Map Jacket

Map Jacket is a jacket made from paper maps, with objects relating to walks and journeys stowed in its pockets. It is an ongoing artwork, with no final finished state in mind; it will continue to accrete and change for as long as I’m able to go out for walks. Conceptually, it will continue to change as well. I began the piece in Spring 2016. My initial idea was to make a wearable jacket out of Ordnance Survey maps, patterned on a corduroy jacket of mine, and perhaps use it in some kind of performance. It quickly became apparent that the jacket was much too fragile and inflexible to wear. I wore it once before I added the sleeves, but once the sleeves were on it became impossible to wear it without destroying it. The jacket took about three years to complete, because I abandoned it as hopeless for long periods of time. Gluing the sleeves on was particularly vexing, because paper does not stretch and form compound curves like fabric will. 

Me wearing Map Jacket in 2016, before the sleeves were attached.

Some time in 2019 I revived the piece and conceived of the idea of using it as a repository for objects found on walks. The jacket would stay at home, but conceptually travel with me. Since then, I have secreted objects in the jacket, adding a new pocket for each object, or group of objects. Some objects and natural materials are attached directly to the jacket. The objects function as mementos of particular walks or places, but most of them are artworks in their own rights, being altered from the form in which they were when found. Sometimes, things found at one place and time are combined with those found at other places and times (nothing is wasted), but each object has one principal association. 

Finding things for Map Jacket is a gentle art, which I’m not sure I have come close to perfecting. It requires walking with the right sort of attentiveness. I usually bring back more things than I can use. Sometimes I make the object shortly after the walk; sometimes it takes weeks or months for an idea to form itself of what to do with the assortment of things I’ve collected. Many of the objects I make involve words – they often have words written or inscribed on them – and collecting words is also a part of my walking practice. I carry a notebook and more often write than draw (though I do both). Both practices (collecting objects and words) are about treasuring and memory. 

Most of the walks commemorated in Map Jacket took place on the North York Moors, Yorkshire coast, Cheviot Hills and a small number of other places. These are the places that have been accessible to me, particularly in the years of the pandemic. They are places that I go to find solitude and often have associations with landmarks of one sort or another (churches, stone crosses, standing stones, tumuli, crossroads etc.) They are also often places where death is close to the surface, where bones lie to be picked up. The walks themselves are a kind of melancholy ritual, because they are fragments pointing to an elusive wholeness snatched from a life embedded in routines which, while not devoid of their own meaning or rewards, are nevertheless characterised by frenetic striving. I have the feeling that Map Jacket is a work that is only in its infancy and that its strength will lie in engendering inner dialogues.

This page documents the progress of Map Jacket and all of the objects in it. I’ll keep it up to date with new objects. Scroll down for images and descriptions of all the objects in Map Jacket.

Map Jacket, June 2021

Attaching a pocket to Map Jacket, using magnets to hold it in place while the glue dries.

Detail of one of the buttons, made from a vehicle number plate.

Objects in Map Jacket

Buttons

Main buttons, top to bottom: 

1. Made from a plastic buoy found at the coast
2. Lead button from a baptismal gown
3. Made from a broken vehicle number plate found on Rudland Rigg 17 June 2021

Bearing roller and glass bead

54°34’55.9″N 2°28’54.9″W

Bearing roller and glass bead on the pocket I attached to Map Jacket.

Bearing roller from my car, which I picked up beside the A66 near Appleby-in-Westmorland when the back bearing collapsed on the way back from Scotland, September 2018. The RAC man took the wheel off and several slightly flattened rollers dropped out. I picked up three but lost the other two. Afterwards, I was often paranoid that it would happen again and to this day listen out for the odd sound of a collapsed bearing whenever I drive. The roller is sealed into a small map paper pouch with a small glass replica Anglo Saxon bead near the left collar of Map Jacket. The bead symbolises hope. The pouch has the word ‘ruin’ on it in two places.

Fat Betty Cross

54°24’35.7″N 0°57’29.1″W

Fat Betty Cross

Cross-shaped candle, modelled after the medieval moorland cross known as Fat Betty Cross, North York Moors, made from two wax tea lights found at the nearby Young Ralph Cross. Wax has earth from Howl Moor and white pigment incorporated. Contained in a small drawstring bag made from a baseball hat found beside the Lyke Wake Walk path on Wheeldale Moor. 

Candles and hat found on a walk from Goathland to Rosedale Head and back, 2nd July 2019. Earth collected on Howl Moor, near Goathland on 5th July 2019.

Young Ralph Cross

54°25’03.5″N 0°41’08.8″W

Young Ralph Cross

Cross cut from a piece of thick rusty steel found on the road near Goathland during a circular walk which took in Lilla Howe and Goathland, 1st July 2019. Modelled after Young Ralph Cross. The shiny metal edges have dulled since it was made.

Ana Cross Jaw

54°19’59.7″N 0°52’34.9″W

Ana Cross Jaw (with Young Ralph Cross)

Lower mandible from a sheep with the shape of Ana Cross, North York Moors, cut out of it. Mandible was found close to Ana Cross during a walk on Spaunton Moor, 5th July 2019.

Book of Spurn

53°35’25.3″N 0°08’09.6″E

Book of Spurn

Book made from materials gathered on a trip to Spurn Point, 17th August 2019. Materials are: aluminium (from a wrecked aeroplane?); painted plywood from a hoarding which was painted with waves and sea creatures; rubber from a seaman’s glove; plastic; seaweed attached to a stone. Bound with copper wire found elsewhere.

Väinämöinen’s Boat

55°31’56.0″N 2°12’26.0″W and 55°35’09.7″N 1°39’44.3″W

Väinämöinen’s Boat

Boat made from fragment of a blue plastic sheep feed bucket found on top of the Cheviot Hills during a figure-of-eight shaped walk starting at Town Yetholm and following sections of the Pennine Way and St Cuthbert’s Way, early September 2019. (It was found on the St. Cuthbert path close to where those two paths cross). The boat is attached to a sea-worn piece of plastic found on the beach at Seahouses, early September 2019. I was reading the Kalavala during the holiday during which both objects were found and also visited Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta garden, so boats were on my mind. You can see the sea from a point close to where I found the blue plastic and it is also very close to the England/Scotland border. The St. Cuthbert Way ends at the sea and also unites the two countries. Both objects were found in England.

Rigg

54°22’06.9″N 1°00’55.6″W

Rigg

Piece of scuffed plastic vehicle trim picked up on a linear walk along Westside Road, Rudland Rigg, 16th November 2019. I inscribed a short section of the trim with a map of the route, including contour lines and tumuli. The long piece of trim reminded me of the linear nature of the walk. I did the walk on a misty day and walking through the group of large round barrows was eerie and stayed in my mind. The tumuli are represented by small drill holes. I made the piece on the 8th April 2020. 

Tees Mouth Cage

54°37’56.9″N 1°10’35.9″W

Tees Mouth Cage

Plastic cage (possibly intended for suspending solid disinfectant inside the rim of a toilet bowl) containing a short length of barbed wire. Both objects picked up during a walk on the north bank of the Tees estuary, 16th January 2020.

Ravenscar Thorns

54°37’56.9″N 1°10’35.9″W

Ravenscar Thorns

Barbed wire barb found next to a freshly cut thorn hedge on Station Road, Ravenscar, during a walk along the Cinder Track from Scarborough to Robin Hood’s Bay, 7th March 2020. Contained in a series of nested pouches. The inner pouch is made from cigarette papers found left as an offering on top of Fat Betty Cross, 5th July 2019. The middle pouch is made from a recycled cashmere wrist warmer found on the Cinder Track on the same day as the barbed wire and the outer pouch is made from a cover for an equestrian helmet, also found on the same day.

Kirkdale Roll

54°15’47.5″N 0°57’42.0″W

Kirkdale Roll

Pack of RAW brand cigarette papers with topographic and farm names from Kirkdale inked onto the individual papers. The cigarette papers were picked up at Fat Betty Cross, 2nd July 2019. The names relate to a walk in Kirkdale, 14th August 2020. The pack also has some tear-off gummed paper strips, which have words gathered on my walk written on in pencil. The coordinates are those of the spot on the dry section of the Hodge Beck where I sat writing in my notebook (I may actually have written the words on the gummed paper at that point, I can’t remember. I did definitely make a couple of small drawings on cigarette papers on the spot). I inked the names on the papers in September 2020.

Kirkdale Bone

54°19’55.1″N 1°03’03.4″W

Kirkdale bone

Sheep bone picked up on Pockley Moor during my walk in Kirkdale 14th August 2020, with words inked on it from my notebook of the day’s walk. The bone has an inked line round it half way along its length, because I intended to cut it in half and take half back to the moors. I never did this.

Orm Stone

54°15’47.5″N 0°57’42.0″W

Orm Stone

Third object relating to my walk in Kirkdale 14th August 2020. It is a flat stone picked up from the dry river bed near St. Gregory’s Minster. It has the name Orm engraved on it. Orm is the Anglo-Scandinavian landowner who restored St. Gregory’s Minster in the 11th century and who is commemorated in the rare Anglo-Saxon inscription above the door of the church. Orm son of Gamel is known from other historical sources and is connected to the feud discussed in Richard Fletcher’s book Bloodfeud. (Richard Fletcher lived in Kirkdale at some point in his life).

Bone for Azazel

54°23’37.2″N 0°59’18.4″W

Bone for Azazel

Rabbit bone and a piece of dried melancholy thistle found on a walk on 22nd September 2020 around the top of Farndale (from Blakey Ridge carpark to the junction of the track up Rudland Rigg, along the top). They are tied together with red embroidery thread and live in a small metal tin. Piece was made in May 2021. Azazel is a demon associated with desert places in Jewish mythology. The ‘scapegoat’ mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus 16) is actually the ‘goat for Azazel’ – not an offering to appease Azazel, but a symbolic taking of the sin of the people to Azazel in the wilderness/underworld, where it belongs. The piece probably belongs back out in the wilderness, but, for now, it is in Map Jacket. It perhaps represents the melancholy holding onto of the memory of sin, rather than sin itself.

Joined Ribs

55°32’09.1″N 2°10’40.6″W   

Joined Ribs

Two ends of sheep rib cut off and joined together. The ribs were found on a walk along College Valley in the Cheviots some time between 5th and 8th September 2020. The piece was made May 2021. Piece lives in the same tin as Bone for Azazel.

