Yew

Taxus Baccata

Silhouettes ruling over their kin – Voluminous shadows breaking through the mist, Like abandoned ships cruising a woody sea. In isolation, defining their orbit – Interstellar black holes, consuming light, From a bleached-out sky.

Near immortality lends to the exit door of a church, A spirit more real than any Christian myth. The chapel is orientated around it, Deferring to a power and status as witness, To the folly of civilizations over five millennia.

The connection with eternal life doesn’t end there – Twisted, contorted boughs suggest internal pain, Imprint memento mori of undead beings – Hallucinations of Hydra, Gorgon and Frankenstein, Course through sticky sap like blood, Reddening the bark in winter.

For hundreds of years these knotted fibres defended this Isle, Bending over archers’ backs, straining against sinew, As volley after volley were released at the enemy, Whomever they were, whatever century, For these conflicts are like the gentle breath of summer, Through poisoned, pointed needles.

 Images and text © DJNorwood (in isolation) May 2020

Change

I’ve been returning (when I can) to a practically invisible agricultural feature in the landscape. ‘Pits (dis)’ are extraordinary in their prominence on local OS maps – I’ve noted, astonishingly,  ten of these things in one square mile close to home. They are evidence of the excavation of chalk used to apply as fetilizer to fields and as an acidity regulator before modern farming practices made this process redundant. Quite often they feature as strange wooded outcrops in the middle of ploughed fields, especially noticable in winter.

I decided to return to this particular one (OS ref: 465 528) repeatedly over a period of two years documenting seasonal and climatic change from one viewpoint.

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Fiction and the Field

 

A boy lies in a field in the sun, wondering how he got there.

The journey itself was unremarkable. He’d wanted to accompany his Dad on one of his quests for ‘buried treasure’ since the day he opened the shed door and a large thin, heavy object crashed behind it.

‘No harm done, son,’ said Dad, plugging in the headphones and twiddling the on dial until a faint but unmistakable whine could be heard through the nearest headphone.

J had dreamed many times of being Indiana Jones. Indiana James! Ha! He imagined being pursued by spear wielding tribesmen and having to use quick-wit and guile to stay alive. He knew it was an arcane, outmoded illusion (although he didn’t use those words, exactly). It was ‘uncool’ because his Dad started him on those 1980’s adventure movies. He also couldn’t help but love everything about them and had a Harrison Ford poster stuck with old blue-tack on the back of his bedroom door. It was a gift from Dad.

The skate park was where he normally hung out with Ed, his buddy and wingman on the hard, grey slopes just behind the local secondary school. J and Ed were in a race to master grinds after they both nailed ollies, kickflips and heelflips. Ed had broken his wrist on his first attempt and had spent the previous couple of weeks sulking on a bench, but at least that’s where Amy hung out. There was always an upside.

The last time J was face down in the dirt wasn’t on his board. He’d launched himself and his ancient hardtail mountain bike at full speed down Greenacre Hill, over some hastily harvested planks and attempted to glide gracefully over Roo, H and Charlie, clipping Charlie on the way down with his front wheel, swearing and feeling the warm tingle of blood as it leaked from his sweaty brow. The ground was equally as hard then as now. He’d have more of an audience today, if he had his bike and could be bothered to build a ramp, but he wondered whether even a light aircraft overshooting the nearby aerodrome would elicit much of a response from the field of foragers whose senses were entombed by the elemental tone of copper and bronze humming through their heads.

The loose change in J’s jeans pocket jabbed into his groin. He commando crawled along to the next clump of dried wheat stems, wondering why he’d seen so few insects lying as he had been for half a day, with his chin nuzzled into the chaff.

At least it wasn’t pissing down with rain.

A version of this image features in the latest edition of Landscape Photographer of the Year.

Pits (dis)

Pits. Everywhere, pits.

©Crown Copyright 2015

The dimpled remains of an agricultural past litter the landscape. Farm labourers gathered its chalky alkaline nutrients, then applied it back to the topsoil as fertilizer around a hundred years ago. Then, fields were smaller and could be re-energized more easily with modest machines and brute strength. Pastures were dotted with people, talking, shouting, singing even.

Go to a ‘less advanced’ nation, Morocco say, and listen to the sounds the land encourages people to make. Whooping in the cold morning light. Toiling ‘till the sweat appears. I’ve been there and heard it. I’ve camped out under the stars on a rocky hill by the side of the road: pitched up by bicycle the day before, thinking I was the only one for miles. As dawn broke, a work party lying low nearby filled the air with the clatter of their pick-axes, which reverberated round the valley walls. These were the sounds that once resonated in the spaces carved out between these woods, in these pits. Now this clamour of voices is consigned to the past.

Al Haouz, Morocco ©djnorwood 2015

Of course, this is not the whole story. There is quiet – in between the gunfire from pheasant and partridge shooting, when their less appetising cousins can be heard. Coppices are festooned with plastic feeders and barrels that could grace a gallery space, as Duchamp-esque ready-mades, such is their utilitarian sculpted form. The only way to negotiate these places, without straying across the sight lines of twin barrels, is with the help of a map. Maps help keep us safe.

Untitled #1 ©djnorwood 2016

Maps also spur our curiosity, if we let them. At the risk of stating the obvious, the ordnance survey map aims to graphically represent three dimensional reality on a two dimensional plane, with all the necessary information needed for safe passage in the outdoors – the location of the nearest pub, for example, being of particular significance. But it also harbours information about physical features deemed necessary for safe passage through space. Pits are a fine example. Each one is marked as if it were a key feature to notice or negotiate – the map yielding these features – pit (dis) – as if they were waypoints on a quest. Yet in reality they are hard to find and usually disguised by mature trees, making full use of the fertile soil beneath.

An open chalk pit ©djnorwood 2016

We are aware of the significance of local actions on the global whole, and this is the starting point for my curiosity. This was reinforced recently by reading the fascinating and far reaching biography of Alexander von Humboldt, ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt recognised the connectedness of the natural world back in the early part of the 19^th century, and although much has changed in the way that we interconnect with each other, our interdependence with the land remains the same. Humboldt recognised both the significance of humans impact on ecosystems and the details of flora and fauna that gave flesh to his ideas. In the absence of so little of each, were he alive today, I’m convinced he would have searched out clues such as these.

Humboldt in South America: Versuch über die gereizte Muskel-und Nervenfaser (1797)

These particular ones aren’t heroic monuments like the usual totems of our recent industrial past – in Cornwall for example – where the chimneystacks of abandoned tin mines break the horizon like spires. These are intimate , hidden depressions, surrounded by trees, and this is the M3 corridor of rural Hampshire – a heavily industrialized zone of mono-cultural farms and fields.

A disused chalk pit, ©djnorwood 2016

Perhaps lingering significance lies with the map makers themselves, who have carefully documented their pock marked presence, laying cartographical bread-crumbs on the surface of paper, and leaving it up to the curious minded to discover and create their own narrative. Perhaps it lies in the simple notion that something insignificant marked on a map can arouse interest and curiosity, and this in itself should be a cause for hope and optimism.

Anyone with a (healthy) map obsession can scratch the itch at the British Library. The fascinating  Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line is open until 1st March 2017.