Sun-gilt lands of bright green pastures

A 19th century painting showing John Scott looking through a telescope at the Ware valley

In 2007 I wrote here about a prospect poem by John Scott of Amwell; I then added a postscript with more information in 2015. This is a further postscript really, but I'm writing a fresh blog post because I recently visited Ware and saw the summer house and grotto he built there. These are preserved in a fragment of what was once his extensive garden, leading down to the New River, which flows here alongside the Lea (they are now separated by the railway). For £2 you can enter and look around - the picture below shows the flint summer house, an 'airy octagon,' which would have provided a prospect of the vale. Scott wrote of the evening view here, of 'sun-gilt lands, / Of bright green pastures, stretch'd by rivers clear, / And willow groves, or other islands clear.' Today this prospect is obscured by trees and 1960s houses, although it could have been worse. The local developer was planning to bulldoze the grotto 'and erect Nos. 30-32 Scott’s Road on the site. The porch and dome of the Council Chamber were demolished, the summerhouse was damaged and the grotto was heavily vandalised.' The restoration work that has happened since then is really impressive.

The grotto is more extensive than I was expecting, with several passages, ventilation shafts and chambers all decorated with shells. Scott bought exotic shells from the Caribbean and South Pacific but also used cockle shells, white quartz and fossils from the beaches of Devon. The 'Council Chamber' is a nineteenth century name for the room shown below, with arched niches that you could imagine a group of illuminati sitting in to debate esoteric philosophical questions. Scott was clearly inspired by Pope, whose 'shell temple' at his Twickenham villa had started as a tunnel under the inconveniently sited road to Hampton Court. Samuel Johnson came to stay with Scott in 1773 and although he wasn't a fan of landscape gardening, he seems to have approved of the grotto, calling it a 'Fairy Hall'.

David Perman's detailed biography of Scott provides further information on the grotto and Scott's nature poetry, which was generally rather conventional, looking backwards to the era of James Thomson rather than anticipating the Romantic period to come. In reading this I was very surprised to learn that Scott had seemingly written about the great Chinese poet Li Bai in: 'Li-po : or, The good governor : a Chinese eclogue'. He can't have known the poetry, but maybe he had come across the name in a history of China? Regrettably, Scott doesn't actually refer to him as a poet and the details in the poem are hazy and don't correspond to the real life of Li Bai. The poem begins with the design of a pavilion - like Scott, Chinese literati were keen on building homes with good views and this Li-Po does not neglect to include a grotto. 'Bright shells and corals varied lustre shed; / From sparry grottos chrystal drops distill'd / On sounding brass, and air with music fill'd...' I'll conclude here with the landscape beyond the garden of Li-Po, a description familiar from eighteenth century chinoiserie, but also perhaps an imaginary equivalent to the river view Scott was able to enjoy.

The distant prospects well the sight might please, 

With pointed mountains, and romantic trees: 

From craggy cliffs, between the verdant shades, 

The silver rills rush'd down in bright cascades; 

O'er terrac'd steeps rich cotton harvests wav'd, 

And smooth canals the rice-clad valley lav'd; 

Long rows of cypress parted all the land, 

And tall pagodas crown'd the river's strand!

Conway Castle - Panoramic View

Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway

I've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Film which can be seen as an extension of the brilliant free-to-access BFI Victorian Film archive. For example, she discusses Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway, a 'sedately paced' landscape film which the BFI website describes thus:

This beautiful film, shot in February 1898, has a dream-like quality and is hand tinted (possibly stencilled). It is believed to have been coloured some time after it was first shown as no contemporary reviews or advertisements refer to what would surely have been a major selling/talking point, 1898 being very early for coloured films.

This film was made in response to the first American phantom train ride film (by the British Mutoscope and Biograph's parent company, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), 'The Haverstraw Tunnel', which showed the scenery around the Hudson river and a tunnel and so delighted the audience that the British operation decided to make their own version, which also proved very popular - it showed not only in London but also in Rochester, New York, and then travelled all over Europe, still being shown in cinemas as late as 1910. This film is preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands.

Dixon's chapter 'Moving Images: Panoramas, Phantom Rides and Travel' explains that the first travel film made from a moving vehicle was Alexander Promio's Panorama du Grand Canal pris d'un bateaux, shot from a gondola on 25 October 1896. There are several versions of this uploaded on YouTube and I've embedded one of them below. Two years later Biograph produced Panoramic View of the Vegetable Market at Venice with a large format camera that gives a remarkably clear, almost 3D stereoscopic effect. Such films can be related in their subjects and composition to earlier picturesque views in art, as well as the more recent phenomenon of moving panoramas (views unfurled on rolled-up cotton with a lecturer explaining each scene). A little later we get more Italian travelogues with more than one shot - Visit to Pompeii (1901) is 8 minutes long and features a 360-degree pan of the ruins, a lovely misty view of Vesuvius with sheep providing motion in the foreground and then a ride up the volcano's funicular railway (another version of the 'phantom train ride'). One more to recommend you look at is Ride on the Peak Tramway (1900), filmed in Hong Kong, which has a grainy, mesmerising quality. 'As the tram crests the peak it's just possible to see the huge vista of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon laid out before us, as if viewed from the world's greatest natural rollercoaster.' 

