Each place, each time, waymark the stories of our lives. Like a pebble plucked from a beach, or a feather caught on a sleeve, we carry them with us, wishing to hold on to something that has passed.
© All rights reserved Groundings.co.uk, 2022. No part of this blog shall be reproduced without the consent of its author.
Shorelines are places of ambiguity and exchange – they connect land and sea, places with other places, often far beyond the horizon. They intermingle different zones, habitats, moods, elements, memories. Where does the sea end and the land begin? How do we relate to the shoreline? What does the shore say to us as we negotiate our lives?
I ran a workshop revolving around these themes with a group of writers based in Stonehaven on the Aberdeenshire coast at the weekend. The group is run by poet and short-story writer Alistair Lawrie, who invited me to come along. Alistair evokes place in his work through the use of Doric – a Scot’s dialect that is unique to the northeast of Scotland.
I was keen to draw on the particulars of place in the workshop by focussing on Stonehaven’s shoreline to highlight how it could be a launching point into wider themes, and to encourage new writing. We talked about form and process, and the value of close observation.
Observations can provide the raw material that we write from – the clay that we later mould into shape, and can be used to enrich the context of our work, whether through setting in a story, or enriching poetry and essay with concrete detail. This use of closely observed detail is something the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’ as it pertained to its use in making field notes during research, but as writers, we can draw from the same principal.
We looked at three pieces of writing that relate to the shoreline by writers who incorporate carefully and closely observed detail into their work, both with constraint and in celebration of a richly descriptive poetic form: Kathleen Jamie’s essay ‘Links of Notland’ in Surfacing, Martin Malone’s opening to his long poem sequence Gardenstown, and ‘The morning Swim’ in Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book.
If you haven’t read all these works yet, I can recommend them, both for how writers can use observation and place as a ‘way in’ to broader and more universal themes – whether that’s the idea of deep time in Kathleen Jamie’s narrative essay, Martin Malone’s exploration of climate change and ecological collapse in the quotidian details of his life in Gamrie, or the cycles of life and death in Jansson’s classic island tale told through the lens of a grandmother’s relationship with her granddaughter – and just as fantastic reads that should be read for simple pleasure alone. All of them ‘form’ favourites of mine, if you’ll excuse the pun…
We took these pieces of writing as our starting point and then explored the shoreline. The tide was out and the rocks were exposed a little way offshore, the memory of waves retained in the undulations of the pebble beach, and the record of the winter storms still scattered in neat bands parallel to the shore. People found inspiration in the stones, in the time they held, in the hushing of the low waves and in the calmness and stillness and presence of the sea. They also found inspiration in the life of a busy beachfront on a mild Sunday afternoon: part of the long story of life here – endless, as one person remarked.
The time spent outside – observing, writing, noticing details – reflecting on what the shoreline might say to us – creating space to imagine that conversation – was very productive; and later, after we’d spent time writing and then had some soup, the range of responses were wonderful. They reflected the lives of each individual writer, and all of life, in those moments we had carved out for ourselves.
Writing is often seen as an activity confined to a desk and a chair carried out by a lone thinker in a room, but coming together as writers, taking time to notice the world around us in all its contradiction and rich detail, is sometimes the most fertile ground. Shorelines in particular are rich metaphors for a range of themes more human than we might at first imagine. Spending time there will always reward a writer with the patience to look closely, and in those smallest of details, we might find ourselves tackling surprisingly big questions.
For a fantastic read on noticing and writing that draws on the outdoors, see Linda Cracknell’s In The Moment: Writing Landscape (Saraband, 2023).
Storm Isha has been named; the Met Office news press announced. She would rush through the country, sweeping it clear of the cold Artic air that had sat silent and heavy over the land, replacing it with the warm, moist air mass that was driving her forcibly across the Atlantic with tornado-strength windspeeds and the warnings of the destruction that would result. She brought with her the highest windspeeds the country had seen in twenty years.
The wind through Glencoe’s highland pass reached 168 mph, the second-highest windspeed ever recorded in the UK. While the old Viking stronghold to the north in Kirkwall saw winds of 80 mph, Hoy’s brief winter wonderland melting beneath an atmosphere of salt and sea-spray. Videos from across Britain submitted to the BBC showed footage of collapsed roofs and flying furniture, debris from fallen trees and terrifying-looking approaches into airports besieged by crosswinds.
