Wandering in a Haunted Landscape

Something different for the new year. A found document from nearly twelve years ago. It’s a kind of origin myth for this blog. It should have been my first post when I started The Psychogeographic Review back in 2012. Perhaps it will be my last.

As soon as I wake up I know that she has gone. The flat is empty, silent. I make coffee, then pack my bags and call for a taxi. It is time to move on, I have an investigation to complete. There are questions in need of answers, which in turn will lead to more questions. I am not the ideal person for the task, but I can see no one else stepping forward to attempt it.

The Queen’s train arrived at Ruabon station at 4.15pm precisely. Her horse-drawn carriage, together with an escort of mounted Denbighshire Hussars, was waiting for her at the station entrance. My train pulls into the same station at just after 10.00pm over 100 years later. I step down from the carriage and make my way along the platform, a laptop bag over one shoulder and a heavy suitcase dragging along behind me on its impossibly small wheels.

In 1889 Victoria’s carriage awaited her no more than a dozen paces from where she left the train. This year the single taxi waiting outside the small station is snapped up by the elderly couple shuffling along just ahead of me. So, suitcase skittering along behind, I follow the curve of road from the station forecourt into the main street of the village. Here I find a taxi office squeezed in between a pub and a Chinese take-away.

By way of conversation the taxi driver asks why I got off the train in Ruabon, one station short of Wrexham General, if Wrexham was where I was heading. I’d have saved myself a six-mile taxi ride, he says. I know this, of course: I’d lived in the town before. But I decided on the train up from Harwich, as I read about the route of her visit, that I wanted to arrive in Wrexham by the same road Queen Victoria took all those years before. I think it best not to mention this to the driver, I always find it best to downplay my odd obsessions when I’m in company. I say instead that I haven’t been to Wrexham for a long time and I want to see a little of the area from the car. In the bloody dark, he mutters to himself.

Victoria was staying at Palé Hall, near Bala. She took the train along the Dee valley to Ruabon and from there processed to Wrexham, where there was to be a civic welcome and concert in Acton Park. Afterwards she took tea in Acton Hall, and then returned to town in her carriage, picking up the train for her onward journey at Wrexham General station this time.

Acton Hall 1829

Acton Hall 1829

Acton Hall is no more. My vehicle pulls up outside an apartment block in Acton Hall Walks, near to the site of the old manor house. I pay the taxi driver and he sits watching me while I struggle to the front door of the building with my luggage. I’ve been abroad for so long that I’ve forgotten the expected tipping etiquette in this country, but clearly I haven’t given him enough to warrant his helping me with my bags. I stand at the firmly locked front door wondering what to do next. I’m sure it had been agreed that someone was going to meet me here. I turn round at the sound of the taxi-cab driving off and as it do so another car arrives and parks in front of me, dazzling me with its lights.

Acton Hall Walks Apartments

Acton Hall Walks Apartments

A young woman in a business suit gets out and strides briskly towards me. She is brandishing a practiced smile and a bunch of keys and introduces herself as the letting agent. She leads the way up to the flat and lets me in. Second floor furnished, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and an open-plan living room/kitchen with windows overlooking the park she recites, clearly eager to be on her way. You’ve already signed all the paperwork for a six-month let, she says, so unless there’s anything else?

I have no questions, so she shakes my hand and leaves, her heels clattering down the corridor. Years of travel have accustomed me to moving on to my next abode lightly with few possessions, but it’s also given me an appreciation of simple comforts, so this flat will be more than enough for my needs. My books and papers will arrive sometime soon and I already have my laptop and notebook, so anything the flat lacks I can easily do without. I have a phone, though I never call anyone and rarely text. But it gives me access to information on the go and serves my need for a camera without the cumbersome bulk of the SLR I always used to carry.

*           *           *

It’s not something I’d planned, but I make a spur of the moment decision as I open the living room blinds that first morning and see the view across the park. Before me is a vista of trees, undergrowth and meadow sloping away into the middle distance; beyond this are the tops of more trees. This view of Acton Park suggests to me that one might have seen a very similar prospect from the upper windows of Acton Hall, which once stood in this spot. I reach for my phone and take a wide-angle picture of the view before me, having already decided that I will do the same every morning for the duration of my time here. The same view every morning, building up over time a record of the subtle daily changes as summer turns to autumn and then into winter. I like to work within a framework and this ever-expanding set of pictures gives me one.

*           *           *

I walk, I look, I write; every investigation starts in the same way. This morning I start in Acton Park, walking its perimeter and then heading down the slope towards its centre. She sits on a bench looking out over the pond. She stares at the water so intently that it is obvious that she is aware of my approach along the path that passes her bench. She is warily alert. I am used to this: people sometimes find the intensity of my presence unsettling. Mindful of this, I put my head down and walk ahead a little more swiftly, making a show of ignoring her. But as I pass she speaks. People keep on feeding the ducks with bread, she says. It’s not good for them, but they still do it. Why is that, do you think? I slow down and turn my head in her direction. She continues to stare at the water and I sense she does not actually want an answer. The birds can’t help it, she continues, eventually all that bread will kill them, but they keep on eating it. They just can’t resist.

I stop beside her bench, feeling it is only polite to wait and show that I am listening.  She is still looking at the water, silent now. So much so that I start to wonder whether she was actually addressing me or simply talking to herself, or maybe the ducks, who are languidly patrolling the shallows near her, ever hopeful. It’s a beautiful morning though, I say, if only to fill the silence. Really? She says, turning to face me for the first time, her brown eyes boring into my face. Or is that just something people say? I smile, unsure how to respond.

Acton Park Pond

Acton Park Pond

Next you’ll be quoting Keats on beauty, she says. So why not tell me something beautiful and possibly even true? That would be the writerly thing to do, she says, nodding towards the notebook cupped in my right hand, a momentary flicker of a smile in her eyes. Ah yes, I say, still struggling for a response. My name is Bennett, she says, I guess I’ll see you around. And with that she turns back to face the pond. Taking that as my signal that the conversation is over, I mumble a goodbye and continue on my way.

