The Faraway Nearby. Rebecca Solnit

I learned to recognise the ripe berries by their gleam, to recognise and skip the dull, soft berries past their prime, spot the sprays of berries than hung in the shadows of the leaves, to reach through the thorny branches with a minimum of scratching, though my hands were always purple and welted by the end, to pull the berries off so that I would not squish I my fingers. Then, after a day of looking at spiderwebs, at the small jewel-like beetles that roamed the blackberries, at minnows in the stream, and at water striders on its surface, a day of wading knee-deep in cool water and picking mint and watercress and red-orange lilies along with berries, I went home with my bounty. I poured the bowls of berries into a pot, added sugar, let the smell and steam fill the room, and made a runny, seedy form of preserves that looked black in the jars but tasted like summer in wintertime. p84

The Unofficial Countryside Richard Mabey

But it is Hampstead Heath, that expanse of wild country rising as refreshingly and miraculously as a mirage out of mile upon mile of besieging concrete, that is for me the finest example of what an urban park can be. Hampstead’s hilliness has always been its greatest asset. To reach its highest point you must climb over 500 feet in two miles. In the days when the air was cleaner they said you see the steeple of Hanslope Church from the top, over fifty miles away in Buckinghamshire. There was even a delightfully Heath Robinson plan to pump air in pipes down from the balmy heights to the choking citizens in the city below.

Hampstead Heath also lies on poor, sandy soil, which in town and country alike gives a piece of ground a fair chance of remaining undeveloped. Being of little agricultural use in pre-industrial times, this sort of ground was usually given over as common land, a status which the commoners would stoutly defend (with clubs and fists on more than one occasion) whilst more secure farmers were selling off their land to the property sharks. Luckily the era of industrial sprawl and ruthless property development sparked off a concern for the recreational value of open space, and the guerrilla commoners often found they had enlightened planning authorities on their side. The ironic result of this was that many patches of poor land remained open whilst the rich surrounding farmland was built on…

Eventually the Metropolitan Board of Works were able to purchase the Manorial rights of the Heath. In 1871 the historic Hampstead Heath Act was passed. In the face of the prettification that was going on in parks all over Victorian England, this stated firmly and clearly in its preamble that it would be ‘of great advantage to the inhabitants of the Metropolis if the Heath were always kept unenclosed and unbuilt on, its natural aspect and state being as far as may be preserved…

Hampstead Heath has something for everyone…overall I think the Heath has succeeded as one of our greatest urban parks precisely because it has not been designed on a drawing board but within reason has been allowed to develop naturally…Hampstead Heath has maybe the closest approximation to the feel of the countryside that you could find inside a city. p108-117

The peregrine JA Baker

BeginningsFarms are well-ordered, prosperous, but a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass. There is always a sense of loss, a feeling of being forgotten. There is nothing else here: no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of the earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterise all sorrow p18

Notes

In this book Baker does not anthropomorphise the peregrine, he imagines, as far as is possible for flightless humans, what life is like for the peregrine, one of the most successful predators in the world. Baker was writing at a time when peregrine numbers were dangerously low, and the peregrine was in danger of extinction. He obsessively follows the peregrine for hours and days at a time, becoming almost at one with the landscape.

But this is not a personal account, and Baker did not want his personality to be asserted. He wanted to write an objective account of his experience based on long, deep and accurate observation: “the hardest thing of all is to see what is really there”.

At the same time, he condenses ten years into one winter, and does not identify specific places, referring to ‘the ford’ or ‘north wood’. This makes it less literal but more universal.

Baker lived in Chelmsford, Essex, and wrote about a small patch of land in an unspectacular part of the world, the valleys of the rivers Chelmer and Blackwater to the North Sea coast. Then the area was quiet and rural, and Baker cycled everywhere on country lanes. Baker wrote: “Before it is too late, I have tried to…convey the wonder of…a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa”

The pump of death The Gentle Author March 9th 2011

See these people come and go at the junction of Fenchurch St and Leadenhall St in the City of London in 1927. Observe the boy idling in the flat cap. They all seem unaware they are in the presence of the notorious “Pump of Death”. Switched to mains supply fifty years earlier, in 1876, when the water began to taste strange and was found to contain liquid human remains which had seeped into the underground stream from cemeteries.

