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fall

yellow knotweed leaves

The coming of fall was always a relief when I lived in Montreal; a release from the hot glazed oppression of the summer, an opening door to freshness, clearness, breath! Even here in the UK, after the coolest summer in decades, I feel enlivened – and still relieved – at the sight of the tiniest autumnal tinge.

Why is that? I’m more at ease with loss than abundance, more at home in sparseness than profusion, perhaps: the peacefulness of knowing there is nothing more that can go. Or maybe it’s the pure allure of the uncovered, the newly shown. The world is disclosing itself as we layer up and retreat to our insulated indoor cocoons. But this is the time to be out!

Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales
6th October 2015

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days

These are four season days just now.

The morning comes cool and green and dew-wet.
The afternoon glazes over under a hot blue sun.
The smoky sweet scent of autumn draws close in the dusk.

And in the night? We uncover the world. We wrap ourselves in its bare unladen branches.
And sometimes we sleep.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
2nd October 2015

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walls

slim vertical grey stone with small heap of slate-like stones atop it, and a grey fissured limestone pavement stretching away behind

Walls, walls. This place is all walls. Row after row of walls, running to the cliff edge, running along it, in line after line, parallel, perpendicular, everywhere. Even the ground is walls, cracked stacks and slabs of rigid grey stone; and the cliff itself, a great smooth wall falling straight into the sea, huge broken chunks at the foot of it.

The walls are in all shapes – stones slatted horizontally, vertically, on a diagonal – sloping or straight but all sharp. This stone does not weather kindly. Even the name for this landscape is harsh: karst – limestone eroded by acidic water into breaking flaking pavements, as far as the eye can see. Walls, and fields of stone, and slabs of rock jammed upright into the crevices like tombstones. It’s like walking in a graveyard: an epic plateau of a cemetery, held up against the flat wall of the blank Atlantic, falling into the hollow booms of the sea.

It’s a relief to finally reach the Black Fort, Dún Dúchathair. The outer wall is several feet thick, a rampart which closes off its own private finger of cliff, but it is curved – curved up to meet the sky and curved out to cup the small eroding point. And behind it, hidden beside the high horizon, are more curves – looped walls of stone folding back on themselves, almost sinuously. It’s profoundly welcoming after all the relentless linearity. Even the floor is covered in downy green grass.

I settle myself down to sit for a while but – boom! – the ground echoes beneath me as the sea slams into the undercut cliffs, and the sky turns grey as a wall of rain approaches. Time to escape, but only as far as the harbour because the stiff bulwarks of wind which surround us mean there’s no easy sail away.

Inishmore, Aran Islands, Ireland / Inis Mór, Oileáin Árann, Éire
17th September 2015

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tenderness

It was a dark and stormy night when we arrived, dropping anchor finally at midnight. Ara’ Deg, our ship, had borne us through it, her yard snapped and her mainsail useless, but ploughing on with her foresail and newly-fixed engine. It was rough sailing but we tied ourselves on, and up and down the waves through hammering rain she carried us, two bodies in one.

We rode it out together – the skipper kept us sailing and I kept my nerve – and we’re glad for that. But when the morning comes and the sky clears, we take separate tenders to row ashore to the sunny Irish harbour we find ourselves beside.

We tie them up at a set of stone steps on one of the piers. Each is tethered with its own painter and each has its own shape and buoyancy – one a rigid fibreglass shell, the other a plump inflatable. As such, they have divergent trajectories of drift, as we do once we climb up onto land. Yet while we are gone the tide – washing in, washing out – nudges them together. And when we return, there they are, sitting on the exposed sand, gunnel to gunnel, as if despite their different tendencies they belong together after all.

small scruffy fibreglass tender and inflatable grey tender beached side by side

Kilronan, Inishmore, Aran Islands, Ireland / Cill Rónáin, Inis Mór, Oileáin Árann, Éire
15th September 2015

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becalmed

“Force 0. Calm. Sea like a mirror.” (Beaufort wind scale)

The sea is like a mirror, although it’s not flat. There’s a steady swell coming in from west-north-west and we rock back and forth on it for hours until we decide to start the engine and move.

Even then, creating a small wind above and a small wake below, it’s like moving through a rippling of the finest fabric: the sun is out and the sea is as silken as the smoothest cliché.

Soon it gets so glassy that it no longer even looks like silk, like anything substantial, but like billowing air. It’s as if we’re sailing through a dream of sea, the unreality enhanced by the effect of moving by motor as its drone and throb drown out the subtler sounds and sensations of being on the water.

Where are we? And how long have we been here? Foula sits like a great cake on the horizon but we could be anywhere – anywhere in this floating, blue-shining world.

West of mainland Shetland
3rd July 2015

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Acer palmatum

Acer palmatum is the technical name for the Japanese maple. A Swedish botanist named it in the 18th century after the hand-like shape of its leaves. Most maples’ leaves are hand-like: Canadian sugar maples (of the flag and the syrup) have broad palms flatly spread. The Acer palmatum, however, has small dainty palms with tiny tapered fingers curling like a child’s hand (the Japanese had already variously named it after the hands of babies and even frogs). And they seem especially alive, these little maple-hands, lifting and shifting and shyly beckoning.

But what do they offer? The fruit of this palm-maple is “a pair of winged samaras,” each holding one seed. A samara? “A samara is a winged achene,” a flat papery thing, shaped to allow the wind to carry the seed far from its parent tree.

“A samara is sometimes called a key,” (wikipedia continues) “and is often referred to as a wingnut, helicopter, whirlibird…” And they do travel. I was always picking up green sugar and silver maple keys as they parachuted around the sidewalks when I lived in Montreal. Their fine veined forms intrigued me. I collected them superstitiously, as if they might actually unlock something: open something, lighten something, transport me through a new sky. You’d find them in all sorts of places, birled around by the warm breezes, often with no maple tree in sight.

The little red keys, achenes, samaras of this Japanese maple are so much more delicate though. They could take off on the faintest breath of wind. Indeed, I plucked one from this tree in this garden last spring and carried it with me until I flew to Japan in the autumn and let the seed fall. The seed itself wasn’t so old but the dream was, long-carried and finally coming to fruition, as maybe a wee many-handed maple is now, in the wooded grounds of an old Shinto shrine somewhere in deepest Tokyo…

red winged keys of a Japanese maple against green lotus leaves

Bryngarw Country Park, Glamorgan, South Wales
9th June 2015