Icons in SE1

David Beckham is currently appearing, in rotation with various “punks” for Brewdog, on a monument, a stainless steel hoarding near the Imax roundabout in Waterloo which serves to block off the view of the National Theatre, those famous concrete towers and cubes that nobody can be bothered to hate any more, I don’t think even Prince Charles gets worked up about it, there are so many much more upsetting things in the built landscape these days. David is being an icon. He had lots of practise for this most boring of occupations because he spent the whole of his childhood kicking a football, not just against a wall, but against a particular brick in the wall. But it’s not so easy for David to be iconic because he loves to change his appearance. Jesus Christ and Nelson Mandela didn’t spend a lot of time at the barber’s or the tattoo parlour. And the man on the cross doesn’t need to have his name spelt out in the bottom left hand corner, but David Beckham does. The modern beard culture allows for so many tedious metamorphoses. David’s now is just a touch casual, as if he’s struggling to break free of the culture of metropolitan narcissistic decadence. Not every millimetre of his beard is under close control. He might be Admiral Sir David Beckham, a patriotic presence on the bridge through rough seas. As well as being an icon, David appears to be advertising watches, though the watch on his wrist is nicely camouflaged by the thick carpet of his tattoos.

Turn around and the IMAX cinema wears a big picture of Andy Murray # 1. That must mean World Number One. Oh dear. Andy has just been beaten by someone – nobody knows his name – ranked 920th. Andy is shown in cartoon form as a grim superstar with supercharged muscles. He too has his name written up in case we don’t recognise him – though the tennis racket is a pretty big clue. There is nothing to my eye that indicates what might be being advertised,though I think I can make out a perverse form of the letters U and A. In the background you can see the Shell redevelopment site, where thousands of workers from all over the world are working away to solve London’s housing crisis – er – 160 ‘affordable’ flats out of 868. The chief executive of the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co says: “South Bank Place is a true celebration of the South Bank’s heritage.” And the Canary Wharf Croup chairman (those two organisations are doing the South Bank together) said : “we are confident that this scheme will be a world-class addition to a culturally vibrant area of London.” (See my recent post, Fresh Outrage in SE1.)

Meanwhile the heavy 19th century gate, the main entrance into St John’s churchyard with its well hidden but vibrant display of world class eryngiums has been locked shut for years because it’s too expensive to repair it. Still, the South Bank Place developers have given us some new compost bins!

June 29, 2017

A piece with people, for Sarah

I stayed recently in Anavriti, a village in the mountains of the Peloponnese, at Guesthouse Arhontiko, a wonderful, welcoming place. Maria somehow combines running it and cooking great food with teaching French down in the valley in Sparta. Her husband George is a mountain guide, a car mechanic, a builder and a craftsman who loves to make things out of pieces of wood and stone that he finds on the mountains.
I told this story after dinner, in French, to Maria who translated it into Greek for George. It came about because up on Profitis Ilias, one of many Greek mountains to be named after the prophet Elijah who went up to heaven in a fiery chariot which swung low and scooped him up, George, who only speaks Greek, apart from just a few words of English, had pointed out to me a speck on a distant hill and said Golas! George! (It’s like Yourgo in Greek, my thanks to Joel Reid for that handy tip, because I was getting confused.) It was the hotel where Sheila and I had spent a few days that first time we came to the Peloponnese. George of Golas had told us that in Xirokambi, the big village in the valley where he had grown up, there had been a blue cafe and a red cafe, the two colours which stand for political and football opposition, for the enduring division of the civil war. I told Maria, who told George phrase by phrase that in 1966 I had travelled to Poland. In a small town after dark I had got drunk in a bar with a friendly student and a man who needed to say things about the war, then staggered to the station with him where we said goodbye and I got on a train to Warsaw. I had to lean out of the train window to be sick and my glasses fell off. I arrived late at night in Warsaw ill and unable to see clearly. A young man came up to me and said I could stay with him at the university. He shared a tiny room with a friend. Sleeping on the floor I exactly filled the space between the two beds. Like many others, my saviour was an exile from the Greece of the colonels’ junta. I said to Maria, he was the first Greek communist that I had met. Then George said something to Maria and she translated: ‘et maintenant vous en avez rencontré un autre,’ now you’ve met another one.

June 29, 2017

deck chair knee jerk

Some time last year the Minister for Transport, whoever that was and what ever the department is now called, rejected the Mayor of London’s request that more suburban rail services be added to the Overground network and no longer be run as private franchises. The Minister rejected the application on the grounds that it would just be moving the deckchairs. More and more the language of politics seems to be made up of cartoon metaphors. Knee jerk reaction is a favourite. (I like to think in metaphors but they have to be my own.) I thought about some of the reasons why it might be a good thing to move the deckchairs.

a) the tide is coming in

b) it’s raining

c) aggressive teenagers are playing football, they seem to think that your deckchair is a goal post.

d) your dad’s snoring

e) the children are fighting

f) it’s very hot and you’ve got a headache

g) if you move a little bit to the left you’ll keep the breeze off your grandmother

h) you’ve decided to steal the deckchair.