 

 

Another interesting genre discussed in Bryony Dixon's book is the sea wave film. 'Nearly every report of early film screening mentions audience reaction to films of sea waves. Films showing the movement of water were very popular for their mesmeric effect as well as for the initial shock they gave audiences at their feeling of 'absolute realness''. She quotes a reaction to Birt Acres' early Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - "It is not too much to say that persons seated near the screen must have shrunk from the approaching billows which gathered, lifted their foam-tossed crests, curled and crashed down with an absolute realism from which nothing was wanted but the roar." Again there are obvious precedents in art and recent photography (Acres was himself a photographer). Cecil Hepworth's film Rough Seas Breaking on Rocks (1899) reminds me of the 'rough seas' genre of postcards I wrote about here in 2011.  Dixon lists other examples but notes in particular 'the beautiful Sea Cave Near Lisbon, filmed by Henry Short for Robert Paul in 1896, in which Portugal's famous Boca di Inferno (Mouth of Hell) frames the waves swirling and smashing against the rocks.'

 

Sea Cave Near Lisbon

The vault of light as the sun goes down

Philip Terry is an academic at Exeter specialising in the Oulipo and experimental writing - he recently edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo and described the experience in an article for The Irish Times. Carcanet have recently published his new book The Lascaux Notebooks, which they describe as 'the oldest poetry yet discovered, as written down or runed in the Ice Age in Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne, and now translated – tentatively – into English for the first time.' 

In his introduction, Terry claims to have come across the name of a local poet, Jean-Luc Champerret, while on holiday in the Charente. He was given a box of the poet's papers, which took some opening but were found to contain a set of notebooks. In these he found what appeared to be modernist poetry derived from 'diagrams reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy.' Champerret, Terry learned, had been sent into the Lascaux caves soon after their discovery in 1940 by his Resistance cell, in the hope that they might prove a good hideout. Getting there before the archaeologists, he noticed that some of the marks on the walls resembled a kind of code. Speculating that they were a form of Ice Age poetry, he noted them down and then over time managed to produce translations them by imagining the signs' likely meaning. Initial versions were simple grids of words but, like a translator from ancient Chinese, he added some connectors and imaginative interpretation to render them as French poems.

 

 

If Ice Age people had poetry, there would probably have been frequent mention of their landscape in it. The extract above from the list of Lascaux signs used in these poems includes markings interpreted as meaning forest tracks, rivers, mountains and caves. They are of course reminiscent of Chinese ideograms, which were so important for Ezra Pound and which I've discussed here before as natural signs - see 'Climbing Omei Mountain' and 'Water falling, drop by drop'. They also reminded me of the poetry many of us find in studying the legends of Ordnance Survey maps! 

I'll give one example here of a Lascaux poem, but Terry's books is pretty long - 400 pages - so I can't really do his whole project justice. The 3 x 3 grid poem I've reproduced at the start of this post is rendered as follows:

                                light              sun             night

                                birdsong       birdsong     waterfall

                                track             river           mountains 

This is turned initially into simple sentences with the addition of a few words, e.g. line two: 'the song / of the birds / by the waterfall.' The text then undergoes two more transformations (which it is tempting to describe as Oulipian). First a version is made with slightly extended vocabulary - 'the bright song / of the birds / by the waterfall'. Finally, inspired by this, a more recognisable poem is presented: 'The vault of light / as the sun goes down / before nightfall // suffused by the song / of the birds / by the waterfall's torrent // the twisting track / following the river / winds into the distance.' 

Sentences on the sea

I am looking forward to reading Experiments on Reality, a new collection of essays by Tim Robinson.  Googling him this weekend and looking at his Wikipedia page, it struck me that for all the praise his work has received, and the reverence in which he is held by those interested in writing about landscape, he doesn't seem to be as famous as you would think...  Oh well, here are three quotes from his book Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), which give me a chance to include a few photos from our stay on Inis Meáin six years ago.  The first quote concerns the way sailors use landmarks to navigate - for example, to reach one particular tiny offshore island, Robinson was told you needed to line up a dip in the Cliffs of Moher with the southern tip of Inis Meáin, and then align a small church with some boulders on a cliff edge (my photograph below was actually taken from Inis Meáin and you can see a dip in the distant Cliffs of Moher).

