CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species. How best to live in the ruins that we have made?

This anthology of commissioned work tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn.

Helen Macdonald, in her remarkable piece on growing up in a 50-acre walled estate, reflects on our failed stewardship of the planet: ‘I take stock,’ she says, ‘During this sixth extinction, we who may not have time to do anything else must write now what we can, to take stock.’ This is an important, necessary book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Dee is a BBC Radio producer, making upwards of thirty programmes a year. His first book, The Running Sky, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009 and described his first five birdwatching decades. His second book, Four Fields, described more deeply his ideas of the pastoral. He collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds.

INTRODUCTION

WE ARE LIVING – many believe – in the Anthropocene, an epoch where everything of Earth’s current matter and life, as well as the shape of things to come, is being determined by the ruinous activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian ape.

How, then, to live on our planet in the mess that we have made? And how to do that in harmony with the rest of the world that we have permitted to remain?

Places are anthropogenic creations called into being by the meeting of humans and their environment. They are prominent among our contributions to our times and our space. We make what has been called patterned ground. Place-making is a signal of our species. We make good ones and bad ones, and plenty of neither-here-nor-there ones. Good, bad or indifferent, they operate on all their constituents.

This is a book of writing about places. The personal geographies come from as many acres as people. The writing about them shares one constant: every description and every thought arises from someone being detained – by views, buildings, sculpture, weather, chairs, churches, trees, streets, people, memories. It seems, broadly, good to be stopped by a place. And this is one way a place comes into being. Our attention to them makes places significant. They are inhabited. Seen this way, these places are all cultural landscapes of one sort or another. Seen this way, they are vital for life. What follows, therefore, are various relief maps: they show what places might look like to themselves, but also how places work on us.

There is succour here. And this is important because most of the time most of us are unplaced. Even when we live somewhere that we can call home, we spend much of our time away. We traffic along roads, through airports, in offices, hospitals, supermarkets – all non-places where the most we can hope for is a relatively frictionless passage. The success of these zones is measured by their throughput, their flow, their footfall. The sinuous path many airports have imposed around their entrances and exits via their duty-free shopping areas might define this world. I want nothing to do with it, yet here I am joining the conga.

An oblong of flat glassy space is now our most common go-to place. Young children, scrolling their fingers, attempt to enlarge images in books as they can on a screen. I’ve seen that. Digits working the digits. Some might try the same outdoors. Why not? Unfold the clouds. Bring me my bow. Mediation is not new. Magnification has long assisted birdwatchers. Ted Hughes’s killer thrushes in his poem were, I am sure, seen through binocular lenses. But optics can distort as well as enlarge. The very tools that take us in close are also keeping us, ultimately, from any happily muddying contact with the hard matter of the world. Objects, as it says on North American car mirrors, are closer than they appear. We fail to notice this when mediation is all.

One of the most depressing places I have been in recent years is Bellaghy in County Londonderry. Seamus Heaney is buried there near his childhood home: the great poet of the personal omphalos, the navel stone that might mark the centre of the world, hence the most important place of all. His grave was young when I was there, still bare and earthy. The town was something else. A flesher’s survived, J. Overend & Sons, and I shivered at the name and the family’s tasks, but many of the other shopfronts were boarded up, or rather blinded with window-sized stickers of garish leafy scenes, manipulated images of healthiness and happiness, screens of greenery elsewhere.

To talk about trees in dark times, Bertolt Brecht wrote, is almost a crime. As more and more people in the world seem to have no place of their own, it has got harder, rightly, for the fortunate to linger in any sort of sacred grove. The Jungle at Calais was certainly a place. And in the knowledge of such places, to extol Birnam Wood or Burnham Beeches or any other sylvan spot would seem like an escapist romance, an umbrageous avoidance of the issue, that few can afford. Masking economic and social collapse and failure with digitised verdancy seems comparably culpable. Natural beauty once guaranteed the status of a place. Not now.

