The Road North

(54) Sora’s Epilogue

2012-01-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

.
The dry tone and rich supple vigorous style keep me immersed in reading the Oku-no-hosomichi, sometimes arising and clapping or lying down, stirred to the core. Once had my raincoat on, eager to go on a like journey, and then again content to sit imagining those rare sights. What a hoard of feelings, Kojin jewels, has his brush depicted! Such a journey! Such a man! Pity only that he turns wearier and more and more white comes tingeing his brows.

...............written by Soryu
.................(early summer
...................seventh year of the Genroku).

photograph: Ken Cockburn, 2010

our Epilogue

And so, many months on from the ending, we append our Epilogue, beginning with the last journey

photograph: Luke Allan, 2011

Back when we were planning the route, pairing off the stations one-by-one, Ken said that the last view should be mine, of Lindisfarne, seen from the train south at the end of the last day. So it came to pass.

tea-moon, Alec Finlay, 2011

Thereabouts Luke and I exchanged gifts on the train, and sipped the final tea, a thermos of Keemun Hao Ya.

photograph: Luke Allan, 2011

he gives me marmalade
I give him whisky
we’re both happy

Enough for a final libation.

(AF)

Leavings

‘After an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them—his pet hobby for a number of days.
One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the Treaty of Versailles.
“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it," said I.
"Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers," said he. Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been leaving original poems in the valleys.

From To The World’s End: XVIII. Making Maps of the World

Reluctant to relinquish the enterprise entirely, I sent a few final labels out into the world, to some of the topographies we hadn’t reached. I’ve become accustomed to the experience of others taking the poems on to places I can’t access, so much so that it has almost become an intrinsic, even natural, aspect of the process by which this artwork was made.

(I) Sado, St Kilda

When I heard Kathleen Jamie was off to St Kilda there was the chance to sew those islands together with Basho’s Sado. I sent KJ a wee parcel of poem-labels and she replied:

‘Ah, but Basho has been to St Kilda. I took his Works there on my last visit three years ago, enamoured of the idea that he was taking the North gait in 1685, and Martin Martin was sailing the Isles in 1695. Brothers in wandering. There was a snowy owl on St Kilda then, white of course, it favoured a particular rocky overhang, and would stand there, as I thought, like a priest at the door of a shrine. One label will be cast adrift in the manner of the old St Kilda mail-boats.

This time I'm taking 'The Selected Poems of Li Po'.

And I'm going to buy a camera on Monday, because I don't possess one.

.........

.................PASSERINE

....................passerby

................,..PELAGIC

....................oceanic

......................ocean
......................brink

.........................St
.........................A
.................... kilDa
.........................O

.......................star
......................blink

wings beat the winds bear the wings

St Kilda / Sado, poems AF; photographs Kathleen Jamie, 2011

(II) Shetland

To Jen, in Shetland. (A link to her road north poem for Tingwall appears in the Intimations, below).

Hello Alec

I got your postcard and label, ta. I have got a lovely raised beach behind my house; I'll go out very soon, soon as the wind dies down a bit; it's been wild. Today or the next I'd think.

fucoid wrack grips the stone
giving wind and wave

grasp to drift and drop it
at the high water mark

poem, AF; photographs Jen Hadfield, 2011

(III) Orkney

Next to Peebo in Orcadia, more beach poems, all of which were inspired by the pioneer ecologist Frank Fraser Darling.

clean sand is beautiful
but being littoral
birds want mud

knotted wrack
quieting, darkening
the tidal wood

poems, AF; photographs Alistair Peebles, 2011

(IV) On Kirsty

Off the shore, Pat & Andy Law sailed the Kirsty, with a stowaway woven poem

'this won't happen without you'
woven poem, AF; photograph Pat law, 2011

(V) Glasgow

To Amy, in Glasgow, a Kasane label, her name 'little pink', sewn in little green

Kasane woven poem, Alec Finlay; sewing and photograph, Amy Todman, 2011

(VI) Assynt

And finally the far north-west, which we regretted not reaching. This photograph, taken by Issie MacPhail near Clashmor, also inspired by Fraser Darling, and in proximity to his isle Tanara Mor.

without spiky
marram grass

there would be no
rich machair

poem, AF; photograph, Isobel MacPhail

(AF)

Chonzie's change of circumstances

‘eager to go on a like journey, and then again content to sit imagining those rare sights’

..........– Sora

'shady hosomichi'
Alec Finlay, 2011

Last June I moved across the city, north to south, from a hill view to Hill View. I left behind a second-floor vista that stretched from the Easter Road stadium across Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags and Calton Hill all the way round to the castle. Seagulls provided the soundtrack – a nesting pair colonised the roof of the single-storey building opposite, keeping shoatie from the lamposts. At Hill View, ground floor with a small, hedged front garden, if you stood in the front-room bay and peered right you could just glimpse Blackford Hill. I’d been with Lorna for nearly three years, and this was us, and Holly, her nine year-old, moving in together.

The flit was hard work. I’d spent five and a half years in the old flat, initially a bolthole after I separated from Tamsin. I’d gone through a divorce there, found and lost new relationships, and watched my kids work their way through school, making the shift from primary to secondary, from secondary to college. Suitcase in hand, I’d locked its dark green door when I left for Bratislava or Fraserburgh, unlocked it again when I returned from Kirkwall or Berlin.

Even if the flit became woven in to the narrative of The Road North, a re-enactment of Basho leaving behind his hut in Edo, and even if I did feel it was high time to move on, packing boxes and then lugging them down the tenement’s worn stone stairs felt like the loss of a slowly garnered order, more precarious than I had realised.

Hill View’s front-room became study and spare bedroom. We had a sitting/dining room that led out to a wee back garden, and to a narrow unheated kitchen; then there was our room, and Holly’s room. Lorna moved in first, unpacked, made an initial order, which my arrival unbalanced and overloaded.

After that, the first road trip with Eck came as something of a relief. The simplicity of living out of a suitcase, of studying a library of a dozen books and maps, of going for walks. Ever generous, the days unfolded their delights – river-swimming, hill-walking, poeming outdoors – Basho and Sora prompting us all the while from the wings, encouraging us to speak and act beyond what we might have done alone, nudging us towards ginko, 'walking to write poems'.

I extended the summer travels with a solo trip to Stornoway, and a week in Krakow with Lorna and members of Zielony Balonik, a Polish book group based in Edinburgh, so it wasn’t until November that I spent much time at Hill View. By that time Lorna, who too had had her own place before the flit, was used to having it to herself, and we found that the house was smaller and colder than we had imagined back in spring. A year, I thought, I have to give this at least a year. Snow fell early and, unusually, stayed. The summer journeys seemed to disappear over the horizon, especially after the last blog (and I kept putting it off) was written.

We had a difficult week when Judith, my sister, who lives in Killin, came to stay. She was beginning a course of chemotherapy at the Western General, for a brain tumour diagnosed in those early days on the road. The street is a bus-route, so the snow-ploughs had cleared it, pushing snow against the parked cars, where it refroze; extricating the car from compacted snow was a real struggle. One day it became a community effort, neighbours and the bus-stop queue all mucking in. But somehow, slowly, we made it there and made it back, one day after another, and at the end of the week I drove her back to Killin, on a day when the roads were clear.

My daughter Isobel lives with her mother on the north side of town. Coming to the hill view was an easy bus trip, or a walk from school. She’d been used to coming with me to visit Lorna in her old flat not far from Hill View, so the journey was familiar to her. But it was a long bus trip plus a walk, and I missed her dropping by as and when, for lunch before Friday afternoon drama, or after Saturday morning hockey. I missed just sitting companionably with her, playing gin rummy or watching Neighbours.

I still had that notional year in my head, but day-to-day the difficulties mounted. We wanted different things, needed to live our lives in different ways. Should I stay or should I go? asked The Clash, and as neither of us could say, stay, come February I was ringing the letting agencies. The month between putting down a deposit and flitting was an odd interlude, theory without practice. April came, and it was time to take the books down from the shelves, box and pack them in the hire-van. Angus helped me shift them across town, south to north, and ground floor to ground floor made things easier. We even got lucky with the roadworks – the No Parking notices were up but the works hadn’t begun, so we were able to park by the stair door.

That first evening as darkness fell I sat among the boxes, wondering if I’d done the right thing. The windows framed a back-green enclosed by an uncultivated slope. Angus and his kids came round after swimming, Isobel visited the next morning, Lorna and Holly on Sunday. I enjoyed hosting them, and soon it started to build its own history, develop its own style, reveal its character. The Garden Flat. Beyond the nearby supermarket I explored the cycle path, the park, the riverside scenic route, discovered the second-hand furniture store, the wifi cafés, the Egyptian frieze, the slug-like vintage Peugot.

Isobel comes for Saturday brunch, Lorna relaxes on the sofa, Eck stays over en route to the far north, Holly likes the rocking chair, I sit out in the back-green with Angus while he smokes. It’s not a warm flat, and I can’t see myself wintering here, but it’s home for now.

The transition mirrors that of Judith, who has been through a difficult separation and move. Last summer, from her own Hillview, she overlooked Loch Tay, while this she sees no further than the finches feeding in her garden. She’s down in the village, in amongst it all, near the shops and the hotel. When Eck and I made our final road-trip last month we ate with her and her kids in her new dining-room. She’s been to stay at the Garden Flat, and we spent a warm afternoon in the nearby Botanics, strolling in the Chinese garden, feeling the waterfall’s coolness, sitting in pleasant shade.