Hundreds died in the resultant Aldgate Pump Epidemic from drinking polluted water – though this was obviously a distant memory by the nineteen twenties, when Whittard’s tea merchants used to “always get the kettles filled at the Aldgate Pump so that only the purest water was used for tea tasting.”

Yet before the Aldgate Pump transferred to a supply from the New River Company of Islington, the spring water was appreciated by many for its abundant health-giving mineral salts, until it was discovered that the calcium in the water had leached from human bones.

This bizarre phenomenon quickly entered popular lore, so that a bouncing cheque was referred to as a draught upon Aldgate Pump, and in rhyming slang “Aldgate Pump” meant to be annoyed – “to get the hump.” The revelation confirmed widespread prejudice about the East End, of which Aldgate Pump was a landmark defining the beginning of the territory. The “Pump of Death” became emblematic of the perceived degradation of life in East London and it was once declared, with superlative partiality, that East of Aldgate Pump, people cared for nothing but drink, vice and crime.

In the photo from 1927, you can see two metal drinking cups that have gone now, leaving just the stubs where the chains attaching them were fixed. Tantalisingly, the brass button that controls the water outlet is still there, yet, although it is irresistible to press it, the water ceased flowing in the last century. A drain remains beneath the spout where the stone is weathered from the action of water over centuries and there is an elegant wrought iron pump handle – enough details to convince me that the water might return one day.

Notes

The Gentle Author has undertaken to write a blog about Spitalfields every day for 10,000 days – about 27 years. Spitalfields lies just to the east of the City of London and has a long and fascinating history but parts of it are now under threat from developers and grandiose schemes. The Gentle Author has vowed to write about the people who live and work in the area, many being the six, seventh or eighth generation to run a business or follow an occupation there.

Although using the internet as the medium, the Gentle Author has done a very good job of remaining invisible, so we still do not know the age or gender of the Gentle Author. The Gentle Author’s aims in writing the blog is not to put themselves forward, but to spotlight the person or feature that is the subject of the article.

The Gentle Author writes:The loss of human stories that go unrecorded when people die is a matter of grief to

me…And so it was as a consequence of these sentiments that I set out to devote my experience as a writer to writing down people’s stories and publishing them, often with their own photographs as illustration…Before long the writing project that began as Spitalfields Life quite simply became my life. It made me look at people differently as I grew to understand their motives better and the result is that the city has become a more human place for me…Like those writers of 14th century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog…In spite of its novelty, there are several venerable precedents. Firstly, in the diaries and journals that people have always written to make a single narrative from the chaos of life. Secondly, in the epic collections of stories such as The Arabian Nights, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, constructed to reveal a mulit-dimensional picture of human nature. Thirdly, in the distinguished literary form of the pen-portrati, which has its former flowering in the newspapers that languished when the internet came along….Once I was concerned that writing was an overly solitary activity to pursue as a lifetime’s occupation, yet Spitalfields Life has led me out into the world, and I have met more people since I started his work than I had done in the whole of my life up to that point. ppxv-xvii

Calum’s Road Roger Hutchinson

One spring morning in the middle of the 1960s a man in his fifties placed into his homemade wheelbarrow a pick, an axe and a shovel and a lunchbox. He trundled this cargo south from his crofthouse door, down a narrow, rutted bridle path, up and down rough Hebridean hillsides, along the edge of hazardous cliff-faces, through patches of bent and stunted hazel and birch and over quaking peat bogs.

After almost two miles he stopped and turned to face homewards. Before him and to his left were steep banks of bracken, turf, birch and hazel. To his right, green pastureland rolled down to the sea. There were sheep on this pasture, and, close to the shore, a small group of waist-high stone rectangles which once, a century ago, had been the thatched cottages of a community called Castle…

Then, alone in an empty landscape, he began to build a road…At the end of that first long day, he had accomplished slightly more than one-

thousandth of a task which would take him twenty years to complete, which would pay him not a material penny and would cost him little more, but which would leave his manifesto marked in stone upon his people’s land.

