Category: Landscape

Gainey’s Well

Do you know Gainey’s Well?

I know you’ve probably heard of it,

You can obviously google it,

But that’s not knowing it, is it?

It’s only knowing of it.

 

It lies at the end of a street with a rec,

Through a seeming suburban garden,

(That is in fact a secret pathway)

Where surprises, incongruities, improbabilities,

And the most fantastical impossibilities,

Reside both outside and inside

Of what appears to be a normal garden shed,

(Or marooned saloon family car garage)

Brick walls, tiled roof, lock and bolt on the door.

 

Outside this anonymously average structure,

Air vents rise up from an underground reservoir;

Inside, a roaring welter in the darkness,

Serpentine subterranean tunnels,

Pulsing water, limestone walls,

A limitless liquid mine,

Fed from Cotswold gravel beds of 800 acres,

More Stroud’s River Styx than aquifer,

A vault of torrential force in the abyssal depths.

 

Beneath the pavements the beach?

Beneath the lawn the abyss.

The Heavens: Saturday January 19th 2013

Landscape Archaeologist, Neil Baker, led about a dozen assorted adults and dogs on a guided tour of The Heavens on Saturday, January 19th. We met outside – I said outside – the Crown and Sceptre at two of the clock, for a two and a half hour stroll and muse. Many thanks to Neil for giving up his time and enriching our eyes and minds; a couple of pints of Budding at the end meant only small beer as payment.

Neil runs a community archaeology group for The Heavens. You can find his number on a leaflet on the Crown and Sceptre notice board. We certainly intend to sign up for such a brilliant project: local history fusing fieldwork, documentation, imagination and literature is right up our street. We are looking forward to Neil’s posting of ‘Phenomenology, Archaeology and the Landscape’ on the blog.

We made notes as we went along about both remains and springs; we intend to walk another part of The Heavens with Neil and then retrace our steps once more. This due diligence, as it were, will hold us in good stead, when we embark on our next Springs Walk on Sunday March 10th (Stroud and its Edgelands , meet outside the Prince Albert at 11.15).

Many thanks to Martin Hoffmann for contributing to the following record of the walk; this re-imagining of landscape, as we walk, is all to the good. As the Stroud Situationists say: “Below the pavements, The Beach! Above the tarmac, The Snow.”

Neil took us Walking into the Past

Walking into the Past
On a winter’s day with friends;
The Heavens, where Bisley sat
In the cleavage of the hills.

Sunlight and clean bright water
Pooled together to concentrate life,
To bring man, sheep, grass and stone;
Final gifting, leats, to complete this idyllic painting.

But nostalgia has rubbed out the old noises,
The clatterings, natterings and smashings,
The belchings and smellings
Of smoke and dust from frost cracked stones.

From wheels grinding and spinning,
Weaving and teasing out life
From Blake’s little lambs
‘Over the stream and o’er the mead.’

Time passes, erases and changes
Those borders and walls, that noise and smoke,
Leaving only brambles and twists of the stream
Where we clung to life on the sunny side of the hill.

The Heavens

The snow wandered into Stroud on a gusting wind,
Leaving a Lowry scene of red brick factories,
Serrated roofs, and mouldering mills,
All garlanded with icicles.

There was a silence that yearned for horse hooves,
Children tobogganed down car-free roads,
Matchstick women, men and tufted dogs
Tottered along the freezing canal towpath.

The fields at The Heavens were shrouded,
Though Thomas Bewick branches
Etched a tree-tapestry,
Across the muffled, white clad fields.

We walked down Daisy Bank and Spider Lane,
Past medieval window panes and casements,
Beyond the spring line below Field House,
To walk a footpath, once the main route to Lypiatt.

We marked hidden ruins by the first cottages,
The search for water and daylight,
Obvious in the silver afternoon sky
And spring line emerald fronds.

Sliding through the snow drifts,
We reached the site of Wayhouse Mill
And cottages, down by the man-made slopes,
Between the bridge and the telegraph pole.

The forgotten groan of the water wheel,
And the long dead splash of the sluice,
Mournful memories in the wind,
Led us on to Widow Petett’s.

Here, the apothecary gathered waters
For tinctures and medicines,
By Fairy Spring at Turnip End Bottom,
Down by the crossing of the stream.

