Hamish Hamilton Presents Five Dials
Number 36 Landmarkings
Robert Macfarlane On The Peregrine Rachel Lichtenstein Approaching London via estuary W.G. Sebald From the archive Stanley Donwood New artwork
Previously unpublished writing from: Roger Deakin, J.A. Baker, Nan Shepherd
Plus: ‘Relics’ from Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton, photography by David Quentin and Jay Griffiths
Guest edited by Robert Macfarlane & Simon Prosser 2 CONTRIBUTORS
J.A. (John Alec) Baker was born in 1926 in Chelmsford, and The Old Ways. His writing has won many prizes, and Essex.The Peregrine (1967) won the Duff Cooper Prize, been widely adapted for television and radio. He is currently and is widely considered a visionary masterpiece of place- at work on Underland, a book about the worlds beneath our writing. Among its admirers is Werner Herzog, who feet. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. describes it as ‘an ecstasy’, written in ‘prose of the calibre we have not seen since Conrad’. Herzog lists it as mandatory David Quentin takes available-light photographs on film, reading at his film school, alongside Virgil’s Georgics, and the generally using vintage camera equipment. His photographs Warren Commission Report on Kennedy's assassination. have appeared in publications as diverse as Artrocker Magazine, Vogue Italia, Scotland Outdoors Magazine, and The Financial Anthea Bell is the prize-winning translator of many books Times. He is also a barrister specialising in UK and interna- from German and French. Her translations of W.G. Sebald’s tional tax law, and (currently) a visiting research fellow at works include Austerlitz, Campo Santo and On the Natural the University of Sussex, where he is researching the human History of Destruction. rights implications of corporate tax avoidance. www.golgothaesplanade.com Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. He lived for many years at Autumn Richardson is a Canadian poet and Richard Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk, where he wrote his three Skelton is a British artist. They formed Corbel Stone Press books, Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, in 2009, a cross-media publishing platform producing books, all of which have been acclaimed as classics of nature writing. art and music informed by ecology, natural history, ethnol- His essay in this issue, previously unpublished, was read as a ogy and animism. Together they edit Reliquiae, an annual radio talk, and is published here with kind permission journal of poetry, translations, essays and short fiction. of Roger’s Estate. www.corbelstonepress.com
Stanley Donwood maintains his own website, slowly- W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in downward.com, where short stories and various other writ- 1944 and died in Norfolk, England in 2001. He was Professor ings are published. He frequently collaborates with the band of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and Radiohead and its lead singer, Thom Yorke. In 2002 he and the author of, amongst other books, the classic sequence of Yorke won a Grammy for Best Recording Package for the prose fictionsThe Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and special edition of the album Amnesiac. His 2006 exhibition, Austerlitz. His essay in this issue of Five Dials, translated by London Views, consisted of a series of fourteen lino prints of Anthea Bell, first appeared in German inDie Weltwoche in various London landmarks being destroyed by fire and flood. October 1995.
Jay Griffiths is the author of several highly original and Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) is now best known for her widely acclaimed books including Wild and Kith, and has prose non-fiction masterpieceThe Living Mountain, written just completed a new book, Tristimania. Her essay in this in the 1940s but not published until 1977, shortly before her issue forms part of a sequence she wrote for Film and Video death. In her lifetime she was most famous for her ‘Grampian Umbrella (www.fvu.co.uk) and is reproduced here with kind Trilogy’ of novels, but the book she was perhaps most proud permission of Jay and the commissioners at FVU. of was a volume of poems, In The Cairngorms, published in 1934. Three of the poems in this issue (‘Loch Avon’, ‘The Rachel Lichtenstein is the author of On Brick Lane, Dia- Hill Burns’ and ‘Caul’) are taken from the reissue of the mond Street and, with Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room. Her essay collection, newly published in paperback by Galileo Publish- in this issue is the start of a work-in-progress, Estuary, to be ers, and reprinted here with gratitude to Galileo, as well as published by Hamish Hamilton in Autumn 2016. to Erlend Clouston and the Nan Shepherd Estate. The three further poems in this issue are previously unpublished and Robert Macfarlane is the author of the recently-published reproduced here with the very kind permission of the Nan Landmarks, as well as of a trilogy of books about landscape Shepherd Estate, from the Shepherd archive in the National and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places Library of Scotland.
3 Guest Editors: Robert Macfarlane & Simon Prosser
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Editor: Craig Taylor Publisher: Simon Prosser Assistant Editor: Anna Kelly Five Dials staffers: Zainab Juma, Natalie Williams, Paul Martinovic, Noel O’Regan, Sam Buchan-Watts, Paul Tucker, Jamie Fewery, Ellie Smith, Caroline Pretty, Jakob von Baeyer and Emma Easy Thanks to: Erlend Clouston, Daisy Hughes Design and art direction: Antonio de Luca Studio Illustrations by: Stanley Donwood
@fivedials
@hamishh1931
4 5 table of contents
Flight South Hunting Life Roger Deakin follows the swallows. How one short-sighted man showed us what the 7 peregrine sees. By Robert Macfarlane 34 Death of the Birch-tree By J.A. Baker Six 11 By Nan Shepherd 42 To the Brothel by way of Switzerland W.G Sebald Kafka’s travel diaries A Singing of Minutiae 13 Autumn Richardson and Skelton explain the visual poems, Relics 47 Wind, Storm and Cloud Denoting the land and nature and weather, one definition at a time. Gathered by Robert Macfarlane Rocks in the Sky 16 Photographs by David Quentin 55 Seven Degrees of Homing Jay Griffiths finds and defines the meaning of home — 22 An Ad That Looks Like An Ad Estuary Rachel Lichtenstein on that place where London’s brackish water merges with the salt of the sea 28
6 a radio talk Flight South Roger Deakin follows the swallows
7 wonder if the swallows that nest in the chimney of the high blue carriages of the Compagnie International des my Suffolk farmhouse have the faintest idea how pro- Wagons-Lits and the enthralling roster of the Blue Train’s foundly they affect my emotions. When they first itinerary: Paris - Dijon - Lyons - Valence - Avignon - Mar- arrive from the south in Spring, and I hear the thrum- seille - Toulon - St Tropez - St Raphael - Cannes - Nice Iming of their wingbeats amplified to a boom by the hollow - Monte Carlo - Menton - Ventimiglia. I travelled almost brickwork, my heart leaps. They seem to bless the house to the end of the line. Sometime in the night I drifted out with the spirit of the south; the promise of summer. Swal- of sleep to hear the insistent ghostly voices of the station lows have such a strong homing instinct that it is quite possi- announcers ‘Dijon! Dijon!’ and later still ‘Lyons!’ At break- ble this same family of birds, by now an ancient dynasty, has fast time, I was woken by stewards clattering along the cor- been returning here to nest for the four hundred and fifty ridors. I peeped under the blind and saw the Mediterranean summers since the chimney was built. on fire as we steamed along the coast past the empty beaches Everything about swallows says ‘South’. They are a shiny, of Frejus and St Raphael. Everything was so much brighter metallic, gregarious, nomadic tribe, decked in magenta and and clearer than in my cool native suburb near the Kodak ravishing deep blues like the Tuareg, Bedouin and Berber factory north of Harrow, and the sky was a deep bold blue I people, whose deserts they must soon cross as they set out had never seen before: much more like Kodachrome, in fact. in September to fly due south all the way to Cape Town on Shadows were inky black and had sharp edges. Suddenly, their winter migration. As they gather talkatively on the tel- in Menton, the French of my textbooks came vividly, even egraph wires, they seem no more afraid of the great distances deliciously alive. Café, croissant, pain chocolat, la mer, le soleil, la they must travel and the hardships they will encounter on table: all took on a vivid brilliance like a revelation. Along the way, than you or I picking up the telephone to make a the rocks towards Cap Martin, men in bright blue denim long-distance call. They speak a glittering desert tongue, trousers twitched silver-backed olive leaves bound on sticks calling to each other incessantly across the chimney tops as to lure the wily octopi from their lairs. When we bathed in I have heard Berber women call like birds across the evening Menton, shoals of small fish skidding across the harbour’s air to one another as they roam the quiet stony desert south clear water like shadows, I felt I was being baptized into a of the Moroccan Anti-Atlas mountains, cutting dried scrub new life. as fodder for their donkeys. I was not the first Englishman to feel that way. Entering Italy for the first time through the birth canal of the Mont hen the household swallows fly away to Africa, I Cenis tunnel, the Bloomsbury painter and writer Adrian Wget restless. I suppose I envy them. I certainly miss Stokes felt born into a new world and ever after experienced standing by the fireplace at night, eavesdropping on their a new vitality in the south, both emotionally and in his dormitory conversations in the mud nests above. Swallows work. His contemporary, the composer William Walton, never fail to stir the nomad in me too. reacted to his first sight of Italy in an almost identical way. I belong to the generation whose migrations south began His train went into a tunnel and when it came out on the at Victoria Station. It was E.M. Forster who said, in How- Italian side he found the most marvelous sun, and the bril- ard’s End, that everyone who has lived in a great capital has liance illuminated the rest of his life like ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’. strong feelings about its various railway termini. ‘They I had lucked out, of course, in landing a pen-friend with are,’ he says, ‘the gates to the glorious and the unknown. a place in Menton. The Villa L’Hermine was on a steep Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, hillside behind the town, surrounded by orange orchards, to them, alas! we return.’ Architecturally, Victoria had less olives and prickly pears. At night, geckos strolled upside character than some of the other great London stations, down across the ceiling as we dined, serenaded by choirs of but it had by far the most romantic trains: The all-Pullman crickets and tree frogs. Jean-Francois and I would creep up Golden Arrow (which connected in Paris with the Ori- in the dark to the concrete irrigation tanks that served as the ent Express) and the Blue Train, which I rode each year frogs’ echo-chambers and catch in our torch beam rows of of my early teens to the south of France to visit my pen- vivid green males with their bubble-gum larynxes comically friend, Jean-Francois, in Menton. I suppose both of us must inflated. We glimpsed others in the shadows apparently in already have had travelling in our blood because our fathers flagrante, still singing lustily in their passion. In the morn- worked for the railways and our exchange had been arranged ings, the cicadas took up the song in the Corsican pines, through the British and French rail unions. cranking up like old gramophones as the sun rose higher. The Channel crossing on the ferry, sometimes rough, slip- It was these raucous creatures who lent their name to streamed by seagulls, not swallows, and the sight of the mail- Cyril Connolly’s Cicada Club at Oxford in the early 1920s. bags being hoisted ashore in huge nets by the Calais cranes, The half-dozen members dedicating themselves to flaunt- the dockside alive with blue dungarees and stevedores, ing the English convention of visiting the Cote D’Azur in already conferred the status of rite of passage on that first winter, choosing instead to roast themselves on the beaches journey. For an English adolescent, the Train Bleu provided of Villeneuve or Menton at the height of summer, when the the full range of initiation rites: the customs, the crossing of rasping song of the cicadas hits the top notes in its frenzy. Paris by Metro from the Gare du Nord to the Gare du Lyon, Never mind magnetic north, it was the south that drew us the need to utter the first halting words of classroom French. like iron filings. My appetite for the sun now fully aroused, At the Gare du Lyon I walked up the platform admiring and my French somewhat improved, my later migrations as a
