I was prompted to think about landscape, about how I might have embodied it or how it might reflect me. I wondered which landscapes particularly speak to me, and realised that in any landscape we don't look at the whole "scape", the whole"scope", instead we look at the details, the aspects that resonate with who we are or who we are trying to be.
I remember when I was baptised into the hills, with snow, by an old man with a border collie, half-way up a mountain, one August day. You will always come back, he said. You belong now to the hills.
Or something like that. I'm sure I've romanticised it over the years. These are the facts: it was August, I was climbing Ben Nevis with my Dad, I'd left my then best friend at the foot of the mountain and my Mam further away on the camp site, we were going to walk to thetop, Dad & I. Walk, not climb, it was a footpath, maybe a bit of a scramble, definitely no rope-work; I was 16 or 17 years old, thereabouts. We met the old man and his dog, there were pocketsof snow, he picked up a handful and crushed it against my forehead and bound me to the hills, and my Dad smiled. And I have never forgotten.
I am bound to the high places. Circumstance and love have brought me to live in the flatlands of East Anglia, but I still hear the call of the hills. I love my adopted homeland, but I still hear thecall. And those who have watched me as I travel back into them, see the change in me.
So the hills were what first came to mind when prompted to think of landscape. Hills. Earth rising.
And yet, I am not earth. I am wood water.
So even in thinking of the hills and the high places, I think not of the earth and the air, but of the wood and the water. Tree-lines and river sources. And soon I am thinking again of the lowlands. Of the oceans and rivers and marshes. I think of the whole. Not the high and the low, but how the high enfolds the low. I think of what it is like to return to hill country. My first thoughts are not of wanting to scale the heights, but of being welcomed among them, of being embraced by the very planet, held, comforted. To be at low level, but among the hills, that to me is feeling safe.
Wood water. The woods ascend the hillside, so far as they can, the water tumbles down to meet it. Wood is my lowland solid self; water is my highland adventurer.
I have a friend who is wood wood. He feels safest in the tree-scape. I am only partly at home there. I easily go astray in the forest; I get lost and that feeling of uncertainty spikes my adrenalin, sparks fear of something that I do not understand. In the modern regimented forest, I fear the people who might lurk in the pine shadows. In the ancient woodland, I fear the unknown, the ancient, the way the paths lead nowhere because they are not human paths, but animal trails down to the water, because the boar and the deer and the whatever else lives in here all need to drink and to return to their other lives, they do not have destinations, other than the water.
I have been alone in the woods and walked the trails and found that they lead downhill and this seems sensible until I am the lake side and nowhere to go but swim, or walk back and try again.
I have been lost in the woods, and frightened by it.
But afterwards, I have also known that we should do this, that it is a good thing to know what it is like to be lost, in the woods, and to be afraid. It makes the manipulations of mankind more obviously petty.
A poetic writer spoke once of being all of the landscapes that she had known. I understand, but that is not who I am. I do not embed the landscapes I have loved. I think I simply leave scatterings of myself upon them, even as I pick up the air-dust of history they breathe into me.
Last week I walked upon scrubby ground. In the distance was the distinctive squared-off shape of a hill that is a grassed over slag-heap. I spoke of Aberfan to someone who had only sort-of heard of it. I spoke of the silence that the word Aberfan would create at home. That silence, that grief, that loss, has been passed down to me who never lived in the shadow of the slag heap, by those that did, by those who knew that there but for the grace of god… Mam and her sisters, grew up in the shadow of the colliery, the mines, the pits. Her Dad and Cyril and Eddie, her brothers, all men that I never knew, worked in the dark and the damp and breathed in their death, they slowly drowned in coal dust. And while they were living and breathing and working themselves to death, Mam and her sisters tea-trayed down the slag heaps not knowing that the hillside above their school was potentially deadly.