The threat to our understanding and valuing of place is not, then, the heaped-up world of the built environment. That is our habitat and has been for thousands of years, perhaps, as Mark Cocker has suggested, ever since we shared caves with swallows where their ‘procreant cradles’ gave us an idea for mud bricks. As long as we’ve been settlers we have been place-makers. We’ve made pied-à-terre, we’ve lived in situ. What saps the possibilities of rooted or detained or placed life is the untextured places we increasingly live among: the unmuddy world of the depthless screen and the sealed space. How many accumulated years have I lived in a car? Even before virtual life threatened lived life, the place-ness of place was under threat in this way: specificities have been dulled, local habitations and names globalised, the instress or haecceity of every street or field driven from common memory. It was house martins, the swallows’ cousins, that King Duncan saw breeding on the battlements of the Macbeths’ castle. It seemed propitious to him that the birds shared a home with his hosts. But it wasn’t good news for Duncan, and now the martins too are struggling on British houses where the eaves are so made these days that there is little purchase. The birds’ mud nests cannot stick.

*

Two thoughts – on the forecast end of places and on their observed persistence:

*

Places, ‘An anthology of Britain’, edited by Ronald Blythe (and made for Oxfam), was published in 1981. It is rich in fine writing about beautiful places. There are poems and essays from, among others, Ruth Pitter, John Betjeman, Susan Hill, Alan Sillitoe, R. S. Thomas, Jan Morris, Dirk Bogarde and John Stewart Collis. Its prevailing mood is wistful and elegiac. Almost everywhere described is either no longer fully there or is remembered from childhood. It seems twentieth-century life has sent place-writing adrift. In one memorable formulation the historian Richard Cobb, writing about his Essex childhood, describes how he has always preferred facing backwards when travelling because the world appears more honest as it is disappearing. It’s a rationale for a historian’s methodology (the ghost of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History is perhaps hovering nearby), but it also describes the myopia about the present that is common to many of the contributions in the book. Throughout its soft-spoken pages the writing intimates its underlying subject: the long and continuing impact of industrialisation, the severance from the perceived sustenance and verities of the rural past, and the alienation of urban life. There is some writing about London, but it seems that in general today’s places – cities and towns and all the living zones – are not places to be written. It is as if something isn’t working, as if Britain, estranged from itself, couldn’t make places any more.

The injuries continued, and another book looked to staunch some wounds and advance an argument. In 1984 Jonathan Cape published Second Nature, a 240-page collection of essays and illustrations edited by Richard Mabey (with Sue Clifford and Angela King). The book was made for the charity Common Ground, and its jacket declared the organisation’s then purpose as being to stem the tide of destruction of much that was wild and natural in Britain, by providing a fusion between the arts and nature conservation.

The editors assembled an impressive collection of words and images, and divided the contributions into three sections headed Personal Landscapes, Nature and Culture, and Beyond the Golden Age. Among the writing commissioned were pieces from John Fowles, Ronald Blythe, Fay Weldon, Peter Levi, Norman Nicholson and Kim Taplin. Intersecting the essays were illustrations of artworks by, among others, Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Richard Long, David Nash, Norman Ackroyd, Andy Goldsworthy and Fay Godwin.

Common Ground was looking forward, but most of the writing in Second Nature still looked back. The historical analysis in essays by John Barrell, John Berger and Raymond Williams reframed the past. But the book stood, as it declared, at the end of things, beyond a golden age. The ancient continuities were still just about graspable, but the incoming tide of destruction was running high. The old natural world was dying and, although imminent, the new man-made world, which had killed it off, had yet satisfactorily to be born, at least in prose. It is more than a collection of elegies, but most of the book’s literary efforts were put into accounts of what had been lost. Common Ground was only a year old and much of the writing in the book (the visual arts are less constrained) makes for sunset songs, or requiems for the end of the long, lived-in (and perceived as mostly benign) entanglement of a people and their (mostly rural) places.

The poem isn’t in the book, but much of what is there has the same odd tense of the pressingly posthumous of Philip Larkin’s ‘Going, Going’:

How the value of place-writing has shifted, and what, more generally, has happened to ideas about place since the 1980s is, I hope, evident in this book. Concrete and tyres, the man said. We now understand that the paved world can be as articulate as the vegetated. Philip Larkin’s poems themselves announced that. What has changed is that we are now prepared to consider as meaningful habitat places previously ignored or written off. Modernity has shattered our world like never before, we are more deracinated than ever, but because we feel most places to be nowhere we have also learned that anywhere can be a somewhere. All of our habitat is relevant: not just the pretty bits. It turns out, counter to prime-ministerial sound-bites, that we are all at once citizens of nowhere and citizens of the world. In one extraordinary essay in Ronald Blythe’s collection, Russell Hoban questioned what a place might be: ‘Place itself may not be possible at all … all the place … is may well be no more than the moving point of consciousness in us.’ Whether we call this place doesn’t matter (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are stalking somewhere about Hoban), but, whatever it is, it ‘provides a cross-over between the seen and the unseen, between the potential and the kinetic energies of that space we move in which is not simply space: perhaps it is the soul of the universe; and perhaps we are the organ of perception required by that soul’.