These past days I’ve been recalling this same week a year ago, when we made our first road trip, which feels much closer again. Day by day… Acharn, Aberfeldy, Bruar, Glen Lyon, Schiehallion, Sma’ Glen, Dunira, Dundurn, Dalchonzie, Dunkeld… I’ve strong memories of the Schiehallion climb, but what I’d forgotten until now was the rest of that day – the Croft Moraig stone circle, lunch at the Watermill, a walk uphill to St David’s Well, a swim in the Tay. As I write, a year ago we were breakfasting and packing the car at Margaret and Gonzalo’s house at Dunira, just starting to realise that renga and QR weren’t the way forward, our eyes and our minds opened and tuned by our encounters and by a new practice.

Here the windows overlook a neat back green of shrubs and clothes lines, extended by a wild embankment of nettles, bramble and elder, home to foxes who emerge at twilight, canny adults and playful cubs. During the day the garden’s animated by blackbirds, thrushes, doves and grey squirrels. The seagulls keep their distance.

Edinburgh, June 2011

(KC)

Eck's Inverianvie

The memories I want to share are here.

pulling my legs
along with my eyes
drawing a straight line

in-between grey-
clitched boulders
and tarry puddles

walk on, walk on
when your boots
get bent

walk on, walk on
to the white noise
of the waterfall

walk on, walk on
with a dream
of the lochan

walk on, walk on
as far as the name-
lost glen

walk on, walk on
kist beneath Carn
an Lochain Dubh

walk on, walk on
sensing skyline
after skyline

walk on, walk on
anticipating every
bend of the river

walk on, walk on
this far, this close
to the water

walk on, walk on
part way up Inverianvie
or part-way down

walk on, walk on
wherever we are now
I can go no further

looking back
down the path
to the sea

letting go the loch
I pour the tea
thinking of dear Tom

still giving illumination
as language flickered
and dimmed

poetry is still beautiful

taking me with it

quiet but still something

ground, river and sea

my body my tree

after that it becomes

simply the world

accepting the mountains
will remain maybe
always too high

reeling in the grip
of fatigue
I nod to the 2 climbers

as they pass
headed out
sullen with exhaustion

been in far?
four days

I’m too shy to ask
what did you see
how bad was the weather?

now I’ve to find
my way out this glen
back by the waterfall

leaving my wishes to
walk on, walk on
over the next rise

walk on, walk on
around that next bend
to Loch a Mhadaidh Mor

descent from Inverianvie

there will always be
some distances
I can only imagine

so I follow the path
of what’s real
seeing how the world

around us
has begun to look
as it really is

allowing new thoughts
to flourish in the verges
catch on briars

slip into dirty ditches
knowing how the path
from making

to accepting
always has to begin
with making

I wind a few words
round the stalks
of plaited bog-grasses

and green rushes
hooking the knot
over the spike

pulling the bow tight
on the seed-head
take aim with the camera

Counterpane

I take a long look
back at rocky wastes
and tussocky paths
from Pillow Hill

so long a stranger
struggling with
the stinging lactic
that shadowed

so many walks
I’ve found other
ways to wander
in the wilds

other ways to be
where Suzanne said
I could never belong
sharing the warmth

of Ken’s quiet company
or sitting by the fire
counting 6,
7, 8, no, that’s 9 hours

he's been gone
plodding up Schiehallion
and down Slioch
carrying my eyes with him

while I walk
along the old paths
at whatever pace
I’m able

running my fingernails
around the contour-lines
gauging the incline
and pain

that will result
letting myself ponder
what would I have been
well, a climber, father to?

would we could
live our lives
as a novel
read backwards

secure in our ending
as a tied rope
or taut stay
each strand untwisting

a moment
tense with shock
giddy for joy
when love becomes

our delirious ending
we slowly un-wind
to the tight knot
of that familiar

difficult beginning
would we could glimmer
the perfect form
of an idea

emerging complete
in its own right
from out some vague
insubstantial object

only every now and then
we may be brave
enough to dare
a handstand

emptying out our
pockets, seeing
inside a world
turned upsidedown

Notes

The Inverianvie interlude is from a long poem reflecting on the road north, that Ken and I have nearly completed.

The Inverianvie River flows from Loch a Mhadiadh Mor to Gruinard Bay.

Notes to the poem: 'walk on walk on', Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee; 'with a dream of the lochan', Loch a Mhadaidh Mor; 'pour the tea', Jun Shan golden needle, one of our 53 teas; 'Tom', Tom Lubbock (1957-2011); 'poetry is still beautiful ... simply the world', from Lubbock’s memoir.of living with a brain tumour; '2 climbers', descending from An Teallach; 'the path from making...', after John Cage; 'Pillow Hill', R. L. Stevenson, 'Land of Counterpane'; 'stinging lactic', symptom of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis; 'Suzanne', Suzanne Piper, post-urban artist.

Intimations

You can read Jen Hadfield's poem here.

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(32) Huntly

2012-01-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

High grew the hills and the mountains,
Cold grew the frost and the snow…

Anon, 'The Duke of Gordon's Daughter'

Our high mountain to cross was Ken’s low hill, The Clashmach, and Eck’s little mount, Battlefield Hill

Our region of Mogami is the red earth of Strathbogie

Our strapping young fellow who looked like he could take care of himself, with curved short-sword at hip and oaken staff in hand is Claudia Zeiske, who we’d choose to guide us if we were in the deep forest darkness atop a lofty peak

Our shino brush is gorse in bloom

Our just the day for is Kate & Will’s Royal Wedding

Our hearts beating faster is delight at being on the road again

32 Aberdeen
Alec Finlay, 2011

audio, basho's station 32
ken Cockburn, 2010

Deveron Arts

32 Huntly
Alec Finlay, 2011

32 The Empty Shop
Ken Cockburn, 2011

On a light Thursday evening we walked down to The Empty Shop in the heart of Huntly to give a show-and-tell on The Road North for a warm-hearted audience of about two dozen people. Sat in armchairs, Jackanory-style, it’s always pleasing to talk to an audience with many ages. Some old pals – Angus Dunn has come down after finishing his fence – and new ones – Mary Bourne who Ken’s been working with in Dufftown.

And there’s the current Huntly team: Anna, Anthony (met briefly earlier as he was shepherding a group on teenagers on Jacqui’s rickety bikes at the start of his Get Lost session, when the aim was to end up… somewhere), Norma, Gayle, Eric and Amy from Canada.

32 hokku-label (for Jacqui)
bikes by Jacqui Donachie, for her slow art project, Huntly, 2010
(‘chalked wheels / fetching messages’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

We read our beginning poem that describes our first forays from Edo, and dip in and out of verses that wander along the way, sensing those little nods of appreciation as someone recognizes a loved glen, beach or ridge, then flip through some photos, holiday-snap style.

We're asked about what we’ve learned, if we were influenced by any other British poets, why we choose remote places, why we’d (till now) missed out this north-east corner of the country. We tell of our aims, to seek out artists and creative communities along the way, people based outside the cities – Kevin Henderson, Ruth MacDougall, Andy MacKinnon, Alistair Peebles, Pat, Andy & Kirsty Law, Eddie Stiven, Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, The Administrator, Alexander Maris, Jayne Wilding, Edna Whyte, Jen Hadfield, Beka and Nickolai Globe – and small institutions, each defined by the folk that run them, such as HICA, Cairn Gallery, Taigh Chearsabhagh, Atlas, Brae Projects, Outlandia, and here, Deveron Arts, mapping their philosophies and common experiences.

Always there is that common factor, which we share, that the journey to a place is intrinsic to the experience in and of a place.

32 Anthony Schrag, Huntly Castle
Alec Finlay, 2011

Under Claudia’s guidance, Huntly’s become the author of a forthright and confident narrative, one that she defines, which is extended and refined by everyone who visits. On our tour we have visited structures which were spaces in which people can meet and share, such as Neil Bromwich & Zoe Walker’s conch, or London Fieldworks & Malcolm Fraser’s hut at Outlandia, but here the architecture in which art pulses is the town itself. Claudia’s emphasis is on social roles, and among the Huntly art-clan there is a ‘shadow-curator’, to argufy with her in periodic reviews.

at their review
the single criticism
Claudia had

was that B—
did not criticize
her enough

Call it ‘socially engaged practice’, toun-art, Beuysianism, or a position akin to community art; each term suggests an era, position, stratification, but the terms never make a static geology. Enough to say, in Huntly art is about artists, people and the effect they have on other people. And the folk we are most interested in are the practitioners themselves, for all but Claudia are visitors here, and we want to see what their stay means to them. Some make it home, as Anna has.

32 Portrait (Anna)
(‘fresh from gardening / in her fancy dress and hat / Anna and I agree / her rough hands are true’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

Claudia interrogates us, in her Germanic manner: have we visited peopled places, how have we interacted with communities? What was the social aspect of our project? We understand her desire to compare our relation to community with theirs, to examine and contrast philosophies, but we were travellers for this journey, as Basho was – being passers-by or passers-through, we had not the purchase to erect a scaffold of critical analysis. We observed ‘participative relationships’, but accepted that what these depend on are the old verities of hospitality, which means having a big enough tea thermos. We’ve bent over tables to look at maps together and listen to local advice on the best route; been lent books to get read up on the local; shared rides and invited folk to be part of the rituals that framed each station along the road north.

32 Nadokoro Beech (CHIEF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

We meet someone for a walk; we make a little art together, we learn some names and come to a better understanding of the lie of the land. If a poem lasts an hour, fine, if it stays tied on to a branch, fine.

This doesn’t mean we are idlers or that we work in an unengaged way; but, as much as taking Basho’s text, we took his practice as our guide and, through him, for this year-long path we have come to understand that our philosophy is defined by lightness.

