Where we went part one: woods dark and deep(ish)

 

 

On Friday as we traveled North-West, the rains came and did not let up. Our plan to camp near Loch Fyne had to be abandoned, but we decided to have a day out anyway. We went into Cruchan, the hollow mountain – a hydroelectric scheme that was built inside Ben Cruchan in the nineteen fifties. Sadly, no photos from there as since 9/11, there has been some reluctance to let people take photographs inside working power plants. Suffice to say – the tour left lots unseen, and what was shown looked very much like a Bond villain’s lair.

 

 

 

 

But beyond that was Inveraray, a small touristy village that would be in good scenery if the mist had not closed in a little and the colours muted.Though the odd splatter of bloom provided colour against the whitewashed houses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, some places look better in the lashing rain. Textures stand out. There are fewer tourists, and the woods stand waiting.

 

 

 

 

We headed for a garden on the far shore of Loch Fyne that A had visited a year before, Ardkinglas. There was no one in the kiosk on the way in, nor anyone in the garden but us the entire time.

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful place, managed but not manicured, full of rhododendron blossoms hanging like powder puffs, and moss and yellow- leaved skunk cabbage (which, D informed A and I, does indeed smell of skunk), a river, old stumps grown over with lichens – all hazed over, all damp and tentative in the late spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this small respite from the rain, a hut full of poems and snippets about trees:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And further along the trail, the tallest tree in the UK, at about 64m in height:

 

 

 

 

and the widest tree in Europe:

 

 

both Firs of some sort, and just sort of there, standing stoic. Us the only witnesses.

 

I’ll leave you with one last picture of a fairy-like pool, with an odd looking tree in the middle of it. It sums up the mood of Ardkinglas quite well I think. A place to be read on a rainy day. A place hat can bear the weight of a thousand glances and still have something more to hint at below the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed on Friday night at A’s flat, in a lot more comfort than we would have been had we tried to set up camp in the downpour.  We spiked out all hopeful the next day to the East Coast. Tomorrow, I’ll post pictures here of our second adventure of the weekend – and a completely different landscape.

Two stories

 

 

D and I have returned from our adventures. As you can see, the weather was – variable. However, this is just a taster for tomorrow, as I have to go through several hundred photos tonight. You’ll have to wait to find out the full story – a picture does not always tell so much as tantalise.

 

Some other news – sadly, I didn’t get selected for Black Balloon Press’ Horatio Nelson Prize, so no tour of the US in an eyepatch. I do hope for further luck for Kilea. And I look forward to seeing who wins.

The cool air between the pines

 

D, A and I went walking this weekend in the woods of Chatelherot, close to where A lives. These were the old hunting grounds of the Lords (and perhaps ladies?) of Hamilton – the woods were kept and cultivated as an environment for deer and foxes.

 

Pictures of the forest, calming on a Monday. Take a deep breath, imagine the creaking of the branches. The flittering sounds in the leaves and red flash of robins. The streaming sunlight turning to washed-out white as the clouds are blown overhead. Here to the right is oak and beech:

 

 

 

Some of the oaks have been dated to the 1460s, when the parklands were planted, though the mounds around these wood monsters were shaped by iron age hands. Modern hands had tied a yellow ribbon round the branch of the tree below. And a millennial has been included for scale:

 

 

Sometime around the Second World War, Norwegian pines were planted – the giveaway is how all the trees in certain parts of the forest are around sixty to seventy years old and planted in straight lines:

 

 

 

We walked the eight kilometer trail which rises and falls, crosses the Green bridge over the river Avon, and climbs up to the rim of the valley, before returning to Chatelherot itself – a grand frontage which overlooks Hamilton, and which despite appearances, was never more than kennels for the hounds and a dining room and chambers for the hunting party.

 

 

 

The sunlight was high and the sky was blue and dashed with white cloud. It is almost Spring, it says – the 18th century buildings, the green short grass, the families out walking, the children rolling down hill, shrieking happily. Or if no Spring comes this year, it is promising something else. A good Summer, perhaps. A chance at a pause. Saying, wait. Look. Breathe in and out.

