Coming very soon...

There have been some delays, not surprisingly with current working conditions, at the printing stage, but the book should soon be ready. News about launch also in the pipeline. Thanks to all those who've enquired about this. I know that the many lovely British and French fans of Spirit of Place kind enough to want to continue following my work have had a long three year wait, but it's nearly over now. At the very least I hope people will enjoy the 'triumph over adversity' aspect that accounts for the long delay in finishing this book. I can still hardly believe I made it to the end.

Wild scraps

I've been thinking and writing a bit lately about the development of my relationship with landscape since childhood. The following post consists of related scraps I sent in to the project Lone Women in Flashes of Wilderness, a new work being created by a most interesting writer Clare Archibald (clarearchibald.wordpress.com).

 Mont St-Michel de Brasparts

My instinct for wild landscape and unbridled thought has always been at odds with a persistent childhood fear of the dark and an allied, equally instinctive concern for personal safety. I have always envied men their freedom of movement and the resulting luxury of unfettered reflection.

Early childhood encounters of wild brought the raw open landscape of the Brecon Beacons into my mental prospect, an eye-opening contrast to the manicured over-farmed environment where I lived. The (apparent) emptiness had a siren call for me, the lure of expanse and a powerful sense of freedom from physical restriction.

This has evolved over a life-time into deep-rooted emotional connection to heaths and moors, where wide views equate with security and my mind can fly out over the heather into unrelieved space. Solitude is essential to my true self and draws the stronger connection with nature that I need for replenishment. I like that no-one knows where I am and that my immediate relationship is only within the scope of my footsteps.  This to me is wild: immunity from control, an intimacy with my surroundings that frees mind and body. Here I can meet my inner wildness, sprawl or soar.

By contrast, in the forest where I now live I feel at a basic level of instinct uneasy with the shifting perspectives, narrow sightlines and plethora of tiny movements. You never know if you are alone. My body subconsciously acknowledges the potential for danger, and holds back other process. Phrases and words for my work come to me among the trees, boulders and hilly streams, but ideas and what I call long thoughts are elusive.

Perhaps I have cultivated my own wildness on a physical scale: the balance would shift in extreme landscapes of mountains and deserts where humans can only be outsiders and interlopers. Savage wilderness is a degree beyond wild and here the proportions scare me. Except for the sky, that ultimate wilderness, my black moor, lit by firefly stars, untouchable and beyond intimacy.

Monts d'Arrée

Being outside

Being outside. Those words have defined my life for good and ill. They reflect my preference for place over people and the resulting separateness. As a child it was a physical longing, more than that, a necessity to be out of doors, away from the cage that family life often formed. The sense of liberation and free choice is intimately connected for me with open space, with air and sky. I have come to see my definition and sense of identity in a connection with landscape. Place before people, expansion before confinement. I don’t function well within physical limits.

Looking back, my life is speckled with moments of profound identification with my environment, and the course of my own career and development has been an irresistible, if wavy, line drawing me along the pathway of freedom and belonging. The journey began in Gloucestershire, found meaning in leaving that manicured terrain far behind, was inspired by the Brecon Beacons, and matured in the south Wales of my parental roots. It floundered in the relentless urbanity of London and revived in the relenting rurality of Somerset. There I began to understand the nature of spiritual pilgrimage and the value of landscape in life. My wayfaring has been equally fired by the Tatra mountains of southern Poland and the misty sweep of Exmoor,before being finally fixed in the granite of Brittany, where the moment of arrival was an awakening.

Here's to being outside in 2017...

The Chaos of Mardoul

Water’s words to stone here are alternately loving and savage, caresses turn violent, stroking becomes a slap. In wild weather it is a seething insistence of water. All that rock can do is hold to itself, edges rounded to ease the onslaught and survive the longest time under a constant assault that is both smooth and brutal. It’s an unequal contest in the end. The river can spread to mount its challenge: the rocks have no more movement in them. In dancing steps the water constantly changes direction, twisting, turning, preening round its static partner, forming shapes and ritual traces, like little tripping thoughts of happy times. As water tires of obstacle, there’s the trumpet of torrent and torment, a surge of force. Under an angry wind, white-topped waves rage down the valley. In gentler times, with little explosions of foam like a series of sneezes, it glides as clear as glass down a shelf of rock. The old war between rock and water is a lost cause for the remnants of another earth. The river will have its way, hard or easy.

Short extract, work in progress

I have been busy with non-work related stuff lately, including a very pleasant interlude manning an art gallery in Goarec last week for a friend's exhibition. Now we have a heatwave and I struggle as ever to achieve much in such atmosphere, but I'm determined to finish with the landscape book in the next few months and move on to completely different writing projects. So, getting back into the mood...

 The landscape is a sponge for emotions, the great soakaway of human experience. We bring our woes and stresses to nature and lay them down at the feet of the sea or on a lonely mountain top or beside a quiet forest pool. Often we seek nature’s company simply because it demands and expects nothing from us, giving temporary release from inner burdens or the opportunity to ponder issues in the comfortable airy freedom of the outdoors. The search for peace and quiet is a strong factor in our need for landscape, balm for the human individual who is so rarely physically alone and in silence in modern life. We also respond deeply to the expansion of our vitality into open space and the basic practice of walking, man’s most natural pace, which puts us back into a lost rhythmic relationship with the detail of landscape. 

A matter of scale...

More and more I become aware that the attractiveness of Brittany's landscape to a great many people is a matter of scale. There are no extremes here, neither of terrain nor temperature, and the degree of comfort and security that confers is a major factor in connectedness. It is often the difference between feeling oneself within a landscape rather looking at it from the outside, which inevitably carries a degree of emotional detachment.

This may well be a matter of age - as we get older we start to seek peace from our surroundings, a reassurance relevant to our size and powers of endurance, rather than challenge or adventure or otherness. This is not a devaluation of experience, as our perception of significance is simply magnified in a smaller sphere.

Brittany’s highest ‘mountains’, the Monts d’Arrée, reach up less than 400 metres, the most towering cliffs near Plouha barely stand 100 metres above the sea. But these bald figures are quite irrelevant to impressiveness of the scenery, which is determined by context not comparison. These are magnificent settings in which to place ourselves.
So we can be ‘on top of the world’ on Mont-St-Michel-de-Brasparts or Menez Hom or ‘at the end of the earth’ at the Pointe de Corsen or the Pointe du Raz without becoming mountaineers or endurance hikers. And there we can feel our surroundings spectacular in a proportionate way to our own existence in the same world.