May 24, 2017

meanwhile in Clissold Park…

…with the help of £6,000,000, mostly lottery money, they’ve been creating a bindweed theme park in the new flower gardens, where the old rose garden was taken out, next to the house.

here’s some background information, in an article from the Daily Telegraph.

As with Jubilee Gardens, the landscaping is fine, the whole park is throbbing vibrantly with leisure and sporting activities, music and culture, but there isn’t any actual gardening, not even in the gardens. As you read in Christopher Woodward’s Telegraph article, the tenders for contracts for park maintenance are all about mechanisation. How many seconds to prune a shrub. In the tenders, bindweed doesn’t even exist.

A sizeable new herbaceous garden was made, but obviously little provision was made for weeding it. The idea seems to be that you make a garden, let it grow, weed it maybe once or twice a year (?), cut it all down in the winter, mulch it heavily with manure and watch it all spring back the following year. A couple of months after it had opened I couldn’t resist having a go at the thickets of two foot high weeds that were already racing away. I was put in my place by an angry park ranger who told me that there was a schedule, there was a plan to do the weeding at some point in the future. Whatever weeding was eventually done, it didn’t touch the bindweed, or the creeping thistles, or the docks. Covering them all with manure and mulch of course stimulated them to vigorous growth the next season. When big patches of the original planting were suffocated and dead, the autumn clearing was followed up with more manure on the bare ground. I suppose there wasn’t any money for either weeding or more planting, and no volunteers. If I wasn’t busy down in SE1 I’d volunteer myself. Maybe I could do a bit. But I don’t understand why the Clissold Park User Group, apparently a thriving body, don’t get their hands dirty.

An old complaint of trusts and charities is that money is available for capital projects, but not for running costs. This is particularly wrong headed with gardens, where most of the work, not just of ‘maintenance’ but also of creation takes place winter and summer, year after year. Every time a gardener decides to take out this patch of forget me not seedlings, or divide that clump of irises, every time she finds seedlings of a welsh poppy and carefully clears the chickweed and speedwell around it, every time an ancient rhododendron is cut back hard revealing ground beneath it where spring bulbs can be planted, that’s ‘garden maintenance’ and ‘design’. Just call it gardening. But gardening doesn’t sound serious enough so professionals almost always call themselves ‘landscape gardeners’ these days. If that’s to distinguish them from ordinary gardeners then it’s true: most of them don’t know a lot about gardening. The false dignity of the idea of ‘landscaping’ became so strong that people who supply plants for offices began to call themselves ‘interior landscapers’.

I thought of an analogy for the capital expenditure wrong-headedness, the idea that a garden is a one-off project, the neglect of the whole business of everyday gardening: you wouldn’t build a hospital and then not staff it with doctors and nurses. Then I thought, that’s misleading and unfair. But then I remembered: (I have it on the authority of somebody who works there, and I trust her – she’s a doctor,) after they built the monumental new Royal London Hospital with a wildly expensive PFI contract they didn’t have enough money to staff it and some wards remained empty for years. As a trade, gardening has much in common with health and social care. Both are time consuming, never ending, under funded and suffer from a shortage of skilled people.

This is what it’s like in Clissold Park now:

Libertia with bindweed. The libertia is now fully grown, the bindweed just getting going.

This is a tip of the iceberg shot. Thick mulching has helped a lot with annuals. That just leaves the bindweed with support from docks, creeping thistles and nettles

Bindweed on an escallonia hedge. Once it can’t go any higher it forms thicker and thicker suffocating blankets.

Call it a weed, call it a wild flower, this is black horehound, Ballota nigra. Whatever you call it, it’s powerful. There’s more bindweed in the yellow dogwood behind.

Dock in alchemilla and salvia.

Here they seem to be trying to get rid of the weeds with a membrane. The bindweed roots just travel to the edge and then shoot up.

The stiff effect of block planting, repeated in the background, with bare soil.

I don’t mean to suggest that the whole garden is ruined. Here Geranium phaeum ‘Album’ has flowered well, but there’s such a big monocultural block of it, it’s nearly finished flowering, and it has mildew. The species, deep purple, almost black, is striking and much more healthy.

But maybe the real question is, who cares?

new outrage in SE1

(ps. Outrage here too: this rambling piece has been sabotaged by inadvertent deletions. Whole and half sentences have just disappeared. But I’ll have to stick the bits together and ‘publish’ it soon because I’ve dithered too long already.)