 

A good walk in a dark and light place. The smell of pines and a sheep farm. The steady, strangeness of ancient trees. A long field rolling out towards the townships.

 

Views of a cold city – a giveaway

 

 

 

A cold blue-dark, a glittering, hazed transformation of black stone. A stalled whirlwind, a battered roof, snow in the distance.

 

I’ve decided to hold another giveaway here, to mark the ending of 2012 and the promise of a new year. You might remember the giveaway I held at the beginning of this year which was for a booklet of pictures and some other goodies from Scotland. For this giveaway I’d like to set you a challenge:

 

I’m asking for the best photograph on the theme of PLACE.

 

A sense of place as obsession

as identity

as an extension of the body

as something to react against

as mood altering vision, as sense memory, as psychogeography

 

This could be your neighbourhood, your favourite chair (as we saw in the Share Your Spaces posts earlier this year), a mountain or a wood you love exploring, the texture of stone, a tattoo, the interior of a bookshop you frequently haunt – anything that speaks to you on that broad theme. Feel free to write a short explanation of how this image is meaningful to you.

 

The winning picture will be posted here, with links to the winner’s blog if they have one.

 

The winner will receive a small framed print of their choosing from any of my photos posted on this blog  – I have taken a lot this year, so hopefully there’s one that takes your fancy. Have a look through the archives! It’ ll also probably reveal a bit about my aesthetic biases.

 

AND ALSO a book from my creaking shelves – this will be a secret, but I have a lot of good reads to choose from and will pick based on what I think you (the winner) would like. Now, I’d love to be able to give away my own novel at this point, but since it’s not published yet, that will have to wait. One day, I hope.

 

FURTHER GOODIES will be picked up from the fine City of Edinburgh as the mood takes me. Here’s what I sent Artboy68 when he won.

 

Send your photo entries on PLACE to: wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com by the 31st of December. Please forward this to any friends who might be interested in taking part.

 

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

 

Driving over the mountain

 

This shot taken by complete accident around eight o’ clock while A was driving us out of Ullapool, a village near to the bothy at Badrallach. And by near, I mean about 17 miles or so. This is mountain, field, moor and sea loch country. All that yellow you see is gorse bush, giving off its perfume of coconut to no one at all, and no bees right now. Perhaps little speck flies pollinate it, I don’t know.

 

I come back to the shot, and think of how it seems so much like my writing mind at times. A delicate blur of some grand scene. Right now, I’m working on a review of Reality, Reality, a collection of short stories by Jackie Kay, and thinking, because she is a Scot and mixed race, about race in Scotland, and trying not to make the review about that at all, because Jackie Kay is Jackie Kay, herself utterly, and a lovely writer.

 

So the review is blurry, because things need to be said to an international audience, that Scotland contains more than the image you can hold in your head of it.  Tartan and pipers and whisky and medieval men, pasty and freckly, in kilts. Or that film, Brave, which makes me put my head in my hands. That alluring, tourist-consumable image. Much more it is, and still becoming.

 

The landscape wooshes by, and now you are in the empty Highlands, but you might not know why exactly they are so empty - The Clearances, for one, as I like to mention here, and other socio-economic reasons I have not begun to contemplate. Woosh, and now you driving by a skiing town built up in the sixties and seventies and only less than hideously ugly when the snow is lying, as if it were designed that way. And then you are stuck in slow traffic on a bridge across a firth (an estuary), looking over at that icon of the railway, star of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and then the sun is shining and warm for once, so you go outside to a beer garden and listen to the crack of summer, a chick inside an egg beaking out and cheeping. Then you are in your house, tapping at the internet, sipping  more and more tea, trying to bring it all together.

 

This is the job of a writer in small countries and large. Bringing the moment together, or the whole nation, or some crumbly part of it, holding up to critique or make shimmering. And my eyes are blurry, and I need more time. And right now my mind is elsewhere, stitching at the world of grief and love in New Mexican mountains. Or it will be soon, when my head stops swinging.

