I might forget but my body never will

Delayed by the strong easterlies of March and April we've only just put the boat back together. I chose the surprisingly relaxing job of untangling the lazy jacks (above) for my starter. These two lines hang either side from the mast to the sail cover on the boom, to make sure the main sail flakes neatly into itself when released rather than needing people to catch and fold it as it falls (as we did in the 'olden days'). Two pulleys and three small clips hang from the one loose end so it's a slow job freeing it from itself, tangled from having been washed. The cord is smooth and easy running, which makes a huge difference to the job.

It was pleasant sitting in the cockpit letting the cord slip through itself, slowly lengthening. It's an assault course for the fingers and eyes, a reverse macramé, the loose sensation of slipping with a river current that required little thought, more physicality. It's a rare boat job that doesn't have a low tremour of anxiety to it. Even mousing lines out of the boom or mast - tying the working rope to a smaller one and pulling it free so the track is still evident for when you need to return it - comes with a sense of worry that I may lose the knot half way down the mast, so pulling the small mousing line free and losing the ability to rethread the reefing lines or halyard.

This being the boat the relaxing job ends soon enough. The lines have to be attached to the pulleys two thirds of the way up the mast... 10 metres up. Even with someone else hauling me on two halyards in a climbing harness as I cling to the stays, the spinnaker halyard and mast, the ascent is nerve-racking. Not so much muscular as mental.  

Do not look down. There is no need to look down. As I rise. And with three people pottering about on deck each wobble of the boat is amplified as it is reverberates up the mast. At least standing on the spreaders to reach the pulleys meantsI feel a little more securely braced against the boat, and takes away the cut of the harness into my thighs, but my fingers are cold and need all the focus I can muster to co-ordinate to untie the end of one cord from my belt, thread it through the pulley, and tie it back to my belt, twice, to bring them back to the deck so we can raise the lazy jacks and therefore the sail cover. My right leg begins to shake uncontrollably, a minute tremour that prevents any load bearing. I press myself harder against the mast until I can shot Done! and am smoothly returned to deck.

As with seasickness, as soon as I'm on solid ground, the shakes cease. Stored invisibly in my muscle memory for the next time.

Breeze. Breathe. Draft

Flurry. Flutter. Blast. Blow. Puff. Gust. Squall. Tempest. Gale. Cyclone. We have lots of names for wind in its various states (not to go into the Beaufort numbers). More specific name are tied to particular places. I particularly like tramuntana, found in north eastern Spain. You'll know when that hits.

Some people are more affected by wind than others. One friend who visited was so distressed by the wind here, she didn't want to be out in it. And even though I'm invigorated by the warmer varieties (especially when on land), I've been tested recently.

Non-stop wind through March roared in like a lion but still hasn't gone out like the lamb of folklore. Everything is looking pretty hammered, flattened, bleached. And with the change in sea temperature, and then air pressure, we're told to get used to it. The preference for dykes over trees here enables it to scoot across the fields unhindered. So every act takes that much more energy and focus to be undertaken. It's as if every decision is being double checked: is it absolutely necessary? Worth the effort? Standing still requires concentration, awareness. 

And perhaps that's what I love most about the wind. It defines me, in a way that swimming also does. But better: I don't have to get wet. In strong winds, air flutes around my body, sharpening my awareness of where I end. I am most clearly shaped when walking into or away from a 25mph wind. Muscles are active. I am a walking channel, a solid mass in the middle of huge movement. And unlike seeing shadows and silhouettes of myself I can feel it in my limbs, in the front and back of my body, along my jaw. It reinforces me.

Which feels similar to my reasons for writing, or creating anything: gardens, meals, clothes. I have, I suppose, a kind of extreme low level body dysmorphia, which possibly isn't the right term, but will have to serve here. My body image is flawed by my not being fully aware of definition. I am not contained by my physical self. And when I feel bigger, I create. Writing, for example, is a way I can manifest myself into something other more cleanly, or perhaps I mean with a cleaner definition. It has form. It is the shape of my overflow. Conversely there are times when I shrink, so overwhelmed I don't write. When we bought the boat, for example, I didn't write for almost the entire year. Being responsible for something so alien, potentially scary, meant inhabiting my own body took all my effort just to function. To function well, I had to fit myself comfortably. To manage the excess of myself, I have to put it somewhere else.

