Lindsey:

“Background assumptions about succession and stability and conservation and consistency often obscure the dynamism that shaped these places and inhabitants. Species loss, erosion, accretion and climate change are part of the past in these places, not just part of the future” - Anticipatory History edited by Caitlin Desilvey, Simon Naylor and Colin Sackett

… and I think learning to live with this comes as we become more intimate with non-human beings with whom we share our living space: Birds are the most obviously present non-human animal being in our lives, and as humans quieten in COVID-19 lockdown, birds have become the dominant presence here. There are ecstatic stories in the media of animals taking over towns (goats in Llandudno, dolphins in Venice, boar in Madrid), and a multitude of observations of birds in people’s gardens. It’s spring (and what a spring! The sunniest on record, following wettest February on record, a sign of the breakdown of the jet stream as a result of climate change – drought and flood). With traffic noise almost gone, birdsong is louder, clear and more varied than I remember before. As part of learning this place, I learnt to identify birds not only by sight but also sound. I now notice more birds by sound than I see. I am almost dreading the summer months when birds go quiet, and the tourist traffic is likely to return. But it has been ideal to work on this piece, with its focus on birdsong, I’ve been able to make traffic-free recordings, turning them into sonograms to visualize them, and using them in this piece we’ve made.

Iain

I began to assemble a whole plethora of material, during which some underlying questions began to form. One of these relates to Tim Ingold’s reminder us that, when we are in a taskscape listening, we are at the centre of the sound-world; whereas when we are looking we are always at the edge of a ‘field of vision’ looking ‘in’ or ‘out’. (Of course these two activities are almost never wholly separable, but the point remains valid if thought in terms of emphasis). This prompted the beginning of a question along the lines of:

“is any link between an emphasis on either listening or looking and the shape of a dwelling”?

The circular (associated with a privileging of listening) in relation to buildings would relate to Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of the phenomenology of roundness –

“For when it is experienced from the inside, devoid of all external features, being cannot be otherwise than round”. (The Poetics of Space p. 234).

The square/rectangular, by contrast, would seem to presuppose a worldview in which sight oriented outwards (including, perhaps, the notion of the four cardinal points is stressed. This gives a more differentiated sense of world, one in which we look out in different directions that, in turn, are given differentiated qualities.

Lindsey

“Around almost every garden there’s a wall, a hedge or a fence:
a strong message to outsiders to keep out. In spring birds need enough space in which to find food for their chicks, and this space is referred  to as a territory. Since birds are unable to build fences, they define their territories by singing.
A singing bird, no matter how melodic or beautiful he sounds, is effectively telling neighbours of the same species to ‘back off and talk to the wing.’”
- Nick Acheson for The Wildlife Trusts

There has been a movement here in Wales, started on Anglesey, called ‘Côr-ona’, sing (Côr = choir, chorus) out of here, started by a woman on Anglesey, where hundreds of people post videos of themselves singing from home. Obviously building on the strong tradition of singing in Wales (and singing happened in Italy too of course), this has built a spirit of facing precariousness together. My neighbour, Elin Tomos worked on a production for Cwmni Da/S4C where they created a ‘digital social choral experiment’ from hundreds of individual recordings (with welsh-speakers contributing from all round the world), and it is life affirming. Côr-ona is the anthem of our novel Coronavirus time (with perhaps more to come). And it feels ‘safe’ here in Wales, compared to what is going on in England. There is a strong - and enlightened - sense of national pride and togetherness.

But borders, boundaries and fences are implicated too in dangers of exclusion and isolation, xenophobia and privilege, and remind us of the origins of the trouble we now face of ecosystem collapse and climate change with associated trauma of forced migration for survival, as well, of course perhaps to the origin of COVID-19 being destruction of habitat:

“The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes/filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow man: Beware of listening to the imposter, you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one” 
- Rousseau

The existence of our garden, enclosed in its present form, with its mature plants, is down to Ina Lynas Gray, who lived here from 1918-ish to 1990. She has a remarkable story, including having an illigitimate daughter who was brought up as her ‘sister’ (I’ve put a picture of the two of them in our piece), and complex negotiations with the Vaynol Estate, farmers, neighbours and family to secure the land which is now our garden. She created such a fantastic garden that it used to (apparently) be open to tours by the public. The large bud in the work is from one of the rhododendrons she planted.

