There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
Emily Dickinson
Hiya, remember me? My name is Bruce and I am 18 months old. Today I am telling you about what I think may be the best place in the world. The place called Yellowcraigs.
This weekend the Tom-human is away visiting the other human that they call The Mule, although he does not walk on four legs. After Tom-human and Kate-human, my next favourite humans are called Mel and Gordon. It is they that know of this place Yellowcraigs.
It is curious what humans find interesting about a place. Kate, for example, just kept staring at these twisty sticks.
But these sticks are of the growing kind, and hence no fun at all.
Gordon knows many things. He knows about how Yellowcraigs was once a rainforest, covered in lava-spewing volcanos! He knows about this island, whose name is Fidra.
He also knows much about the growing things.
This spiky thing is “Sea Buckthorn”
And this blue-ish purple-ish thing is “Viper’s Bugloss”
But the best thing about Gordon is that he likes BALL.
Gordon, please throw BALL.
While we were engaged in the pressing business of BALL, Mel and Kate marvelled at this swimming human.
There was much talk of “brr” and “chilly” and “a stronger woman than I” but I did not see what was so remarkable about it. For I will swim in the water whatever the weather! Who braved that frozen bog-pool at Eshaness last January? Bruce, that’s who. And can that swimming human find an important pebble in a pile of seaweed?
Or leap and seek out elusive BALL through the long grass?
I think not.
On Saturday, we climbed Schiehallion – another munro. Rising out of the surrounding landscape like a great, squat cone, Schiehallion resembles a child’s drawing – it looks exactly like what a mountain should look like. Easily accessible from the shores of Loch Tay, it is extremely popular with walkers, whose pounding feet, over the past thirty years, have created some serious erosion. Since 1999, the mountain has been in the hands of the wonderful John Muir Trust – who have realigned the path sustainably, allowing the eroded scar to heal. This path is clear and very well-maintained all the way up to the boulder fields that surround the summit, and I would recommend Schiehallion to anyone as an ‘easy’ or a first munro. Schiehallion is famous for many reasons – it is the place where Neville Maskelyne calculated the weight of the earth, and Charles Hutton invented contour lines. On a fine day, it is also a lovely-looking mountain, whose gaelic name translates as ‘Fairy Hill of the Caledonians’. I wish I had some photographs that suggested how shapely and pleasing Schiehallion is, but on Saturday the cloud was low and the weather was foul. This is about as much as you are going to see, unfortunately.
On the lower slopes, blaeberries were beginning to appear, and, among the heather, we saw many pretty violets.
A little further up, we hit the cloud.
Bruce kept checking to see that the gang were all together.
The wind picked up, the cloud grew thicker . . .
. . .and by the time we hit the upper summit slopes, visibility was very poor.
Picking my way over those slippery lumps of quartzite was not easy and, just after taking this photo, the storm that had been threatening all morning decided to break. The wind howled and whirled, and the rain lashed down. It was pretty wild. We had to hurry up, push on, and get back down off the mountain. Here I come!
You can probably see how my left arm is refusing to do much by this point, and that the plantarflexion of my left foot is poor. Also, having foolishly forgotten my merino tights, I am wearing a pair of stripey pyjamas under my shorts, and I fear that this may add to the day-release-from-the-puzzle-factory effect of this clip (my choice of legwear was the focus of amused remarks from fellow walkers). But, 1) I am successfully descending 2) I am not tired and 3) I am very happy.
On the way down, the weather cleared up a little, and there was time to pause and photograph the interesting lichen I’d been spotting.
Specialists may correct me, but, from my books, I’d say this was porpidia macrocarpa, and that the wonderful lines and colours – which to me suggest maps, or the script of an ancient hand – is the effect of the lichen extracting iron from the rock. On Schiehallion’s upper slopes, the presence of iron makes the quartzite very pink – so much so that some of the boulders seemed to me to resemble giant slabs of ham . . .
Perhaps I was just getting hungry. . . but hold on a minute, could the powers of the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians possibly transform that quartzite side of ham into . . .
. . . a magical pork pie?
We had a magic day out on Schiehallion, anyway.
The landscape of East Lothian is littered with the ruins of medieval castles. Just a stone’s throw from each other are Crichton, Dirleton, and Hailes (which I note from my archives we visited a while ago at exactly this time of year). But the most impressive is surely Tantallon, which, as we came out from North Berwick yesterday, made a fine location for a walk. It is obviously not a hill, but has challenges of its own. Shall we go inside?
