'I see a new earth': Herzog v Machen

Opening scene of Heart of Glass; directed by Werner Herzog, soundtrack by Popol Vuh, 1976

'After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointment and sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath'.

The Great God Pan; written by Arthur Machen, 1894

A Field in England: All hail the New Psychedelic Puritans

Following on from Kill List and Sightseers, I'm looking forward to Ben Wheatley's forthcoming film A Field in England; tapping into Witchfinder General and Winstanley territory: all hail the New Psychedelic Puritans!

'Yon pure waters, from their aery heights'

Mountain pool, Offa's Dyke footpath, Hatterrall ridge - Black Mountains

"When hope presented some far-distant good,

That seemed from heaven descending, like the flood

Of yon pure waters, from their aery height"

Tributary Stream, William Wordsworth (Poems of Wordsworth, Oxford University Press, 1919)

The beautiful game lives on in Ultima Thule

I'm very much an ex football fan, jaded and disillusioned by the ridiculous grandiloquence of the professional game.

However, in remotest Ultima Thule, it seems there is a true venue for the beautiful game.

This is the home ground of ÍB Vestmannaeyja, a football team based on the island of Heimaey off the south coast of Iceland. Photograph from http://groundhopping.se

Landscape in particular 6: Harberton, Devon and Tierra del Fuego

Several years ago my partner Lisa and I spent a month criss-crossing the towering wonder of the Andes of Chile and Argentina; a Patagonian odyssey of the sublime and the superlative. In the midst of all this epic-ness my memory reserves a special place for an altogether more temperate landscape, that of Harberton in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego. This tiny settlement and gentle farm-scape occupies a narrow peninsula that nudges into the cold, wind-whipped Beagle Channel; a plain-speaking and modest interloper amidst the drama of the world's southern-most settled terrain. Head south and Cape Horn and Antarctica await. 

Harberton is the oldest estancia (rural estate or ranch) in Tierra del Fuego, established as a sheep farm by an English misionary from Bristol, Thomas Bridges, in 1886. This was a period when the vast lands of Patagonia were opened up to sheep farmers from England and Scotland to become, for a time, one of the largest wool producing regions in the world. The settlement is named after the Devon home village of Bridges wife Mary ('Farmstead on the river Harbourne', an Old English river name meaning 'pleasant stream'). The distinctive white corrugated iron, red roofed farmstead that still stands today was prefabricated by Mary's father in England, shipped over and assembled at a sheltered spot chosen by indigenous Indians of the local Yamana tribe. With an empathy unusual for the time, Bridges devoted the last 30 years of his life to living amongst the Yamana people and compiling a dictionary of their language, with a sideline in rescuing shipwreck survivors, and was granted the land at Harberton by President Roca in recognition of his work.

Intrigued by the guidebook description, we took a bus trip from the provisional capital of Ushuaia; a tedious and interminable drive on a poorly maintained side road from the main highway. Released from the stuffiness of the bus we found ourselves, after weeks of Andean terra incognita, in a strangely familiar place. Bruce Chatwin also visited, and described this discovery of the known in his classic In Patagonia:

"Coming into Harberton from the land side, you could mistake it for a big estate in the Scottish Highlands, with its steep fences, sturdy gates and peat-brown trout streams. The Rev Thomas Bridge's settlement was strung out along the west shore of Harberton Inlet, shielded from the gales by a low hill ... The house, imported long ago from England, was of corrugated iron, painted white, with green windows and a soft red roof ... The flowers of an English garden seemed to glow with an inner brilliance. A path led through a wicket gate arched with a whale jaw. Woodsmoke drifted over the black water, on the far shore, geese were calling."  

And this is exactly the scene that we found. A serene piece of England transported to the far end of the earth; a National Trust tea room would not have been out of place amongst the well kept shrubs and cottage garden borders. South America seems to specialise in this type of liminality; isolated remnants of transplanted northern European material and psychological culture incorporated into the predominant and home-grown Latin American hegemony: German style houses throughout rural Chile; Welsh enclaves in Patagonia; English country clubs and polo in the prosperous hinterlands of Buenos Aires; the Falklands, a Hebridean outlier garrisoned by red, white and blue. 

