Author Archives: boneland

About boneland

Photographer, writer, story-hunter.

On Alderley Edge

Posted on by
2

Yesterday I went to Alderley Edge for the first time and the thousandth. It was a strange thing, visiting a place that I’d never been to before and yet which is a key part of the geography of my world. Here were caves and hollows, ancient woodland, rocks and wind-blasted edges I’ve explored so many times in the fiction of Alan Garner, in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, and more recently in Boneland. 

Even the placenames here are tales: Stormy Point, the Devil’s Grave, Iron Gates, the Thieves Hole, the Golden Stone, Clockhouse Woods, Druid’s Circle, Holy Well, Castle Rock.

So I wandered along the paths of that known and unknown place, thrilled by it, a little afraid of the intensity of melding the imagined and the actual.

And I stared suspiciously at random mischievous-looking silverbrows who may have been Mr Garner, or Cadellin, or both … Shamans of this eldritch landscape.

Stormy Point

Stormy Point

The Thieves' Hole

Mining tunnel, Church Quarry

Church Quarry, where John Evans, the Hermit of Alderley Edge, lived in a hut around a hundred years ago. The tunnel goes back and back into a starless subterranean night.

Rock and root

Rock and root

The Wizard

The Wizard’s Well

The face of the Wizard of Alderley Edge, carved by Robert Garner, Alan Garner’s great-great grandfather.

Drink of this and take thy fill for the water falls by the Wizhard’s Will.

Into Snowdonia

Posted on by
2

It rained all the way on our journey from Builth Wells to Llyn Tegid. I didn’t care. The mountains of mid- and north Wales are so spectacular, so mythic, that the relentless rain only added to their mystery and power.

I wanted to take photographs through the windscreen as we traveled. The only thing to hand was my iPhone but it wasn’t up to the job. I don’t think any camera is really up to the job.  I’ve seen this landscape on TV and in thousands of photographs but 2D media cannot do justice to the raw wildness and heft of it. It’s a landscape that you need to experience, to occupy.

The road runs alongside the River Wye for miles. Not yet the sleek brown Wye of the south but its wilder upper reaches, a stony river of hurtling black water flecked with white. Beyond road and river, the mountains fill half the sky – steep wooded slopes; platforms of wiry grass, bracken, and gorse; sheer drops of fissured rock.

A great waterfall plunging from heights lost in cloud, as if falling from the sky itself.

Spring is late this year. Oak and alder are leafless as we head north, black and dripping in the rain. Here and there, shaggy-fleeced mountain sheep lie with their lambs beneath the trees, waiting out the downpour.

We pitch up at the northeastern end of Llyn Tegid, Lake of Serenity, and the winds battered us for four days and nights. Llyn Tegid – the biggest natural lake in Wales, home to a mythical water beast much like the Loch Ness Monster. On moonlit nights, so legend has it, towers are visible in the lake’s depths – the drowned palace of Tegid Foel, husband of the enchantress Ceridwen who swallowed her servant Gwion Bach and nine months later gave birth to Taliesin, bard and wildman of the mountains.

Llyn Tegid

Llyn Tegid

I have been a course, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas:
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp,
Disguised for nine years.
in water, in foam.

- Cad Goddeu, The Book of Taliesin

And so we went on, to the coast and the western edge of Snowdonia National Park. Spring arrived in a rush – sunlight, warmth, hawthorns tipped with green, willow catkins bristling like hedgehogs, a bumble bee bumping drunkenly from one pollen-yellow head to another.

We walked through Barmouth, over the famous railway bridge that spans the Mawddach estuary then along the Llywbr Mawddach towards Dolgellau.

All the while here, we feel outside time, or moving through mythic time. That we might see footsore Roman soldiers trudging along the valley, or look up and see Myrddin Wyllt silhouetted on a high peak, or hear the songs of Taliesin – bard, shapeshifter – whispered on the breeze.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

In the Welsh mountains

Posted on by
6

We’re in Powys, on a smallish and lovely site called Fforest Fields. It’s not far from where my friend Neil Ansell spent 5 years living alone in a remote cottage – an experience he later recounted in his beautiful book Deep Country. It’s a magical place – low mountains, steep wooded gullies where tiny streams hurtle downhill, rolling farmland on the lower slopes and the raw uplands still patched with snow. 