Once the stronghold of the “Red” Douglases, the castle saw its way through many sieges, before Cromwell had a go at it in 1651. The damage was irreparable, but no artillery could destroy the drama of the place.
Positioned high on the headland above the Firth of Forth, Tantallon was protected on one side by masonry built 12 feet thick, and on the others, by the sheer force of the landscape. No one was going to scale those cliffs to breach its walls.
I love the wind-blasted, salt-weathered sandstone.
Within the castle walls, things are darker, cooler; the sound of the waves a little quieter. You can go exploring . . .
. . . and climb some vertigo-inducing stairs . . .
. . .to the top of the curtain wall. . .
. . . where you can enjoy the best view of the Bass Rock there is.
Medieval castles are clearly not built for those with mobility issues, but, I am happy to say, cause minimal problem for scampering dogs who must learn to be good on their lead. Still, I made it up and down those crazy stairways without sticks or a fuss or anything. (Mum – all I can say is remember the clock tower at Dinan – you get the picture).
I often get a thing about a landscape, and I have one for this part of East Lothian that I find quite hard to put my finger on. It is rolling and domesticated, with its hawthorn hedgerows (you only see these in lowland Scotland, of course), its villages and towns, its fertile farmland. But there is something stark and exposed about it too – ruined castles, blasted trees, stubble fields, lone standing stones, volcanic plugs, beating waves – something discomfiting. The landscape is quiet, but with an underlying turmoil, and the sense that the dead do not sleep easy here. But perhaps this is obvious, given its history. I once wrote a poem for Tom about it, but that is another story.
Ok, so enough of this waffling on about castles and suchlike, what about that hat?
You may remember that I wrote about contrast and shade a little while ago, and this hat is an example of how I’ve been testing out some basic ideas. It uses a simple peerie pattern to showcase six colours, in pairs. My main principle when selecting colours (apart from whether I liked them or not) was that there had to be contrast within each pair, and contrast between each pair. There is nothing fancy going on here: the peeries use the pairs in turn, and within each pair, the colours alternate as foreground and background. The diagonal lines of the x’s give the eye a sense of the pattern’s continuity between each peerie stripe, and the crown decreases are integrated into the pattern, though the right slanting k2togs ruined my diagonals in some places – I didn’t notice this till the blocking, and realise it can be remedied by using a skpsso instead. Must give this a try.
This was totally addictive knitting – the pattern is so simple and intuitive that after just one peerie, I didn’t need to look at a chart, and it came together very quickly. The brim uses the same method of a knitted-in lining and i-cord edging as this, making the whole thing very cosy. The funny thing is that it was meant to be a tam – and indeed could still be blocked out as one if I used some pins or a plate – but when I had finished, I became sort of attached to the slightly slouchy beanie shape, and found myself unwilling to tam-ify it. I am thinking that, once I have adjusted the crown decreases, and tested its tam-i-ness, that I might write up the pattern. It is seriously fun to knit, can be made as either tam or beanie, and might also look great using just 2 colours. I used a little bit of orkney angora for the brim lining, and, for the rest, the Alice Starmore Hebridean 2 ply in poppy, whin, selkie, pebble beach, solan goose and machair. I have called it Tantallon, of course, and ravelled it here. Anyway, I have caught the colour bug again, and am already embarked on a further design experiment – whose guiding principle is, like this hat that of keeping it pretty simple.
Last week wasn’t so bad, but had its difficulties, for reasons I may elaborate on tomorrow. I am hoping for a good one to come.
It was probably inevitable that I would return wanting a campervan. . .
(yes, I am the blurry gnome in the tartan blanket)
. . . unfortunately, my only prospect of owning one right now is winning the one currently on offer over at Dorset Cereals. But who can argue with the luxury and convenience of van camping, especially when this is what you see when you look out of the window?
(leaping lambs at dusk!)
The van is a VW T5 and it was brilliant – comfortable and really well equipped. I particularly like the fact that its exterior is so unassuming — it just looks like a common or garden van, but then you open the door and find a whole bloody house in there: stove, sink, tiny fridge, roomy cupboards, table, seating, comfortable sleeping options, and all so niftily designed. (We slept on the fold-out sofa which was fine — no clambering about in the extended roof space for me!) Given the wild camping purists that we ordinarily are, so much about the experience felt almost decadent: imagine being able to just drive away if you don’t like a pitch; to stand rather than crouch while cooking; to fire up the stove wherever you like, and to drink a proper cup of tea with fresh milk and everything. . .
