Imagination
In this horizontal landscape it turns out there is flat and flatter. Out of flat some small scenes may appear neat and complete - tidy country vignettes of modest levels, jovial images of rhyne and clumps of tree. Rounded corners and warm to the touch. But in this flatter flat grislier scenes appear, desolate and older, less worked and more abandoned. Although evidence of livestock are pressed into the ground, the network of fields and gates is empty of life. In the chokingly spacious flatter, gates languish in high water, unbroken ice rots in puddles and blackthorn stabs up through the earth gasping for the air in my tyres.
Maybe it’s my current reading (Ghostland by Edward Parnell and a short selection of M. R. James ghost stories) that is setting my mind off on a florid tangent, but this particular arrangement of field, rhyne and stick-in-the-mud path feels loaded with some graspable otherness today. Human hand spent time laying proper hedgerows at some point in the distant past, but other interventions appear quick and desperate as if no one wanted to linger too long or come back anytime soon. Flailed hedge, close shorn ditches.
My mind wilfully drifts to inventing torrid tales for this place when a dot of white appears conspicuously far off down the rhyne. Cycling closer and raising my binoculars I see a little egret, spectral white, fishing for tiny silver fish. There in the oil tank black of the rhyne against the mud-dark bank and shivering reeds its luminous whiteness is the intangible ether of a spirit flickering on the shadowy moonstone water. When I get too close the bird escapes to the sky – silver fish and all – a focused torch beam effervescing across the backdrop of mazy ditches and dark violet trees, joined by another: two phantom visitors from another realm burning a lightning white trail across the retina of this one. Taken with the scene, revelling in its fictive potential, I continue, slogging past small ruined stone buildings along a frozen marsh track mostly grass, ice and cattle-rutted mud. Out of the flatter I eventually emerge, back onto familiar flat: A lane, warm to the touch, tame in comparison.
Tell me the egrets were long ago drowned sisters or jealously murdered lovers and I am an eager captive to the tale. Watching them wing away I am reminded of the eponymous woman in the song Polly Vaughn who, wrapped in her apron, is mistaken for a swan by her lover and slain. The last couplet of Tia Blake’s 1971 version concisely and evocatively describes a drear winter day not unlike today’s:
He roamed near the place where his true love was slain
He wept bitter tears but his cries were all in vain
He looked on the lake, a swan glided by
The sun slowly sank in the grey of the sky
I’ll take a more likely explanation for the little egrets too, but without such relish.
For me, these flat places provide a powerful conduit to the past and to otherness. Akin to abstract art and poetry, they are subliminations of our known world, mirage impressions of reality, prone to quick change and transmutable by definition. Physically they require human hands to dyke and drain else they would wash away in the tide, submerged like Doggerland, real now only in name. All this washes through my imagination as I stand on a concrete bridge above a place where several rhynes converge, listening to the sound of rushing water draining from fields across Severnland. It’s what brings me back and back and back: The eternal unfold of this landscape of imagination.