The hollows and brambles on the other side,
Indicated a sheep-house and springs,
Where seventeenth century residents
Had rights to water and an apple orchard.

The scattered remnants of weavers’ cottages
Came next, up there at Dry Hill,
In the woodland, above the spring line,
There by the ruined walls and wells.

We wandered on through our time line,
Crossing the stream at the water fall,
To drop down into Kinner’s Grove,
And further hidden ruins.

The rivulet was once diverted here,
To long vanished buildings on the right,
Where we sat and stared at the westward sky,
And a red-shift Neolithic sunset.

We climbed back up to Horns Road,
Lowry figures in red brick streets,
Pints of Budding in the Crown and Sceptre,
Reflecting on the past, in the here and now.

Madeleine moments in The Heavens,
The past beneath your footsteps,
For those with eyes to see, ears to hear,
And an archaeologist like Neil Baker.

Map 163

Re-imagining the landscape’s mapping,
Envisioning an old-new cartography:
Erasing the blue of the motorways,
The red and yellow of roads and thoroughfares,
The lines of footpaths, byways, bridleways,
All that pale blue signification
That denotes tourist amenities,
Ignoring those black lines of railway tracks,
Cuttings, embankments, viaducts, tunnels,
The red squares and circles of railway stations,
Along the so-called permanent way,
Bus stations, power lines and pylons,
Then radio masts, television masts,
Churches, chimneys, towns, boundary lines,
An alphabet of abbreviation,
And even symbols of antiquity
Are all immaterial to our search
For thin blue lines issuing from nowhere,
Where William Blake sees the universe,
In tumbling drops of iridescent water.

Map 163

I wrote the above piece down by the garden pond and distinctly recall that when I got to the lines about William Blake, a busy wind came out of the still nowhere of a still afternoon, and scattered my notes all over the garden. As soon as the wind had done this, it stopped. I wrote these few contextual lines in Sicily, just after walking up to the medieval battlements above Cephalou, after visiting the Temple of Diana, by way of a Megalithic 3,000 year old shrine to water. I wonder what shrines we once had on what is now map 163.

Toadsmoor Valley Haiku

The following haiku are based around our 12th Night walk and the traditions of turning the world upside down on that day. Commoners became aristocrats, lords and ladies, for one short, if lengthening, day. We maintained that continuity by locating bedraggled, forgotten, unnamed springs in the Toadsmoor Valley and ennobling them with democratically chosen appellations. Pictures, other writings, video and audio recordings will eventually be posted on the website that accompanies this blog at www.radicalstroud.org.uk
Next walk is on Sunday March 10th when we meet outside the Albert at 11.15 to recce, record and re-imagine the springs of urban Stroud and its Edgelands.

Gurgling springs and spouts,
Ragged mists and shrouded trees:
The Toadsmoor Valley.

Listen in the woods,
A concerto of water:
Music of the spheres.

Mythopoeic worlds,
Soft, elemental, magic:
Heaven kisses Earth.

Earth returns the kiss,
With a muddied, moist, embrace:
Oozing, trickling, springs.

Anonymous springs,
Ignored genius loci:
Ennobled with names.

‘Bella’,’ Noah’, ‘Bob’,
‘Holly’, ‘Ash’, ‘Forget-Me-Not’,
‘Voles’ Spout ‘ forever.

A Stroud Valleys Christmas

There is a poem below called A Stroud Valleys Christmas, but first I would like to draw your early attention to our first collective walk, when we map, record and re-imagine the landscape. This will be on Twelfth Night, Sunday January 6th. By then, our website at www.radicalstroud.org.uk should be moving beyond work in progress: that is the place where we shall place our collaborative multi-media interpretations of our locality. Further details about the walk – meeting point, route, mileage and so on, will follow, both on the blog and the website; but for the moment, let us all enjoy Christmas-Tide, remembering that the poem below could become a half-forgotten memory if building takes place in the Slad Valley.

A Stroud Valleys Christmas

One damp, December Sunday afternoon,
I biked out through Stroud’s featureless streets,
And then along the Slad Valley to Bull’s Cross:
Past shooting, pollarded willow trees,
All lined along the lanes;
Past well wrapped figures stacking yuletide logs,
All shrouded in a coppice;
Past the chapels turned to guest houses,
Their graveyards full of cars;
Past families cutting mistletoe,
Their long handled secateurs silhouetted
Against the setting sun’s cloudscape;
Past rooks, gathering in the gathering dusk,
All calling in the copse –
Until, all was still and silent,
At sunset;
That moment,
When all life seems to be suspended.

