Wild spaces: the Carneddau, Snowdonia

24 05 2013

Wild ponies near the bothy at Dulyn.

Wild ponies near the bothy at Dulyn.

For anyone familiar with the landscape of Snowdonia in North Wales, the Carneddau – the range of mountains that fill the far north-east of the national park – summon up solitariness. Unlike the more well-known Glyders or Snowdon, no main roads penetrate into the Carneddau, even though it’s the area of Snowdonia nearest to the densely populated areas of the industrial northwest of England. One weekend, with unexpected fine weather in prospect, I headed out from Manchester to spend a night wild camping in the Carneddau and to test the lie of the land before taking my young family. Wild camping simplifies the entire world to a home that you can manage to carry on your back; a world of essentials only: a tent, necessary food and cooking equipment, a sleeping bag and perhaps something to read. From the moment you step out onto the path, time slows, the mind focuses and everything else is left behind. It’s a wonderful, if daunting, form of release.

Dulyn bothy

Dulyn bothy

The Carneddau is the highest area above 3000ft anywhere south of the Scottish Highlands, virtually treeless and usually shrouded in mist, wind-beaten or rain sodden. Arriving from a three-mile boggy walk from the end of a long single-track road, my chosen campsite was close to a mountain bothy near the Dulyn reservoir, at the foot of cliffs guarding the 3000ft plateau. Windy and cold on that first day. Glowering clouds scudded in fast from the north. Sheep huddled among boulders. Wild ponies stood rigid, manes tossed over their heads. This year has been a bad one for the 50 or so wild ponies of the Carneddau, many of which were trapped by snowdrifts as they sought shelter from the bitterly cold winds in an unseasonal March. One lay rotting in a stream close to the bothy while others nonchalantly nibbled the grass around it. I was glad of the bothy – a former dwelling now maintained at a very basic level by the Mountain Bothies Association. Two rooms of bare floorboards but with a neat cast-iron stove and plenty of supplies left by former visitors – the familiar accruements of the bothy: empty bottles of wine and whisky, cans of out-of-date food, surplus gas canisters. After scouring the area for firewood (a thankless task), I sat reading my book – Robert Macfarlane’s rather camping-unfriendly hardback, The Old Ways - while the fire roared as the wind stoked its mixture of old gorse, heather and rotting wood. Dinner out of a saucepan, then washed in the river.

Dulyn bothy

Dulyn bothy

Looking down the valley towards Conwy

Looking down the valley towards Conwy

The wind eased, leading to a late evening calm. Up on the slopes above the reservoir, the cloud continued to roll in, funnelling into the gentle valley east all the way back to the Conwy river. Not a soul in sight; the plaintive song of a Ring Ouzel echoing off the cliffs in melancholy isolation. A restless sleep, woken by the light and the cold at half-past five. Again the Ring Ouzel continues its song, supplemented by larks, those perennial early risers of the bird world.

Mist on Foel Grach

Mist on Foel Grach

Solitary copse in the Carneddau

Solitary copse in the Carneddau

A full day of walking – up again above the reservoir and further up grassy slopes to the mist-covered ridge. A rough but solid stone shelter below the rocky summit of Foel Grach; the onward path to Carnedd Llewelyn (the highest of the Carneddau) suddenly revealed as the mist clears. Up again into the cloud, this time over slippery rocks to the top of Carnedd Llewelyn where a couple of other campers are already drinking tea in the circular shelter of rocks at the summit. They (and their dog) slept the night in a tend by the small lake beneath Yr Elen (a favoured wild camping spot). I return by the same route, or at least try to, becoming disorientated in the mist but eventually finding my back back as the cloud begins to burn off. Heavy legs all the way back. As I pack up my tent, the sun finally emerges and stays with me all the way back to the car, lighting up the lovely colours of lichen on rocks: lurid greens and ravishing oranges. Stumbling the final mile, I reach beginning of the road.

Lichen on a boulder

Lichen on a boulder

Lichen on rocks

Lichen on rocks


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Categories : landscapes, mountains

Into the Forbidden Zone: Varosha, ghost city of Cyprus

30 03 2013

Varosha from Palm Beach

Varosha from Palm Beach

In 1974, the glamorous resort town of Varosha in Cyprus was abandoned by its 35,000 mainly Greek Cypriot residents after the Turkish army invaded the northern part of the island. Now fenced off and forlorn, Varosha has never been resettled, being set aside by the Turkish authorities as a possible bargaining chip should negotiations even begin with the south. Today, nearly 40 years after being abandoned, Varosha remains one of the largest modern ruins in existence, on a par with Pripyat in the contaminated zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine.