Our stops are brief; we leave a few poem-labels fluttering in the breeze; a wordless wish attached to a tree; or a libated dram to strengthen the water-table.

32 hokku label, after Paul Celan
('what is a cloud? / a cloud is a thought / waiting for rain', AF)
Photograph: Loch Eilt, KC, 2010

Our faith and discipline lies in the journey itself, which we know that anyone can share, or recompose, in their own way. We are only trying to learn how to see prospects better and respond with immediacy and openness to the here-and-now, connecting the moments we spend here, wherever here is, with the long-gone, the elsewhere, and the other, in those particular ways that literature makes possible.

32 wish, pear, Garden Zeiske
Alec Finlay, 2011

We cannot sketch a town. We don’t set words in stone. Perhaps our brief visit to Huntly can touch a few people, catch the gist of a handful of places – the orchard in Claudia’s garden, Anna staking-out the new beans, the newly planted oak saplings among the waste of Battlefield Hill, the path over the Clashmach – reflecting a brief image of our take on their lives.

32 Clashmach
Ken Cockburn, 2011

Given Claudia's innate feeling of troubledness that we did not do it quite her way, these are some portraits of folk we met along our journey.

Folk

(I)

elegy for Martyn Bennett

though the instrument
lies broken

Martyn's playing still fills
the silence of the glen

(II)

elegy for Tom McGrath

at Ash Villa
passenger trains are short
goods trains long

if a blackbird
comes to join us
that’ll be Tom

(III)

Annie Briggs of Kilmiddlefern

being the music
while the music lasts

Clancy’s piping carried her
so deep within herself

when he asked her name
Annie found she was beyond

knowing she even had one
but she knew to say

Willie Clancy, let me sing you
a song and I will find I have one.

(IV)

Kevin Henderson

on the bike
did Kevin say
it was space

became time?
or time
became space?

(V)

Jayne with a why

there’s my old pal
waiting at the bus-stop
her hair touched with frost
humming Corcovado for breakfast

finding words to lighten darkness
and, when the tide’s high,
showing me the safe path
that leads through the graves

(VI)

Tom Clark

come over
have some tea and cake
but no poetry

(VII)

Alex & Mary

Alex & Mary
renew their octogenarian
vow of love

at their yearly camp
on the summit
of Ben Nevis

(VIII)

Annie & Jessie (Berneray)

i.m. Jessie

how many folk were offered
scones, pancake spreads
and strawberry jam
with the lilting refrain

.....very good
.....very good

windbent in faded blue macs
herding the sheep
with their handbags
shearing them by hand

Annie's place’s not right
for us to come in
but she'll sit a while
with us at the door

her hands are shaky
but she's still the wit
to gently tease
Eck, are you not married yet?

(IX)

Suzanne Piper: Robespierrist of The Mountains

ethics and geology
aren’t for confusing
rock’s rock: ergo inhuman

despite the bitter rages
of those who perceive
unpeopled moors

as the only things
that are worthwhile
their being wild,

their being all that
isn’t us – for all
their lonely at-one-ment

no peak ever felt
such an apartheid
of the spirit

Mesostic Claudia

32 Portrait (Claudia)
Alec Finlay, 2011

And this is our portrait of Claudia as (some of) the mountain’s that she loves.

............loChnagar
..............cLasmach
.............cArn gorm
...........sgUrr alasdair
..........skiDlaw
..............lIathach
...........mAtrspitze

(KC, AF)

Yu

32 Yu
Alec Finlay, 2011

James Legge, missionary, Sinologist and early translator of the I-Ching – part of the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, intended to encourage mutual understanding between Christians and Chinese – was born in Huntly in 1815.

Legge collaborated with a number of Chinese, including the reforming writer and publisher, Wang Tao, who came to stay with him in Scotland.

In their honour, I consulted the I-Ching, casting a reading for Deveron Arts on my i-Phone. The outlook is good.

XVI. THE YÜ HEXAGRAM

Yü indicates that, (in the state which it implies), feudal princes may be set up, and the hosts put in motion, with advantage. Commentary: The Yü hexagram denoted to king Win a condition of harmony and happy contentment throughout the kingdom, when the people rejoiced in and readily obeyed their sovereign. At such a time his appointments and any military undertakings would be hailed and supported. The fourth line, undivided, is the lord of the figure, and being close to the fifth or place of dignity, is to be looked on as the minister or chief officer of the ruler. The ruler gives to him his confidence; and all represented by the other lines yield their obedience. (II). The second SIX, divided, shows one who is firm as a rock. (He sees a thing) without waiting till it has come to pass; with his firm correctness there will be good fortune. Commentary: Line 2, though weak, is in its correct position, the centre, moreover, of the lower trigram. Quietly and firmly its subject is able to abide in his place, and exercise a far-seeing discrimination. All is indicative of good fortune.

tr. James Legge

32 Yu, I-Ching
Anna Vermehren, 2011

(AF)

Red Earth, Red Flags

The weather is scorchio. Today was the right day for republicans to be up on the hills. I prefer Gala Day bunting to all these Union Jacks.

32 hokku-label
(‘lovely day / for a wedding // better day / for a walk’, AF)
photograph by Ken Cockburn, 2011

They’ve upgraded Kate to Catherine and awarded her some extra shield.

3 of the admiral’s oaks
turned to gold

ready to be impaled
on a divided shield

per pale azure & gules a chevron or

The new Middleton heraldic coat has oaks to represent her family’s purchased home, Bucklebury, Berkshire. The trees are said to have grown from acorns scattered by Admiral Collingwood on his return from Trafalgar, in order that the English Navy would never be short of ship’s timber.

Kate-Catherine’s arms will by now have been ‘impaled’ with those of her new husband, the right-royal yellow-budgie pilot.

32 wedding
Alec Finlay, 2011

There’s a Huntly Royal garden party and wedding viewing at Claudia’s, everyone dressed to the nines, some marking their service in the forces, others dolled up with humour.

Here’s another philosophical challenge for Ken and me to think through, whether or not to respect local custom, how to define ritual: our politics is a fondness for shared acts, but we keep pomp at farther than arm’s length.

I’d used the word rite last night, in the chat after our reading, saying I knew it had an air of embarrassment, but no other term would seem to serve. Our rituals are everyday; they became so only through their repetition – as I like to joke, if it happens twice, then to the poet it’s always, as in, we always stop here for tea, we always listen to Jimi Hendrix in Glen Nevis, etc. Most folk have such customs for their journeys.

What we share is the observation – seeing, sharing, recording – a willingness to mark certain intersections to folk, time and place. Rites in stone place holy buildings at the intersection of two rivers. Apples are found in an orchard, alders by a river, rowan at the gate, each with a wish tied on its branches.

32 wish rowan
Ken Cockburn, 2011

Our rituals are pocket-sized; a spring or burn, libated with whisky.

(AF)

Walking

32 Coynachie
Ken Cockburn, 2011

We’re staying out of town, at Coynachie. Next morning, after his fine bath, Claudia drives Eck back into Huntly for his tour of the toun.

32 Basho’s Bath
(‘life’s lived / in bet- / ween / long baths’, after Issa, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

Ken’s decided to walk and this is his account.

Setting out across the bridge and up the hill below the small conifer plantation, given landscape and weather, I anticipate, rightly, an easier journey than Basho and Sora’s deep forest darkness.

32 Sora’s departure from Coynachie
Alec Finlay, 2011

to get my bearings
I have to go back
for the compass

two boys and a wolfhound
play football in the garden
at Burncruinach

the hills roll gently
one into the other
which is which?

32 hokku label
(‘the daylight constellations / of the verges’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2011

The anxiety to avoid fields with cattle, especially those with calves, leads to detours, scrambles and legs hoisted gingerly over barbed wire.

32 The Clashmach
Ken Cockburn, 2011

It’s hard to pick out Clashmach among the other hills until close to. The weather is fine, and when at the top of the Clashmach I take off my rucksack to find myself drenched in cold sweat it’s heat rather than terror-induced.

I meet no-one until nearly back in Huntly – a couple I, slightly startled, hear before I see, on a bench just up from the Mart’s road-end. Walking through town, I see next to nobody – a few cars round Asda, but the playpark’s deserted. Perhaps they’re all inside watching tv? But outside the only nod towards the wedding is a house flying a pair of Union Jacks; if the rest of town has monarchist sympathies, it’s not making a fuss about it.

We set out mid-May last year, so later than this: it’s good to catch up with the blossoms and wildflowers we missed.

32 Compassing Huntly
Alec Finlay, 2011

(KC)

Deveron Arts HQ

32 wish, apple
Alec Finlay, 2011

For Eck first stop is Deveron Arts HQ, from where he sent this report. The morning tasks have been divvied up. While Anna’s fetches out the beans for planting I tie a wish in the apple. Different yields.

32 hokku-label
(‘better to fall / than cling on / and rot’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

I compose a bean poem for Anna, summarising a brief poetic lineage

Vicia faba

BEAN-HOE
Thoreau

BEAN-ROW
Yeats

BEAN-BOOK
Knowles

Then Anthony – Schrag, who is in residence – takes me up to Huntly Castle, one of the many Gordon strongholds that have stood or fallen hereabouts.

32 hokku-label
(‘trees / out-/ last / walls’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

Pat, the keeper of the ruin, happens to be dowsing, so we chat about that. She’d no idea that she had the knack with a diviner until her son started. It seems to be a divinatory place this, in the tradition of Legge.