Cinder Track Tool and Cinder Track Object

54°27’18.0″N 0°33’03.1″W

Cinder Track Tool, Cinder Track Object and another associated object made from hawthorn berries and hazel shells.

Cinder Track Tool is three hawthorn thorns mounted in the end of a cut-off sheep’s rib, with three dried harebell flowers inserted in a hollowed out cavity in the rib. The thorns and harebells were found on a circular walk from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby along the Cleveland Way and then back along the Cinder Track, 8th October, 2020. The rib came from the College Valley (it’s the same rib as used in Joined Ribs). The Cinder Track is not all that far from the famous Mesolithic site of Starr Carr and Cinder Track Tool reminds me of an archaeological find of unknown purpose.

Cinder Track Object is made from four dried hawthorn berries collected on the same walk as Cinder Track Tool, set into holes in a piece of sheep’s rib found in College Valley. Both pieces were made May 2021.

Hallelujah Stone

54°23’29.1″N 1°02’13.3″W

Piece of ironstone with the word ‘hallelujah’ painted on it in white oil paint. I picked the stone near the Cammon Stone on Rudland Rigg. The Cammon Stone is a prehistoric standing stone and it has the word ‘hallelujah’ carved into it in Hebrew characters, reputedly by the nineteenth century clergyman Rev. W. Strickland, vicar of Ingleby. The walk was from Blakey Ridge along the top of Farndale, across to Urra Moor and then back down Rudland Rigg and finally across Farndale back to Blakey Ridge, 17th June 2021. I made the piece a few days afterwards. The stone is heavy for its size.

Hallelujah Stone

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Hobstone

Untitled drawing, Matthew Herring, 1999. (© Matthew Herring)

To escape, over Christmas, I went out for a walk around the suburbs near my home in York, one afternoon. I took Iain Sinclair as an imaginary companion, or rather, he brought himself along, as I’d been reading his London Overground, a book about a walk Sinclair took around the route of the London overground railway with the filmmaker Andrew Kötting. The presence of Sinclair turned a stroll into a minor odyssey. I tried to weave into my walk some sensitivity to the psychological lie of the land and to deliberately cut across my usual routes. I started on Beckfield Lane: a mile long and dead straight. Someone once told me it was bombed by a Zeppelin during the First World War, because the Germans thought it was an airstrip. Most of the houses were built after then, so it’s part of the twentieth century semi-detached sprawl. The school I went to (recently demolished) was at one end and I used to think of the whole as a huge neurone, with the school as the cell body and the road as the axon extending to where I then lived at the other end. Beckfield Lane takes its name from one of the original open fields of Acomb, before enclosure. It runs along a ridge from which you can look downhill towards York Minster and the city centre. It’s a road for going along rather than across, so my first attempt at escaping the spell of Acomb (or entering into it) was to cut down through a snicket to Jute Road, heading down into the valley of the eponymous beck, now hidden. All the streets in the ex-council-estate area on the Western slope above the Beckfield beck are named after the city’s connection to the Vikings and the Battle of Stamford Bridge (there’s a Tostig Avenue). 

I headed towards a small copse called Fishponds Wood, a numinous place where the Beckfield beck seeps to the surface. The fishponds are gone, but what remains is a crescent of dense marshy woodland, neglected by all but the obligatory band of ‘friends of’ and hidden behind a stockade of council houses with tiny gardens. A significant local road is called Carr Lane and I imagine Fishponds Wood as a relic, or descendent, of that primordial carr, as if every neighbourhood needs its weep hole where things hidden can come to the surface.  The Fisher King’s wound kept eternally fresh. Again, neurone-like, the copse reaches out its thin tendrils into the cellular mass of Acomb. A sliver of green. 

I cut across its muddy, dank gloom of black twigs and snared crisp packets, failing to ask the right question, and on, past the back entrance of St Stephen’s churchyard, to Beech Grove, another relic. I can’t remember the name of the estate, long gone, which the avenue of massive beech trees once led to (the fishponds were also part of it). A double row of Egyptian temple columns, leading nowhere. Another illegible fragment of a different time and place parcelled up as ‘green space’ and left embedded, like shrapnel or scar tissue, in the cell culture of housing development. I imagine they tried several times, but failed, to blow the trees up, like one of those Icelandic boulders inhabited by fairies which the road builders are forced finally to go around, having wasted a good kilo of dynamite.  

Somewhere on my route I saw the word ‘Hob’ or ‘Hobstone’ and a destination presented itself, a justification or galvanising principle for what had till then only been a mere walk to get some air: the Hobstone on Hob Moor. I set my sails southwards and felt the pull of the Hobstone, the vagueness of its features forming in my mind like a stalagmite. From the straightbacked Victorian shopping row of Acomb Front Street I cut down through the Arts and Craftsy posh bit of Acomb which loosely hangs around Hobgate and Moorgate, eschewing those alternative sites of myth, Holgate Windmill and West Bank Park (site of the fake Alpine ravines and cliffs of the former Backhouse Nursery). Trying too hard to avoid the known route, and pulled by the obscure gravity of the Moor, I tried to follow the most direct line and prospect for a way through to the Moor down a street called Queenswood Grove (gravid consort of the nearby Kingswood Grove, where I lived until I was four). This circuit of a street, shaped like it’s trying to draw the belly of a pitcher plant, led me round in a circle and no way through to the Moor was there. I was forced to pay my dues to the labyrinth before I was allowed on the Moor (itself a labyrinth). 

I found the Moor where I knew it to be. I noticed a stone-built Victorian house by the entrance to Hob Moor School at the bottom of Green Lane: imagining it when it was built, all alone on the lane leading from Acomb to the Moor, surrounded by fields. A flashback. Striking out for the Hobstone greatly increased the distance of my walk, beyond what I’d intended. It’s out on a limb; not really in Acomb at all. The stone, a badly eroded effigy of a knight about two feet tall, sits next to a plague stone next to the path in a limb of Hob Moor known as Little Hob Moor, which is cut off from the main Moor by the East Coast Main Line railway. It is, in fact, close to Tadcaster Road, the old Roman road into York from the South West. The stone was placed in its present position in 1717, but the carving predates that (13th century, if I remember correctly – or 14th). An inscription on the reverse, now gone, read: “This image long Hob’s name has bore who was a knight in time of yore and gave this common to ye poor”. For some strange reason, the knight faces towards the Moor, not away from it so that it would face you as you enter the Moor – it stands at an entrance to the Moor. I remembered it as a deeply pitted and misshapen knub of limestone, like a chewed pencil rubber sticking out of the ground, with no trace that it had ever represented a knight.  

A long stretch of walk took me across Hob Moor to the stone. It used to be on my cycle route to and from work, so memories of that time arose. My father used to walk his dogs there when I was a child: always clockwise around the perimeter, never anti-clockwise. One Christmas Day he brought me here to try out a boomerang I’d got. My father had the first throw and it smartly disappeared into the ditch or the hedge and was never found; he promised he’d buy me a new one, but never did. There used to be two or three old railway wagons which football clubs used to change in, but these were burnt out and are now gone. Motorbikes used to tear up the scalloped edges of the old brickworks, until barriers were placed at the entrances to the Moor. The line of the narrow-gauge railway leading to the brickworks is still clearly seen: a lone bush on the line of it turns out every spring to be one half elder and one half hawthorn. The Moor is windswept and mysterious. 

According to the ‘friends of’, the name comes either from Robert (Rob/Hob); from the trickster and marsh-spirit Robin Goodfellow; or from a name for the Devil. I can’t accept the Devil, but a minor (and folkloric) trickster cum ignis fatuus makes sense. Strange lights do hover over the Moor on dusky winter’s afternoons, even if they are just railway signals. Edmund Wilson swimming baths (now gone and replaced with a Lidl), lit up, used to be the guardian presence of Hob Moor for me; its twin concrete chimneys seeming, against the moving clouds, always to be falling and never landing, like Andrew Kötting with his resurrection jig in the film Edith Walks. 

I reached the Hobstone. It looked knightlier than I remembered – shield and the shape of a head could be clearly discerned – gazing back towards Hob’s Moor, the diminutive squirt’s view blocked by the embankment of the East Coast Main Line. If this Hob was a Robin Goodfellow, he was a severely eroded and impotent one, trapped in a crumbly block of limestone well on its way to the status of mineral content of the local soil, ridiculous as the Stone of Scone.  

Not willing to turn on my heels and return the way I’d come, I took the path which branches from the one I’d come on and went in the direction of York Railway Pond. This was new territory for me: in all the years I cycled past the Hobstone, I never once bothered to explore the path that branched off at that point and I never knew about the pond. Another foreign body in the tender meat of post-Victorian York, surrounded by a protective callous of suburban back gardens (various styles of fencing) and legitimated by a Council-sponsored noticeboard for the ‘friends of’. York Railway Pond is a sink hole which leads directly into the very mush and marrow of the earth; slate grey and frigid it is and frequented by fishermen (/kings). The way there from Little Hob Moor is guarded by an out-of-place row of Victorian terrace houses with an oddly Magrittesque feel – they are dark when the sky is light. Then a newish yellowbrick estate complete with serpentine roads that lead nowhere and a little swing park (so that the soft skinned yellowbrick youngsters don’t have to run the gauntlet of thistles, cowpats and working-class people on Hob Moor before their carapaces have hardened into those of cynical fag-smoking teenagers). Then a strange green corridor that spirals down to the omphalos of the pond itself (it truly is like the siphon hole of a huge buried mollusc). I walked (anticlockwise) round the pond, signs warning me of the dire consequences of a dip (apparently, rats pee in it). It seemed like a fitting coda to the Hobstone, this motionless whirlpool at the centre of it all guarded by gnomic fishermen. If the Hobstone is the head of the worn hobnail which holds the world together (or the axle on which it turns), and Fishponds Wood the unhealable wound, then the pond is a dark grail.  

After a votive pee against the railway embankment, I headed back home. It was getting dark and four crows perched atop four elder trees on the far edge of the Moor.