8 teenager and a university student were as a hitchhiker. I was in French as ‘La Deesse’ – the goddess. The philosopher a Cicada Club member by nature, willing to venture south Roland Barthes, who was later killed in a car crash, com- regardless of season or convention whenever I had money pared the genius of the design of the Deesse to the building in my purse and time to spare. The French have the perfect of the great French medieval cathedrals as a supreme expres- phrase for this ‘I will arise and go now’ impulse to drop sion of the spirit of the age. He mentions the many-spired everything, walk out one midsummer morning, and head cathedral of Chartres, an ever-fixed mark to which we south. It is a la derive , adrift. steered across the yellow oceans of maize and sunflowers In the late fifties and in the sixties, hitchhiking was an from Rouen, and in which I once spent the night hidden entirely dependable means of transport. It was an age of between pews in a sleeping bag. Modern France’s new reli- considerable trust and hitchhiking, for me and my friends, gion of mobility was all there in the Deesse. was above all an education in human kindness. At the time, And Roland Barthes was right. The Deesse was a kind of however, we saw it in more practical terms: getting a foot miracle, and a lift in one after a long, dusty vigil in the sun in the car door, getting your bottom on a seat. In those could feel like divine providence. Perched on the Deesse’s pre-Thatcher days, a surprising number of people actually sighing white leather seats hugging our rucksacks, we mar- thought it was pretty selfish to go bowling along alone with velled at the way the steering wheel appeared to float like empty seats in your car when there were bums aplenty wait- a halo, magically suspended by an almost invisible stalk. ing beside the road to occupy them. After several days hitch- Shakespeare wrote ‘My mistress when she walks treads on ing south and sleeping rough, most of us soon transmogri- the ground.’ You’d never say that about the Deesse. The car fied into the other kind of bums: bums with thumbs. Hence floated, gliding forward effortlessly, having levitated itself the expression bumming a lift, I suppose. Quite why one with unhurried dignity from its parked stance, slumped on thumbs a lift I’m not sure. Perhaps because the thumb is the all fours. You wouldn’t choose a DS for a bank robbery. And least aggressive, or suggestive of the digits, the other four there was so much glass. No car had ever been this trans- being reserved for varying degrees of sexual innuendo. parent. Even the headlights swivelled about like two eyes, mysteriously coordinated with the steering, so the Deesse he favourite gateway for the southbound hitchhiker had the uncanny, almost supernatural ability to see round Twas the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry because you could corners at night. Even now, the ineffable design remains out- then follow a route through Rouen, Chartres and Orleans side time, more modern, more confident, than anything that that took you to the Route Nationale Vingt – the N20 – and has come since. bypassed the hitchhiker’s graveyard, Paris. There were no The main roads south, the Routes Nationales, were wildly lifts to be had there. At Dieppe, your thumb would join the dangerous then. Traffic hurtled along in both directions forest of others raised aloft at the roadside in a mass demon- either side of a common central overtaking lane. Saying a stration of faith in the essential goodness of human nature prayer out loud, our hitchhiking chauffeurs pulled into the and its willingness to chauffeur every last one of us south. face of the oncoming traffic, willing it into submission, hop- Right from the start you would have to face the eternal ing to dive back in again to their side with a nanosecond in hitchhiker’s dilemma: whether to choose a good spot, beside hand. We prayed too, and held our breath. August 1st, the a lay-by for example, stay put, and risk appearing lazy, or opening of the holidays, was a gigantic national game of whether to plod on southwards, as if preparing to walk the chicken. seven- or eight-hundred miles to the Mediterranean, in the But however dangerous, those pre-motorway roads were hope of inspiring sympathy and approval. The latter course beautiful. The endless avenues of overarching plane trees had two disadvantages. Either it meant having your back to dappled the tarmac with shadow as you bounced along in the oncoming traffic, depriving motorists of the opportunity the back of a 2CV or sped comfortably in a DS. Cyril Con- to study in advance your eager, open, honest features, or you nolly wrote in The Unquiet Grave of ‘Peeling off the kilome- turned to face them, with the consequent risk of walking ters to the tune of ‘Blue Skies’, sizzling down the long black backwards into a milestone, pothole, or parked car. liquid reaches of the National Sept, the plane trees going Like angling, hitchhiking required patience and cun- sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yel- ning. We were fishers of cars, and we were all connoisseurs lowing with crushed midges.’ of the varied species of our quarry. Most of them are now Songs on car radios figure prominently in my recollec- long-extinct: the Simca, the Panhard Tiger, the slender tions of these journeys. French idols like Johnny Halliday Renault Dauphine, the hilarious Fiat Topolino, the stylish and Françoise Hardy: Citroën Flat Fifteen – as driven by Inspector Maigret. The only survivors seem to have been the two real eccentrics: the ‘Tous les garcons et les filles de mon age ubiquitous 2CV and the car you most hoped to ride in, the Se promenent dans la rue deux pas deux’ Citroën DS, known colloquially on the road as ‘Le Crapeau’ – the toad – with its wide-mouthed bonnet and all its sleek, And the exhilaration of The Who’s ‘I Can See For Miles’ invisible power somehow concentrated in the car’s slender in an old Peugeot as we drove full tilt out of Blois towards haunches. a first bathe off the sandbanks of the sparkling Loire. The But this astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was Beatles’ ‘Baby You Can Drive My Car’ booming out of a also known by the punning pronunciation of the initials DS Morgan Plus Four along the coast road from Narbonne to
9 Perpignan one July night, with the moon reflected in the salt the edge of the rock into this fountain – a practice in the hot pans beside the Mediterranean. ‘Good Vibrations’ trailing weather exceedingly refreshing.’ from the open windows of a Citroen Safari driving through On another occasion two of us found an abandoned the hill villages of the Corbieres one hot evening towards fishing punt somewhere upstream of Beaulieu on the Dor- Limoux from Carcassonne, families sitting out on kitchen dogne, recaulked and tarred it by the riverside, improvised chairs before their shadowy front doors, girls in espadrilles some rough-hewn paddles and set off downstream on a voy- and cotton housecoats and the clink of boules beneath the age that lasted several days with our damp belongings lashed village trees. with baling twine into a plastic fertilizer bag. Returning south the following year, we raised the sunken boat from the t was Cyril Connolly who drew a magic circle on the map river bottom, baled it out with a baked bean can, and con- Iof France around the river valleys of the Dordogne, the tinued the voyage downstream, eventually abandoning it to Lot, the Aveyron, the Tarn and the Garonne, from Tulle to subside again into the riverbed. Toulouse, from Bergerac to Rodez. Connolly daydreamed Like any serious addiction, my need to go south kept on of a house there, ‘A golden classical house, three stories deepening over the years. I had to go further. I followed high, with oeil de boeuf attic windows and a view over water. the swallows across the Pyrenees into Spain, then on into A great tree for summer and a lawn for games; behind it a Morocco, past the Atlas mountains, to the beginnings of wooded hill and in front a river, then a sheltered garden, the Sahara. Here I experienced the local Berber techniques indulgent to fig and nectarine, and in the corner a belvedere, of hitchhiking from the motorist’s point of view. Driving book-lined like that of Montaigne, the wizard of this magic a Renault Four towards the little town of Tafraoute in the circle.’ Connolly dedicated his circle to Montaigne’s own Anti-Atlas mountains, my ten-year-old son and I were halt- two ruling passions: liberty and laziness. ed by a tortoise in the road. Springing out to rescue it, we This is the circle to which I returned again and again on discovered it was attached by a string around one hind leg my journeys south, often with Connolly, Orwell, Kerouac to two small boys hidden behind a rock. They demanded a or Montaigne stuffed in my rucksack. Reading seemed much lift and as we drove towards their village they slyly smacked the same thing as travelling, journeying down the sentences, their lips and explained how very much they were looking new landscapes unfolding, two hundred miles or two hun- forward to enjoying the little reptile for dinner. My son duly dred pages at a time. I sat drinking Bergerac wine under expressed a desire to rescue it, and having paid over a hefty Montaigne’s statue in Perigeux, bathed for the first time in ransom in Polo mints and fruit gums, we eventually settled the Dordogne near Souillac, helped a friend fix a ruined into room eleven at the Hotel Redouane in Tafraoute with stone house perched above a trout river that dashed down to our new companion. We fed it on lettuce and tomato, and St. Cere through steep chestnut woods. Every other stone on eventually released it in the remotest desert place we could our pile concealed an adder, and on our first fungus-foray we find, far away from boys or roads. misinterpreted the pictorial guide we’d borrowed from the chemist’s and poisoned ourselves. ravelling thousands of miles on such serial migrations, Everywhere we discovered, half-ruined and half-strangled Tone builds up a cumulative debt of gratitude to one’s by their own vines, the golden houses of Cyril Connolly’s hosts, and it is always good to find the opportunity to pay dreams. In an abandoned mill-house by a steeply flowing some of it off now and again. One Easter in the mid-sixties, tributary of the Lot, we found the miller’s cobwebbed coats I travelled south with a friend to the Camargue and the great still hanging on the nails where they hung them when they festival of nomads at Les Sainte Maries de la Mer. Thou- left, or died. Eel traps and bee skeps littered the baking loft. sands of gypsies had gathered from every corner of Europe In a channel cut in the stone kitchen floor a small, clear leet for the annual celebration of the miraculous landing on the still danced. Outside, cowbells clanked like a prison riot and shore near the little town of the three Saint Marys on their in a lean-to shed was enough kindling to keep the damp out storm-tossed voyage from the Holy Land. On the first even- of the place for another winter. Here in this chestnut valley ing, after enthusiastically joining in the festivities I went for we Cicadas honoured Montaigne, the presiding genius of a stroll under the stars and fell into the Rhone, fully clothed Connolly’s magic circle, by idling on the sandy riverbank for and wearing an overcoat. The current was strong and the days, observing metallic green shield beetles browsing on the water deep and muddy. I clambered out somehow and made big white flowers of umbellifers, and regularly submerging my way back to the hotel, where my companion had already ourselves in a small swimming pool we had constructed by sensibly retired for the night. I stood fully clothed in the damming the torrent with stones. We used to sit about on shower to wash off the mud, then crept up to the flat roof the rocks there reading, as Shelley did in a Tuscan woodland above, undressed, and laid out my clothes to dry in the next pool where he reports bathing in the summer of 1818 in a morning’s sun. I also solemnly laid out all the ten-franc notes letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock: from my pockets in the stillness of the night and retired to ‘The water of this pool ... is as transparent as the air, so bed. Early next morning, a sea breeze arose, swirling my that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trem- francs into the air above the streets, distributing them from bling in the light of noonday. It is exceedingly cold also. My the heavens amongst the gypsies, who must have thought it custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, another miracle, as banknotes and swallows wheeled above until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from them. ◊
10 poem Death of the Birch-tree By J.A. Baker
Lean is the dull steel flashed white in the sun Like a sudden lifting of the white-leaved abele, Flushed from the raw thongs of the birch-tree The white wood flies through the mists of morning.
The ringing singing of the axe-blade widens, The keen cold frost edge flashing with dew, The smell of the bruised sap darkens the air, Raw and lithe is the air that shivers.
Sheer from the cruel north of my cleaving arms Fierce falls the arctic fang of the axe-blade And the light is shed from the heart of the birch-tree.