Intermission: Review

A timely and thoughtful review of 'Lune' by Billy Mills on Sabotage:

"Lune: a leash for a hawk; fits of lunacy; a crescent formed by the overlapping of two circles; a crescent moon; a river whose tidal estuary is at Plover Scar, Lancashire; a poem in five sections by Sarah Hymans printed as a neat concertina or gatefold pamphlet, subject of this review.  ...

Lune is a rich addition to this contemporary pastoral tradition: part narrative, part evocation of land- and sea-scape, part metaphysical meditation on what the world is and what it is to be in that world. The title in the first instance derives from the river, but the other definitions of lune that I referred to in the opening paragraph of this review all seemed to me to come to bear on the poem as I read it. The sea is a leash, limiting the walker’s range of movement, the pull of the moon is what creates that intertidal space, the bay’s crescent is formed by sea and land intersecting, and these are all things the poem brings to our mental vision."

You can read the full review here.

I like the timing, given the subject of current posts being the landside of the Lune.

Name-holdings

There's a t-junction nearby known as Bonkers corner, derived from Bank House Corner. Bank House Farm being at the end of the lane. That particular Bank House is still there. There were at least three other Bank House Farms (Upper and Lower included) around here once. Plenty of embankments.

Most of the farms have kept the names of their tenant farmers from years ago. So Tomlinson and Gardener's Farms don't have the Tomlinsons or Gardeners living there anymore. The previous inhabitants are as part of the landscape as the buildings. Waymarkers, inscribed on maps.

So when people moved into School Villas (down the road from where the old school was) and changed it to 'Chick Villas', it seemed a casual disregard, almost insulting, of the place. As if their smallholding of chickens took precedence over the previous role of the house. I don't know if someone said something, but a month or so later, the new plaque was removed and the old name reinstated. I might be imaginging the curse, but I always thought it bad luck to rename houses.

Crook Cottage, however, neighbour to Crook Farm, was originally Mill Cottage (housing the nearby Abbey's mill). Perhaps it was sold to the farm after the abbey was dismantled for family or workers and so became Crook. Crook Farm is so-named for its location in the crook of the estuary.

Our place is called Lighthouse Cottage, despite the (replacement) light having been demolished in the nineties. The old fireplace still stands in an external wall, and the stone flags that would have been the foundations of the light are still, in part, visible. But no light. In name only.

As with the fields, layers of past activity and residents are sometime evident, other times not. Not everything can remain to honour the past. There isn't the space. As with memory, the reasons for forgetting can also be lost.

It's a kind of hording, reminding me of an attic crammed with old clothes, photographs, toys and momentos. Does my clinging to names, suggest a reluctance to allow it to become past? Aware my own presence here could be lost, like the mill. And yet, I've renamed all our outbuildings: the shed of shame, the shed of danger, the garage of retirement (already renamed to the garage of redemption), creating new histories in the small time we've been here, despite their previous purposes of housing fishing tackle, cows and the lighthouse oil. I'm busy making a new cartography for the place. An aural map, which of course will always be incomplete.

Slack and other Fields

Ironically, the inland houses are more likely to be flooded than those on the seawall. Their cellars wash out every few years. All the land round here is reclaimed, dyked; the reedbed long since cut down for grazing cattle. Over a couple of square miles lie ten or so farms, some of which, no longer farming, have been divvied up into two or three houses. Fields grow on or just above the water table. The sea wall, alternatively, is butressed, raised a little higher.

This is most obvious after heavy rain when the fields gleam with huge swashes of water, and  curlews, especially, crowd the mud, pecking for whatever has been lifted by the wet. Shallow pools stretch where the old dykes were, dividing the smaller fields. Swans spread across two fields this year, with maybe as many as fifty in each most days. I like the sight of them and sheep sharing the land. It adds a surreal quality to my notion of 'coast': more blurred than otherwise. Transitory.