'The currach-fishermen had dozens of these runes to guide them to good fishing grounds and keep them out of danger. They often involve places the fishermen had never visited and to which they gave names their inhabitants would not recognize. ... A tiny patch of green grass clinging to the brinkof the cliff below Túr Mháirtín is well known to the Inis Meáin boatmen as An Réallóg, whereas few Árainn men would know it had a name at all ... Thus offshore usage recreates the surrounding landscapes; like a poet I know who finds his lines by glancing along titles on library shelves, so the fisherman low among the waves raises his eyes and picks words off the land with which to write sentences on the sea.'

My second quote links landscape, myth and music.  Robinson is talking about a sea cave which is said, improbably, to connect to a lake on the north coast.  The story goes that a piper once entered the cave and was never seen again, though his music can still sometimes be heard.

'Tom O'Flaherty mentions this legend in one of his autobiographical pieces.  According to him the piper was a fugitive outlaw from Connemara, and "anyone who hears his mournful music will before long be called to the Piper's Castle, from which none return."  ... I am told by a spelaeologist that similar legends are widespread in other countries too, connecting certain caves with the traditional musical instruments of the locality.  Orpheus himself was probably not the first musician to visit the Underworld.'

There are many paragraphs like these in Aran: Pilgrimage that could be quoted, but I will conclude here with a description of the idea underpinning his walk and his book, the attempt to take 'a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin's arc to its wave'.  To do this it is necessary to bring into unity 'geologies, biologies, myths, history, politics etcetera', not to mention personal associations.

'To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry.  Can such contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground?  At least one can speculate that the structure of condensation and ordering necessary to pass from such various types of knowledge to such an instant of insight would have the characteristics of a work of art, partaking of the individuality of the mind that bears it, yet with a density of content and richness of connectivity surpassing any state of mind.'  

At the end of the book, Robinson concludes that such an artwork has proven impossible to write.  But what does seem evident is that a sequence of steps can still amount to something: momentary propositions, taken with a freedom beyond academic or national boundaries.  There may be a likelihood of 'superficiality, restlessness, fickleness and transgression', but also 'by contraries, goes the possibility of recurrency, of frequentation, of a deep, an ever-deeper, dwelling in and on a place, a sum of whims and fancies totalling a constancy as of stone.'

Undercity

I have started the audiobook of Underland.  I listen to it underground, during my tube journeys to work, where claustrophobia comes from the crush of people rather than the confined space of the tunnels.  It is the first of Robert Macfarlane's books I have listened to and so far the reading is excellent and clear, although there is a point on my daily journey between Highbury and Kings Cross where the scream of the train is so loud that I have to reverse back a little way in order to move forward again.  The fifth chapter, 'Invisible Cities', is particularly resonant to anyone listening on the Underground, as it describes a weekend spent with urban explorers in the world beneath Paris.  At one point Rob is compelled to crawl through a crumbling tunnel which begins to rumble and shake with the passage of a train heading overhead to Montparnasse station.  It wasn't difficult to predict, as I did here a few years ago when Underland was a work in progress, that there would be some 'arduous activity' of this kind in the book.  But there are also rich seams of cultural history, like the pages devoted to Walter Benjamin (including his arduous final walk and memorial.)  And there's Italo Calvino of course: his 'Invisible City' of Eusapia had a copy of itself underground, a dead place that over time became more and more like the 'real city' above.  

Cities are increasingly vertical - it has been estimated that the infrastructure supporting urban life spans from 10,000m below sea level to 35,000 km above it.  But one day they will be gone. Then

'it is the invisible cities - the undercities - that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock.  The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence.  Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids - these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.'

Listening to this, I imagined our tube train preserved intact within the fossil record, along with other machines and artifacts that have been abandoned or buried underground.  In an earlier chapter, Rob is told that potash mining machines are simply left when they come to the end of their lifespan.  In their caves they will gradually be covered in translucent halite, burial shrouds of salt.  Another striking Ballardian image occurs in 'Invisible Cities', when Rob remembers a trip he made to a slate mine with the writer and urban explorer Bradley Garrett.  There, in a great flooded chamber, a shaft of sunlight illuminates an avalanche of abandoned vehicles. The oldest cars were the furthest down - at its base, 'a blue Cortina estate was poised as perfectly as a glacial erratic atop the moraine, with a moss-green Triumph Herald both its pivot and its point of repose.'   

Guardian readers may recall a 2013 article Rob wrote about urban exploration, describing his first excursion with Bradley Garrett.  Some of this material reappears in Underland and encountering it again made me wonder about the tube journey I was taking - who else might have passed through those tunnels during the night?  Towards the end of his 'place-hacking' day in London, Rob was worried he might miss his half-midnight train from King's Cross.

'"We'll get you there," replied Garrett. "In fact, if you want we'll walk you north up the tunnels, and pop you out of a manhole just by the station." I liked the thought of taking the tube rather than the Tube back to King's Cross. But I pitied whoever sat next to me on the way home.