I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a few weeks now. And I’ve got the photos. I can’t decide whether it’s a completely cynical project by developers who maybe controlled and perverted the intentions of all those who took part and created the thing, or whether they’re all just astonishingly stupid.

Shell have demolished most of their monumental office complex on the South Bank and the site is being redeveloped. There will be a lot of flats – no information is given about how many of those will be ‘affordable’, and there will also be lots of cutting edge vibrancy. The now commonplace display on the perimeter fencing of the history of the site mentions the war, and the almost irreparable damage done by the bombing. Irreparable damage is best done by developers.

On the east side of the site, by the busy pedestrian route to Waterloo station is an art display.

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Can you read it? I’ll pick out the best bits: DESCRIPTIONS OF PHYSICAL QUALITIES, ATTITUDES, FEELINGS AND EXPERIENCES…… TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPPING….. IDEAS ABOUT WHAT MAKES A PLACE SPECIAL OR UNIQUE….. SELECTIVE, PRECISE AND TRUTHFUL……. RICH, PERSONAL

And this is what you get:

Nothing you see has any relationship to the aims -more than aims, the blurb seems confident that they have been realised – expressed in the promotional intro. These big words express the death of ‘special, unique’ places, they are unselective, imprecise and untruthful, they are shallow and impersonal. No point going into a rant. I said to some friends, (in their thirties, so maybe they’ve known such bollocks most of their adult lives and take it for granted) ‘and they’ve shamelessly exploited children! It’s child abuse!’ They said, ‘oh, they do that all the time.’ Maybe it doesn’t matter too much; all the time I was there – I went twice – and for a while sat on the ground with my camera – not a single person in the brisk homeward crowd looked at any of it.

As if to make the display even more impersonal the length of the hoarding – 60, 70 metres? – means that most of it is repeated. It’s EPIC FRESH RELAXING and then it’s EPIC FRESH RELAXING.

I thought – hasn’t anybody noticed the homeless? the dirt? the dirty money? the diesel fumes? the mocking palaces of finance? the poor old BFI forced to raise a few bob by keeping the IMAX relentlessly covered with huge sexy adverts for trainers and smart phones and perfume? the squalid approaches to Waterloo station? the bindweed in St John’s churchyard gardens? (That’s another story. To follow.)

here’s the IMAX cinema:

Then I went to have a look at Jubilee Gardens, the fab new open space by the river, between the old County Hall and Hungerford Bridge.

There’s a little previous history here. When I worked for Putting Down Roots, St Mungo’s gardenng project, one of our gardens was in St John’s church yard, just opposite Waterloo station. Plans were being made to re-make Jubilee Gardens and for it to be run by a trust involving lots of local organisations in a partnership. There was a possibility, never more than vague, that we might be involved.

I was trying not to be an old ranter, but then I saw the phormiums:

Only one greedy block of them, licking a brown bottomed box hedge, so it looked as if something else had failed, and the designer being long departed, a contractor said, what can we stick in there then, and someone said, I know the very thing, tough as arseholes.

(see phorms and cords)

And these plants were only just hanging on

You know all that stuff about nature being good for you, how people’ spirits are lifted by living green things, and people in hospital with a view out over trees get better quicker than people who can only see the car park? They’ve done research that proves it apparently. But a park like this can only remind you of disease, neglect and death. And even the successful planting just reminds you of the army, or family oppressions, or very long boring journeys. This isn’t a good photo so you can’t see it but this bed is on a slope and the soil has been eroded so that the uppermost roots of the plants are exposed and withered.

Then I thought it was time to approach Waterloo again and go home. This is where things get properly vibrant and epic.

This special foot massage bit is fun

sorry, I know my satire is feeble. Here’s Mrs May:

and some fury:

I love this. Anybody can run our railways – but not the bloody French!

So I got the Waterloo and City line to Bank and walked to Liverpool Street,

felt the stirrings of a truly creative response to the south bank word display: if I could play around with colours and fonts I could do

BOLLOCKS LIES NONSENSE FUCK OFF

I gave the woman begging a quid. Not sure if a very crowded spot like that is a good place to beg; it’s easier to ignore a beggar when you’re in a crowd.

A few days later….. I was very unfair to Jubilee Gardens. ‘Disease, neglect and death’ was ridiculous. I skimmed through online the 83 page document which details and trumpets Jubilee Gardens. A painful exercise because it appeared on the computer screen at right angles and I couldn’t get it the right way up. But I read enough to find another split between aspiration and reality, or between lies and truth. For example:

‘Topography is a critical parameter in the park’s success. As much as possible the park will be shaped and sculptured in the tradition of the English Garden. The topography rises and falls, whilst the pathways are kept relatively level. This creates a “design language” – pathways either raised above the landform or cut into it. Paths, viewlines, trees and slopes are integrated in a subtle composition, which triggers the unconscious.’