Oban: Brilliance, Folly, and Moss

Oban Harbour, looking out towards the island of Kerrera, from the ferry bound for the isle of Mull (the snowy mountains beyond)

D and I are back from Oban, where we spent a delightful Thursday night to Saturday morning.  In the Friday pictures, there is a tinge of the delicate, low sun that never exceeded a forty-five degree angle above the earth. The waters of the bay were glassy and shallow, and the weather dry: this state of affairs is highly unusual, being that Oban is on the West Coast of Scotland, where the rain spends a good deal of its time (though I gather it counts permanent residence on the really big green island next door) pattering the soil, eating away at the cliffs, and making sure the woodlands and any feasibly-situated permanent human structures have a good coating of moss to them.

Below is a taste of the town, which wraps around the horseshoe bay, and tucks itself  amongst some smaller hills. The structure at the top of the hill in view is McCaig’s Tower, or McCaig’s Folly, built around 1900 by a ‘essayist, philanthropist and banker’ as it says on the plaque on the walls of it. Mr John Stuart McCaig, wealthy narcissist, planned the design himself, but got a little ahead of himself.

Towards part of downtown Oban from the middle of three piers.

A panorama taken from the folly, stitched together with the aid of MS paint.

A closer view, approached from behind the town

From Wikipedia: “McCaig’s intention was to provide a lasting monument to his family, and provide work for the local stonemasons during the winter months. McCaig was an admirer of Roman and Greek Architecture, and had planned for an elaborate structure, based on the Colosseum in Rome. His plans allowed for a museum and art gallery with a central tower to be incorporated. Inside the central tower he planned to commission statues of himself, his siblings and their parents. His death brought an end to construction with only the outer walls completed.”

In one of his wills, McCaig tried to set up the tower as a charitable place, on the grounds that it would be leased to the stone artists who were making the statues of himself and his family meant to adorn it.  But ah – “In a landmark ruling the Court of Session decided that the tower was not a charity as it was self-advertisement and not in the general public good.” So the town has this quite lovely monument to vanity, half built, sitting like a crown on top of its head.

After puffing up the hill, we walked down and through the town – too many photos to put up here – and later went to the island of Mull, but not until 4pm since we had missed the previous ferry at 12pm.  Some things might do to be planned for, but we were happy just to take things with a slow spontaneity. All we had was the journey out to the island, there and back again – since the buses that were supposed to take us around the island inexplicably would not return for the 7pm ferry.  Never mind, it was one of the most beautiful ferry rides I’ve ever taken. I did do them regularly once upon a time, between the isle of Skye and the mainland.  That was more gloomy than not, with the sight of the crumbling Castle Moil to greet you on the way home.

The route to Mull passes not one but two castles, one on the mainland who has made good acquaintance with the rain:

The jauntily named Dunollie Castle

And another that seems an outpost in a bleak world:

...the far more appropriately named Duart Castle, on Mull

The crossing was calm, but we were told by a chatty fellow passenger that in bad weather the shallows around the islands – which even on that day were making little white horses to indicate their presence – can produce large breakers and make the going rough.

Hence the need for lighthouses and buoys where the rocks jut out.

Despite the lack of time to go adventuring on Mull, and the awful weather of the following day that sent us home on the train early, it was without doubt, worth the journey.

From the ferry, looking back to the mainland

That ghostly pink peak is Ben Nevis, Ben Cruachan (thanks for the correction Stramash!) known as the Hollow Mountain because there’s a hydroelectric power station inside of it (one that can be toured, and I do intend to do this some time). Lastly, for now, a picture from the train southwards:

Mountains near Loch Awe

D read law, and I snapped what I could of the rain-blurred scenery, in between reading something I picked up for the ride. I had at last reached my self set two week deadline with Smollett – more of him later – and begun on what seemed an appropriate novel for a passage from Highlands to Lowlands, And The Land Lay Still, by James Robertson. Or, A Beginner’s Guide to the Case for Scottish Independence, as I like to think of it. Though the book is a light one (I managed nearly 300 pages today) it may demand I write a longer post, with a fair bit of background thrown in for those unfamiliar with twentieth-century Scottish history, the rise and politics of the SNP, devolution, stone-stealing, and so on. Warning you (or piquing your interest) now…