2. Fence around Varosha

1. Fence around Varosha

As part of the militarised zone between northern and southern Cyprus, Varosha is effectively off limits to all but official visitors: a ‘Forbidden Zone’ as the countless signs along the fence proclaim (1). The fence itself is a formidable barrier to any would-be explorers: a mixture of barbed wire, corrugated iron, Prickly Pear cacti, oil drums and signs warning off intruders. Yet, away from the obvious observation towers on the town’s seafront, where lone guards sit or stand in abject boredom or blow whistles at anyone trying to take photographs, there’s surprisingly little security: gaps have opened in the fence and it’s easy to slip in and out unnoticed.

2. View over Varosha from a former apartment building

2. View over Varosha from a former apartment building

3. Vegetation in Irakleus Street, Varosha

3. Vegetation in Irakleus Street, Varosha

4. Former workshop in Ermou Street, Varosha

4. Former workshop in Ermou Street, Varosha

5. Ermou Street, Varosha

5. Ermou Street, Varosha

So, my two visits inside the abandoned town were not fraught with danger; neither did they involve anything more physical than slipping through a large hole in the fence. Yet, once inside everything is different. You are at once an illegal trespasser in danger of arrest or even of being shot; an explorer of unimaginable ruins stretching as far as the eye can see (2); and the ‘Last Man’ (or woman) of Mary Shelley’s invention (and countless fictional end-of-the-world stories since). Almost 40 years without human intervention have resulted in the streets becoming overgrown with lush vegetation (3); former shops and bars disintegrating in the hot sunshine (4); signs becoming simply vacant spaces in the sky (5); and former apartments turning into the homes of pigeons and crows (6). Everyday spaces and objects left by fleeing residents now take on an uncanny or surreal quality: omnipresent peeling paint creates a new kind of interior aesthetic (7); broken chairs and rusted fridges and stoves become reminders of the accelerated redundancy of modern objects (8); a stripped motorcycle metamorphoses into a human skeleton (9); and a strange animal-like sculpture creates a mysterious presence in an empty room (10) (is it a post-abadonment intervention or just an unsalvageable leftover?)

6. Line of pigeon droppings in a former house in Varosha

6. Line of pigeon droppings in a former house in Varosha

7. Peeling paint in a former house in Varosha

7. Peeling paint in a former house in Varosha

8. Rusting 1970s fridge on a rooftop terrace in Varosha

8. Rusting 1970s fridge on a rooftop terrace in Varosha

9. Rusting bicycle

9. Dismembered motorcycle

10. Mysterious object in a room in Varosha

10. Mysterious object in a room in Varosha

Ruins on this city-like kind of scale always invite an immersive form of meditation. Sit still for a while and you hear the sounds of nature reclaiming the human environment: the cooing of pigeons, the cawing of crows, the wind rustling old curtains and rattling decrepit doors and windows (11). This, together with the obvious abolishment of what was once private property, is the emancipatory power of urban ruins: they calm, liberate and offer visions of different kinds of futures freed from the constraints of the normative present. However, ruins on this kind of scale are also always deeply unsettling, especially if we think of the violence that made them what they are. Embedded somewhere in the present peaceful spaces are traces of the tens of thousands of stories of violent rupture and loss that accompanied the abandonment of Varosha. All these silent spaces were once imbued with human qualities, whether those of the home, workplace or places of play. It is these stories that are waiting to be reconnnected with the spaces as they are now.