There are miles of trails and footpaths here, some along the valley floor but we take the paths that zigzag up the mountains. Every twist reveals some new wonder: a dramatic sky over a mountain landscape that stretches to the far horizon; a waterfall tumbling over a mossy rockface; an ancient alder, gnarly and knuckled; a blood-red elf cup fungus. Ravens drift on the high thermals, making clicky calls I’ve never heard before: tick tock scraaaa! A red kite, buzzards. And, in the very early morning, a strange deep fluting that we think may be a Long-Eared Owl.

It’s been sunny almost every day since we arrived. On the uplands, there’s a biting wind and spikes of ice glitter in the higher waterfalls. Far snowy mountains, scored as if the wind raked claws over their flanks. A dozen skylarks, drenching me with song. In the valley below, lambs just a few days old gambol in the sunshine – lucky to be born just after the unseasonal extreme cold that killed so many ewes and lambs this year.

It’s easy to understand why Neil spent 5 years in this part of the world. We’ll have to leave next week for the coast, Snowdonia, Cumbria, then Scotland. But I think we’ll be back one day.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Purton Hulks

Posted on by
8

In 1909, a number of old timber lighters were beached along the Severn at Purton to reinforce an eroding bank. Over the years, more barges at the ends of their working lives were added. Today there are 81 hulks along this stretch of river, half-buried in sandy mud, overgrown with grass. There are schooners and trows, concrete-hulled barges, workboats, lighters, Appledore and bird barges. Broken curves of wood, weathered and grainy, mapped with lichens and algae.

barge1barge2barge3

It was bitter out there. We’re on course for the coldest March for 50 years. Spring waits – a froth of hawthorn blossom here and there, clumps of chilly daffodils, snowdrops still out like lingering patches of dirty snow. This morning I watched sand martins skim the canal for insects. But there are no insects. Not yet.

Glastonbury Tor

Posted on by
2
Glastonbury Tor

Glastonbury Tor

The National Trust sign says the Tor has been a place of pilgrimage for some 10,000 years. It’s easy to see why it would be – this improbable, steep-sided hill rising from the Summerland Meadows in the vast lowland sweep of the Somerset Levels, views for miles in every direction. On a clear day you can see all the way to Dorset, Wiltshire, Wales.

Once the Somerset Levels were marshland, a glittering expanse of water and reed, misty, mysterious, and the Tor a hill island in fenland. Ynys Wydryn, the Isle of Glass. It’s a mythic place: Annwn, gateway to the Celtic Otherworld; Avalon, the magical isle where Excalibur was forged and where the mortally wounded King Arthur was taken after the Battle of Camlann; the Spiral Castle of the King of the Faeries.

St Michael’s church stood atop the Tor until 1275, when an earthquake shook it apart. The tower that stands there now is all that remains of its replacement, built in the 1360s and destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. In that year, on this spot, the Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey and two of his monks were hanged, drawn and quartered, blood spilling into the magical stuff of the land. Christianity has a long history here yet still seems uncomfortable, alien, shattered by geophysical and political earthquakes, surviving only as a spin on more ancient beliefs – holy wells and chalices, votive offerings, liminality, gateways to magical lands.

View from theTor at dawn

View from the Tor at dawn

Stonehenge in the rain

Image

4
Stonehenge in the rain

Stonehenge in the rain

Many of these visitors took photographs not of Stonehenge itself but of themselves standing grinning before it. Something about that reminded me of old photographs of Great White Hunters posing with the pathetic ruins of lions, elephants, rhinos they’d killed. Of course the visitors to Stonehenge haven’t killed anything but there was nonetheless something about this posing that made me uneasy. A casual disrespect. As if this most sacred and mysterious of landscapes was just another trophy.

Wind Chill

Posted on by
7

Winter, 1928-29 and Britain froze. In the north, 50,000 people skated on Lake Windermere. In Trafalgar Square, people smashed through inches thick ice in the fountains so the famous pigeons could drink. And the sea at Whitstable froze, a half-mile of lumpy floes between shore and open water. Undaunted, the oyster fishermen trudged across to check on their ice-bound yawls.