The term ‘English Garden’ is capitalised to give it the kind of status which nowadays is always referred to as iconic, and to hide the fact that it’s so vague as to have very little meaning.

And:

‘An exceptional quality of flower beds is proposed – beds maintained by the Royal Parks are the reference for desired quality. Vibrant colours will be replaced at least three times a year to reflect seasonal change and to achieve a high quality visual effect.’

Here the word vibrant, another contemporary favourite, is used to cover up the fact that they haven’t given any thought to what the colours might be. And I think ‘high quality visual effect’ means pretty.

And:

‘The landscape was designed by landscape architects West 8, a cutting edge practice which delivers ground breaking urban parks and public spaces worldwide…… a wonderful green vision for gardens in London’s most vibrant area.’

Do you think whoever wrote this believed in what they were saying, or believed that anybody else would believe it, or take any notice of it?

But I decided I should try to see beyond the phormiums and go back and have a proper look at the gardens, trying not to be a an old moaner. And yes, the trees are excellent. Big when put in but already well established. And the paving in granite blocks is beautifully done. Nice lines to the curving paths. If they’d only left it at that…. The main flower bed, backed by hedging or shrubs in clumps is a finely pointed, undulating flame-like curve that looks exciting on paper. But it’s too narrow, even at its widest, for anything but dwarf bedding, and there isn’t any bedding. Nothing that could be replaced ‘three times a year.’ Instead they’ve used perennials and shrubs in distinct blocks in the almost universal municipal manner. There is no attempt to mingle different plants in a naturalistic manner which would fit with what is a strong tradition in many English gardens if not the English Garden.

A good few of the 83 pages are given to a careful and detailed description of the species of trees chosen… and to their cultivation, for example their plans to avoid the dreaded ‘sump effect’ which is created when the planting hole for a tree with a big root ball is deeper than the top soil.

But when the document comes to consider the ‘flower beds’ the Royal Parks are invoked, to give a blessing to the completely unspecified planting. We’ll just copy them. They’re cutting edge and they’ve got the power of heritage. It’s another dream. The word ‘bedding’ isn’t used, but bedding is indicated by the intention to change the plants – the document actually says change the ‘vibrant colour’ , so a plant becomes simply a colour – at least 3 times a year. It’s as if all this crazy activity in itself authenticates the project. Not a single plant or ‘flower’ is named, but the trees all get their full names in two languages. Anyway, there is no bedding. And this made me realise again what a strange dream the internet can be. The 83 page document was never edited to say – we’ve decided not to go the Buckingham Palace way, we’re going to go for blocks of perennials and some blocks of small shrub roses and top it all off with a couple of big clumps of phormiums. It didn’t go out of print. No friendly librarian to say, no, that’s out of date, this is the one you want. Nothing in the internet to explain the change of plan or hint at the debate that must have taken place.

Bergenias and persicarias in blocks, purple heucheras at the back:

The document, in its discussion of social factors, explains the landscaping concept of ‘desire lines’. When you make a new design for a park, don’t try to cut through well established short cuts with a flower bed; people will just go on walking straight through it. A good design should create new desire lines, quietly suggesting that the people walk where you want them to walk. But in Jubilee Gardens they’ve laid down these tapering skinny beds which end with a point like a piece of pie – you can’t get a plant to grow in the shape of small triangle. And it’s obvious that many people walk straight through the bed, not just at its tip, but in a broad band about two metres wide.

But for a place so heavily used, notice the good quality of the grass.

I took some photos of the trees too, to show how good they look, although it was raining at the time.

I wonder why redwoods and Douglas firs are so rarely planted in cities. They might be able, after many years, to stand up to the huge new buildings.

It’s obvious that there’s a whole part of this story which doesn’t appear in the planning document or in the publicity and reports produced after the park was opened by the Trust which administers it. In a survey of park users in 2016 98.5% rated Jubilee Gardens as good or very good and 97% said the landscaping was w ell maintained. That’s excellence on a north Korean scale! I think it would look better if they didn’t plug the gaps trampled in the planting with sections of green plastic fence. I would use rose and pyracantha prunings. Still, one time at St John’s when things were bad they just set fire to the effective thorny barricade which a couple of our volunteers had carefully built.

March 22, 2017

I’ve been busy gardening

John Clare:
Where last years leaves and weeds decay
March violets are in blow
I’d rake the rubbish all away
And give them room to grow

My favourite poem on gardens and gardening. He’s not even in a garden, but he responds like a gardener to the wild flowers. His heart was also dancing but what he tells us about is the impulsive, nurturing impulse.

