Walking after the Crossing England Exhibition: a more focused approach
After my Crossing England (2016) show, I resumed walking to find that, rather than the walks informing the studio activities, this had now become a two-way process, with the new walks equally informed by previous activities within studio. Throughout the summer of 2016, I made more walks on my route between Cambridge and Plymouth. As this was the third summer of walking for this project, I anticipated that the walks would continue to unfold in a similar vein to previous summers, noting and absorbing a mass of information in different kinds of landscape, followed by a period of retrospectively ‘sorting the wheat from the chaff’.
It did not turn out this way. There was more wheat, less chaff. As a result, there were minor shifts in my walking methodology. While I continued to keep my walking blog, I found myself less concerned with recording the minutiae of each walk, for a lot of detail seemed irrelevant, now that I had identified the themes I wanted to use for my making-practice. It was the interweaving storylines that I now tracked across the landscape. Tropes and motifs that I had developed, from studio to exhibition, were now jumping out at me with every step I took. After phases of writing, and of making work in the studio, my exploration of the
landscape felt more focused; I never knew what I was seeking, but I was much better at recognising it when I found it. I collected more red and white soil, and some rusty hinges that brought to mind my folding paintings.
Instead of edgeland, I more often found myself walking from village to village on paths between open fields and woodland. I noted new rhythms. Rather than wheelie bins and fence posts, I noted trees; Ash (often by a spring), Beech, Holly, Oak, Yew (always in a graveyard),
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Ivy (everywhere). Diedre Heddon reports how, when she worked with director and dramaturge Dorinda Hulton, Hulton found:
Leaving the spinney was like a semi-colon, crossing a ditch like a comma, standing around the little tree at the end of the piece was like a dot dot dot… (Hulton in Heddon
During the sentences of my walks, I started to understand the logic of Robert Graves’ theory of how trees once formed an alphabet: the Ogham. Graves’ elaboration of the Ogham as a
‘genuine relic of Druidism orally transmitted down the centuries’ (Graves, 1961: 165) is now largely discredited as poetic whimsy. However, as I strolled through those woods, I began to understand how his intuitive invention could have come about.
When walking between villages it is the spire or tower of the local church that reassures that we have taken the right path. Guided across the terrain by these landmarks, the village church became my primary destination in each new village. I noted that many churches by water were dedicated to Mary (Virgin or Magdalene). Some church doors were locked, some were open. I lit a candle in every church that was open; I am not a Christian, and had never
previously felt at license, nor any inclination, to do this, but now I did. The candles I lit were to illuminate the passages and paths between spaces and times, and had nothing to do with god or religion.
During this period I continued to revisit significant sites, widening my geographic knowledge of the areas around terrain already explored, and also reaffirming, as Roberta Mock describes it, ‘the bonding of thickly laid temporal dimensions through embodiment’ ( 2010: 8). Several sites played particularly in my mind; two of these were sites of excavation, for different minerals, on an industrial scale.
191 Return to the Spinney and the Chalk Pits
I returned several times to Lime Kiln Hill, the site of the Spinney and the chalk pits, a quarter of a mile from my parents’ house, at the back of my old school playing fields, on the
threshold of Cherry Hinton, now a Cambridge suburb. My research had exposed this site to be a repository of some of my most intense childhood and teenage memories. Once a brooding, menacing, enclosed space, it has now been cleaned up and made accessible as a nature reserve. In 1910 Edward Conybeare wrote of this site:
The great quarry [...] is a conspicuous object on the hill-side above the village; and above that again, equally conspicuous is the reservoir of the Cambridge water-works, looking like a redoubt, on the summit of the slope. At the foot clear springs break out from the chalk, which are also utilised to supply the town. (Conybeare, 1910: 208) I visited this spring, over the busy main road from the Spinney entrance, five minutes walk from my old school gates; we had played there as children and I remember it being full of rubbish. The spring is called Giant’s Grave, a strange name for a spring.
I read more about the chalk pits including Alexandra Pickstone and Richard Mortimer’s account of their 2009 archaeological survey of Lime Kilne Hill, (which is, in fact, no longer a hill, but the chalk spine of an ascending road, quarried away to sharp cliffs on either side).
Reading the survey, I discovered that before it had become a quarry, it was a site of notable archaeological interest:
War Ditches is a large enclosure, lying on a spur of the Gog Magog hills to the south of Cambridge. Much of this originally circular monument was destroyed by chalk quarrying in the late19th to mid 20th centuries, during which time a series of excavations was conducted, largely under the auspices of Cambridge Antiquarian Society. Had the monument survived intact, it would undoubtedly have acquired scheduled status as one of the county’s key prehistoric monuments. (Pickstone &
Mortimer, n.d.)
I was amazed that I had never known this before. The survey contained other fascinating information:
During the summer of 2008 children playing within the East Pit, Cherry Hinton (Fig.
1, TL 484 555) discovered the legs and feet of a human burial, along with animal
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bones and Romano-British pottery, high up in the south-eastern corner of the quarry.
(Pickstone & Mortimer, n.d.)
This reminded me of my time playing in this forbidden place, and how terrifying I had found it, but I had never found human bones.