Filey Bay walk

Filey Bay. Image © Matthew Herring

 

Feeling the need again to just look ahead of me and walk, I went to Filey Bay, a favourite place. A windy day and partly overcast, light and clouds alternating like disordered thoughts; the tide just beginning to ebb, a sliver of beach appearing in front of the sea wall at Filey. I set off south along the thin sabre-curve of the bay, towards the start of the Flamborough Head cliffs four miles away. I wanted to be on my own, quite frankly, to sweat out a certain muddle of thoughts, but the beach was busy until well past the Reighton Gap caravan site. People radiated out from different points of the bay – Filey, Primrose Valley, Hunmanby Gap, Reighton Gap – but they rarely ventured far from their entry point, even the dog walkers.  

I’ve started to find it more and more odd that people view the beach as a place to let go of thinking, as if here, beyond the edge of the great ant hill and out of reach of employers, tax men and worries, there is nothing left to shackle them to the necessity of thought. The beach is as blissfully blank as a crisp, unslept on hotel bed; the sea, an impeccably discreet and dedicated night nurse, wipes the beach’s fevered brow clean of all cares twice daily. And so here you can pitch your stripy wind break and lay down your trusty picnic blanket, beneath forty feet of boulder clay cliff made of rock ground and pulverised to fleshy mud by groaning, creaking glaciers crushing their way across the terrain of the North Sea and giving succour to the weird shapes of butterbur and coltsfoot. Here is an excellent place to play rounders and show your toddler how the shore is littered with the partly decomposed mesoglea of thousands upon thousands of moon jellyfish, proclaiming that death will triumph over you too.  

And so, a misanthrope and buried in my own self-aggrandising daydreams, I strode forth, overtaking far more casual strollers and those tethered to dogs and companions. I should have worn a hoodie so that I could have pulled the hood around my face in order to feel even more like a monk. Filey Bay is a place where space seems relative, expansive, changeable, like in a dream. Time shrinks with the tide and you get places quickly and it surprises you, or it expands away and you seem to be going backwards, away from your destination and against the direction you are actually walking. The curve of the bay means that you can see every point along it from every other point, you are never out of sight of where you are going to or where you have come from. Before I knew it, I was at the further reaches of the beach and the people thinned out. The last trickle of humanity was a group of teenagers who picked their way down the path, barely discernible from the beach, that takes you up onto the high chalk cliffs. I owe to them the fact that I found the path myself. 

The change is very sudden and you find yourself in another place, although the distance is not very great back to the Reighton Gap caravan park. Ahead tower the sheer chalk cliffs of the headland, swirling with gannets. Chalk boulders from a series of rock falls block the way and must be clambered over. Smaller chalk pebbles, mixed with flint nodules, have been swept into neat banks at the foot of the clay cliffs. The rounded stones have fissures that look like the sutures on a skull; the effect is of half buried skulls, some hobbit sized and some gargantuan and misshapen. Strange twisting valleys choked with willowherb and brambles divide the final stretch of boulder clay deposit before it gives way to chalk. The sea has sculpted the sand into hard undulating ridges that tire the feet – somehow, reality never gets caught out: the sea never forgets to create and recreate these shapes. 

Wading through pools of water left by the retreating tide, I get caught out by how deep they can suddenly become. Places which are wild resist human movement: one of the things I like about Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the sense it gives of how difficult travel was in those days across a land of marshes, woods and rivers. Familiar place names juxtaposed with an unfamiliar terrain. In one of these pools I nearly catch myself on a curved sheet of iron jutting out of the sand; part of the wreck of a steam cargo vessel called the Laura, which foundered on this beach in 1897. The Laura’s two boilers were just starting to be revealed by the tide. There are several wrecks along this stretch of coast, including a First World War submarine which is hard to reach. The striking thing is how something so large can be rendered down into a few fragments, like a whale that’s been stripped down to a few bones. The Laura was dismantled for scrap – I don’t know why they left the keel and two boilers. The keel emerges sometimes from the sand, like a bad memory, or a ghost, only to be covered up again. 

Clambering underneath the chalk cliffs is an intimidating – and dangerous – experience, and I daren’t go far, even though I know I have several hours before the tide starts to flow. Easy to slip down between the boulders with a broken ankle. Would anyone find me? There is another ship’s boiler, broken and covered in rough barnacles, a short distance from the Laura. This comes from a trawler called the Diamond. Boilers from a further three (at least) trawlers can be seen between here and Flamborough Head (I’m indebted to Lee Norgate’s website for information about these wrecks). Interesting what survives longest of things: boilers from steam ships, tests from sea urchins, bones, shells, names, memories. 

I sat on the rocks and tried to write notes. Somehow, stopping moving stopped me thinking. I noticed a dark shape a short distance away which turned out to be a cormorant, its head tucked mournfully into its back feathers. I approached it and sat next to it. It woke up and approached me, probing its narrow beak towards me, and then veered off behind me when it realised I wasn’t a source of food. I suppose it was sick or injured – though I couldn’t see an injury. I thought about trying to take it to a vet or animal sanctuary, but carrying a struggling bird four miles back to Filey didn’t seem an option. I hoped it would die before gulls found it and left it be.  

I decided to try to head up onto the cliffs via the path that I’d seen the teenagers use. This did indeed take me by a windy route up to the top, where I joined (and discovered) the Headland Way. I only had time to walk a couple of miles along the cliff top – I was some way off the buildings of the RAF Bempton World War Two radar station when I turned back. Gannets rise overhead and perch metres from the path. Perilous to try to approach for a better view of the colony, but I could see dark coloured juveniles on ledges. Inland a combine harvester was at work. You can see all the way to the sea on the other side of the headland and down the coast towards Spurn. It’s unusual to be able to see such a recognisable feature from the map of England on the ground, but you can more or less see the whole headland from the Buckton cliffs. Inland is a landscape of arable fields. The village of Speeton perches on a prominent knoll, which reminded me of the knolls which are often occupied by farms in the flat southern plains of Iceland. A three storey farm house with all of the upper windows bricked up intrigued me. Louis Aragon, in Paris Peasant, has a great line about (as far as I remember) a red checked table cloth teaching you about the mysteriousness of the world. A triangular field filled with gone-to-seed thistles all shedding fluff in the wind and swaying slightly does the same thing to me. 

I had to turn back because I’d left my family with friends in Filey and they were getting ready for home. I could see Filey quite clearly, but it took me a long time to get back there. By the time I was back down on the beach it was nearly deserted – and massively wider, due to the tide being fully out. The narrow, crowded beach of a few hours earlier (not dissimilar to a gannet colony) was gone like a mirage, replaced by the aching empty space I’d sought in the first place. Thousands of blobs of jelly, the last remains of moon jellyfish, led the way like breadcrumbs. I reacclimatised myself to humanity by eating fish and chips from a carton while the kids wet themselves in a fountain marked with the directions of all the Shipping Forecast sea areas.  

London memory walk

Brompton Cemetery, © M. Herring, 2018

Once over, if I visited London I would try to cram in as many art exhibitions as I could. Now, what interests me more is London itself, and going to exhibitions is an excuse to walk places. It’s as if London is something that can be (needs to be) exorcised by walking it. I was in London in February to deliver a painting of mine to a show at Studio 1.1, Shoreditch, and I wanted to see the Rose Wylie show at the Serpentine Gallery as well. The Serpentine is close to the Royal College of Art, where I studied between 1999 and 2001. ‘My London’ – the London where I spent most of my daily life during those years – starts there and extents westwards. I’ve seldom visited it since, so I decided to use seeing the Wylie show as an excuse for a walk into loaded territory. I almost conceived of it as a ritual, or an exorcism of memory. There is something deeply uncanny about parts of one’s past which are lost in the folds of memory, and about the places associated with them. Places and memories become joined to one another in such a way that leaving a place means leaving memories behind with it. Staying away from the place preserves the memories, like leaving a cupboard full of junk untouched for a long time. Conversely, if you stay in a place you constantly scrub out memories – like a cupboard you use often and keep tidy. So unvisited places are freighted and somewhat dangerous. 

For some reason, I’d been reminded that I used to walk past Brompton Cemetery sometimes on my way from my flat in Fulham to the RCA. Only once, I think, did I enter it. I remembered a strange place with gravestones arranged like an amphitheatre, like something out of a dream. I remembered also the bridge over the underground railway on Lillie Road/Old Brompton Road as being one of those borders where the temperature of London changes. It is often said that London is a collection of villages, but I think that at a more profoundly phenomenological level it consists of numerous zones each with its own emotional content; its own sort of static emotional energy. I like to call this the ‘temperature’ of an area. London is more like a multiverse than a series of villages: each temperature zone is its own self-existent, hermetic bubble. This is separate from the attachment of memories to places, which is an individual matter. West Brompton tube station, which perches liminally between the hump of the bridge and the cemetery, is the gatehouse of the Brompton temperature bubble. 

So, I resolved to walk from King’s Cross to the Serpentine and then follow one of my old routes from the RCA to Fulham, then walk back from Fulham to South Kensington down Lillie Road/Old Brompton Road, checking out the cemetery on the way. I used to have an almost obsessively large number of routes, and combinations of routes, which I would take between Fulham and the RCA, each with its own particular feel and associations. Going from Fulham to the RCA cuts obliquely across the grain of London; I also lived for a time in Hammersmith, but that sits on the same grain line as the college, so it presented only one sensible route, up Hammersmith Road/Kensington High Street. The Fulham-RCA axis proliferated possible routes across approximately the same distance, so that it became a hobby to find new ones and to mix and match bits of the route into new combinations. A walk takes you through different temperature zones and can unfold like a musical composition. I had also wanted for a long time to visit Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformist burial ground where Bunyan, Blake and Defoe are buried. This is close to Shoreditch, where I needed to deliver my painting, so somehow, I wanted to weave this into my walk. I’m not into the mystical side of psychogeography, but here is a rough triangle with cemeteries near two of its angles. 

King’s Cross to the Serpentine 

The sun was low and bright, making it hard to see. I improvised a course across the grain of Bloomsbury – Judd Street, Leigh Street, Marchmont Street, Tavistock Place, Byng Place, Gower Street. The sun dissolved the city into an illusion, easy to disbelieve in. Part of the ritual was to buy a notebook from Rymans, and I knew from the internet that there was one on Tottenham Court Road and one on Gower Street. I gambled that the one on Gower Street was southwards from the point halfway along where I joined it. I gambled amiss – there was no Rymans and I committed myself to cutting Tottenham Court Road out of my route – but I was lured instead into the Oxfam Bookshop where I weighed myself down with three books: Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster, by Karen Lee Street, Letters from London, by Julian Barnes, and Common Ground, by Rob Cowen. Two London books and a Yorkshire one. Walking London can be like playing a game with the city. Sometimes the city wins the throw; sometimes the city gives you the unexpected win. I continued my route straight up Oxford Street and through Hyde Park to the Serpentine Gallery. 