Down the stream to the City of Camelot

Illustration from Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498

Source: John Rylands Library

I have written before here about the description of nature in Gawain and the Green Knight, with its journey through a wintry Britain, where 'ice-cold water poured from the clouds / and froze before it hit the grey ground.'  Sadly there are no such descriptions in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, even where landscape features in the story.  The lake, for example, into which Excalibur is thrown by Sir Bedevere, has to be imagined by the reader.  Tennyson, in his reworking of Malory, Idylls of the King, gives us more to go on: Bedevere takes zigzag paths past 'juts of pointed rock' until he comes to 'the shining levels of the lake' where there are dewy pebbles, bulrush beds and 'wild water lapping on the crag.'  Malory though, does make Bedevere say to the dying king that he had seen "nothing but waves and winds" a phrase somehow evocative because of its concision.  As I wrote here previously, these words begin a poem by France Horovitz, 'The Crooked Glen' - the title referring to 'Camboglana', the Celtic name for Birdoswald, one of the sites identified as the setting for Arthur's last battle.

The main way that landscape comes into Le Morte d'Arthur is through the book's locations, mentioned if not described, which cover the British Isles, France and sometimes further afield.  As a geographical region it feels both strange and familiar.  Often Malory himself provides a link with somewhere his readers will know, associating Camelot with Winchester, for example:

'Also Merlin let make by his subtilty that Balin's sword was put in a marble stone standing upright as great as a mill stone, and the stone hoved always above the water and did many years, and so by adventure it swam down the stream to the City of Camelot, that is in English Winchester.'

This sentence also illustrates again the way Malory's text might be unpacked and reimagined more fully - that magical stone heading downstream in a manner reminiscent of David Nash's Wooden Boulder.  As you read Malory you start to imagine an Arthurian Britain just below the surface, even in the Home Counties.  At one point he has King Arthur stay at the castle of Ascalot 'that is in English Guildford' - an identification probably due simply to its location between London and Arthur's intended destination, Winchester.

The topic of Arthurian topography is discussed by Geoffrey Ashe in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. He dismisses the idea that Camelot would have been an actual city, as opposed to a military headquarters: 'the claim of the Somerset hill fort Cadbury Castle carries unrivaled weight.'  There are places in Britain that may be the connected with a historical Arthur, like the ten battle sites mentioned by Nennius in his Historia Brittonum, and then there are places that are merely named for him (or, less frequently, Merlin, Tristram, Guenevere and Lancelot).  I mentioned a Welsh landscape feature, Arthur's Chair, in my abecadarian piece on the Itinerarium Kambriae of Gerald of Wales (1188).  This was a lofty spot with a well-shaped pool, fed by a spring, in which trout were sometimes seen.  Earlier in the century, Hermann of Tournai, travelling through Devon and Cornwall in 1113 encountered another Arthur's Chair and also Arthur's Oven (the latter may be what is now called King's Oven on Dartmoor).

Some Arthurian features are natural, others are ancient megaliths that have become linked to his legend.  In descending order of scale there are: a mountain - Ben Arthur in Scotland; the saddle-like hills that have suggested Seats and Chairs; five earthworks known as 'Round Tables'; and many stones - at least six called Arthur's Stone and eleven called Arthur's Quoit.  The idea of Arthur has been fused with local folklore in places, turning him into a giant. Thus, 'seated on King's Crags in Northumberland, he tossed a huge boulder at Guenevere on Queen's Crags - which are half a mile away.  It bounced off her comb and now lies on the ground between, showing the toothmarks.' Geoffrey Ashe goes on to describe the way this folkloric Arthur differs from the knight of Romance, in the manner of his survival after death.  In the chivalric stories, Arthur resides in the Isle of Avalon, but in folklore he sleeps with his knights in a cave.  Intriguingly though, these may both point to a common source deep in Celtic myth.  In 82 CE a Roman official in Britain (quoted by Plutarch) reported that the Britons believed in a god lying asleep in a cave, attended by spirits.  This was on an island, a warm and pleasant place "in the general direction of sunset".

Memoryscapes

I was pleased that Caught by the River made Frozen Air their Book of the Month, although they have now sneaked in a second one - The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris - a book it's been impossible to avoid this week, with coverage everywhere from the reviews pages to the Today programme.  There was a typically rich and thought-provoking essay by Robert Macfarlane on children, nature and reading in The Guardian, and I am tempted to set down my own reflections here, but they would be based on nothing more than personal experiences as a child and parent.

For fans of Macfarlane, The Lost Words will fill a gap while he completes Underland, a book that sounds from scattered interviews to be increasingly ambitious in scope.  Whatever it covers, it is certain to delight in language and the physical challenges of exploring a landscape.  In The Telegraph, two years ago, he described exploring the River Timavo which flows through the karst region of Slovenia and northern Italy. “I descended a 100ft doline, a sort of narrow, eroded vertical channel, with a 70-year-old Italian man called Sergio, who smoked a briarwood pipe all the way down. That was one of the most extreme places I have ever been: a great black river roaring out of a cave mouth on one side and disappearing down a rabbit hole on the other, and the sense of the earth’s surface above us.”

