Approaching Grimspound from the South-East

 

Imagine ancient travellers arriving at Grimspound, but coming downhill from over the moor to the east, the great citadel on Hookney Tor high above to the north, dotted with look-outs and linked by the causeway.  Imagine the women at the water – the fast-flowing stream at the northern edge of the huge circle.  The water runs right through the settlement.  And mighty it is too.

‘The Modern Antiquarian’ – Julian Cope

Grimspound did not disappoint – it was only the weather that was grim that day, battering us with driving rain as we came down off the Tor to continue on towards Chagford.

The four-acre site comprises a circular defensive enclosure containing the remains of twenty-four hut circles, all originating from the Late Bronze Age.  The site is dominated by the heights of Hookney Tor to the north.

Hut Circle

Hut Circles Showing Entrance to the Enclosure

From Hookney Tor

The name Grimspound, of course, is a relatively modern invention, with ‘grim’ meaning deadly or savage and ‘pound’ an enclosure.  But there is ample evidence that this was not such a grim place in Bronze Age times, with the climate of southern Britain being much more temperate and the four-foot walls of the enclosure being more suited to herding animals than necessary for defensive purposes.  Nonetheless, on our visit nature succeeded in evoking a powerful sense of a landscape steeped in desolation and hardship.

I leave the final words to Julian Cope again:

Today I expected nothing so alive or so full of the ancient past as this.  This place reeks of the elements bursting forth.  I’m sitting at the edge of the south gate looking up at the great Hookney Tor citadel.  Here, the walls are high and the importance of the mountains in the relationship to the settlement reminds me of Mycenae.  Now, a full downpour is wetting my paper too much and I must leave this note-taking…

ibid.

Quotes – courtesy of Julian Cope and Thorsons

Images – the writer

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love; groaning: My sin, my terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty—how can they tend the wheels?

                                                              ‘Brave New World’ – Aldous Huxley

 

I guess they have always been out there; but it’s only when you look, really look, that you start to see them.  And once you consciously embark on the process of looking you see them everywhere.  I’m talking about wheels; wheels and their invertebrate siblings otherwise known as tyres.  The first stray wheel to grab my attention and start this obsession was on a recent walk at low tide over to the island of Hilbre in the Dee estuary.  It sat in a rock pool on the short stretch of sands between the islands of Middle Eye and Hilbre.  Alone and abandoned; but still retaining its functional integrity as a wheel, as if placed at a strategic staging post should a replacement wheel ever be needed by a passing 4X4.

Why was it here and how had it reached this place, a point far from any road?  Calculating the possible explanations took a hold of me.  And then I started seeing them everywhere: abandoned wheels and tyres in hedgerows, in the corners of fields, on river banks and by the roadside.

The wheel is ubiquitous; an everyday object extant long before our recorded history and now found in all parts of the world.  A vital tool for our industry, agriculture and transport.  But the fascination for me, so I have recently found, is to discover wheels or tyres in places where they are not meant to be.

In most cases the wheels I have recorded appear to be merely abandoned, but sometimes one finds redundant wheels employed for purposes for which they were not specifically designed: I’ve seen them used for planters on allotments, as weights to hold down the tarpaulin on a compost heap and, in the case of the picture below, put to use as a poultry feeder.

But I keep coming back to those how and why questions; speculating about the story behind each abandoned wheel and the journey it has taken to reach its current resting point.

Take a map and consider the possibilities: plot the point where you found your wheel and look for likely directions of travel to arrive at that point.  Did you find it near a road?  Is there a farm nearby?  You might want to look at the contours on your map; a wheel at the bottom of a slope conjures up a myriad of stories.

Taking my Hilbre wheel as an example, I plotted a number of possible arrival routes as shown below.

The most likely direction of travel for a vehicle would be from the Wirral shoreline at low tide, perhaps from West Kirby or Red Rocks.  Less likely, because of the course of the river, would be someone driving over from the Welsh shore.  But one also needs to consider the possibility that the wheel might have originated much further away and either have been swept downriver or have been thrown up on the Hilbre shore by the incoming Irish Sea.

Once you’ve plotted your lines on a map, walk each route outwards from the centre and note your impressions, in particular looking out for any wheel-related clues.  Hopefully all the routes on your map will be on dry land, unlike mine!