The pieces in the Rose Wylie show which impressed me the most were the ones which drew on her memories of the London Blitz during the Second World War. Park Dogs and Air Raid has what I took to be a simplified aerial view of the city behind the childishly drawn German aircraft, with the blue river and the texture of the city suggested by horizontal blue strokes. Looking again at an image of it, I’m not sure if that’s what’s intended: the blue ‘rivers’ seem to be coming from the aircraft, like exhaust fumes or smoke. Having grown up making accurate and detailed drawings of German warplanes, I could never have depicted them in such a way, with backwards Nazi swastikas on the wings and not bearing the slightest resemblance to any actual type of plane. (German aircraft never had swastikas on the wings, though Finnish ones did). In the lower half of the painting is an image of Kensington Gardens, with the Serpentine Gallery, Round Pond and some dogs and ducks. In a video interview about the exhibition, Wylie says that she painted Kensington Gardens, both in response to the exhibition invitation and because she had childhood wartime memories of the park. I liked this looping back of memory and place. 

Rosemount (Coloured) seems to be a more complex work: a map of Farnborough Park, just outside London, overlain with the silhouette of a large house where Wylie once lived, in the process of being bombed. Bombs fall and a large red V1 flying bomb is spied by a disembodied eye. The colours of the work – mauves and washed out greens and blues – suggest the era of the Second World War. The activity of mapping is identical to that of remembering: here the words which Wylie commonly scrawls across her paintings delve back into the past. Both paintings have the perspective of a child’s memory of living through the Blitz: seeing a flying bomb; seeing bomb damaged buildings; seeing stray dogs in the park (their owners killed by bombs?) The lumpen aircraft are exactly right for unseen raiders. The other works in the show, which featured female film stars and footballers, engaged me less and seemed shallower. (Queen with Pansies (Dots) is the one other work that I enjoyed). 

Kensington to Fulham 

After leaving the park, I scuttled down Jay Mews, the lane that runs through the middle of the RCA. Absurdly, I was afraid of meeting someone I knew. It was probably a decade since I had visited the college last and it looked exactly the same. I snubbed the college by rushing past; it was like a sepulchre locked up with memories, but I couldn’t go inside and I could hardly stand there staring at it. It was good to reacquaint myself with the layout of streets at the bottom of the Mews – doing that restored part of my mental geography and put the passageway I remembered which runs alongside the church back in its right alignment. I exited the Mews down Bremner Road. 

The area of Kensington I now threaded my way through has a ‘cold’ temperature on my scale. It’s a fantasy realm of white stucco and foreign embassies; plane trees and wealth. It isn’t a place that offers the soul any sort of resting place; not even your eyes feel like they are allowed to linger on its pristine surfaces. You wonder who (if anyone) actually lives in these stolid excrescences of spotless guano. None of the people who you see walking the streets can possibly inhabit them: they are all mere workers of one kind or another. I imagine the inhabitants must pass like barely visible ghosts straight from shiny cars through immaculate doors. I used to wonder if they would be interested in buying my art, but mostly what you see through windows is acres of white or magnolia paint and large potted palms, not art. I wouldn’t even be surprised to find that many of the houses are empty, mere assets. I did notice that some of the numbers on the pillars of the houses on Queens Gate Terrace, which are all in an identical typeface, were painted less neatly than others, and this pleased me. The badly painted ones at least spoke of a human hand. A group of two or three (I forget how many) Chinese men in casual dress and with cigarettes between their fingers strolled towards me and began gesticulating at one of the houses. They looked incongruous enough to actually live here. 

Crossing Gloucester Road, I found a Rymans and fulfilled that part of the ritual which demanded that I buy a black A6 notebook (thank you London). Diving down Kynance Place as down a rabbit hole, I found myself in even more bizarre surroundings. Wealth seems to suck all of the possibilities out of a place, as if not even a scrap of neglected brickwork must be left to the casual stroller. Kynance Mews, which runs parallel to Kynance Place, and which I did not even dare to walk down, has an overbearing stone arch at each end, like a massive mouth ready to bite down on the unauthorised pedestrian. There is something cruel about the very architecture. Go down Kynance Place (or, if you dare, Mews) and you are in the land of twisted fairytale. There are more stone portals leading into forbidden courtyards and an overly luxuriant growth of styles from Arts and Crafts and Regency to Second Empire, much of it stuccoed like a sickly cake encrusted with white icing. Odd corners and angles, which elsewhere would make the place characterful are here too scrubbed and painted to enjoy. Barley twist chimneys recall the eggs atop the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres. The neighbourhood simultaneously treats you as dirt too lowly to notice and makes you feel observed. It’s hard to believe that I used to regularly walk down these streets; what it did to my mental health I dread to think. 

I followed the line of Cornwall and Lexham Gardens into Logan Place. When I used to take this route, the wall enclosing the house where Freddie Mercury died used to be covered with graffiti dedicated to him; now that too was scrubbed clean (and there was a large perspex sheet bolted over the door into the garden). Emerging from these heady streets into the brutal daylight of West Cromwell Road is like a bucket of cold water in the face. West Cromwell Road is a major traffic route through West London, dirty, noisy and wide. Heading over the bridge over the railway into West Kensington, I followed a complicated route to Lillie Road, where my flat was. I wondered, how does one address the complexity of the city. I wondered also why these streets always seemed to be a poor substitute for the tenement streets of the West End of Glasgow for the pleasure of walking. I still can’t put my finger on it.  

The turning point of my walk was the Fulham Cross Cafe on Munster Road, where I had a cooked breakfast sitting aloof from a lively community of elderly gentlemen. Heading back down Lillie Road (my old flat still the same), I came at last to the boundary bridge and Brompton Cemetery. The road leading up to the hump of the bridge rises as unexpectedly as the bus which carries the protagonist in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce from the grey town up to heaven. Behind is indeed a sort of ‘grey town’: a disparate area of tower blocks, Victorian terraces, low-roofed pubs, playgrounds and hotels, which, like Lewis’s town, seems to tend to pull away from itself. The passage of Lillie Road into Old Brompton road is marked by a sort of linguistic sputtering out of the name ‘Lillie’ (which is robustly anchored in the centre of Lillie Road by the massive bulk of the Sir John Lillie Primary School). On the approach to the bridge there is the Hotel Lily (the sign says HOTE_ LILY) and the Lillie Langtry pub (formerly named after the other Lillie); across the bridge on the Brompton side is the Li Li massage parlour. 

Brompton Cemetery 

The cemetery. Through the arched gateway yet another world is reached, though one which is penetrated constantly by the living (as by ghosts in reverse). A wide avenue leads straight to the amphitheatre I remembered. In reality, it is a sort of circus created by stone arcades, surrounding and surrounded by countless graves. The vertical tiers of graves I expected to see were a creation of my memory – though flat, the cemetery is no less dramatic and unreal. The first thing about the place which is shocking – as shocking as the white bones of a skeleton – is the sheer number of graves: a petrified forest of stone stumps lined up like souls on resurrection day. The cemetery is a rupture in the life of the city; scar tissue in living flesh. The memorials are of all sorts: crosses, angels, urns, broken columns, obelisks, mausolea, simple gravestones. The phrase ‘strange fruit’ came into my mind. Workmen were busy repairing some of the larger memorials and many were fenced off. I peered in through an opening above the heavily rusted iron door of an Egyptian style mausoleum. The space extended downwards a long way but eventually ended with a bare floor and a stone bench. The variety of graves was engrossing: one had red and white glazed tiles; another had a severe art nouveau bas relief angel; another had copper art nouveau lettering which had flooded the stone with green oxides; there were a couple of Orthodox crosses with Cyrillic text; there was a grave with stone canoe atop. 

Constantly, the life of the city dodged through all this death with the hardiness of the citizens of a bomb-blasted city who have become accustomed to seeing so much dereliction. Cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, commuters all clearly pass through as a matter of course. The energetic workmen gave the whole place the air of one vast restoration project (as featured on TV in an episode of Restoration Cemetery). I imagined a glossy, upbeat brochure describing how many newly carved stones would be inserted into previously crumbling monuments; how our heritage was being kept alive. A shrivelled lady in a mobility scooter trundled up and down the main avenue, as if merely enjoying the sun (which she probably was). I tried to catch the eye of an Asian or Hispanic lady with heavy foundation makeup who was sat on a bench, but I couldn’t. She looked deep enough in thought, but probably not of death or the dead. Above it all, heavy A380 and 747 airliners mooed on their way down to Heathrow at close intervals. 

And then I realised that the entire place was one babbling mass. The different shapes and sizes of stones, as jostling and individual as the living. Different languages and scripts. “In sacred and devoted memory of…” “Who fell asleep July 9th 1956 aged 84 years”. “Resurgam”. “Family grave of John and Eliza Todd”. “The sepulchre of Charles Cave”. “1866”. “1917”. All asserting facts and identities. Even the brambles which enclosed some of the less well tended graves like railings resembled mad rambling script many times overwritten. 

Quitting the cemetery, I continued down Old Brompton Road and stopped in a swish pub to gather my notes and thoughts together over an expensive but refreshing Coca Cola. After the disparateness and openness of Lillie Road, Old Brompton Road has an enclosed and enclosing feel. A young woman gushed in an American accent to another young woman who was sat working at the next table, about some graphic design project of the latter’s, and she then repaired to another table to make a phone call in French. I could imagine either of them living nearby. Even though Brompton is an upmarket area of London, it doesn’t have the eviscerated, enervated feel of parts of Kensington. It might just be that the predominant material is warm brick, rather than stucco (though there’s plenty of the latter as well). There is also something about the proportions of certain streets – the height of their buildings in relation to their width – that makes them feel enclosing (this is common with Glasgow tenement streets). Old Brompton Road unfolds through a series of doglegs. The space of the street gives onto the enclosed spaces of the thousands of rooms – thousands of lives – hidden behind permeable facades, just as the railings of the cemetery give onto the thousands of voids in the cemetery. 

I wonder if you can define West London areas by the colour of Mercedes. In some places, white seems to predominate; in others silver, or black, or a kind of gunmetal grey. Never do colours predominate. They are the spirit guides of the grey city. 

