Wednesday 31 January 2024
Before Scotland disappeared and the bird food in our garden turned to mush, I’d intended to spend today in our friend George’s garden. I’d imagined how satisfying it would feel, removing the posts and rails that used to flank the long driveway before they got weather-wrecked. That fence has been on a bender for an age, and sozzled as it is with damp and slime, beyond repair. I’d planned on stacking the wood in a heap for the time being. From a distance, if I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I crossed my eyes, it would resemble a pile of bark mulch.
Anyway, today turned into full day of reading and writing and watching the rain. Ez clattered down the stairs and around the cottage last night, cooking up a storm of his own. Flatpack furniture can do that to a person.
I sent him a text late last night. “Did you get your bed put together? X.”
“Yes, I did. After two hours of trying to get one screw in. You thought I was stressed and losing my head at home, should’ve seen me trying to do that by myself.” [Three ROFL emojis and a photo of his bed.]
“Yes!! Congratulations.” [Raising Hands emoji] “Well done. XXX.”
I enlarged the image of course, could see he’d bought new bedding. The little travel clock that M bought him at Christmas was on the window ledge, and I could see the curtains I’d given him on Monday folded on the radiator.
“He needs a curtain pole,” I said to M.
Counting years, months, days and hours in my diary, as I’m wont to do, I see there have been five Mondays this month. Is that why the month has felt so long?
Here’s something I wrote on the first Monday of this month (before I swapped things around on Scrivener and deleted them from Substack, so some of you will have read a version of this before at third draft. Here’s the fourth.
New Year’s Day 2024
Come with me. You’ll need a torch, on account of the windows being boarded up and the rotten floorboards in the hallway.
One hundred and twenty years ago1, William lived here with his siblings, Sarah, John and Catherine; and a farm labourer, also called William. One hundred years ago, William let the farm, to John and Mary Lizzie. Their children were Elsie, William, Anna and John. John and Mary Lizzie’s nephew, Joseph, lived with them too. Just before World War II started, John and Mary Lizzie’s youngest, thirteen-year-old John, left school. He was the farm’s horseman. Twenty-seven years ago, a Border Collie called Rick chased a Border Collie called Spike up the hill and around the corner.
Over the years I’ve tried all the doors of the farmhouse, explored all the rooms and, as with childhood odysseys, hung tough to brave the spectre walking down the stairs. It’s gone now, but time was when a framed cross-stitched sampler hung on the wall of the master bedroom, above an iron bedpost.
Be thou faithful unto death.
“Hah,” I said. I was exploring the farmhouse for the first time. It was the mid 1980s, I’d learned an engineer condemned the building in the 1960s, the gable end being unsound: the wall ties had corroded. That bedpost, incidentally, wound up atop a stone wall that bounds an old orchard. It’s still there, amid a thicket of snowberry.
I’ve heard the wind whip around the farmhouse, imagined it rushing at the gable end and sucking it outward. Still, the farmhouse stands. No wind today, though. It’s the first day of January 2024, and I’m here for the last time, grateful for your company because the words on that sampler are on my mind and so too is The Old Year by John Clare2, and Clare’s Ghost by Edmund Blunden3. And who likes goodbyes? This year, a construction company will demolish this farmhouse, build a dozen houses on the site.
Goodbye, old friend. This farmhouse is where I first attended to my curiosity about the village: What was around me, who lived here, would I ever feel I belonged here? It’s where feelings, facts, and folk tales rallied and spread; and where I became, I suppose, a kind of psychogeographer.
Look down. Scuff the dross and dust with your foot, expose the red and black quarry tiles in the kitchen. And from the kitchen, step back into the day with me, walk on the mossed-up concrete through the stackyard. Cawing jackdaws, a murmuration of starlings, we could be on a film set, A Quiet Place, The Last of Us.
Walking around to the front of the farmhouse once more, I stand and look at the boarded-up parlour window. There’s the graffiti tag which Ez made while he was in the last days of primary school. I remember the maquettes Ez made at that school; his painting Pulteney Bridge over the Avon; a conversation in our car after he’d joined the after-school philosophy club. I think about dereliction, that dereliction is intentional. I think about Ez’s drinking and my hypervigilance around that.
