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.

Of Hargate Hall

-Rather than of the wedding D and I attended, which was full of light and bustle and food and good cheer, this post is about the venue itself. About the feeling it carried, subtle, overwhelmed by the good mood of our party (70 odd souls and three dogs).

 

Hargate Hall, Friday, early evening. That white tent is a marquee.

 

You could say it was the perfect setting for hush, for suspense. For reading at the windows, looking out across the stumbling, black-tree garden. Hargate Hall was built (so a photograph in the entrance-way told us) in 1899, so not very old by the standards of English Country Houses. In little over 15 years after its construction, the facade of the aristocracy would begin to crack with the onset of World War One.

 

Nowadays it’s a collection of self-catering apartments adjoining a fantastic central hall replete with stained glass windows with pseudo-heraldry, and a spiked candelabra hanging from the ceiling. We stayed in a low mezzanine, located up a steep wooden ladder and overhanging a small central room. It was like staying in a cosier treehouse.

 

On that first evening, D and I walked the grounds through the soft wet mist as it grew darker.

 

the flash reflecting off the white mist, just outside our kitchen.

 

The garden path curves both up and down. We followed the downward path first, by the marquee and into the thin woodland.

 

 

we found this little…house? It is used for wedding ceremonies in warmer weather. Here it stared at us mournful, open mouthed

 

 

This ghostly gate marked the edge of Hargate Hall’s lands. Beyond was a farm reeking of the cows.

 

The light was beginning to go, and my poor wee camera struggled to keep up. It’s hard to capture the atmosphere under such conditions. It wasn’t eerie – I have been in eerie places – but was instead still. Stoic.

 

The farm, the drystane walls shelving the fields off into the close horizon

 

 

We wandered round along the main road and towards the gates of the hall. I’d like to say I had time then to read The Secret History (it would I think have been a perfect choice – second only to The Little Stranger) but there was far too much to do and far too many people to meet. The same of course was true of Saturday, the day of the wedding itself. But the evening of the second day brought snow, and our last morning saw Hargate Hall and the farmlands covered white.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One last shot of the hall itself. We had to take a taxi and then a five hour train ride back north. It’s funny though, on the ride to Buxton train station, the driver referred to us coming ‘up’ to the Peak District, though he had already asked where we were from. Perhaps he misspoke, or perhaps it was something to do with where he felt situated – Northern, already. It always strikes me strangely, to hear of ‘the North’ on the BBC weather forecasts, when there’s so much more north. It reinforces the idea that Scotland is, to those who live below it, a different country, though they might in other respects (and irksomely to those who believe otherwise) refer to Scotland as a region. A region North of Thule, I suppose.

 

From the train we watched the snow storm follow us into the North, skittering the higher lands and leaving the valleys green and then, further, the tufty brown of semi-moorland, then green once again. I began The Secret History, but still have much to go. It seems so far like a slip of caramel over a big white plate – flavourful, but. More coherence (possibly) later. Thanks to all who wished us a good trip. It was.

Departure

 

I am off to the wedding of my friends A and M, down in the English Peak District. Things will be quiet, but I hope to take advantage of the (presumably) lovely scenery and take a lot of photos – snow is predicted. Which I would be excited about, but it’s March, and March snow is always a little wearying.

 

Happy International Women’s Day and World Book Night (for yesterday). I shall be merging the two holidays by reading a book by a woman on the long train journey down – The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  So if the landscapes going by the train are gloomy and misted like the picture of the Meadows above, I shall have something to keep my mind off of it.

 

Wishing you a good weekend, and that if you are in the frozen Northern Hemisphere, that you stay as toasty as you please.

 

Your words for a Shooting Star

 

Some vignettes of Edinburgh – unimportant – but setting a mood, a sense of the season. Also to sweeten a post which is just a lead up to a link. But so worth while.

 

Vintage Books (of the tumultuous Random House, soon to be Penguin Random or Random Penguin, I’m not sure) is offering critiques of the first thirty pages and summary of your novel, either in person (if you live in London and can make it to their charity fete at Whitton Chase Charity Shop TODAY) or by email – in return for a £10 donation, or more, to a local children’s hospice called Shooting Star CHASE.

 

I am not always in favour of charity. Sometimes they come with problematic baggage, sometimes the giving is a form of self-bolstering, of patronisation to developing nations, or to the working class in this country, or else, some arts charity helping the status of the super rich. pseudo de Medicis. Charities in certain areas might be a poor substitute for decent infrastructure that should otherwise be provided by the government. They can mishandle supplies and spend all their money on ‘chuggers’ and ad campaigns. I’m with Oscar Wilde in his The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in other words.

 

But a children’s hospice is one of the least politically charged things I could think to give to. I think of the carers who need caring for themselves. I think of toys given to younger siblings, books to older ones. Little comforts that make the difference. I think, I’d like to support that. Perhaps you’d like to as well?

 

Click here to see the rules and how to give.

 

For those who can afford to do so, why not think about matching your donation to this charity with a donation to a children’s hospice in your area?

 

Season of -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Awesome Delicate

The same season, the same month, the same small, Northern country.

Taking the time to acknowledge this variation in tone, light, scent, weather, impression.

If we are the one then we are/can be also equally the other, or our own hybridities.

Tidal

 

Landscape of: rustling grass, desert right before the black stump,  flatness, kanga and sheep country, Eastern inland New South Wales.

 

 

Landscape of: Mountain, Gums, Eucalyptus vapour, Blue Mountains, New South Wales.