11 12 from the archive To the Brothel by way of Switzerland W.G. Sebald Kafka’s travel diaries
13 Dutch acquaintance recently told me how she there were comparatively few cars around in Switzerland, travelled last winter from Prague to Nuremberg. and because many of those were American limousines – During the journey she was reading Kafka’s Chevrolets, Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles – I really thought we travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time were in some entirely foreign, quasi-utopian country, rather Alooking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of as Kafka found himself thinking of Captain Nemo andA the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains Journey Through Planetary Space when he saw a revenue cutter and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her on Lago Maggiore. of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen describes one of his fellow travellers cleaning his teeth with years ago, Max and Franz (one almost envisages them as a the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that couple invented by Franz himself ) decided to go on to Paris, not because the description was particularly remarkable, since cholera had broken out in Italy. At a coffee-house but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a table in the cathedral square, they discuss apparent death strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and shooting pains in the region of the heart – obviously and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his a particular obsession in the now sclerotic Habsburg own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any Empire which had been suspended in a kind of afterlife for inhibitions at all. This story made me return, after I had decades. Mahler, notes Kafka, had expected those pains in not looked at them for a long time, to the notes that Kafka the heart too. He had died only a few months earlier at the made when he and Max Brod travelled from Prague to Paris Löw Sanatorium on 18 May as a thunderstorm broke over by way of Switzerland and Northern Italy in August and the town, just as there was a thunderstorm on the day of September, 1911. Much of that account is as real to me as Beethoven’s death. if I myself had been there, and not just because ‘Max’ is so frequently mentioned, for instance when a lady’s hat falls Open in front of me now I have a recently published album on him in the train compartment, or Franz leaves him alone containing photographs of Mahler. He is sitting on the deck ‘sitting over a grenadine by himself in the darkness on the of an ocean-going liner, walking in the countryside near outskirts of a half-empty open-air cafe’; no, in a curious his house in Toblach, on the beach in Zandvoort, asking way the stages of that summer trip of the past taken by a passer-by the way in Rome. He looks to me very small, the two bachelors are more familiar to me than any other rather like the impresario of a touring theatrical company place at a later date. Even the car drive in the rain through down on its luck. In fact the passages of his music I like Munich by night – ‘The tyres make a rushing noise on the best are those where you can still hear the Jewish village asphalt, like the whirr of a cinema projector’ – bring back musicians playing in the distance. Not so long ago I was great tracts of the memory of my first real journey taken in listening to some Lithuanian buskers in the pedestrian zone 1948, when I and my father, who had just returned from of a North German town, and their music sounded exactly a POW camp, went from W. to visit my grandparents in the same. One had an accordion, another a battered tuba, the Plattling. My mother had made me a green jacket, and a third a double bass. As I listened, hardly able to tear myself little rucksack of check fabric. I think we travelled in a away, I understood why Wiesengrund once wrote of Mahler third-class compartment. On Munich station, where you that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart. could see huge mounds of rubble and ruins as you stood in the forecourt, I felt unwell and had to throw up in one The friends spend their few days in Paris in rather of those ‘cabins’ of which Kafka writes that he and Max melancholy mood, going on several sight-seeing expeditions washed their hands and faces in them before boarding the and searching for the joys of love in a ‘rationally furnished’ night train which passed through the dark foothills of the brothel with ‘an electric bell’, where the business was Alps by way of Kaufering, Buchloe, Kaufbeuren, Kempten conducted so swiftly that you were out in the street again and Immenstadt to Lindau, where there was a great deal before you knew it. ‘It is difficult,’ writes Kafka, ‘to see the of singing on the platform long after midnight, a situation girls there very closely . . . I really remember only the one I know very well, since there are always a number of who was standing straight in front of me. She had gaps in drunks on Lindau station who have been out on excursions. her teeth, stood very upright, held her dress together with Similarly, the ‘impression of separate buildings standing her clenched fist over her pudenda, and rapidly opened very upright in St Gall, without being part of a street’, but and closed her large eyes and her large mouth. Her blonde running along the slopes of the valley like one of Schiele’s hair was untidy. She was thin. Felt afraid of forgetting to Krumau pictures, accurately corresponds to the scenery of a keep my hat on. You positively have to wrench your hand place where I lived for a year. In general, Kafka’s comments away from the brim.’ Even the brothel has its own social on the Swiss landscape, the ‘dark, hilly, wooded banks of standards. ‘A long, lonely, pointless way home,’ the note Lake Zug’ (and how often he writes of such things) remind concludes. Max returns to Prague on 14 September. Kafka me of my own childhood expeditions to Switzerland, for spends another week in the sanatorium at the natural spa instance on a day trip we made by bus in 1952 from S. to of Erlenbach in Zurich. ‘Travelled with a Jewish goldsmith Bregenz, St Gall and Zurich, along the Walensee, through from Krakau,’ he writes after arriving. Kafka must have met the valley of the Rhine and home again. At the time this young man, who had already travelled widely, on the
14 way back from Paris to Zurich. He mentions that getting out of the train the goldsmith carries his small suitcase like a heavy burden. ‘He has,’ writes Kafka, ‘long, curly hair through which he occasionally runs his fingers, a bright gleam in his eyes, a slightly hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a suit of American cut, a frayed shirt, socks falling down over his shoes.’ A travelling journeyman – what had he been doing in Switzerland? Kafka, we are told, took another walk that first evening in the dark little garden of the sanatorium, and next day there were ‘morning gymnastic exercises to the sound of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn played by someone on the cornet’. ◊
Translated by Anthea Bell
15 A List Wind, Storm and Cloud Denoting the land and nature and weather, one definition at a time. Gathered by Robert Macfarlane
16 aigrish bruach of wind: sharp, cutting ring or halo around the moon, presaging unsettled weather Essex Irish
black-east, black-easter carry cold, dry east wind drift or movement of clouds Galloway English
blackthorn winter cherribim winter that turns very cold late in the season sky Herefordshire Anglo-Romani
blae ciabhar of wind: cold, cutting, harsh slight breeze, just enough to stir the hair Galloway Gaelic
boff dim-wood to blow back: used only of wind blowing smoke back down a chimney area of the night sky where few stars can be seen (Gerard Manley Hopkins) Staffordshire poetic
bright-borough dintless area of the night sky thickly strewn with stars (Gerard Manley Hopkins) of a sky: cloudless poetic poetic
17 duvla’s pani fuaradh-froise rainbow cool breeze preceding a rain-shower
Anglo-Romani Gaelic
eeroch garbhshíon pains thought to be caused by the east wind in winter unseasonably cold and windy weather
Northern Ireland Irish
fell greann-gaoth sudden drop in wind piercing wind
Galloway Gaelic
flam gurl sudden light breeze howl of the wind
North Sea coast Scots
flan gurley sudden gust of wind cold, threatening wind
Shetland Galloway
flinchin gussock deceitful promise of better weather strong and sudden gust of wind
Scots East Anglia
18 hefty lythe of weather: rough, boisterous, wild calm or absence of wind
Ireland Fenland
hot-spong mackerel-sky sudden power of heat felt when the sun comes from sky mottled with light, striped cirrus clouds under a wind-shifted cloud Exmoor East Anglia
meal-drift huffling high, wispy clouds wind blowing up in sudden gusts poetic Exmoor
moor-gallop
wind and rain moving across high ground hulder Cornwall, Cumbria the roar in the air after a great noise
(e.g. thunder)
Exmoor Noah’s ark
cloud that widens upwards from the horizon, in the shape of an ark, and signals an approaching storm katabatic Essex wind that blows from high ground to low ground, its force being aided by gravity; sometimes known as a ‘fall wind’ meteorological noctilucent cloud
high and rare cloud type (literally ‘night- shining’) that drifts in the upper atmosphere, is made of ice crystals and is so high as to be invisible except when, after sunset around midsummer, ‘the tilt of the earth lambin’ storm allows it to catch the last light of the sun’ (Amy Liptrot) gale which usually happens in mid March meteorological North Sea coast
19 oiteag thraw wisp of wind of sky, sea or wind: threatening
Gaelic Galloway
osag twitchy gust of wind of wind: blowing unsteadily
Gaelic East Anglia
piner ultaichean penetrating, cold south-easterly wind strong, rolling gusts of wind
North Sea coast Hebridean Gaelic
roarie-bummlers up’ tak fast-moving storm clouds (literally ‘noisy blunderers’) rising of the wind, usually signalling a fresh outbreak of bad weather Scots Shetland
shepherd’s flock urp white fleecy clouds indicating fine weather cloud; ‘urpy’ means cloudy with very large clouds Suffolk Kent
skub wadder-head hazy clouds driven by the wind clouds standing in columns or streaks from the Shetland horizon upwards
Shetland
20 water-carts small clouds
Suffolk
whiffle of a wind: to come in unpredictable gusts
Kent
wimpling rippling motion induced in a bird’s wing feathers by the passage of wind (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic
windin’ rooks circling in the air and thereby indicating stormy weather
Suffolk
21 A List Seven Degrees of Homing Jay Griffiths finds and defines the meaning of home
I am not here.
I am sorry, I can explain.
This event is titled Stay Where You Are, and I’m taking that literally. I am at home.
I’ve used this series to explore ideas of home, the hearth, homelessness and homesickness. And in this piece, I want to look at the variety of ways in which home manifests itself.
22 Home. The grounding note of the scale.
These are the seven degrees of homing I’ll talk about: Home is one’s body, the body which in the gritty imagery of Anglo-Saxon was called the ‘bone-house’. Home is one’s deep self, vulnerable when someone says something which really ‘hits home’. Home is one’s homeland: the land, I stress, not the nation state. Home can be understood in terms of time. Home can be understood in terms of language. There is a sense of home in music, the home-note of the tonic.
And there is the home of the world, the earth, which contains – which houses – all the other homes.
Seven degrees of home, seven notes in the scale of Western music before the melody comes home to the tonic, or the octave which repeats it. Seven colours, we agree to say, in the rainbow, which houses every hue, from the violet, the lowest of the colours in the arc of rainbows, to red, the highest.
The second note in the scale. The violet shade in the rainbow. The kind of home: the body.
I am at home, where now wild violets are in bloom. They flower low, just one step up from the earth, as the colour violet is just one step up from the ground in the rainbow.
It is my birthday, you see, and my bone-house has marked another year, this body, this first home from infancy, when we were closest to the earth. Another person’s physical body can seem like home: one’s tell-first, the person who you tell your news and thoughts to, the person whose physical nearness makes you feel complete at the end of the day, psychologically at home.
Boethius considered that there were three branches of music: the actual music of singers and players, and then the famous ‘music of the spheres’, and a third kind: ‘musica humana’, the internal music of the human body, in tune with itself. We speak of someone being ‘at home in their own skin’, comfortably at ease in themselves, evincing a kind of inner harmony.
The third note in the scale. Its colour is indigo. The kind of home: the self.
‘This really brought it home to me,’ we say. To be affected, intimately so. Speaking home.
To penetrate, strike close. The self exists on a cusp of vulnerability and defendedness; these phrases imply. They suggest a relationship between home and honesty: ‘telling some home-truths’. ‘To come home to oneself ’, we say, meaning a regaining of prior – and true – selfhood after an intermission.
The fourth note on the scale. Its colour is blue. Kind of home: homeland. ‘Occupy’ is the theme-word of this project. The word ‘occupy’, by the way, is from the Latin to seize, possess, and was also used, from the early fifteenth century, to mean sexual intercourse which fact, my dictionary says coyly, ‘caused the word to fall from polite usage.’
In the Occupied territories, 1948 was the Nakba, ‘the Catastrophe’ when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes and today their access to their own homeland
23 is tightly constrained. There is a phrase revolting on the lips of racists: Go Home. This is one kind of racism which Israeli settlers cannot use against Palestinians.
Occupied is also the word on a toilet door and in horrible mimicry, there are documented cases of settlers deliberately spraying raw human sewage over Palestinian homes in Abu
Dis, a suburb of Jerusalem. Sewage from other Settler communities is regularly siphoned through Palestinian villages.
Since 1967, the Israeli authorities have uprooted over 700,000 olive trees, about the same number of Palestinians uprooted from their homes in 1948.
When I say homeland, I am not referring to the nasty categories of political territory or nation state but to the actuality of earth, the flora and fauna, the kith, the landscape of your home, the love of which is rooted in the human heart like an ancient olive tree. In damaging the land itself, Israeli settlers are in effect providing emotional evidence that they themselves are not treating it as their home.
24 First the Palestinian population was evicted in the Nakba, the Catastrophe, now they are imprisoned, as the infamous wall has put a whole nation indoors in a detention centre.
Let me read you something:
‘The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.’ ‘Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all ... but those with the proper labour card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening.’
So wrote Thomas Keneally in Schindler’s Ark, describing the Krakow ghetto being built for Jews but it is a mirror for the Palestinian experience now.
The fifth note on the scale. Its colour is green. The type of home: time. ‘But those with the proper labour card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening.’ If home is one time of day, it is evening. The sun has done its travels, its journeying of the jour, of the day. The end of the jour-ney is evening. Hometime for kids at school.
The Maariv in Judaism is the evening prayer. It was written by Jacob, and written at evening, and because of evening. He was in exile, in a strange land, and as the sun set, he encountered the place where the Temple would later be built. He felt spiritually at home. Times of prayer can be ‘homes’ in the hours of the day, a habitual prayer is a kind of home for the soul.
Habits themselves create a sense of home: people say they feel at home when they are in their daily routine. Habits can house your hours, your life. A habit is both time (as in rhythm tapped out) and also a home, as in to inhabit, having a habitat.
A happy rabbit has a habit of habitat tapping.
The sixth note on the scale. Its colour is yellow. The kind of home: language.
Some years ago, I was returning home after being abroad for many months. I can’t say I missed England, or Britain, but I missed English. And, on my homeward journey, I heard English spoken – as a mothertongue – with relief and gratitude. I was home in words. Sometimes I find that if I say – or hear – the precise word for something, my psyche feels as if it has been welcomed: the word is offering my mind hospitality. I can feel at home. At other times, a particular word comes into view, unsought-for, but glowing like embers, inviting me in, to stay a while, have a drink with it. In the course of any day, words can be flitting-tents on a desert journey, quick shelters on a stumblepath.
Mother tongue. Native language. Word world. Language and land combined, Langland peerlessly plowing the earth for a harvest of eloquence.