Light, Placement

Japanese Garden 1 (Dublin), 2004 - taken from Glasgow Print Studio Archive

Yesterday I went with my dad and D to an exhibit of the works of Elizabeth Blackadder. She is in her eighties now, and, in the video at the end of the exhibit seemed heartfelt, tongue-tied, surrounded by the curated objects of her life, and by flowers (her other, more well known subject matter). This print above is one of my favourites of hers, and I have been thinking about why.

As you can probably infer from the title of this post, it’s to do with the light and placement in the picture. How the dark grey of the sky melts into lightness, but is still firmly divided from the snow covered earth. The luminous quality. The placement of scratchy circular lines around the stones, and the distance of the stones from one another. The dividing screen forming both a link between garden and sky, and a shelter for the viewer to stand behind – a limit to the landscape, perfectly judged, imperfectly rendered in slightly wonky lines.  It’s to do with the tiny gilt touches on the black fencing – drawing the eye, but not too much. A trust in the viewer to notice, a tip in the scale of things, a fleck of luxuriant colour in an otherwise austere scene.

Fifeshire Farm (1960), taken from Tate.org

Another of her prints tackles a larger scene – the fertile farmland of the Kingdom of Fife on the East Coast of Scotland. In opposition to the carefulness of the first picture, here is all wildness in frantic motion – a wind seems to shake through the black trees, the colour of the earth rushes, crumbles, licks into the roofs of byre or house.

At this time of year, when it is so dark, when there is a sense of holding ones breath in wait for the new year as if it will never come, these paintings suggest a kind of kinship with winter, darkness, winds (gales buffeting us here, yesterday, possibly today but I haven’t risked poking my head out the window yet), the possibility of fat cold rain outweighing the likelihood of a breaking sky, a return ever of the crystalline or verdant.

I have to relate this to my writing too: that, nearing the beginning of the end of the draft (I’d give a word total, but it would only be for my benefit, and not really meaningful) I long for the betterment of my sentences and a crispness and fruitfulness that for course can’t and shouldn’t be there in the text just yet.  Right now, I must see the value in having the bones, the stark branches, all lying out. And in the sense of possibility – a sudden blast might metaphorically tear off the roof of Aida’s cabin, or sweep her to her country, before I expected that to happen. I can’t know quite yet how things will place themselves of the page –  like the progressive inching of frost or the weight of snow – or whether, what this time will do to the text. Bring the weight of an absence of colour, or a chill, brooding space where the words can breathe.

Aida Travels

Aida feels strong, in my mind. I have her appearance – which I don’t wish to share – her fears, the love she has of oblivion landscapes – nothing and no one, sprawl of trees or horizon. A response to the narrowness of her life so far, in which distrust has taken hold and excluded so much.

I know she has done something unkind to a man who respected her, and that she is both sensual and rigid in her ways.

But is she deep enough? Or merely a shallow stream of thought?

I have set out to follow her on her journey to New Mexico and into a new life, but before the details can be carved out, I need to take the same trip.  Here’s hoping for a ticket to fly my way.

Fresh Tracks

Something old infused like basil in oil, a tiny leaf of something crushed and perfuming…

This is how it begins:

When you make the move into a landscape, you take pains to name the most insignificant parts. All the big, obvious landmarks have been named. Eagle rock. Achachork. Death trail. Ida, though, gives names to the hidden, overlooked. Desert trails through the brush, too small to have garnered notice. Mines. Maybe they have names, but no one remembers them. Potholes. Gentle inclines in the road. A tree with a particular look to it.

Her own name blurs. Is it Ida? Aida? Ada? She must work out what country she came from, and what this town is called. She has to seed the place, so that later, when the research is done, it has accumulated meaning.