A place, then, as ever, might be a hollow tree or the dark end of a street, a childhood bedroom, a roundabout, a refugee camp or a sewage farm. In the last thirty years all sorts of anywheres were promoted in the collective consciousness and could be written as places. Despite this, none of them were secure. All places are challenged by modern times, yet none will go quietly, even those hedged with simulacra or trampled under real feet. Places, meetings of people and world, remain stubbornly there, itchy, palpable, determining. Good or bad, they are felt on our skin and get under it too. Time, the deer, is in Hallaig wood, said Sorley MacLean (as translated by Seamus Heaney). Birmingham is what I think with, said Roy Fisher.

Among the pieces collected here, the art of Richard Long and Greg Poole does some place-holding for me. All three of us are Bristol people. Greg and I have birdwatched together for more than thirty years. We don’t do so much now, and the place we most often meet is just behind his garden where his micro-meadow is up and coming. He tries again and again to get my non-bird naming – flowers, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, bats – up to scratch. I stake a claim to Richard Long’s work. The polished stone behind his text here is the product of generations of Bristol bottoms sliding down a smoothing slope of rock between the old observatory and camera obscura on the top of the Downs and the approach-way to the Clifton Suspension Bridge (subject of Patrick McGuinness’s piece here). For an hour of most Sundays for years of my youth my sister and I would add our shine.

A green city, Bristol has been called these past years, a green capital even. Green capital is what it has. One of the reasons I like the place is because from almost anywhere locked within its streets and buildings, you can see beyond to a green rim, where the city ends. It talks to its opposite in this way. My grandfather was a clerk in the old Fry’s chocolate factory in Keynsham. From his desk he could see a summit ring of trees on a round hill south towards Bath. They kept him going, he would say. And the green belt fed Romanticism too. The poems of the Lyrical Ballads, first set in type in Bristol, were for Coleridge and Wordsworth made out of that West Country green.

At its simplest or starkest the effect of a cultural landscape is expressed in a poem fashioned from another west. Seamus Heaney, in his last book, Human Chain, translated ‘A Herbal’ by Guillevic, the great twentieth-century poet from Brittany, who was also a civil servant in the French Ministry of Finance. Towards the conclusion of the poem, which lists the grasses and flowers of a western headland, is this simple, somewhat stony, couplet:

It is striking how few of the places described here might be thought special other than to their describers. There are no grand houses, no Georgian cities, no national parks, no demarcated nature sanctuaries. Beauty spots – remember those? Preserved territory or reservations like these perhaps lose the quintessence of place, the co-evolved mutuality of people and surroundings, which many of the writers notice here. Places are better unplanned, when thay are feral spaces where things and lives can get on, more on less, like the entangled bank where life thrives, that Darwin described in the last paragraph of his Origin. Calculated attempts to make places often show only the dead hand of management. New public spaces often suffer in this regard; public art, too.

Striking, too, is how ugly and broken many telling places are. We paint with distemper when, as now, the time is felt as out of joint. In much of Britain everyone navigates what Ian Nairn called subtopia. The drosscape, Alan Berger’s American term for the splurge, is perfectly at home in the UK, and extends for many miles in most directions. Topographical phenomenologists and cultural geographers have found things to say in the non-places – those zones where we, unwittingly, spend much of our lives, where indeed we mostly live, but where no one feels at home. There are books on shopping malls, the M25; there is Jean Baudrillard’s America. But it is scant fare. Recently the leftovers, the ends of places, have been more arresting and have offered better nourishment. W. G. Sebald was an unlikely tour guide, but showed many readers some ways back into the richness of rot, the humus of memory meeting an evanescent world.