(joy!)
We hired our van from Andy at Open Road Scotland whom I heartily recommend. Under my present circumstances, it was a great option and meant that we had a wonderful time away. The weather was, at times, superb; Islay is a truly magical place; and I have come back thoroughly refreshed and enlivened. It is so reassuring to know that, within significant limitations, I can actually still do some of the things that I love in the great Scottish outdoors. This Thursday, I’m off to the cardiologist: he is going to stick a tube down my throat to get a good look at the hole in my heart. If it is the right sort of hole, he can then make arrangements to cover it with a tiny umbrella, which will be fed in through a vein in my groin. With such things on the horizon, it is good to feel strong and (relatively) capable, which is certainly the effect of our fun island jaunt. (Um, did I mention that I really want a campervan?)
(happy van camper at Machir Bay)
As you can imagine, I have a few posts planned, and 9483574579 photographs to process, but here’s a few to be getting on with . . .
Many thanks, by the way, for your comments regarding the blog’s appearance. I’ve still to make up my mind completely about some things, and keep tinkering away. Further comments and suggestions are always welcome. Also, entries are now closed in the Mini Manu draw – when Tom returns from work this evening he will pick the winner by randomly selecting a number between 1 and 283. More soon!
PS I heart campervans.
(A familiar walk between St Annes and Lytham).
I have written before about walking in familiar places. As I think about last year’s walking project, I realise just how important the familiar is to the particular pleasures I find in walking. Stomping the same ground is an important way of connecting with a landscape, allowing you to create a personal map of a particular space, and to lend that map your own meanings. And familiar walks map time as well as space: the landscape changes daily with the seasons, and each walk contains the memory of all previous walks along the same trajectory. Last year, I enjoyed walking in some truly spectacular unfamiliar places — the Clisham Ridge, the Black Cuillin — and these walks were thrilling precisely because their spaces were unknown to me and because (in the case of Skye particularly) I felt myself to be far too small and insignificant to impose meaning on a landscape that sublime (There’s a certain kind of excess to the landscape of Skye that I find incredibly compelling, and impossible to articulate).
(Am Bastair).
These unfamiliar walks were challenging, exhilarating, and tremendously awe inspiring. But I think that, on reflection, the most significant walks of 2009 were those where the only map I needed was the one in my head.
(The Pentlands: a chilly walk on familiar ground)
For example, I have walked the same 10 mile circuit of the Pentlands innumerable times. This is a walk I never tire of, always look forward to, and often dream about. If you asked me, I could draw or narrate the trajectory of this walk in precise detail. There is nothing exotic or wild about the Pentlands: they are a small range of small-ish hills a few miles away from where I live. Managed as a regional park, and combining a variety of working landscapes, the Pentlands are very much a public space, used by all the folk of Edinburgh for many different kinds of recreation. They incorporate a fine rollercoaster of tops and valleys, and, on a bright day, afford a prospect of the city and its environs that is pretty much unbeatable. I love the Pentlands because I am close to them, both geographically and emotionally. The way I feel about the familiar ground of these hills has a certain something in it that is proprietorial — but (to me) this impulse is neither acquisitive or selfish because it involves spaces whose pleasures are explicitly public ones.
(a familiar path in the Pentlands)
I think that my proprietorial feelings about the Pentlands are perhaps similar to those that I find suggested in Nigel Peake’s maps. Peake’s maps are idiosyncratic, personal documents of spatial experience. Looking at one of his maps is like being party to a landscape that is coming into being inside someone’s head: these are spaces to which his pen and his perspective have given a local habitation and a name.
(Nigel Peake, Maps, xviii and xix, one mile right and one mile left. © Peake, 2008.)
All maps, of course, are proprietorial — they all represent a claim, in one way or another, to a landscape. Peake’s maps are no different, and they articulate his own particular set of claims (as cyclist, artist, architect, itinerant, inhabitant). But while the abstract and purportedly objective nature of some forms of cartography can alienate the viewer (or walker), Peake’s maps draw us into a landscape by making it seem both intimate (knowable) and enigmatic (unknowable). Looking at one of Peake’s maps is like being let in on something: but then he isn’t giving the whole game away, either. And when any of us walk through our own familiar landscape, when we traverse our own familiar paths, all of us create emotive, mental maps a bit like Peake’s: maps full of meanings, signs and portents that are unreadable to anyone else but us. So I think I like Peake’s maps precisely because they are so personal, intimate, and subjective: because they allow us a glimpse of the innumerable private landscapes that inhabit all public spaces.
