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I see winter coming in
A December walk from my East Bristol city-suburb front door, through the green places of Fishponds, Frenchay and Stapleton. The images speak of Emily Dickinson's words: 'there's a certain slant of...
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The Dig: a bleak midwinter read
No end of year list this. Just a short recommendation of a short, stark and arresting novel: a bleak midwinter read.The Digis Cynan Jones' fourth book, but the first that I have found. It is the story...
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Sharron Kraus - Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails
Cold and damp January days require an appropriately melancholic soundtrack and I've recently been enjoying Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails by a new find, Sharron Kraus. Sparse and, dare I say,...
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'And far away a mountain zone ...'
"And far away a mountain zone,A cold white waste of snow-drifts lies"Speak of the North, Charlotte BronteThe new year's first encounter with a snowscape, and its the exceptional array of colour that...
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Towards a new landscape aesthetic
"There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts. ... my body has to be on the move to set my mind going ... to free my spirit, to lend a greater boldness to my thinking, to...
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A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
I've recently watched A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, Jeroen Berkvens' 2000 documentary that I came across via the Dangerous Minds web site. Like his music its gentle and melancholic, with...
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Light the paths you want to roam
Well I'm goingBack to the countryUp on the mountainsUp on the rising side(Street Song - Thirteenth Floor Elevators)
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Kei Miller - The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
A new collection by Jamaican poet Kei Miller; a dialogue between a map-maker, seeker of rational order and cartographical truth, and a rastaman, for whom the landscape, its names and landmarks weigh...
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The Sad Road to the Sea: Walking a forgotten branchline by Jack Cooke
A guest post from Jack Cooke on the storied melancholia of walking a forgotten East Anglian branchline. No one departs, no one arrivesFrom Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.They've all passed out...
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Catch Me Daddy - Moorland Gothic
Catch Me Daddy is the rough-edged but searingly memorable debut feature film from music video director Daniel Wolfe, name-checked in Robert Macfarlane's recent Guardian article on The eeriness of the...
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Digging the English landscape of radicalism and rebellion
"The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility ... and it had been used with no moderate hand." Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott.This was at one time to be a lengthy treatise on the...
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Topographical legacies of monasticism: evolving perceptions and realities of...
I will be commencing a full time PhD at the University of Exeter in September. Here is my research proposal; the landscapes and places that will be occupying my time, inspiring me and driving me to...
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Reverie in tranquil industry
Like much of the surviving relict remains of the explosion of industrial activity in Britain in the late eighteenth century and the Victorian era, Sapperton canal tunnel has been slowly and...
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New horizons in the Gwent Levels
Some images here from a preparatory field visit for my forthcoming PhD research. In looking for a contrasting case study to supplement the study of 'monastic' estates in the south-east Welsh Marches I...
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The Way of the Hollow
The work of something of a topographical supergroup, Holloway, is a collaboration between Adam Scovell (film and direction), Robert Macfarlane (words and voice-over), Richard Skelton (music) and...
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Monastic ruins as topographical memories. An elegy to landscapes drowned deep...
“They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of...
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The mountains of Arran: a landscape of wonder within reach
"My place above every other placeto be on your high shoulder-bladesstriving with your rocky great grey throat"The Cuillin, Sorley MacLeanThe beginnings play out the familiar rhythms of the start to a...
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Richard Long: 'Time passes. A place remains.'
"A good work is the right thing in the right place at the right time. A crossing place."Richard Long, 1980The Arnolfini gallery in Bristol is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Richard...
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Unseen Places: Exploring ‘hidden’ topography in a historic upland landscape
I recently gave a talk as part of the Tertulia: Radical Pastoral event at the Arnolfini in Bristol on the subject of unseen places and hidden topography. The piece brought together themes and content...
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