Rose Auslander was a Jewish poet whose name became her destiny. Auslander means outlander; foreigner or alien, and she became a foreigner in her own land, a fugitive to escape the Holocaust. She hid in cellars fleeing from place to place: ‘And while we waited for death, some of us lived in dream-words, our traumatized home in the homelessness.’ After the Holocaust, she refused for some eight years to write in German, and instead wrote in English. Here is one of her poems, ‘Mutterland’, published in 1978.
My Fatherland is dead. They buried it in fire.
25 I live in my Motherland – Word. Language is home. Words make shelters, they fluff out nests for themselves. They dig into the earth of their derivations, find their roots, at home in the families of language, at
ease in their connotations with neighbours. Cognates snuggle up together, genealogies of related words nestle together, they fall asleep on each other’s shoulders: they have spent so long in each other’s company that they smell of each other. Some words don’t get on with their relations, and quarrel with their etymologies and take a different path. Other words accept they’ve made the same journeys, walked the same routes, their feet have trod the same ways, their iambic pentametres limp at the same moment and stride out a little further at the same time-rhyme, the little neologisms skittering around their heels like puppies yapping for the attention they need if they are to survive.
I give you one such: Chillax. A word that should have been strangled at birth.
26 The seventh note on the scale. Its colour is orange. The kind of home: music.
The tonic is the note which is the ‘home’ tone of the key. From this, it sets out on an exploratory beginning, a stepping forth.
The melody journeys, and wanders, but it has a homing instinct, it strains, like a horse near its stable, it is pulling at the reins to get there, the tension is clear – either on the seventh or on the second, and if the melody stays on either too long, even the least musical person tries to hum it home. Back to the stable. The stable, the secure note of the octave or tonic, back to where all is harmonious, the home tone in harmony with itself, well fitted, well joined. The word harmony is related to both art and also joining things together, a door fastening, and also the joinery of a ship’s plank: Schindler’s ARK, and Noah’s ARK.
The eighth note on the scale. Its colour is red. The kind of home: the whole world. In the arc of the rainbow, we have reached the red at the top. In the arch of the scale, we have reached the eighth, the home tone.
The octave reflects the tonic and if we began on the ground with the muddy earth, then the octave suggests the world, the planet Earth. The word for ‘home’ in ancient Greek was Oikos which gives us ECOLOGY, the study of this world-home, this planet Earth which is the home of all the other homes, holding music, language, time, homeland, mind and body.
But the earth is not feeling at home in her own skin. She is too hot, itchy, restless, irritable, climate-changeable. And the world-home, the Earth, the one world which could welcome life, earth the beckoning miracle, is now unhousing us: Noah’s ark will be called for countless times over as sea levels rise, and no rainbow’s promise will cover the damage. The people of the Pacific Island of Kiribati are jetsam on the waters of the future. By 2030, some say, Kiribati will be underwater. This is the homelessness to come, people on the move within nations and between them as a result of climate change.
It is hard not to hear the harm of disharmony in the oikos, the world-home. Degrees of unnatural temperature are degrees of dissonance, until a kind of cosmic tunelessness creeps up on us on the waters. It is quite a feat to unharmonise a world, to dis-temper the well-tempered Bach, to unwaltz Strauss, to de-music this sphere.
And we are in the hands of thugs, a tone-deaf cabal who have seized the conductor’s baton and occupied the dais, and the world is being occupied – fucked – by a philosophy which is a menace to humanity and mocks the music of the spheres into disharmony, all proportions broken.
Pythagoras considered that the sun, moon and planets all emitted a unique hum – orbital resonance – and that the quality of life on earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds. The proportions, in the movements of the sun and moon and earth and other planets, are a form of music. This is the ancient idea of the music of the spheres: this music which is literally inaudible but a harmony nonetheless. A harmony of maths. A harmony of spirit. Listen very carefully and you won’t hear it.
Boethius, as we’ve heard, thought that the music of the spheres had two corollaries, not just the music of singers and players but the music of the body. Listen very carefully and you might just perhaps hear the gentle hum of your animal body, the human purring- home in the bone-house. ◊
27 Our Town Estuary Rachel Lichtenstein on that place where London’s brackish water merges with the salt of the sea
28 n the night of the summer solstice I made of that place; all we could agree on was that the estuary my way to Hermitage Moorings just east of encompasses the stretch of water between the River Thames London’s Tower Bridge. There were about and the North Sea. Defining its outer and inner limits a dozen other vessels in the harbour when I seemed almost impossible, as the fluid boundary lines shifted arrived,O tugs and Thames Barges mainly, which had all been constantly throughout our discussion. lovingly restored by a community of passionate enthusiasts. The historic boats made an impressive sight with the dark We argued for some time about where the royal river ended wooden masts of the barges and their folded heavy red sails and the estuary began. I told the group I had been looking silhouetted against the great Royal Palace behind. at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Admiralty charts in the British Library’s map room; beautiful hand-drawn I found IDEAAL moored alongside an immaculately documents, covered in a mystifying array of complex lines, refurbished Thames Sailing Barge, which now served as which had been difficult for me to decipher but at the top a permanent residence for a young couple and their dog. of a chart dated 1871 the Thames Estuary was described as Skipping over the artfully arranged nets and ropes on the being: ‘18 nautical miles long from Gravesend to the Nore’. deck of the boat I hopped onto the 50-tonne Dutch barge Some members of the crew thought it was much longer than which had originally been built in the 1920s as a sailing this, starting as far upriver as Tower Bridge – the ancient vessel to carry freight and had since been converted into a control centre of the Estuary. Others felt the Thames Barrier live-work studio by owner Ben Eastop. or even the QE2 Bridge were obvious beginnings. But most agreed that before these structures were erected the historic As the light slowly faded on the longest day of the year I sat gateway into the Thames for centuries had always been the on deck with the rest of the crew drinking bottled beers, ancient shipping port of Gravesend, which sits at Lower sharing stories and watching the cityscape transform. By Hope, the narrowest point in the river, a place of strong dusk a low mist had begun to obscure most of the buildings. tidal currents where the brackish dirty water from London The iconic dome of St Paul’s temporarily disappeared before merges with the salt water from the North Sea. re-emerging, floodlit, against the London skyline. Red- flashing beacons began to appear sporadically through the Leaving London the inner estuary is generally believed fog, marking the tops of tall cranes and skyscrapers. The to end somewhere around the forbidden military zone of skeletal frame of the Shard came suddenly into focus as Foulness Island, which sits opposite the site of the former every floor of the tall skyscraper lit up simultaneously. At Nore light ship. However a Hydrological Survey, dated the same time the beautiful gothic structure of Tower Bridge 1882, states that the eastern boundary of the outer reaches behind us was illuminated from above and below, throwing of the Thames Estuary stretches much further out into a sparkling reflection into the black waters of the Lower the North Sea, from North Foreland near Margate across Pool of London – a place where so many of the world’s most to the Kentish Knock Lighthouse in Harwich. The sailors important ships must have anchored at different points in in the group agreed with this definition although the time. As night fell the lights inside all the flats, hotels and contemporary chart we were looking at showed the outer offices along the riverside came on. We floated in the dark limits of the Estuary extending all the way up to Orfordness void of the river, suspended in time. on the Suffolk coast.
On the water the sounds of the city seemed altered. I could The boundary line for the beginning of the inner estuary hear the distant hum of traffic on the bridge, the clatter of was thought to be somewhere near the head of Sea Reach, trains rumbling past, the intermittent backdrop of sirens south of Canvey Island, although I felt it could originate wailing, but it was as if these sounds were coming from as far along the Essex coast as the Crowstone, which sits another place altogether, not from the great throbbing just off the foreshore of Chalkwell Beach. The first of the metropolis around us. I sat and watched the vast twin ancient stone obelisks to be placed there in 1197 was referred bascules of Tower Bridge being slowly raised. A Thames to in official records as the city stone of Leigh. The base of Barge sailed silently past and drifted beneath the bridge this medieval stone may still rest under the mud but the before quickly disappearing into the shadows on the other original marker has long since disappeared. The monument side. On the remains of a wooden jetty nearby, I could just that exists there today is made of granite and looks similar make out the shape of a large black cormorant standing in shape to Cleopatra’s needle on the Embankment. It was perfectly still with its great wings outstretched. erected there in 1836 but an older version sits amongst the rose beds in Priory Park in Southend. Eventually we all went below deck into the former hold of the boat, which now served as the living quarters for the You can walk out to the Crowstone easily when the tide male members of the crew, with a small galley kitchen at goes out. Inscribed on the north, east and west faces are one end and a large wooden table and chairs in the centre the names of the lord mayors of London who used to visit of the open plan space. Ben asked us to gather around the every seven years for the water pageants that once took table to examine a nautical chart of the Thames Estuary. We place around this local landmark. In Southend Library I had spent the next hour or so deliberating over the definition read eighteenth-century descriptions of these ceremonies,
29 which told of great processions from London by steamboat, filmmaker, a writer and an ornithologist. ‘The journey will with the Lord Mayor being accompanied by water bailiffs, be deliberately slow paced,’ he said, ‘allowing those on board sheriffs and the aldermen of the city. The ceremonies were a direct and immersive experience of this ancient waterway performed to huge crowds of people and would begin with during a crucial period of change.’ We aimed to amble the city sword being placed against the stone, ‘an act which downriver, to drift on the tides, to meditate on the unique signified the official maintenance of the claim of the city of seascape of that place. London of the jurisdiction of the Thames at this limit mark.’ At high tide city officials would row around the Crowstone The idea appealed to me immediately as the estuary and three times before drinking the toast ‘God Preserve the City the mud flats of the Thames had been the landscapes of my of London.’ At low tide entertainment was provided for the childhood. I had grown up in Southend-on-Sea on the Essex spectators with the local sheriff being ‘respectfully bumped’ coast and spent my school holidays paddling, swimming and against the stone by watermen, after which he obtained the playing in the Estuary waters. When the tide went out, I Freedom of the Water. The proceedings would continue walked out on the mud for miles, catching crabs and shrimp with a huge amount of drinking and merriment followed by in the little pools of water left behind by the receding sea. ‘a scramble in the mud for coins, usually one hundred newly I knew the dangers of the incoming tide and also knew coined sixpences, thrown to the crowd by the mayor.’ The something of the military history of the place, having same ceremony would then be repeated on the other side of visited the remnants of crumbling forts along the coastline. the river, at the London Stone, which sits directly opposite I knew the stories of the ship filled with bombs sitting on the Crowstone at the entrance to Yantlet Creek on the Isle the riverbed, but before my trip on IDEAAL I had never of Grain. The imaginary line between the Crowstone and actually spent any time on the water itself. Most Estuary the London Stone is called the Yantlet Line and denotes the dwellers haven’t either. For the majority of people who live final end of the Thames. As a child I was told theYantlet Line in the many towns and communities dotted along the Essex is the place where London ends and Essex begins. and Kent coastlines the Estuary is little more than a much loved scenic backdrop to their lives. It remains, for most, an The London Stone has become a mythical pilgrimage site unknown landscape. for a number of artists and writers recently who have risked their lives to touch it at low tide. In fact I had been listening It was late on that first night when I finally settled into my to the writer Iain Sinclair tell a story about such an adventure cabin in the stern of the boat, which I was sharing with the the night when I had first met Ben Eastop, the owner of only other woman on the crew, the archaeologist Sefryn IDEEAL. In the former drawing room of the old manor house Penrose. I lay awake, feeling the weight of IDEEAL in the of Chalkwell Hall, which overlooks the Thames Estuary dark water, listening attentively to the creak of old wood in Essex, Iain spoke to a crowded room of people about his and the sound of water lapping against the hull, whilst recent explorations around the marshland territory off the inhaling the strange odours inside – a mix of paraffin, old North Kent coast, where he reached the London Stone on a rope, wood and dust. In truth I was nervous about the swan pedalo with the artist Andrew Kotting: journey ahead; before that night I had never spent more than an hour or two on a boat. ‘In Ghost Milk, a book I wrote as a charm against monolithic Olympic enclosures in the Lower Lea Valley, I decided that Eventually I must have fallen asleep, as the vibration of the I needed to actually touch the London Stone, as a physical diesel engine above woke me at six am. Crawling out of my marker for the start of the tidal Thames. I was going to bed I made my way into the former cargo hold next door. walk the river, from mouth to source, as a way of taking the Abandoned sleeping bags and mattresses lay scattered around temperature of the softest part of Middle England. But you the floor; the rest of the crew were up already. I helped myself can’t reach it! The Stone is on unmapped military land. I spent to the remains of the still warm coffee in the pot and sat for a four days trying to get in and being turned back by razor while in the belly of the boat, thinking about the merchandise wire and the wives of policemen. I finally managed it with that once filled that space: potassium, tea, spices, bricks, hay, the photographer Stephen Gill. We carried a kayak to the anything that needed moving from one place to another. mouth of the Yantlet Creek. But we didn’t need it, the tide Ben had told me that when the vessel was used as a privately was out. We walked across. So the return on the swan pedalo owned taxi service for shifting goods around the Dutch canals from Hastings, with Andrew Kötting, was like a final gesture the great curved solid steel beams on the ceiling could be against those Olympic enclosures. We rode the tide, saluted removed to throw large loads into the hold. the Stone, and read from my earlier book, Downriver.’ Tentatively I climbed the almost vertical wooden ladder up After Iain’s event Ben approached me and asked if I would be onto the deck. The sun was shining brightly and London willing to be the writer-in-residence for a multi disciplinary looked magnificent. Ben was standing in the wheelhouse next arts project he was organising, responding to place. The to the musician John Eacott, the only other experienced sailor idea was to take a five-day experiential cruise on IDEEAL on the crew. Everybody was in good spirits and we were ready along the Thames Estuary with a mixed crew of visual to begin our first day cruising along the Estuary; the start of artists, an archaeologist of the recent past, a musician, a what would become for me a deep exploration of that place. ◊