February 25, 2017

Moving on in the Gasterntal

Just above Kandersteg in the Bernese Oberland which is easily reached by train, the river Kander comes out of a gorge. The first indication I had that anything untoward had happened was a sign warning that the path had been swept away, so you would have to follow the road which was cut into the cliffs. After the gorge the valley, the Gasterntal opened up, green, sunny, relaxed and almost flat, with the river sprawling wide and slow among pasture and woodland. Here I shown my first ladies’ slipper orchids, and part of the pleasure was the meeting with strangers who somehow knew that I wanted to see them. See a piece I wrote earlier. Cypripedium calceolus I was back in the Garden.

After a couple of miles the valley narrows again, conifers crowd in, road and path wind up over rocky outcrops and the river rushes between short waterfalls. And then you come to the steep sided upper valley with its summer grazing, where there are two simple guest houses and one or two farm buildings. We’re now at about 1600 metres. I booked in at the Hotel Steinbock, where quite a few people were having lunch but I was the only guest, then I went to explore higher up the valley, towards the Kanderfirn, the glacier which is the source of the river Kander. That’s where I came to a full-stop. I followed the path, or where the path had been, over two broad, chaotic mounds of stone, but gave up at the third. There is some predictability to a scree slope, or maybe just a familiarity. It might well move, but you can slither down with it, even run. But these great new piles of stones looked dangerous, like the unsettled ruins of a bombed city, not that this analogy struck me at the time.

I made my way up the side of the valley to be able to see what had happened. Across the surviving patchwork of young trees and pasture rich with flowers ran several broad fans of stone, very narrow at the top but hundreds of metres wide at the bottom of the valley. I learnt later that in October 2011 unseasonably heavy snow was followed by a sudden rise in temperature and torrential rain; an unmoving, persecutory storm which attacked until soil and sand and rock ran before it. Easy slopes of flowery pasture where sheep and cattle brought up for the summer graze peacefully below high crags had been flayed by avalanches of rock and mud. Issuing from high gullies they charged down to the valley, ripping off the turf and disembowelling the guts of the mountainside. The upper valley had been stripped of so much pasture that fewer sheep and cattle were allowed up into the Gasterntal that summer, these things being carefully regulated in Switzerland.

If Nietzsche and Wordsworth composed works of philosophy and poetry while walking in the mountains it wouldn’t have been here. Here the only subject for thought was geology. None of the nicely developing themes you might play with while strolling or striding along a picturesque, well-worn path could survive. Only the most vicious ear-worms could resist.
Such things shouldn’t happen in Switzerland. And this summer – 2012, just a few months after the disaster – was wet and the lady who ran the Hotel Steinbock was anxious. A little lower down the valley a big crack along the edge of the narrow road suggested that it might break away from the mountainside and slip down to the bottom of the valley. The man who ran the other guesthouse was dissatisfied with the authorities’ efforts. On a shoal of shingle in the middle of the river, which was broadening again with the new rain, sat a digger, waving its bucket to and fro like a beetle on its back as it scooped stones from one part of the flood and dropped them into another, trying to reset the course of the delinquent river Kander. I stood with this man on a newly restored bridge and spoke pidgin German. He thought they should have brought a much bigger digger, and explained that they can take them apart, transport the parts by helicopter and reassemble them. All for a valley deserted in winter and a summer population of about twelve plus visitors..

I couldn’t see how the land would recover. Forest regenerates quickly after gales and fires. Flood often spreads a layer of fertile silt which supports new growth. Spring follows the hardest winter. In some places in the Gasterntal there was thick sand and mud – see the photo of the half buried farm building. And the silt that had been dumped in the river bed was six feet deep in places; the stream had already carved a new channel through it. But the forces of erosion seemed to have neatly separated different types of material. The huge fans of rock that spread nearly half a mile wide in places were full of air. Fine materials had been washed away or to the bottom, so far from the light that nothing could germinate there, and if any seeds did they would send up hopelessly thin and yellow shoots towards the light and die. Wouldn’t they? And how long would it take for those dead spaces between the stones to fill with silt and organic matter? Only snow would accumulate, then melt. At lower altitudes large quantities of organic matter are produced every year – think of the famously buried Lost Gardens of Heligan which were dug out of thick blankets of leaf mould which had built up during decades of neglect. But at 2000 metres organic matter is scarce, and here in one day it had all been taken away.
Elsewhere, a little further down the valley, below the guest houses, a different kind of destruction had chipped and shredded trees in choked gullies. This too was hard to understand. Like the wrath of God. It seemed that trees had not only been smashed and driven down the mountain side but had then been repeatedly pounded and smashed to shreds, by successive waves of rock and water.