But long before Eeyore walked East Anglia, Richard Mabey (the presiding genius of this book, its own spirit of place, and the only writer common to this and the other two place books I’ve mentioned here) had directed our attention to The Unofficial Countryside. Following him, Patrick Wright botanised on asphalt in A Journey Through Ruins and Paul Farley co-wrote Edgelands and re-launched a habitat. Ken Worpole studied suburban cemeteries and paved-over front gardens. The whole of Essex seemed brought to book. J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, like a radioactive pellet, the product of a sick man tracking a sick species in a sick place, became a holy text. Werner Herzog teaches it. Things fall apart and many of us like it that way. Analogue scratches on vinyl speak of a relationship between sound and listener as no digital dead air can. Ghost walks, hauntings, landfill, the draw-down of silting tides – all have made for copious place-based literary deposits. Edward Thomas has steered Matthew Hollis; the Thames estuary flooded Rachel Lichtenstein; Hayden Lorimer is excavating a pet cemetery on the North Sea shore. A kind of grit, the granulated ordinary past, has become a common currency. Copper pennies on the tongue are obols for many a traveller. Julia Blackburn, just out of Essex, knows the old money. David Matless mapped made-up landscapes and our inherited fantasy localisms in his Landscape and Englishness. Tim Ingold read into the lines on the land. We learned to call the scuffed marks that we’ve footed into a place desire paths. These have been Richard Long’s arteries, ever since he created A Line Made by Walking fifty years ago in Wiltshire.

Places call up the places they were; that is part of what makes a place. Aside from Milton Keynes (which feels olde worlde these days, as old futuristic sci-fi films do, or the words Betamax or escalator or even sci-fi), is there any city in Britain that is more twentieth century than nineteenth? I can’t think of any. But we have new ideas for these old places. Ruin lust is one of them. Entropy tourism. I recently joined the pilgrims to the modern ruin of a 1960s seminary at Kilmahew on the Clyde: as striking a place now as it falls down as it was when built up. Jonathan Meades made a tremendously ferocious TV film about rust. A recent book by Caitlin Desilvey is called Curated Decay. ‘Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it’ – so Malcolm describes the death of the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth. We might say the same of most of our places today. The ones that matter to us are still often going or gone. Ozymandias truncated says more than the whole man would. We don’t want to know how the garish Greeks painted their palaces. Filters on our phone cameras will age an image before our eyes. But modern life has always done this. These fragments, quoted T. S. Eliot, I have shored against my ruins. W. H. Auden was drawn to old human junk in rocky places. Rimbaud liked trash and kitsch. We laughed at a president for fixing a new marble penis on a dismembered Mars. The broken place speaks louder than the perfect place. Even the National Trust finds visitors more interested in the kitchens of the great house than their ballrooms. Downstairs tells more truth than up.

There are many places noted here, many other conversations with natural places as well as nurtured places, with other people, and with other animals: Michael Viney has been writing dispatches from a shifting Irish shore for decades; Fiona Sampson moves house; Tessa Hadley looks outdoors from inside on a new view; Helen Macdonald accesses her girlitude in western Surrey; Andrew Motion goes fishing; Richard Holmes gets drenched; Peter Davidson raises the ghost of one of the first in Britain to consciously notice and capture an ordinary place; Marina Warner remembers being ushered into a landscape by Peter Levi; Andrew McNeillie digs over his allotment and thinks of his plot; Sean Borodale goes underground; Alexandra Harris sets out to learn about a place and asks where it leads her; Hugh Brody maps his British childhood onto his adult life in Arctic Canada; John Burnside stops at some wayside shrines; Sean O’Brien plays out; Adam Thorpe lets a muddy puddle take a cast of his mind; Nick Davies wonders what birds make of their places; Barbara Bender logs how communal memories can be preserved; Adam Nicolson digs up his own; Philip Marsden passes down river; Phillip Hoare goes out to sea; Dexter Petley asks what the salt water gives back.

*

In the summer of 1801, Coleridge often went walking in the Lake District. On 18 June he found a rest stop:

Before the tide ebbs a grazing limpet heads home … to its home scar: the shape of its shell can grow to precisely match the contours of the rock it fixes to. The limpet has marked the rock; the rock has marked the limpet. Jen Hadfield has written poems about the home scar of a limpet. It’s a nice term for a nice idea. Richard Pearce has been counting the same in north Cornwall ever since the oiling disaster that followed the sinking of the Torrey Canyon in 1967. He showed me Porthmear beach where there are, he has counted, one million home scars.

*

This collection of new writing about places draws on the ideas and ideals of Common Ground. Common Ground gave Britain the concept of local distinctiveness, and this book is made for the organisation that has worked since the 1980s to revive, preserve and celebrate the diverse, local and intimate connections that people and communities have had, and might yet have, with the landscape that surrounds them.