His name was Calum MacLeod. He belonged to the township of South Arnish in the north of the island of Raasay… p1-2

In total, Calum worked his way through three wheelbarrows, six picks, six shovels, five sledgehammers, four spades and one crowbar while building the road between Brochel and Arnish. It was estimated that the largest single boulder he removed weighed nine tons. It stood in the path of his road. He used a jack to lift it, then packed it in place with stones, then jacked it up again, then repacked it with stones, then jacked it up once more…until it had been heaved out of his way and had fallen, defeated, into the sea.He was accompanied on his painstaking travail between Brochel Castle and Arnish by a tiny portable hut which edged its way, yard by yard, month by month, year by year, along the verge in line with Calum’s progress. p137

Notes

For almost all of his life, Calum MacLeod lived in the north of the Hebridean island of Raasay, where he worked as a crofter, postman and tender of the Rona lighthouse. Yet, due to clearance and neglect, the population of northern Raasay dwindled during his lifetime to just two people – Calum and his wife.

Calum had an idiosyncratic response to this decline…‘With a road,’ his former neighbour Donald MacLeod said, ‘he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay’. It would become a romantic, quixotic venture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years.Dustjacket

There is clearly a risk – if ‘risk’ it is - of sentimalising a definitively robust and unsentimental story. I am not immune to such things, but luckily, the story itself seems to be. The metaphor, the parable of Calum’s Road inspires flights of fancy. The evident engineering, the solid rock and tarmacadam of Calum’s Road inspires a most bewildered by deep and lasting respect. Whatever else is said and written about this subject, the least firmly grounded of visitors to Arnish will leave with one essential, important conclusion: that here lived a man who desired not fame and money, nor television and radio programmes, nor medals and recognition by UNESCO, nor paragraphs in travel guides, nor tributes in magazines and newspapers and books; a man who would have been astonished and

bewildered by the tribute of an exhibition of art. Calum did not even want a driving licence. He merely wanted a road. p xiv-xv

The Wild Places Robert Macfarlane

ForestBark is a subtle, supple substance, easily overlooked. It can be thought of as the tree’s skin; like skin, it carries the marks of folding and of expansion, a stretching which snaps it into flakes or plates or lenticles. If you were to take slow-motion footage of elm bark over a year, you would be able to see it moving, working, living; crevasses gaping, calluses forming, the constant springing open and closing of fissures. As Constable knew, the world can reveal itself in a tree’s bark. Lean in close to bark, and you will find a landscape which you might enter, through whose ravines and edges you might make day-long journeys p102

Notes

Robert Macfarlane is a lecturer in English and one of the ‘new nature writers’. I admire his work because he is attempting to write lyrically and rigorously about landscape and our relationship to it. The Wild Places is also about the journey from the romantic thinking that wild places have to be distant, harsh, remote, unpeopled, hard won to understanding that a small patch of urban turf can be a wild place, too. He is a fan of the poet Edward Thomas, Nan Shepherd Living Mountain and of JA Baker, and played a large role in The Peregrine being brought to attention again.

The peregrine JA Baker

October 8th

Fog lifted. The estuary hardened into shape, cut by the east wind. Horizons smarted in the sun. Islands grew upon the water. p42

November 4th

For two hours a falcon peregrine hovered in the gale, leaning into it with heavy flailing wings, moving slowly round the creeks and saltings. She seldom rested, and the wind was too strong for soaring. She followed the sea wall, flying forward for thirty yards, then hovering. Once, she hovered for a long time, and sank to sixty feet; hovered, and sank to thirty feet; hovered, and dropped till only a foot above the long grass on the top of the wall. There she stayed, hovering steadily, for two minutes. She had to fly strongly forward to keep in the same place. Then the grass swayed and crumpled as something ran through it, and the hawk plunged down with outspread wings. There was a scuffle, and something ran along the side of the wall to safety in the ditch at the bottom. The falcon rose, and resumed her patient hovering. She was probably hunting for hares or rabbits. I found the remains of both; the fur had been carefully plucked from them, and the bones neatly cleaned. I also found a mallard drake, drab and ignominious in death p62

Palestinian Walks, Notes on a Vanishing LandscapeRajeh Shehadeh

The Albina CaseBefore moving away from this rock I made sure to remember its location: several terraces down from the pine trees, halfway between the top of the hill and the valley, in a field full of the common thistle called natsh (Poterium Thorn), which was likely used to make the crown of thorns worn by Christ. Natsh is as plentiful in these hills as heather in the Scottish Highlands. Both are tenacious plants with strong roots. In winter natsh acquires thick narrow leaves that conserve water. The fields are full of small green mounds not unlike porcupines. As the dry summer months advance the leaves eventually dry up and fall off, leaving humps of wiry mesh that farmers sometimes cut and use as a broom to clean coarse surfaces of pebbles and stones. It is also used to drain water and, because of its elasticity, as a substitute for a spring mattress by people who are sleeping out in the open. In Arabic the verb Natasha means to pluck, hence the name of the weed extractor, Minttash.