Alojzij Schaffenrath,  Postojna: view of the Great Cave, c. 1821

'The right names, well used, can act as portals.'  A doline is the name for a portal to the underland, and there are others too on the karstic plateau: foiba (a deep inverted funnel), abîme (a vertical shaft) uvala (a collection of sinkholes).  My only experience of descending into this world was on a family holiday to Yugoslavia, when we visited the spectacular Postojna cave system in Slovenia.  It felt as if I had suddenly entered the marvellous subterranean settings of my recent childhood reading: The Silver Chair, The Hobbit, Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  I can still recall the soundscape too - a a strange babel of amplified sound as competing tour groups listened to guides in the different languages of Europe.

As can be seen in the image above, tourism at Postojna stretches back to the early nineteenth century.  When Crown Prince Ferdinand visited in 1819, soon after the main caves were opened, he was greeted with a band and singers.  Perhaps the caves would have been too eerie, experienced in dripping silence.  They have subsequently hosted orchestras, jazz bands and even the La Scala chorus.  There is a long tradition of music making in caves and now, it seems, a new trend for concert halls themselves to be built underground.  I have written about caves and music before, so here I will conclude by returning to the surface and highlighting some recent music made in the karst landscape of Slovenia.

For Memoryscapes, the experimental folk trio Širom returned to the regions of Slovenia they grew up in and improvised outdoors, curious to see how the environment would affect what they played.  The film of the project (embedded below) begins with the construction of some bamboo balafons which they carry down into the hollow of the Bukovnik sinkhole.  As they sit under the trees, the camera pans slowly round, catching motes of light and the slight movement of branches in the breeze.  Watching this made me think that taking children into the woods to make and play instruments would be another way to reconnect them with nature.

On Mt Tolminski Migovec, the music is harsher and the surroundings cold and inhospitable.  In a mountain hut they do some more percussion with pots and pans (it looks like this would get annoying pretty quickly, as I know from having heard my own sons try it).  In the final segment, they sit surrounded by a sea of yellow flowers; if the music was as pretty as the visuals it would be too much to take.  The film ends by a watermill, with an insistent rhythmic sound, like hundreds of squeaky gears and cog wheels.  Eventually the music fades and breaks apart, leaving nothing but sunlight on the water.

The Green Ray

'In America they call it the green flash. When the sun sets, in a very clear horizon, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles, and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing it. The slowest ray is the blue ray, which comes across as green when the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions. It’s the last ray as the sun recedes with the curvature of the earth.' - Tacita Dean, Bomb Magazine, 2006

Still from one of several videos of the phenomenon that have been 

uploaded to YouTube, this one by Noel Barlau

The quote above comes from a conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides, who briefly refers to the green ray in his novel Middlesex...  “They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray and I grabbed my camera and I got it.”  In the interview Eugenides asks Tacita Dean about the elusiveness of the phenomenon in her film The Green Ray.  "I think you said that you got the green ray in the film, but it never appears in any single frame. But you can see it momentarily when the film is running. Is that right?"  "Yes. The film is 24 frames a second but you can’t isolate a single frame that has it.  He goes on to ask her whether everybody sees the green ray when they see the film.  "No. That’s what’s nice about it, because otherwise the film would just be about a phenomenon. But in the end it’s more about perception and faith, I think."

From Tacita Dean's video, The Green Ray (2001)

I first heard of the green ray when Eric Rohmer's beautiful film was released in 1986.  Delphine, alone on her summer holiday and nervous of any new intimacy after a split with her boyfriend, overhears a group discussing a novel by Jules Verne, The Green Ray (1882).  One of them says that "when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others too."  Later she sees a beach cafe named Le Rayon Vert and at the end of the film, when she finally meets an appealing young man (they both like Dostoyevsky), she asks him to sit with her and watch the sunset over the sea.  What follows is, according to Gilbert Adair in his book about the first century of cinema, Flickers, 'the tiniest and most moving special effect in the history of cinema.'  Tacita Dean was less impressed: "it’s very heavy-handed; it’s like this huge, green thing. I mean, the real green ray makes your heart miss a beat, because you look, you look, you look. And then you see it so suddenly, and it’s gone. Somehow rapidity is part of its beauty."

From Eric Rohmer's film, The Green Ray (1986)

I have not read Verne's novel and it is hard to find any reviews that wholeheartedly recommend it - see for example the description on with hidden noise: 'as fiction it is sorely disappointing'.  In Jules Verne, Geography and Nineteenth Century Scotland, Ian B. Thompson describes it as the slightest of his three Scottish novels; however, it is informed by Verne's 'passion for sea travel and is meticulous in the nautical, meteorological and geographical detail of the journey.'  At the climax of the story the two lovers, having repeatedly failed to glimpse a green ray, miss seeing it because they only have eyes for each other.  Verne was clearly fascinated by the idea - in an impressive Annotated bibliography of mirages, green flashes, atmospheric refraction, etc., Andrew T. Young refers to an earlier mention of the green ray in Verne's novel Les Indes Noires (1877).  This is the earliest fictional reference in the bibliography, but the phenomenon was noted by other nineteenth century writers, like J. A. Froud, whose account of a voyage to South Africa describes a sunset on 'the sea calm as Torbay in stillest summer ... The disk, as it touched the horizon, was deep crimson. As the last edge of the rim disappeared there came a flash, lasting for a second, of dazzling green - the creation I suppose of my own eyes.'