30 31 32
The Natural World Hunting Life How one short-sighted man showed us what the peregrine sees. By Robert Macfarlane
hat did I see that morn- feathers blossom, it falls to the low cover decade (1955–65) watching and tracking ing? Hot winter sun of the crop and flails for safety to a hedge. the falcons that wintered each year in the on the face’s brink, felt The falcon rises to strike down again, fields and coastal margins of Essex. Before as red but seen as gold. misses, rises, misses again, two more rises leaving, I decided to go for a run up to Air,W still, blue. Tremors at the edge of and two more misses, the pigeon makes the beech woods that stand on a low hill vision: quick dark curve and slow straight the hedge and as I rush the wood-edge of chalk, a mile or so from my home in line over green, old in the eye. Intersec- to close the gap the falcon, tired, lifts and south Cambridge. A thin path leads to the tion, shrapnel of down, grey drop to crop, turns and flies off east and fast over the woods; a path that I have walked or run flail and clatter, four chops and the black summits of the hilltop trees, with quick every few days for the last ten years, and star away with quick wing flicks. sculling wing flicks. thereby come to know its usual creatures, Let me tell that again, clearer now, if And let me tell it one last time, clearer colours and weathers. I reached the fringe clearer is right. What did I see that morn- still perhaps. What did I see that morn- of the beech wood, where the trees meet ing? A green field dropping citywards. ing? It was windless and late autumn. The a big sloping field of rapeseed, when my The narrow track at the bronze wood’s sky was milky blue, and rich leaves drifted eye was caught by strange shapes and vec- border. The sun low but strong in the in the path verges, thrown from the trees tors: the low slow flight of a pigeon over cold. Then odd forms glimpsed in the by a night frost and a gale not long since the dangerous open of the field, and the eye’s selvedge. The straight line (grey) the dropped away. That afternoon I was due quick striking curve of a sparrowhawk flight-path of a wood pigeon passing over to drive to Essex to see the archive of a – no, a peregrine, somehow a peregrine, the field. The fast curve (dark) the kill- man called John Alec Baker, author of unmistakably a peregrine – closing to it path of a peregrine cutting south from The Peregrine, and among the contents of from height. The falcon slashed at the the height of the beech tops. The pigeon the archive were Baker’s binoculars and pigeon, half hit it, sent up a puff of down; is half struck but not clutched, chest- telescopes, with which he had spent a the bird dropped into the rape and pan-
34 ‘His fingers are invisible to the viewer, curled tightly into his palm like talons.’
—
icked towards the cover of the hawthorn of a landscape that I know. ~ hedge. The falcon rose and fell upon it as If Baker’s book can be said to possess I reached the University of Essex soon it showed above the surface of the crop, anything so conventional as a plot, it is after noon. I was shown into a room with striking four more times but missing each that one autumn, two pairs of peregrines a large table, in the centre of which had time. I ran to get closer, along the fringe of come to hunt over a broad area of unspec- been placed two big clear plastic packing the wood, but the falcon saw me coming, ified English coastline and hinterland – a crates with snap-lock lids: a life reduced had known I was an agent in the drama mixed terrain of marshland, woods, fields, to 100 litres. The table was otherwise since before it had first struck, and so it river valleys, mudflats, estuaries and sea. empty, so I unpacked the boxes and laid lifted and flew off east over the beech tops, Baker becomes increasingly obsessed out their contents. black against the blue sky, its crossbow with the birds. From October to April There were several maps: half-inch profile – what Baker calls its ‘cloud-biting he tracks them almost daily, and watches Ordnance Surveys of the Essex coast near anchor shape ’ – unmistakable in silhou- Maldon, a road atlas, a large-scale map ette, as my blood thudded. of northern Europe. There were rubber- I had followed the path to the beech banded bundles of letters by Baker, and woods a thousand times, and I had seen other bundles of letters to him from read- kestrels, sparrowhawks, buzzards, once a ers and friends. There was a folder con- tawny owl, twice a red kite – but never a taining yellowed newspaper clippings of peregrine. That one had appeared there review coverage of The Peregrine. There on that morning seemed so unlikely a was a curious collection of glossy cut-out coincidence as to resemble contrivance images of peregrines and other raptors, or magical thinking. But no, it had hap- scissored from magazines, bird-guides, pened, and though it felt like blessing calendars and cards. There was a list of or fabrication it was nothing other than the contents of his library. There were chance, and a few hours later, still high drafts – in manuscript and typescript – of from the luck of it, I left for Essex to look The Peregrine and his second book, The through Baker’s eyes. Hill of Summer. There were proof cop- ~ ies in red covers of both books, every J. A. Baker made an unlikely bird- paragraph of which, I saw as I flicked watcher. He was so short-sighted that he through them, had been arcanely anno- wore thick glasses from an early age, and tated by Baker using a system of ticks, he was excused National Service during numbers and symbols. There were the the Second World War on grounds of his as they bathe, fly, kill, eat and roost. field journals he had kept during his years vision. But this myopic man would write ‘Autumn,’ he writes, ‘begins my season of ‘hawk-hunting’. There was a sheaf of one of the greatest bird books ever, the of hawk-hunting, spring ends it, and early poems. And there were his optics. fierce stylistic clarity of which must be winter glitters between like the arch of A pair of Miranda 10x50 binoculars in a understood in part as a compensation for Orion.’ The book records these months black case with a red velvet interior. A the curtailed optics of its author’s eyes. As of chase in all their agitated repetitiveness. brass telescope, heavy in the hand, which an elegy-in-waiting for a landscape, The Everything that occurs in The Peregrine collapsed to ten inches, extended to a foot Peregrine is comparable with Barry Lopez’s takes place within the borders of the fal- and a half, and was carried in a double- Arctic Dreams (1986). In its dredging of cons’ hunting grounds, and with respect capped brown leather tube. A feather- melancholy, guilt and beauty from the to them. No cause is specified for the weight spotter-scope, light and quick to English countryside, it anticipates W. G. quest itself, no triggering detail. No other lift, from J. H. Steward’s in London. And Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995). Along human character of significance besides a pair of stubby Mirakel 8x40s, German- with The Living Mountain – with which it Baker is admitted. His own presence in made, in a carry-case of stiff brown shares a compressive intensity, a generic the book is discreet, tending to paranoid. leather lined with purple velvet, the base disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry We are told nothing of his life outside the of which had at some point come loose, and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with hunt: we do not know where he sleeps and which had been carefully repaired the eyeball – it is one of the two most at night, or to what family – if any – he with pink strips of sticking plaster that remarkable twentieth-century accounts returns. The falcons are his focus. still held it together.
35 ‘What began as a distraction became first a passion and then an obsession for Baker.’
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There were also dozens of photographs, managed but did not eliminate the chron- childless and loving, although – one sus- some of them still in the branded enve- ic pain, and Baker underwent agonizing pects – difficult at times for Doreen. Also lopes of their developers (‘Instamatic – long-needle ‘gold’ injections into his in the early 1950s Baker was introduced Magnify Your Memories!’). Among them joints, hoping to slow the progression of to birdwatching by a friend from work, I found a black-and-white shot of Baker his disease. But his body nevertheless suc- Sid Harman. What began as a distraction taken in 1967, the year The Peregrine was cumbed: his knees and hips first, and then became first a passion and then an obses- published. He was forty-one at the time. I his hands, which were thoroughly strick- sion for Baker. Soon he was birding alone. had not seen it before, though it was the en by the 1960s. Thus the fused knuckles, Whenever possible, he would cycle – on photograph he chose as his author image the curled fingers, the stiffened shield of his Raleigh bike, with khaki canvas saddle- on the jacket flap of the first edition. He his right hand – so bravely on show in his bags – in search of birds, out into the 200 is seated in an armchair and dressed in a author photograph. square miles of coastal Essex that com- collared white shirt and a dark woollen Despite the pain, photographs from prised his hunting ground. He would pass tank-top. He has wavy brown hair and an Baker’s youth show him as a cheerful and London’s overspill factories and car dumps, owlish gaze. He is resting his chin upon sociable young man. Golden hair, hands heading for the inland fields and woods, or his hand, and looking away from the cam- in pockets, always the thick spectacles. to the lonely sea wall and saltings of the era, over the left shoulder of the viewer, Arms round his friends, drunken embrac- shore. He would wear his standard bird- towards a sunlit six-paned window – we es in wartime pubs, walks along the sea watching clobber: grey flannel trousers, know this because there is a curved reflec- wall. He was six feet tall, deep-voiced an open-necked shirt, a jumper knitted tion of the window visible in each of the and strongly built, though the spondylitis by his mother, a Harris tweed jacket, a flat thick lenses of the spectacles he is wearing. diminished his stature. He was an eager cloth cap, and a gaberdine mac to keep the There was something unusual about reader and a prolific correspondent: his weather off. He would take a packet of the image, though, and it took me time letters from the war years speak of an sandwiches (made by Doreen), and a flask to realize what it was. Baker’s right hand, intellectually adventurous teenager – pas- (filled with tea by Doreen). He would also the hand on which his chin rests, is dis- sionate above all about landscapes and carry a pair of binoculars or a telescope. torted. The knuckles of the first and sec- literature. He would often spend weeks He took a map on which he marked the ond finger appear to have fused together, writing single letters, and because of this locations of his sightings, and a Boots and the back of his hand has swollen and tended to double-date his letters ‘Comm:’ spiral-bound notebook in which he kept stiffened into a pale spatulate shape, so all and ‘Conc:’. A letter to his friend Don his field records. At the end of each bird- that can be seen is the plain white paddle Samuel was ‘Comm: Sept 19th 1945’ and day he would return to a big meal (cooked of the hand’s back. His fingers are invis- ‘Conc: Oct 4th 1945’, and ran to sixty- by Doreen) and then retreat up to his den, ible to the viewer, curled tightly into his four pages of blue notepaper. ‘Dear Sam,’ the spare bedroom, to transpose and refine palm like talons. it opened. ‘Here beginneth what promises his notes. He was, Doreen remembered ~ to be indeed a “weird” if not a “wonder- after his death, ‘a prickly customer’, who Baker was born on 6 August 1926 in ful” letter. Many subjects will drift lei- became a ‘loner’ as an adult. Limited in Chelmsford, Essex, the only child of an surely across the pages – vague substances sight and mobility, and suffering near-con- unhappy marriage. His parents were Con- phantasmal, trailing clouds of unwieldy stant pain, he was prone to bursts of anger. gregationalists: his father, who worked as imagery . . .’ It ended with loving Birdwatching helped Baker thwart his an electrical designer, suffered prolonged descriptions of the ‘delicately balanced’ short sight, and offered him a form of mental ill health due to a bony growth Essex landscape: ‘green undulating fields, relation. ‘Binoculars and a hawk-like vigi- that pressed onto his brain (his treatment rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, lance,’ he wrote, ‘reduce the disadvantage was, brutally, a lobotomy). pine clumps, rows of stately elms’. ‘In of myopic human vision.’ Aided by optics At the age of eight, Baker contracted things beautiful there is an eternity of and instincts, a new world became visible rheumatic fever, the after-effects of which peace, and an infinity of sight,’ concluded to him: the beyond-world of wildness would be lifelong. It induced arthritis the myopic Baker, longingly. that proceeds around and within the that spread and worsened as Baker aged, In the early 1950s, while working for human domain. He recorded his discover- and at seventeen he was diagnosed with the Automobile Association in Chelmsford, ies in his notebooks and journals, in total ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory he met his wife, Doreen, a wages clerk more than 1,600 pages of field notes taken form of acute arthritis that fuses muscle, at the company. They married in Octo- over the course of ten years, made in bone and ligament in the spine. Codeine ber 1956: the marriage would be durable, black and blue ink and his looping hand-
36 ‘These were the circumstances he needed to convert the sprawling journals into a crystalline prose-poem.’
