Edgelands

Uffington is a glorious sweep of downland, a sleeping body under wide skies.

The path between Cat’s Tor and Shining Tor is a magical place, with suns’ rising tattoed into the outlines of the escarpment, and in the hills beyond, Ludchurch, that thin place.

Santorini, Monreale, the arena in the ruins of Salona above Split… Hemingford Grey, Malham…

These have been “event spaces” for me, places where even going there means something.

Lockdown means that Uffington remains the event place that I last visited, unreachable except in my mind’s eye; Thoon is as beyond me as Monreale. And as for those big, bold holiday destinations, well, I wonder whether, as I ponder the urgencies beyond the virus attack, I will ever see these tourist places again. Maybe as “events” we see them, glory in them, and carry them with us.

And then there’s Boundary Brook.

I could, at the moment, call it Rat City: plenty of lively inhabitants of the Rattus Norvegicus kind scurrying around, and I wonder when the fox population will move in, or the badgers and hawks and owls step up…. and this is part of the problem with Edgelands: they are a stark mixture of human-stuff-we-like and animal-stuff-we-like with human-stuff-we-don’t-want and animal-stuff-we-don’t-want. Stark? Or vibrant?

If we are looking for writing that conveys the vibrancy of such spaces, then Rob Cowen can give it to us: at one point in Common Ground he writes that

the edges provided playgrounds for kids and illicit bedrooms for lovers. Whether consciously or not these spaces kept us in time and rooted to the rhythms of land and nature… We all still go to edges to get perspective…

and elsewhere

The ebb and flow of birdsong, the rise and fall of the sun, such things became my world. The slow spinning of the earth, the circadian rhythm is of the solar day, the life and death of the flowers and fruits, these whirred the mechanisms of my mended biological clock.

But the great Annie Dillard can also add to this vision.

Now [she is writing of late June] things are popping outside. Creatures extrude or vent eggs; larvae fatten, split their shells and eat them; spores dissolve or explode; root hairs multiply, corn puffs on the stalk, grass yields seed, shoots erupt from the earth turgid and sheathed… and everywhere watery cells divide and swell, swell and divide. I can like it and call it birth and regeneration, or I can play the devil’s advocate and call it rank fecundity-and say that it’s hell that’s a-poppin.

Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. 10: Fecundity

Cowen and Dillard give me two quite different views that I can take with me into the wildlife corridor that leads from by my house down to Boundary Brook and then extends onto Warneford Meadow. Despite its grandiose name, this is a strip – or a plait of interwoven strips – of self-seeded trees, wild clematis, ivy, Wild Garlic, squirrels, a pair of sparrowhawks, old fences demarking a different pattern of land use, an electricity substation, and (as is very obvious in a night time ramble) the street lights from Old Road and the car park lights from the labs and libraries of the campus buildings. So to make sense of this edgeland, I have to turn to two further sources: the book by Michael Symmonds Roberts and Paul Farley that gave me (and lots of other people, I suspect) the word Edgelands, and Richard Mabey.

First of these concluding words, then, are an extract from Richard Mabey and his Unofficial Countryside:

…It’s not often that the scrubland stage is reached. Where it is, it is in those awkward-shaped parcels of ground – left over like a hem when the surrounding areas have been sewn up – often called ‘marginal land.’ These seem to be multiplying with the piecemeal extension of built-up areas: a sliver of land left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electicity substation. Nothing can be done with these patches. They are too small or misshapen to build on, too expensive to landscape. So they are simply ignored – at least until the bushes start shutting out the light from the machine-shop. For that spell of ten or twenty years they form some of the richest and most unpredictable habitats for wildlife to be found in urban areas…

The Unofficial Countryside: Bearings

and (almost) last words to Symmonds Roberts and Farley:

It’s always a surprise… To find a gap in the shiny advertising boardings or a bent back sheet of corrugated iron which affords a few onto an open wasteland carpeted with flowers in summer… The city suddenly has a new scale and underness and an overness. 

The journey to a high moor or heath in search of wilderness and communing with nature involves a slow readjustment in terms of scale and space, but a city wasteland is all the more mysterious for the manner of our encounter with it: the imagination does the travelling.

This is what the Edgelands represent, an No mans land between the two sides…

I wrote “almost” because the typing of that quotation was initially overridden by the computer, unexpectedly throwing up a very different (and much more dramatic) touchstone on the constantly shifting border: Rob Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s disturbing meditation Ness – in that my text at one point read “and under Ness and an over Ness.” So I turn to this shattering prose-poem about the fall of a Babylon to the greater Principalities of wood and water and lichen, and find similarities with the rotting stumps and rusting gateways of where I run.

The encounter in the poem of the Powers of Nature with the grim purposes of humanity is exposed in an “environmental takeover,” and the willow-boned, hagstone-eyed entities that possess the nuclear defence site do so in their own time:

& time to them is not deep, not deep at all, for time is only ever overlapping tumbling versions of the now.

It has about it the bitter vision of triumph after oppression of the Book of Revelation; ruination; shattering; repossession. In the same way in the Edgelands, the everyday submits to the unbounded potential of weed sycamore and umbel and the run of the brook as the spring puts out, in Robert Macfarlane’s words, the green where shadow meets leaf.