11. View over Varosha (video)

More of my photographs of Varosha can be found here.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, landscapes, ruins, seaside, tourism, war

Walking the girdle (part 2)

18 12 2012

1. Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in turquoise)

Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in blue)

1. Strangeways Prison from the east side

1. Strangeways prison from the east side

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

Part 2 of my circular walk around inner Manchester and Salford begins at Strangeways prison. With its 234-ft high ventilation tower, Strangeways is an extraordinary inner-city landmark in Manchester, but one that is nevertheless barely visible from the city centre. Of course, the presence of a prison – and a notorious high-security prison at that – in any city is troublesome, signifying as it does aspects of our society that we’d rather remained hidden. Walking up close to Strangeways (1) - an enormous complex made up of Alfred Waterhouse’s original 1868 building and new additions built after the 1990 riots – one is immediately reminded, in the most graphic of terms, what a prison is for: its blank 30-ft high brick walls an overwhelming visual symbol (and spatial enforcing) of incarceration. Circling these monstrous walls I found a broken picture frame containing an iconic photograph of New York’s Grand Central Station (2), one that probably adorns the walls of thousands of rooms across the world. In this photograph, sunlight streams through the high windows of the station onto a crowd of passengers below – a visual symbol of the dreams of liberation that once attracted so many to America’s iconic metropolis. Was this photograph some remnant of protest to the prison, resting as it did at the base of its immense walls? Or perhaps it was flung out of a high window above, a sign of abandoned hope in the prison that still has the highest suicide rate of any in Britain? Or maybe just a discarded object come to rest in a random place?

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

With these unsettling questions I headed away from Strangeways and across the invisible border that separates the cities of Manchester and Salford. Whilst both cities were built on the same industry – textile production – that was fated to oblivion, there’s a stronger sense of melancholy in Manchester’s lesser-known twin. Almost immediately there are ruins, such as the Springfield Mill, built in 1845 (3); ruins that are materially very different from those in Manchester. Where the mills of Ancoats seem to be awaiting some form of restitution, those in Salford seem beyond repair – cracked and crumbling and surrounded by a mixture of weeds and waste. And, walking through Salford towards Broughton and the river Irwell, the road is flanked by piles of rubbish, as if the geography of ruin has extended from individual buildings to whole districts.

4. An abandoned mill and Strangeways Prison behind, from the Broughton bridge over the river Irwell

4. Abandoned mill and Strangeways prison behind, from the Broughton bridge on the river Irwell

On this bright, crystal-clear day, finding the river Irwell seemed like a revelation – like discovering the hidden heart of both cities – where the seemingly ever-present brick of Salford’s closed-in streets suddenly opens out to reveal new vistas – the towers of abandoned mills rising in aesthetic unity with those of Strangeways beyond (4). Yet, the path along the banks of the Irwell is empty, the monotonous low-rise housing of modern Salford hidden behind newly-planted rows of trees.

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

Heading across the zone between Manchester and Salford, there’s an even greater sense of opening out, but here created by the vast waste-grounds that used to contain some of the terminal docks that turned Manchester into Britain’s third largest port when the ship canal to Liverpool was opened in 1894 (5).Now, these former docks are, in contrast to those at Salford Quays, filled with large expanses of rank grass and the signs of fly-tipping, their organic messiness contrasting sharply with the cluster of shiny buildings that ornament Manchester’s skyline beyond.

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

7. A portal to another world?

7. A portal to another world?

Further east, I cross that invisible line back into Manchester, but here between two giant railway viaducts that divide the two cities – a genuinely unsettling and claustrophobic place made up of very dark caverns under the arches (6), some of which bear the visual marks of bottom-end habitation (filthy mattresses, empty bottles) and graffiti that suggests that others might be the entrances to an infernal place below (7).

8. New housing in Hulme

8. New housing in Hulme

The final stretch of the girdle heads across Hulme, its once dystopian housing-block ‘crescents’ of the 1960s now replaced by community-designed housing that marries individuality – an eccentric curve here and there – with the rather-more repetitive requirements of mass housing (8). A short step across Higher Cambridge Street completes the circle – the stark, almost brutalist brick of the university buildings softened to an almost lovely orange colour by the last rays of the winter sun (9).

9. The University of Manchester's Cornbrook building in Booth Street West

9. The University of Manchester’s Cornbrook House in Booth Street West


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, landscapes, Manchester, maps, railways, ruins, tourism, Victorian

Meta-ornament: railway tracks

4 10 2012

Tracks on the southern approach to Manchester from Stockport

According to Walter Benjamin, railway tracks had a ‘peculiar and unmistakeable dream world’ attached to them, one that, for early railway travellers, was related to their unprecedented straightness in the landscape, their geometric alignment, or in their wider convergence into networks. Early railway prints in the 1830s and 1840s (1) emphasized the sharp linearity of railway tracks, cutting through the landscape with unprecedented geometric precision; while contemporaneous travellers were transfixed by the seemingly infinite recession of parallel tracks.