(Nigel Peake, Maps, v, Guide to Fields. © Peake, 2008)
Peake’s maps are also records of a time that is prior to the time of his drawing: his maps transform the past into the present by documenting not just space, but the memory of of space. In her own inimitable creative practice, Felix uses sound to explore and excavate this very territory of spatial experience and private memory, and I love the way that she writes about the landscapes and noises of her own familiar paths. And perhaps, to one extent or another, we all feel this impulse to document, map, memorialise, or creatively transform the spaces that are close to us. As I look back over a year of walking, I know that photographs fulfil this function for me — and I have been surprised to discover patterns in photographs of my walks that have remained pretty much unconscious until now. For example, all of my pictures of familiar places and walks seem to share a common focus on a tree or group of trees.
These particular trees are situated in a small copse between the dunes and the road that connects Lytham and St Annes. I walk the same 8 mile circuit every time we visit the Fylde coast, and I always look forward to seeing these trees. They are an unusual sight in a wind-blasted landscape of salt and starr grass, and their twisted forms seem stoic and defiant.
Now, I was aware of my fascination with this particular group of trees, but, as I looked through my photographs, I realised that there was another tree in the Pentlands that I felt similarly about, and which I also looked forward to seeing again and again. . .
. . . and there is a recently planted rowan in the Eildons that I look for every time we walk there. . .
In fact, as I looked through my archives, I found pictures of many other trees with one common feature: they all inhabit the places that are familiar, frequently visited, and very well-loved by Tom and I. Here is one at Kilchoman, on the Isle of Islay:
and here is another near the Bridge of Orchy:
Now, clearly I have a thing about windswept, isolated trees, but I think there’s something more to it than that. All of these trees are the inhabitants of the places that I love, and that I love to walk in. In their different seasonal forms, they bear witness to the changes that occur in these familiar landscapes over the course of the year — changes that I cannot see when absent. Each photograph of a tree fixes my memory of the landscape, and perhaps also stakes my future claim on it: I have to go back again, to see that tree again. This is what I mean when I say that the familiar walk is a proprietorial one: each tree is my claim, as a walker in the landscape, to a space I cannot possess, nor wish to own. But while I am a transient figure passing through a familiar place, the trees are its permanent residents. Perhaps it is the permanence of their connection that I am attempting to fix, or document in my photographs. Either way, these images reveal a take on my fond and familiar walking places that I hadn’t thought about or articulated to myself until now.
More of Nigel Peake’s work is available here as well as from the fantastic Analogue Books.
We had some fine weather on Islay, and on Sunday enjoyed a glorious day’s walking. When we last visited this part of the world in May, we sat by the water at Ardfin, and gazed across the sound of Jura to some very good looking Islay hills which we had never ascended. So we decided to ascend them. The hills in question sit in a corner of the island that, in comparison to other parts of Islay, feels incredibly remote. Our walk started at Ardtalla and our route (North-West, then South-East) is marked by that wiggly red line:
This is a great walk, but it is not for the faint hearted. While the hills are not particularly high, and nor, at 10 miles, is this a particularly long route, the terrain — involving a characteristic mix of bog, rock, and waist-high bracken — is consistently challenging. . .
. . . but rewarding in every way. After tramping a couple of miles round the coast, we came down to the water to have a look at the old abandoned farm at Proaig.
. . . which is not quite as abandoned as it looks.
A tin roof and some rudimentary furniture make this quite a serviceable bothy, and the swallows nesting in the beams certainly seemed to like it. While I enjoyed the graffiti (“no writing on wall”) Tom found a notebook in which visitors had marked their recent presence in the building in pen and ink.
We were interested to see that Dave G had visited Proaig that morning, though we saw no sign of him — or anyone else for that matter — all day. Perhaps he had already returned to McArthur’s head and the otter.
After crossing the water along a conveniently placed girder, we began our climb.