In Israeli military courts this weed has gained great popularity. Never has a weed been more exploited and politicised, not least by Dani Kramer, the legal advisor to the Israeli military government responsible for expropriating Palestinian land for Jewish settlements. Dani knew few Arabic words. Natsh was one of them. How often I have heard him stand up before the judge in the military land court and declare: ‘But, your honour, the land is full of natsh. I saw it with my own eyes.” Meaning: what more proof could anyone want that the land was uncultivated and therefore public land that the Israeli settlers could use as their own? p53

Notes

Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist who lives in Ramallah. In the introduction to this book he writes:

When I began hill walking in Palestine a quarter of a century ago, I was not aware that I was travelling through a vanishing landsxcape. For centuries the central highlands of Palestine, which slope on one side towards the sea and on the other towards the desert, had remained relatively unchanged…Those hills were, I believe, one of the natural treasures of the world.

All my life I have lived in houses that overlook the Ramallah hills. I have related to them like my own private backyard, whether for walks, picnics or flower-picking expeditions. I have watched their changing colours during the day and over the seasons as well as during an unending sequence of wars. I have always love hill walking…

I began taking long walks in Palestine in the late 1970s. This was before many of the irreversible changes that blighted the land began to take place. The hills then were like one large nature reserve with all the unspoiled beauty and freedom unique to such areas. The seven walks described in this book span a period of twenty-seven years.

Although each walk takes it own unique course they are also travels through time and space. It is a journey beginning in 1978 and ending in 2007, in which I write about the developments I have witnesses in the region and about the changes to my life and surroundings.

Palestine has been one of the countries most visited by pilgrims and travellers over the ages. The accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to

me but rather a land of these travellers’ imaginations… I can only hope that this book does not fall within this tradition…

I like to think of my relationship to the land, where I have always lived, as immediate and not experience through the veil of words written about it, often replete with distortions…

This long running drama has not ended. The stage, however, has relocated to the hills of the West Bank, where Israeli planners place jewish settlements on hilltops and plan them such that they can only see other settlements while strategically dominating the valleys in which most Palestinian villages are located…The Israele architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman perceptively uncover a ‘cruel paradox’: ‘the very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’, its traditional inhabitants and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone building and the presence of livestock, is produced by the Palestinians, whom the jewish settlers came to replace… The Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear’…

Now when I walk I the hills I cannot but be conscious that the time when I will be able to do so is running out…

In Palestine every wadi, spring, hillock, escarpment and cliff has a name, usually with a particular meaning. Some of the names are Arabic, others Canaanite or Aramaic. Evidence of how ancient the land is and how it has been continuously inhabited over many centuries…

In the course of working on this book I came to realise that the writing itself was the eighth journey…The penultimate journey led to a confrontation with a young jewish settler who had grown up and spent his twenty-five years of life in the very same hills…Yet despite the myths that make up his world view, how could I claim that my love of these hills cancels out his? And what would this recognition mean to both our future and that of our respective countries? pxi-xx

The Faraway Nearby. Rebecca Solnit

[Photographer Subhankar Banerjee. Photographing in the Arctic]I went to the Arctic, thinking that I’m going to a faraway place remote from my home country. As it happens, the Arctic is connected. Today, after ten years, I call the Arctic the most connected place on the planet. And that connection is both celebratory and tragic. It’s celebratory because birds travel to the Arctic from every part of the planet, including from Calcutta. There is a species called the yellow wagtail that winters outside of Calcutta, where I’m originally from, and nests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where I’ve been working for ten years. So that’s a celebratory connection.