I haven’t come any further since that full stop at the great pile of stones in the Gasterntal. and now I feel as if my brain is encased in fever and snot, though I can’t quite go to bed yet. On the web I was introduced to the extremely useful word ‘anthropocentric’. Most of what you find on the web is of course extremely anthropocentric, especially if you enter words like avalanche or Lavine (German for avalanche). How many houses destroyed, how many bridges down, what were the effects or should I say impacts on train services and roads, on power lines, on tourism? Lower down the list the scientists write, in German mostly, if you’re making European inquiries, or else in American.
It seems that what happened in the Gasterntal wasn’t an avalanche, or series of avalanches, but a Murgang, which in American is a debris-flow. Most avalanches flow swiftly over the surface. They are good for bio-diversity, because they strip away trees and eventually encourage the growth of a wider variety of plants. But a Murgang, and here I’m surmising, rips open the mountain side and a growing, churning mass of stone, mud, water, silt and melting snow comes rumbling down. A Murgang will typically break open an old, steep, moraine wall. The greatest extent of the glaciers in the Alps was at about 1850, the peak of a little ice age, and there are many dramatic moraines which date back to then so they’re quite new. In In the Gasterntal steep slopes which in the last 150 years had grown an illusory protective skin of trees and flower rich pasture are now sliding down to the valley, provoked by recent extremes of snow and rainfall, and will go on doing so until they reach a stable pitch. I’d seen geomorphic chaos in the Himalayas, but naively I didn’t expect to come across it in the Alps. India is a chaotic country, Switzerland so calm and well ordered, right? But the Alps are new, though the Himalayas are newer, and change tends to be faster and greater in new mountains. We live in such an old, stable country where almost everything that happens to the landscape is the result of human agency, where our dreadful Murgang was the one that destroyed Aberfan. The seas nibble away at the coast and in 1839 a big landslip created the undercliff near Lyme Regis. Even that was decorous enough for farmers to harvest wheat which continued to grow on chunks of land which had slipped down and broken away.

Coming to the broad valley at the top of the gorge

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the Gasthaus Steinbock

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the damage

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two kinds of water, clear rainwater and silt- laden water from the glacier up the valley

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and it kept on raining

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the digger doing its best

of course there were still flowers – Orchis ustulata with raindrops

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Astragalus alpinus

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Thalictrum aquilegiifolium

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In between the showers of rain the air was amazingly clear. Here’s the Doldenhorn, which rises to the south of the Gasterntal, in the early morning

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February 22, 2017

at a full stop in the Gasterntal

and how to go on? How to write on a subject about which I know next to nothing, but find myself drawn to?

But first, one or two more deviations, diversions and prohibitions:

15. We moved to Cold Ashton, north of Bath and east of Bristol, in 1950 I think. The one street village extends along the edge of the southern scarp of the Cotswolds, 700 feet high, hence ‘Cold’. Opposite our house was the beautifully built eight foot high drystone wall of the thickly wooded garden of the Victorian vicarage, which was on the scale of a manor house. That wall taught me the meaning of the word ‘private’ before I knew the word itself. I only once remember going behind it: we sneaked in, me and my sisters, we were hidden away in the shrubs, some distance from the house, which had a great swathe of lawn in front of it, and Myna, just a toddler at the time, ate a lords-and-ladies berry. Somehow I knew that they were poisonous. We all ran for it and hoped for the best.

16. When I went for my long and winding walk from Cornwall to Scotland in 1973 I took a notebook in which I wrote virtually nothing, for seven weeks. And I spoke to virtually no one. Years later I wrote this, and only this:

‘On that walk I avoided farms when I could, behaving like a trespasser even though I was almost always on public rights of way, listening for dogs, cursing fences, skirting woods, striking the pose of the dispossessed, the vagrant; finding safety in invisibility. Often I didn’t camp till sunset and was on my way again soon after sunrise.’

But there was one brilliant meeting. I walked up the hills and valleys from Bath and came once again to Cold Ashton. It must have been sixteen years after we’d left, although it seemed longer then, or sixteen seemed like a bigger number then than it does now. Next door to our old house was Mr Lewis at his front door. We said hello. We chatted for a minute or two. I didn’t tell him who I was. It was enough that he had greeted me warmly as a stranger. As I left the village I saw a badger, moving slowly, in broad daylight. The only time I’ve ever seen one. And then over the dreary arable Cotswold plain. The Cotswolds are only interesting on the edges and in the dips and folds.