1. T. T Bury’s view of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway over Chat Moss, 1830

 

                                2. 1898 film from the front of a train in Barnstable

As recorded by Edward Stanley in 1830, when he witnessed a locomotive approaching from the far distance, train tracks seemed to compress space and time and usher in a new form of perception; Stanley thought the parallel tracks made the engine seem to increase in size ‘beyond all limit’ as it came nearer, eventually ‘absorbing everything within its vortex’. A similar fascination came at the end of nineteenth century, when railway tracks formed some of the earliest subjects for film: that is, in the ‘phantom ride’ (2), a term used to mean a film that looks from the front of a moving railway engine along the tracks themselves. Here, the novel view of the camera (one that was seldom experienced in ordinary life) combined its ‘subjective’ view with an inaccessible position that laid bare, through an unwavering emphasis on the endless perspective of the parallel tracks, the disembodied consciousness of the railway journey.

3. Railway maps of England in 1850 (left) and Britain in 1900 (right)

If railway tracks suggested a new kind of machine aesthetic, defined by extreme linearity and a corresponding overturning of ‘natural’ perception, then the conglomeration of tracks into networks seemed to produce revolutionary new patterns – or ‘meta-ornament’ in the landscape. In its early decades, the new railways spread at a seemingly exponential rate across Britain, from just under 100 miles of track in 1830 to over 6,000 by 1850 (3; left), rising to 19,000 by 1900 (3; right). Yet, their growth was far from ordered, the consequence of unregulated competition among private railway companies, and for some, the resulting network was perceived as alarmingly chaotic. Punch pictured its own ‘Railway map of England’ in 1845 (4), at the height of railway speculation in that decade, with the English landscape of the near future enmeshed ‘in irons’, with no ordering principle to the layout. Left unregulated, the railway companies would, Punch argued, eventually create so many tracks that ‘we shall soon be unable to go anywhere without crossing the line’.

4. Punch’s ‘Railway map of England’, 1845

For others, the speed at which the railway network spread across the country was nothing short of miraculous: The Builder arguing in 1852 that the railways were ‘preparing the world for a wondrous future’ when they would unite the whole of humanity ‘as one great family’. Later, when a new railway was constructed between Buxton and Bakewell in 1876, The Builder argued that the iron tracks enhanced the picturesque landscape through which they passed by adding a ‘new element of what may be called the mental or moral picturesque’. In contrast to John Ruskin, who bitterly opposed the building of the new line, The Builder perceived ‘a kind of mystery’ in the track’s ‘windings and burrowings’ through the soft landscape which, taken as a whole, were strongly suggestive of the ‘bond of civilization that connects us’. If Ruskin lamented the railway’s tendency to obliterate beloved landscapes and their traditional cultural forms in its gigantic network of lines, The Builder had the opposite reaction: railway tracks became picturesque precisely because of their connectivity, that is, the way in which they created, through ‘the triumph of science’, new geographic and social networks that had a high moral purpose.


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Categories : film, iron, landscapes, Manchester, maps, ornament, railways, shapes, symbolism, Victorian

An English edgeland: Covehithe, Suffolk

5 06 2012

The beach at Covehithe, Suffolk

Coastal erosion is a common-enough occurrence in Britain – from the windswept Holderness coastline, north of the Humber, to the wild rugged cliffs of Cornwall; yet, it never fails to generate unease, an unsettled feeling of dread that sometimes haunts our dreams.

1. St Andrew’s church, Covehithe

Some of my childhood dreams of being trapped on the beach by an onrushing sea were probably rooted in frequent visits I made then to the Suffolk coastline, near to where my grandparents lived. Guided by my father, I heard stories of Dunwich – the once-great medieval town now mostly buried beneath the sea – or the weird world of Orford Ness – a great shingle spit constantly being remade by the sea. Most evocative to me was the isolated coastline north of Southwold. At Covehithe, the ruins of  St Andrew’s church (1) stand just one field away from the crumbling cliffs, the original 100-ft tower now the outgrown focal-point of a much smaller church building. Like many churches in Suffolk, St Andrew’s was outsized in relation to the size of the community it served – never more than 300 people. The villagers themselves pulled down most of the building in 1672 leaving the tower surrounded by ruins.

