Talking About Time and Place
Place
On Gallow’s Down
I had to share the latest post on The Clearing by Nicola Chester, introducing a what looks to be a really interesting and thought provoking series of responses to the themes of her book On Gallow’s Down, which I haven’t read but now must, having read Nicola’s introduction. This feels particularly important right now, encompassing themes that have been the preoccupations of my own work: belonging without exclusion, the meaning of home and place, and our relationship with the landscape and the natural world. I hope you’ll check it out, with some wonderful writers engaging with this series.
A Dream of Stones
I drove to Calanais in the rain, looking for the stones. I found them there, standing tall in the mist, like a distant dream I had once dreamt but long forgotten, a silent memory. Did they walk this way those thousands of years ago? What gods and spirits did they dream of; what lost stories did they tell? Where do they dream now, long buried in the ground? Across Loch Ròg to Kirkibost the sleeping woman lies, and the Shining One waits in the west. Too many stories wait here, commodified even now: unreal place, resting in its unknown truth.
Wind and Tide
I looped round Harris before another storm blew through, chasing echoes from the past: old saints and their stories; old places filled with memory, fleeting shadows from another time. Losgaintir shone with a cold brilliance against its ancient hills. Time slept, dreaming the ocean, its voice lost to the wind without echo or meaning. I drove back through a landscape of splintered rock as old as the earth, leaving the beach and its impossible confluence behind.
Sacred Mountain
‘I become only breath; movement; the sound of my feet crunching along the trail, vaguely aware of the dawn chasing behind me.’
Along with Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, a publication that I have followed and admired for a long time is The Clearing edited by Jon Woolcott of Little Toller Books, an online journal of nature, landscape and place and a natural home for my interests, so I’m really pleased to have a piece feature.
‘Sacred Mountain’ takes the reader on a walk to the summit of an iconic hill that defines my local landscape to watch the Autumn Equinox sunrise, exploring notions of the sacred and what it might mean to us. You can read ‘Sacred Mountain’ HERE.
Groundings 