32 audio, Pat dowsing
Alec Finlay, 2011

Battlefield Hill

The Wedding
Alec Finlay, 2011

Then, post-wedding, I’m passed on like a parcel, from Antony to Norma, and now it’s time to climb the hill named after no-one seems quite sure what battle. When the nation’s ruined it only leads to more ruin. The plantation woods up here were supposed to be thinned 30 years ago, and 15 years ago, but those jobs got forgot, until now, when the council’s need of cash led to a savage clear-cutting. Many folk would see the scene as one of utter waste, with scarred ground and heaped grey branches, dusty brown soil scored with tyre tracks and only few bare trunks standing, reminiscent of Ypres or Paschendale. It takes years for a forest to right itself after an industrial felling like this.

Basho, Battlefield Hill
Norma Hunter, 2011

Claudia feels the loss so keenly she hasn’t yet felt ready to survey the scene. I would have reacted the same, but Norma guides me to look farther, for she sees things differently. She’s helped create a new planting in amongst the ruin –5,000 natives, spiraling over the plateau. Best of all, she invited two of the original planters to help replace sitka with oak. It is Norma who hears more birdsong, sees the deer more often, so I learn to listen.

32 hokku-label
for Stan & Dan, who planted this wood, 1947, 2011
Alec Finlay, 2011

32 hokku-label
Norma Hunter, 2011

......(I)

......B
..........cleAr-cut
........siTka
.......T
.......L
.......E
.......F
...............vItrified
stonE
.......L
...........Dun

.......(II)

.......boy
.......&
.......man

.......Stan & Dan
.......planted this wood
.......(1947)

.......planted this wood
.......(2011)

.......mono sitka
.......&
.......varied native

.......(III)

.......Ken’s over there
.......having a sun-

.......hat day
.......on Clashmach

.......(IV)

.......more
.......bird-
.......song

.......since
.......the
.......sitka

.......have
.......gone

.......(V)

.......the view stretches
.......4,500 years

.......from clearcut plantation
.......stone hut circle

.......and charred dun
.......to Huntly town

.......(VI)

.......5000
.......saplings

.......hidden
.......among

.......heaped
.......brashes

.......(VII)

.......tony and I
.......walk slowly

.......either side
.......of norma

.......(VIII)

.......nadokoro-beech

.......PHEEB

.......WAD
.......THE
.......WAG

.......BONFIRE

32 Nadokoro Beech, Battlefield Hill
Alec Finlay, 2011

32 hokku-label
Norma Hunter, 2011

Eck, Ken, Norma
Tony Hunter, 2011

(AF)

Proposal for a Xylotheque Viewing-Platform (for Battlefield Hill)

As we walk through the ex-wood-&-woodland-to-be, Norma says she’d like there to be a tower up here, and I suggest it should go somewhere near the old dun, to pick out the prospect of the toun which has come clear again, freed from the thick screen of sitka branches.

After I get back home I sketched out an idea for a viewing platform, much in the style of a ladder stile, and sent it to Claudia & Norma. It adopts Norma’s wish for a place to look-out-from – always something that was done from this hill – and adds the idea of a xylotheque (a library of wooden books), to archive the wood past and wood future.

Xylotheque: a Library of the Native Woodland (the hidden gardens, Glasgow)
Alec Finlay, 2004; photograph Allan Pollok-Morris, 2004

I envisage a series of wood samples, one for each native species that populated these isles after the glaciers receded. The trees would be set in order, one per step, so that as folk ascend the ladder to the platform they are walking through the vastness of ecological time. A healing for the clear-cutting, which is such an unnatural way to manage a wood and, best of all, someday the view from the top of the platform will, once again, be engulfed by the trees.

I found it amusing that Claudia didn’t like this idea, because, as she explained, it was not Deveron Arts enough, being not for, or about, people. It seemed to me that a stile-platform was precisely for people, but I knew what she meant – it wasn’t an idea I’d had in the local bakers. Norma and I hope to make it happen someday, and, for Claudia, there is a different idea to work on, with Ken’s help, relating to the muckle sangs.

(AF)

Ballads: Momus

Hereabouts the wives and daughters of rich earls were wooed away from them by black-eyed gypsy-laddies, despised outsider figures who queered the norms of farm life.

A contemporary Japanese twist to this balladeering tradition comes from Momus (Nick Currie), who stands in the same tradition, combining narratives of lust and betrayal with casio bleeps and techy glitches, as in ‘bishonen’. The map that I composed to summarise the road north (here), pairing Basho’s stations with our 53 equivalents, was a nod to Momus own rorsharch vision of Scotland, made with the designer Zak Kyes.

Momus gave his blessing and said my map reminded him of another mapwork he had made, which seeds Japanese towns onto Scotland. Funny how persistent this connection of the two cultures is.

(AF)

Hambo Fulton

Hamish Fulton, 2011

The same connection is made, implicitly, in the work of Hamish Fulton – or Hermit Futon, as we like to byname him – who recently published a book with Deveron Arts, documenting his walks here in the toun, and, over many years, up in the Cairngorms.

I’ve long admired Hamish’s work. Ken & I have found that our journey has refined the practice of our poetics, embedding words in the immediate experience of being & making, responding to particular places. And so I feel a deep kinship with the recent variations Hamish has made, in counterpoint to his longer walks, such as the slow walks, city walks, backwards walks and communal walks.

(AF)

Another Shirakawa

Continuing the walking theme, we invited Robert Macfarlane to contribute his suggestion as to where that crossing into the wild places, Shirakawa, might be found. In the end Robert choose to place it somewhere between our Perthshire glens and Huntly. Again, he picks up the idea of rites of way.

Dear Eck, Ken,

You're making magic with your map. I'm checking back in often, watching the overlaps and the time-slips, while I fashion my own foot-atlas, my old-way-book. Many miles now tramped, many words now to write. Alec, you asked what my Shirawaka Barrier was, the transition or passage-point into a wild place, 'when the heart slips and a breath is exhaled'. Well it's here:

The southern gateway to the Lairig Ghru, the Cairngorm valley where snow lies sintering all year round. The Ghru is winter's fall-back point, its last fastness, the place out of which the cold musters itself again in the early autumn. Around about now, in fact. Entering the Ghru from the south, the sense of crossing a threshold or portal is unmistakable. The gatekeeper peaks are Devil’s Point to the west, with its diagonal flashings of scree, and the battleship flank of Carn a’ Mhaim to the east. They stand close, intimidating and sentinel. You must pass between and beneath them, and only then on up to the watershed.

I last walked the Lairig Ghru a summer ago, while crossing the Cairngorms from south to north on the way to my grandfather's funeral in Tomintoul. That was a ritual walk, and these were some of the things with which we met in its course – riverbed boulders – bog myrtle – pine-resin – a siskin’s cry – a salmon’s splash – sphagnum – fire on the pass; and these were the types of rock over which we passed – Dalradian limestone, diorite, quartzite, feldspar, granulite, granite, slate, phyolite and mica-schist – and of these the most durable is granite.

Yrs,
Robert

(Robert Macfarlane)

Garden Zeiske

After the wedding, dresses back on their hangers, Clan Zeiske are off to Skye for some more Munros. Before they leave neighbour Rae and son Ian look in with a regal strawberry cake, which we wash down (ceremonially) with Glenfiddich, chosen in honour of Claudia, who worked on the residency program there a few years ago.

Car packed, everyone departs, leaving the to poets hang-out in another lovely garden, rich with fruit trees, and do some poeming.

32 hokku-label
(‘some of us / have ladders / inside // some of us / have swings / inside’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2011

32 hokku-label
(overlapped/buds/unfold’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2011

32 hokku-label
(‘pear/appear’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2011

32 hokku-label
(fortunately / this beautiful / blossom // knows nothing / of Autumn's / poor yield ’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

(AF)

Coda (I)

This is a selection of our Ballad Headlines, from the proposal for Deveron Arts. The form seems to be a kind of mélange of IHF’s HEADLINE poems of the 1960s, composed from the pages of Fishing News, with a feint echo of Harry Smith’s thematic summations, in his Anthology of American folk-song:

“19) THEFT OF STETSON HAT CAUSES DEADLY DISPUTE, VICTIM IDENTIFIES SELF AS FAMILY MAN; 20) McKINLEY SWEARS, MOURNS, DIES, ROOSEVELT GETS WHITE HOUSE AND SILVER CUP; 21) ALBERT DIES PREFERRING ALICE FRY, BUT JUDGE FINDS FRANKIE CHARMING AT LATTER’S TRIAL; 22) MANUFACTURERS [sic] PROUD DREAM DESTROYED AT SHIPWRECK, SEGREGATED POOR DIE FIRST; 23) GEORGIE RUNS INTO ROCK AFTER MOTHER’S WARNING, DIES WITH THE ENGINE HE LOVES; 24) CRACK ENGINEER JONES IN FATAL COLLISION, KNEW ALICE FRY, WIFE RECALLS SYMBOLIC DREAM, LATER CONSOLES CHILDREN.”

BALLAD HEADLINES

(I) (‘Son David’)

DNA TESTS CONFIRM
BLOOD STAINS ‘HUMAN’
NOT EQUINE

DAVID CHARGED

(II) (‘The Four Marys’)

THREE MARYS CLEARED
MARY HAMILTON CONFESSES

EXECUTION PULL-OUT SPECIAL

(III) (‘Dowie Dens of Yarrow’)

BLOODBATH AT YARROW –
LATEST TOLL: 9 DEAD

(IV) (‘Mill O’ Tifty’)

FINAL TRUMPET SOUNDS
FOR LAMMIE

WHEEL TURNS AGAIN
AT TIFTY

(V) (‘The Gypsy Laddies’)

EARL’S WIFE MISSING

SUSPICION FALLS
ON GYPSIES –

MAIL EDITIORIAL INSIDE

(VI) (‘Clerk Saunders’)

CLERK CLAIMS
‘WE DIDN’T MEAN
TO GO TO SEA’

(VII) (‘The Fause Bride’)

RIDDLE OF ‘SHIP
IN FOREST’ SOLVED

BRIDE ADMITS
FALSE TESTIMONY

(VIII) (‘Edom of Gordon’)

FLAMES ENGULF
CORGRAFF

ABSENT LAIRD
‘HEARTBROKEN’

(For Deveron Arts)

(AF, KC)

Coda: Shadow Curator

The English artist Ben Jones was shadow curator to Clauzia Zeiske at Huntly for 6 months in 2011. Ben offers some thoughts and photographs taken in and around Huntly, reflecting his impression of the town and community.