Bunhill 

Reaching South Kensington I was forced to take the tube. The walk was disintegrating and I didn’t have time enough to walk to the East. My visit to Bunhill Fields cemetery was likewise rushed. It was getting dark and commuters streamed through the main artery of the cemetery, like corpuscles under pressure. The lights were on in the surrounding office buildings and the green mosses and lichens on the tombstones glowed with the sickliness of strip lighting. I saw Bunyan, Blake and Defoe, or at least their monuments: Bunyan’s is a sarcophagus with a carving of the writer reclining on top of it; Defoe’s an obelisk and Blake’s the simplest of all, an upright slab. They are arranged on an axis crossing the main one of the cemetery. Most of the stones here are simpler than those at Brompton (older). I photographed a squirrel who perched obligingly still on one of the stones. My visit was somewhat like the birth recorded in T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi: “It was (you may say) satisfactory”. 

I wondered what I gained from this memory-symbolic walk. Memory is something that resists and flees as well as something you can call upon. Walking is both inimical to and encouraging of memory. Inimical, because the physical exertion involved and the obstinacy of the present both intrude. Walking a memory also erodes it, like playing an acetate disk. I did remember things and manage to reconnect with the geography, if nothing else. However, I felt more of a stranger, both from my own past and from the place. I was happy to go back to wife and home and children rather than an empty student flat.  

 

Grey squirrel in Bunhill Fields cemetery. © M Herring, 2016

 

 

The liquid city

View of the Thames, drawn from Patrick Keiller’s film London, 2005. © Matthew Herring 2005

The river Thames at Bankside is one of my old haunts from back when I lived in London. I was there again recently with my family, visiting Tate Modern. Ioana took the kids back to our friends’ home once they’d had their fill of rolling down the slope in the turbine hall on the huge stripy carpet installed by an artist collective SUPERFLEX (far more fun than the giant swings). I stayed on for a bit, drawn by the place rather than the art. The view from the South Bank has always seemed to me like a vision, as if nothing is quite solid or real: the elements of London exist in deep affinity with one another by the river, pervaded by a veiled whiteness of Portland stone, concrete, river, and sky. When I went up the Shard, a few years ago, it struck me how much the buildings around St Paul’s Cathedral resemble the limestone pavements in the Yorkshire Dales: the same pale, flat, rectilinear slabs separated by deep fissures. I remember once trying to sketch from somewhere near Bankside and finding the luminous greyness oppressive. It was impossible to capture in crayons, the grey light pressed on my retinas, like a kind of concrete and Portland snow blindness. Light can emanate from concrete as from an overcast sky.

London is a city of skyscapes. And of sound: I can still hear the clanking of cranes and the rush of traffic; the buzz coming across the river from that sketching trip years ago. London from the South Bank manages to be both crushingly heavy and as weightlessly evanescent as pumice. I realised I was trying to draw the structure of London – the forms of its architecture – but London has no structure and oscillates like a mirage. It’s like trying to draw a feeling. Sometimes I feel London draws its oppressive weight from the concentration of power and wealth – power and wealth that exclude you and grind on with no need of you. Looking across the river towards the towers and slab office blocks of the City you are acutely aware of a terrible gravity. I ended up overworking my drawing with a white crayon, always an admission of defeat.

Years later, I left the Tate hoping to sit somewhere and reconnect to that memory. Instead of a slab sky of white, it was one of those windy-sunny days where the clouds look as if they have been wrenched and torn apart by some frenzied being. It was Sunday and the crowds were out in force along the South Bank, scudding and milling along like clouds. Tate Modern is the nexus, the centre of gravity, of the current popularity of modern art; the tower of Tate Modern is like the pinnacle of rock beneath the Gulf of Coryvreckan which causes the whirlpool – in this case of people restlessly circulating. I made my way westwards as far as it would take for the crowds to thin out a bit. I had half a mind to walk to South Kensington, another old haunt. The crowds thinned out after Westminster Bridge (where I noticed the new concrete barriers like cutwaters put there to stop repeats of the terrorist vehicle attack) and I sat on one of the benches with weird cast iron swans’ heads, opposite the Houses of Parliament.

The river is both a hiatus in London and its liquid essence. I imagined the river being constructed as a massive civil engineering project, a vast trench dug through the heart of the city without yet any water in it. The river is a fault line between the two halves of London, like the city is a stone that has cracked in half. I had been looking at Mark Bradford’s huge collage Los Moscos in the Tate, with its grid-like structure recalling Bradford’s home city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a city defined more by the grid than by the Los Angeles River, but London’s structure hangs on the river, like a wasp’s nest on a branch.

I imagine the river having the same relationship to London as God has to his creation in process theology. London as the river’s emanation. In process theology God and the world are fellow travellers in time: both exist within and are transcended by its flow. Becoming trumps being. London and the river are also locked in a similar flow and a similar becoming. The river is the liquid city: liquid Portland stone and liquid concrete. Liquid possibilities. The suspended silt which gives the river the appearance of dirty milk is the dust of the city. The city, for its part, is the river’s precipitate, a crystalline deposit crusting its banks. The river begets the city from its – the city’s – own substance. A god locked in time is a lesser god, however. 

The river is thick with thought, with the city’s crowded mind. As I sit staring at it, the river is flowing backwards: the tide is coming in and pushing the flow back upriver. (When I lived in Hammersmith I once saw the same dead dog floating up the Thames and then later on back down again on the ebb tide). Unlike the flow of time, the flow of the river is reciprocal; uncertain. Its ebb and flow are the heave of the crowd and its silt the hiss of its thoughts. I wrote down some of the things that the river’s surface reminded me of: mercury, graphite, liquid brass, milk, urine, paper pulp, the cortex of a brain. Everything and nothing.

Walking on a little, I looked at the apartment blocks being thrown up by developers along the riverbank. The concrete lift shafts stood starkly like insane overgrown pillboxes inside the steel skeletons of the unfinished flats; stains on the concrete showed where water had once flowed in rivulets from each section as it was cast. Water soaks through concrete. Beneath the Blavatnik Building at the Tate is an area which originally housed storage tanks connected with the power station. It is a massively constructed space made of rough concrete. High up one of the walls water seeps through, like one of London’s lost rivers trying to escape its confinement. Water is the true state of concrete and rock. The river is the key to London, seeping as it does into the Tate basement.

Across the river from the unfinished flats, impure light reflected off the glass and steel of Millbank Tower, home of (at various times) both the Conservative and Labour parties, the UN and the World Bank. London is a city of reflections. I crossed Vauxhall Bridge. Sometimes the river gives you a smile: a flash of indigo on the ruffled surface. Usually, it is the colour of melancholy, or of one of the silver mercedes that course through the arteries of the city like undissolved drugs. The river disposes of things. It erases and cleanses; is both forgetfulness and memory. London is a state of mind that you can read by walking. I ended my walk at Pimlico tube and headed back to rejoin my family.

The following day, I reflected on my walk and reread my notes in a cafe in Hampstead. Hampstead types talked intensely to each other, over generous portions of cake, of business or dilemmas or other people’s follies. Over the road, I could see a building with a crooked sash window and a pink bacterial water seep down its cream painted masonry. Everywhere in London – even in rich Hampstead – there are buildings with cracks, some of them huge. Everything is shifting and provisional; threatening to slump into the oozy substrate. I looked at the people around me in the cafe and thought that it was the same for them (and me); that they were worn, stressed and cracked like the buildings, without foundations. Next to the building with the crooked sash was a yard entirely festooned with Russian vine and overshadowed by a sycamore tree. A strange, extravagant green recess in the city. Two men manhandled a steel I-beam off the roof of a van, which was also loaded with umpteen sheets of plywood and PIR foam.

Later on, Ioana and the kids and I went in the cafe in Waterstones on Hampstead High Street. There the scene was different. Hampstead High Street is unreal, so astronomically wealthy and fussed over that it seems to levitate; if the hill didn’t support it at the altitude it does, it would float there anyway. Egalitarian Waterstones is there like the embassy of a foreign land. At the next table in the cafe sat a group of several children and women. The women were very obviously nannies. They talked in the way that employees do behind their employers’ backs. The children – the infinitely precious progeny of the wealthy – messed around, spilling their drinks over books unpaid for and dropping lumps of pastry on the floor. The nannies apologised to us for the disruption – they were nannies, they explained, and these were the children they looked after. As if that would excuse the scene or as if, indeed, we wouldn’t have guessed the fact. Ioana – a nanny – smiled and said it was OK. I couldn’t help being smug that our children were our own and better behaved. We oscillated in between two strata of society: those of the nannies and their rich and badly behaved children. Outside, it started to get dark.

Faxi’s stream: a short walk at the crux of England

Photo: © M Herring 2017

Faxfleet

 

2nd November, Faxfleet, at the confluence of the Ouse and the Trent; the start of the Humber. A marsh harrier patrolled the reed bed, up and down, while a Lynx helicopter passed over, heading towards Lincolnshire. The harrier wheeled overhead and went inland, towards a farmhouse. Stonechats flitted in the reeds. After the helicopter, silence but for the tinnitus of distant traffic and the peeping of unseen waders. Silence is a sense of space rather than the absolute absence of sound; sounds either form the boundaries of the space, or cut into it, like the helicopter did.

I made the trip to Faxfleet to celebrate the first day of a new work pattern which will give me more time to dedicate to my practice as an artist, and to connect up with the past. The last time I had a regular day a week built into my working pattern to dedicate to art was a little over two years ago, and, on my last ‘art day’, I took a similar trip to Airmyn, also on the Ouse. (I wrote about this trip here). That trip was partly an act of faith that I was going to get that time back again, and this trip I guess was an attempt to heal the rift. I’ve made several trips to places on the lower reaches of the Ouse and the Humber, drawn by a fascination with estuaries and forlorn places.

I wanted to see the place where the Ouse and the Trent meet. It seems to me to be one of the hidden cruxes of England. The Trent drains a huge chunk of the Midlands, as it slews its ‘U’-shaped course. The Ouse drains both the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. They meet quietly and unobtrusively, without any fanfare, surrounded by reedbeds and mudflats. It looks from Google Maps like you can stand right on the cusp between the two rivers, at Blacktoft sands, but you can’t. I went there a year or two back, to the RSPB nature reserve. You may not depart from the path: you can’t even see the rivers for the reeds. (I did have a great time, however, spotting all the rare birds the other bird watchers pointed out: ruffs, bearded reedlings, spotted redshanks, marsh harrier).

