on the footpath and track, so here is my own homily to these benign but sometimes arduous routeways through the landscape. And, without wishing to sound reactionary, I will leave the delights of the motorway, dual-carriageway, roundabout and traffic clogged A and B roads to the dogged flâneur. Here I am wandering the field path, the green road, the holloway, the packhorse road, the monks trods, the country by-way and the ridgeway that bind the landscapes of the British Isles together in their familiar, omnipresent yet still mysterious grip. 

Like many people, footpaths were my entry point into the landscape, whether in search of Last of the Mohican's style adventures through the woods, moorland tramps to the endless horizon of the uplands or roaming local meadows and fields. And walking will always be the best way to experience the topography and morphology of the landscape. There is spiritual, aesthetic and practical pleasure in following a well-trodden route, taking in the varied scenery and memories that the physical track gives access to. Strip away the sometimes impenetrable psychological language of the archaeological concept of phenomenology (experiencing the landscape) and what you have is the yearning to follow not only paths that "the footsteps of a dozen generations have given...the force and sanctity of a popular right" (Elihu Burritt), but also "single tracks, a road untrodden" (from Beowulf, Anon).

Review of Writing Britain: from Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition

South Pennines landscape by Fay Godwin (from Remains of Elmet, her collaboration with Ted Hughes featured in the exhibition)

Interesting post from Diane Hale on the current British Library exhibition - Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderland; looks well worth a visit:

From William Blake to the 21st-century suburban hinterlands of J G Ballard, Writing Britain examines how the landscapes of Britain permeate great literary works. It will allow visitors to read between the lines of great works of English literature, discovering the secrets and stories surrounding the works’ creation, shedding new light on how they speak to the country today.

Westcoasting - A guest post from Eve MacFarlane

Westcoasting in Knoydart, Lochaber

A year ago almost to the day, I left my urban ways behind and moved to the west coast of Scotland. After years of living in England and abroad, I decided it was time to return to the place that felt like home. My family headed south when I was eleven, but the west coast remained my touchstone. Wherever I was in the world, I could close my eyes, unzip the tent and step out onto the summer-dry machair – just me, the silence, the view and a sheep or two. It reminded me of where I came from. It also reminded me of what life could be about. 

One day I overheard my dad’s old climbing pal say something like: ‘Ach, I’ve no seen Rab for a few weeks. He’s been aff westcoasting.’ Meaning that Rab had emptied his pockets of money and, with just a sleeping bag, a knife, a stove, a fishing rod and a few tins of sardines, headed west to walk, sleep out, catch trout, scramble up hills and wash in burns. Westcoasting. I love this term, this idea. It speaks to me of simplicity and adventure, of moonlit foraging, beach fires and starry nights. It’s inspired by the landscape of the west coast – the sheer space, the opportunity to get lost, the bountiful sea, the mountain springs – as well as the people who carved out a life here. Look at any hillside in the evening, when the twilight picks out the detail, and you’ll see the signs – the ridges and furrows of run rig farming, an old sheep enclosure, the remains of a stone cottage. The land tells the story not of a pristine wilderness, but of people drawing life from this harsh environment. 

A year on and I’ve carved a life out here too, guided by my own take on westcoasting. I’ve pared my life back. I’ve lived closer to the seasons. I’ve explored the wild places. I’ve forced myself to endure a bit of discomfort and been rewarded for it. A night spent on the beach wasn’t the cosiest, but it gave me shooting stars and otters swimming in the pink-tinged sea at sunrise. There have, of course, been challenges. The winter was long, dark and shaped by the weather. You can see why people might turn to the drink. But I’ve never regretted the move. Every morning I look through the little square window in my kitchen across the loch to the hills beyond and I’m filled with something I can’t put into words. This raw, rugged, beautiful landscape moves me like no other.  

Find out more about Eve's westcoasting life by visiting her blog.

War propaganda films on landscape themes

Came across these short films, part of the British Film Council Film Collection, extolling the glories of the English (or rather British) countryside and related subjects in glorious Technicolour: 

The People's Land

The Gardens of England

Book review: Urban Wildscapes

Since Richard Mabey first published his, at the time, groundbreaking The Unofficial Countryside in 1973 many of the scruffy, neglected and wild enclaves of the natural and semi-natural in urban areas and edgelands have been transformed. This has sometimes been in the name of formalising and improving natural recolonisation of redundant industrial infrastructure, to enable reconnection for urbanised populations: disused quarries, slag heaps and factory space turned into nature reserves and country parks; or simply to tidy up, landscape and make 'safe' informal public spaces. Many other marginalised open areas have, often without much public discourse or protest, been washed away in the great tide of urban renewal and development seen in recent decades, replaced by retail parks, park and ride schemes, new roads, business parks and other trappings of car and retail based materialism that are much-used but little loved and have a curious (and depressing) lack of identity or relationship with their surrounding environs.    

Somewhat paradoxically - or maybe in reaction to - this relative decline in the actuality of informal areas of wildness in our towns and cities, the flowering of 'new nature' writing in recent years has included a vigorous and tenacious off-shoot focusing on such places. The prime example being Edgelands: Journeys into England's true wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, an updated and, dare I say it, postmodern tramp across the territory covered by Mabey, taking its lead from Marion Shoard's influential 1992 essay, Edgelands.   

The left-field pathways of the psychogeographical fraternity are also a touch-stone for wildscape analysis; Iain Sinclair, one of the disciplines reluctant figureheads, has heralded Mabey's work as the 'unacknowledged pivot between the new nature writers and those others, of a grungier dispensation, who are randomly (and misleadingly) herded together as 'psychogeographers''.  

Into the dense undergrowth of this environment, given vigour by both light and shade, comes a new book from Routledge entitled Urban Wildscapes, edited by Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan and proclaiming itself to be 'one of the first edited collections of writings about urban 'wilderness' landscapes'. The ideas put forward in the book stem from a conference organised by the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield in 2007.