I will end here with another art form, music.  Gavin Bryars has described witnessing the green ray in Southern California, but his 1991 composition refers back to the setting for Verne's novel.  'This part of Western Scotland is also the place where certain piping traditions originated. Male pipers practised in one cave on the seashore, females in another ( the "piper's cave" and the "pigeon's cave"). As they played their laments at twilight a triangulation, similar to that in the Verne story (male-ray-female) may well have occurred without the knowledge of the innocent participants, hence the sequence of simultaneous laments in the coda.'   The clip below is the first half of The Green Ray - I can't find anything to embed that includes the coda, with its laments for saxophone, cor anglais, French horn, and solo violin.  You can buy or hear the whole piece elsewhere of course, but perhaps it is appropriate to the theme that this should be left here to the imagination.

The Seven Wonders of the Peak

I've been reading A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe (3 vols, 1724-6), written whilst he was living at 'a very handsome house' just up the road from me here in Stoke Newington.  It is a very handsome edition,^* published by Yale University Press in 1991 and illustrated with 319 contemporary engravings and watercolours, which set me back me just £4.95 in the little second hand bookshop a few yards from the Daniel Defoe Pub.   There is much I might say about it here but I want to focus on Defoe's travels in the Peak District at the beginning of Volume 3, because it reveals much about his no-nonsense attitude to landscape.  The earlier volumes covering London and the South and are full of descriptions of farming, commerce and trade, thriving market towns and expanding cities.  In Derbyshire he remains more fascinated with human activity and industry than the beauties of the scenery - coal and lead mining and the operation of a throwster's mill (for silk throwing), whose owner nearly came to grief once showing some friends his impressive water wheel.^†  And when his narrative eventually gets to the spectacular natural phenomena of The Peak, he goes out of his way to downplay them.

The first 'Wonder of the Peak' he dismisses is the baths at Buxton - 'nothing at all; nor is it any thing but what is frequent in such mountainous countries as this is, in many parts of the world.'  Next, at Poole's Hole, he observes that 'the wit that has been spent upon this vault or cave in the earth, had been well enough to raise the expectation of strangers, and bring fools a great way to creep into it.'  Earlier writers had gone over the top in their praise: 'Dr. Leigh spends some time in admiring the spangled roof. Cotton and Hobbes are most ridiculously and outrageously witty upon it. Dr. Leigh calls it fret work, organ, and choir work.'  But 'were any part of the roof or arch of this vault to be seen by a clear light, there would be no more beauty on it than on the back of a chimney; for, in short, the stone is coarse, slimy, with the constant wet, dirty and dull.'  A famous spring is 'a poor thing indeed to make a wonder of'; nor is The Devil's Arse all it has been cracked up to be (I referred to this cave here before in connection with Thomas Hobbes' book in praise of The Seven Wonders).  As for Mam Tor, 'the sum of the whole wonder is this, That there is a very high hill, nay, I will add (that I may make the most of the story, and that it may appear as much like a wonder as I can) an exceeding high hill. But this in a country which is all over hills, cannot be much of a wonder, because also there are several higher hills in the Peak than that, only not just there.'

Page from The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton (1741, written 1681)

But Defoe doesn't leave the Peak District without praising two of its sights, 'one a wonder of nature, the other of art.'  The extraordinary and mysterious Elden Hole is a 'frightful chasme' whose 'opening goes directly down perpendicular into the earth, and perhaps to the center. ... What Nature meant in leaving this window open into the infernal world, if the place lies that way, we cannot tell: But it must be said, there is something of horror upon the very imagination, when one does but look into it.'  And then, by contrast, there is the Duke of Devonshire's house at Chatsworth, whose beautiful new garden required some serious landscaping.  'To make a clear vista or prospect beyond into the flat country, towards Hardwick, another seat of the same owner, the duke, to whom what others thought impossible, was not only made practicable, but easy, removed, and perfectly carried away a great mountain that stood in the way, and which interrupted the prospect.'  The result is a house and garden that delight the traveller as a haven of civilisation in a wild place (an emotion I've always associated with Tolkien's Rivendell). 