Approaching the farmhouse we observed a tall, slim man, white haired and bearded, in denim dungarees. Visually he was as familiar as the English buildings and landscape around him, but he was in conversation in the easy Spanish of a native speaker. This I took to be Thomas Goodall, the great grandson of the founder of the farm, who still works the land today. In his cultural history of Patagonia, and spefically in relation to the old sheep rearing areas, Chris Moss observes that "Englishness has been preserved in people's faces, and in surnames". We then spent several slow hours wandering the lush greeness of the peninsula, the land meshed together by sheep folds and enclosures of wood and stone, accompanied by a warming breeze and ever-present bird song. The distant views seawards and southwards to the harsh mountains of Chile's Isla Navarino seemed, and not just administratively, to occupy another country; sentinals of malevolence biding their time, like circling behemoths.

Thomas Bridge's son, Lucas, 'went native' amongst the Yamana and used Harberton as a refuge for the dwindling numbers of indigenous speakers during the aggressive colonialism of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina. He wrote a thrillingly titled memoir Uttermost Part of the Earth (1947) that I would love to find a copy of; perhaps to read on a visit to the soft green hills of Harberton, south of Totnes in deep England, busy and prosperous in the fifteenth century but now a quiet backwater, and be transported again to this facsimile dreamscape in the 'land of fire', 8,000 miles distant.

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes and places that are particularly meaningful to me, for whatever reason; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts: 

Hergest Ridge

Worth Valley

Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle
Bolton Abbey

References

Blacksell, Sophie (Ed.), 2005 Footprint Patagonia Bath: Footprint.

Chatwin, Bruce, 2005 In Patagonia London: Vintage.

Hoskins, W.G., 1971 Old Devon London: Pan Books.

Mills, A.D., 1995 A Dictionary of English Place-names Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moss, Chris, 2008 Patagonia: A Cultural History Oxford: Signal.

The landscape that Thatcherism created

"Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair."

"I see no joy, I see only sorrow; I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow; so stand down Margaret, stand down please, stand down Margaret".

A last blast of winter: 'Come see the north wind's masonry'

Seen from afar, the ridge of the Black Mountains was a bright white saddle-back; we expected snow, but not the 'merciless whiteness' we encountered as we parked short of the car park, our way cut off by a drifting blockade.

Up we trudged to the Cat's Back ridge with a view down to the forsaken Olchon valley, the boundaries of its ancient fieldscape and intake from the moorland waste shown in sharp relief by the monotone white.

As the sun broke through we passed a group of mountain ponies, hardened to the harshness of the wind and unselfconsciously at home in this extreme citadel. Once on the level, bestriding the slopes of the narrow ridge we were in our own personal Cordillera Blanca, the drifting snow several feet deep and sculptured with impossible vibrancy by the wind; a sight captured by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem, The Snowstorm: "Come see the north wind's masonry...the frolic architecture of the snow".

We pressed on to the trig point at the high point of Black Hill. Until now we had been but two of numerous pairs of footprints in the snow. Northwards from the trig point, however, we had few antecedents. The path itself was buried beneath the depths and, as Robert Macfarlane observes, "snow is the disguise artist of the mountains". However, visibility was good and the head of the valley to which we were aiming was in clear sight. So we followed the line of a pair of footprints, deep holes punched into "the great silence of snow" (Snow, Edward Thomas). 

The going was heavy but blasts of sunlight kept our spirits up, a reminder of the magical other worldliness of our surroundings. Nan Shepherd's epistle on the upland topography of the Cairngorms gets it right: "Loose snow blown in the sun looks like the ripples running through corn".

Our forebears had forsaken the ridge line and headed straight down the steepling slope, their footprints converging far below with the ghost of the footpath in the valley bottom. And so we followed in their tracks, a route that would be cruel to ankles and knees in normal conditions but given unexpected legitimacy by several inches of snow. Now back at low level, in the secret vastness of the upper Olchon valley, there was no let-up in the depth of the snow; we were though edging towards normality, our stinging shins and etched memories accompanying us homewards, renewed: 

"And through the snow our fallen world's reborn

And I a child again, born of this night"

(Een Geur van Hoger Honig, Martinus Nijhloff). 