As are the fields themselves. I saw a map of local fields. Each had a name, given for its soil type or relative location. The field opposite us is called Slack Field, where slack is used to mean a "soft wet area of low-lying land that sinks underfoot, poor drainage, soil is unfit for cultivation but can be cut and dried and used for fuel".

Other names: Dead Man’s Butts, Chapel Hill, Salt Coat Piece, Long Greet, Lower Greasy Pike, Higher Greasy Pike, Little Barn Field, Mill Pasture Meadow, Little Rough Mill Pasture, Further Moss Field.

The map is obsolete. These fields have been dyked together but these names conjure small histories. In less than a square mile were over seventy named fields. The map is undated, but is from before the lighthouse was built in 1847.

Naming something is a peculiar habit that both connects and distances us from it. Connects by the thought process of defining a thing’s quality. And distances us in the way language (code of the intellect) does from physical entity. Either way, and both, what had been fairly nondescript fields become containers of history from when the Abbey was a vital part of the landscape, pre 1534.

Everything shifts round here, more so than many places. The bay's turf and channels have swung in patterns for the past centuries, and its people have never been too worried about this, knowing it's ‘twenty yard one way, twenty yards another’. But now everything is unknown. In a recent, wonderful piece on the weather Richard Mabey calls British weather whimsical and claims climate change will increase this 'whimsy'. Just as meteorologists can't forecast exactly what change will occur, nor can oceanographers. Sea levels will rise, obviously in some places, surprisingly in others. Coastal erosion around here could mean the deepening of dykes, the loss of still-working farms, equally it could mean the silting up of localised coves. Ultimately, nothing is known.

Hunt

reproduced with kind permission from Jackie Morris

Not only do people come here to admire the sunsets and snowbuntings. But also to course hares. At night. The 'sport' is to send dogs chasing hares across the fields. Once killed, the hares are strung up on the barbed wire at field gates as trophies.

With March coming, we'll feel the resulting decline even more keenly than we have during the winter months when often they'll hop out of the dykes onto the road to zig-zag in front of the headlights, partly to confuse the preditor, and partly due to being dazzled by the beam.

One of the calls of spring is their running ragged circles around and around the fields, across the saltmarsh, chasing each other like kids. They run so closely, tagging tails, almost, I've mistaken them for labradors, seemingly so large. And of course the more famous image is of them on their hind legs, rearing up to a height of a small child, boxing.

They're a popular subject for paintings. Symbol of our meagre wild. But art rarely captures the lean energy of the creature: their scrawny bodies, wide ears, and that lope of theirs when they're poking about the fields. Their image is often domesticated, made more cuddly than they are. By far my favourite artist of hares is Jackie Morris, above). Part deer, part fox, solitary and metamorphosing colour through the year, hares have a mythological quality. More often than not, these portraits sadden me: sport three - art nil.

The hares around here, I'm told, are unusually large for brown hares. The exposed flatlands perhaps necessitate a tougher build. When not playing centre field, they keep to the dykes and hedgerows, warmer, sheltered lines. Despite being able to run upto 45mph, their young are more exposed to machinery and digs because they nest above ground. Plus their reaction to danger is to freeze.

The salt marsh is the safest place for them. No one would want to set their dogs chasing across their with its irregular sump holes that could so easily break a foreleg, or two. Their colour matches the grasses perfectly. And the tufted scape means their silhouettes are not so obvious. At least to human eye.

Apparently the hunters come from Manchester and Barrow, this being one of the last places around the NW to find so many hares. What really irritates me is how stupid these coursers are. Not only in an ecological sense, but for the sustainability of their own pleasure. Erradicate the hares over their ability to reproduce and bang goes that entertainment. The farmers don't like the hare coursers because of the danger to their cattle – startled, the cows and sheep can easily fall into a dyke to drown. £1000 lost per cow (the police have a rural officer dedicated to overseeing the area, contactable on 101).

Late last summer a guy knocked at the door, asking who the landowner was here. I told him various farmers and asked why. He was from Manchester and had a marsh harrier he liked to exercise by picking off unwanted rabbits. He was about three weeks too late for our infestation (either a fox or mixy had beaten him to it). I haven't seen him again and suspect he didn't meet with much luck – either permission-wise or rabbits.

