The place to start

looking into landscape

So I have landed in a new place. Always a frisson of excitement and sense of potential, often a nagging anxiety about fitting in. I hope my work will do the connecting for me, so below I offer an extract of a text published in my book Spirit of Place in Finistere to show what I write and, literally, where I’m coming from. After a long time on the treadmill of producing a book every year, I’m really looking forward to the focus of shorter limits, and sharing more directly with readers. Welcome to new and old, as I take the plunge into Substack world. Do please stop and say hello…

HUELGOAT

Regeneration. I live on the edge of a forest, at the point of stepping into a discrete world. It holds that special edgy energy, defensive and anticipatory. Forest’s realm is segregated by very visible, natural boundaries, giving the process of entry a ritual sense of moving from one state to another. Wooden walls and a green roof raised on many pillars create shape and structure for the forest at large, yielding an atmosphere of enclosure and containment. A mass of trees like this is a veritable community, like any town or village, with all the issues of shared resources, inter-dependence and rivalries that involves. Forest is as complex and intricate as any relationships between people.

At human scale, to be within forest is anything but a clear-cut experience. The sphere of vision is curtailed by foliage, trunks and branches, perspective distorted by winding paths. Sounds change according to the moisture in the air and the breath of wind on the trees. With separation from the guiding point of sun or stars, it is a natural place of disorientation, which has engendered two strong cultural images: losing one’s way and identity-swapping, taking on a new persona within the forest limits.

My forest is a hilly one, riven into a landscape dominated by broken granite, tremendous boulders dotting the oak and beech clad slopes. Trees sprout from the very rock, in a relationship of faith. In winter, among a mass of grey skeletons, evergreens stand out, not in rigid phalanx but irregular clumps here and there, dark bands of knights surviving in a last stand to defend the hill-tops. Every ripple of contour nurtures a fall of stream. The highs and lows of terrain give plunging torrents to swell the river-beds in frequent times of rich rainfall. The crash and curl of the water adds to the drama, for there is always a touch of theatre in forest, a sense of unfolding scenes.

This forest is littered by rocks, perched like sentries on the high ridges, dramatically tumbled down a narrow river valley, or polished by forceful streams which rub them smooth, shaped into the emptiness of caves and tunnels, harbouring wedges of damp old air in their impenetrable folds. The Chaos at the head of the Argent valley is the result of an old war between fire and earth, magma swelling and cooling over an unimaginable period of time and eroding, worn and fissured, to split and buff into boulders that eventually succumb to a random tumbling. The resulting mountains of misshapen rocks balance in a vast carapace above the deep channel of the river, driving the force of life below, unseen like a subterranean engine. So water underpins chaos, contributing to the forest’s sense of unseen powers and movement. Forest is potent.

Two rocks stand out by size and shape and isolation from the others around them. The Mushroom looks exactly that, a granite chanterelle worthy of a giant’s appetite. The Trembling Rock is a massive almost rectangular slab, estimated to weigh more than 100 tons and yet capable of a slight shiver if touched in the right spot. Physics in a magic cloak. The surrounding slopes are covered in other lumps of stone, many bearing strange gashes like bodies on a battlefield, lines of small rectangular holes or smoothed edges that look unnatural. These are wounds from stone-cutting tools, in what was once a working quarry, and the disappearance of so much granite in the vicinity is accounted for by this important 19th century industry. The local clear grey version was much in demand for building work, and its exploitation almost oversaw the destruction of the very Chaos itself.

But the time when the quarry thrived also saw a burgeoning interest in Bretonness, in the wonders of a landscape steeped in the legend that characterized its oral Celtic culture. Such sites were to become intrinsic in the concept of Breton identity. As the region’s population became more mobile with the spread of railways, the concept of holidays and leisure pursuits, exploration of previously isolated spots away from the better-known coastal regions became possible. The unusual and exotic in a setting of natural beauty had a special allure. Slowly the balance between industry and tourism as a means of supporting the local economy began to shift, and forest – that place of transformative powers – began a change of persona from utilitarian to picturesque.

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