So whether you’re walking in the countryside or in an urban environment, look out for them, they’re out there.

And the meaning of the title of this piece?  Full marks to anyone who recognises it as a quote from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.

Map – courtesy of OpenStreetMap

All pictures – by the writer

This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

   ‘Scarp’ – Nick Papadimitriou

Nick Papadimitriou’s meditation on walking, landscape and his upbringing in North London under the shadow of the ridge of land he refers to as Scarp

   ‘Spring Returning: a selection from the works of James Farrar’ –                                    Christopher Palmer

James Farrar was a young airman who died in World War Two.  This is Christopher Palmer’s moving collection of Farrar’s poetry, prose, diary entries and writings on the music of Delius

   ‘Wales: An Archaeological Guide’ – Christopher Houlder

A comprehensive field guide to the archaeological sites of Wales; an invaluable tool for exploration as well as an entertaining read

   ‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft’ – George Gissing

A writer at rest reflecting on the quiet pleasures of life that he is at last able to enjoy in his final years after a lifetime of hardship and injustice

   ‘The Good Soldier’ – Ford Madox Ford

A portrait of deceit and hatred and one of the key works of early modernism

   ‘The Wasp Factory’ – Iain Banks

Gender, identity, myth and ritual; all brought to life with Banks’s pyrotechnic use of language

   ‘Father and Son’ – Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse’s ‘study of two temperaments’ – his recollections of a Victorian childhood, his loss of religious faith and the father whom he loved but constantly fought against

   ‘Journey Through Europe’ – John Hillaby

John Hillaby’s original and engaging account of his walk from Hoek van Holland to Nice via the Alps; a journey across a continent in flux

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

   ‘Gapland’ – Charles Swain and Lost Trail

Travin Systems’ Chieftain picks up North Carolina’s Lost Trail in his battered Escort as he slides across the slick bitumen and up into the timberline.  A four track exploration of their beloved backroads, backwoods and the nature of car travel with turning synths, descending haze and irresolute house http://travinsystems.com/

  ‘To an End’ – Helm

Captivating debut solo LP of drone and sound poetry from Birds Of Delay’s Luke Younger aka Helm.

   ‘Affinity’ – Affinity

Sadly neglected jazz/rock fusion album from 1970 featuring the extraordinary vocal talents of Linda Hoyle

   ‘Workingman’s Dead’ – Grateful Dead

Also from 1970: the Dead’s take on country, blues and folk laced with spine-tingling harmonies

And watching:

   ‘In the Fog’ – Sergei Loznitsa

Sergei Loznitsa’s bleak tale of collaboration and revenge in Nazi-occupied Soviet Russia

   ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ – Guillermo del Toro

A Mexican/Spanish co-production merging fantasy, myth and parable against the background of the resistance movement in the early years of Franco’s regime in Spain

   ‘Rumble Fish’ – Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola’s black-and-white homage to German expressionism and the French New Wave staring Mickey Rourke and a young Matt Dillon.

‘Felix: Lighter V. 4′ – Graham Hooper

Film of Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic free-fall (helmet-cam footage) reversed and slowed down to last as long as the Bond film ‘Skyfall’. See it on YouTube here

Clerkenwell: a hectic hub in the centre of London. Today, as always, several times co-exist here. Today, the times of the media industry, the postal workers, the Italian Diaspora, and a (mostly white) working-class. I lived in Clerkenwell from late 2009 to late 2011; I was fascinated then; and I am fascinated now (I write these words under the same spell). I used to spend my mornings pushing a pram around the area; my daughter, now two, was an early drifter. Now this is arguably not the best place to push a pram; yet I hold dearly these times where we could dérivé around Clerkenwell, just the two of us, alone in the crowd of early morning workers and local drunks.

We would reproduce the same journey on a daily basis. The starting point would always be Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, around the corner from our flat.

Across the road from Mount Pleasant sorting office

This space, currently housing one of the largest sorting offices in Europe, used to be known as Coldbath Fields Prison (1794 – 1885). Something of its past survives in the building. An imaginary palimpsest, perhaps; but there is something carceral about the place.