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writing, the legibility of which deterio- they heard the song of a wood lark and, myself, a second-order spotter, trying to rated as his illness advanced. inspired, they impetuously ‘plunged into see Baker through the darkness of six dec- ~ the wet wood’ to find its source: ades – ‘gorping’ after something I could The journals are coal to The Peregrine’s never really hope to perceive. diamond. Crushed, they became his book. I had a handkerchief over my head, Half a year or so into his journal- The first journal entry is dated 21 March like a puddingcloth, and followed the keeping, Baker started to produce more 1954: it is functional and unadorned: a sound – at first along the footpath, then intense entries: brief prose-poem para- partridge is seen in the meadows oppo- through the bracken, the ditches, and graphs, modernist and spiky, that antici- site a church on ‘Patching Hall Lane ’, in the bushes, until . . . we stood under pate the dense energies of The Peregrine: ‘long’, ‘rich’ grass. Thirteen species are that wonderful sound, coming down to seen in the day; a wren is heard ‘singing us in the thick darkness and the pouring Saturday November 20th 1954 Great lustily’. Habits of annotation that will last SE/SW gales each night, Rooks were are established: each date is underlined; swept from home to roost on immense each bird name is double-underlined and waves of wind, thrown like burnt pa- capitalized (lending a Germanic feel to per, very high, revellers in the wind. the prose); weather and wind direction are recorded. Tuesday November 1st 1955 50 degrees. Within weeks of that first entry, Baker Edney Wood was quiet, but frighten- had begun to experiment with his lan- ingly beautiful. The sodden glow of guage, sensing that the field note might the millions of leaves burnt my eyes. be a miniature literary form of its own. But after sunset it was just a desolate, He soon employed metaphor and simile deserted autumn slum of trees. to evoke details and aspects that conven- tional field notes would have eschewed as Light fascinated him, as he worked at irrelevant. Such comparative tropes, often how to represent its volatilities in lan- elaborate, served to sharpen rather than guage. He tried out phrase after phrase, blur observation: remaining hostile to cliché: ‘clear varnish of yellow, fading sunlight’; ‘that quality Sunday May 9th. Wood Hall Wood – of sunlight, which is like the dusty golden Nightingale singing well, and perched varnish on some old Rembrandt oil-paint- amongst brambles and white may. ing’. Occasionally he relinquished simile Throat working convulsively as it sang, rain. And a feeling of great exhilaration in favour of common adjectives, uncom- like an Adam’s Apple, or bobbing, like possessed me, like a sudden lungful of monly combined: ‘Wednesday April 23rd a pea in a whistle, tremendous sound purer air. The great pointlessness of it, 1958. Light was tricky and strange.’ to come from such a narrow place as a the nonsense of nature, was beautiful, The early years of Baker’s journals bird’s throat. and no one else would know it again, reveal him to be a good writer but a rath- exactly as we knew it at that moment. er bad birdwatcher. Partly because of his As I read the journals that afternoon, Only a bird would circle high in the myopia, he did not develop what birders Baker’s well-hidden personality became darkness, endlessly singing for pure, call ‘the jizz’: the gestalt of body shape, more visible to me: a private and pained untainted, instinctive joy, and only a flight-style, song or call, context, behav- man, in flight himself, who discovered bird-watcher would stand and gorp up iour and location within a landscape that a dignity and purpose in the work of at something he could never hope to see, allows an experienced birder to make an watching – and whose encounters with sharing that joy. instantaneous identification. The jizz is birds supplied him with kinds of happi- the knowledge-without-reflection that ness that were otherwise unavailable. On A feeling of exhilaration possessed me the bird glimpsed at the edge of vision is 16 June 1954, five days before midsummer, as I read that entry, smiling at the detail a kestrel, a firecrest, a curlew. Baker, though, he went out with Sid late in the even- of the handkerchief, sharing something of was often uncertain as to what he had ing in search of nightjars, undeterred by Baker’s joy. But I was aware of the reflex- seen. Early one January he watched a bird the heavy rain. Suddenly, unexpectedly, ivity, too: that I had become a watcher in ‘glorious light’:
37 moving very fast, with wing’s [sic] strewn with corpses whose lacerations to forge a new style of description. The beating quickly, rolling slightly from and dismemberments Baker records with style he created, up in his Chelmsford side to side. Its tail looked longish and the diligent attention of a crime-scene spare room, was as sudden and swift as tapering. The instant I saw it I thought investigator. Indeed it is, in many ways, the bird to which it was devoted, and one it was a Hawk, a Kestrel or a Spar- a detective story: there is the same pro- that – like the peregrine – could startle rowhawk, or even a Peregrine [. . .] or cedural care, the gathering of clues as to even as it repeated itself. a Wood Pigeon or Stock Dove. . . . No the nature of the killer, the bagging of Baker gained his effect by a curious markings could be seen in the glasses, evidence, and the following of hunches combination of surplus (the proliferation so it wasn’t a Wood Pigeon. Either a when evidence falls short and deduction of verb, adjective, metaphor and simile), Stock Dove, or a falcon, presumably. will not suffice. And as with so many deletion (the removal of articles, conjunc- crime dramas, the killer comes to fasci- tions, proper nouns) and compression (the Another day he spots what he supposes nate the pursuer. decision to crush ten years of ‘hawk-hunt- to be a wood pigeon but ‘the possibility After he first saw (or believed himself ing’ down to a single symbolic ‘season’, its of it’s [sic] being an immature male Per- to have seen) a peregrine, Baker quickly year unspecified). This mixture of flaring egrine flashed across my mind’. ‘Presum- elected the bird – which he often, inac- out and paring away results in the book’s ably’, ‘possibility’: wish fulfilment is at curately, calls a ‘hawk’ rather than a shocking energies and its hyperkinetic work here: the beginnings of a longing ‘falcon’ – as his totem creature, rife with prose. Neologisms and coinages abound. for the peregrine so keen that it caused – dark voodoo. In the late 1950s, peregrines There are the adjectives Baker torques in the blurry distance of Baker’s far-sight become the chief object of his searchings, into verbs (‘The north wind brittled icily – dove to morph into falcon, pigeon to and his language from this period begins in the pleached lattice of the hedges’), and pass into peregrine. From the start, the to invest the birds with disturbing powers the verbs he incites to misbehaviour (‘Four predatory nature of the falcons, their and qualities: a northern purity, a shatter- short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse’). decisive speed, their awesome vision and ing capacity for violence – and the ability Adverbs act as bugle notes, conferring their subtle killings all thrilled him. Baker to vanish. bright ritualism upon scenes (‘Savagely he was enraptored. ~ lashed himself free, and came superbly to ~ The winter of 1962–3 was the fiercest the south, rising on the rim of the black After two hours with the journals, I set since the mid eighteenth century. The sea cloud’). There are the audacious compari- them aside and turned to Baker’s maps. froze for two miles out into the North sons: the yellow-billed cock blackbird ‘like The Essex maps, inch-to-a-mile Ord- Sea. Spear-length icicles hung from eaves a small mad puritan with a banana in his nance Surveys, had obviously been heav- and gutters, and snow drifted to twenty mouth’, the wood pigeon on a winter field ily used. At the corners where the panels feet deep in places. The estuaries of that ‘glowed purple and grey like broc- met, the paper had worn through from Essex iced up, and the wading birds that coli’ – like broccoli! – or the ‘five thousand folding, and threads of cloth were visible. depended upon access to the mudflats for dunlin’ that ‘rained away inland, like a The maps were also heavily annotated their food supply died in their thousands. horde of beetles gleamed with golden chi- in ink and pencil. There were territories Not a day in England dawned above tin’. Such flourishes have the appearance of marked out with ruled biro-line perim- freezing from 26 December to 6 March. surplus to them, but in fact they aspire to eters, which presumably represented the Soon after the snow at last left the land, maximum efficiency. A baroque simile is area of a single day’s exploration. Pocking Baker resigned from his job at the Auto- offered because it seems to Baker the most the maps, too, were hundreds of inked mobile Association in order to commit precise way to evoke the thing to which circles, each containing a capital letter or to his pursuit of the falcons and work on it is being compared. These comparisons pair of letters: LO, M, K. the book he was starting to compress out are ‘far-fetched’ in two senses: elaborate in It took me longer than it should have of the field journals. By day he watched, their analogies, but also serving to fetch- done to realize that each of the circles and by night he wrote. It was a frugal, from-far – to bring near the distant world recorded a raptor sighting. P = peregrine. focused life. He and Doreen lived off sav- of the birds. SH = sparrowhawk. M = merlin. LO = ings, a tiny pension and National Assis- I had known before coming to the little owl. BO = barn owl. HH = hen har- tance. The house had no telephone, and archive that Baker had rewritten the book rier. K = kestrel. Only raptors – birds that Baker seems to have communicated little five times after its first draft. But until I hunt and feed on other animals – were with friends. These were the circumstanc- opened the red-jacketed proof copy of recorded in this way by Baker. Our word es he needed to convert the sprawling The Peregrine I had no idea of the unique raptor comes from the Latin rapere, mean- journals into a crystalline prose-poem. method of analysis he had devised for his ing ‘to seize or take by force’. I felt a Waiting for Godot was once described as own prose. Almost every page of the proof sudden surge of unease at seeing Baker’s a play in which nothing happens, twice. was rife with annotations. Ticks indicated obsession with raptors recorded in this The Peregrine is a book in which little hap- phrases with which Baker was especially way: as if I had stumbled into the room pens, hundreds of times. Dawn. Baker pleased. Here and there he had re-lineated of someone fixated with serial-killers, watches, the bird hunts, the bird kills, the his prose as verse. He had subjected his note-boards and walls papered with yel- bird feeds. Dusk. Thus again, over seven sentences to prosodic analysis, with stress lowing news-clippings of past crimes . . . months. What Baker understood was and accent marks hovering above each syl- The Peregrine is a book of bloodiness, that to dramatize such reiteration he had lable, as if scanning poetic meter (echoes of
38 ‘One of the many exhilarations of reading The Peregrine is that we acquire some version of the vision of a peregrine.’ —
Gerard Manley Hopkins). ing to Baker, it sees like a Cubist painter things imperceptible at ground level. We On every page, he had also tallied and gazing from the cockpit of a jet aircraft. become the catascopos, the ‘looker-down’: totalled the number of verbs, adjectives, It perceives in surface and plane, a tilt- a role usually reserved for gods, pilots metaphors and similes. Above each meta- vision of flow and slant. It remembers and mountaineers. This falcon-sight, this phor was a tiny inked ‘M’, above each form and the interrelation of form: catascopy, makes Essex – a county that simile an ‘S’, above each adjective an ‘A’ never rises higher than 140 metres above and above each verb a ‘V’. Written neatly The peregrine lives in a pouring-away sea level, a county that one sees often in the bottom margin of each page was a world of no attachment, a world of across, but rarely down onto – new again. running total for each category of word- wakes and tilting, of sinking planes Baker gained this perspective for his prose type, and at the end of each chapter were of land and water. The peregrine sees by studying RAF and Luftwaffe aerial final totals of usage. ‘Beginnings’, the first and remembers patterns we do not photographs of the south-east of England. chapter of The Peregrine, though only six To see like a peregrine, he had first to see pages long, contained 136 metaphors and like a helmeted airman. Short sight led to 23 similes, while the one-and-a-half-page bomb-sight led to hawk-sight. entry for the month of March used 97 ~ verbs and 56 adjectives. The Peregrine is not a book about watch- There, laid bare, was the technical basis ing a falcon but a book about becoming of Baker’s style: an extreme density of a falcon. In the opening pages, Baker sets verbs, qualifiers and images, resulting in out his manifesto of pursuit: a book in which – as the writer and orni- thologist Kenneth Allsop put it in a fine Wherever he goes, this winter, I will early review – ‘the pages dance with image follow him. I will share the fear, and after marvellous image, leaping forward the exaltation, and the boredom, of direct to the retina from that marshland the hunting life. I will follow him till drama’. That quality of ‘leaping forward’ my predatory human shape no longer is distinctive of Baker’s writing: distinc- darkens in terror the shaken kaleido- tive, too, of course, of what the world scope of colour that stains the deep does when binoculars are raised to it. Thus fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan the stunning set-pieces of hunt and kill, head shall sink into the winter land, close to imagist poems, describing chase and there be purified. and ‘stoop’ – that ‘sabring fall from the sky’ when the peregrine drops onto prey from know exist; the neat squares of orchard There, in four eldritch sentences, is the a height of up to 3,000 feet, at a speed of and woodland, the endlessly varying book’s chill heart. Baker hopes that, through up to 240 mph, slaying with the crash of quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds a prolonged and ‘purified’ concentration impact as well as the slash of talons: his way across the land by a succession upon the peregrine, he might be able to of remembered symmetries . . . he sees escape his ‘human shape’ and abscond into A falcon peregrine, sable on a white maps of black and white. the ‘brilliant’ wildness of the bird. shield of sky, circled over from the sea. He begins his ‘hunting life’ by learning She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as One of the many exhilarations of read- to track his predatory prey. Peregrines can though the air above the land was thick ing The Peregrine is that we acquire some often fly so fast, and at such altitude, that and heavy. She dropped. The beaches version of the vision of a peregrine. We to the human eye – especially the myopic flared and roared with salvoes of white look upon the southern English landscape human eye – they are invisible from the wings. The sky shredded up, was torn from above and perceive it as almost ground. But Baker discovers that they can by whirling birds. The falcon rose and pure form: partridge coveys are ‘rings be located by the disturbance they create fell, like a black billhook in splinters of of small black stones’ on the fields, an among other birds, almost as the position white wood. orchard shrinks ‘into dark twiggy lines of an invisible plane can be told from its and green strips’, the horizon is ‘stained contrail: ‘Evanescent as flame,’ he writes ‘What does a falcon see?’ asked Anaxi- with distant towns’, an estuary ‘lift[s] on 7 October, ‘peregrines sear across the mander in the sixth century BC. Accord- up its blue and silver mouth’. These are cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in
39 ‘Why might a man want to become a bird?’