References

Cotter, Gerry (Ed.), 1988 Natural History Verse: An anthology London: Christopher Helm.

Davidson, Peter, 2005 The Idea of North London: Reaktion.

Macfarlane, Robert, 2003 Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination London: Granta.

Shepherd, Nan, 2011 The Living Mountain Edinburgh: Canongate. 

Derek Jarman - A Journey to Avebury

A Journey to Avebury - an early Derek Jarman Super 8 film from 1971 (via You Tube). Another addition to the hippy-pagan-folk landscape aesthetic of the time, complementing the contemporary The Children of the Stones/ The Owl Service/ Penda's Fen oeuvre. With a nicely judged soundtrack by Curve, though I think John Martyn's Small Hours would fit even better.

Thanks to the web site of the fantastic Little Toller Books for alerting me to this video.

Conflicting narratives of a landscape past and present

Below are two images that appear to be starkly different; one in a bucolic setting, the other concrete and urban. They are in fact the same location: Stapleton Bridge at the bottom of Bell Hill, borderland between the village suburb of Stapleton on the north-eastern edge of Bristol and the grittier environs of Easton and Baptist Mill further into the cityscape.

This is a topographical snapshot through which I pass on a regular basis and one which demonstrates the complex entanglement of emotions, memories, perceptions and debate that landscape engenders. In discussing the relationship between landscape and Englishness David Matless asserts that "if landscape carries an unseemly spatiality, it also shuttles through temporal processes of history and memory. Judgements over present value work in relation to narratives of past landscape".

The first image, a postcard photograph taken in the early twentieth century (from the Tempus Images of England: Stapleton volume) has all the elements required to conjure up feelings of wistful nostalgia for times past: the sunny black and whiteness, a ford gently sloping to a rocky river, the luxuriant trees and distant cottage. The setting populated by a group of children, a horse and a charabanc. All harmonious and timeless, everything in its right place. Never mind that such scenes were often stage-managed or that the juggernaut of suburbanisation was rapidly approaching, this is how we want Old England to be represented in our imagination; and sits well with a popular strain of elegiac gloom, tapped into by Philip Larkin in his poem Going, Going: 

"And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There'll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres."

The second image, taken last summer and on my cycle route from home to work, is an equally interesting view of the same spot. But all is now changed, the only constant in the century or so between the photographs is the river Frome. The handsome arched stone bridge replaced by the straight-line utilitarianism of its 1930's successor - no doubt seen as shiny and modern at the time, but now drab and anonymous - and the ford no more. Most dramatically, the flyover carrying the M32 motorway into the heart of the city stomps over the ground-level topography like an unstoppable and disregarding lava flow of concrete; physically connected to its surroundings by its supporting pillars, but wholly dismissive of the reluctantly subterranean world cowering beneath. The bare, infertile earth in the foreground emphasising the malignant impact of this early 1970's addition; part of a wider contemporary malaise that Keith Brace articulates in his 1971 Portrait of Bristol: "I believe that Bristol is at a point of crisis in its history and that the modest-sized, relaxed, intimate city we have known is all too likely to become a disproportionately large provisional metropolis, resembling all other provisional metropolises of the future in clinical impersonality".    

Undeniably this kind of motor-city infrastructure, conceived on a drawing-board - the product of a late twentieth-century narrowly focused technocratic imagination - unsettles the balance of the existing landscape through which it courses. The benefits that it provides - harder, faster, stronger communications links between city and hinterland - are disputable and, in any case, locally irrelevant compared to what it takes away not only in terms of pollution but also aesthetically and spiritually.

But linger and look, and all is not lost. Move under the flyover and, on the right day, a sunlit vista of the neighbouring Bridge Farm opens up, framed by greenery. This eighteenth century agricultural relic (seen opposite and in the old photograph below, also taken from Images of England: Stapleton) occupies a visually stimulating juxtaposition with the modernity of the airborne motorway just metres away. A pleasing reminder that this area plays fast and loose with simplistic notions of zonal separation between urban, suburban and rural: all three rub together here. And we can begin to chip away at the, in Matthew Johnson's words, "unrestrained empiricism" of the Romantic view of landscape as a purely visual and aesthetic phenomena.  