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Walking along the crumbling mud cliffs a stone’s throw from the church, one cannot help but re-imagine its history as a product of the unstoppable power of the sea. For, over many hundreds of years, this coast has been gradually eaten away: the only road terminates right at the cliff edge (on one childhood visit I remembered seeing a car that had careered over it); the footpath often disappears into the void; and trees are visibly tumbling over the edge.

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It’s these trees that form a kind of mirror image of the ruined church, that is, of survival amongst ruin. On the beach a group of trunks are arranged in a spectacular display of the effects of the meeting of wood and water. In some, exposed roots have been transformed into explosions of weird spikes – like strange, petrified sea creatures (2); in others, the roots seem to emerge from the sand as the new growth of some unknown plant (3). Some trees stand almost complete, their angular forms offering a kind of melancholy testimony to their stubborn refusal to decay (4); others lie prostrate, gradually sinking into the sand world beneath them (5). Some cradle pebbles, stuck fast in between sea-smoothed branches (6); others, in a much more advanced state of ruin, barely register, mistaken for stones on the shoreline (7).

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These trees offer tangible visible evidence of what happens to supposedly solid objects in these coastal edgelands. Contrary to what we imagine, these places are not really edges at all; rather, they are the meeting points of two different worlds, ones that we generally hold to be entirely separate. For us to remain solid and rooted, that other world of ceaseless flux must be kept at bay. In reality, however, this notion of solidity is an illusion; for everything is always moving, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy. It’s precisely that movement which is constantly producing new and unexpected forms – the beauty of which is displayed in those sea-blasted trees.

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Peak Hollows

5 03 2012

Paul Dobraszczyk, 'Peak Hollows', 2012, coloured paper and sequins.

Hollow between two gritstone boulders on Kinder Scout.

Man-made hollows carved into the gritstone on Stanage Edge. These hollows, each of which is numbered, were created as drinking troughs for the moorland grouse.

Circular hollow near Monk's Dale in the White Peak. These man-made hollows were created as drinking troughs for sheep.

Natural water-filled hollow formed in the gritstone on Kinder Scout.

Abandoned hollow above Monsal Dale in the White Peak.

Natural circular hollow in the gritstone on Derwent Edge


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Categories : abandoned space, landscapes, shapes, symbolism

Hidden spaces: the Derbyshire Dales

25 01 2012

Cave Dale, near Castleton, Derbyshire

There’s probably no more dramatic contrast in the English landscape than that between the Dark and White Peak of the Peak District National Park; and all because of two different kinds of rock – Gritstone and Limestone. Divided by the Edale and Hope valleys, to the north is the Dark Peak – an area of high moorland, its hard Gritstone foundation chipped away by the elements into undulating wild plateaus of heather and peat and rocky ‘edges’; to the south, the White Peak – its bed of soft Limestone sunk into gently folded hills, farmland and hidden valleys, known as Dales. In contrast to the wild, windswept and barren moorland of the Dark Peak, these Dales are places of fecundity – steep-sided valleys carved by rivers and streams into self-enclosed worlds, protected from wind and cold.

Hay Dale, looking towards Rushup Edge, the boundary between the White and Dark Peak
Moss covering trees and a stone wall in Cressbrook Dale

On a map, the Dales are identified by the serpentine windings of watercourses, enclosed by narrow countour lines. In reality, they are almost hermetically-sealed environments, usually hemmed in by thick broadleaf woodland and a treacherous floor of uneven and slippery limestone, collected over time from the crumbling cliffs that fringe the upper slopes. With alluring pastoral names – Monks Dale, Millers Dale, Dove Dale, Hay Dale, Chee Dale – these valleys are places cut off from the elements, where moss covers wood and stone alike, where exotic birdlife flourishes, and where ancient trees gradually sink into decay.

Limestone cliff in Chee Dale
Monks Dale in Spring

It is perhaps unsurprising that these secret spaces were one of the most important sites for the birth of England’s industrial revolution. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Dales saw the building of the first large-scale water-powered textile mills, such as Cromford (1771) and Cressbrook mills (1787). These provided the template for the hundreds of mills that would later define the urban centres of the industrial revolution: Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. In these early days, production on this industrial scale needed fast-flowing water to power the steam-engines that drove the mechanised looms. It seems appropriate that the industrial revolution should have begun in these hidden worlds: the mills and factories almost shamefacedly emerging out of an otherwise agrarian world; their new kinds of workers housed in rustic cottages in the surrounding hills.