Iain

I have been looking at a great deal of archaeological material, which suggests that both circular and rectangular enclosures – whether built for human habitation or the protection of domestic animals, have existed for the last 6,000 years. Both can be related to the Welsh term Hafod – a summer place (equivalent in terms of place to the English/Scottish Borders term sheiling) – and in both cases a relic of the ancient practice of seasonal transhumance.

But if these point to a type of place in the semi-nomadic agricultural world of seasonal transhumance,  Corlan can also be related to other enclosed spaces – for example the portable herb garden that supposedly belonged to Siwan, the Lady of Wales. (There is an argument that the architectural design of different parts of the castle can be seen as ‘male’ and ‘female’, with the garden area being central to the ‘female’ part. This in turn relates to the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden (and so by implication to the medieval symbolism of the Garden of Paradise). These nested senses of enclosure as symbol, taken together, played an important part in shaping medieval attitudes toward both women and nature. The sexual ambiguity involved is heightened at Dolbadarn because, in 1230, the English knight de Braose and Siwan began an liaison. He was later charged with adultery and hanged, after they were caught in the chamber she shared with her husband.

Ironically, Dolbadarn would later be used as a ‘vaccary’, that is a corlan for cows.

(Iain: I have a love/hate relationship with rhododendrons based on very fond memories of playing in their thickets as a school boy and on the later knowledge of them as what a local gamekeeper in the highlands used to call ‘gentry weed’; an invasive Victorian import that spread everywhere to the detriment of the local flora).

Lindsey

“Sometimes a  landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtains, landmarks are no longer geographic but also biographical and personal”
- John Berger

We share some early experiences on upland farms. Although as a child I particularly loved the time we spent in the Lake District, visiting family including our hill farm cousins and wandering the hills, following old paths. I don’t remember folds other than the pens on their farm. I’m not sure why, but perhaps because it was in these pens that I once witnessed the trauma of my cousin Debbie getting her ear half torn off by a sheepdog, and we were constantly warned about the chemicals and bits of machinery lying around. 

My initial (bodily) feeling – perhaps shaped by those early childhood experiences - is about these places is functional, as having the potential of trapping, as not safe … which makes me wonder (more intellectually) about creating ‘safe places’ and for whom (especially in the context of COVID-19!) – who is kept out, who is kept in… not least symbolized by this ‘miniature castle’ sheep dip area behind the barn I used to use as a studio.

I very much relate to the surprise in finding considerable work on (seemingly random) walls/fences, a trace of a presence in a landscape that is otherwise ‘empty’ of contemporary humans yet ‘full’ of relics of their past activity. Often these new fences/walls incorporate old bedsteads too, integrating ghosts of home and family.

When I see the ruins in the ffridd (the mountain pasture, the area between the mountain proper and the fertile valley bottom and the subject of the ‘corlan isaf’ part of our piece), the hafodau (summer residences), the strange buildings, water enclosures and walk ways of which no-one knows the purpose now,  the sheer intensity of the activity, and connection with the land, that must have existed in order that people could survive here seem pertinent: there is a certain (what I’ve learnt from the book you gave me!) ‘anticipatory history’….

….“about how the stories we tell of ecological and landscape histories shape our perception of what we might all future ‘plausabilities’”
– Caitlin DeSilvey, Simon Naylor and Colin Sackett in Anticipatory History

On my walk on the ffridd, past the flooded Ash corlan, along the line I indicated on the lower frame picture, I worry about carrying spores (from the many infected ashes lower down in the valley and in our garden) on my shoes, and sometimes take my shoes off to go barefoot. Wandering the slopes without shoes is a sensory joy that gives a completely different experience of being on the mountain.

Not least because the birds come closer. I have realised they are so sensitive to the attitude with which you are moving through (or sitting in) the landscape that being still isn’t really the secret to seeing birds. It is to go with a sense of ‘be with’ (rather than seeking – which is a form of hunting) them, and it seems to me that wearing no shoes makes this happen almost immediately.

There is something particularly symbolic about flooding around these structures. Myths and legends abound here of lost places (Cartref Gwaelod, Llys Helig), and at least five houses in Nant Peris were flooded to make way for the pumped storage hydro scheme in the slate quarry. The Cofiwch Dryweryn (‘remember Tryweryn’, the flooding of Capel Celyn to provide water to Liverpool) movement has, in the last year become something of a symbol of mass resistance, and enlightened nationalism based on community resilience. In the making of my pond (more on this later) I’ve created a bit of a submerged ruin. Stones, slate + water…

The ancient solidified time of the mountains and erratic boulders stand as backdrop to those comparatively tiny blip moments of intimately being with birds. I think of them as ecstatic moments (see for example cwcw ecstatig. As it happens, that sense of connection, particularly with birds - although it can also happen with other beings from trees and mosses to bank voles, badgers, polecats and foxes – is intense and it deepens my relationship with the place. Often these events have happened near or within on or other of the corlan enclosures, which is one reason birds (and their sounds) feature in this piece we have made.