Later, back at the flat, I settle down at the kitchen table to write up my report. I fire up my laptop and open up a file I’ve already labelled The Psychogeographic Review. A buzzing sound breaks my reverie. What’s that? An alarm of some sort, or perhaps a timer? Then I realise it is the phone on the wall by the front door. I recall now being shown that last night: it is the intercom linked to the outside door.

Removals, the voice says, we’re here with your stuff. I press the button to open the front entrance then prop open the flat door with a heavy chopping board. Two men in matching green polo shirts bustle in, each pushing a sack truck bearing two tea-chest sized boxes. I direct them to stack the boxes against one wall of the living room. One more journey from the van and they are done. Seven boxes: all my worldly possessions, a jumble of mainly books, papers and clothes. I’m not sure what else is inside; I never fully unpack these boxes from one home to the next, I just reach inside if there’s something I need. Why bother unpacking, only to have to pack again?

I turn my back on the boxes, feeling weary with the very idea of them. I take two steps and sit at the table. I have my journal to write up and I want compose my report while it is still fresh in my mind.

*           *           *

All paths lead to the pond, or so it seems. I follow the curve of gravel along the water’s edge and see her across the pond from a distance. She sits on the same bench. Somehow I knew she would be there. Once again she seems to be acutely aware of my approach, but deliberately continues to look the other way, eyes fixed on the murky waters of the pond. If she doesn’t speak. I will just keep on walking, I tell myself. It’s not as if we’ve arranged to meet.

Hello Mr Writer, she says as I near the back of her bench. Hi, I answer, it’s cloudier today. She turns and we share a brief awkward smile at the banality of my remark. Going somewhere? I say, with a nod towards the well-stuffed rucksack on the bench beside her. Maybe, she says, what do you think? I really don’t know, I say. She stands up, slides the straps of her bag over her narrow shoulders and walks around the bench to join me on the path. Shall we go? she says.

As we walk, Bennett points out the stone circle squatting on an area of flat ground just beyond the lake. Not Neolithic, of course, she says. A modern reproduction for the National Eisteddfod in 1912. You know, the crowning of the bard and all that? There’s something both tragic and inspiring about a nation that celebrates poets as national heroes, don’t you think? And not dead poets, she continues, but new ones. OK, so they’re required to write in the straight-jacket of an ancient metre, but they’re still living poets. Even the occasional female one too.

As we pass the circle Bennett says: You see that other stone over there, the one standing on its own? I nod. It’s more of a post than a Gorsedd stone, of course. Well, legend has it that George Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge, used to tie his horse to it when he wanted to stop to admire the view across the Acton estate. His family owned the house and all the land around her, you know that?

She stops and turns to face me, eyes fixed on mine and hands balled into fists. If you stand by the stone at midnight, so the story goes, turn around three times saying his name with each turn, then Jeffreys will appear before you. She’s holds her gaze on me for several seconds, without blinking, then softens her face into a broad grin. Absolute fucking nonsense, of course! And I should know, believe me.

It strikes me that I have no idea who Bennett is, nor where she comes from. Neither do I know where we are walking to together. My mind’s eye swoops up above us and I see the park with its lake and, nearby, the stone circle with the two of us walking just beyond it. At the top of the slope I see the modern recreation of Acton Hall, my temporary home. I know now, it feels as if I’ve always known, that this is where we are heading. It’s as if there is something that Bennett and I share, but I can’t for the life of me work out what it is.

You live locally? I ask. Not really, she answers. I move around a lot. She nods to herself, as if satisfied with her explanation. We pass a section of ancient wall that forms an entrance into the park. You’re moving on somewhere now then? I mean, I say to her, you have your rucksack with you. I already know the answer.

We are out amongst the new houses of Acton Hall Walks now, heading for the apartment block. Just a few nights then, she says. Thanks for offering. Bedding down on the sofa will suit me fine. And so it was settled. Though I had made no such offer, it seemed too unbearably awkward to try to contradict her now. The flat had a spare room, but Bennett turned it down and insisted she was happy to sleep on the sofa. Which was fine, but for the fact that the flat’s entire open-plan living area had now become her domain. Still, it was good to have someone to work with on my investigation; to join me on my walks.

*           *           *

I think the idea’s fascinating, says Bennett. We are sitting at the dining table in the flat and planning the next day’s walk. What you’ve got, she continues, is one small town divided into two: Wrexham Abbot and Wrexham Regis. One half is owned by the church and the other owes allegiance to the crown. The two rival entities of hereditary power: church and crown fought over this town. They reached an impasse and tacitly agreed to divide it between themselves. Wrexham Abbot and Wrexham Regis: Janus-faced, impassively cruel.

But it’s not unusual; it’s a story, a history, that plays out all over England and Wales. She taps the table between us to emphasise her point. Have you read any Tudor history? You need to remember there was a civil war in this country a century before Parliament and Cromwell began to flex their muscles. What I’m talking about is Henry’s war against the church, and it wasn’t confined to armies on battlefields, but it took place  locally in each town, village and country estate up and down the land: a real civil war. She turns to me, her eyes flaring. And, believe me, it’s still being fought.

*           *           *

We sit at opposite ends of the sofa. Bennett spends the evening listening to podcasts on her phone, which precludes any conversation. That’s fine by me, I need to study several local maps, tracing the course of urban rivers and streams. Rivers, especially hidden ones, fascinate me. If you follow the course of a country’s rivers and you can map out the growth of its settlements, its agriculture, its trade route and the development of its industry. That’s why I want to have a look at Wrexham’s two rivers, the Gwenfro and the Clywedog. As soon as I start marking the map with a highlighter pen I can tell that I’ve caught Bennett’s attention. I look across at her and, as soon as I catch her eye, she takes out the ear buds and looks at me.

What are you up to? I tell her my ideas about the Wrexham’s urban rivers and how I’d like to explore them. We can do that, she says, but you’ll not find a lot of the Gwenfro, the section through the centre of town particularly, it’s been built over. It’s not exactly a lost river, but it’s hard to follow its exact course. But even when its underground, the clues are all there, if you know what you’re looking for.

OK, I say. I really want to get to the confluence of the two rivers. According to the OS map, it’s at King’s Mills. Bennett leans on my shoulder and studies the map. Her breath brushes my cheek. We’ll start here, she says, stabbing a finger at a short thread of blue in the town centre.