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the blue haze above. But in the lower air a earth- bound, joint-crabbed, eye-dimmed extinguished by what he called ‘the filthy, wake of birds trails back, and rises upward Baker had been deprived. One can hear a insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. Over through the white helix of the gulls.’ hint of envy when, one November, Baker a decade he had watched the dwindling of As he improves his tracking skills, so notes seeing a peregrine moving with ‘his peregrine numbers: ‘Few winter in Eng- Baker draws closer to the bird, and he usual loose-limbed panache’. The falcons land now, fewer nest here . . . the ancient begins to seek contact with it, through embody all that is unavailable to him, and eyries are dying.’ Thus the atmosphere ritual mimicry of its behaviour and habits so they become first his prosthesis and then of requiem that prevails in The Peregrine: (a method that has affinities with those his totem: ‘the hunter becoming the thing a sadness that things should be this way, of revolutionary mid-twentieth-century he hunts’. mixed with a disbelief that they might ethologists such as Frank Fraser Darling Baker was also suffering from intense be changed. Occasionally, the elegiac and Konrad Lorenz). One November day species shame. The peregrines of Europe tone flares into anger. Out walking on 24 he rests his hand on the grass where a per- and North America were, at the time he December, a day of cusps and little light, egrine has recently come to ground, and wrote, suffering severe population decline. Baker finds a near-dead heron lying in a experiences ‘a strong feeling of proximity, In 1962 Rachel Carson had alerted the stubble field. Its wings are frozen to the identification’. By December he has gone world to the calamitous effects of pesti- ground, but in a ghastly thwarted escape, fully feral. Crossing a field one afternoon, cides on bird populations in Silent Spring. it tries to fly off: he sees feathers blowing in the wind: A year later a British raptor specialist called Derek Ratcliffe had published a As I approached I could see its whole The body of a woodpigeon lay breast landmark paper revealing the terrible body craving into flight. But it could upward on a mass of soft white feath- impact of agrichemicals upon peregrine not fly. I gave it peace, and saw the ers. The head had been eaten . . . The numbers in Britain. Pesticide use, nota- agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly bones were still dark red, the blood bly DDT, was leading to an aggregation heal with cloud. still wet. of toxins in raptor prey species, which in turn was causing eggshell thinning No pain, no death, is more terrible to I found myself crouching over the kill, and nesting failure in the falcons. Their a wild creature than its fear of man . . like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned breeding success rate plummeted, with . A poisoned crow, gaping and help- quickly about, alert for the walking chicks typically dying in the egg. In 1939, lessly floundering in the grass, bright heads of men. Unconsciously I was Ratcliffe noted, there were 700 pairs yellow foam bubbling from its throat, imitating the movements of a hawk, of peregrines in Britain. A 1962 survey will dash itself up again and again on as in some primitive ritual; the hunter showed a decline to under half of this to the descending wall of air, if you try becoming the thing he hunts . . . We number, with only 68 pairs appearing to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul live, in these days in the open, the same to have reared chicks successfully. Baker with myxomatosis . . . will feel the vi- ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. was aware of both Ratcliffe and Carson’s bration of your footstep and will look work; as was J. G. Ballard, whose work for you with bulging, sightless eyes. The pronouns tell the story – ‘I’ turns Baker admired, and whose story ‘Storm- into ‘we ’; repetition becomes ritual; bird, Storm-dreamer’ (1966) imagines We are the killers. We stink of death. human dissolves into falcon. Allsop a future in which pesticide overuse has We carry it with us. It sticks to us like understood this drive for transformation caused massive growth in the bird species frost. We cannot tear it away. to be the book’s central psychodrama: of the country, who then begin coordi- ‘The [book’s] strange and awful grip,’ he nated attacks on the English crop-fields ‘We stink of death. We carry it with us.’ wrote, ‘is in the author’s wrestling to be in an attempt to feed their vast hungers. By this point in The Peregrine, we under- rid of his humanness, to enter the hawk’s The south-east English coastline becomes stand these to be the words of a man who feathers, skin and spirit.’ a militarized zone, with anti-aircraft guns feels himself stricken with disease – and Why might a man want to become a mounted on barges, there to resist aerial of a man appalled to belong to his own bird? Baker’s illness, and the pained discom- attacks not by Heinkels but by hawks. kind. He wants to resign his humanity, fort of his daily life, bear upon this question. In the mid 1960s, as he laboured over and to partake of both the far-sight and The peregrines – in their speed and freedom his drafts of The Peregrine, it must have the guiltless murders of the falcon. of manoeuvre, with their fabulous vision – seemed likely to Baker that the peregrine Towards the end of the afternoon in idealized the physical abilities of which the would vanish from southern England, the archive, I took Baker’s telescopes and
40 ‘ I am another of those obsessives, differently stricken, unable to free myself from The Peregrine’s grip.’
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binoculars one by one to the window. if Baker the magus might magic these wild the Mare’s Tail waterfall in the Scottish There was a view of beech trees, concrete birds up to order. A student of mine was Borders, riding along the rim of the sky in a buildings, and a lecture hall with a curved so inspired by The Pere- grine’s vision of tremendous serration of rebounding dives and zinc roof. I tried out each instrument in human irresponsibility that she became an ascensions, then dipping down in hooping turn. When I extended the Steward scope, eco-activist, paddling kayaks up rivers to dive to its nest on the cliffs of the cataract. there was an ominous rattle from its inte- gain illegal access to coal-fired power sta- A breeding pair high above a crag in misty rior. I held it to my eye and stared into tions. Several years ago I came to know a sunlight on the side of long Loch Ericht milk. The eyepiece was misty, glaucous. I young musician living a marginal life in a in the Central Highlands, heard first, giv- tried the other telescope, brass and heavy. south London squat and performing as the ing high, husky muffled calls, keerk, keerk, But it was missing its front lens, and there front man for a hardcore punk-rock band. keerk, keerk, keerk, sharp-edged and barbarous, was only blackness to be seen, with a tiny He was a talented and troubled person, for then appearing as dark crossbow shapes. And circle of light at its centre. whom ‘nature’ as conventionally experi- then the peregrine that morning, before Both pairs of binoculars, though, were enced was irrelevant, tending to incompre- leaving for the archive, firsta tremor at the scratched but functioning. Through the hensible. But he had found his way to The edge of vision, then at last sculling away with Mirakels I tracked wood pigeons on their Peregrine, and the book’s dark fury spoke quick wing flicks. clap-clap-glide crossings of the campus sky, to him. He read it repeatedly, and began The month I finished writing this passing over the green-gold of late-season to mimic Baker’s mimicry of the falcons: chapter, eight months after I had been to oaks. Through the Mirandas I watched a once, on a London street outside a club, the archive, a pair of peregrines took up wagtail figure-eighting for flies above the he demonstrated the action of ‘mantling’ residence on the great brown brick tower zinc of the lecture hall. – when a peregrine spreads its wings, fans of the university library in Cambridge. Binocular vision is a peculiarly exclu- its tail and arches over its prey to hide it They made their nest on a ledge high on sive form of looking. It draws a circle from other predators. He and I collabo- the tower’s south side, in front of one of around the focused-on object and shuts rated on a project one summer and made the small windows that let light into the out the world’s generous remainder. plans to work together again. Then that dim miles of book-stacks. A friend told What binoculars grant you in focus and December he died of a heroin overdose, me one afternoon that they had arrived, reach, they deny you in periphery. To aged twenty-three. He was lowered into and gave me directions to the window: view an object through them is to see it in the cold hard earth of a Cornish field a few South Front Floor 6, Case Number 42. crisp isolation, encircled by blackness – as days before Christmas, with the cars of his I went the next morning, rising up the though at the end of a tunnel. They per- friends pulled up around the grave, their tower in a cranky lift, and approaching mit a lucidity of view but enforce a denial stereos blasting out his music in tribute. the window cautiously. I could see feath- of context, and as such they seemed to Buried with him was a copy of the book er fluff and guano; then, tucked in tight me then the perfect emblem of Baker’s he revered above all others. to the retaining tiles, a clutch of three own intense, and intensely limited, vision. I am another of those obsessives, differ- eggs, brick-red and black-flecked. And I thought of him out in the field towards ently stricken, unable to free myself from suddenly I stepped back, because she was the end of his decade of hedge-haunting The Peregrine’s grip. As Nan changed the there also, scything in and up to the edge and hawk-hunting; how difficult it must way I see mountains, so Baker changed of the ledge and perching, the feathers of have become to hold the binoculars, as his the way I see coasts and skies. I have writ- her piebald breast rippled by the wind, her finger joints thickened and fused, and his ten often about the book, and followed yellow feet gripping the ledge, the ridged tendons tightened. Baker’s own wanderings through Essex as knuckles tense, and big with muscle, and her The Peregrine, a record of obsession, has best I have been able to reconstruct them: great black eyes looking into mine, or rather itself in turn provoked obsessions. It is a hunting the hunter’s huntings. The open- through me, as though they see something book which sets the mind aloft and holds ing sentences of a book of mine called beyond me from which they cannot look away. ◊ it there. In the archive I found scores of The Wild Places knowingly invoke the admiring letters written to Baker by read- opening sentences of The Peregrine; Baker ers. Some wished to acquire his supernatu- is present through the whole work, his ral abilities as a tracker: ‘I hope to have the style stooped into its prose. good fortune to see Peregrine somewhere When I have seen peregrines I have — in the [Blackwater] estuary on Thursday seen them, or I remember them, at least The photographs of J.A Bakers ‘optics’ and map Feb 9th or Friday Feb 10th,’ wrote one – as partly in Baker’s language. A falcon up at were taken by Robert Macfarlane.