Thirty years ago, Sue Clifford and Angela King set up Common Ground to help us understand where we are vis-à-vis nature in Britain: both to acknowledge our footprint, the tyre tracks, a paved country, its concrete overcoat, and to encourage some repairs, interventions, preservations and some newfangledness, and to do this in the belief that a relationship with our local outdoors environment – even as we have clobbered it to within an inch of its natural life – remains fundamental to human health and happiness.

The genius of Common Ground is precisely its understanding that genius loci is all important: that, in our ever-more internationalised, corporatised, mediated and de-individualised world, the spirit of a place, the sum of the meeting of people and land, remains of vital importance. Crucially, as Common Ground saw and sees it, place pertains and operates most and best at a local level, and on a scale we still might call human. Consequently, their efforts were not about restoring the wolf, or rewilding by managing facilities for nature: they were about looking at and growing a feeling for those less dramatic times in our lives when we cross the path of our own community; moments when old ways seem still operative; times when dormant traditions wait to be woken; times when our lives mesh with those of others who share the same weather; moments of intense and personal response to familiar corners.

The strong presence of both Common Ground’s directed projects and the spontaneous manifestations of the same ethos elsewhere, their tang and their multum in parvo feel – a great deal in a small space, much in little – is even more important today in our vastly accelerated and denatured times. When Common Ground began no one anywhere in the world knew of the internet. But throughout its life the organisation’s engine has been and remains the creation and inspiration of site-specific work for what it recognises as site-specific lives. Most, though not all, Common Ground projects have happened away from metropolitan centres. While it is fully understood that rural Britain is as man-made as urban, the parish scale has proved to be the most fruitful ground for the organisation’s ideas. Where this scale can still can be felt in the big towns and cities, projects that promote local distinctiveness can be as life-enhancing there as anywhere.

Common Ground’s work (art commissions, community projects, practical assistance) is made with an understanding that people and place are entangled at all levels – functionally (e.g. the built infrastructure of the country and farming and food); emotionally (novels, painting and music, flower arranging); intellectually (planning and philosophy); physically (walking, knitting, hang-gliding and working the land); and genetically (the home phenotype). Giving a local habitation and a name, Common Ground repeatedly declares, is neither yesterday’s thing nor just a job for poets …

Common Ground is still at work. In the last few years Sue Clifford and Angela King have handed over to Adrian Cooper. The rich archive of the charity’s accomplishments to date is being prepared for study and exhibition, but its energies are still current, with its intentions little changed.

It has mostly failed, of course. As all our best-laid plans will. The world is still, substantially, to win. But its successes are many and have also been writ large into the wider world. One of the reasons why nature writing is resurgent today is because of Common Ground’s steadfast belief in the value of exploring what the natural world – even the broken-down, rubbish-dump world – means to us. One of the reasons why almost every poet in Britain has written a blackbird poem is because Common Ground has reminded the country that local looking is as valuable as any panoptical survey – that the imaginative work that will address climate change, say, will come not from windy pieces blowing vatically around the planet, but from attending to what is close at hand.

There is still much to worry at. That tide is even higher, with the sea level rising, and lapwings, skylarks, even starlings and house sparrows, depleted beyond the imaginings of 1984. Larkin’s concrete and tyres are even more in the ascendant. But to answer this has come passionate and articulate energy born of new ways of seeing that are less wistful and more animated, that demonstrate that fallen man can, by understanding his fall, be more vital than any heavenly body; that, for example, the edgelands might come to the centre of our lives and mean as much to us as any wilderness ever might have done.

We are on the far side of the river now, and no amount of looking back is going to help the guildhalls. A kind of singing in the dark times has begun. It says that the state we are in is worth as much attention as the world we have lost; that there is masses to do, and many struggles and obstacles ahead, but also that a renewed diligence and attention to what remains, and what it means to us, can help us live more fully, happily, healthily, wisely, more humanly, and better placed to know why we should step back from finishing off our planet in our own cracked image.

My thanks go to all those who have written here. The idea of writing something for Common Ground made many say yes very willingly. Some wouldn’t, and I also failed to find anything other than white contributors. There are lots of gaps, and there are countless other places. But I hope something of how we live now is ahead.