As someone who has lived in a city for ten years but was brought up close to fairly rural countyside, it sounds ridiculous, but living in Aberdeenshire, I did feel as if I was in a different country – which I obviously was. A comment that has stuck with me is that in England there are rural areas, but in Scotland there is rural and there is also remote.

English remoteness rarely exists, as you are never that far away from easy access to a city or large town. However, for large swathes of the North of Scotland, towns are far apart, the combination of the rural landscape and the decimated transport system creates a strong sense of remoteness – something that I have never experienced before. This remoteness brings with it a sense of otherness, alterity, so some things that would not usually have any specific interest develop a level of, for want of a better word, exoticism.

(BJ)

intimations

Deveron Arts

Hamish Fulton

Huntly Woods & Norma Hunter

Walking and

Rocca Gutteridge

(53) the hidden gardens

2011-07-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

So leben wir, und nehmen immer Abschied.
(So too our life, an ongoing goodbye.)

– Rilke, Eighth Duino Elegy

Our Joko’s house, the demesne of Ogaki is the hidden gardens, back of tramway

Bashoing the hidden gardens

Luke had come to tramway to meet us. Reached the seclusion of the familiar brick and raised beds of the hidden gardens by Scotrail, Irfan having also come in from London and Angus came speeding in with the kids on the mainline, got together at the Yurt. Larry, Colin, Margaret, Morven & Gerry, as well as other friends, day and night, kindly called, as if encountering someone restored to life, showing their pleasure and warm affection. Before fully recovering from the exhaustion and exertion of the long journey, on the final day of the season, decided to visit the old woodland platform. With the wooden books sheltering under the big oak, back on the train again

pulling mussels
from a shell

parting the paired
tea cups

May leaves
lead this journey
back into memory

(May 15, 2011)

53 the road north
Alec Finlay, 2011

Prologue

53 Tomohiko Ogawa

An e-mail arrives on the 11th from Tomohiko.

Today I sent you a package of green tea for the Matsuri Festival in Glasgow. It will be arrive hopefully 14th, it might be 15th. If you have it in 14th, please bring it and serve it at Glasgow. If it's not in the date, please take it to the road north trip.

The tea is taken in Yame (Yame is written with eight women in chinese chracter), and the place is well known as good quality tea and also it was well known as great early exporter of tea for Europe. Yame is not so far from where now I live.

The place is very far from Fukushima (probably Fukushima has been known as same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki now), so you don't have to worry about nuclear.

53 Tomohiko's tea
Ken Cockburn, 2011

the way west

On the 11.00 train Waverley–Queen Street, over a thermos of puerh, we adapt station (53). It goes fine until that dense closing hokku, which we puzzle over between Linlithgow and Falkirk.

the hamaguri
shell and innards parting
departing fall

Eck puns on the Squeeze song 'Pulling Mussels from a Shell', and finds the line, ‘parting the paired cups’, referring to the two tea-bowls Lorna gave us before the first road trip a May ago. They’ve come on our journeys, and then sat together on the shelf in Ken’s new flat, until Eck, who stayed there last night, brought ‘his’ bowl with him today, leaving the other behind.

53 Eck's tea-bowl
Luke Allan 2011

The train is busy. Before we pull out, a young policeman walks through the carriage, disembarks. There are two football matches taking place in the west today, with the championship at stake, though you’d be hard pressed to make either the kick-off from this train. Shoppers, more likely, though we can’t imagine they’re the policeman’s concern.

As we walk down Buchanan Street towards Central Station, Eck talks about his first football match, the infamous 1980 Celtic-Rangers cup final, won by a sclaffed deflected Danny McGrain 'shot', which he remembers more for being hit in the face by a can of tennants flung from a Rangers bus that took the wrong road in to the game, and the riot afterwards, sparked when a wee Celtic fan ran onto the pitch, kicked a ball into the goal at the Rangers’ end, and flicked them the Vs.

1980

Ken’s glad his own memories of Starks Park can’t compare. The first game saw go Raith went 2-0 down to Falkirk, before winning 4-2, which he found excitingly satisfactory.

Arriving

53 the hidden gardens
Luke Allan, 2011

Luke & Colin are already at the hidden gardens when we arrive. Colin, just back from a week in North Uist, shows us photos of Langais Wood – new display boards, letterboxes among the trees, stamps in his notebook.

53 Langais
Colin Will, 2011

Eck and Andy are in constant discussion about how to stop the boxes from flooding in horizontal Uist rain: option (A) alter the lid, option (B), alter the rain.

53 Bharpa Langais
photograph by Dana Macphee, 2010

Colin still couldn’t bring himself to crawl into that ancient hillside chamber.

53 Irfan
David Williams, 2001

Next to arrive is Irfan, up from London, after getting in touch via the blog and sending some haiku we’ll read today. We haven’t seen him since the pocketbooks days, ten years ago. He was our poster-boy, the wonderful David Williams’ shot of him in turban and grandpa shirt gracing the cover of Wish I was here.

53 Morven
Luke Allan, 2011

53 Gerry
Luke Allan, 2011

In the café Morven and Gerry arrive as we’re finishing, so we leave them the table. At the yurt the first tea-flasks are set up, Granny’s Green Cherry Tea (as Eck calls it) and a rich Black Gabalong.

We scan the clouds for any sign of a helicopter, its direction of travel an oracle for the way the championship’s headed. The shouts from a nearby block of flats suggest someone’s scored, but who?

We say hello to as many of the guests as we can, some of whom we met on the road. It’s disorientating and delightful to find them all here in one place on one day. Emma (Loch Insh), Ella (Falkland), Pat & Andy (Luing), Margaret (Dunira), Colin (Langais), Gerry & Morven (Carbeth, Glen Fruin), Isobel, Lorna and Holly (Kilmartin), Angus, Mark and Tana (Edo), Maris (Kinloch Rannoch), a This-Is-Your-Life moment, with the wooden books of the Xylotheque as The Big Red Leather Book.

53 Gathering, Woodland Platform
Luke Allan, 2011

We’d planned to read with our backs to the Woodland Platform but the crowd beat us to the only shelter available. While they huddle against the drizzle we each take our turn on the gravel stage. A glance back, no sign yet of Mr Tarahara, the Japanese Consul.

53 Maris & Angus
Andy Law, 2011

Ceremony

53 Colin's ceremony
Luke Allan, 2011

Colin begins with drum and chimes. Margaret sings our pair for the women's rice-harvest song of Shirakawa, ‘Gradh geal mo chridh’ (I would plough with you and reap'). We read the poem's prologue.

when was it I first had that dream
of roving the glens up and down
guided by Basho’s oku?
leaving behind the pink lanes of gean
blossoming in The Meadows
heading off to look
for Shirakawa...

Taking us back a year to setting-out at Bonnington Road, the Pilrig Park cherry-blossom, and stops along the way.

53 wish, cherry blossom, Pilrig Park
Paul Edgerley, 2011

ten years on
this old house 260
is our degree zero
not all the vista
but still a start
gean pink again in Pilrig Park
and a flitting in the offing

swopping one hill view for another
familiar streets
Pilrig, Rosslyn, Bonnington
exchanged for hills
Tinto, The Buchaille, Roshven

Names that touch us more than we knew they ever would.

word-map

53 reading, Angus Reid
Luke Allan, 2011

53 reading, Larry Butler
Luke Allan, 2011

53 reading, Ken & Alec
Luke Allan, 2011

53 Margaret
Luke Allan, 2011

The centrepiece of the day is a word-map of Scotland. Of course, we haven't covered the whole country, still it's a start. 9 readers read 100 place-name hokku, which we've gathered from a range of contributors, listed on the website. To read the word-map, or to download the complete reading, click here.

***the road north: an audio word-map of Scotland

***Track 1. Margaret Bennett's 'Gradh geal mo chridh'
***Track 2. Basho & Sora's introduction

***Track 3. Alec Finlay (1 - 11)
***Track 4. Morven Gregor (12-22)
***Track 5. Irfan Marchant (23-33)
***Track 6. Larry Butler (34-44)
***Track 7. Margaret Bennett (45-55)
***Track 8. Gerry Loose (56-66)
***Track 9. Colin Will (67-77)
***Track 10. Angus Reid (78-88)
***Track 11. Ken Cockburn (89-100)

***Track 12. Rewriting Basho's last station
***Track 13. Margaret Bennett's 'Grioal cridhe' (Glen Lyon's Lament)
***Track 14. Mr Tarahara's Kojo no tsuki (ruined castle)

***(Recording by Alexander Maris, 2011)

53 Mr Tarahara
Luke Allan, 2011

Mr & Mrs Tarahara have arrived and we agree what he’ll do and when. Eck and Ken read the Basho adaptation for this station. Margaret sings the great lament of Glen Lyon, which we last listened to after our swim on that scorchio day June 21, 2010. To close Mr Tarahara speaks of how we shall all someday ruin. We couldn't agree more. And sings ‘Kojo no tsuki’ (ruined castle).