*           *           *

No, it’s not travel writing, I explain to Bennett; not that kind of thing at all. What I’m trying to do is investigate the personality of the town. She looks at me in that silent, unblinking way she has. I try to ignore the discomfort this causes me and continue to speak. Places have personalities, don’t you think? Her face is impassive but her eyes are alert, watching. All those people who have lived in a place, I continue. All those lives, generation after generation, they leave a mark. The things they’ve done, and said, and thought, they all have a resonance, something etched into the very fabric of a place. Just go to Auschwitz, or Culloden or the area around where Newgate stood in London and you’ll feel it; there’s something palpable in places like that.

 

Something evil? she asks. Yes, I answer, but not just evil. There’s sadness, joy, spiritual benevolence…. everything. Places have the endless variety of individual characteristics that people do. So are you ready for what you’ll find with this investigation of yours? she asks. What do you mean? I say.

 

Bryn Estyn

Bryn Estyn

She leans forward to emphasise her words. I mean there’s a lot of darkness in this town. She frowns. It’s an oppressive darkness. Acton Hall was built on the proceeds of the slave trade. Elihu Yale, he’s given pride of place with a memorial in the parish church and a sixth form college is named after him, he was another slave trader. Bryn Estyn children’s home, you’ve heard of it? It was at the centre of a massive child sex abuse scandal over many years that was finally exposed in the nineties. It’s now a council staff training centre. But there’s something dark, corrupting and corroding there still. A malign influence. He stalks the corridors of Bryn Estyn. The victims, those who didn’t die young, survived and grew into men. Torn flesh will heal and bodies will recover. But the person inside that body is broken forever, indelibly scarred.

 

Gresford Colliery

Gresford Colliery

Then there’s Gresford Colliery, 266 men and boys buried underground because corners were cut on health and safety in the name of profit. A lot of the colliers who died that morning in 1934 had switched their shift so they would be free in the afternoon to watch the big football match, Wrexham against Tranmere Rovers. The club still holds a minute’s silence before the home game on the nearest date to the anniversary each year. So much darkness. She shakes her head and slumps back into the sofa.

*           *           *

We sit in silence for several minutes, then Bennett raises her head and speaks again. Acton Hall is gone. It was burnt down and demolished in the 1950s. But how much of its influence lives on? It’s like a malign resonance seeping into the very soil of this town. This apartment block: a brick and render edifice raised up in the image of a building that was meant to have been destroyed. It’s been built on the cursed site of the original, which in turn was built on the crushed bodies of people torn away from one continent and taken to another. Blood money, the proceeds of the slave trade.

 

Did you know that African-American soldiers were housed in the Hall during World War Two? Yeah, young men wearing the uniform of the nation that oppressed them at home and which continued to do so here, 3,000 miles away and in the teeth of a European war. Even while they were here America still segregated them from other young men wearing the same uniform but who happened to have skin of a different colour.

 

Before that there was the Belgian-born diamond merchant Sir Bernard Oppenheimer who bought 224 acres of the Acton Hall estate when the Cunliffe family put it up for sale in 1917. He immediately sold some of the land for housing and set up workshops and small holdings on the remaining plot. He claimed he was trying to do something positive: helping disabled ex-servicemen to rebuild their shattered lives; teaching them new skills, giving them jobs. Diamond polishing, says Bennett, her lip curling in distaste as she utters the phrase. Gems taken from their rightful owners in Africa. Even worse, they made those owners dig them out of the ground, paying a pittance and working them death in many instances. Blood diamonds. How is that any different to slavery?

*           *           *

I sit at the table with my papers and maps the next morning. My task, I am convinced, is to establish the underlying pattern, the links between all of these nodes. There seems to be a duality, a similar pattern in the two adjoining towns of Wrexham and Chester. I can almost feel it; it squeezes at my head. It’s as if there is retaining band enclosing each town’s core and ganglions of energy stretching out into the surrounding area and linking the two centres. In the case of Wrexham the outer circumference seems to be the area within the boundary of the ancient twin boroughs of Wrexham Abbott and Wrexham Regis. For Chester the enclosing circle is demarcated by the line of the Roman wall, which in turn was built on a much older perimeter.

 

What is the link between the two centres? Look at the map and you see Wrexham and Chester straddling the ancient border between Wales and England. Just ten miles apart, but forever united and always divided. Is the road the link? Not the modern A483, but the older road that is Watling Street. This route skirts Wrexham to the north-east of the town centre, crosses the Dee at the site of the old ford at Aldford and then runs through the centre of Chester towards York. So it’s possible that Watling Street is the link. Indeed, it follows the route of a much older path that linked the two towns generations before the arrival of the Romans.

 

I look closely at the map again and it’s obvious what the link is: the river. Before we had passable roads people would travel and trade along the river routes, in this case the River Dee, a permanent umbilical cord linking north-east Wales and Chester and, beyond Chester, the sea.

*           *           *

Sinclair Grave, Gresford

Sinclair Grave, Gresford

I sleep late the following day, lying there until almost lunchtime. I knew I was doing it; part of me was awake and aware that my inert body was lying there and I listened to my own slumbering breath. Bennett says she’d been out for a walk while I was asleep. I took the footbridge over the dual carriageway, she says. Then I followed the lanes all the way to Gresford. You remember that pond in the centre of the village? I nodded. Well, she continued, I saw May Sinclair there. Not dead. I knew it was her. It was so fucking obvious really. I followed her all the way to the churchyard. She stood by her brother’s grave for a minute or two and then hurried off. Mother will want to know why I’ve been away so long, I heard her say.

*           *           *

The lights flicker as I leave the apartment and walk down the staircase. My vision swims in and out of focus. The hard steps become softer. I don’t remember them being wooden. A runner of carpet winds up the middle. Creaking steps. A smell of log fires, furniture wax and tobacco smoke, A large hallway, dimly lit, doors leading off. I stand and wait. A clock ticks. Loudly. Is it my imagination, or is it getting louder by the second. A door opens and a maid, dressed in black and white, walks silently into the hall with a tray. She glances at me and then, eyes downcast, says: shall I take this up to your room, sir? Or will you take your brandy in the library?

