All Change in the Edgelands

 

I don't much care for change. Part of the stress is waiting for it all start - or, if it has, to reach you. 

Back in the cold snap before Christmas, we wandered over the fields on the far side of Fishpool Hill, where the development of Brabazon is already under way, and became quite disorientated, thanks to the removal of a short stretch of hedge that made two large fields into one huge one, and seemed to alter completely the lie of the land.

We've also heard - and seen - more goods trains running on the Henbury loop, which only used to happen at night, and which signals its reincorporation into the infrastructure of the area, as it becomes more densely populated.

There have even been changes in the Small Dark Wood of the Mind. I walked through with Cwtch, my dog, the other day, after an absence of three weeks, and was surprised to find the path that leads to the Grove of the Silver Chair (and Ruby Crown) had rebranded itself as Golden Gate Way ... so I had to go down it and find out what was happening. 

When we got to the clearing where we first saw a roe deer a couple of years ago, I was shocked to find that all the trees on that edge of the wood had been felled, and then I remembered hearing a chainsaw a few weeks ago and being relieved to find 'they' weren't cutting down the magnificent ash at the entrance to the wood. Now, sadly, I know what 'they' were up to. Here's how it is now, and how it was in April 2021. 

The Grove itself - and the discarded patio chair and builder's helmet that inspired its nickname - remain unchanged, but are themselves now right on the edge of an even smaller Small Dark Wood of the Mind. There might well be an excellent reason for this work being done, but it does seem a shame to reduce cover, in a wooded corridor where tawny owls (amongst other creatures) live, at a time when so much of the surrounding area is going under concrete.

Here's some more folklore in one of the gardens in the trailer park, namely, Blodeuwedd. ('She wants to be flowers but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.')

There have been a few more treasures to spot at this most apparently barren of times:

oak leaf with rivets, blackberries, a waxcap dancing the dying swan, badger poo studded with damsons, more waxcaps, a sea green snail shell, a little daisy showing its head, a bramble leaf, and sycamore leaves

As for fauna, apart from sparring magpies, jays, crows and rooks, which we hear and see most days, and grey squirrels, which are ubiquitous in the extreme, there's been little to note, though the gulls, which are always present but which fly so high they're seldom on my radar unless they're mobbing predators, have been a lot noisier than usual these last couple of weeks. 

And of course there's the aforementioned Cwtch, who might count as fauna, I suppose. She's certainly attempting to interact with some down that hole.

The hollowing oak has changed too, losing the last of its leaves. I realised a few weeks back that it features on the 1844 - 1888 OS map on the Know Your Place website, so it must have been a noteworthy tree even then.

And of all changeable things, the weather is most, from frost and ice and residual snow ... 

 ... to wind ... 

... and some welcome sun.

Strangely, there was no one standing to my left when this photo was taken ... 

... though here you can jut see Cwtch at my right.

And more than any other sort of weather, there has been rain, characterised first by stormy skies ...

... which then turn dreary and grey as soon as the precipitation starts. 

It's rained so much that the ditch is a winterbourne with a current ... 

... and even the badger path is flowing.

As for the formerly helpful step in the kissing gate out on the farmland, it's now a lot more precarious in its broken state. (More change.)

In fact, it's been so wet, the golf course was closed for a couple of days over New Year, which was doubtless a disappointment for the golfers, but lovely for us, as it meant we could have a wander without the risk of being brained by a golf ball. (Most golfers we've encountered are pretty friendly, but we've had balls hit at us even when crossing the course on the footpath.)

Here, in addition to the landfill at the northern end of the course, and the new pitch and putt, work on which seems to have stalled, there is yet more change around the two largest ponds. The Northerner had warned me, when I was laid up with a sprained ankle back in October, that both ponds at the top of the course had been fenced off, but this was the first opportunity I'd had of seeing the work for myself.

Of course it's impossible to guess what the plan is, without being in the know, but lots of the vegetation has been cut back around this, the smaller pond, and some youngish trees felled, which is a shame, given the ponds form one of the more biodiverse areas of the course. Here's how it is now vs how it looked in July of last year. 

Meanwhile, it looks like the larger, very shallow pond is being made deeper, with an island, which is funny because a golf club member, who's also a dog walker, told me a while back that the management had originally intended to drain it and establish a green there, and capped the spring feeding it in readiness, only for the level of Henleaze Lake, a couple of miles away, to drop dramatically, much to the consternation of the swimmers, therefore requiring a change of plan. Here's how it looks now and back in September 2021, when it was a large muddy hollow, and I walked right through it among the reedmace and loosestrife, fleabane and Michaelmas daisies. 

Right at the bottom of the course, where she first learnt that ice melts and water doesn't support even the weight of a small pup, Cwtch eyes the potential for a wetting with suspicion. She might take a sip but nothing will induce her to dampen even a paw. The change from warm fur to sodden is not one she'll entertain. 