I listened to the silence,
Then turned my bike for home.
And when I returned to Stroud in darkness,
Nocturnal winter-spring had sprung:
Every window was now ablaze with lights,
And glittering trees and candles;
Doors were hung with stars and wreaths of holly,
Laced with ivy and mistletoe;
Christmas has come!
Cold season’s magic!

Common Sense under Threat

I think it was Leon Trotsky who once opined that “Common sense is the wisdom of the ruling class” but that old chestnut was cast rudely to the pavement recently by our country’s planning minister. In a classic case of nominative indeterminism, Nick Boles said he wants to see a 33% increase in land under new construction. He declared that “The built environment can be more beautiful than nature” and that “We shouldn’t obsess about the fact that the only landscapes that are beautiful are open.” He then added, “Sometimes buildings are better.” This is beyond parody. But it is frightening.
The piece below was written in the spring of 2009 as part of the Remembering Rodborough project, when we went out with Walking the Land, looking at old maps and pictures as we ambled along. The second line has a reference to an old pub and bakery that used to exist – the buildings still do. The second verse refers to the old field names that used to adorn Rodborough Fields. You just know that if the developers move in then someone will think it quaint to name the new streets after the old field names.That is beyond parody. But it is frightening.

Psycho-Geography: A Walk around Rodborough Fields

There we were, a baker’s dozen, at Butterow West,
Just by the Princess Royal and Gardiner’s Bakery,
(Opposite the Pavilion, don’t you know)
Sketching, chatting, filming and reminiscing,
Looking at old maps and photographs,
Listening to recorded voices, oral histories,
Telling us how it used to be –
Tales of the allotments and the parrot
Calling the men up the hill to the pub,
When Sunday noon meant time to down tools.

Then on to Rodborough Fields’ long dead elm trees,
Recreating the patchwork quilt of fields of 1838:
Rack Hill, Thresher, Bacon Slad,
Spout Leaze, Lower Orchard, Upper Bacon Slad,
Calves Close, Sheep Furlong, Little Chapel Hill,
Freeze Land, The Park, The Island, Cobswell,
Side Long Piece, Fir Tree Ground, Wheatlands,
Cobbs Acre, Great Fromate, Spillman,
Well Croft, Birds Lagget, Home Ground, Broad Close,
The Mead, Old Well Close, Kitchen Close,
Barn Close,Dye House Mead,
Sweetmead, New Leaze.

We then ambled through Victoria’s reign,
To stand on the bank above Capel Mill,
We saw an Edwardian lady gaze at the waters,
Hands clutching the rustic fencing
That ran all along the bridge,
In a picture postcard pose and scene,
More seaside than Stroud,
Like the puff from 1902,
Selling land for building in Coronation Road,
“Near the GWR and Midland Railways”,
And the well known “health resort” of Rodborough Common.

We returned to the present and walked along Arundel Drive,
(Cherry trees all in dazzling bloom, front path exotic splendour,
A suburban trope reminding us of our Imperial heritage)
To track the water’s trickle of the culverted stream,
(32 feet deep behind Coronation Road,
With 6 springs at the end of Rodborough Avenue)
Moss and lichen growing on the hidden dry stone wall,
Where the water drops down on its way to the Frome,
The stream where our senior citizens used to play,
Swinging in the trees from willow bank to bank,
Their muffled shouts of joy bursting from the depths of time,
Traces of the past escaping from the confines of the present.

Rodborough Fields Under Threat

Rodborough Fields in Space and Time

I like the way the hidden springs gather force,
A wild winter rush down the meadow side,
The wind singing in the saplings’ rigging
On the water’s voyage to the treasured Frome,
Thence on to the Severn and the ocean.

One glance is enough to enhance our lives,
And to make us feel a part of it all,
Both spiritually and globally,
Impossible thoughts with pipes and culverts:
Diminished lives.

I like the way the path of a low winter sun
Highlights the shadow of ridge and furrow,
A medieval landscape’s palimpsest;
I can see the ghost of Piers Plowman,
His footprints fresh in the frosted fields.