The sorting office as seen from Farringdon Road

Etching of Coldbath Field Prison (Source: The British Postal Museum & Archive)

The sorting office is a spiky, brutal, affair. The windows don’t let one see more than bits of postal clutter and the occasional postman (before the current redevelopment; the building is now covered in scaffolding and Christo-like fabric; I dread to think what will become of it once the redevelopment of the area is finished). I’ve always fantasised about asking to be led into the building; I understand this is possible; I don’t know why I never did it (perhaps the fear of ruining an ideal relationship with this building?).

Back of the building, intersection of Warner Street and Phoenix Place.

Towards the back there’s a huge parking lot frequently packed with red vans. And, although invisible to the eye, there are tunnels underneath the ground, tracing wanton trajectories across the city, connecting who knows which buildings with who knows which other underground spaces. In the past Royal Mail used to run their own underground train, carrying only letters. Letters being the most anthropologically charged of objects, the trajectories remain for whoever wants to feel them. You might imagine them being love letters; I prefer to imagine them as utility bills and junk mail, the kinds of epistolarity the city imposes on its citizens.

I have used this space in my fiction writing. Two of the stories of my upcoming book (Ordinary Stories in Minor English) take it as setting or background. In the first one, a group of black and Asian postal workers manage to prevent a plot to kill the Queen with a pair of exploding shoes sent to her by Mossad; on the second one a young barmaid who works in the pub across the road can’t sleep due to the vibrations (the charged letters) she perceives from the sorting office (her cocaine habit might contribute to her insomnia but she blames the sorting office nevertheless). The sorting office also has a secondary role in many other short stories I wrote around this time. I guess it was my way of taking something of this building with me when I left the area.

After Mount Pleasant it would be Spa Fields, just a couple of hundred metres east down Farringdon Road. Now home to mostly local winos, media clerks on lunch-break, and the staff of the London Metropolitan Archive, Spa Fields was a burial ground from 1777- 1849.

Back gate; Spa Fields

The crematorium used to occupy the space in which the park attendant’s house lies today. The burial ground was originally planned for +2700 interments. According to British History Online by “in fifty years it was carefully computed that 80,000 interments had taken place in this pestilential graveyard”. This practice was permitted by the constant exhumation, chopping-up, and cremation of older corpses. Due to the infectious smells that emanated from the place, all the corpses were finally removed and relocated to other cemeteries at the then outskirts of the city. This practice continues today in the expulsion – via extortionate rent – of the original inhabitants of the area. Gentrification is always a gory business. One might thing Clerkenwell is already fully gentrified; one should think carefully. There’s always the potential for further expulsions. The local council flats are today a mixed affair: working families cohabit with students, media people and City yuppies. There is nothing stopping the huge monster that is the City of London from conquering what it hasn’t already conquered. The soaring rents in the area, in addition to the housing benefit cap should do their part in contributing to this.

Formerly a crematorium and bone-house, now the park attendant’s house.

I used to spend several hours every morning walking in circles in this square. Babies are pram-fascists that only sleep while on moving wheels. Nevertheless I owe these lost hours the pleasure of re-reading W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. I guess the only way this book can get any better is if one reads it while walking.

Sooner or later the young fascist child would wake up. We would then head to Saint James Clerkenwell church, just a hundred metres north from Clerkenwell Green, temporary home to Vladimir Lenin. The legend states that Lenin met Stalin at a pub just around the corner from this church. I ignore whether they walked on the churchyard; but I guess they did: atheists cannot resist religion’s call.

You don’t see any commies around here now. This is also mainly a place for media people on their lunch break and local drunks. The latter are a fixture in Clerkenwell. The area is close enough to Central London and far enough from Westminster’s and the Met’s Street Homelessness Unit. I used to talk to one of them, a guy with a northern accent. He had just been released from prison after many years; he shot a man but he failed to kill him; the man had abused him when the homeless guy was a child; he waited almost ten years and he took his revenge; he regretted not having killed him; he didn’t regret having spent time in jail. I used to hear all this from behind a pushchair; and so did my daughter (luckily she didn’t understand English back then).

Saint James Church, Clerkenwell

Now I am guilty of living in another gentrified area of London (is there any area that isn’t gentrified here?). But there are no industrial buildings over here; no prisons but the everyday; the postmen only turn up to deliver letters (bills); and you don’t see any homeless drinkers at the park.