It’s tragic because of climate change and because of toxins migrating north along with the birds, the toxins that turned bears hermaphroditic and reach human beings as well. Breast milk of Greenland women is now scientifically considered as hazardous waste. And that’s because these toxins are migrating from all over the planet, and they’re ending their migration in the Arctic. So all my work is actually a metaphor for this interconnectedness. p158-9

Everything travels. Even the story of the Buddha came to Iceland several hundred years ago like a migratory bird, another fairy tale that mutated as it meandered. The honorific term Bodhisattva became the Arabic name Budhasaf or Yudhasaf, which became the Greek name Iosaph, and Joasaph elsewhere in Europe, and Joasaph was long revered as one of the two saints who converted India to Christianity. The story migrated from Syriac to Greek to Latin to a Norse translation of about 1250 that is credited to King Haakon the Younger, who may have done it himself or more likely commissioned it. An independent Icelandic translation from a German version was made a couple of centuries later.

Both tell the story of the prince whose father tried to protect him from the world and from knowledge of suffering, of how he finds it anyway, and goes on to a monastic life. “Thus it was” said a caustic writer in 1895 “that by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to the papacy in matters of faith and morals, Buddha became a Christian saint.” Which was viewed as problematic if you wanted facts with untangled lineage, but if you prefer stories to migrate as freely as birds and mingle and evolve, it’s a joy. p171-2

Notes

Rebecca Solnit was mentioned by Elizabeth Reeder at the writing workshop last week.Solnit has also written the excellent:

Solnit, R. 2006A Field Guide to Getting LostEdinburgh: Canongate

Solnit. R. 2001Wanderlust: a history of walkingLondon: Verso

The PlotMadeleine Bunting

What I’ve realised is that belonging is first of all about commitment rather than possession. It is about how one pays attention. What I have learned on the plot in North Yorkshire has been what a Buddhist might call a practice, a set of habits: the skills of listening, observing, enjoying the many narratives of place and how they collide, compete, echo and repeat each other. My story of the plot began in my childhood but the practice of belonging can travel and I use it now on the canals of east London as I urge the kids on, pedalling past the Victorian reservoirs, pylons and vast warehouses. And I used it on the hollow ways over the last fragment of chalk downs in west Berkshire. One can belong in many places. Belonging is where we nurture our capacity for awareness of the myriad histories that constitute a place and from these rich materials draw inspiration to shape our sense of self and community. These are the insights that helped inspire by father’s chapel as his manifesto in stone, wood and glass half a century ago.

Notes

Madeleine Bunting is a writer and journalist, one of five children of John Bunting (1927-2001), sculptor and teacher. During the second world was John Bunting was evacuated to Ampleforth College Benedictine Monastic School, in North Yorkshire and while there he first went to, and fell in love with, the site of his later chapel.

After university and national service, in 1948 he returned to the furniture maker Robert (Mouseman) Thompson in Kilburn as his apprentice. On a visit to Henry Moore at work in his studio at Much Hadham, Moore advised Bunting to go to art school and he studied at St Martins and the Royal College of Art.

In 1955, he returned to Ampleforth College and was appointed Master of Drawing. His pupils include sculptors Antony Gormley and Martin Jennings, painter Andrew Festing and wood engraver Simon Brett. He also taught life drawing at York Art School for nearly 40 years 

Bunting was a deeply religious man and built a War Memorial Chapel for the 1939-1945 war and three Ampleforth pupils who died in the war. This work occupied years of his life, and family visits to this site as his work progressed prompted his daughter Madeleine to write ‘The Plot’.

If you travel on the train north from York, about ten minutes out of the station, you can see a long line of hills to the east, the Hambledon Hills. You will see a white horse carved onto the hillside, and this is just above the village of Kilburn. The Plot perches on the steep edge of this ridge. Deep valleys in this area house Rievaulx and Byland abbeys.

Although a deeply personal memoir, and addressing, amongst many things, Bunting’s difficult relationship with his children, this is a not a self indulgent book.

Bibliography

Baker, J.A. 2010The PeregrineLondon: Harper CollinsOriginally published 1967

Bunting, M. 2009The PlotLondon: Granta Books

The Gentle Author 2012Spitalfields LifeLondon: Hodder and Stoughtonpp21-23

Hutchinson, R. 2006Calum’s RoadEdinburgh: Birlinn

Macfarlane, R. 2007The Wild PlacesLondon: Granta Books

Shehadeh, R. 2007Palestinian Walks, Notes on a Vanishing LandscapeLondon: Profile Books

Solnit, R. 2013The Faraway NearbyLondon: Granta Books