53 the road north
Luke Allan, 2011

Eck says: I’m sure it was on Neil Young's jukebox, that bluesy classic of the road: 'We are all gonna be a ruined castle someday’.

Tomohiko adds: 'Kojo no Tsuki' is the song for ruined castle and moon. It’s a interesting coincidence that I am living in Oita prefecture now where there is the ruin of the castle in that song. I haven't visit there yet but I will visit someday not for far future.

the hidden gardens

It's always a pleasure to wander in the hidden gardens, and from what people tell us after, the quiet performance has a calm that fits. Jim McGonigall writes to say it was 'absolutely memorable, strange, human and spiritual.' Our minds go back to the twenty-four hour renga we composed here a few years ago, moon rising over a sleeping city, the first train at dawn and a bow to Peter Manson's marathon contribution.

53 Nest-box, The Parliament of the Birds (Alec Finlay, 2004)
Luke Allan, 2011

The nest-boxes have been redone. The wooden books have survived well, the oak's girth's expanded, and Angus, the gardens' founder, is here – Angus who whose trail we've followed from Achnabrek, through Glen Lyon to The Quiraing – with his 2 girls bonny and growing.

53 Xylotheque (Alec Finlay, 2004)
Luke Allan, 2011

coda: The Mainline To The Shallow South

as if the endless sari
of Draupadi
unravelled at the matsuri

born this way –
ballet dancers
in the Tramway

rereading Calvino
Why Read The Classics?
on the Virgin Pendolino

last night in Carlisle
Lady Gaga
was all about style

the craving's begun –
no cigarette
till London

counting every sacred cow
remembering
to be here now

coda: gallery

53 woodland platform
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('now the poem's over / it's able / to begin again', KC)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('I kept seeing the birds / flying in and out / of the boxes / during the reading', KC)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('May leaves / lead this journey / back into memory', KC)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('as it should / the last tea / has a tang / of seaweed', KC)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('pulling mussels / from a shell // parting the / paired cups', AF)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('one helicopter / doesn't make / a summer', AF)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label
('silver birches / green city shade / reclaimed ground', anon)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label (Irfan Merchant)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 hokku-label (Irfan Merchant)
Luke Allan, 2011

53 wish
Luke Allan, 2011

53 wish
Luke Allan, 2011

53 yurt gathering (L-R: Angus, Alec, Ken, Larry, Morven, Gerry)
Luke Allan, 2011

intimations

Kojo no tsuki was composed in 1901 by Japanese pianist and composer Rentarō Taki. The music of the song was inspired by the ruins of Oka Castle. You can view the arrangement here, and the Japanese lyrics and their English translation here.

the hidden gardens are situated on what was once a debris field of bricks and rubble harking back to the partial demolition of the building in 1987-88.

(9) Monreith

2011-06-28T01:21:00.000-07:00

‘hide a stone among stones

a man among men’

- Akira Kurowsawa, Hidden Fortress

Our Joboji would have been Tom Pow, but he’s away in Lebanon

Our shrines to inspect are Celtic Christian and Neolithic: chapels of Ninian and Medan, The Wren’s Egg and Nest; our temple there called Shugen-komyoj is St Medana’s Chapel down among the rocks

Our Inuoumono, the dog-shooting field, is Gavin Maxwell’s basking shark fishery, Soay, and the memorial to him here at Elrig

Our Nasu reed-brakes are ‘medan’, the cliff-top meadows of the Rhinns of Galloway

Our Tamamo-no-mae's tomb is St Medan’s stone-boat by the chapel, the hawthorn and well, found and not.

Our native land has turned gorse-yellow, Salmond-yellow

Our prayer is to our boots, that they be waterproof without waterproofing for one last trip

9 ‘Last few days’

Alec Finlay, 2011

‘Last few days’: the road south-west

Ken starts his civic day voting at the Ebeneezer Chapel in Bangor Road – then drops off a bag of books at at St Andrew’s & St George’s on George St, for the annual Christian Aid book fair. Books bought there in the past are still unread, so now he’s happier to give than to receive.

He drives slowly through morning traffic as Eck’s train pulls out slowly from Newcastle Central. Past Tollcross it’s quiet and soon the car skirts the Pentlands on the A702, as the train shuffles along The Wall towards Carlisle. Rain’s forecast later but for now the weather’s fine. Ken stops for tea and wifi at Annandale Water, scenic services remembered from long-past family and SPL van trips; Eck empties his flask of dark puerh cup by cup.

Our ways intersect at Dumfries without mishap. We head west beneath still fair skies, though by the time we stop at Bladnoch the rain’s on. At the distillery we forgo the tour and the venerable bottles for a 46% miniature – from a choice of labels we opt for a Wigtown-Scotland’s-Book-Town stack of books rather than Burns and scenery

(KC, AF)

Isle of Whithorn

9 hokku-label
(the flag of the Fifth kingdom, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2011

Our first stop proper is at Isle of Whithorn. Bladnoch’s as far as Ken’s been before, so the Machars is new territory for him. The land is fairly flat and, despite proximity to the sea, with rain reducing visibility we feel landlocked – views defined by gorse and cattle. We follow the blue P round past the harbour, and an optimistic berth.

angled rain
waterproofs

safe & dry
in the car

an ironical boat
in the harbour

BRIGHT HORIZON

The locals say
on a clear day
you may see
four Kingdoms from here

Scotland
Ireland
England
Man
& the fifth Kingdom
Heaven

whose flag is
sometimes grey
sometimes blue

and which
translate into
Radio Scotland on-FM-and-Medium-wave
BBC Ulster
Radio Cumbria
Man FM
Celestial Radio

9 The Chapel

Ken Cockburn, 2011

St Ninian’s Chapel is a short walk away. By the time Ken’s gathered thoughts and necessities from the car Eck’s poemed, and drunk a cup of lukewarm Jasmine tea – that thermos from Lewis is on the wane, new-filled it’s hot near the neck.

The first wee beach is mirrored by another, 30 yards away, like Eilean nan Gobhar. The drystane walls on the approach are thick with lichen, but the ruined chapel itself is well-maintained, tidy stone and shorn grass, sans wildflowers of say Sand or Kilmarie.

9 Sora’s cloistered window

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Although haphazard, the Witness Cairn’s permanent-markered stones are fastidious compared to our transient labeling.

9 The Witness Cairn

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 i.m. Kenneth Kay

Alec Finlay, 2011

It’s cold and windy. May, and we agree not bringing gloves was a mistake. Eck returns to the car for shelter while Ken investigates an odd square white structure at the headland – no idea what it is.

Nearby’s a second Solway Harvester memorial – the first one, ‘Erected by the Freemasons’, sits outwith the Witness Cairn wall. A scallop dredger, Solway Harvester sank off Man in January 2000 with the loss of seven crew. One suspicion was nets became entangled with a submarine which dived, dragging the boat under, but the final report raised concerns over maintenance.

(AF, KC)

Tale of the stone woman

9 'St Medan's boat'

Courtesy Les Dunford, 2011

At Dunadd we saw the footfall of King or Queen or Witch imprinted in rock, here there’s a whole woman, man or boat, Medan, depending how you open the name:

Nadokoro Medan

for Medan

read maiden

for Medan

read Edan, Etain

for Medan

read Medoin

for Medan

read Moninne

Modwena

for Medan

read Muadan

my Aedan

for Medan

read Modan

friend of St Drostan

(our translation)

for Medan

read cliff-top meadow

Rhinns of Galloway

There being no consensus. let’s agree: Saintly man or Saintly woman, probably from Ireland, in the era of tidal influx associated with Ninian, whose cave is nearby.

The shape-shifting of myths and beliefs gives us Medan as our pairing with Lady Tamamo, the fox spirit who assumes the guise of a seductive woman. That story originally Indian: Kalmasapada, a king, was born of a union between his father and a female tiger. Fierce he was, and with stripy legs.

ANGRY KING CLAIMS—

LAWS HAVE “NO CLAWS”

In the Japanese tale Yasube no Yasunari exorcised Lady Tamamo’s fox spirit, revealing its true form.

YASUNARI PUTS HEX

ON “FOXY” LADY TAMAMO

She was then hunted over the reedy plains of Nasu where Miura no Suke Akira shot her through with an arrow.

LADY TAMAMO

KILLED BY ARROW

AT NASU

This gave Basho reason to mention the dog-shooting competition. Lady Tamamo’s ghost was transformed into the Sesshoseki rock.

LADY TAMAMO

TURNED TO STONE –

EXPERTS SUSPECT GAS

This noxious moth-killing stone we paired with the Murder Stone by Tingwall, which Jen visited last summer.

KAZUNAO ”TURNED ME ON

TUNED ME IN”

CLAIMS LADY TAMAMO

Eventually, through the guidance of Minamoto Kazunao, Tamamo was enlightened. For more details see the Noh play Sesshoseki.

9 The Murder Stone, Tingwall

Jen Hadfield, 2010

Tamamo-no-mae’s tomb

9 Nasu Kogen, Sesshou seki
courtesy Nekoguchi, 2011

9 the stones of Kirkmaiden

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Haec Loca

9 Maxwell Memorial

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Heading down toward the bay we come across the memorial to Gavin Maxwell out on the cliff-top. This was his childhood home, on the family estate – Maxwell was a Percy of Northumberland, but they’d family lands at Monreith.

9 otter & Sora

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 Kirkmaiden may

Ken Cockburn, 2011

There’s white may, though the hawthorn, mindful of the searing wind, is cooried down in the scrub. There’s a signpost pointing the way we’re not going.

9 Clarksburn

Ken Cockburn, 2011

'Take the last path to Clarksburn, and I’ll meet you at the seaside’, as the Monkees might have sung.