I’m bored to death. I miss Clerkenwell.

Sources:

British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45101

Islington Now, http://islingtonnow.co.uk/?p=3029

The British Postal Museum Archive, http://postalheritage.org.uk/page/mountpleasant

Reffell Family History, http://www.reffell.org.uk/cemeteries/spafields.php

The British Postal Museum & Archive, http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/page/mount-pleasant

Local signposts

Biography:

Fernando Sdrigotti is a writer, urban photographer and film researcher. Born in Rosario, Argentina he has lived in London since the early noughties. His first book, Tríptico, was published in 2008; he is currently finishing his first collection of short stories, Ordinary Stories in Minor English and a novel in Spanish, Shetlag [sic]. At times he has been a full-time musician, part-time melancholic and occasional bohemian.

The chalet colony, through which I walked with Anna on that bright morning, was larger and more cheerful than the neighbouring villages.  Nobody needed an expulsion order to move in.

‘Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project’ – Iain Sinclair

I was alerted to the existence of the river chalets near Farndon by Psychogeographic Review reader, Rob, who wrote about them in his response to a piece I wrote after one of my River Dee walks.  The chalets at Farndon are an expression of the ‘plotlander’ movement of the inter-war years whereby city dwellers acquired small plots of land in rural areas and built their own country retreats, largely free of any planning constraints.  The movement effectively ended with the onset of the Second World War and the tighter town and country planning regime that was introduced in its aftermath.

So this week, as part of my odyssey to walk the full length of the River Dee, from sea to source, I walked the section between Aldford and Farndon in Cheshire.  The most engaging thing about this section of the Dee Way is that the path closely follows the meandering course of the river, rather than making use of paths some way away from the river as in other parts.  The highlight, however, was the stretch of river just north of Farndon where numerous plotlander chalets line both banks.

Many of these dwellings are simply static caravans, often with the addition of a terrace and lean-to and, sometimes, modified and extended to the point where the original caravan is all but hidden from view.  Others take the form of huts and cabins of various types, while some are little more than glorified sheds.  But the point is that they are the owner’s shed; self-built and designed to meet his or her individual vision.  This is the kind of humble architecture I take real delight in seeing whenever I pass an allotment: improvised, organic, making use of odd bits and pieces that come to hand.  The result is something charming and cosy, but with a whiff of the post-apocalyptic to prevent the overall effect becoming too cloying.

I’ve since read that the actor, Ricky Tomlinson, owns one of these plots near Farndon.  The first political demonstration I ever went on, as a student in the 1970s, was to demand the release of Ricky and a number of other jailed pickets.  If I’d known which was the right door on which to knock while I was walking, I’m sure that would have earned a cup of coffee with the man himself, even if I had to confess I’d never actually seen Brookside or The Royle Family.

Dwellings of this sort are not, of course, a uniquely British phenomenon. Every small town in the south-western United States, for instance, has its halo of improvised shacks clinging to every road out of town.  Driving from Twentynine Palms to Baker a while back, I was particularly struck by the flat-pack wooden dwellings with attendant SUVs in the yard which seemed to go on forever along the desert highway before we reached the true emptiness of the Mojave.

The definitive work on the plotlander movement is Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward’s Arcadia for All.  Hardy and Ward chart the growth of the movement in the early part of the twentieth century; a coming together of small farmers willing to rent out or sell small plots of marginal land and urban-dwellers eager to get away from the cramped conditions of the city and to recapture a dimly-remembered or perhaps imagined pre-industrial past.  The homes the original plotlanders created were often constructed from discarded materials and, in some cases, from converted former railway carriages.

These were mainly a phenomenon of south-east England and the dwellings were initially weekend and holiday retreats, but some owners eventually opted to occupy them on a permanent basis, subsisting on local casual work or retirement pension.  The phenomenon also drew in numbers of ‘artistic types’, particularly those with a wealth of creative drive but a paucity of ready cash.

Farndon’s chalets comprise a mix of those used as holiday homes and others that appear to be permanently occupied.  Many of them lack mains services, but there appears to be no shortage of satellite dishes and four-wheel drive vehicles.  Also, given their location, several of the chalets have landing-stages and boats.