'Nothing can be more surprising of its kind, than for a stranger coming from the north, suppose from Sheffield in Yorkshire, for that is the first town of note, and wandering or labouring to pass this difficult desert country, and seeing no end of it, and almost discouraged and beaten out with the fatigue of it, (just such was our case) on a sudden the guide brings him to this precipice, where he looks down from a frightful heighth, and a comfortless, barren, and, as he thought, endless moor, into the most delightful valley, with the most pleasant garden, and most beautiful palace in the world: If contraries illustrate, and the place can admit of any illustration, it must needs add to the splendor of the situation, and to the beauty of the building, and I must say (with which I will close my short observation) if there is any wonder in Chatsworth, it is, that any man who had a genius suitable to so magnificent a design, who could lay out the plan for such a house, and had a fund to support the charge, would build it in such a place where the mountains insult the clouds, intercept the sun, and would threaten, were earthquakes frequent here, to bury the very towns, much more the house, in their ruins.'

 J. Kip after L. Knyff, Birdseye View of Chatsworth House, c. 1707

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^* A reviewer for the London Review of Books felt this edition 'breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’' and questions the way it has been abridged.  Nowadays it is of course possible to read the original unabridged version online.

^† 'Keeping his eye rather upon what he pointed at with his fingers than what he stept upon with his feet, he stepp'd awry and slipt into the river.  He was so very close to the sluice which let the water out upon the wheel, and which was then pulled up, that tho' help was just at hand, there was no taking hold of him, till by the force of the water he was carried through, and pushed just under the large wheel, which was then going round at a great rate. The body being thus forc'd in between two of the plashers of the wheel, stopt the motion for a little while, till the water pushing hard to force its way, the plasher beyond him gave way and broke; upon which the wheel went again, and, like Jonah's whale, spewed him out, not upon dry land, but into that part they call the apron, and so to the mill-tail, where he was taken up, and received no hurt at all.'

Sonic Waters and Fantastic Caverns

I have written here before about composers who have sought to impress the environment into their music by burying instruments in the earth (Richard Skelton) or immersing recordings in river water (Rob St. John).  A desire to enter into the landscape may also lie behind music that has been created underwater or in caves beneath the ground.  I have mentioned a few examples of the latter before, but there is now a relatively long history to these genres of landscape music and so I thought I would highlight here some examples from over thirty years ago, beginning with the work of Michel Redolfi, whose Pacific Tubular Waves / Immersion was recently reissued by Editions Mego.  Pacific Tubular Waves (1979) is not an underwater piece - it was 'inspired by the oceanic horizons of San Diego' - but it became the raw material for Immersion (1980).  For this, Redolfi played his earlier piece through a sonar loudspeaker underwater, so that it was 'shuffled by the waves and unexpected filtering effects resulted from its passing through clouds of foam.  Its dispersion at sea by currents would send back incredibly smooth harmonic echoes.'  If he had left a recording of Immersion in the sea it might have been brought up years later, scoured by the underwater currents but still usable as the basis for a third version of this composition.

In 1981 Redolfi's Sonic Waters concert was broadcast underwater in the Pacific for an audience who could experience it floating on the surface or submerged in diving suits.  However, as Stefan Helmreich has pointed out, this concert was 'accompanied by campy sea creaturey devices, such as the giant colorful “jellyfish” that kept a low-frequency speaker afloat in La Jolla Cove. Such playfulness is a reminder that Redolfi does not imagine crustaceans, fish, or marine mammals as audiences ... Redolfi’s approach looks similar to that of the Florida Keys underwater music festival. Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009, the festival offers to scuba divers music played over Lubell Laboratory speakers attached to boats floating near the reef.  Attendees dress up as fish.'  There is an ocean of difference between that festival's 'reef rockstars, "Paul McCarpney" and "Ringo Starfish"' performing sea-themed pop songs and the experimental underwater investigations of modern sound artists like Jana Winderen.  I can't help feeling there must be potential between these extremes for new forms of site-specific undersea composition and performance in the future. 

Over the last few decades most of Redolfi's concerts (see clip above) have taken place in swimming pools, where the emphasis is on the unusual auditory experience rather than the character of the sea. However, the ambience and special qualities of these locations will never be irrelevant.  The pools chosen by Redolfi and others like the Wetsounds organisation or Max Neuhaus, the pioneer in this field, will have had their own acoustic properties and historical associations.  Similarly, performances in cave-like spaces in cities or industrial locations can be as atmospheric as concerts in natural caverns.  As with the underwater composers, much of the motivation for seeking out resonant underground spaces has been to make use of their unique sound properties - the Deep Listening Band, for example, have played in the giant Fort Worden Cistern which has a 45 second reverberation time.  But caves have a deeper significance, having been the sites for music making since prehistoric times, a point brought home to me recently by the discovery of an ancient lyre in a cave on Skye.  Here there is no direct parallel with performing underwater, although if there is an atavistic urge to make subterranean music, there may be an even more profound source for subaquatic music, since all of us begin life experiencing sound and music immersed in amniotic fluid.