My sister was trying to get home from Orkney after a week exploring its pre-historic sites: the megaliths that have metaphorically and spiritually stood watch over the island archipelago for thousands of years. Her flight south was disrupted and she was waylaid in Inverness. I thought about the lives of the Neolithic Orcadians who crossed that same turbulent stretch of sea that is the Pentland Firth, to and from the mainland, in boats of willow and hide.
Life was short-lived with an expectancy that extended only into the mid-twenties, but still would have had its comforts and its pleasures: days in the sun collecting shellfish from the foreshore; gatherings and ceremony in the endless light of the northern summer; feasting and celebration at harvest time and long into the night of midwinter. Summer temperatures at the time the stones of Stenness were being lifted into place just east of the ceremonial complex at the Ness of Brodgar around 5000 years ago, were, on average, ten degrees warmer, the air significantly drier: something akin to the climate of the Mediterranean today; but by the Bronze Age the climate had shifted from warm and dry to cool and wet.
No one can say what malignant gods they may have attributed to the eventual turning of the weather, to the failed crops and the winter storms that buried settlements like Scara Brae in the dunes. Today, we know. Today we call those gods ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming.’
Isha is a Hindu name, meaning ‘one who protects’; an odd name for a storm, you might say. But perhaps Isha calls for us to heed her warning, to take greater note of the taste of things to come that she and storms like her reveal to us. Isha was the ninth storm in less than five months and was closely followed by Jocelyn less than 36 hours later.
The march of relentless storms that now characterise the North Atlantic winter, we all know are the result of the warming in our oceans caused by anthropogenically driven climate change: the direct result of the C02 we have been pumping into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution; from the C02 released in the melting of the permafrost and, indirectly, from the mass deforestation we are responsible for, taking away one of the planet’s ways to regulate its temperature.
As a low-lying archipelago of many islands, Orkney is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and the flooding caused by the increased frequency and intensity of storms that come with global warming. If the Greenland ice sheet completely melts – and it is already predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2040 – the main island of Hoy will eventually become two separate islands, the stones of Stenness will be submerged and the famous Ring of Brodgar will become an isolated, low-lying island of its own.
The industrial revolution has raised overall wealth and living standards, has driven advances in medical research and treatments, leading to life expectancies in the Global North that are fifty or sixty years longer than for the Neolithic people who erected the giant stones in Orkney. The stones are silent, but in their silence they still speak to us. They speak of loss, of absence, of a People that are long-gone but were just like us. The stones sat at the centre of their lives: there for all their births and deaths; their hopes and harvests; their fears in a world that was difficult to understand or explain.
We may blame those early farmers for what came after them: for the turning away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyles that had dominated for millennia either side of the last great ice age; for the ideas associated with ancestry and territory; for the naming of lands not our own and for the obsession with surplus and growth and power; for the greed and the inequalities that define our age. But how were they to know? How were they to hear their gods?
As Isha approached, I went outside and stood in the garden to take in the night. The sky was nightmare dark, vast and cloudless. The winds had not yet reached their peak, but the branches of the silver birch at the back of our house were already swaying wildly against a backdrop of indifferent stars, witness to a world whose future is now being written. Will we be the generation that let things slide, allowed all to be swept into the sea with our own indifference? Or will we be a generation that took control, that said this matters, and not just to us but to all who will come after us?
I watched the swaying branches for a short time and then I headed for bed. Climbing the stairs as the wind moaned around the eaves and tried to lift the roof, I paused at the landing window to take a last look at the brittle, plate-glass clarity of the sky. The stars still glittered coldly and I thought of the stones in Orkney, the slate-grey sea, the waves pounding ever higher at Kirkwall’s harbour wall, and in the wind I heard, or imagined, the laughter and the murmur of story from a mid-winter feast five-thousand years ago. I felt strangely comforted by it: grateful for the stones those people left behind, grateful for the stories they tell. We, at least, have a way to hear our gods.
For further reference, please see:
‘I bend down and trace the outline of each foot in the cool, hardened silt. I can feel the definite impression of the man’s big toe and a ridge of sand that had been pulled up under the ball of the foot as the toes gripped the surface and he pushed his weight forward with each stride. I can feel the outline of the woman’s heel: the rounded edge and then forward into the arch.
“So how old are these prints, again?” I ask.
“About six-thousand years old,” Burns tells me. “Just in that transition between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic.”‘
From ‘Traces’ Archipelago 2.3 edited by Andrew McNeillie and James Macdonald Lockhart, published by The Clutag Press (2024), pp. 107-115.