Local councils, of course, tend to dislike this type of development intensely.  Using planning laws and building regulations they have succeeded in closing down many plots over the  decades since the Second World War.  Other developments, like those at Farndon, mercifully still remain.  Many plotlanders have, against the odds, succeeded in making very comfortable homes on increasingly valuable portions of land whilst, at the same time, retaining a spirit of independence within a community of like-minded souls.

Our overwhelming impression was of the way that the plotland self-builders, who started with very little, over the years turned their own labour and ingenuity into capital, with no help at all from local councils, building societies or any other financial institutions.

‘The Hidden History of Housing’ – Colin Ward

References

Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape(London, Mansell Publishing, 1984)

Colin Ward, ‘The Hidden History of Housing’, History & Policy, 2004, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-25.html#plot

Acknowledgments

With grateful thanks to Rob and the extract from his notebook he so generously provided

Charlie has put together an e-booklet of this piece and we will be sending a PDF of the booklet to all our email followers so that they can enjoy his pictures in their full glory.  We can also send it to anyone else on request and free of charge.

Charles Swain, by the way, runs Travin Systems.com/Travin Systems Records ‘providers of rural oddness and spa town lariness through writing, photography and techno.’  His site is definitely worth a visit:

www.travinsystems.com

]]> http://psychogeographicreview.com/?feed=rss2&p=1733 0 http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=1730 http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=1730#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:18:25 +0000 Bobby Seal http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=1730 Continue reading →]]>  

 

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kiss’d it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.”
A Dream of the Unknown by P.B Shelley

Situated in one of the heavily wooded pockets that seem to make up the majority of Eastern Maryland’s state parks lies Daniels Mill (previously Alberton and marked upon the map as Daniels).

Practically the entire state was once covered in forest before the arrival of European settlers and Colonial Lords who found that the oak and white pine were particularly useful for shipbuilding and quickly press-ganged them with saws and nails into a new life on the sea.  Clearance for farming and tobacco was always quite popular as well.  This is not to say that Maryland is now barren of trees.  The state is rife with them.  Only now a thickly braided net of urban development has been cast over their crowns and between their trunks.  At least in the populous DC/Baltimore area the woodland has been cut up into pockets of rich verdure or stark timber and it is in one of these that Daniels Mill sits.

Heading towards the village we drive past petrol stations with their breeze block back walls pushed up against dry winter woods.  We see large manicured lawns separated from the messy forest floor only by fence-posts and finally descend into the tangle of undulating blacktop that carves through the valleys and ridges of the upper Patapsco.

We park the car down by the side of the river and follow a muddy tarmac track (once Alberton Road) that clings to the side of the river.  The river is wide and shallow at this point and separated from the path by a meadow of tangled long grass-strewn with broken branches of the wiry trees that populate it.  On the other side sits the railway on top of a small rise.  The train approaches.  It’s long and takes over fifteen minutes to pass.  Carving through vast tracts of countryside day in and day out glimpsed only occasionally by humanity,its bright coloured lettering a moving billboard for the birds and bears.

Further on we catch site of an overturned van sticking out of the greenish water.  The skeletal struts of its chassis revealed like the exoskeleton of a upturned beetle, burnt umber in places by rust.

The path weaves around to the right and on a highish ridge above us stood rows of winter beech.  Tall and stripped of their leaves, their bark a dry and bright silver like the colour of some volatile metal that must be kept constantly in oil.  From time to time the exposed root structures of these giants crept silently towards the path, coiled round mounds of earth and stone in search of stability and nourishment.

“They look like dead octopi” voiced my companion “Touch its papery skin”.

Suffice to say I declined and we moved on.

The path took another bend and the former riverside meadow was replaced by wide sand banks that fanned out into both the path and the river.  Here and there brightly covered moss draped fallen trunks in Sylvan opulence.  To visit the area at the tail end of a hot Atlantic summer would be pleasant.  The lush greenery of the sloping forest running into warm sand skirted by an opalescent stony river all cast in the mellowing hues of the late sun’s rays.