 

 

Landscape of: aridity, sustaining water, bush, deep into New Mexico.

 

 

Landscape of: sea creep, early morning, Eastern Seaboard, Maryland.

 

 

 

Landscape of: Fenland – marsh, meadowy, Cambridgeshire, England.

 

 

Landscape of: estuarine mingling, Atlantic sift, river tide, Morar Scotland.

 

 

Landscape of: the sea, the sea, the sea.

Hazy by the falls

On Saturday, D, A and I went on an outing in the West of the country, on one of the best days of the year so far. There was a brilliance, diffuse, to the air. We walked by the falls of the Clyde, the river that feeds silver and peaceful into Glasgow but in its spry, quick stage is put to use by industry and the generation of hydroelectricity. We briefly visited New Lanark -

New Lanark, a preserved former cotton mill (now tackling wool) which had progressive ideals - for the time. Health care for the workers (from the early 1800s when it was set up), the children sent to a school onsite, good pay, cheap rent. But they were still using cotton, brought, presumably, from America. Slavery at an arm's distance.

The three of us decided however that the weather was too fine to be indoors. It is not often 17c in March in Scotland, and we all caught the sun: the average temperature at this time of the year, for comparison, is around 9-10c. I’m still waiting to break my record of getting sunburnt in April on the Isle of Raasay while out hiking.

I should let the photos speak for themselves, emit the light and heat they soaked in when I took them. All this is is a journey along river, on a gorgeous day, sweet with the smell of the awakening earth.

Stillness, the shadow of the pines

Finally when we got back to the East coast, this is what awaited us: a mist that descended to cloak the city gothic and chill.

(it burned off the next day, hot once again) (brilliantly hot and bright)

Image/feeling

 

 

1. A reclining figure. A grainy texture. A view of red sandstone houses, curving downhill.

2. Smirr and mist and threads of trees. A village at the head of a loch, sped by half-witnessed.

3. Blackened branches, gathered from the mesa top. Foiled food slow cooking, steaming.

4. A collapsible nylon room. Clarity on the stones, the bright green leaves.

 

It’s like this: Low evening light, morning light. Fire, ashes. Desire for a certain place, now far and in the past, or an instance that was understood only later, in pictures. Or a place that was Spring, in a remote desert camping ground. Or a beautiful third-floor flat, long since leased out to others. The one who helped find it, dead too young. It’s the sorrow and the striving, the echo down the corridor to the tiny impossible bathroom, to the living room with the bay windows where the light has room to let itself sprawl, golden, grey, pink, to the bright aquarium with the mouthing goldfish, Shen-Long the weather loach undulating in the current.

 

It’s the collecting of other people’s photographs of a path or break through a looming green forest, the human figure tiny, laden, fragile, in tartan-patterned flannel and thick walking boots, carrying a metal cup and sleeping bag lashed to their knapsack. It’s the wishing for more than stone, however well-weathered that stone is, for a wild range, at last, rather than muted sickness. For the outdoors, the flimsy, the breath of plants, the movement and rustle of the body passing along the trail, the cooking in ember, the tea over flame. The chik of bats spinning in the gloaming, the wave on the dark loch.

 

And for you?

 

 

Drift, blur, and the effect of words

Reflections from the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow

A loch seen from the train south from Oban

 

D in Oban, down by the harbour

Mountains, Pines

I wasn’t going to post again today, but something has been weighing on my mind, and I felt the need to write it out in public.  It’s on the question that will be posed to Scotland in the Autumn of 2014:  ”Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” Now, the referendum is not for a long time yet, but articles on the matter seem to be sprouting like mushrooms all over the place – that is, like mushrooms, their roots are underground, and have been there a long time, and only are now popping up for air and to spore.

 

Part of the pressure I’m feeling on my poor brain is from the book I’m reading, And The Land Lay Still, by James Robertson. I think I’ve written that title and name out a half a dozen times today, and I apologise. This isn’t even a review of it yet. Just that it is all about independence, the movement for it, the arguments from recent history for an independent Scotland. Books have influence, and if ever a book wanted to influence, it’s this one, much the same way as Orwell wanted to get his message across (although Orwell was more convincingly literary, but I’ll get to that another day).

 

Further, in the last day I’ve been reading this post in the Guardian by comedian Stewart Lee. You can go and read it now, if you like. I’ll wait…yes, so, what did you think? Lee is a comedian, and satirist, which allows him to say all sorts of things in the guise of comedy. In the guise of old stereotypes – I know what he is doing is using hyperbolic language to undermine points made in newspapers against the idea that Scotland could ever be independent. But i also know, I think, when someone is using a joke to say, the first leader (prime minister) of Scotland associates with homophobics, is a coward, can’t be trusted, will lead to a collapse of the left wing support if Scotland is to leave the union.  All of which, I believe is a nonsense.  I could deconstruct every flaw with what I perceive his argument is, but we’d be here all day, and I don’t trust myself to know precisely where the satire ends and the truth begins. Perhaps the flaws in my sense of humour, perhaps in his.

 

To cut a long story short, the reason I wrote this post is to link to my tumblr, where I wrote a bit of a screed on the positive sides of the case for independence. It’s not meant to sway anyone, but just to have a more positive angle out there, one that is, I hope, rational rather than romantic.  All of this could be considered background for my book review on Robertson’s epic, but equally it might just be all a fash to my international readers, a signal that there may be more to come, down the line – but I hope you might find it interesting at least on this occasion to read some of the politics coming out of a little corner of North Western Europe, and I know I would love to hear all of your opinions.