9 Mounted Archery Chasing Dogs circa 1896, Japan.

Maxwell is our pair for the Inuoumono Basho records: the ancient dog-shooting field, where skilled warriors practiced for the hunt. The author of Ring of Bright Water, one of the classic idylls of wild nature written in the last century, killed over 1000 basking sharks during his ill-fated fishery on Soay (1945-48). Kathleen Jamie records how

Rifles and ammunition were never far from hand. ‘We were raised to hunt’. he says. Indeed, before Camusfearna, Maxwell had already had a short-lived and ruinous career as a basking-shark fisherman, laying waste to those huge creatures. Raised to hunt, indeed, but observant enough to notice that the fox had undigested sand-hoppers in its droppings. Two pages after the fox-slaughter, Maxwell professes ‘a love of living creatures’. He has, he says the ability to ‘make a conscious effort to put myself in the animal’s position.’

(Kathleen Jamie, ‘Ring of Bright Water’, London Review of Books)

9 Kirkmaiden otter

Ken Cockburn, 2011

When Kathleen visited Sandaig she found piles of frogs’ legs at the mouth of the burn; not the aftermath of some teenagers’ massacre but the work of otters, a natural killing field.

9 hokku-label

(‘flame will / claim you’, AF)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Camusfearna / Sandaig’s also where Ken left a verse of Valerie Gilles' last August. 'The lost cascade’ is a translation of the name of the Allt Caillte waterfall on Sleat.

the sound of the lost cascade
reaches out
beyond the sea

(Valerie Gillies)

9 audio: Valerie Gillies, 'St Medan'
Alec Finlay, 2011

Eck tags the otter’s paw. The same flames that cast this memorial would destroy Camusfearna, killing Edal, enacting the curse that ended Maxwell’s idyll.

Medan (East Coast)

9 Kirkmaiden Chapel

Ken Cockburn, 2011

..**S

..*faiTh

*...*M

..floatEd

**...D

.......A

...stoNe

We’re seeking our stone-boat man-woman, Medan. Eck used to holiday down here, at Port William, and has dredged up a cinematic memory of visiting the stone-boat, which carried a beautiful young woman away over the bay, safe from a lightbob soldier who was bewitched by her eyes. A retelling of the Medan myth set in the Napoleonic era. His gran read the story from a big red book of folk-tales as they sat on the boat-rock, which really did seem as if it could have floated off on a tidal flood, if the need came.

The tale had sunk back into deep memory for years, and then at one of Norman MacCaig’s birthday bashes Eck heard Tom Pow – who Sheena McDonald rudely introduced on stage as the ‘tall, strange-looking one’ – read his retelling of Medan, ‘The Gift of Sight’, it all came flooding back. It was Tom’s poem that suggested to us we should find our way back to Kirkmaiden, the site of the blinding, and of the healing. We’d hoped to meet him here, but today he’s heading for Beirut, as part of Reel Festivals.

9 hokku-label

(‘seen thorn / Medan / seeing spring’, AF, for Valerie Gilles)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 Medan’s blinded eyes AF, after Valerie Gillies

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Now the map’s Gothic letters promise us Kirkmaiden and St Medana’s Well, which we know from Valerie Gillies’ poem in her survey of holy wells The Spring Teller.

St Medana’s Well, Wigtownshire

Medana left Ireland and the man

who stalked her. Stepping onto a rock,

she floated here across the bay.

He followed, tried again to praise her.

She plucked her own eyes out.

You want these? He left unseen.

A disc of blue, the spring is flowing

from the boat-shaped rock

and its strand enters the salt sea.

This is where she washed her face

and somehow she could see again:

the painful stabs of sea holly,

a rock pipit on the cliff,

its streaked breast.

A tight cluster of sea aster

and a great mass of thrift.

Two perfect quartz pebbles

white and smooth as eyeballs.

9 Medan’s blinded eyes

AF, after Valerie Gillies

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 hokku-label

(‘are the ash & the ivy / the only one’s left / to celebrate the arch’, KC)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

We find Kirkmaiden easily, following the path bending below the golf course – old gravestones, an open enclosure, and a padlocked chapel, the carved arch in good nick, but otherwise cracks and missing slates say disrepair.

9 Kirkmaiden Chapel

Ken Cockburn, 2011

But down the steps to the beach, we don’t find the well or the boat-shaped rock which crossed Luce Bay.

9 hokku-label

(‘myth’s semblance / of shadow / sinks into / cold stone’, AF, for Tom Pow)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Eck’s mythic childhood movie is dissolving in the rain. He walks forlornly up and down the length of the beach looking for the spring of his imagining. There’s nothing harder than being a failed finder.

9 hokku-label

(‘LITTORAL / as far as the sprays / cast / as deep as the sea / reaches’, AF)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

The skies lower than low, greyer than grey, so we can’t see over the water to Medan’s twinned chapel on the Mull, to the west of the west. That’s the mist we’ll disappear into tomorrow.

Ken has a theory based on observation: the tide isn’t far enough out – below the cliff the big boulders are still sea-buffeted – and he suspects the floaty-stone is one the tide’s still holding onto. We take it in turns to point at the tops of rocks farther and farther out, that one, perhaps, this one, maybe. All the while our boat-stone feels more sunken.

Still, we’ve the poems to imagine. We read Valerie’s poem by the cliff, with the rain soaking the sheets and our fingers freezing. Imaginations consoled, Ken projects a miracle onto the isolated rock safe on the sand. Maybe?

9 hokku-label

(‘you may know the story / you may know the place, / still it’s the poem / that bears the trace’, AF)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Eck finds his own miracle of the fishes.

9 flying fish, Medan’s angel

Alec Finlay, 2011

On the path back we read Tom’s poem by the brightest hawthorn, and stop for a quick libation of Booktown Bladnoch overlooking the shore, our backs to the putting green. It has to be said, dram 52 isn’t the finest we’ve tasted.

9 audio: Tom Pow, 'St Medan'

Alec Finlay, 2011

9 rock & whisky

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 Sora’s libation: wet meets wetter

Ken Cockburn, 2011

The Wren’s Egg & Nest, Monreith

9 Wrens Egg

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Damp as we are there’s more to do, balancing Christian and pre-Christian. The area between the coast and the Fell of Barhullion, with its fort, is scattered with a rich arc of Neolithic culture: circles, rings, pockled rocks and homesteads, cupped toward the sea highway, as at Dunadd.

Stellock

Myrton

Craignour

Blairbuie

Dumtroddan

Reminders of other places. Benbuie Burn up the glen at Moniave; Dun Troddan Broch in Glenelg; and Craigenvenie at Rannoch.

Is a Stellock a Fankock on a hillock for the sheltering of sheep?

Farther east on the map we enjoy the name Barmeal, and wonder, if we drive through there and go far enough, do we reach the wee hamlet of our dreams, Alldaybreakfast?

9 Wrens Egg

Ken Cockburn, 2011

The monument we pick out is the the Wren’s Egg, still near Monreith; curiously, it’s the single feature that finds its way onto the AA road map, though unnamed on the orange Pathfinder. We follow a single-track road and turn down a farm-track before skirting a just-sprouting crop-field. There’s a mound topped with beech, like Paul Nash’s Whiittingham Clumps, and alongside them nestles the Wren’s Egg.

9 Wrens Egg

Ken Cockburn, 2011

An erratic boulder, a ‘natural’ stone, set down here gently by the cradling of a glacier, like Clach Ossian.

9 Clach Ossian

Ken Cockburn, 2010

The egg stone looks like it’s just been placed – nested – on a bed of fresh compost, with two smaller stones just below it. Eck says, “I wouldn’t like to meet the wren that laid this”; and we share a joke about its alignment with the nearby farms of Low Clone and High Clone. At the fringe of the wood we find Spring’s blue broken egg-shells to place on the mother-stone.

9 Wrens Egg & ‘wren's’ egg

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Back in the car we decide that was the final drenching off the day. At Glen Luce, a wee place the road forgot, the hotel rooms have big warm radiators like in an old school, which become driers for boots, coats, waterproofs, socks, trousers. Now we’re inside the rain has eased. Ken asks what kinds of tea they have. “Just tea, son, just tea”.

9 St Luce Hair cult

Alec Finlay, 2011

St Medan (2): west

Most of what we went to look for we never found – but still it was all grand. Breakfast tv has the SNP on 46 seats, Labour 20, Tories 4, LibDems 2 and Greens 1.

9 West Freugh Wren’s Egg

Ken Cockburn, 2011

We head down to the Rhinns past another, even bigger, Wren’s Egg – there really is something in this cloning lark – towards the westerly Kirkmaiden, St Medan’s Chapel and Cave, down at the very foot of the Mull of Galloway. It’s fairer today but the far shore of Glenluce Bay, where we were yesterday, is still fog-shrouded, extending the voyage of the stone into another dimension of time and space.

When we park we’re welcomed by swifts, on the fence, circling and dipping, accompanying us along the cliff edge, close-calling the thrift, joying in their safe arrival.

East Tarbet and West Tarbet, another narrow neck of land with a beach either side, wider than at Isle of Whithorn.

9 wish, gorse (Rhins of Galloway)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Medan’s meadows

9 Medan’s meadows

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 Meadan's meadows

Ken Cockburn, 2011

***medan

***alternate translation:

**a clifftop meadow

**..**priMrose

gorsE

orchiDs

*..*****seA-pink

.*ferN

**..*.*raMsons

*..*.bluEbell

*****....meaDowsweet

..****And

**greeN ivy

9 circle poem (‘bobs of drifting thrift nod on the cliff’, AF)

Alec Finlay, 2011

A journey of faith

The big brown bull the other side of the drystone wall we wouldn’t like to be in the same field as backs off when Eck approaches. We’ll call him Tomintoul. The book says the chapel isn’t visible from the clifftop path, and the map’s vague as to its exact location. It’s a journey of faith.