To say I’m pleased to have writing in these pages is an understatement. I’ve been following Archipelago for years and to be in it is, well, something. All issues of the journal get archived in the Bodleian Library in Oxford so I could be sitting hidden on a library shelf for many more years, yet…
’Traces’ explores the Mesolithic landscapes of the Sefton coast with archaeologist Dr Alison Burns. We search for prehistoric footprints found in fossilised beds of ancient mud along Formby beach, reconstruct the landscapes and lives of the Mesolithic past, and consider the implications of modern day sea level rise.
Also in these pages:
Nicholas Allen, Alex Boyd, Julie Brook, John Bryant, Moyà Cannon, George Chamier, Claire Connolly, Tony Crowley, Gerald Dawe, Tim Ecott, Nick Groom, Kirsty Gunn, Andrew Hadfield, Howell Harris, Ben Keatinge, Angela Leighton, James Macdonald-Lockhart, Edna Longley, Michael Longley, Jamie McKendrick, Garry MacKenzie, Angus Macmillan, Robert Minhinnick, Heather O’Donoghue, Judy O’Kane, John Purser, Alan Riach, Fiona Stafford, Michael Viney, David Wheatley and Lyn Youngson.
Very humbling company.
You can order Archipelago direct from The Clutag Press.
“There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back […] looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland…”
From ‘Winter in Den Wood‘ – Elsewhere: a Journal of Place.
Three years on and Den Wood has become a semi-regular haunt. I like to visit throughout the year to see it in the changing seasons, feel the woodland in all its different atmospheres. I returned there again earlier this month – before storm Isha, before that brief covering of snow was swept clear by Isha’s warm Atlantic airmass.
Winter always feels special in the wood – still and redolent with potential; a place on the edge of happening. I felt slightly disoriented, set slightly off balance. A familiar wood had become strange to me again, its well-trodden pathways submerged in a layer of snow – a trail of ill-defined footprints twisting through the closely-packed, naked trees. The moon was out, a thumbprint in the pale ink of the sky, the sun dragging the last of the daylight through the tops of the branches.
I came eventually to a crown of wych elm that had first drawn me to the wood three years previous. Once commonly found growing at the sites of tumuli and barrows, elms have a long association with the underworld. In Celtic mythology elves lived amongst the trees, guarding the barrows and protecting the dead that lay within them, overseeing the passage between life and death. With the advent of Christianity, travelling priests would give sermon beneath their branches. Its wood was used to make coffins.
The word wych is not associated with witches, though both witch and wych can be used interchangeably. It is the old English for pliant or supple. Being resistant to rot, the same qualities that made it a suitable wood for coffin-making also made it a good choice for boat hulls and bridge foundations. In Gaelic the tree is known as leven, which can still be seen in some Scottish place names. Loch Leven in Perth and Kinross, where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in its island castle, takes its name as a place where elm bark was used to make dyes for wool. Its inner bark was also boiled down to make a liquor, seen as a good medicinal cure for sore throats and colds. Despite the lack of any witch association, their long, broom-like branches extending up to thirty meters skyward definitely have a witchy air about them.
Survivors of disease, maker of coffins, of wool dye, of dogmas now long forgotten, their presence impressed upon me the nearness of something I find difficult to express: not a sacredness, as such, but an empathy, maybe – an empathy that seems to emerge out of their branches and extend out into the world. It leads me to think about that traditional false separation between the human and non-human, about the way all of life is threaded through, together – woven, as Tim Ingold writes, in a ‘domain of entanglement’.1
Where do the trees end and I begin? Where is the boundary between tree, roots, soil, air, my breathing and thinking and being? It is not just a hippy idea of ‘oneness’, this, a flaky new age folksy feeling that yes, we are all connected, but an intellectual, phenomenological and objective reality. Everything really is whole within the multitudinous, messy complexity of everything: this domain of entangled life and death we wrap ourselves in. The elms are me. I am the elms.
Is this some radical new thought? Not at all. We all know that everything is interdependent, and yet why don’t we live by it? Why don’t we live as though elm is me and I am elm? There is less than 3% of truly ancient woodland left in Britain. The rest has been replaced by agriculture, commercial forestry, urban development and transport networks. We need all these things, but we also need the trees. We need to find a way to get ourselves entangled again, play a little twister.