17. It must have been one evening after I’d passed my driving test, which was one of the biggest flukes of all time, in about 1963. A few of us drove one evening to Stonehenge in my mother’s car. We had a special relationship with the stones because we lived in Amesbury, and the landowner who had given the site to the nation had stipulated that residents of Amesbury, about three miles away, should have the right of free entry. Apparently. In any case there was nothing but an ordinary waist high wire fence, you could step over it. All of a sudden a voice came out of the gathering darkness: Stonehenge is closed! It was especially striking because I don’t think we even knew that Stonehenge could be closed. It wasn’t like a pub or a theatre with opening times or a schedule of performances. It had just been there for four thousand years, part of the landscape. Of course this story doesn’t quite make sense, because we knew that we were exempt from the entry fee that others had to pay.

Anyway, he was only dong his job. We obeyed and left. I don’t think I ever went back.

I’m still working my way back to the Gasterntal, but I’ll leave you with an illustration of prohibition at the Giant’s Causeway.

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And this is why they think it’s dangerous. This next picture was taken 11 years after the last one, those slopes have been slithering for a long time. But remember the great mountain illusion: what looks like a sheer slope when you view it head on is rarely so. If it were there would be no grass or soil left on those cliffs

January 22, 2017

Deviations

1. I finally went back a long way, realising how much my walks and walking have been influenced by prohibitions. My mother used to tell the story of how when I was three, I took my little sister Judy out of the house one Sunday morning when our parents were still in bed, how they panicked when they realised we weren’t in the house, I was pushing her in her pram round the streets of Preston.

2. Long walks as a boy with a disobedient labrador when we lived by the mill in Amesbury. There are farmers and gamekeepers about. You can’t pass unobserved when there’s a big dog thrashing about and the pheasants raise the alarm.

3. in Rome, in 1980, we found ourselves locked out of the botanical gardens. Terror and kidnap had stiffened the defences of the villas out along the Appian Way, but at that time the public realm was poorly defended and it was easy to climb in, on a sunday when the gardens were officially closed. As we walked along a broad avenue through a wilderness of luxurious neglect a voice called out something in Italian that we couldn’t understand, then repeated it in German and finally, in English: be careful of the toads! (At that time in various wild places we met the perfect German, they’d always got there just before us.) And toads were crawling everywhere.

4. The countryside around Fiesole outside Florence is also heavy with prohibitions. A grove of olive trees surrounded by a six foot high wall with four feet of wire mesh fence on top of it. The gardens of the Villa Medici which we had hoped to visit were so well walled in that you get not a glimpse of its famous terraces. Lanes lined with high wall and fences so it feels like you’re in a railway cutting. Who are rich Italians – and no doubt plenty of foreigners – so scared of? But when we came to the ancient cathedral at the foot of the hills which is now part of some European university the caretaker spied us through his peep hole popped out with his bunch of keys to see what we wanted and let us in with a show of privilege and conspiracy. Because it felt as if rules were being broken we gave him a tip.

5. Travel is all about negotiating various permissions and exclusions. (The word passport means open door, pass through the door.) You have to pay to go into the Boboli gardens in Florence, but it’s free for EU citizens over the age of 65 (and for residents of Florence.) That was the only occasion in my life when I’ve been asked if I’m european, which I foolishly thought was odd until I realised that I could be american – I could be american!! And that’s when I realised I’d lost my passport. Once we were in and longing to sit down, every lawn and bank of grass had a keep off sign in several languages and there were no benches. But when you go up the hill, away from the palace, benches appear and the signs disappear, and the whole spirit of the place is transformed by people sitting about. We seem to move from an aristocratic estate where we are only tolerated if we stay on our feet and mind our place to a people’s park. But it took some finding, and we were weary. If you’re used to English landscaping the contradictory combination of wide open vistas and dark paths through bosky wilderness takes some negotiating. I’m surprised none of the guide books tell you any of this. It’s surely more important to the tired traveller than some fanciful idealisation of ‘the best pizza’ or ‘the most delicious ice cream’.

6. At Peniarth-uchaf it’s the public footpath that draws us in. The Ordnance Survey map charts our little freedoms with green lines which often cut through private estates. Sometimes I can’t quite believe this entitlement and still feel like a trespasser even though the path very rarely goes up to the big house itself but slips past stables and barns and off into the woods. The miracle of Peniarth is that the squire – not sure what word you’ld use for an invisible Welsh land owner – lets us stray from the path. He doesn’t actually say, you are welcome to come into this garden, and he doesn’t say behave yourself when you are in the garden, he simply asks that we shut and bolt the door when we leave, as if to emphasise ours and the garden’s exclusion. And then at the end he puts ‘thankyou’, which is nice. Actually, you couldn’t bolt the door because it had dropped on its hinges, but I managed to prop it up a bit and leave it in a temporarily better state than when I found it.