Faxfleet is barely a hamlet – more a scattering of farms – situated on the north bank of the Ouse/Humber, opposite Blacktoft sands. Away from the river, it’s a land of flat arable fields, reclaimed from marsh. There was once a Knights Templars’ community there, so it must have been drained pretty early on. There’s something that’s hard to grasp about the landscape. It’s overlooked to the north and south by the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds, which give it the uncanny feel of being a no-man’s land between two opposing forces. Two mirrored opposites. The hills rise suddenly and unaccountably from the flat. They’re not that high, but they do odd things to the space; as if, by being raised up, the things atop them are also brought closer. You have the feeling that, if you squinted, you could see in through the windows of houses in Alkborough, on the Lincolnshire Wolds. There is the same sense of acoustic space as I’ve noticed at Spurn Point and Sunk Island: sounds seem to carry further over the water, or just over the flat ground. Clanks and bangs of distant activity pierce the silence at intervals.

Dark, compact woods sit between the fields, like thoughts you can’t quite get hold of. Residues of thought. Robert McFarlane talks about how landscape provides us with metaphors for living. If the landscape is an extended metaphor for our own being, then depicting it is self portraiture. I have the fantasy that the flat landscapes of lowland England are a vast thought process, a brooding consciousness. Thoughts are distinct things, like the woods and other features which occupy and cross the land surface. You can return to a thought like you can return to a wood. You might find it changed or attrited, but it will be there in some form. In that sense, thoughts are more like things than flow (we often talk about consciousness as a stream, meaning flow, but I think it is more like a stream in the landscape, a more or less permanent, albeit shifting and changing, feature). Thoughts build up archaeological layers.

Place names do, too. I like the fact that Alkborough and Faxfleet have both retained a kind of awkward primal ‘spikiness’ – of the ‘k’ and the ‘x’ – as if they have resisted erosion into forms that are kinder on the palate. They have an Old Norse strangeness. (In fact, Alkborough is Old English, meaning ‘Al(u)ca’s hill’; Faxfleet is of uncertain meaning, but is also Old English, perhaps with an Old Norse personal name, Faxi. Faxi’s Stream, perhaps). Aluca and Faxi and their streams and hills have left their residue.

 

Get lost signs

 

A ‘get lost’ sign that stops you going too far along the riverbank east from Faxfleet:

Associated British Ports

Notice is hereby given that there is no right of way on this embankment or any other part of the estate. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

By order ABP

 

And another:

Strictly no access.

Humber Wildfowl Refuge Committee

 

There’s another on the gates of the Weighton Lock:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS

And next to it:

Horse riders please

keep to Bridle Path

Take your pick. On the bridge over the lock there’s a stone carved inscription, partly eroded:

Mr Grady Engineer Mr [?] Surveyor

Mr Smith Carpenter Mr [?] Mason

Anno Domino 1775

Repaired 1826 by Joseph Whitehead

 

Blacktoft

 

Past the Weighton Lock (where the Market Weighton Canal ends), the landscape opens out as you face across to the southernmost escarpment of the Yorkshire Wolds and towards Brough. Hunched crows sit in trees. The Humber Bridge is like a drawing, executed with extreme efficiency and elegance of line. A short distance later, you are halted by the pale blue ABP sign quoted above. For my part, I turned back, quailing at the threat of prosecution, and walked back the other way, past Faxfleet to Blacktoft.

The spiky, straight leaves on the rushes all point east, away from the prevailing wind. A small patch of borage darkens the counsel of a tilled field. Flowers of yarrow are too white on the embankment side. Farm houses are half lost in trees. I think of the Templars’ preceptory and try to avoid the move of associating it with the uncanny of the place.

And on the water side, the mirrored silver of the exposed mud, riven with serpentine rills like blood vessels at regular intervals. The mud has the iky shininess of membranes in the body, or of a cerebral cortex. Its thoughts cannot but be inscrutable. Tiny wading birds pitter-patter across it like flies. The light reflected from the surface leaves an after-image on my retina.

Once I’ve turned the Faxfleet corner, near where I parked the car (by a sign saying ‘Private road’), I’m on the Ouse and the river immediately starts to feel familiar. The Lincolnshire Wolds, looming over yonder, look like a foreign country, and the Trent, which I can barely see, is a foreign river to me. The Ouse is a businesslike Yorkshire river. A thug of a river? No, she’s a lady! From the outset she’s recognisably the river that passes through Goole and Selby. A definite river, after the equivocal and dissimulating estuary.

I stopped at the Hope and Anchor, Blacktoft, for a cup of tea. Hope and Anchor has a faintly religious sound, like it should be seaman’s mission, not a pub, and it does look a bit like a mission hut. I sat at one of the picnic benches outside, close to the river, drinking in the quiet. The sense of space is aural as much as visual. The Konik ponies over the river in the RSPB reserve are galloping in circles. The muffled crump of their hooves travels across the water and occasionally their heads briefly appear over the reeds. A robin regards me coolly from a post: do I exist only because observed by it? Aircraft pass obtrusively: a fighter jet and a couple of light aircraft. Small pieces of debris, no bigger than otters’ heads drift silently and sadly down to the sea, like they’re in disgrace. Even smaller ducks defy the current – the ones I can identify are widgeons. Everything is distant, at arm’s length: aircraft, traffic, rivers, hills. The hum of things unseen. The silence hollows out a space through which sounds pass. The water looks as deep as it is opaque. Hot chocolate water.

Leaving the pub, I notice a sign:

The management accepts no liability for any injury sustained while using the play area on these premises.

There is but a single swing frame, with no swings hanging from it.

 

A path through the reeds

 

Heading back towards Faxfleet, I meet a woman with two young children, the first people I have met while walking the embankment. They have with them a dog which barks at me. The woman says, she has never heard it bark before. It’s a baby and it has never barked before it met me. I’m taking photographs of the hawthorn bushes (thick with haws) and the yellow weeping willows.

About opposite where I left the car, I spot a well trodden path going down from the embankment and into the reeds. (Next to where I parked the car is a gate with a sign saying there’s no right of way: the space between the gate and the embankment, where there clearly is a right of way, is about four metres). The path is well trodden and well mudded. It snakes like one of the rills on the mudflats. I’m pleased to be among the reeds, which are taller than I am. The path forks and I briefly consider going back – afraid of losing my way in a labyrinth of treacherous muddy paths bounded by reeds; of sinking unseen into the grey mire. Massive washed up tree trunks are half buried beneath the reeds. The usual industrial estuary rubbish: industrial-sized plastic tubs formerly full of stuff you can’t buy in supermarkets; telegraph poles. And, eventually, the rivers.

The path leads right to the view I was looking for and unable to find from the embankment. It has obviously been made and maintained by birders, itching for a proper viewpoint over across the mudflats. Directly opposite is the mouth of the Trent and the pointed headland I’d wanted to stand on (it is mostly mud bounded by two boulder walls; not really land at all). To my right the Ouse and to my left the Humber. It was exhilarating to stand somewhere not officially sanctioned, where a wrong footstep might lead to a sticky end. A huge flock of waders swoops over the waters like Job’s storm; as far as I can tell they are mostly lapwings, with shelducks on the outside. There are small groups of shelducks on the mud. The flock is silent. Yellow light gleams on the rivers’ mucus membrane and echoes the ragged patches of sun snarling through the blue clouds. It’s only 2:40 in the afternoon, but feels like the gloaming. Uncanny spots of light shine brightly on a patch of mud not far away from me: broken glass, or just pools of water? Fairies?

Just as I was thinking that I hadn’t seen a single boat on the rivers, a converted barge came inching down the Trent at a snail’s pace. A guy is stood in the bow staring intently forward. I watched a TV documentary once about the Trent in which the presenter extolled the dangers of the confluence of Trent and Ouse. The water may be metres or centimetres deep and look much the same. The boat crept gingerly round the headland, did a standing turn and motored off at increased speed up the Ouse. Pleased with the end of my day, I also headed back up the Ouse to home.

Photo: © M Herring 2017

 

Walking and theodicy: Robin Hood’s Bay to Scarborough

Red cliffs, 2004, Matthew Herring, oil on board. © M Herring 2004

I have a favourite walk between Scarborough and Robin Hood’s bay, on the Yorkshire coast. It’s about fourteen miles, mostly along the cliffs. It’s a good walk for thinking, because you don’t have to worry about losing the way and it’s not so varied that it drags your thoughts constantly into different registers. It’s more or less of one substance from beginning to end. What variety there is tends to fit into a rhythm: high, undulating cliffs separated by deep ‘wykes’, or valleys. You have to walk down into them and then up again.

The cliffs, especially near Scarborough, are boulder clay. Their whole substance is heavy, unstable and fluid. If it has rained, then you labour through deep sticky mud and try not to slide down the cliff. You have a sense of the land slumping into the sea. Change is rapid: the land might have slipped away to leave a knife-edge of clay standing. Next time you visit, it will have gone. The mud is red.

Somehow, I think, the mud is like thought. Thoughts can trip along freely, but, if you are mulling something over, they can be heavy and viscous, like you are trying to shape clay in your mind. Or, the act of walking through the mud can be like thinking. The mud resists, sticks and causes you to slip. You make progress, but it presents always the same face; it is the same. It’s a distance to cover, but it’s more like wrestling. Reaching the destination is the end of the bout. And the mud remains: what form you have managed to impress onto it is just waiting for the next rain or heavy sea to change again. It’s always there the same.

I did the walk recently. When I reached Robin Hood’s Bay by bus to start the walk, it was raining steadily (pax the forecast). By the time I reached Boggle Hole there was a thunderstorm directly overhead, so I sheltered in the Youth Hostel cafe. I had no mind to be the tallest object on the top of a cliff in a thunderstorm. The thunder passed, but it rained torrentially after I set off again. By the time I was up on the cliffs again it had eased. There was clear sky above the horizon out to sea, but a smudge along the horizon meant another squall rolling in. You could see the mechanics of how they manoeuvred about: one out to sea and coming in; the thunderstorm now away off inland to the north-west; another slab of raincloud wheeling round over the high clifftop at Ravenscar ahead of me, to the south. They don’t come across in straight ranks, but jostle and wheel around each other, like giant cogs. You think you’re going to get soaked; then you don’t; then you think the next one’s going to miss you; then it catches you head on.