I read more about War Ditches (I had never known it by that name) in Conybeare’s Highways and Byways in Cambridgeshire and Ely (1910). He describes a fortified, pre-Roman
earthwork next to the reservoir on top of Lime Kiln Hill, that was excavated by a Professor Hughes. Conybeare writes of Hughes’ excavation:
At the bottom of the fosse he discovered rough British pottery along with the bones of domestic animals, and above these a layer of disjointed human skeletons of both sexes and all ages, apparently due to a general massacre, in some pre-historic struggle, of men, women and children, whose corpses were hurled over the parapet. (Conybeare, 1910)
Pickstone and Mortimer report one more intriguing detail about early excavation of the site in 1854, a detail that was originally published in the Cambridge Chronicle at the time:
They reported the discovery of up to nine skeletons and noted that “several of them were of large size, and were evidently the remains of men who reached to a greater height than ordinary men in the present day”. (Pickstone and Mortimer, 2009)
Return to the Wolfram Tungsten Mine, Sparkwell
In Devon I returned to the Wolfram Tungsten mine near Sparkwell on the edge of Dartmoor.
I saw a wild stag running away from the place I had found the hind leg of a deer hanging on a barbed wire fence three years before; the rest of its bones picked clean on the floor
below. This time, I scrabbled around in the undergrowth, trying to find the bones, thinking that maybe I could integrate them into my artwork, but with no luck; they had either returned
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to the earth, or been carried away by animals. So I spent the afternoon picking sheep’s wool and horse hair off the barbed wire fences to take back to my studio.
I discovered a previously unexplored area, Drakelands, to the East of the established tungsten mine, which had been earmarked by the mining company Wolfram for expansion. This zone was a Devon valley with a small stream, mature oaks, rowan and apple trees and more wild stags. There were several recently abandoned, boarded up houses with overgrowing gardens and private security signs on the gates. With the constant hum of the active tungsten mine in the background, the doomed valley had a strange and mournful ambiance. It was here that I caught my own knee while climbing a barbed wire fence, and watched the bright blood run down my leg like a red, painted road in one of my paintings. I promised to return to the site with a camera; to document it before everything was gone forever, and this I did, six months later.
Figure 6.1: Wolf Minerals sign in the abandoned village of Drakelands, near Plymouth (2016).
Return to Rouses Wood, near Royston
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Another place I returned to was a friend’s woodland not far from the Ickneild Way called Rouses Wood at Shingay cum Wendy nearRoyston; this land that once belonged to the Knights Templar. It was here that family of white deer had lived, before being shot, one by one, by the neighbouring landowner. I never saw the white deer, but my friend and his family had had several encounters with them, and it was after hearing their stories that I had stalked images of the White Hart up Royston High Street in the form of street signs. This time, my friend handed me a carrier bag of large, white bones. They were bones (he said) from a white stag that had lived in Rouses Wood. He had had them for a number of years, and now they were mine. They were not only beautiful and enigmatic, but felt good in the hand, and made a musical sound when knocked together. The fact that I had never seen the white deer did not bother me, for that made it the stuff of myth. The fact that I had no proof the bones were actually from a white hart was also irrelevant, for such is the way with all relics.
The vehicular drift
Fiona Wilkie (2014) notes the complicated and paradoxical relationships that many artists have with their cars when she describes it as ‘caught in the contradiction between the promises and pleasures of automobility and the unsustainable, environmentally offensive machine of the automobile’ (2014: 89). I now had to drive at least an hour and a half from my home in Plymouth, or from my childhood home in Cambridge, to access previously unwalked stretches of the route. A project that was born from a desire to escape the tyranny of the car had become increasingly reliant on it. This left me feeling curiously untethered from either end of the route. Time and money always a pressure, I tried to use trips that I needed to make anyway – such as visiting friends or family, in Somerset and Wiltshire – to explore new parts of my journey. The way I used the car changed; I took the motorway less, exploring minor
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roads so that I could reconnoitre for future walks. I noted that the intuitive navigational skills that had been activated through walking were now at play during these car explorations. My car journeys were longer, but more engaged, I lost my anxiety about getting lost, and would deliberately veer off the road, enjoying winding slowly around empty lanes on hot days, noting place names and landmarks, finding places to walk, until finally I would be spat out onto a major artery to join the rush of traffic once more. The car dérive had become an important part of my process.
Simon O’Sullivan suggests that
…digital imaging and editing technology means that there is now the possibility of a more accelerated mixing of different temporal and spatial worlds and, as such, of increasing this density – and, with it, producing ever stranger spatialities and temporalities. (O’Sullivan, 2015:6)
Rather than (or as well as) digital technology, the use of the car as a tool for the dérive achieved the same purpose. Instead of tethering me to the Newtonian grid, the car now functioned as a machine to collapse time and space, giving me the ability to pop up anywhere on my route at any time, walking in different directions, picking up, dropping, crossing, splicing and accelerating separate storylines. The effect was the same as that described by O’Sullivan, allowing: ‘the introduction of a different character (or a different speed) into a different scene that has its own duration, or, indeed, the insertion of one scene into
another’(2015: 6).
Red and White water
In a small town in Somerset I was excited to discover, quite by chance, water gushing from walls either side of a narrow lane. The water issued from two distinct sources; a red spring on
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the left of the path, and a white spring on the right. The two waters are visibly different from each other. Each water has its own taste and the waters of the two springs are celebrated locally with a knotted tangle of Christian and Pagan tales. They are collected at source for their libatious and their ablutive qualities. Not only did I feel compelled to immerse myself in the waters at the site (it was a hot day), but in the same way that I had collected the red and white soil, I collected the red and white water, took it home and drank it, a sip from each bottle every day. The duality of red and white now not only flowed as a theme through my walking and studio practices, but took on an embodied nature, as water flowing over and through my own body.