Scars: the Coledale Fells

Aim of the experiment:

To bring closer awareness and attention to how we inscribe (write, mark, groove out) our narratives upon the fells by exploring the links between our own human scars, and those we make upon landscapes.

Background

‘In seeking solace from the landscape, might we end up inscribing our own griefs and traumas upon it?’

So if this is one of Scree’s key themes, then why replicate it? Agreed, there is something contrary about this experiment. Yet we aren’t going to stop coming to the fells at times of difficulty, and neither is it Scree’s place to suggest that we should. Instead, this experiment aims to bring closer attention and awareness to what we expect to take from the fells (including solace), what we bring to them, how we do so, and the impact. The closest I come to experiencing a sense of my body blending into the hillside is when running fast downhill; the second set of exercises takes this observation as a starting point for reconsidering how the embodied nature of the relationship between our physical and emotional selves and the fell unfolds.

Route instructions

Route 1 grading: Medium (7.5 miles, 2,748 feet of ascent)

Route 2 Grading: Difficult (10.7 miles, 4,300 feet of ascent)

Accessible route alternative: Easy (4.9 miles). The track to and from Force Crag Mine is unmetalled, but is designed for vehicular access. Acessible in rugged mobility scooters, pushing off-road buggies, or by bicycle, but please note that it’s almost 2.5 miles each way. For further accessibility info on this route, see the National Park Miles Without Stiles guidance here.

All three routes start in Braithwaite, 2.6 miles west of Keswick (see Google maps). The two key locations for the experiments are Force Crag Mine and the zig zag path which descends from Sail towards Scar Crags and Causey Pike (NY 204205). Route 1 is a shorter circular walk including both of the above locations. Route 2 is a longer day’s outing, incorporating additional fells. For those who only wish to go as far as Force Crag Mine and return the same way (Route 3), please follow the instructions to the Mine in Route 1, and then reverse your footsteps.

Route adaptation for walk-from-home

To complete the zig zag exercise below, all you need is a path which goes down a (fairly steep) hill, but ideally one which forms a clear scar on the landscape, either as a result of being surfaced, or due to erosion etc. The image below is from a different Lakeland ‘scar’ - the path down from Sticks Pass to Glenridding - which might suit better if you’re in the Ullswater area. It could also be done on a road (with care, obviously!) To complete the Mine exercise, choose a site of intense landscape impact nearer to home, and complete the exercise there.

Writing & Art Ideas, & Virtual Alternatives

Sail zig zags

Start at the top of the zig zags from the summit of Sail down to the col before Scar Crags, via either of the above two routes. From here, you are going to either run or walk as fast as you can down the zig zags, over and over again... Every time you descend, turn your attention to an issue of difficulty in your life, which you hope to explore (focus on just one, not a different one each time). Take care with what you choose; you might prefer to focus instead on an idea with which you’ve been preoccupied if this is easier. At the bottom of the hill, record your thoughts directly into a voice recorder, and then repeat the above until you run out of ‘material’. If you are completing the visual art exercise, make sure to also take some photographs or sketch the zig zags - the path up to Scar Crags provides a good viewpoint.

1. Writing

When you get home, transcribe all of your notes, and use these as the starting point for a piece of writing. Are there various themes, or lines / phrases / thoughts which surprise you? Maybe start there…The writing is likely to be stronger if you work your reflections more broadly into your experiences on the walk that day (ie to ground it, and provide context, through the use of sense experiences - what you saw, heard, touched etc). In my own case, this exercise provided a means for me to explore the grief at my mother’s death in my writing, in ways that I hadn’t been able to get close to previously.

2. Visual art

Start out with your ‘favourite’ image of the path, and use your recorded material to try and decide how to edit, process or present this so as to perform your experience (like how my own experience of embodying the fell’s scars are explored in the superimposed collages below). It might be that you actually find the path strangely beautiful (I certainly find it compelling in its brutality, and have taken many photographs of it over the years). If this is the case, then how can you present your work so as to foreground this uncomfortable sense of appreciation? Or if you found your thoughts spiralling a bit like the twists and turns of the path, then how might you process your image to capture this sensation? There are lots of directions in which this might be taken.

3. Virtual exercise

In the next couple of weeks I plan to upload a GoPro Video of me descending the above zig zags. Once this is done I will upload it here so that you can use this as the basis for completing the exercise from home.

Force Crag Mine

4. Combined writing and visual exercise

Take a photo or make a sketch of the mine while out on the fell, which really strongly captures the lines which the mine tracks make upon the landscape (see above). Back home, do some research into the history of the mine, and use this material (plus any notes you might have from your walk) as the starting point for a poem which takes its form from the pattern and length of lines on the hillside. It might help to actually print out the image and to write directly onto it (or using editing software to do similar), in order to get a better sense of the length of the lines, and their energies. Indeed, the final work might comprise an image with words superimposed upon it, or a separate image and poem to be enjoyed alongside each other. Note of caution: try and make sure that the image and the words are doing different things ie don’t just describe the image in your ‘poem’, since the image already does this (better)!

5. Virtual exercise

Do the above exercise using my own image of the mine (click on the image to open it as a lightbox).