The body of Daniels Mill is on a slight raise in the land.  A humped wooded knoll lays at its back and the river draws a horseshoe around its feet.  The most striking remnants of the 19th century mill village are a gothic,red tiled spire and a brick smokestack rising up from the main mill complex.  A wooden cupola once crowned the main mill building but this was airlifted to safety to protect against flood in a somewhat ostentatious move of historical preservation.   A small welding firm had apparently appropriated the land where the workers’ houses once stood and had erected some low, tin-roofed huts.

We walked a little further along the path following the curve of the river around the village.  We came upon two stone bridge supports,stranded in the narrows.  The railway or road it once shouldered long removed and transferred to the iron train crossing a little further on.  Passing some stone foundations, the outline of an old white chapel defined itself through the trees.  Only the wood and plaster frontage and parts of walls still stood.  The floor of the nave had fallen in, exposing a old rusting boiler and there was remains of brick chimney work, vibrant with green moss in the vestry.  We took some portraits using the glassless windows as frames and moved on.

Topping a slight incline we came to the terminus of the ephemeral town.  A large stone weir that had obviously been the mill’s power supply.  A fly fisherman flicked his brightly coloured lure at the curtain of water and glanced up at another church on the knoll.  A solid edifice of Victorian revival, built in 1880, that had survived the closure of the mills and dismantling of the town and the hurricane that swiped most of what was left away in 1970’s.

The valley and the village where composed of various layers.  A layer of industrious settlement balanced precariously on the forest floor propped up with numerable places of worship and then torn down by the caprices of man and nature.  The dismal winter forest glistened with glimpses of the approaching spring and summer and was scattered with Arthurian scenes.

A low fog began to ascend from the valley and my companion became talkative as we headed back to the car.

Charles Swain runs Travin Systems.com /Travin Systems Records – providers of rural oddness and spa town lariness through writing, photography and techno.

www.travinsystems.com

In the end it all gets back to land. Looking back, I see that a link that runs through my life concerns the right to land and property on it. Shared out equally, there would be a couple of acres for every adult living in Britain. That would mean each family or group could have a reasonably sized small holding of ten or twenty acres and learn once again to become self sufficient. The present day reality is the reverse, with some folk owning hundreds of thousands of acres and others owning none. There’s talk of community in war time. We can be ordered to go and fight and die for Queen and country. In peace time is it too much to ask for just a few square yards of our green and pleasant land to rear our children on? That’s all we want, myself and the squatters and travellers and other people in the many projects I’ve been involved with. Just a few square yards of this land that we can in wartime be asked to go out and die for. And if we ever achieve that, what else? What else is what I call the Vision of Albion.

Sid Rawle – activist and organiser of squats, communes and music festivals

Winstanley is a 1975 film directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo.  It received a very limited release at the time and was all but forgotten in subsequent decades.  A BFI Southbank revival and DVD release in 2009, however, went some way to restoring the reputation of Brownlow and Mollo’s work as a thought-provoking examination of Gerrard Winstanley and the English Revolution.

Winstanley is a film that cuts through the ‘roundheads versus cavaliers’ knockabout that so much of our popular understanding of the English Civil War has become and reminds us of the titanic political forces that the conflict released.  Gerrard Winstanley was a political activist who, with a group of fellow Diggers, occupied St George’s Hill in Surrey in April 1649 with the aim of setting up an agrarian commune.  The same St George’s Hill that is now that most desirable of Home Counties locations and was once home to John Lennon.  ‘Imagine no possessions’.  Indeed, John.

This is a flawed film.  To ensure historical accuracy, much of the dialogue used by the actor playing Winstanley is based on the historic Winstanley’s published speeches, which often gives the action a somewhat wooden character.  The fact that it was also made on a very limited budget and with an amateur cast tends to show through too.

But despite all of this, the central performance by Miles Halliwell, an unknown actor and school teacher, still manages to bring startling passion and genuine warmth to the part.  Kevin Brownlow creates a vision of an England in turmoil and presents it in stark monochrome beauty, while Andrew Mollo pays painstaking attention to the historical accuracy of all the clothing and uniforms in the film, even going so far as to borrow armour from the Tower of London.  The directors also managed to find a part in their film for Sid Rawle, who plays a charismatic Ranter.  In other words, he plays himself.