Tim Dee

2018

NOTES FROM A DEVON VILLAGE

Barbara Bender

UNTIL RECENTLY I lived in Branscombe, a small seaside village in East Devon. I lived there for nearly thirty years, which is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. As the child of German refugees who arrived in London in 1939, I never felt much at home, or that I really belonged. My mother did her best, but I always seemed to wear the wrong clothes, never seemed to know the right way to use a soup-spoon or fork, and, longing to conform, was mortified by my school friends’ remarks about my mother’s accent. My suburban childhood was, in retrospect, very lonely. Things got better, of course, as I got older. But Branscombe is the nearest I’ll ever get to ‘belonging’ or being in place. I’ll never be an ‘insider’: for that you’d have to be born in the parish, or have married in, but that’s all right.

What’s it like, this place? A tucked-away ‘picturesque’ landscape. Small streams from three steep valleys flow together a mile or so from the sea, meander through a narrow flood plain, skirt a high shingle bank that almost blocks the valley mouth, and peter out amongst the pebbles on the beach. The bay is a wide-open scoop with tricky currents that makes fishing difficult. To the east of Branscombe Mouth, chalk and sandstone cliffs rise steeply above an almost sub-tropical undercliff created in 1792 when a large stretch of land slipped down. You can take a narrow path through the undercliff lined in May with gentian-blue gromwell flowers, and if you’re lucky watch peregrine falcons and ravens disputing the crags overhead. In contrast, to the west, the cliffs are dark red marl with a thin topping of chalk and sandstone. During the great gales of 2014, slides of red mud came down and glistening bands of pink gypsum suddenly appeared.

Inland, the valley slopes are parcelled into small odd-shaped fields. It’s pasture land, and the slopes are so steep that there’s never been a reason to uproot hedgerows or enlarge fields. On the higher slopes, and along much of the cliff top, the grass gives way to unkempt woodland. Only the segments of plateau between the valleys have larger fields – now, more often than not, slobby pig-lands.

Once upon a time five hamlets dotted the main valley, but over the centuries they were stitched together by small rows of terraced houses. Even so, there’s still a strong distinction – if you live ‘up’ Street your pub is the Fountain Head; if you live ‘down’ Square, it’s the Masons Arms.

These words don’t begin to describe what season or weather does to this place – a dusting of snow with footprints of birds or foxes, moon paths across the sea, long winter shadows sharpening tump and hollow, low sun haloing sheep. It is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. And yet, a couple of years ago, we moved over the hill to the next village. Why? Partly because, as we got older, the hills got steeper and the garden larger. More acutely, there was a sense of malaise. Branscombe had been ‘discovered’; in estate agents’ parlance it had become ‘iconic’. The kiss of death. More and more houses have become second or third homes or holiday lets. Thirty-five per cent of the houses are unoccupied for most of the year. Come the winter, most of the cottage windows at Street are dark, the lanes eerily quiet. It feels as if the village is hollowing out.

Finally, two years ago, the Post Office was sold. The old owner had wanted to find a buyer who would take it on; the new owners said they would. But they’d just wanted a cheaper house, and after six months they closed it. It was the end of a long, drawn-out process. Talk to the old villagers and they’ll tell you stories about half a dozen small shops:

Shops and front-room tea rooms, a bakery, blacksmiths and cobblers, carpenters and coffin makers, fishmonger and market gardeners. By the time we arrived, in the late 1980s, they’d mostly gone, but the Post Office-cum-shop, hub of the long, straggling village, where you met and caught up with the news, where, alongside pensions and stamps, tickets were sold for village entertainments, was still there. Now a visiting post office sets up in the Village Hall for a couple of hours once a week.

One of the reasons the place is ‘iconic’ is because it appears ‘timeless’, and that’s because much of it is ‘owned’ by the National Trust. They’ve preserved it, and pickled it. They say that they want to work with, and for, the community, which may once have been true, but isn’t now. They used to let their cottages to villagers, but the rents have soared far beyond the range of local people. They used to house their warden in the village and pay local people to do conservation work. Proposals that they might offer – at a reasonable rent – a small building to serve as Post Office or farm shop or exhibition space are brushed aside. Time, energy and money is spent stamping their corporate image on their properties and, by extension, the village, but contact and consultation are minimal (and, more often than not, bad-tempered). Not good for them, nor us.

So we decamped to the neighbouring village of Beer – less tidy, more mixed, much busier, with shops, a doctor’s surgery and a Post Office.