Cressbrook Mill, Cressbrook Dale, 1787


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Categories : architecture, landscapes, Manchester, maps

Industrial ruins: abandoned slate quarries in North Wales

1 11 2011

1. Workers' houses at the Rhosydd Quarry, North Wales

Scattered throughout North Wales, and particularly concentrated in the Ffestiniog area, are a large number of abandoned slate mines and quarries. Perhaps the most evocative – and certainly one of the most isolated – is the Rhosydd Slate Quarry. Situated 1500ft above sea level between two mountain valleys, the location of the Quarry is spectacular, facing Cnicht on one side (known as the Welsh Matterhorn) and the bulky Moelwyns on the other. It’s accessible only by a mountain path, being over 2 miles from the nearest road and 4 miles from Croesor, the nearest village, itself remotely situated at the end of a minor road.

2. Fireplaces in the workers' houses

The remote site of the Rhosydd Quarry adds greatly to its potent sense of mystery. For it’s almost unbelievable to think that for 80 years from 1840, over 200 men were employed by the quarry, many of them living in purpose-built houses in this bleak location – treeless and one of the wettest spots in Wales. The workers’ cottages still stand in splendid but ruined isolation, their house-like quality just remaining in the surviving forms of the windows and chimney (1). For miles around are scattered enigmatic structures, including bits of rusting machinery and a succession of mills, barracks and adits constructed at different stages of the quarry’s development – testament to the lengths that were gone to to reach the then valuable slate, which lay in beds underneath the mountains.

3. Window in the workers' houses

4. Underground tunnel leading to the slate mine

Nearly all of the smaller Welsh slate quarries closed down in the early twentieth century due to falling demand and today only a few working quarries remain around the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The buildings of the Rhosydd Quarry express the complete dominance of just one building material: for everything that was built here was built with slate – from the window and fireplace lintels (2 & 3) (sometimes the only surviving bits of entire houses), to fences and walls that enclose and protect the buildings. Close to the houses are entrances to underground tunnels which gave access to the buried slate, hewn by hand and now made strangely beautiful by the return of nature – moss and water bringing colour to the otherwise grey walls of the tunnel (4). In the remains of the quarry buildings, architecture has been eroded into its most elemental forms: walls have bulged outwards, chimneys have collapsed in on themselves, isolated hearths are now surrounding by ruins. If these ruins are bleak and melancholic, they are also beautiful in their geometrical simplicity: in one of the buildings, the one remaining door lintel perfectly frames an enormous almost perfect cone of discarded slate above it (5).

5. Lintel and slate cone

The buildings of the Rhosyyd Quarry represent the ruins of an artificial industry naturalised by the passing of time and the brutal forces of nature – ruins that seem to be engaged in a powerful yet mysterious dialogue with their environment. In another remote abandoned slate quarry – the Prince of Wales Quarry – on the flanks of Nantlle mountains, most of the buildings have almost disappeared into the ground. Those that remain seem to testify to their submission to the larger forces that created the landscape from which they arose: the ruined roofline of one decaying building mirroring the form of the serrated mountain ridge behind (6).

6. Ruined building at the Prince of Wales Quarry


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, landscapes, mountains, ruins, underground space, Victorian

Wild spaces: Great Moss

10 10 2011

Scafell (left) and Scafell Pike (right) from Great Moss

In England, wild camping is an activity that is generally discouraged and is usually dependent on getting landowners’ permission. However, in isolated spots, such as Great Moss in the Lake District, it seems almost laughable than anyone owns the land and, in places like these, you can pitch a tent and not encounter anyone else for days. Great Moss is a vast, flat area of marshy ground near the headwaters of the River Esk, surrounded on all sides by England’s highest and grandest mountains with their evocative names: Scafell and Scafell Pike, Esk Pike, Bowfell and Crinkle Crags. From Great Moss – a five-mile walk up the Eskdale valley from the hamlet of Boot – these mountains present their wildest aspect: craggy, precipitous, treeless, and remote from either roads or buildings.

Scafell Pike, evening on the first day

Scafell Pike, dawn on the second day

I camped alone at Great Moss for two nights in unseasonably warm weather at the end of September this year, with a few isolated sheep and the occasional croaking of ravens for company. Here, mobile phone signals cease to operate and one is forced to focus on the basic essentials of living: preparing water and food, washing, and sleeping. Carrying everything on one’s back means leaving behind most of what we now regard as basic entertainments – a computer, television, even books. In my trip, the sense of aloneness was heightened by the short days, with darkness descending more quickly here – the sun disappearing behind the crags at 5pm and not reappearing again until 8am.