Yes! I love this sense. And as I’ve mentioned, rounds here are tragically rare. But perhaps an equivalent is that moving to Coed Gwydr, that sense of wholeness has come from the initially daily practice of walking in circles from home up onto the ffridd and back. There was – is - something of a ‘positive ritual sense of getting to know my milltir sgwâr, my cynefin, and my becoming an artist through connection to place.

My ‘map’ of fy milltir sgwâr has become dotted with structures and places (including corlannau) that give me the same feeling as those dens in childhood, as does following the sheep tracks (as I did the cow paths as a child). Focusing on the place, I returned again (full circle) to childhood interests in geology (mountains, solidified time, ground to dust), birds (whom Bachelard describes as ‘essentially round’), trees (protecting new trees with rounds) … with two additions – learning welsh (a fundamental quality of the land), and mosses (also round).

“We tend not to roam endlessly: we stick to a patch; we become familiar with it,
we grow attached to it; we begin to feel ‘at home’ there.
Landscape becomes embedded with memory” – Tilley, 1994

Iain

I think my conscious interest in the fold as a specific type of structure or site started back around the very end of the last century, when I was beginning to explore the Borders and its history and archaeology.  However, I had also had a certain amount to do with the processes of sheep farming in the Highlands as a boy and in my early teens, including the all-important activities of gathering, dipping and shearing, all of which happen in or around the site where the sheep are penned and sorted. That structure was not, however, a circular fank but a series of gated pens with the dipping trough as their focus. I’ll come back to this experience later.

Access to Tamshiel Rig is via a track which runs pass a typical (although particularly large) fank, which I came to associate with it. It was a bit of a mystery, in that the growth of bracken within it suggested it was not used but, as this photograph suggests, somebody was obviously keeping it in some degree of repair.

My exploration of the Borders also brought me sight of innumerable fanks, all round or near round. One in particular, part-flooded by a man-made reservoir, suggested the remains of round archaeological sites such as the brochs found in the Western Isles and all down the west coast of the Highlands. (My younger son and I had spent a short holiday during which we explored a valley on the mainland across from Skye that contained the remains of three such brochs).

However, it is certainly the case that I was photographing such phenomena at the same time that I was working on the first stages of the Debatable Lands project, whether at those sites overlooking the coast or, for example, as carved onto a standing stone in Cumbria.

It’s also possible that I may have unconsciously linked the circular space of the fank with other phenomena I was exploring at the time, such as cup and ring markings at sites up on the far north east coast just short of the Scottish border, although I’ve only thought of this just now.

Consciously or otherwise, I now think that all this fed into the kind of visual material that appears in the first book – see example above - that came out of what I was by then coming to think of as my Borders deep mapping project – Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode. As I’ve come to see more and more clearly that stage of the project as a whole was, as I can now admit, as much an act of personal ‘working through’ of a difficult childhood as it was an engagement with the parish of Southdean.

What has also occurred to me in going through these images again and the various  places and experiences that led me to take the photographs or make the above, is that the shape of the folds / fanks I see as ‘typical’ is echoed in another phenomena that’s typical of the northern landscapes I’m familiar with and that have become something of an obsession – namely sink-holes. These are the product of underground streams eroding the limestone and their shape is an uncanny replication of the round structure of the folds fanks, their underground or basement equivalents (to borrow from Bachelard and even Jung) if you like.

I’m not sure where any of this is taking me, but I think there are a cluster of relevant associations attached the fold/fank as a site of caring (human) communal interaction with non-human beings (sheep) which have a special and close relationship to a particular landscape place. (The sheep I know about are all ‘hefted to the hill’ and, in consequence, this draws in an entire ecology, human and otherwise).

At a difficult time when my parents’ marriage was disintegrating, working temporarily as a family with members of the local community on age-old sheep associated tasks may have taken on something of a positive ritual sense, one that has unconsciously (until now?) become linked to the space of the round fank, with its symbolic circular suggestion of wholeness.