Cities around the world are beginning to take up this idea, perhaps not as I’ve put it, but in a way that attempts to meld human and nonhuman ecologies; the most famous of them being Singapore where the Gardens by the Bay project has blended the old distinctions between the city and the wild. In Glasgow too, there are efforts to intertwine nature and culture and economy for a greener city, with the Glasgow Doughnut concept.
The idea of the Glasgow Doughnut is a play on the doughnut economy idea developed by Kate Raworth, where human wellbeing and health is seen as being fundamentally connected to the health and wellbeing of the planet. The doughnut consists of two concentric rings: an inner ring that represents a social foundation where the needs of society are met within an outer ring that represents a known and measured ecological ceiling. Between these two rings is a zone that is both ecologically safe and socially just. Glasgow has followed the lead of cities like Amsterdam, the first to begin to practically take up Raworth’s concept in its recovery from the pandemic, and has commissioned a report recommending initiatives to help the city move toward a more entwined future that inhabits this space. If more and more cities take up this principal, we will live in a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world.
The more I have visited Den Wood, the more this idea has seeped into me – from the elms perhaps, from their winter canopy of witchy broom and their summer shade. Not only the White Letter Hair Streak butterfly relies on them. We do too. Those and all the other tree and plant species with all the ecologies their roots, branches and canopies contain. We need to make space for them. We need to make them part of our everyday lives, not just tucked away in parks and gardens, but part of the infrastructures we live by. We need to live with and through and not apart from. Elm is me and I am elm.
The sun dipped toward the lower branches and I trudged back through the snow between thickets of gorse and over fallen trunks. The wood would rot and become part of the woodland understory, supporting insects, beetles and worms, liverworts, mosses and lichens, enriching the top layers of the soil and allowing new growth. The moon rose higher ahead and the shadows deepened. I imagined myself part of the wood, asleep in the understory; come time, an elm growing where once I had lain.
As the western calendar year comes to a close, it’s a natural time to look back and reflect on the previous twelve months. It’s been a significant year for me on a personal level. I turned fifty early in the second quarter of 2023 – a significant event for anybody – and I successfully defended my PhD thesis early in November, which marked the culmination of a long process of research, writing and reflection that helped answer questions that have occupied my thoughts for many years: questions of place, of identity, of how the landscape shapes our lives.
I have been able to explore these questions both creatively and academically, and the submission and accession of my thesis – comprised of a book-length work of creative nonfiction alongside a critical commentary – closes a significant period in my life whilst opening up another. The time spent working toward the PhD signifies a period of deep change and transition: from a former life as a helicopter pilot largely servicing the offshore oil and gas industry toward a new life that places my feet firmly on the ground, encompassing and embracing community and working in a way that is less certain but offers more freedom and is more in line with my values and the aspirations I have now.
This year has been one where I’ve seen hard work begin to pay off and a future direction begin to take shape, replacing the uncertainty that came with the end of a career and dominated my life as I embarked on doctoral study in the midst of a pandemic. It is a year that leaves me feeling hopeful and positive as I go forward, despite all the world-changing events that this same period has also been witness to.
As a writer, I have seen some of my writing find a home with Stravaig, Hinterland nonfiction magazine and, this coming spring, one of the chapters from my PhD will be published in Archipelago, a literary journal I have long admired. I’m pleased that my approach to questions of place will also feature in an anthology of academic writing through the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt’s Practicing Place Centre, due for publication in 2024. I was also very happy to have had writing published in the Paperboats Zine, for which I took part in a launch event at the University of Stirling.
Beyond my own writing, in September I ran an outdoor creative writing workshop, helping people engage with their surroundings and fostering a sense of togetherness. Earlier in the year I became involved with the charity Open Book, running a pilot creative writing group over the spring and summer that has become an established, monthly group as part of Open Book’s Scotland-wide Community Project. Seeing people develop in confidence and find their own voice in a supportive group setting is something that is hugely rewarding and I look forward now to taking the group – just one of many Open Book groups across the country – into 2024.
As I head into the New Year I will also embark on a significant community engagement project, working in collaboration and consultation on commission to explore how people feel about where they live and documenting community story and memory. It’s a role I hope will expand and flourish through 2024 and beyond.
What can we do but go forward? Uncertainty and change will always run side by side with our lives. 2023 has shown me that, on a personal level at least, positive change is possible, and that, if change is needed, it is worth living with the uncertainty that comes with not knowing what the outcomes might be. Despite the fears, taking those first steps toward an uncertain future is important. The change that you walk toward, the change that you need, will find you.
Groundings 