9 Sora's Path of Faith

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Eck chooses the path of ecstasy and risk, heading his boots down a precarious-looking ridge too beautiful with flowers not to brush against death for. Thankful for the little knoll at the end of the dragon’s back. It was one of the loveliest moments of the whole year’s journey, so perfect in its meeting of geology, ecology and poetry.

The plunge was a short-cut to the chapel - not - and he ends up clambering over cliffs, round a point and then back up through a chimney of rock, forsaking the chapel to loll in the meadow, suited to his creed.

9 hokku-label

Ken Cockburn, 2011

sea-meadow hokku

(I)

taking the wrong cliff path
trapped among Medan’s

tormentil, primroses, meadow-
sweet and nodding thrift

(II)

my path
leads down

marked by flowers
and birdsong

(III)

if I’d come looking
for bright flowers

would I have found
the dark chapel?

(IV)

trending spring
may, primroses

ramsons and every-
thing

9 Sora's Path of Faith

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Ken sticks to the high road of quietude and certainty along the gorse path of life, descending further along. Down on the beach there’s no sign of any chapel – looking back at Eck, shouting to ask if he’s found it gets a thumbs down.

9 Medan's schooner

Alec Finlay, 2011

Clambering between huge rocks to the next bay, and then up to the grassy slope, and still nothing.

9 hokku-label

(for 'cassock' read ‘tussock’ / for ‘saint’ read ‘snail’, KC)

Ken Cockburn, 2011

Another mystery withheld, contenting himself with wildflowers and the ubiquitous snails, Ken thinks it can’t be any further on so give up and head back, and of course it reveals itself, the remains of a drystone wall against a natural cliff.

9 St Medan’s Chapel

Ken Cockburn, 2011

The cave is at the back where a wall has been built up, holding a low iron rectangle a spiderweb’s spun on which marks the entrance to Medan’s original hermitage the chapel was a later extension to.

9 St Medan’s Chapel

Ken Cockburn, 2011

The way the site’s been used is impressive, the two side walls formed by slabs of rock. Ivy grows down from the cliff above, as ivy half-covers the Machars’ Kirkmaiden.

And here’s Sora, back where he started – at the top of Eck’s ridge, looking down to Finlay’s Point. A swift flies low between us. We walk back in a dry fog. The bull’s mingling with the crowds. Three lambs we pass weigh up anxiety against indolence, and shift a bit, but don’t exactly scarper. The swifts are still pegged to the fence.

Come evening, searching for a place to eat, we're enjoying the radio again, tuned to Scotland 'Getting it on' the FM band.

GET IT ON

right this is Senga

on the blog

wanting to hear

the whole meat loaf

cause it’s good

right the way through

from The Rhinns to Killin

this is the day

Scotland turned yellow

balancing the best

of her scorn

with her desire

for the ideal

summed up in

Wee Eck’s cheeky grin

As we leave the Rhinns and the count is continuing we take a quick stop to photo the windmills at Ardgour.

9 hokku-label

Ken Cockburn, 2011

9 hokku-label

Ken Cockburn, 2011

the black-headed turbines

prefer to take their turn

on the lower hills

close to the farm

Ailsa Craig: for sale

9 hokku-label

('For Sale, beautiful beaches, bijou beaches; own supply of curling stones. Plentiful bathing. For details apply A. Craig', AF)
Alec Finlay, 2011

9 yellow, from Kelty to Skye
Ken Cockburn, 2011

By Stranraer the SNP are up into the 50s, Libdems stuck in low single figures. North through Ayrshire, between the news we listen again to old favourites: Neil Young’s Jukebox, classics all; Van Morrison’s St Dominic’s Preview; Joni Mitchell’s Court & Spark, which Ken knows vaguely except ‘Raised on Robbery’ which he knows perfectly – probably taped off the radio onto a C120 and played and replayed then taped over and long since discarded. Van Morrison’s ‘Jackie Wilson says’ is great, a tight song, but whatever comes next has him improvising grunts Ken’s less time for (seeing The Last Waltz back in those C120 days, Van didn’t do it for him.)

VARYAG

9 VARYAG memorial, Lendalfoot
Ken Cockburn, 2011

We’re intrigued by a War Memorial sign that has a Russian translation. Pulling in we read a story of loss and failure – a Czarist ship defeated in battle, scuttled, raised and reused by the (Japanese) enemy, sold back to the Russians, sent abroad for renovation, ‘set adrift’ by the Revolution, sold for scrap and finally sinking here off the coast. It’s a big, traditional, heavy, recent, bilingual monument, and we wonder why. An unlikely source of pride for contemporary Russian patriotism. Perhaps it’s a new narrative to counter the old one Ayrshire’s Moscow tells. But it reads too much like a government-approved textbook version of history to be convincing.

the road north

The road north runs through Paisley, specifically Nitshill, once home to the legendary Frances Seneca McDade. Sadly a visit to the crucible of this remarkable mind will have to wait for another occasion, as the Erskine Bridge beckons. We cross the Clyde beneath grey-black clouds, but by the time we reach Loch Lomond (our Matsushima parva, as McDade macaronically might have put it), the sun is more or less out again.

9 MNTN, BEN LOMOND
Ken Cockburn, 2011

Eck labels Ben Lomond. The kids in the extended layby step back sensibly from the road as we drive slowly past, but it doesn’t stop them aiming their toy guns at us.

On the radio Ken's eastcoasthometown Kirkcaldy’s the star; David Torrance brings the SNP to 65, and an absolute majority in the new parliament. Eck imagines the measures his namesake will have to take to tone down his smug smirk at victory as he descends to Prestonfield House in a helicopter. The radio presenter suggests it’s been circling, waiting for the magic number. What is it about political leaders ascending from the skies? He involuntarily thinks of Triumph of the Will, and Hitler descending from the skies at Nuremberg; but we democrats respond to theatre too.

At Crianlarich, where we meet the Oban road, Eck says he finds this an incongruous junction, a meeting of two different holidays, Kyle and Argyll.

At Killin we eat with Ken's sister Judith.

coda (I): Jim’s hokku

Although our journey is nearing it's end there are still new poems arriving

Full moon on the loch,
****are you also composing
a fine letter home?

Loch Ken

Rhythm of footsteps,
****the weight in your heart, sighting
the evening star.

Whithorn

Boughs bent with berries
****above waterfall bubbles.
My old eyes lost count.

Moniaive

White breath of cattle
****and hay strands frozen today
in muck round the heck.

Hightae

Trout underwater
****watch us passing like shadows
of the old gods. Gone.

Whithorn

My ancestor shot
****yours hereabouts. Now speugies
peck at roadside grit.

Newton Stewart

(James McGonigall)

coda (II): Jen’s poem

And this is from Jen on Shetland, after her mulling over Tingwall.

coda (III): Ken’s Triduana

“Medan – whether she was a she or a he – the story about her blinding herself (as in Tom's poem) has to be the story of a woman – it is basically the same story of that St Triduana, who has a chapel here in Edinburgh and one on Papa Westray too. 'Intercession', the first poem in On the flyleaf is about her. But she is a very different character from the fox lady – renouncing rather than seeking power. Perhaps a closer parallel is a selkie? Not that we will find a grave.”

Intercession

St Triduana’s Well and Chapel, Restalrig:
among the graveyard’s still apparent skull-and-crossbones
there’s a sign, that the chapel keys can be collected
at DECORUM, Painting and Decorating Contractors,
9-5 Weekdays. Somebody’s taken the trouble to mark nearby: PINK FLOYD, NIRVANA, BEAST McPHILLIPS.

The unusual hexagonal chapel was built for James III
above a spring, and the floor-slabs, laid below ground level,
would have been underwater: became, much later, linked
with Triduana, an “obscure Pictish saint”,
who gifted a princely suitor enamoured of her eyes
those eyes on thorns; was granted her desired seclusion.

The waters, like her intercession, the blind’s remeid;
all mere idolatrie, in the Reformers’ eyes,
who tumbled down the upper part: the lower, since
restored, re-roofed, kept dry with pumps, is bare except for
a wooden figure rising above the streams of sunlight,
plotting a king’s descent into humility.

High up on the outside wall, somebody’s taken the trouble to record, twice, with a permanent marker, the name: SHEREE.
The enormous trees are beginning their meditations on autumn,
and beyond the ordered, secular windows of
the Pensions Department, in which so much has been invested,
the golden-antlered flanks of Holyrood unfold.

Where a well-house stands, the chapel’s
miniature double, exact
down to the floral bosses,
but pumpless: mosses thrive,
and a pipe dribbles water into a pool of water.

A small-mesh grill bars
the aperture, bars touch,
taste, the chance to test it,
but wishes are still admitted;
coins, their remnants, dot the flooded chamber’s floor.

intimations

St Medan’s Chapel: grid square reference and summary at Geograph

Tom Pow is a poet as well as writer of young adult novels, picture books, radio plays and travel literature. In The Becoming, Selected and New Poems was published by Polygon in June 2009.

Valerie Gillies' collections of poetry include Each Bright Eye (1977), Tweed Journey (1989), The Lightning Tree (2002) and The Spring Teller (2008).

Jen Hadfield wrote Almanacs (Bloodaxe) in Shetland and the Western Isles in 2002, winning an Eric Gregory Award for the work in 2003. Nigh-No-Place, written in Canada and Shetland, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007 and won the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008.