41 poems Six By Nan Shepherd
42 1. LOCH AVON 2. THE HILL BURNS
Loch A’an, Loch A’an, hoo deep ye lie! So without sediment Tell nane yer depth and nane shall I. Run the clear burns of my country, Bricht though yer deepmaist pit may be, Fiercely pure, Ye’ll haunt me till the day I dee. Transparent as light Bricht, an’ bricht, an’ bricht as air, Gathered into its own unity, Ye’ll haunt me noo for evermair. Lucent and without colour; Or green, Like clear deeps of air, Light massed upon itself, Like the green pinions, Cleaving the trouble of approaching night, Shining in their own lucency, Of the great angels that guarded the Mountain; Or amber so clear It might have oozed from the crystal trunk Of the tree Paradisal, Symbol of life, That grows in the presence of God eternally. And these pure waters Leap from the adamantine rocks, The granites and schists Of my dark and stubborn country. From gaunt heights they tumble, Harsh and desolate lands, The plateau of Braeriach Where even in July The cataracts of wind Crash in the corries with the boom of seas in anger; And Corrie Etchachan Down whose precipitous Narrow defile Thunder the fragments of rock Broken by winter storms From their aboriginal place; And Muich Dhui’s summit, Rock defiant against frost and the old grinding of ice, Wet with the cold fury of blinding cloud, Through which the snow-fields loom up, like ghosts from a world of eternal annihilation, And far below, where the dark waters of Etchachan are wont to glint, An unfathomable void. Out of these mountains, Out of the defiant torment of Plutonic rock, Out of fire, terror, blackness and upheaval, Leap the clear burns, Living water, Like some pure essence of being, Invisible in itself, Seen only by its movement.
43 3. 4. rest
Caul’, caul’ as the wall Where the outline of the hills That rins frae under the snaw Reclines upon the azure west, On Ben a’ Bhuird, There comes a blur that a blue mist fills, And fierce, and bricht, And there I know cool water spills, This water’s nae for ilka mou’, And there is rest. But him that’s had a waucht or noo, A quiet hollow dim and deep — Nae wersh auld waters o’ the plain How quiet, my very pulses know! — Can sloke again, Where all desire is lulled asleep, But aye he clim’s the weary heicht And the lone crying of the peeweep To fin’ the wall that loups like licht, Will hardly go. Caulder than mou’ can thole, and aye And there is nothing, nothing at all, The warld cries oot on him for fey. To bear the blood from the earth’s own face — Only her bosom’s rhythmic fall — The moving of world’s processional — Wall, well. Wersh, tasteless. The heave of space. Waught, draught. Thole, endure. 23rd February 1918
44 5. underground 6. daffidowndilly
What passionate tumult tore this black disturbance Daffidowndilly, O daffidowndilly Out of the rugged heart of the obstinate rock, How do you come to be green and gold? Fixing secure a thousand-age-old shock The bulb that you grew from was brown like a walnut, Beneath the quiet country’s inperturbance, And we planted you deep in the dark brown mould. I have no wit to utter, no what breath Daffidowndilly, all shining and yellow, Blew like a bubble that flees through water this Are you a bit of the golden sun, Chasm in the bowels of earth where dark streams kiss Caught by the wind as it tumbled from heaven, In guilty dark slant shores they will kiss till death And stuck on the daffodil bulb for fun? And I never look on: but I give my thanks Tonight to that antique destructive whim, Written for ‘Brownie’s’ class – 7th May, 1919 That so the risen and torrential flood That else had burst all measure and drowned the banks And swamped my life, may pour along those grim And secret caves, and none discern its thud.
May, 1918
45 46 from the wild A Singing of Minutiae Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton explain the visual poems, Relics
n late 2008, en route to Scotland, we took a detour provided a vivid material record of the environment along some of the Lake District’s lonelier roads; reaching far back into prehistory. The embedded pollen through the backcountry between the Irish Sea and grains were analysed, uncovering a fascinating narrative the high peaks of Great Gable and Scafell. This region of plant succession over several millennia. This was once ofI crags and scars, heather and bracken, grassland and bogs, a landscape covered with trees, rather than thin soil, sedge scattered with the remnants of prehistoric settlements, made and moor-grass. Eleven tree genera were identified: Alnus, a great impression upon us both, and we later moved to Betula, Coryloid, Fagus, Fraxinus, Juniperus, Pinus, live in the area, to commence what would become several Quercus, Salix, Tilia & Ulmus. years’ work, comprising publications, music CDs, prints and artefacts. This material was gathered together as Memorious Pennington’s work became the basis for our own series Earth and exhibited at Abbot Hall and Blackwell, Cumbria, of visual poems, Relics, which holds in stark relief the in early 2015. contemporary and prehistoric landscape. The material presented in Relics is a form of salvage; a dredging of the As the work progressed, our focus became increasingly linguistic record for traces of the lost tree genera found in centred upon the tarn known as Devoke Water, which Pennington’s survey. Each of the eleven trees is visually we visited in different seasons and weathers, walking its represented by a trunk cross-section, the innermost ring perimeter and traversing the fells which cluster around it. comprising its earliest linguistic form and the outermost its Along with our field notes we gathered phials of water modern-day equivalent. But unlike the physical certainty and alluvium, wind-blown filaments of sedge and bracken, of the soil core, the linguistic record is imperfect: the fragments of bone and cotton grass. These thing-poems are earliest Indo-European word-forms ultimately stem from a vital testimony of the land itself; they are voices in an an extinct ‘proto-language’ – a hypothetical parent tongue infinite polyphony –a singing of minutiae. During this time reconstructed from subsequent languages that survived into we also began to research the history and ecology of the the written age. By comparison, the landscape itself has an region. Many toponyms for water have great antiquity and immense capacity to ‘remember’; to record its own history. ‘Devoke’ is thought to derive from among the oldest strata of Celtic languages in Britain. It means ‘the black one’. We should note here that the analogy between language In the written record the name has undergone centuries evolution and tree-growth is imperfect. Many closely related of attrition – Duuok, Duffok, Dudock, Denok, Dovic, languages (such as Old English and Old Norse) developed Devock, Duvvock – to rhyme them off is to participate in a concurrently, rather than sequentially. Old Norse has summoning; the recital of an incantatory place–poem. been included in Relics as it exerted a great influence on the toponymy and dialect of Cumbria. The English dialect During our research we discovered that others had pre- is also incorporated, but only those word-forms that are empted our study – among them the archaeologist variations on the English common name for each tree. As J. Cherry and the limnologist Winifred Pennington. In with any such survey, it is incomplete – but it is perhaps in the 1960s Cherry identified hundreds of cairns scattered the nature of salvage that it should be so. throughout the uplands surrounding Devoke Water, many of which were hidden beneath a thin veil of vegetation. If Cherry’s work alerted us to the remains of a significant Due to the non-intrusive nature of his methods, his survey prehistoric human presence in these Cumbrian uplands was ultimately inconclusive as to the cairns’ purpose and (including the nearby earthworks of Barnscar), Pennington’s antiquity – but his work contributed to our understanding research showed us a coinciding decline in the wooded of this remote location as a landscape of absence – a place of environment. Forest clearances resulting from human departure and loss. The cartographic record bears this out, activity are likely to have played a key part. Analysis of as the hills, crags and scars are littered with names, among sediment layers beneath tarns such as Devoke Water show them wolf (Ulpha Fell), deer (Harter Fell), pine marten how the landscape recorded our effect upon it, even if we (Mart Crag) and red kite (Kitt How). These and many more did not have the means to document it ourselves. It could lost, or declining, animal species are now little more than be said, therefore, that our first writing implement was the ghost-presences; glimpses of a vanished epoch. axe. Today – somewhat ironically – remains such as Barnscar are now listed by English Heritage as ‘at risk’ from ‘plant Pennington, also in the 1960s, visited Devoke Water to growth’ (http://bit.ly/1bAVnpL). Nature, it seems, is always take soil core samples from the tarn, the results of which keen to redress the balance. ◊
47 HAZEL Corylus
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48 SALLOW Salix
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WILLOW Salix
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse & . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
49 BEECH Fagus
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
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BIRCH Betula
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
50 ELM Ulmus
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
ELM ELM E ELM LM EL LM M E M E LM EL E-TREE ELLUM OM E M OM E-T LM EL M RE E LU AL E L M EL ALME ME ELL EL M EL E ME E E L E RE UL LL UM L M T E EM M L - LN LMR ALMR O E E E R LM E M E M E LM R LM E L M O A AL - M L M R M T L LM ELM E R E E E M E M E LM L R U L LM M E L E EL L M M L M R M M E E L L L M L A ALM E R E E E E E E M LM * A L E E L L L L E E M A L M A * * L N M M M A L U E M E L E R L E M R M - EL M L E L - A L E E L E * U M E R T L * M L A - * L - L M - * L O E * L A M M E M L E L M * E L L E A E E * M L M M R L E E E L - E M - M L O L A - L R M A M L
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WYCHELM Ulmus
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
51 LIME Tilia
. Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
E LIME LIME LIM LIM E LIM IME E L EE LIND LIM ME NE-TR EN LI E LI LI NDE L E EE N- IM TR ND LEIN TR E IM N- E LY DE LI E L E INN EN E LI E D L DE LI M IN NE L N E IM L I IND LIND L IN E L L D L IN - L N N IN D L L T I E E E L IN N R M D D D D D E M N IN EN LIND E E I N L ND LIN LI L L I L LI D N L L L D E E N I E D L D I M E E IN I D N D L IN Ô LEN N L M E N L ND * DÔ D I E D E I E N R D L E L E L D L N D L T L * N N N * E I - I Ô N N E I L L M D L L D O- LEN D I L E N T- * T- N I D M N O Ô N I E N N E I D N E - N E D I D L E L L N L L * D L N * L L * * L I D E I - E L E L M E N L N I E Ô N O N I I N I N I - T N E D N E M L D D D L T - -
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OAK Quercus
. Proto-Germanic . Old English . Old Norse . Middle English . English Dialect . Modern English
52
PINE Pinus
. Proto-Indo-European . Latin . Old English . Middle English . Modern English
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53 54 Portfolio Rocks in the Sky Photographs by David Quentin
he first photograph I ever took of Ta rock in the sky was rubbish, but it could not have turned out otherwise given my inexperience at the task and the technical limitations of the kit I had with me. I now know that you need to be using exceptionally fast film, so that you can stop down, and crank up the shut- ter speed: you don’t want the landscape blurred out by selective focus on your rock and you certainly don’t want the rock blurred by any hint of motion. You want it to be just hanging there above the landscape ‘in much the same way that bricks don’t’. You also need to be using a wide angle lens so that you can be close to the rock and move around it as it moves; so that you can physically compose the shot in the always vanishing sliver of time when the rock is attractively positioned in the sky and catching the light favourably.
Visually I think they are quite derivative. The Sugar Loaf one is a clear rip-off of Magritte’s Le château des Pyrénées, and the slanted slab over Watendlath Fell only seems so portentous because it reminds you of the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors. But to my mind the kitschi- ness of these reference points adds to the fun. They are not meant to be serious pictures, even though it’s sometimes hard work to get them right.
But while they are not serious, they do nonetheless represent a kind of geol- ogy. When I started the project I was already inclined to recognise geology as investigating what is (owing to the dis- proportionate brevity of recorded human thought) an unnaturally static moment in a (however ungraspably slow) dynamic. Likewise as my understanding of geol- ogy increases I find that one of the most important and truly interesting proper- ties of rocks in motion is the role played, in the formation of the landscapes we humans love, by their relative buoyancy ◊.
55 Near Callanish, Isle of Lewis
56 Brent Crater, Ontario
57 Charlevoix Crater, Quebec
58 Nine Barrow Down, Isle of Purbeck
59 Seilebost Beach, Isle of Harris
60 Sugar Loaf, Monmouthshire
61 Watendlath Fell, Cumbria
62
Five Dials
Number 36 Landmarkings