Brownlow and Mollo had worked together before; as teenagers they made a film called It Happened Here, a vision of an imagined Nazi-occupied Britain, for just £5,000.  In 2011 Brownlow was interviewed about his work at a BFI/NFTS event.  The interview is available here.

Winstanley’s aim was to free up Britain’s common land for the poor and landless so that they were able to grow their own food.  To give access to land for those who had no land of their own before Cromwell’s revolution, nor indeed after it.  The St George’s Hill commune lasted just five months; Winstanley and his comrades were forced to move on by militia men and local thugs hired by the landowners whom the Diggers’ occupation threatened.

But surely everything is different now?  We have the ‘right to roam’ on any uncultivated land in our countryside and our land-owning aristocracy are corralled mainly into National Trust-administered reservations.  Not so, according to the 2010 Country Life magazine report ‘Who Owns Britain?’  The report highlights the following facts:

• Just 0.6% of Britain’s population own 50% of our rural land;
• Of this land-owning group, the vast majority of land is in the hands of a core of 1,200 aristocrats;
• The top ten biggest individual owners control over a million acres between them;
• The biggest individual landowner is the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury with 240,000 acres; and
• Large corporate and financial interests are fast moving into rural land ownership.

Gerrard Winstanley would, no doubt, turn in his grave if he knew how little change there had been in land ownership since his time.

The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Spring up at their command

                   Billy Bragg – ‘The World Turned Upside Down’

Approaching Hilbre from Middle Eye

The Slipway

Stratified

Hilbre Pond

At the very tip of the island he came upon a ruined lifeboat station made from blocks of local sandstone.  Though badly weathered and roofless, he was amused to find inside a near perfect fireplace carved from sandstone.  Beyond the ruin was a small causeway jutting out into the sea.  He gazed out at the sea, tongues of which were already lapping about his rocky perch.  The tide had turned and was beginning to come in.  Soon the island would be cut off until the next low tide.  To the west was the shoreline of Wales and, beyond that, the hazy outline of Snowdonia.  He felt the sun on his back drying the sweaty dampness of his shirt.

Lifeboat Station

Observation Post

Hilbre, it was clear to him from his vantage point, guarded the seaward approach to the River Dee.  Her cliffs, layers of weathered red and yellow sandstone came to a point just here.  Sitting there, facing the Irish Sea, he felt like he was on the prow of a ship; an old battered ship maybe, but one which had stood proud and determined against all the incoming assaults the sea could throw against it.  The sandstone seemed very familiar to him.  Familiar not so much because of any previous visit to Hilbre but, it suddenly occurred to him, because this was the local stone was used on so many of Liverpool’s older buildings.  In a literal fashion, he mused, the masonic sandstone grounded Liverpool into the bedrock of its bluff along the side of the Mersey.

Captain’s Log

He was walking along the cliff-top of the eastern edge of the island now.  He stopped and faced the water.  To his left was Hoylake and, at the very tip of the Wirral peninsula, the Red Rocks.  He switched his gaze to the right, tracing the line of sand dunes as far as West Kirby with its marina and the slipway where he had started his walk.   But the huge expanse of sand he had walked over was now gone.  In its place, but for the odd sandbank, was an expanse of grey water.  And clearly the tide was coming in quickly; foamy waves were already lapping at the few remaining stretches of sand.  He’d set out too long after low tide and had missed his opportunity to walk back over the sands.

Sand Ripples and Worm Casts

Rope

Dead Seabird

The Welsh Coast

Sand Tyre

This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

   ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ – Jean Rhys

   ‘London: City of Disappearances’ – Iain Sinclair (Ed.)

   ‘Pavane’ – Keith Roberts

   ‘Erewhon’ – Samuel Butler

   ‘The Owl Service’ – Alan Garner

   ‘The Well of Loneliness’– Radclyffe Hall

   ‘Dorian’ – Will Self

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

   ‘Dawn Songs’ – Vivien Ellis

   ‘The Next Day’ – David Bowie

   ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ –                                    David Bowie

   ‘Sugarland’ – Talk Normal

And watching:

   ‘In the Flesh’ – Dominic Mitchell, BBC3 UK

   ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ – David O Russell

   ‘Village at the End of the World’ – Sarah Gavron

   ‘False Trail’ – Kjell Sundvall