*           *           *

Moments later, or perhaps decades, I step down into the hallway. I am aware of khaki uniforms, neatly pressed. The two African-American soldiers stride in step past me, one on either side. I feel a movement in the air, smell leather and boot polish, but neither of them acknowledges my presence, nor even seems to notice it. Nothing is where it should be. I open a door on the ground floor and enter a room. Heavy oak furniture and a Persian rug, a fire blazing in the grate.

So why was this apartment block built in the image of Acton Hall? And not just that, but actually placed on the footprint of the old building. There’s an essence of Acton Hall that remains, a vestige that couldn’t be destroyed by their fire and bulldozers, something stronger than mere stone and brick. And this building celebrates it. What’s more, it flaunts it.

*           *           *

There’s a negative energy here. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s here. It’s in the soil, the rock, the streams and rivers. May Sinclair sensed it, which is why she moved away; but not before two of her brothers died and her mother went mad. Look at Bryn Estyn and everything that went on there: the cruelty, the perverted desire and the young lives destroyed. Continuing the twisted rites of George Jeffreys and Elihu Yale; lynching, squeezing the life out of young bodies in the name of God and the law. Their law. There is a darkness her, can’t you feel it?

Then, I asked her, why do you stay? Maybe it’s for the same reason you’re here, she replied. This investigation of yours, what do you hope to uncover? It’s not as if everything is hidden, it’s all out there in the open for those who choose to see it. But most people do not; it’s too uncomfortable, too disturbing, so they convince themselves they can’t see it and let it remain under the surface. These things, these dark connections, become a series of obscure footnotes and are never linked and rarely traced back to their source.

*           *           *

Acton Hall Interior

Acton Hall Interior

I step out of the door of the flat again. Even before my eyes can focus, my feet tell me something is different. In place of the familiar ringing hardness of polished concrete in the corridor, I sense something softer beneath my feet; the springy feel of carpet and wooden floorboards is unmistakable. As my eyes adjust to the dimness of the corridor, I realise that the only light was coming from an oil lamp on a small table pushed against the wall further down the passage to my right. I take a deep breath; the air is cool and smells of furniture polish and burning coal. I walk towards the lamp and, in its arc of light, see that the corridor turns to the left. I follow the turn and ahead of me see a staircase leading downwards.

Though I walk softly, hesitantly, the stairs creak with each step. At the foot of the stair-case I reach a large room lit by several lamps. A fire blazes in the grate of a stone fireplace and casts dancing shadows across the high ceiling above me. Before the fire are two armchairs, Someone, I suddenly realise is sitting in one of them. I stop walking and all but stop breathing. The figure in the chair holds a book on his lap. He looks up, turns his head and stares straight at me.

*           *           *

The next morning, as soon as I wake up I sense that Bennett has gone. I wander through the empty flat looking for any sign of her presence, any reminder of her absence. Her bag has gone and she has left no message behind. I do not need a note to tell me that I will never see her again.

 

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Elihu Yale

Elihu Yale: colonial administrator, senior representative of the East India Company,  President of Madras, philanthropist and founding benefactor of Yale University. His bones lie in a tomb in St Giles churchyard in Wrexham, flesh and shroud long gone. Upon the tomb is an epitaph:

Born in America, in Europe bred

In Africa travell’d and in Asia wed

Where long he liv’d and thriv’d; In London dead

Much good, some ill, he did; so hope all’s even

And that his soul thro’ mercy’s gone to Heaven

You that survive and read this tale, take care

For this most certain exit to prepare

Where blest in peace, the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the silent dust.

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The ‘some ill’ of his time in India is glossed over. The slave trading, forced labour and arbitrary executions are not mentioned. Nor is the lynching of his stable boy who took a horse and rode it without permission. But his name lives on in Wrexham. A name like a nasty taste in the mouth. A Wrexham sixth-form college was named after him until it was rebranded as Coleg Cambria. But there is still the Elihu Yale, a large Weatherspoon’s pub in the centre of town. Formerly a cinema, it now provides cheap beer for the town’s drunkards, money siphoned into the deep pockets of the chain’s EU-hating owner.

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Psychogeographic Review’s Books of the Year, 2024

The city is a map of stories, and in them we are both the inhabitants and the explorers. Zadie Smith (from NW)

At Psychogeographic Review I write about the books, poems, maps, photographs, paintings, films and music that help us to construct a living map of the places where humans live. The following is my personal and very subjective list of some of the books that have informed this discussion in 2024.

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Wild Twin by Jeff Young

One way of reading Wild Twin, Jeff Young’s companion memoir to 2020’s Ghost Town, is to see it as a tale of three cities: Liverpool, Paris and Amsterdam. But it is also, among many other things, the story of a haunting. The ghost at the heart of Young’s previous book was his mother. Wild Twin, on the other hand, is haunted by the spirit of his late father, Cyril.

 

This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land by Charlie Hill

coverCharlie Hill’s slim paperback more than makes up for its lack of length and detail with the depth and perceptivity of his observations as he charts a series of walks he has made through locations in England, Scotland and Wales. The book’s format is simple: each short essay focuses on a particular place Hill has visited in recent years, some urban and some and others rural, and crafts a collecion of meditations on what he sees, hears, thinks and feels.

 

It’s not just that spaces are shaping our subjectivities, it’s that they are a product of histories of social and political forces. Wendy Brown (from States of Injury)

Sunken Lands by Gareth E. Rees

coverThere is a story etched into the rocky shell of our planet. Geologists present us with conclusive evidence that history is cyclical; that the physical processes determining the fate of life on Earth are subject to climactic and tectonic ebbs and flows. In this, Gareth Rees’s most ambitious work to date, he charts the many cycles of lands that emerge from beneath the waves and the flora, fauna and humans that gradually move in and prosper, only to be forced out again many thousands of years later as the sea returns to reclaim the land. Beneath the waves of coastal regions all over the world are remnants of forests, plains and the ruins of human settlements.