One glance is enough to enhance our lives,
And to make us feel a part of it all,
Spiritually and historically,
Impossible thoughts with bricks and mortar:
Diminished lives.

So why not build homes on brownfield sites,
So that these new families will also
Be able to feel a part of it all,
Walking the fields with undiminished lives,
Not listening to the car radio,
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”:
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,
They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Walking the Landscape and Mapping Springs

Well, we all need Wikipedia, sometimes, I suppose, when we move out of our comfort zones, as I do today when I begin to muse upon our spring-quest and its depiction by map. The font of all knowledge says that “A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes. Many maps are static two-dimensional, geometrically accurate,” or almost accurate, “representations of three-dimensional space, while others are dynamic or interactive, even three-dimensional.” The article then goes on to speak of scale, ratio, projection etc. and the usual distinction between “political” and “physical” maps.

Why did I look this up today, the 29th August 2012? Well, partly because it’s pouring down again and I can’t face getting soaked again, but also because of a splendid article in the Guardian which touches upon our spring-quest. Oliver Burkeman wrote about Google Earth – “inspired by zooming satellite images in TV war reports” – and how Google continually adds new data to its maps (“in June it was 2,000 miles of canal towpaths…in July it was bike lanes”). This constant process could, of course, add data from the movement of individuals…No wonder “cartographic historian”, Jerry Brotton thinks that the switch to digital mapping is an even “more profound change” than the Renaissance manuscript to print revolution.
Now, seemingly surreal invention is at one’s fingertips: Alice in Wonderland one to one scale is possible, as are cartographic mash-ups, as is the seeming impossibility of getting lost. One of the most ubiquitous sights of recent years is the traveller consulting a smartphone and resolutely, if mutely, going on their way. No more “Excuse me. I’m lost. Could you help me find…” Burkeman points out, however, that “In a world of GPS-enabled smartphones” whilst you are consulting a map, Google and Apple are mapping you. Martin Dodge from Manchester University says that products that might appear to be “innocent and neutral” are actually “vacuuming up all sorts of behavioural and attitudinal data.”
The article concludes with cartography curator, Lucy Fellowes’ famous statement that “Every map is someone’s way of getting you to look at the world his or her way” and the implications of viewing the world through the lens of Californian capitalism rather than through Alice’s Looking Glass: a world of mercenary, Gradgrindian logic, no matter how cool the employees dress. So this is where we come in with the spring-quest.
Our map making will reclaim Lewis Carroll from Google and we will walk hand in hand with History, Philosophy, Geology, Literature, Logic, Mythology and Pyschogeography. We may not go down the rabbit-hole but we will certainly peer into the depths of our springs and map the genius loci of Stroud and the Five Valleys. Our maps will be collaborative, shared and Blakean in their envisioning of the fusion of Space and Time, past, present and future. Who knows? We might even meet the Green Man. And s/he might even tell us how to name unnamed springs and so change Google Earth. As the Paris Situationists used to say: “Underneath the pavements, the beach!”

 

The Genius Loci of Stroud: Springs

If you are looking for the genius loci of Stroud, it has to involve water, and as water moves and flows in a constant reinvention of itself, it is a fitting initial symbol of Stroud and the Valleys. To understand the effect of water around us, locally, we have to have some basic understanding of our local geology: we can slice open our scarp to reveal the layers of rock and time, stretching from the heights of Minchinhampton down to the River Severn. I thank the Stroud Museum for giving me this sort of Ladybird understanding, with their excellent displays; I have had minimal interest in or understanding of geology before, but I do recommend a visit to Stroud Museum, if you are geologically illiterate, like me. So, what did I discover? Well, on the top, we have Great OoLitic Limestone; dropping down to Rodborough, we find Fullers Earth Clay; then we drop down to Lower Inferior Oolite Limestone; then Cotswold Sands; then Upper Lias Clays (we are now at Stinchcombe, King’s Stanley and Wotton under Edge); we then get to the Maristone Platform and the Severn and Lower Lias Clays.