So it went. So much rain fell so quickly that the path was ankle deep in water and I gave up trying to step round it. The water roared as it escaped downhill in waterfalls hidden behind blackthorn and giant horsetails. It was the same colour as the wastewater from a washing machine, soapy and greasy. The rain filled my bum-bag up like a toilet cistern and the water trickled out all in one spot and soaked my backside. When the rainstorm I’d seen out to sea arrived, it was impossible to look into. Out to sea, you could see it as a blur. When it closed in, it enveloped you and it hurt your eyes to try to look into it, like staring into a grey angry sun. It made me aware of inhabiting myself like a set of Chinese boxes: me, my thought, my body, my coat, the squall, the world.

I’ve been reading the book of Job. I can see why God appears to Job in a storm. A storm somehow envelops you; cuts you off; locks you inside yourself, but also locks itself inside with you. It’s all around you, but you can’t look at it. It forces you to look at yourself. It is simultaneously everything, something and nothing. It can roar and whisper at the same time. It’s a bit like being hit by a juggernaut which turns to mist the moment it hits; like a falling dream.

I thought about Job as I walked along. I can’t get my head around what’s going on in it. It seems so full of paradoxes. God appears in the storm at the end of the discussion between Job and his friends, in response to Job’s request for an audience with God, but he doesn’t inject any new information into the discussion at all. Instead, he reiterates the one thing Job and his friends already agree on: that mortals can no more hold God to account than explain the natural world. The God who orders the cosmos is beyond human accountability. God says to Job: “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?”, but then later says that Job was right. However, lack of knowledge was a major aspect of Job’s problem in the first place: he didn’t understand why he had to suffer. Similarly, God says that Job’s friends are wrong about him, but a lot of what they say is correct. The friends tell Job that if he pleads with God and confesses his sin, God will restore him. In the end, Job does this and God does restore him. The narrator says that Job didn’t sin by “charging God with wrongdoing”. In the dialogue that follows, Job does exactly that: “Though I cry, ‘I’ve been wronged!’ I get no response”. A further problem resides in the pretext for Job’s affliction, namely the Accuser’s implication at the beginning of the book that God’s judgement of Job as a righteous man is faulty and that Job will curse God if pushed to it. Job has to vindicate God by his response to his suffering.

You can push it this way and that way, and it slips through your fingers. Things fail to connect and slip by each other. The sin Job appears to commit by his tirades against God isn’t sin that disqualifies him from vindicating God’s judgement of him as righteous (in contrast to the conventional piety of Job’s friends, who are required to present a sin offering to God at the end). God says that Job both lacks knowledge and is right, but without specifying the content of the missing or present knowledge; presumably they are different. Or does Job say what is right without knowing it’s right? God’s self revelation to Job as an almost amoral orchestrator of a tumultuous, chaotic nature (symbolised by the monsters Leviathan and Behemoth) slides past God’s initial accusation that Job lacks knowledge and seems to corroborate what Job has said about him all along. (Or is the accusation of lacking knowledge directed to the friends? Or does God have a twinkle in his eye? A genuine invitation to speech?) Job’s impiety wins him a slap down from God which is nevertheless the encounter with God he has longed for – a slap down which is anyway very ambiguously a slap down. The violent mood swings of the grieving Job somehow set off the whole push and pull that threatens the logical cohesion of the whole book.

I thought about all of this whilst being battered by rainstorms. By the time I reached Ravenscar the rain had stopped, but it was misty on the cliff top. The water was still ankle deep. Gradually it cleared and got out sunny. My bum dried (not my shoes).  At Hayburn Wyke, the water in Hayburn Beck was impressive and terrifying. In the last half of my walk I thought about a painting I’m working on, without resolving its problems.

Notes written while sat by the River Humber at Hull, 21 May 2016

[The following notes are fairly unedited from my notebook.]

 

Why do people stare into water? Watching families coming in and out of The Deep (an aquarium), they nearly all take a short detour to look over the railings into the churning grey-brown Humber. Surely, they’ve seen enough water in the aquarium, and now it’s time to go home, or to lunch, or on to the next attraction? Some take photos of themselves with the estuary behind. Excited children in pink cardigans and neat blue jeans; mothers in saris carrying bags and pushing pushchairs; couples in dry, clean clothes  all take a moment to cast a votive eye into the water. Next to their neatness and comfort, the water represents an obscene chaos. Bodies cosseted in comfortable, well-made clothes move from a warm, safe building across a safe car park and into comfortable, upholstered and enclosed auto-mobiles without a thought, save a few seconds’ glance into the water. A man-made world channels bodies comfortably about from one safety to another. It is strange to think how thin the barrier is between this human-friendly tunnel and a completely hostile other: just railings. The waters of the river would not respect the boundary of woven fabric with which we separate our inner from our outer, or public, selves: the turbulent waters would defile cotton and acrylic textiles alike and deposit silt from fields miles upriver into the wove.

 

The families peering over the railings into the river are a bit like the crowd at a Roman circus, watching gladiators slaying each other. A thin partition separates them from violence. On the one side comfort, ease, safety. On the other turbulence, chaos, strife, death. A thin barrier decides whether they are fighting for their lives or merely looking on. The choppy, boiling waves do look like battling souls, mired in their own gore. Endless, senseless war from some grim, apocalyptic fantasy computer game world.

 

People who you don’t necessarily think of as reflective – thoughtful – stare into water. Does water give permission to reflect/think/forget? Is staring at water like reflecting – staring into yourself? You are water, so staring into water is staring into yourself. Or is staring into water a surrogate for reflection; an avoidance? A mere resting of the eyes? Permission for the brain to rest a short while? (People will stare at a TV, if there is one switched on in the room, no matter what crap is on it. But TV is also a flow). A yearning for formlessness?

 

Why do we talk about a ‘body’ of water? Body-as-mass; body-as-extent; body-as-expanse. A body has form (read ‘limits’). A body of water has limits and form: a lake, a sea, etc. Mass without limits wouldn’t be a body. Infinite water wouldn’t be a body – it needs limits. But water’s principle is limitlessness. We stare into water because it could be limitless; it represents limitlessness. Water is limitless, because water usually flows into other water; into all water. Your brain is water. Thought is water. Clogged, dead thoughts are ‘Lehm’ (earth, loam) in a quote I like from All Quiet on the Western Front. Thought is fluid. What does it feel like to think? Isn’t it like a kind of flow, like water flowing over/through you?

 

Water and air are both elements that we can’t enter without some special contrivance or effort. We can’t go into the air without some kind of aircraft, and we can’t go over water without a boat, or by swimming (most of us can’t swim very far). So staring into air or water represents a yearning for where we can’t go. When we stand on the edge of the land we have reached the limit of where we can go. So water reminds us of our limits. It is infinite, we are not. We long to enter its eternal flow.

 

Estuary water is thick like blood. Impure. Something between earth and water. Staring out across the estuary is like staring across a rolling, moving field; like geology speeded up. Estuary water has taken up earth and also taken on some of its sluggishness. The estuary is like a field you can’t walk across. Distances and scale are deceptive. A small boat is lost amongst the choppy brown waves; waves which look like furrows. Words flow like estuary water, sluggish with the silt of meanings. The estuary resembles drying concrete.

 

Silver reflections are deceptive. Knife-like shards of silver rake like stilettos over the water. (Light hitting parts of the river where the current has surfaced to render the water flat, I suppose). Shadows, of clouds obviously, move like shadows of bears’ claws. Where the sun really catches the water and is reflected back through some depth, the water glows gold like tea. Reflective water pretends that it isn’t there, or that it is something else: light, silver, concrete, steel, mercury, flesh, whatever. Solid or immaterial, its mood changes. But the mood-changes are those of the sky. The water itself is dead. The light playing on the surface of the water is like a living face projected onto the dead face of a corpse, animating it deceptively. The light dances over it, seeming to change it, but the water is unchanged, travelling in the same headlong direction like the combined souls of the dead sleepwalking to Hades. (The waves do indeed look like individual souls rushing along, at the double. Thousands of grey heads bobbing and ducking). The point about water is that it is always the same.

 

The oil refineries around Immingham, on the other side of the estuary, look like a child has been sticking canes into the sand dunes, all at different heights and spaced in clusters and individually. The chimneys, I mean. They look like pea sticks in an allotment. Another simile that comes into my mind is that of strange fungal structures – fruiting bodies firing spores into the atmosphere, polluting the air with life. Refining oil is all about taking something from the ground which is the product of decay and transmuting it into a multitude of products, from plastics to spirits and gases. Some of the products of that process are vented into the sky as waste.

Walk along the river Aire (Airmyn to Rawcliffe) 27 August 2015

A landscape picture is composed on the vertical. The view is through a vertical ‘window’. From top to bottom it consists of foreground, middleground, background and sky, all stacked on top of one another. In reality, the clouds which are ‘above’ the hills in background of your picture are miles beyond them, and the hills are beyond the lower hills in the middleground. Look at them on a map to see how skewed your picture is. A good landscape picture gives you some indication of landscape as horizontal extension and as temporal extension; it leads your eye into the distance, and into the past or future. However, it also compresses distance and time, bringing the distant and the past/future closer to the plane of the picture. (In paintings made before photography led to the triumph of the idea of the picture as instantaneous – as temporally ‘thin’ – scenes separated in space have less the impression of taking place simultaneously. Look at the approaching guards in the backgrounds of Bellini’s and Mantegna’s related paintings of the Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery. The events could be simultaneous – Jesus praying as the guards approach – but it is hard to read it that way and the approaching guards point anyway towards the future arrest of Jesus).

You can rarely imagine walking very far in landscape paintings, even when the background is distant, though there are exceptions, such as Ruben’s painting of his home Het Steen, also in the National Gallery. This might be because background, middleground and foreground are presented as discrete ‘things’ juxtaposed in space (like objects in a still-life), rather than as parts of a single extension (unlike in Rubens’ Het Steen painting). Distant mountains are imagined as like scenery at the back of a stage, and the receding space behind the picture-plane as possessing the same sort of depth and proportion as a stage. The horizontal is what is denied by the vertical picture, what is squeezed and squashed out by this foreshortening. Looking at maps and going on a walk bring back the horizontal, which is the real essence of landscape, and time.