Frozen sea at Whitstable, 1929

Frozen sea at Whitstable, 1929

March, 2013. A two minute walk from our camper van to the sea. For three days and nights, gales smashed in from Siberia. Temperatures dropping as low as -15c in that brutal wind. The van pitched and rolled and creaked, the wind screaming around it. Times when it felt like the van would dry-capsize but go outside and it looked surprisingly stable.

Whitstable: part Islington chic, part 1950s chintziness, part working fishing port. In the harbour fish market there’s a stall with trays of chipped ice piled with rock and native oysters. You can buy them singly or by the half dozen. A worktop with a bucketful of sliced lemons, a bottle of Tabasco, a jug of something vinegary. J. and I try oysters for the first time. They’re easier to swallow than I thought they’d be. And yeah, they taste of the sea, briny, a bit mineral, a bit creamy.

The beaches on this stretch of coast: shingle, with clacky ridges of oyster and slipper limpet shells. Another dead gannet, the second we’ve found in the southeast. From a footbridge above a tidal channel I watched redshanks probe the mud for worms and tiny crustaceans.

Walking back along the shore in the biting Siberian wind. We meet an old man with a greyhound. Finn and the greyhound chase around together until Finn accidentally treads on the greyhound’s foot. “Whooowhooo!” it cries, chattering its teeth at us, face a comical trumpet of affront. “Whoooowhoooowhoooo!”.

The old man sighs. “Took him to the vet for his jabs one time,” he says. “‘He jumped off the table and ran around the room with the needle still stuck in his neck. Cryin’ just like that, he was. All cissy. Vet said she’d never seen anything like it. Not in all her born days.”

5am on a caravan site

Posted on by
3

Yesterday we walked for 6 hours along the Stour Valley. So last night I fell asleep earlier than usual, which meant I woke at 3.30am. Sat with my laptop and worked on my next book. After a while, I needed to move, to stretch. So I went outside.

5am on a caravan site in early March. Still dark, tinged with a faint dirty orange to the east. Stars, a half moon, a haze of mist. A wild rabbit, upright, motionless, frozen until I pass. Then more rabbits, silent shadowy forms chasing along a stretch of hawthorn hedge. In the little woods next to our van, a blackbird sings – rough-voiced, as if not yet quite awake and needing to sing himself into being.

All around, caravans and camper vans and motorhomes, windows shuttered and dark, their human cargo still slumbering. That odd assortment of people you find on caravan sites out of season, and of which we are now a part. Two pitches along from us, a transit van where two youths sleep on a mattress in the back. The small camper that belongs to ageing hippy couple who spend most of the year touring Spain but are stuck here until the husband gets the all-clear to drive again after heart surgery. The 50-something couple who live full-time in their coach-sized motorhome, preferring it to the stress and gravity of bricks and mortar. The sweet, dormouse-shaped couple who spend every weekend in their caravan and who spend much of their time inside it, reading newspapers and watching TV, content merely to be somewhere different for the weekend and feeling no need to justify their stays with day-trips and tourist checklists.

And here I am, standing on a patch of grass in the dark, stretching the stiffness from my muscles, quietly and completely happy.

Waiting for Spring

Posted on by
7

It’s seemed like a long winter this year. Maybe it’s because the second half of the summer was a chilly washout that blurred into autumn, into winter. Or maybe it’s because now I’m off the work treadmill, I’m living every day instead of surviving it and my sense of time passing has slowed accordingly, like when you’re a kid and the 6 week summer holiday seems like 6 years of freedom.

I’m tired of winter now though, Tired of browns and blacks and greys and those wintry greens that survive through the bitter months. The temperature hovers a little above zero. The sky is a flat gun-metal grey. Everything is waiting.

But there are signs. The days are noticeably longer now. Trees and hedges crackle with birdsong. Snowdrops frost patches of ground in the woods. The first primroses are out and two inch high nettles fringe the footpaths. There are tiny leaves on the hawthorns and catkins on the alders. A few days ago, I saw a newborn lamb and the next day, two more.

In a few weeks’ time, everything will have changed. Greens spiked with bright spring flowers. Birds nesting. Balmy days, sunshine and blue skies.

Spring lambs, Kent

Spring lambs, Kent