The springs that occur where limestone meets clay attracted early settlement, with wells subsequently dug away from the spring-line. This combination of rocks and clays has produced the history that will later follow, after our spring-line wander lust, in other ways too. The steep valleys caused by erosion have produced the fast flowing streams and the consequent cloth trade, with their quaint hill-climbing patterns of settlement. It is true to say, therefore, that our first search for our genius loci should involve some walking or cycling around the spring-line, writing and photographing the springs as we go. As Robert Macfarlane said in “The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot”, “This book could not have been written by sitting still. The relationship between paths, walking and the imagination is its subject, and much of its thinking was therefore done – was only possible – while on foot.” It will be the same for us – although we might well bike as well as walk, but just like Macfarlane, we might well have Edward Thomas and Flann O’Brien as company too.
Or, just like Rob Young, in “Electric Eden”, we might hear Caliban reminding us to
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.”
It would be good to declaim this by a spring’s harmonies when out walking, and then cup spring water in one’s hands, reminding ourselves, like Rob Young, of Blake, once more:
“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.”
And if the walk to a spring, once named or featured on an OS map reveals nothing of its issue, then we could speak two lines from John Clare:
“There once were springs, where daisies’ silver studs Like sheets of snow on every pasture spread;”

 

Pyschogeography: Part2

So, let us follow further the ideas of Mr. Coverley, as in his lower-case entitled and unpunctuated “the art of wandering the writer as walker”. Here, Merlin Coverley invokes the spirit of an equally magically named savant, anthropologist Tim Ingold, “who has outlined in some detail his belief that such fundamental activities as walking, writing, reading, and drawing” will, in Ingold’s words now, leave “ a path through a terrain…a trace, at once in the imagination and on the ground.” This, he calls “wayfaring”, and the process of reading a book and reading a landscape through walking are the same: “To walk is to journey in the mind as much as on the land: it is a deeply meditative practice. And to read is to journey on the page as much as in the mind.”

So, we are almost ready to go wayfaring through space and time, but before we depart for the springs around Stroud, we have another port of call: William Blake. Coverley writes of Blake: “Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to pyschogeography today: the mental traveller who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by an awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of antiquarian and occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and anti-rational over more systemic modes of thought.”
This way of thinking (in a sense, the simultaneity of linear and lateral thought) has had a permanent influence upon me, ever since I had a time-shift moment at the Tower of London when I was 9 – way before I knew the term, “pyschogeography”.We’ve all had these moments, even if we don’t see angels in the trees in Peckham Rye, but I finish with four famous lines from Blake about the River Thames (even more poignant and relevant in 2012 with some economists describing water as “natural capital”) and an aside from me about our local waters. There then follows a piece from Tim Wright at http://www.timwright.typepad.com/L_O_S/  as an inspiration to us all to get walking and recording. It is not a conclusion; it is an introduction.

 

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

 

The Mill Race
When you sit by the mute, still, mill race,
With swallows swooping low over a surface
Likeglass, it’s easy to miss the water’s whispers.
I don’t mean the oozing and splashes,
The swish of the fish or the wind in the rushes,
I mean the tales of long ago when weir
And sluice meant a spuming spate of power,
A circuit of cog, belt, loom and jenny,
A revolution of the water wheels,
A pandemonium of 5 valley hammer-noise.

 

I laughed then in the face of precocious steam,
Bade weavers leave their homes to come to me,
Sprung cycles of boom and workhouse bust
To make any modern credit crunch seem very small beer,
Told workmen to form combinations,
Threw masters in the cut and felt the red coats’
Horses’ hooves pound the ground with General Wolfe,
Forced spinners to emigrate to New South Wales
Or lodge in hulks on their way to Botany Bay,
Saw coal black gold shift on cut and iron railway,
Fought a losing battle with boiler, chimney, steam,
Felt weed-dank choke my wooden-wheels,
Then knew my time was past.

 

So shed a mournful tear and took my vow of silence.

 

“Standing at the top of the Monument with the Bells of London ringing out, I had something of a Revelation. I am BlakeWalking to Escape. By refusing to Record the Obvious, by Publishing on the Hoof and Concentrating on Seemingly Aimless Conversation rather than Actual Output, by Consorting with Fellow BlakeWalkers, others who Refuse to Conform to the Usual Views & Routes, I can hope to Transcend; and perhaps Create a True Work of Personal Genius; rather than of General Commodity. Something closer to what might be described as a Vision! If youwould like to Walk and Talk and Create, please Make Contact so we can continue to Evolve our Shared Ideas and develop Continuous Creative BlakeWorks.”