This is where the walk got really interesting. The sides of these hills are steep, and that solid-looking heathery undergrowth is deceptive. Beneath the heather is moss, beneath the moss is bog, and beneath the bog is The Unknown. The Unknown may be water, it may be loose rock, or it may be a Nice Big Hole just waiting to sprain your ankle. Ascending up such hills can be quite a tricky business — very much like climbing up a large, slippery sponge. This is the kind of walking where one must look down frequently, to see on precisely what one is stepping. But I like watching my feet. There are amazing things to see.
I was not quick enough to photograph the fat cream-and-chocolate adder who appeared out of the heather, and the camera also missed the bright yellow lizard that darted across Tom’s boots. But that gigantic caterpillar wasn’t going anywhere, and neither were the fungi or the flowers.
I love the way that the peat and water that shape this landscape bring things to life in such outlandish colours.
There are incredible greens and browns and oranges everywhere you look. And the shades of rock and lichen are equally intense. Sun-yellows, reds and peaches. Quartzite, pink as a giant roast salmon.
When one reaches the tops of hills, one begins to look down in a different way. If the day is clear, there is the reward of a fine expansive view. And whatever the weather, there is that heady sensation of traversing the curve where the earth meets the sky.
Sometimes the point of a walk seems the prospect, and in this case, it was a delicious one: back across the Sound to the three paps of Jura. We could see the place where we sat three months ago, anticipating this superb Islay walk.
But I’m in a nuts-and-bolts kind of mood at the moment, and however great the prospect view, I think that its the nuts-and-bolts of this landscape — the things that I noticed by looking down at my feet — that I’ll continue to muse upon.
Yes, I did knit that hat. It is my new favourite walking hat. I’ll perhaps say something about it another time
They are demolishing — sorry — developing part of the university. This is what I saw through the wreckage this morning.
After the conclusion of my clothing-myself project in 2008, I have a new project for 2009.
I think that most things are seen better when seen from on foot, and I am often struck by just how much more atuned one becomes to the changing uses and meanings of a landscape when walking through it. Walking radically changes one’s sense of place. For example, when I walked from the West to the East coast of Northern England in 2006, I became very aware (as I passed fishing ports, and slate quarries, and leadmines, and sheep pasture, and reservoirs, and grouse-filled moors) that I was moving through the landscape’s many different economies, sometimes encountering the relics of old economies as well. I noted the shifting geology and ecology of the ground under my feet, and began to look at hills and valleys in a completely different way. I developed a fondness for limestone and an antipathy to bracken.
Loch Uigedail circuit. January 8th, 2009. 7 miles.
Though one is perhaps less concerned with geology in an urban landscape, similar things can be said about walking in towns and cities. Walking allows the walker to really read an urban space — to encounter corners and ginnels, neighbourhoods and the boundaries of neighbourhoods — in a way that is completely impossible in a private car or from public transport. On foot, you can seek out and be party to a city’s particular vernacular.
January 2nd, 2009. Post Hogmanay crowds, Edinburgh. 3 miles.
I have long been intrigued by peripatetic projects — for example, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space, or Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital — and this year seemed like a good time to pursue one of my own. There are downsides to commuting, but one of the good things about it is the four daily walking miles I can clock up, as well as the many amazing things that I see on my way. My weekends often involve walking in more remote locations, but I am most interested, I think, in the ordinariness of walking — in walking as a daily, quotidian activity. Anyway, armed with podometer and camera, I intend to document a year as a pedestrian.
January 4th, 2009. Kilchoman – Kilchiaran circuit. 4 miles.
I’ll be keeping the visual record over on flickr, but will certainly be making remarks about the progress of the project here from time to time. Meantime, here’s a taste of the project’s beginning, and some walks from the first couple of weeks of 2009.
January 5th, 2009 Bunnahabhain, 2 miles.
January 9th, 2009. Goatopia. 5 miles.
January 18th, 2009. Pickled eggs (after seeing Charles Avery’s The Islanders: An Introduction). 6 miles.
A beautiful Autumn day — we went walking in the Ochils.
We began here at Castle Campbell. . .
. . . and then ascended into the hills and pootled around all day — up and down, from top to top, following the grassy rollercoaster up toward Ben Cleuch . . .
. . . we admired the view of the snow-capped Lawers range . . .
. . . came back down into the valley near Tillicoultry. . .
. . . and enjoyed the fading light as we walked back to Dollar along the Devon way.
It is very nice to get out into the hills again.
In other news, craft has been occurring here! More soon.