 

Final Approach by Mark Blackburn

arrayFinal Approach is the story of Blackburn’s life, with the constant thread of his love of planespotting running through it. He charts this obsession from his childhood right through to the present day and describes his compulsion to see planes, photograph them and note their registration numbers. Indeed, planespotting determines the whole structure of this, his autobiography.  Each chapter heading is the three-letter IATA code for an airport (MIA, LGW, ORK and so on) and each airport plays a significant part in the story of Blackburn’s life.

I am not a person, I am a place. Clarice Lispector (from The Hour of the Star)

Going to Ground: An Anthology of Nature and Place – Ed. by Jon Woolcott

coverJust over ten years ago the Dorset-based publisher, Little Toller, set up an online journal of new writing about landscape. The Clearing offered a space for new and extablished writers to explore themes and ideas about landscape and place. This collection, edited by Jon Woolcott, the author of Real Dorset, brings together poetry and prose by thirty writers who have contributed to The Clearing over the years, as well as a sympathetically considered introduction by Woolcott.

Dark Play by Tim Cooke

coverDark Play is a collection of linked short stories by Tim Cooke, each one featuring a father and young daughter living in an isolated farmhouse on a Welsh hillside. Cooke’s stories were inspired by the concept of ‘dark play’ developed by the American professor of drama, Richard Schechner. In Schechner’s dark play some  or all of the participants are not aware they are taking part in a game and, implicitly, they are unable to consent to their participation.

 

I have always been interested in the way that the landscape mirrors our inner lives. Jeanette Winterson (from The Passion)

The Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia by William Burns

coverGhost of an Idea examines the impact of nostalgia on the horror and hauntological genres. In this deeply researched work William Burns addresses the question of nostalgia, which can be defined as a longing for a past that may once or may never have existed. Is it, he asks, a force which stimulates contemporary creativity, encouraging further exploration and expression? Or does nostalgia too often produce a culture that is a bland shadow of the original upon which it is based?

 

 

 

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Two Arrow Falls (from Chester City Walls) by Giants of Discovery

Music Review – November 2024

The Wirral, where I was born and bred, has an incredibly rich Viking heritage and is the only place in mainland Britain to have documented evidence of Norwegian Viking Settlers, from 902AD. This album is a homage to that heritage and the many place from around the peninsula whose names are born of Viking tongue.

The Wirral and Chester’s city walls are two of my favourite places for walking, looking and contemplating, so this new album by Giants of Discovery was one I definitely needed to hear. The Wirral is very much its own place: a finger of land squeezed between Wales and Merseyside, close to both but part of neither. With its ancient villages, woods and marshes it is a haunted land soaked in memory, its Norse past betrayed in many of the local place names.

Giants of Discovery plays all the instruments and has written all the music on this release. Why ‘two arrow falls’ I wondered when I first picked up the album, wouldn’t ‘two arrows fall’ be more grammatically correct? Then I realised that an arrow fall is a measure of distance, the two arrow falls in question being the span from Chester’s walls to the ancient boundary of the Wirral.

 

 

Track 1: Church in the Wood

The sound of running water. Distorted string chords, as if sound is travelling backwards. Ominous bass notes brought forward in the mix making the whole sound fatter, and gradually more disturbing.

Track 2: Crane Bird Sandbank

Peaceful ambient sounds, a bubbling of water. Marimba-like chords rise and take flight.

Track 3: Bruna’s Stronghold

Some great guitar work, deep layers of ambient sound behind it. Bruna, in ancient Norse, means ‘to advance like wildfire’. Like a blazing fire, this track builds to a crescendo,

Track 4: Island of the Britons

It opens with a haunting circular melody, then the sound opens out like the sun appearing from behind a cloud. Bass notes emerge like footsteps. I don’t know the location of the island of the Britons referred to in the title, but after the arrival of the Saxons, Wales remained a stronghold of the Britons.

Looking towards Wales from the Wirral

Track 5: Heather Island on the Marsh

The Wirral certainly has a lot of marshland, particularly on the peninsula’s western side, along the Dee estuary. This track is dreamily serene, with rich textures and a pleasingly layered sound.

Track 6: Headland Overgrown by Birch

This is my current favourite piece. A feeling of flying. Wind through the trees. A repetitive melody in a lower register. Somewhere at the periphery of the listener’s senses something sinister lurks. Am I the hunter or the hunted?

Track 7: Nightfall Across the Assembly Fields

The Assembly Fields, þing-vollr in Old Norse, is now the present-day village of Thingwall. Birds circle, home to roost. The sun retreats and night emerges to claim its realm.

Track 8: Moonlight on Myrtle Corner

Wir heal, the Old Norse name for Wirral, also translates as myrtle corner. A piece of music to bring the whole album together. An assembly of sounds and voices. Ancient. Immutable. Deep textures. Swirling colours. A celebration of a land proudly sitting between two arms of the sea.

Two Arrow Falls (from Chester City Walls) is Giants of Discovery’s tribute to the place he calls home. This is an atmospheric and deeply satisfying contribution to the select canon* of contemporary music inspired by the ancient landscape of the Wirral.

 

Discover Two Arrow Falls (from Chester City Walls) and other music by Giants of Discovery here at Bandcamp.

*I would also add the music of Forest Swords to that canon, particularly his Engravings album.

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Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia by William Burns

Book Review – November 2024

Is nostalgia a harmless skip down memory lane? Can nostalgia be used like propaganda to mollify, entice, and seduce: encouraging us to turn off our critical thinking, stick our heads in the sand, and revel in a past that actually may have never been, a past gone mad? While conservative politicians have made nostalgia an intrinsic and explicit part of their political platform, the social consequences of nostalgia on culture and art can be sinisterly opaque.

Ghost of an Idea examines the impact of nostalgia on the horror and hauntological genres. In this deeply researched work William Burns addresses the question of nostalgia, which can be defined as a longing for a past that may once or may never have existed. Is it, he asks, a force which stimulates contemporary creativity, encouraging further exploration and expression? Or does nostalgia too often produce a culture that is a bland shadow of the original upon which it is based?