Maps are pictures of landscape that stress the horizontal. Maps are pictures of landscapes you could walk across. Maps express height as contour lines and hachures, but it is essentially landscape as surface. Maps bring time into landscape, because they depict land as you would cross it. A walk is an experience that unfolds over time. It is about the horizontal landscape; about land. The experience of walking is quintessentially the experience of covering distance. Views come and go. Exceptional views you might stop to take in, but the walk’s content is as much the boring stretches as the interesting. The unfolding experience is one of distance and time, but the attitude of walking for the sake of views tempers your memory of a walk. Covering distance is hard work, which wearies the feet and dulls the mind, but this aspect is the quickest to be forgotten. A walk is taken as much in the feet and the mind, but memory selects the views, or certain views, and files them away as indicative of the walk. Memory turns the walk into pictures, as it does with life and time in general. Recovering the walk as it unfolds is possible through a different attitude to walking and a different kind of recollection.

Certain walks are boring, and these boring walks can approach the condition of the ‘pure’ walk, devoid of any content except walking and distance themselves. The pleasure in these sorts of walks is that of experiencing with the feet a distance that would otherwise be an abstract quantity viewed on a map. Instead of looking back at the outstanding views of the walk, you look back at the distance covered, as anticipated and recollected via the map. From this point on the map to this point. These walks make sense only with maps. Their drama and incidence are only visible on maps. The appeal of a walk from the mouth of the Aire, where it joins the Ouse, upriver is the dramatic shapes made by that river as it snakes and hooks. It is also somewhat arbitrary and somewhat symbolic. On the ground the drama is often disappointing: invisible. Even the dramatic meeting of the two rivers – the promise of being able to stand on the very tip of the cusp of land created by the acute angle of the rivers and look across to the opposite cusp created by the sharp bend in the Ouse at Asselby Island – is denied, because the river bank at this useless point, beyond the flood banks, is an impenetrable thicket of willows, policeman’s helmets, nettles and rubbish. But this is as it should be, because this is a perverse walk and the land itself, open and intelligible on the map, is allowed to be perverse. It is allowed to hide in the bushes and stick its arse out at you. On the ground are the real facts.

(A footprint in the mud at the start of a barely visible path led me to venture into the thicket, but I couldn’t get ‘the view’ and I got lost trying to retrace my way. I had to stamp down policeman’s helmets stems and walk over nettles and dead branches, uncertain where the wildly uneven ground was below my feet; a feeling like walking on water, or air. I worried that I was going to come across a corpse decomposing forgotten in its rotten clothes in one of the hollows).

I wanted to walk up the river Aire from Airmyn (where it joins the Ouse) back up towards where it is crossed by the East Coast Main Line, from where I have seen it from the train. From the train it zig zags nicely between flood banks (a picture!) I didn’t get anywhere near that far, because I didn’t bother to measure on the map how far it was with all the meanderings and because I lost my glasses and decided to turn back for them. I was also defeated by the boringness of pure distance; by the lack of a sense of progression. The defeat felt as ignominious as the loss of my glasses, which I didn’t find.

I got some way past Rawcliffe (which was once bigger than Goole, so a sign said). I didn’t have the will to go as far as Eskamhorn (site of the second ferry in the Rawcliffe area), even though its name appealed to me. Boring land, but the trick is to unpick it. The land has the same non-quality as a supermarket car park: the same drive of absolute utilitarianism in agriculture as in retail spaces obliterating any trace of the particular as irrelevant. The most charismatic features are all engineered ones: motorway viaducts, wind turbines, power stations, swing-bridges. The land itself is a blank; a car park for crops. Only the river itself has retained some of its archaic and forgotten horror, but you have to stand on the very edge to appreciate it.

The river is the most striking feature on the map, a serpent coiling across the land. From the ground, anywhere except close up, it disappears into its own hollow and becomes yet another evacuated feature in a utilitarian landscape, unremarkable and overlooked. Close up you appreciate the brute, obscene physical force of the thing: the coils on the map suggest not lazy meanders but writhing body, and the fast-flowing dense brown water surges with the power of viscous life blood forced along by a beating heart – the life blood of time and history. There is something breathtakingly brutal about the sheer efficiency and austerity of the river as machine, or as body. The ten feet or so of featureless muddy bank, presumably marking the normal range of its tidal flood (it must be impressive when in flood), are as ruthlessly purged as the cylinders of an engine, or a motorway hard-shoulder. The river permits no pity or special-pleading. The mud is like lubricant, or a mucus lining, speeding the flow and at the same time forming itself from the river’s substance. In the same way that an engine abrades itself and accumulates as tiny fragments of metal in its own lubricating oil, so the river carries and reforms its own gut: hardness yields to softness and brute force. Standing on the edge it is hard not to imagine slipping down into the water. You would never stop yourself from slithering down the muddy bank, a dead-weight of body with nothing to grasp but ooze, and no chance of getting back out as the current sucked you under. It makes you feel like a body, a weight; the weight that would pull you down if your foot slipped. The eye and mind can skip free of gravity, but the body is dead weight at the end of the day.

I ended my walk underneath the M62 bridge over the Ouse. Walking under the carriageway between the vast concrete pillars is like walking up the nave of some strange temple: York Minster, Stonehenge and an Egyptian temple all rolled into one, but with sides open to the light and views across golden wheat fields. The quality of sound – the muffled and distorted sound of the traffic above – is also the disorientating acoustic of a sacred space. The sense of space is exhilarating. At the end of the profane concrete sacred grove is a scummy polluted stream full of rubbish and beyond it a concrete slope covered in graffiti resembling the sacred rock paintings of some aboriginal tribe. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see bones placed in crevices where the slope meets the underside of the carriageway, or to find the remains of a sacrifice. It was a space for reverie after the dullness of the river; mineral lightness and loftiness to counter liquid heaviness.

Walk, Poppleton to Ouse/Nidd confluence, along the Ouse.

The flat countryside of England seems to be a land bleached of meaning, spent and exhausted of place. The discreteness of place is provided on a mico-level by the varied textures and abrupt juxtapositions of plants and by the ankle-deep undulations of the path itself as it sinks and rises over the bones and fallen flesh of soil turned over by hands and machines over millennia – as if the soil itself were the bodies of soldiers fallen in the battles of centuries and folded over and over again and again then forgotten. The space underneath a fallen over clump of tansy: the bitter taste and sharp smell of a dark green shade – shade for the metallic green of a tansy beetle’s shell to shine from. Pale poppies by the side of the path for a short while, shedding petals like shields or banners, and then no more of them. A row of last years giant hogweeds stand like scarecrows with mad arms and mad heads of seeds and holding withered leaves like rotten handkerchiefs. How satisfying it would be to rush at them with a cavalry sabre and slash the hollow dry stems down! Varied patches of creeping thistles, butterbur and nettles. Meadow cranesbill (only one).

Smells mark places, too. Sickening policeman’s helmets give over to pineapple weed (before four wet and large dogs fuss me and dispel it – or did the dogs’ feet crush the pineapple weed and release the smell in the first place?) Sudden smell of wood smoke (that cliché). Is the boundary between policeman’s helmets and pineapple weed there for everyone who passes by, like a contrived water trick in a renaissance garden, or just for me, a gift of chance eddies of the wind at a particular moment? Or a figment of my imagination? The woman whose dogs fussed at me evaporated like a volatile oil and vanished from existence the moment I got out of earshot of her calls to her dogs (calls which, for a while, I misinterpreted as calls to children, as I forgot about the dogs).

Going the wrong way.

It is amazing that plants can still quietly grow up and bar our way, mould our world as much as we mould theirs; limit our paths. Abandon a path for a year and up come policeman’s helmets, hogweed, willow herbs as tall as a man, and you have to go round. This time, however, I took the wrong path worn through the rank grass meadow and ended up the wrong side of a plantation of willow; the real path was still there.

Loosing yourself in a walk

The more you walk the more you go into yourself. It becomes about covering a distance then emerging, or surfacing like a submarine. I don’t want to sketch, because I want to reach the confluence of the Nidd with the Ouse. I want to cover that distance. On the way I know I may not be there, because my thoughts will absorb all of my attention. I might think about a conversation I had with somebody years ago, or might have had, and which came into my mind for who knows what reason and for the first time in who knows how long. The mind turns itself over like the soil and the bits and bobs of a past self and moment come up to the surface again, to be picked over then discarded. Aching limbs and a hint of a headache aid this process – as does a flat land. Today, though, I’m a bit more alert to notice things and I manage to wring some thoughts out of the fabric of my brain which might be useful when I get home, if I write them down and don’t forget about them. Or I might get home and decide they are a load of crap: the last sour water squeezed out of my spent mind.

A group of walkers ahead of me, which thankfully vanishes off somewhere, between the tansies and the ash trees, before I catch up with it, gabbles like a flock of geese. The bigger the group the more everybody gabbles and renders even the most spectacular walk banal. It brings to mind the group of elderly tourists from New York state I encountered at Megiddo, who all talked incessantly and at the same time, jaws going with mechanical regularity, and the lady with Lucozade-orange candyfloss hair who I had to lend an arm to climbing back down the slope from the archaeological site, who talked at me about her friends as if I knew them all – a monologue that had simply continued from before I came into her orbit, which was aimed at nobody, and which suggested that she noticed not at all that the person by her side was no longer one of her party of geriatric Olympic talkers. The only snatch of it I can remember was about somebody not having brought their rain coat. I imagine myself telling this story to somebody.

‘Land’ is a terrible word. What is fought over. ‘The Land’. Our land. Romanians call Romania ‘Ţara’ – the land, Blighty. Tristan Tzara was a pun: triste în ţara (sad in Romania; sad in the land). Land is stuff, quantity not place, earth.

I sit by the river near the end of my walk. The river is mysterious. I try to think of what to liken the peaty tea-coloured water to. It is all surface. Guinness. Black rippled glass. Wrinkled bitumen paint. Ink. Ink – it is like a river of black ink. It is actually black. Or, with the reflections, black and white. When the sun comes back out it changes subtly into the brown of bitumen. But water can be any colour. Sitting here it is truly like ink – I can easily kid myself into thinking that it actually is black ink flowing towards York. Am I real? If I walk into the river, I will wake up at home out of a reverie I was momentarily having while sharpening a pencil over the bin. The river is a river of thought.

Flat landscape is something to travel across, but there are different ways to travel.