They'd moved away from their valley before Aberfan, and which was a different valley, but you could see it in their faces, when they watched the news, the memorials, year upon year, and then the dramas and all the rest, you could see the haunting of what might have been, that it was Aberfan, but it might have been Seven or Onllwyn or anywhere else in the valleys. It might have been any one of those heaps, upon any of the schools that sat innocently beneath them.
There was no sense of any of that as we walked it last week. No sense of the past. To me it felt as though the land had beenclosed down with the last of the pits. The winding gear sitting forlorn alongside hard-to-read information panels, did not speak of the dark and the damp and the friendship and the laughter, did not speak of the men I was deprived of knowing. I felt a pride in those men, who worked somewhere beneath the paths I was treading. I felt a pride in the mother and the sisters that survived and moved away and (between them – and others) enabled me to have a different life. I looked at the church and wondered if the girls had gone there. I looked at the terraced houses and wondered where they'd lived.
I don't think I'd fully realised how proud I am of my Mam and her sisters.
If I stop romanticising and get real, I feel that yes, this is my heritage, but it is not my history…it is not the landscape of my parenting. That lies in the north-east…it lies inHamsterley Forest, at High Force, on the North York Moors, in Braithwaite and on Grisedale Pike, it lies on the Whitby cliffs and the beach below. Seaton Carew and the beach that I haven't been back to in half a lifetime.
Landscape conjures up great vistas…but the landscape of my childhood, of my links to the people that raised me, includes the central reservation on the Bath Road, where I remember lunch-break grapes with my Dad's sister…it includes freezing lochs and swimming…it includes allotments and old railway lines…the River Wear at Willington…a swimming pool at Selsey and the shingle beach in the rain.
I think of Malham Cove and Hadrian's Wall and the view of Bamburgh Castle from beyond the dunes. School trips.
I think of my beloved North Norfolk coast, my adopted wilderness.
I sit in my suburban bungalow in a pale pink dawn and I wonder about how we connect with the land.
WheneverI walk the land, whatever kind of land, I reach back into its history. I remember walking the north east hills of Scotland, deprived of people to feed sheep and the sheep too are now long gone. I remember the ruins on Jordan hills. I remember finding abandoned ships in up-river creeks. Picking up sea-creature fossils high in the Himalaya. Always the past is tangible.
In most places I can sense the past and those have walked this way before but, strangely, I have never stopped to wonder about those who will come after. I have never thought to wonder about what traces, what energy signatures, what resonances, I am leaving on the land I walk.
In the places where I was sad, or angry, or grieving, have I left fragments of my sadness, anger and grief? Will the echoes of that disturb those who come after? Do I, therefore, have a duty, a moral obligation, to manage the energy trace I leave behind, just as I have such an obligation to take my physical litter home?
I think of places I was happy: walking along the northern coast of Scotland, sitting onthe Calf of Man, many times on many beaches, exhausted and awe-struck on many hills, sunrises and sunsets in cities and in the countryside, the midnight sun on a Finnish lake…and I wonder if my joy of those places, my pleasure, my awe, help to neutralise any lingering dis-ease left by others. Does being grateful for simply being in a place, help to cleanse it, heal it. Does it count as litter-picking?
I do not know. I merely wonder. I accept these new thoughts as an invitationto be in the world more consciously. To become more aware of my energy. It is so easy to get lost in the self-generating landscape of the mind. The mine field. The mind field.
It helps, I find, to leave that behind, to quite literally just walk away from it.
And thenI come back to this idea of our selves as imaged in the land…
We are all shifting sands,
dunes lighting the evening with
a million reflected sundrops, we are
wind-blown shape-shifters on
a desert floor, casting
strange shadows.
We are all the dancing white horses
thundering onto the beach.
We are all the magical landscapes
in the sky, the purple hills of cloud
at evening, when the storm
has passed.
We are the laughter of the mountain stream,
the exuberance of the waterfall.
We are the climbing of the ivy and the tumbledown
of the neglected dry-stone wall.