A slide show from my own day out on the fell, writing the poem below:

My own poetry

Setting Sail to mountains:
a breathing exercise

(written on Sail, a Lakeland summit, Feb 2021)

A momentary jettison, firing empties.
Did I imagine you saying that this would be easy?
I make my heart beat faster than is possible.

*

This poem is an offer of implication.
The scarred path upon this fellside
an erosion of multiples of grief.

Down and down and down,
over and over.

My blade is a pair of studded
fell-shoes to this fell-ridge limb.
The cliff behind is called The Scar.
That hill ahead Scar Crags.

I silently beg you, Sail,
do not quit your breathing with me.

*

The snow on Hopegill Head
reflects the purple-reddish early morning
sunshine back to the sky and back again.

Despite myself, I locate my emotions
in this shapely mountain’s name and the gash
which leads its river to the sea.

Of course, I will never forget the moment
when I learnt my mother had ceased breathing.
The rush to be there quickly – but for what?
There weren’t tears sufficient to it.

The river ups its melting game
and delivers us unto the sea.

*

From the summit of Sail
the descending hillside faces slightly north
of east, and my eyes consume the views
with such intensity
that it’s like I am just eyes.

No face. No mouth. No neck. No torso.
And now, no limbs.
The air condenses where my eyes are breathing.
My eyes are overthinking absolutely everything.

(Pink snow frames the
ragged gash of Broad Stand
on the southerly horizon.
Is anybody already out there?)

Grief is not an absence.
It’s a self-explosion-whole-whole-lot-of-mountain
many many pieces. (Pebbles, stones.
My eyes kick the pebbles and the stones.)
It’s an unrequested and unreliable visitor.
It’s in me, and it follows me around when I choose
to travel out of me, as well.

Overthinking’s easier than overfeeling
maybe.

*

Or perhaps, more simply said.
I miss you.

A phrase that’s short enough to be expelled
in a single, simple breath.
Who’re you kidding now?

I read a notification on my phone:
the yellow warning of snow and ice
has just been cancelled. In the next few days, they say,
it’s going to rain.

I run into the future and my mother isn’t there,
yet when I speak to her, she answers me.

*

It wasn’t until I’d thought about silence
on the approach run up the valley
that I noticed the insistent birdsong
and the steady rush of flowing river,
and the swoosh of the road I left behind me
to the ragged rhythm of my breathing
syncopating my tread.

Turns out death is everywhere. (I’d read about
the Halifax bomber that crashed into the face
of the Force Crag cliffside up ahead in 1944
and all three flight-hands died.)

Silence. I forget to hear my breathing.
Sworls of frozen ice. Individual tree growths
on the flanks of Grisedale Pike.
(We’re all, more than occasionally,
outgrowths of fell).
The water running off the hillside
stops frozen in the instance of dripping.

This valley was known for the mining of baryte.
Feeling of battle.

*

On the night before, I lay my head
upon the bed beside her, and I told her,
everything was going to be ok
and for that moment – only – everything
was only me.

Her reassurance was a heightening pitch
in the distress she experienced breathing.

A few months previously she’d asked
me, ‘am I giving what you seek?’

A catching of breath.
I break some ice. My attempt to keep my feet dry
at the stepping stones had been futile.

*

So what now?
A solitary female black-faced sheep surveys
the valley and the view of Skiddaw from her
elevated promontory perch,
as if it is her own.

For a moment,
I’d believed I was the first one here today.
(There’s something so familiar in the way
Skiddaw dominates the turning of
my landscape.)

But then, the black-faced sheep on the hillside
now behind me and the light-scribbled markings
of some early-bird claws leading briefly up the path ahead
before digressing elsewhere. A slight disturbance
on the settling of windblown snow.

I’m wearing someone else’s hat
with someone else’s name-tag sewn
into the inside seam.
Who’s now breathing here, and for whom?

*

If you cannot quite conclude
then it’s best to do so
with the basic law
of the ups and downs of gravity.
To be part of something makes it happen?
Up and down the mountain goes, forever.

I’m reminded of the erstwhile art
of scree running.
The trick is to go with it. Lean forward.
Trust your feet, the shifting ground,
the pull of instinct. But the true art resides
in moving lightly. Precisely. Slowly?

How she barely left a trace
and the lack of trace became her.

Allowing myself to be unmade
in the process of becoming mountain –
which kind of mountain would you choose
to be – the mountain steals a single breath –
and vice versa, forever…

*

Yet still -
I take the eroded downhill zig zag
path at speed, remembering the joke I can’t remember
but whose punchline ends with:
‘faster Mummy. Faster, faster, faster.’

Turns out, my breath cannot keep up
where my driven body leaves off.
Three steps to an inhalation, two steps out.
The constructed path is solider than scree –
tripping over each and every impact –
and by the time I reach the bottom
my hands are crying from cold. To speak of joy and despair
as the nearest two emotions. Memories bounce low.

It’s been 7 months and 19 days
and every day, a day I think of you.

In your absence
will the thigh deep heather,
deeply flocked with cotton snow, support my fall?
I take that risk, and begin once more to run,
and submit myself to the simple gravity of breathing.