The term ‘hauntology’ came into common use in cultural studies circles as a result of its being employed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. The British academic, Mark Fisher, further developed the concept of hauntology, applying it to manifestations of popular culture and popularising the term in the English-speaking world. Hauntology explores the ways in which nostalgia, memory, and the remnants of past ideologies manifest in contemporary culture, art, and media. It looks at how the past ‘haunts’ the present, creating a sense of temporal disjunction.

In Ghost of an Idea William Burns considers a comprehensive range of horror and hauntological films, television programmes, literature and music, displaying considerable knowledge and great affection for his subject matter. The book’s format is very much like that of an anthology. It starts with what Burns describes as a ‘hauntology primer’ and then goes on to discuss manifestations of this concept in the arts. Burns’ love of the types of music influenced by hauntology is reflected by a series of interviews he conducted with musicians and reviews of gigs that he attended that he reproduces here. Hauntological music is hard to define, but embraces the folk, electronic, ambient and rock traditions.

boards of canada picture

Boards of Canada

He presents a convincing argument as to why Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol should be regarded as the ‘first truly hauntological work of art’ and goes on to closely consider the works of other writers such as H P Lovecraft and Alan Moore. Film (and by extension television) is possibly, the perfect medium for works of hauntology as its creators are able to use such devices as jump cuts and flashbacks and are not bound by a linear narrative structure.

Childhood is an important trope in hauntological art as the innocence, expectations, and fears of the foggily remembered past and the anticipated future are expressed through the intermingling of the thrills and the dread of the ordinary…the extraordinary…and the apocalyptic.

As a child of the 1970s Burns’ is haunted by memories of the children’s television of that period. Indeed, he’s not the first to observe that some of the programmes supposedly aimed at kids from that period were decidedly weird.

still from Owl Service opening credits

The Owl Service

The final part of Ghost of an Idea addresses the question posed it its title: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary? Burns does not sit on the fence. With justifiable wit and anger he turns his ire upon the franchise merchants, The people who take what was once an original idea and a landmark film and milk it for all its worth with sequels and remakes. In the process they denigrate everything that was good about the original.

Horror fans are now a prime target audience and marketing demographic meant to be milked the same way that all the other fandoms are. Horror and its fans were the outsiders, the neglected, the underdogs, even the despised for being interested in the transgressive, darker aspects of human experiences. Now we are merely consumer metrics.

Particular targets for Burns’ wrath are the Stars Wars films since the founding trilogy, American Horror Story Season 10 and the Toy Story merchandising machine. On a positive note, however, he applauds the integrity of Alan Moore who refused to simply bow down and take the Hollywood dollar.

Just a word though in defence of Randy Newman (misspelt Neumann in my copy of the book). While Burns is no doubt entirely right to describe his Toy Story film scores as ‘maudlin’, Newman also has a singer/songwriter back-catalogue going back some fifty years in which he consistently exposes the dark side of the American dream with wit and eloquence.

William Burns

William Burns was born in 1972 upon a day when, he likes to point out,  crucial scenes for both The Exorcist and The Wicker Man were being filmed, forever marking him out as a member of the ‘Haunted Generation’.  He is the author of The Thrill of Repulsion: Excursions into Horror Culture (2016).

This review is based on an advance copy of a book due to be published in March 2025. It is available to pre-order from the publisher and the usual retailers.
The Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia
William Burns
Headpress Books 
March 2025
UK – £9.99 (ebook), £19.99 (paperback), £23.00 (hardback)
Images 
Book Cover – Headpress
Boards of Canada – Wikipedia
The Owl Service – Granada Television
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Dark Play by Tim Cooke

Book Review – November 2024

I woke to thud and a crack, a small face ricocheting away from the glass. The features – much like my own – creased into a familiar frown. A spurt of blood spilled from a crevice in the brow, running in thick lines down to the chin.

cover

Dark Play is a collection of linked short stories by Tim Cooke, each one featuring a father and young daughter living in an isolated farmhouse on a Welsh hillside. Cooke’s stories were inspired by the concept of ‘dark play’ developed by the American professor of drama, Richard Schechner. In Schechner’s dark play some  or all of the participants are not aware they are taking part in a game and, implicitly, they are unable to consent to their participation.

Play is, indeed, at the heart of this collection. The girl, Nia, does not appear to have any friends nor is it ever mentioned that she attends a school. But she has a fertile imagination and is well-versed in the art of playing alone. But perhaps never completely on her own. Her father, often an observer, is at other times, some of the stories seem to suggest, an active participant. But the real connection in Nia’s play, and the channel whereby more sinister elements seem to enter her games, is with the remote landscape all about them and the stories of the people who lived and died there. Within the orbit her play, and spilling out of these games, the landscape and its tales seem to come to life.

Reality and imaginative play are tumbled together. Are Nia’s stories real and, indeed, is her dad a reliable narrator? We are offered no easy answers, but palpable feelings of dread tighten their grip as each tale unfolds. Driving home after a pub meal in the opening story, The Judgement, Nia asks her father about the ladies she saw while he went to the toilet as they were leaving. They were in a red room in the pub with candles, flowers and a funny smell: The woman with brown teeth asked me about you. Do you think she knows that we live up here? Later, in The Visitor, on  a stormy evening, someone unexpected really does come to their door. Dad had just entertained Nia with a strange story of a persecuted witch who wandered the local hills looking  for her now demolished cottage. She would appear to people in a variety of disguises, so the young male hiker, soaked to the skin and asking to use the phone, immediately raised Nia’s suspicions. Then, in a later story, a game which starts as a silly prank leads to that worst nightmare of any parent, a missing child.

The stories, some of them very short, are linked and all centre on Nia and her father. But they do not follow a linear arc; nor does the beginning of one story pick-up on the ending of the previous one. Instead the reader is left to puzzle how the various episodes fit together. Perhaps they follow a cyclical pattern or even, in a nightmarish way, they are locked in a continuous loop.

Other characters appear in some of the stories. Dad’s sister and her baby, in a story called The Conversion, come to visit. But they somehow seem to be characters within the framework of the underlying game rather than individuals acting with their own agency. Nia’s mother is a tangible absence throughout the stories. We are led to sense that something has happened, but we have no idea what this might be.