Ez, working in town and staying with friends over the holidays, tells us over the phone he won’t be home just yet. We’re grateful to hear his chat, is all. Ez talks with M about Luke Littler, the sixteen-year-old who’s tipped to compete in the PDC World Darts Championship on Wednesday night.
Drawn to watching Luke’s semi final match ourselves - watching darts a first for me - after a walk on the beach with Alfie, we’re late for an early evening get together in our local pub. So many conversations about Luke and how several of us have watched darts for the first time. There’s a sing-song in the pub, before it closes for the month. A neighbour cajoles me into dancing. I’m wearing a deep green full tulle skirt, and a pair of oversized earrings, Christmas cactuses made from tiny green and pink seed beads. Thanks M.
Later that first shiny week of the new year, I spread out the maps I’ve collected on the table: I wanted to write a kind of introduction to the village.
We’re not so far away from that seductive affluent neighbour, the English Lake District. You can think of the parish as being sandwiched between the Lakes and the Solway Firth - an estuary where the river Eden and river Esk meet. From where I’m sitting, I can see the hills of Dumfries and Galloway, Criffel, in particular. Some describe Criffel as a mirror image of the Lakeland fell, Skiddaw.
The Lakes are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Solway Coast is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. But this parish falls under neither designation. It’s a kind of agricultural hinterland, lowland farms, pasture and pockets of woodland criss-crossed by roads, hedgerows, stone walls, becks. A few minor roads bound the parish; water bounds the rest: the River Ellen - which originates in the Skiddaw massif - then there’s Threeping, sometimes called Threepy Beck, Row-Gill Beck, Outfield Beck and Gill Beck…
Around and about there are traces of ridge and furrow and strip fields. You can see that the village, a linear settlement, has a high medieval origin. As to its more ancient past, place names, dialect and archaeology point to a multicultural community. Five miles South West there was the Roman settlement, Derventio. Less than a thousand years later, and even closer to home, farmers sailed from Norway around the west coast of Scotland and colonised the land, as did the Irish Norse.
The village is a row of what were medieval tofts (houses) and crofts (narrow parallel strips of land for agriculture) on either side of the principal thoroughfare. There’s a church and village green at the east end of the village, where there’s also a field on which stood a significant building, perhaps a fortified manor house. There was a tithe barn nearby, too.
Our friend George lives in what was a stone barn, it was a byre, loose box and hayloft adjoining what would’ve been a yeoman’s farmhouse (toft,) both of which were built in the late 17th century, likely on the footprint of a much older toft and croft. George’s front garden would’ve once been a croft, and it was subject to Rights of Common, would have been pasture for livestock. It is a long and narrow garden, bumpy, boggy, labyrinthian. Apart from the drunken fence, there’s a tumbledown shed, an orchard and a beck running through. Springs arise here and there, too.
Amid the neat front gardens, paddocks and greens around and about the village, some see George’s garden as being a mess, have whispered what a shame to see this unkempt garden. Other parishioners see its beauty. I feel inspired by the layers of life, the disorder, the ecology, anarchy and magic of the garden. Human access, though, through the garden is difficult. George can neither sit in the garden nor make use of its abundance.
For the next twelve months, George has given M and I free rein to reimagine the garden using radical and regenerative gardening practices. We don’t want to compromise its wilderness and apparent spontaneity, and dream of a day when front gardens everywhere are wilder, biodiverse, nature-friendly.
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Quantitative and qualitative data gathered over a period of years from Cumbria Archive and Local Studies Centres in Carlisle and Whitehaven.
Lady Gillford's House, Petteril Bank Road, Carlisle CA1 3AJ
Scotch Street, Whitehaven, Cumbria CA28 7NL.
Online at: <https://cumbriaarchives.org.uk/archives/archivecentres/>; accessed: Friday 19 January 2024
The Old Year by John Clare (1793-1864) Online at: <https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-old-year/>; accessed: Monday 01 January 2024
Clare’s Ghost by Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) “Blunden reads his poem 'Clare's Ghost' (1917) about the poet John Clare, and explains he must have written it at home on leave. From a recording made with his biographer Barry Webb.” The First World War Poetry Digital Archive. Online at: <http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/9421>; accessed: Monday 01 January 2024
And so it begins 👌
Love this instalment - keep going! X