Beer is a good place to live, but Branscombe is still my place. Partly, of course, it’s about knowing people. Partly because my heart still lifts when, taking the steep road down into the village, I catch a first glimpse of the hillside and hedgerows rearing up on the far side of the valley, or, swinging seaward, wait for the moment when the sea – and our old house – comes into view. But more, it’s because I know so much about this place. My Branscombe landscape is a depthy place ingrained with stories that go back thousands of years.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of us set up the Branscombe Project. We were aware that the old villagers were getting older and that their children had often moved away. When we started there were at least forty people who had lived in the village all their lives; now, perhaps, there are ten. Alongside the affluent incomers, they have often seemed marginalised.

We began to record their voices and memories. Lillie Gush, the first person I ever recorded, was born in ‘an hundred and one’ (1901). With no teeth and a strong Devon accent, she wasn’t easy to understand, but it was clear she was very angry. She’d lived in the village all her life, she’d looked after her family. Now there was no one left and no place for her, and she’d been sent to a care home some distance away. Not really anyone’s fault, but still she felt it was unjust. She knew all about inequality and village class divisions. She remembered when the first water pipes were laid and how, though they passed through her parents’ garden, ‘they didn’t even give we a tap. But’, she added, ‘they’ll get their deserts where they’ve gone now!’

We wanted to do more than just siphon people’s memories into cassettes. So we began to unwind their stories into annual exhibitions, wrote and published booklets, and ended up with a capacious website.² We also host well-attended winter talks.

Some of the best moments come as we pore over old photographs or postcards, or manipulate a digitised map³ so that people can mark their favourite places or landscapes and wonder at each other’s choices:

Other good times are spent walking the landscape, stopping and poking around, old villagers and incomers talking with one another, remembering things they’d quite forgotten, often contradicting each other. Moments of communal gathering-in; theoretical or techy know-how twining with people’s intimate local knowledge.

After we’d transcribed the old gravestones in the churchyard we put on a performance. Masked ghosts (old villagers and new) emerged from behind the gravestones to recount the life-stories of the deceased. At one point, Ralph Cox suddenly stopped, swept out his arms to embrace the graves – ‘Thirty-five of them, thirty-five, all my relatives!’

We went on from oral history to working in the archives, and to field-walking. We pieced together stories that went back 700, even 5,000 years. Where the chalk-lands of southern England come to an end, on the east side of Branscombe Mouth, you can see the bands of flint nodules in the cliff face. It’s a beautiful black flint highly prized by prehistoric people; they would have scavenged the beach and scaled the cliffs for it. Inland, you find spreads of waste flakes, cores, scrapers and points. Once, when I was walking with a fellow archaeologist on Bodmin Moor, he pulled out a flint point from the side of the path – Branscombe flint! Even 5,000 years ago, people and things moved long distances.

Working with maps is another way of exploring time and space. Recently we ran workshops⁴ with about thirty people in which we compared the 1840 tithe map, an early Ordnance Survey map and a current map, and plotted changes in the social and economic landscape. For example, on the 1840 and 1880 maps every farmstead was surrounded by orchards. In spring the parish would be flushed with sweet-smelling apple blossom. But, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the farmers turned the apples into fairly gut-rotting rough cider which then formed part of the farm workers’ wages. Not great news for the household economy. By the 1960s farmers were being subsidised to grub up old orchards.

We also used maps to trace the changing fortunes of footpaths and tracks. They leave the best traces of past generations of men and women going about their daily business. Paths taken by the farm workers as they walked to and from the farms and fields, climbed the hills to the quarries and lime kilns, or made their way down the zig-zag paths to the cliff-plats or beach. The five shutes⁵ that mark the spring-line along the lane through the village were where the women came to fetch water and gossip. Other paths took them to work in service in the big houses, or to Barnells where John Tucker, the mean-spirited entrepreneur who enforced a monopoly on their Honiton lace-making, lived. He paid them a pittance, and made them buy their goods at his over-priced truck shop.

Although many of these paths have gone and those that remain are often deserted, it’s still true that the best way to get a feel for the topography of a place, what was in view and out of view, the activities that went into the making of landscape, is by walking the footpaths. If you take the coast path from the beach, up the steep west hill to the cliff top, you’re following the donkeys that carried the coal landed from Welsh colliers up to the Berry lime kilns. Further along the cliff top the path broadens out into Kiln Lane and you’ll find huge flint spills, debris from the old lime quarries, or occasional pieces of coal or brick from one of the long-dismantled kilns. Eventually Kiln Lane meets the lane by which farmers ‘from away’ came by horse and cart to fetch the lime.