Then in the final story, Mother, she is suddenly there alongside Nia and Dad helping her husband to host a barbecue for friends. But what should be a carefree, relaxing afternoon becomes steadily more unsettling and the very landscape around them seems to exude portents of menace. As a moment of real horror approaches the reader becomes aware of a malign influence reaching both backwards and forwards through time.

Tim Cooke has set his collection of ‘weird’ stories in the land which gave birth to a much older collection of tales, The Mabinogion. His great achivement with Dark Play is to take a contemporary narrative and ground it in a much older, storied landscape. Past tragedies, injustices and pain are alluded to and, through Cooke’s stories, a lingering darkness soaks through into the present day. A remarkable feat in just 67 pages.

 

Tim Cooke

authorTim Cooke is a teacher, writer and creative writing PhD student. He was the winner of the New Welsh Writing Awards 2022: Rheidol Prize for Prose with a Welsh Theme or Setting for his blended nonfiction book, River.

 

Dark Play: A collection of weird stories
Tim Cooke
Salò Press 
March 2024
UK – £6.99 (paperback)
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Halloween 2024

I’m not a huge fan of Halloween, though I am looking forward to going to a kids’ Halloween party later on today. Nor do I particularly enjoy horror as an artistic genre. But I have many exceptions to this aversion: I have always loved Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Mervyn Peake, The Owl Service and The Wicker Man, for instance. I am also fascinated by hauntology and enjoy lots of recent music and literature influenced by folk horror.

By pure coincidene, however, I finished my second reading of Tim Cooke’s Dark Play in bed shortly before midnight last night, and this morning I started reading Ghost of an Idea by William Burns. Cooke’s short story collection is excellent, though decidedly unsettling. Burns’s study of hauntology, folk horror and nostalgia so far promises to be both comprehensive and fascinating. I will review both of these books in these pages very soon.

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Wild Twin by Jeff Young

Book Review – October 2024

One of the things that struck me about all of this junk was that every single object was a repository of someone else’s memory, because it had got to the auction rooms from the house clearances of dead peoples’ property. The house was a museum of grief and loss and abandonment, and our dad was the curator.

cover

One way of reading Wild Twin, Jeff Young’s companion memoir to 2020’s Ghost Town, is to see it as a tale of three cities: Liverpool, Paris and Amsterdam. But it is also, among many other things, the story of a haunting. The ghost at the heart of Young’s previous book was his mother. Wild Twin, on the other hand, is haunted by the spirit of his late father, Cyril.

As readers of Ghost Town will already know, Jeff Young was brought up in Liverpool. But it is more than just his home city: Liverpool is the lens through which he sees and interprets the world. Young’s first home was in the terraced streets near the Everton FC football ground in Walton. Incidentally, an area with which I have my own maternal family connections. The Young family moved out to suburban Maghull while Jeff was still a child and this remained the parental home until the last year or so and it was where his mother, and more recently his father, died.

Young’s experience of formal education was not a happy or fulfilling one. Nonetheless, he grew up with a love of literature and music, and in particular outsider art. From his mother he learned the joy of walking and exploring; of how quirky and fascinating corners can be found hidden within the city’s streets. Liverpool was Jeff Young’s psychogeographic training ground.

By his late teens Young was in a dead-end clerical assistant job with the local council. Gigs, beer and weed were his escape and filled his weekends. He devoured the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, he soaked up art house showings of French New Wave films and fed his inner life with the music of Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, Steve Reich and Can. But he wanted more. He longed to wander the streets of Paris like Sartre, Miller, Burroughs and Beckett before him; to drink absinthe and write poetry. He dreamed of living like a Beat, embracing everything serendipity had to offer and to become a latter-day dharma bum.

So, one March morning fifty years ago Young packed in his job and set out to hitch-hike to Paris. That’s ‘a silly thing to do’ was his father’s understated response as Young announced his plan and said his goodbyes at the family breakfast table. Jeff Young’s friend and fellow aspiring Beat, Stan, accompanied him. But Stan quickly got homesick and turned back to go home at Ostend. Young carried on alone, hitching through Belgium towards Paris; by turns frightened, lonely and exhilarated.

Upon reaching Paris he stays in an attic room in a flea-bitten hotel on the Left Bank, never ceasing to delight in the roofscape view of Paris from the window of his room. He wanders the streets absorbing all the sights, smells and sounds of Paris. He visits Jim Morrison’s grave and some of the locations that were familiar to hime from French films. Opposite his hotel he stands outside the house where William Burroughs and Brion Gysin lodged, but is too fearful to knock on the door. In a bar he is latched onto by a somewhat menacing British exile called Baxter, and he keeps bumping into him in subsequent days.

None of this is the real Paris; all of this is the real Paris. The Paris I wanted to run away to and now I walk through it in tears.

Part One of Wild Twin closes with Young returning home to Liverpool from Paris. He signs on the dole and spends his days and sleepless nights lying in bed reading and listening to music. A dodgy cassette tape of Television’s Marquee Moon, recorded from John Peel’s radio show, seems to speak to him in the darkness of his room. Books and records assault his senses: Young describes them as being like ‘detonations’ and ‘fire alarms’. He senses that his family and friends are talking about him and are concerned for his well-being. He realises that it is time to move on.

and then, in some kind of cancellation of myself, I went suddenly, abruptly, to Germany to have some kind of breakdown.

Young takes a job as a barman on a British army base near Paderborn. He spends his spare time listening to Krautrock and drinking himself into a stupor with Apfelkorn. He returns home the following Christmas having come to realise that he wasn’t going to find whatever it was he was looking for in Germany.

At a party he meets an unconventional young woman called Becks who looks like ‘a punk Elizabeth Taylor’, is an expert shoplifter and loves drinking. He has discovered a soul mate.

she was drunk on her favourite concoction of Merrydown Cider and Cinzano, a dash of Night Nurse on the top just to jazz things up a bit.