Several years later I think that the notice is intended for guests at the holiday homes on the estate, not for stray vagabonds… People thought that Wordsworth was quite the vagabond. Until the late eighteenth century nice people only walked within the grounds of an estate; he was one of the first to take to the hills.

7. In the middle of wild swampland where the trees are intertwined in an inextricable thicket, there is a plain with very green vegetation which attracts the eye by reason of its fertility; no obstacle impedes the walker. Not a particle of the soil is left fallow; here the earth bears fruit trees, there grape vines cover the ground or are trained on high trellises. In this place cultivation rivals nature; what the latter has forgotten the former brings forth…. this is an image of Paradise; it makes one think already of heaven. William of Malmesbury

8 One of the best places to experience a delightful transition from security to insecurity, from crowds to solitude, is the Giant’s Causeway. A path continues along the coast after the most famous, tightly geometric rock formations, running roughly on an even contour half way between the sea and the cliff top. After about half a mile you come to quite an elaborate fence blocking the way and signs warning that the path is dangerous after that point because of landslides. But the most difficult bit is climbing over the fence. The path itself is subject to erosion, but is no more dangerous than many mountain walks. No doubt there are occasionally rockfalls but most of the slippage is mud on the steep slopes after heavy rain, and there’s a bit of a scramble at the end as the path goes back up to rejoin the track along the cliff top. As well as peace and beauty this little expedition brings the joy of disobedience.

9. The hills around our gite at la Montagne, a hamlet in the Büech region of France, where I went walking with Judy again for nearly the first time in 66 years, are free from overt prohibitions. There are inaccessible limestone cliffs, and strange barren slopes of sticky marl, and in places tangled shrubs, for we are at the edge of the Mediterranean garrigue, but there are none of the signs which in some areas constantly remind us of what we already know: that almost all of our continent is private property. And there is no clear division between proper tarmac roads with their legally binding signs and commandments and rough, stony tracks. Are we still on a public highway? Is it safe to carry on driving over ruts and sharp stones? No signs to say what kind of traffic is permissible, unlike England where a public footpath has an identity different from that of a bridleway, for the bridle of a horse, where distinctions are made between pedestrians, horses, mountain bikes, 4 wheel drives; or parts of the Alps where the road ends with a locked gate to which only locals have the key. (what a feeling of freedom when you walk past the gate, and leave behind the motorised tourists!) But around la Montagne thanks to subsidised electricity the local farmers use electric fences to control their sheep and goats. Some are not active, but some are, though they look rusty and neglected. Just too high to step over comfortably, too low to crawl under easily. And I hate the violent thrill of an electric shock. So some pasture and meadows were not easily accessible.

10. In the Peloponnese ( in the Peloponnese 3, Vaidenitsa) sheep and goats have the freedom of the hills, and so do we, although there are lots of William of Glastonbury’s ‘impenetrable thickets’. Botanists enjoy this freedom but wish the herbivores had less of it. As you leave the coast you leave outspoken private property and guard dogs. On minor roads the skin of tarmac is often flayed. More so than in the Büech, it is often not clear that you are leaving behind the security of a public road for a rough track, leading maybe to an empty monastery, which could eventually become an overgrown footpath zig zagging down into a gorge. (I read in that little book on the Peloponnese that the insurance on hired cars is often not valid on dirt roads. But is there in Greece a clear distinction between dirt and tarmac?)

11. In Corsica I walked above our campsite in the mountains, through a wood of theatrical old Corsican pines (Pinus nigra var. corsicana) where leathery Helleborus corsicus survived the intense heat, and came up to a ridge from where I could see my way back to the campsite, barely half a mile away. From a distance the hillside appeared quite open, but in the end I had to crawl under the maquis, learning how a small mammal could easily run where I struggled to move at all. Over and through were impossible, the only way was the narrow band of air between stony ground and almost horizontal branches. If I did it again I would wear a helmet and kneepads, like a miner.

12. Dense, thorny scrub whether on mediterranean hillsides or the cornish coast is inviting from a distance. You can’t believe that you can’t walk there. Smooth greens and gentle slopes. I’ve often looked for routes up from Vault beach at Lamledra, but always when you go closer you find barbed entanglements of brambles, knee high hedgehogs of thick gorse, it really is impenetrable. Camouflage camouflaged.

13. Scrambling down over scree in the Alps you learn which plants to trust. Alnus viridis, green alder, grows on slopes which are subject to rock fall and avalanche. Its branches are almost prostrate, they allow snow to sweep over them; catch hold of them and they will hold you like a rope or a rail. What you remember afterwards is not the view but the sensation of rock and branch, the flexible strength of the alder, its firm handholds making up for no firm footholds, and the way your body is stretched as you swing and slither down. And how grateful your feet and legs are when you eventually get back to an even path.

14. In the Gasterntal I came to a full stop.

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