The Watching Place

This is Beetor Cross on Dartmoor. It's on the B3212 that crosses the moor from Moretonhampstead to Yelverton. 

It's also known as The Watching Place, and there are several stories in circulation as to why this might be the case. 

The first is that it was the haunt of a highwayman called John Fall, whose speciality was leaping out at his victims and taking them by surprise.


Then there's the theory that it marked the point beyond which French and American officers on parole from Dartmoor prison during the Napoleonic wars and living in Moretonhampstead were not permitted to proceed. 

Or that in mediaeval times it was the site of the gallows, where relatives or friends of the condemned person would watch and wait for permission from the Lord of the Manor to cut down the corpse.

My favourite story is that the name dates back to an outbreak of plague in 1626, which was spread by soldiers and sailors travelling between Barnstaple and Plymouth via the Mariner's Way. Some of the inhabitants of a settlement called Puddaven, near Beetor Cross, were afflicted, and as they were no longer able to care for themselves, every evening neighbours placed provisions for them on a flattish stone at some distance from the house. They would then retreat to wait and watch. If the food was removed, fresh supplies would be left the following day. On the fifth day no one came and the food stayed where it was, so the neighbours understood that the last survivor had died. So, having approached the house, with no response to their shouts, the neighbours set fire to the thatch and burnt it down in the hope that this would stop the plague spreading further. From this time, it is said, the area became known as the Watching Place.

Something about this old story, the solidarity shown by neighbours during a time of great fear and uncertainty, lifted it above its rivals and prompted me to start writing a story of my own. As part of my research, I read all the folklore I could connected with the moor, and found several other stories associated with outbreaks of plague.

Notably, there was the story told about Merrivale by the celebrated chronicler of Dartmoor, William Crossing, who recalls that the area of Bronze Age relics on Longash Common was once known as Plague Market, the tradition being that during outbreaks of plague at Tavistock,

food would be left there by moor folk for townspeople to collect. 

And another that attaches itself to sites all over the country, but on Dartmoor to the ruins below Hound Tor: that the mediaeval village was abandoned during the Black Death.   

I visited and was moved not just by the deaths of the villagers but by the detail of their lives also, such as the fact they built their houses into the side of a hill, with livestock housed in the shippon at the lower end, and a gully cut to drain the slurry  ... 

... and the step leading up into the cramped communal sleeping chamber.  

And I read and wrote, and wrote and read, and after seven years there was a coming-of-age novel ... 

... and after a few more years, during which it sat on my laptop while I wrote poetry, and won a prize to have a collection published, it finally emerged into a largely oblivious world under my publishers' Tamar Books imprint.

I picked up a copy the other day and read the back. Swine flu ... avian flu ... SARS ... We are frequently warned of imminent, drug-resistant pandemics. But what is it really like to wait for the end of the world?

I flicked through. Social distancing. Self-isolation. It's all in there, centuries before these practices were formally identified and their names coined.  

There's even a scene involving frenetic hand washing, though no emphasis on that as a way of avoiding infection, because my characters, stuck in 1349, wouldn't have known that. And besides it's fleas they should mostly have been avoiding. 

Every day on Twitter there are countless stories of selflessness, bravery and idiocy surrounding Covid-19, and I'm reminded again and again that while pandemics come and go, and technology and medical treatments improve, people are essentially the same as they've always been. We're all in the Watching Place now, and I feel a renewed closeness to characters that were such a big part of my life for so long.




Illustrations by Dru Marland

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2019

Every day is World Poetry Day in our house. I love the fact that poetry is such a big, comforting, startling thing in our lives. But today is the official World Poetry Day that only comes once a year ...

... and to mark it, I'm posting my poem 'Oystercatchers', which recently won the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. (Still haven't quite integrated that information into my life.)

And also some photos of Uphill Slipway in Somerset, which is the landscape I had in my head when I wrote it. 

Uphill is where, according to local folklore, the boy Jesus landed with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, en route for Glastonbury. For me it has a deeply creative, rather more pagan resonance that feels just as divine.  

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                                                                

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission      

©Deborah Harvey 2019 

'Oystercatchers' is from my forthcoming collection, The Shadow Factory, which will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing later this summer.  

A Visit from Old Scritch

Having brought the little apple tree grown from seed from the last apples harvested from my grandmother's garden after her death almost 25 years ago with me when I moved house recently, I've been keeping a close eye on it in its new location to maximise its chance of survival.  

In this respect, the very mild weather we've been having this winter has been helpful. However, on New Year's Eve, my friends turned up to help me celebrate and reported that it was forecast to get very cold out, and a frost was already forming.  I immediately shuffled down the garden path to put a nice thick mulch of straw, bought for this very purpose, around the roots of my precious tree, but no sooner had I put one foot on the grass than I slipped and fell flat on my back.  