Looking in the opposite direction there is a certain grace to the curving slip road, descending along the edge of the defiant greenery of Eastville Park; a pleasing contrast of light and shade. The paved non-space below the road has become here an arena for a variety of unofficial activities: unseen daily depositors of vast amounts of bread crumbs for pigeons, a troupe engaged in fire-eating training and, most impressively, guerrilla artists decorating two of the concrete supports with bright and vibrant scenes of nature. Humanity is re-colonising this desolate void.   

So, far from being, as it may first appear, merely a scene of brutalist alienation - an elegy for a lost land, the contemporary landscape has character and interest aplenty; a mixture of historic features, re-imagined and reused, and what Nan Fairbrother describes as the "self-contained linear landscape" of the motorway. Stepping back into the picture post card Edwardian scenes there is much that we are not told when viewing this reassuring scene, as seemingly wholesome as a period drama, that may similarly alter the initial perception.

The bridge was on the edge of eighteenth century Kingswood Chase, a remnant of the much larger Royal Forest of Kingswood that covered 200 square miles until disafforestation in 1228. By the eighteenth century, and continuing into the nineteenth, Kingswood was viewed as a hot-bed of criminality, non-conformity, popular protest and general unruliness, with a rapidly growing population of colliers, quarrymen and other squatter-inhabitants. John Wesley sums up the areas reputation succinctly: "Few persons have lived long in the West of England who have not heard of the colliers of Kingswood: a people famous from the beginning hitherto, for neither fearing God nor regarding man". By the time of the black and white photographs shown here much of Kingswood and the areas surrounding Stapleton had become heavily populated and industrialised and Eastville Park, bounded by the bridge, had been established as a municipal green lung for the urban population. As it has largely remained, the area was already an oasis of residual or revenant rurality, surrounded by 'Ouses, Ouses, Ouses'. The chimera of old world stability and orderliness is further undermined by a decidedly non-photogenic landmark a mile down the road. At the opposite end of the village stood (and still stands) a huge Victorian complex that had seen time as a prison for 5,000 French soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, a lunatic asylum and workhouse for the poor.

Cycling home over the bridge and under the flyover I feel the full force of these diverse and conflicting temporal and spatial energies; a flash mob of liminal stimuli skulking in the shadows. Landscape as multi-sensory immersion. I sigh heavily at the imagined memory of the old house, 'Sunnybanks', (though I have never seen it) that used to stand on the higher ground above the bridge and was demolished to make way for the motorway embankment. But I also can't help finding the fleeting phenomenological experience of under-passing the concrete monolith exhilarating; sound-tracked by the disembodied harsh monotone of the traffic above, like a minimalist symphony of repetitive drones. And the prospect of the last mile home along the still green banks of the Frome, with the potential for sightings of heron, kingfisher or barn owl, spurs on my tired limbs and lifts the landscapist spirit further.       

References

Avon Archaeological Council and Avon Local History Association, 1982 Avon Past 7 Pamphlet.

Baker, Kenneth (Ed.), 2000 The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry London: Faber and Faber.

Bartlett, John, 2004 Images of England: Fishponds Stroud: Tempus.

Brace, Keith, 1971 Images of Bristol London: Robert Hale.

Fairbrother, Nan, 1972 New Lives, New Landscapes London: Penguin.

Johnson, Matthew, 2007 Ideas of Landscape Oxford: Blackwell.

Matless, David, 1998 Landscape and Englishness London: Reaktion.

Smith, Veronica, 2004 Images of England: Stapleton Stroud: Tempus. 

Wylie, John, 2007 Landscape Oxford: Routledge.

Off the map familiar

Source:  landofmaps

How the world would look if the land masses and oceans were inverted

Here are some strikingly idiosyncratic and tangential cartographical images (see more at Maps you never knew you needed).

Source: landofmaps

Every country Britain has ever invaded (all but 22) 

Source: landofmaps

The world using a different centre point than you are used to

Source: Reddit.com

The USA drawn as a map from a fantasy novel