They quickly hatch a plan to thumb it around Europe together and, by a circuitous route, end up in Amsterdam. They live amongst squatters, anarchists, illegals and exiles. They work in bars on the black, collect beer bottles for small change, steal bicycles and have their bicycles stolen and raid skips for furniture. Amsterdam occupies most of Part Two of the book. It is a time peopled by a host of unforgettable characters. Bill the Wolf presides over the house they live in and is insomniac, flamboyant and gin-soaked. Harry the young heroin addict, whom Bill loves, lives in a former electrical shop on the ground floor. Mondo the dealer, brooding and malevolent, lives in the attic behind a padlocked trap-door. On the first-floor lives Nina, a Portuguese artist who paints everything pink including her clothes. Young also meets Gregory Corso, the Beat poet, now a shambling husk of his former self.

It is, for the most part, a happy time, especially if one sticks to Bill’s maxim of ‘not to believe’. Young’s parents visit him. They love Amsterdam and he delights in seeing the pair of them wobbling off on bicycles along the canal side, whooping with laughter.

Time Machines, the third and final part of Wild Twin is set back in Liverpool several decades after his time in Amsterdam. Young’s father, Cyril, now a widower, is in hospital with dementia and prostate cancer. His end is inevitable, but he is deemed to be a bed-blocker and must be moved elsewhere. He is taken to a care home at short notice. It is a cold, unhappy and understaffed place and Young and his sister, Kathryn, decide it is time to take their father home. The family home is the semi-detached house in Maghull, a place full of memories and mementoes.

In the year my dad was dying I started building time machines. In tobacco tins and cigar tins I curated memories…

time_machines

Jeff and Kathryn take turns to be with him. The house is full of memories. These memories may be out of reach for Young’s father, drifting in the fog of Alzheimer’s, but they are all around and they are real. They provide comfort. This final section of Wild Twin is ineffably, painfully sad, especially for those of us who have experienced loss which, sooner or later, is the fate of everyone. But the beauty of Jeff Young’s writing speaks for all of us.

Now in his sixties Young has arrived at another place. But his searching goes on.

The place I wanted to be when I left home was a place where I had no past, no ancestors, no memory. Dislocation from the familiar. Absence. Erasure. The opposite of the way I think and feel now that I’m in my sixties – the past, my ancestors, memory are the centre of my being.

 

Jeff Young

authorJeff Young is a writer for screen, stage and radio. A former senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, Jeff lives in Liverpool. He is also the author of Ghost Town.

 

Wild Twin
Jeff Young
Little Toller Books
September 2024
UK – £20 (hardback)
Author Image – Pearl Buscombe Young
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This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land by Charlie Hill

Book Review – September 2024

I had for some time believed the key to effective writing was to concentrate on the surface of things. Record them faithfully, and they’d do the work for you. After all, the world is manifestly absurd and provides you with everything you need in the way of character and environment and plot; why complicate – or simplify – things with undue authorial mediation?

Recently, however, I had started to question the value of such an approach. . .

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Charlie Hill’s slim paperback more than makes up for its lack of length and detail with the depth and perceptivity of his observations as he charts a series of walks he has made through locations in England, Scotland and Wales. The book’s format is simple: each short essay focuses on a particular place Hill has visited in recent years, some urban and some and others rural, and crafts a collecion of meditations on what he sees, hears, thinks and feels.

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Mercifully, there is nothing self-consciously clever or showy about Hill’s prose, though his resume suggests he is more than capable of writing in this way if he chose to. Instead, he tells his story, his series of stories, simply and clearly. However, the overall achievement of these separate pieces, when considered as a whole, is to present us with something much more profound. Hill’s snapshots show a nation in flux, its people split by division. He feels the weight of history resting heavily on today and senses anxiety about the future underlying much of Britain’s public discourse.

But there is hope aplenty. Like some latter-day pilgrim Hill sketches a starburst of destinations radiating out from his home in Birmingham, England’s phrenic centre.  He is everyman and everywoman, he is you and me, and he guides us on his walks with humour and good sense and, despite the despair he notes in some quarters, he also meets kindness, acceptance and positivity wherever he goes. Though simple and staightforward on the surface, Hill’s writing conjures up a deep poetic beauty.

Charlie Hill

authorCharlie Hill is an  author from Birmingham. He has written long and short form memoir, and contemporary, historical and experimental fiction. He is the co-founder and former Director of a literary festival, the PowWow Festival of Writing, which ran from 2011 to 2017 and featured guests such as Joanne Harris, Alex Wheatle, Stewart Home and Natalie Haynes. He has also appeared at many such events, including Frankfurt’s Literaturm and the Birmingham Literary Festival.

This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land
Charlie Hill
Culture Matters
August 2024
UK – £12 (paperback)
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Muntjac by Clevelode

Music Review – July 2024

Although I left this place, part of me remains

(this is) very much musical psychogeography

~ Paul Newland

I have fond memories of The Lowland Hundred. They provided me with a soundtrack for the middle-teen years of the present century when I spent a lot of time walking the paths and byways of North and Mid Wales. A project of Paul Newland and Tim Noble, the name Lowland Hundred is an English translation of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a mythical lost land off the coast of present day Cardigan Bay. Their music evoked a sense of loss and longing and seemed to tap into memories buried in the very landscape of this part of Wales.

Clevelode is Paul Newland’s latest venture and features the composer himself on vocals, guitar, piano, synths and percussion together with a small group of collaborators featuring Mike Seal on bass and Emma Morton on backing vocals. The eight tracks of Muntjac are a meditation on the landscape of Epping Forest and the memories that area holds for Newland. Some track titles, such as Loughton Camp and Grimston’s Oak, refer to particular places in and around the forest. Others, like It Must Have Rained Last Night (Avenue of Trees), seem to touch on more personal recollections for Newland.

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Memories inhabit the forest like fallen leaves, layer upon layer, year upon year.  High Beech summons up images of the wanderings of John Clare concurrently with East End gangsters digging shallow graves. Ambresbury Banks concludes the album and is an instrumental piece that is epic in scale and ambition and very satisfying in its effect.

 

Clevelode

Clevelode is Paul Newland and his collaborators. Newland was one-half of The Lowland Hundred, a critically acclaimed duo that released three albums, Under Cambrian Sky (2010), Adit (2011), The Lowland Hundred (2014).

Muntjac
Clevelode
Fenny Compton
July 2024
Compact Disc – £12.99, Digital Download – £7.00
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