Sitting on the sodden lawn with wet mud seeping through my clothes, I decided I might as well spread the straw anyway before struggling to my feet and lumbering back into the house like the creature from the black lagoon.  It was hardly a propitious start to my celebrations or a good omen with regard to the tree's survival, and I hadn't drunk a drop at that point.  Plus, it didn't get any colder and there was no frost. Gah.

Today I glanced out of my bedroom window and caught a flash of buff, white and blue in garden. Horace's 'chattering jay, ill omen'd', one on the grass, one perched on my tree. Except I'm taking this wonderful visitation as the best of signs.  

Inspiration : Winterset

One of the reasons why I keep this blog is as a Commonplace Book.  Writing posts about my jaunts with photos helps me to remember in detail where I've been, and if I'm lucky enough to come home with a potential poem in my pocket, it's an invaluable tool for the writing of it, especially since a fair bit of time can elapse before the poem is ready to be shaped.  

With this in mind, I thought I might occasionally post finished poems with their associated photos, and a brief description about how they came about.

One of my favourite beaches is Berrow, on the Somerset coast.  Park near the church at the west end of the village, cross the churchyard, wind your way through the dunes and you'll soon reach the fantastic beach.  A large part of its appeal for me is that it's dog-friendly all year round.  It's also less frequented than the neighbouring beaches of Burnham, Brean and Weston-super-Mare, and it even has a shipwreck.  Of course, this being the Bristol Channel, it also has the world's third highest tidal rise and fall, so you can miss seeing the sea altogether, but the light reflecting off the mud has its own beauty.   

I last visited Berrow on Boxing Day 2013.  It was the brightest of days, made more so by the knowledge that the dark would start seeping up from the ground as early as 2pm and by 4pm the light would be all but gone.  I came home with a series of photographs that were  - to my eye, at least - quite startling in their brilliance.

 

Back at home, the following photo interested me the most.  It was taken through an ancient plain glass window in the church, and it was like seeing all the colours and shapes of nature outside refracted through water.  It made me want to write a poem that refracted the landscape I'd seen, within the parameters of the (almost) shortest day.

So I started to think about how I could achieve this, and it was immediately clear that I had to adopt a different approach from usual.  The majority of my poems are about more than their ostensible subject, but this one needed to be simple - a straightforward record rather than a piece of writing filtered through something else.  This meant form would be important, as it would compensate for possible lack of depth.  

Because it is out of routine, the time between Christmas and New Year feels somehow out of time to me, and I wanted to reflect this in my poem.  I also wanted my poem to mirror the length of days by being short, and by beginning with daybreak and ending with night.  A circular poem, then, and that needs a circular shape. I started to think about poems that begin and end with the same image, and remembered Ted Hughes' 'Amulet'.  This beautiful piece of writing makes use of 'anaphora' - a type of parallel structure generated by the repetition of certain words or groups of words at the beginning of each line.  This is an ancient technique which is used in both religious and folk poetry and which creates the effect of a litany.  

By now, the word 'between' was becoming an obsession. Mentally, I went back to the landscape - between land and sea, between sky and mud - and the notion of 'time between' - between one great feast and another, between sunrise and sunset.  The whole experience became suspended in my mind like a brilliant bauble. It could have happened thirty years earlier, not just a few days - in fact, I wasn't sure I could remember a time before it was part of my experience.  Which meant I needed to write something that could have been written at any time, that was timeless - something that could even be part of our folk tradition.

Next, I made a list of images including:

sun and sand dunes 

the wreck of SS Nornen

worm casts and shells 

ripples  

sand trees and sea flowers  

a treeful of magpies

Then, the hard work. It's a truism that the most artless poems are the ones most effort has gone into to make them appear that way.  My main problem was that I had one or two beautiful images I badly wanted to use that were too complex to fit the rhythm of my poem - because when you're relying on form and repetition to create an effect, you can't then cram in something that doesn't fit.  So they were duly put to the sword (or rather, set aside for possible use in the future).

I walked the poem for the best part of a month.  I was sure it fitted together. I left it for a month.  I found it didn't fit as well as I thought it did. I tweaked a little more.  Finally it was done.

The last thing I had to do was find a title. In the end, I settled on 'Winterset' - a pun on the location of the poem, which harks back to mediaeval tradition and suits the feeling of timelessness I'd tried to engender. 


Winterset

Between dark and dawn, the sleep-smudged sun
Between sun and moon, the scavenger flood
Between flood and flux, the blackening wreck
Between wreck and sky, the covetous mud
Between mud and sand, the glyph of worms
Between worm and beak, the runes of gulls
Between gull and pebble, the butterfly shell
Between shell and ripple, the ebb-tide flower
Between flower and scrub, the crouching dune
Between dune and reeds, the glancing marsh
Between marsh and tower, the magpie's eye
Between eye and blink, the plummeting dark


© Deborah Harvey 2014

There - all over in a blink!

'Winterset' is published in my 2014 collection, Map Reading for Beginners, published by Indigo Dreams and available from their website. (Or from Amazon if you must, but remember that they sell this sort of stuff as well as books.)