Most of the old zig-zag paths down the cliff to east and west of the Mouth have fallen away or become overgrown, but a few remain. At Littlecombe Shoot you’re walking smugglers’ paths that date back to the eighteenth century. ‘Littlecombe Shoot’, wrote a Customs officer in 1807, ‘is a good landing place, and a road [Kiln Lane] leading up to the head of Branscombe Village. The fences in general very indifferent, so that the smugglers may cross them in any direction that best suits their purpose to avoid the Officers.’

An old smuggler recounted this story late in the nineteenth century:

Some of the smugglers, and many others as well, put these same paths to more legitimate use. On the cliff faces where the land had slipped, there were patches of soil which, aided by sea breezes and the sun on the cliff face, and manured with seaweed from the shore, produced very early crops. Farm workers renting the plots could grow early potatoes, vegetables and flowers. They called themselves cliff farmers and used their donkeys to carry the produce up the cliff and off to market. It gave them a modest, but much prized, independence. But it was hard work, and by the mid twentieth century the plats were abandoned.

But not quite. Some of the stone linhays the cliff farmers had built for their donkeys were turned into holiday huts. When these new cliff-dwellers were asked to mark their favourite places on our map, it was nearly always ‘their hut’:

And that’s not the end of it. In 2007 a startling bit of Branscombe history was made when a huge container ship, the Napoli, breaking up in the channel, was beached at Branscombe below Littlecombe. Overnight the wind came up and nearly 200 containers slipped into the sea, many washing up on the shore. They contained an eclectic assortment of BMW engines, motorbikes, cosmetics, personal belongings, oak barrels, nappies, dog food and Xhosa Bibles. A microcosm of world trade.

The popular press castigated the white-van people ‘from away’ who arrived a couple of days later, for the wild scenes on the beach. Before that, however, the local lads had already appropriated most things of value. They easily avoided police cordons and guards by using the same old cliff paths. One night, Jamie Lambert and his mate were scouting the containers at Littlecombe when they suddenly saw the guards:

Same footpaths; different histories.

Final story: not long ago we took an inland walk with a group of villagers. We were walking in the footsteps of Harry Layzell, village blacksmith-cum-chimney-sweep-cum-postman. Sometimes he’d deliver the post by bike, but mainly he walked, and sometimes it was a good eight miles. Jenny Newton, now in her seventies, used to ride on his shoulders, and as they went along he’d be singing Methodist hymns at the top of his voice. So, with Jenny, we walked part of his round. Down the steep hill to Hole Bottom where the owner of the former mill came out to tell us about the ghost of a lady in a red cloak, another man showed us the millstone that marks his threshold, and Angela Lambert brought out a polished chert axe found in the stream-bed behind her house. Then up the steep hill to the disappeared farmhouse at Hooknell. Ross Wilmington, the farmer’s son from up the road, remembered that his grandma had lived here and that, each day, she’d walk up to the farm to fetch her bread. We stopped at another disappeared cottage – faint traces of wall foundations, different sorts of vegetation where the postman’s path was barely visible – then trudged up to Hill Arrish for tea and buns.

Hill Arrish is a grand new house built on the footprint of a 1930s Indian-style bungalow. Pulling down the bungalow revealed a cache of newspapers. Copies of the Black Shirt and Action dating from 1935 to early 1940. Sitting out in the sun, reading these obscene anti-Semitic rags, the hairs rose on the back of my neck. The then owners of Hill Arrish, Rafe Temple-Cotton and his mother, Lucy, had been ardent fascists, and Rafe was chief south-west organiser for Mosley.⁷ He ran a large market garden and was considered a good employer, but his innocuous white delivery van also served as a grandstand for him to spout his fascist views – in Sidmouth and Hyde Park. Villagers still remember him and some at least were not unsympathetic. In Sidmouth the locals threw him in the river.

It’s a truism that history’s always in the making and that we’re part of the making. Sometimes, being on the spot, you can offer small interventions.

In 2014 came gales so fierce you couldn’t stand up, a sea so wild that spume from the waves topped the Sea Shanty café. The waves took out the foundations of the beach chalets to the east and tore away the trackway to the west. Natural England and the National Trust showed little sympathy. For them, the wooden chalets were a blot on the landscape. Far better, and all part of the national Shoreline Management Plan, to allow cliff and beach to revert to their ‘natural’ state. The owners of the chalets and café offered to pay the costs of reinstatement. To no avail: the pebbles were not to be moved because they might disturb the elusive scaly cricket (which, it seems, had not been much disturbed by the beaching of the Napoli