So, why would anyone want to expose oneself to this level of solitude? The nature writer Robert Macfarlane, in his book The Wild Places, argues that being alone in the wild has the potential to give us perspective on ourselves, our concerns and our place in the world. Yet, Macfarlane is also blasé about his own sense of vulnerability during his wild camping experiences, even as they are often characterised by intense cold, danger, and fatigue. For me, the experience was initially more frightening than liberating – for most of the first night I battled with anxiety and a sense of dread. Yet, once I’d relaxed the following day, the slowness of the passing of time became something that could be embraced as wondrous, the rituals of everyday life taking on a kind of mystical significance – bathing in the rushing stream, cooking in the twilight, waking to see the sky full of stars.

Scafell Pike, early morning on the second day

Scafell Pike, evening on the second day

Scafell Pike, the second night

By relaxing into the rhythms of silence, the world – narrowed to the views of the mountains from my tent – took on a kind of renewed simplicity. With my camera – my only luxury – the experience became framed as a series of almost-identical views of Scafell Pike, to which I had faced my tent on the first evening: in the last rays of sunlight, at dawn, in early morning sunlight, in late afternoon fading light, and in the pitch black of the final night. It’s almost as if the world had temporarily revealed to me its most basic origins, the mountain being the always-has-been presence in a world of ceaseless flux: “And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day. And there was evening, and there was morning – the second day”.


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Another Place

14 07 2011

Another Place, Brighton-le-sands, Merseyside

Another Place is a seaside sculpture by the British artist Anthony Gormley. It consists of 100 cast-iron replicas of the artist’s body arranged over a 2-mile stretch of beach near Crosby north of Liverpool. Originally made in 1997 for exhibition on a beach in Germany, the sculpture travelled from there to Norway, Belgium and finally Britain where, after much local debate, it was decided to keep the sculpture permanently.

1: 'Sound II', Winchester Cathedral crypt, 1986

2: Figure on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall, London, 'Blind Light' exhibition, 2007

Cast iron is a material Gormley uses on a regular basis – and casts of his body appear in such diverse locations as the crypt in Winchester Cathedral (1) and on the tops of various buildings in London, as part of his 2007 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (2). In making multiple replicas of his own body, Gormley invites questions about the production of art, the mechanisation of the human body, and how the reproduction of art affects our consciousness of it. In addition, in his use of cast iron, Gormley harks back to an earlier era of industrialisation and the location of works like Another Place and The Angel of the North in former centres of industry reinforce these connections.

In Another Place these connections are further strengthened by cast iron’s relationship with the British seaside. In many of Britain’s seaside resorts, cast iron was formative in the transformation of sites defined by wild nature into artificial environments, in that it provided the raw material for both structures (piers, pavilions and shelters) and ornamental utilities (lamps, railings, toilets and kiosks). Today, much of this Victorian ironwork remains but now, in its state of rusting decay, a melancholic reminder of the slow decline of British seaside resorts from their heyday in the early twentieth century.

3: Another Place, figure on the shoreline

4: Another Place, rusting head

5: Another Place, view towards Liverpool docks

Gormley’s sculptures fill a relatively undeveloped stretch of coastline north of Liverpool, away from the Victorian resorts of Southport or New Brighton. All the figures face the same way – out to sea – and they are arranged in lines stretching from the high- to low-water tide lines. What is striking about the figures is their varying degrees of naturalisation. In only a few years, some of the figures are almost completely covered in barnacles or seaweed (3); others are rusted with golden patterns (4); some seem almost as new; others have even been given clothes to cover up their nakedness (5). Where Victorian cast iron in nearby Southport is being repainted to keep rust at bay, here the iron is deliberately exposed to the violent natural forces of wind, sea, sand and salt. The result is a sense of positive value given to both artifice and nature and the relationship between the two, which here assumes a highly individual character despite the original figures being exact replicas. Here, Gormley perhaps offers, in these cast iron figures, a metaphor of ourselves being both similar to each other but also made unique by our individual trajectories in life.


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Categories : iron, landscapes, seaside, Victorian

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