Just last week we met a hunt on the lane. A pack of about 20-30 dogs and the same number of huntsmen/women. Red jackets, black boots, whips, the lot. Lambing time seems a odd time to allow a hunt on the fields round here. They said they were 'scent-hunting'. I didn't ask (I should have) how they controlled the dogs to divert once the scent grew strong and close. How can they?

It's the first hunt seen around here within the living memory of my neighbour Ralph, who's lived here for 88 years. I hope it'll be at least another 88 before they're back. Blatent or shady, I don't know which hunt is worse.

Genius Loci

taken by Bob Parkinson c 1950

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind." said Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

And when you fall in love with a place, rather than a person, there's so much more evident history and physicality to excavate and obsess you, to occupy mind and body as you connect with it and understand it more. It is inevitable through action, perhaps, to grow roots into the present and history of a place, attempt to preserve those and shape its future. And I suspect I'm more shaped by being in a place than I am by being with someone. There is a larger force/presence there. A greater, more constant physical interaction between myself and place. Is it this physical connection that feeds the deeper one?

I moved here two years ago, and before that cycled here regularly for over ten years, and before that, when I was twenty-odd, cooked up a dream to live in a lighthouse. I suspect this is the nearest I'll get to that. No light except the one in the channel is here now, but the cottage remains on a slightly elevated piece of land, and despite having been partly washed away once, is standing tall, if crooked, still.


Apparently the first keeper, Frank Raby, built the cottage when his family out grew the four rooms below the wooden light. He built the stone walls straight from the inland room, and when he'd gone so far realised he was about to hit the road, so cornered it slightly to accommodate the size he wanted. It was only one storey then. More children (or grandchildren perhaps - the family was here for 100 years) gave rise to the second storey.

I discovered this last year when I met Bob Parkinson, who lived and worked this and then the replacement steel lighthouse until he was 29 years old, for the first time. I'd wondered why it had the odd bend ever since moving in. The solving of the mystery didn't diminish my feelings for the place, rather generated a deeper sense of knowing it, of carrying (if unable to share) its history. Giving me a stronger sense of connection. I grew up in a house that was built by my great grandfather, lived in by my grandparents and parents. I think this experience has sharpened my attachment to 'home', attuned me to wanting to know a home's history.

Bob came round the other day. Maybe the stamina required to live here before double glazing and central heating, when the lights still needed daily tending and self-sustainability wasn't so much a middle class lifestyle choice as 'what you did', has ensured his deep attachment to the place. Exposed to whatever weather whistled off the Irish Sea, bolsters the dependency between whoever lives here, and must increase the value of 'home' faced with such ferocity.

But I think there is more to it than practical allegiance between people and stone and cement. I think it epitomises our animal need for security, our scenting a nest. Out here, in the barely changing landscape (up until the recent drastic change in sea temperature/level), the changes we make remain evident for longer. Bob's life is set in the earth, walls, outhouses, path and imprinted deeper, as I bear witness.

We walked around the house and then up the garden while he pointed out where the garage was; how the fish house was sunk below ground to keep it cool; where the lighthouse ladders hung on the seawall for easy access to the light; how the washhouse was larger then than now and the pig they kept in it; where the well was and how their water pump had pipes into and out of the house, with two troughs to collect water from; the shed he built for his motorbike; the new stones where the house had been washed away, rebuilt and reinforced. 

As we wandered, his walking stick as airbound as earthed, I drank his memories, nodding like some chick being watered by their parent. In the larger scheme of community, he is the parent. I am carrying the (non-genetic) baton of place. While I grow vegetables, a blackthorn hedge, prune the apple trees, wipe the moould from inside the house, I am also learning about the house, the Rabys, Bob's time here in comparison to mine, alongside mine, almost as mine. 

Beatrice Parkinson, Bob's mother, was celebrated by Pathe News (below). Bob's role of lugging paraffin oil and lighting the lamps before or after school was overlooked for the sake of the 'newsworthiness' of her being the only femal lighthouse keeper in the UK, I suspect. But no place can be fixed as one person's. We all have the responsibility to light its beacons.