Back in the late 1950s (when the real Paul McCartney was making his first appearances at the Cavern club with The Quarrymen), the Great Stalacpipe Organ, designed by Leland W. Sprinkle, was under construction at the Luray Caverns in Virginia.  Although described as ‘the largest natural musical instrument in the world’ its design involved altering the shape of some of the stalactites.  Music had actually been performed in this sonorous cave (as the postcard above from 1906 below shows) almost since its discovery in 1878.  A delegation from the Smithsonian Institution were surprised on an 1880 tour when co-discoverer Andrew Campbell picked out a tune on the rock formation that was later used for the Organ.  There are no other Stalacpipe Organs, but many other American caves have been settings for concerts: Bristow Cave, Tennessee, the Great Saltpeter Cave, Kentucky, Longhorn Cavern, Texas.  Worth mentioning here if only for its cover is a live recording from 1968, The Fantastic Thrashers at Fantastic Caverns.  According to its sleeve notes, 'the underground auditorium was packed and jammed. The dripping water, the underground river in the background, the weird effect of the lights off moist stalagmites were all made to come alive by the sparkling sound of the Thrashers.'

Then, in a very different vein, there was Don Cherry, who recorded two improvisations at the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in 1978.   Here is Anna Mayo's description (from the useful Caveinspiredmusic site)

“On a morning in early October I watched the great free jazzman Don Cherry as he scaled a ledge high on the sheer wall of the Longest Cave in the World and played the rocks like a xylophone. Far below, our guide had fired up two kerosene lanterns so that we were able to doff our miners’ hats. Cherry, on the ledge, gave off vibes of the leopard-spirit of the Ngbe tribe as he improvised a roller-coaster of sound. Throughout Cherry’s performance, producer Verna Gillis sat on the cave floor, at one with her Stellavox tape recorder, earphones like a ceremonial headdress... Adjusting the AKG microphone... was sculptor Bradford Graves. Cherry darted from one rock to another, striking them with two hickory branches he’d brought along at the guide’s suggestion.”

Perhaps improvisers are best suited to exploring the musical possibilities of cave systems.  The Summartónar festival has brought jazz musicians like John Tchicai to perform to an audience in small boats in the sea caves of the Faroe Islands.  However, it is more usual to find show caves used as natural halls for the staging of more traditional concerts.  There are several such venues in Germany, including the cavern at Hohler Fels where, some 35,000 years ago, Palaeolithic musicians left behind bone and ivory flutes.  In Lebanon the Jeïta caves were opened for concerts in 1969 and closed a decade later during the Civil War, its passages converted into a munitions store.  Thus the distinction between caves and buildings becomes blurred - 'natural' spaces cease to become natural when they are discovered.  My last example below below combines natural and electronic sounds.  It is part of Jeïta ou Murmure des eaux (1970), a composition by François Bayle, who performed the inaugural concert at the the Jeïta caves.  When he found back in Paris that some of the field recordings he made in the cave were not good enough for his purposes he decided to replace them with 'beautiful water sounds' recorded in the bathroom of the studio.

The sea is never far

'Narrated in fruity tones by future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Figures in a Landscape offers a poetic portrait of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the otherworldly Cornwall landscapes that inspired her work.'  This is how the BFI Mediatheque describes Dudley Shaw Ashton's short film and you can hear that plummy voice in the extract below, along with the 'haunting score' by Hepworth's friend Priaulx Rainer.  It would be easy to assume that the words in the film are Day Lewis's but in fact they were written by Jacquetta Hawkes, whose remarkable book on Britain, A Land, had appeared two years earlier.  The film begins with shots of the sea and coast and the words I have quoted below (punctuation my own), in which landscape, through the forces of wave and wind, is figured as a natural sculptor.  It then traces the ways that stone has taken on 'forms rising in the minds of man', from stone circles to churches and mines, standing out initially from their settings until 'seasons and centuries claimed them for the landscape.'

 

"Cornwall, a horn of rock, its point thrust out into the sea. Smooth or ribbed with waves, pale deep blue or angry dark, the sea lies round about it and from three sides sends up its mirrored light. Here is Penwith, the moors narrowing to Lands End, from the sea coast to the north it is not far across the rusty moors, where the rocks break through the bracken, not far to where the sea lies to the south. The sea is never far. It shapes the rocks, sometimes fingering them gently, sometimes forging them with long thundering blows, hollowing those caves where waves revolve in darkness.

"Or it cuts arches where the bright see light stares through above the waters, the wind blows upon the skin of the sea until it creeps and shivers. It follows behind the relentless roll of the tides. The wind passes its hand across the moors, ordering the grasses, smoothing the rocks beneath. Autumn, winter, spring and summer, the wind and the sea carve the rocks, whittling their images. They are at it now and have been at it a million million years, beyond the reach of clocks."

Whilst the dominant metaphor here may be nature as sculptor, it is hard not to read a sexual element into this imagery.  I mentioned this in an earlier post on Jacquetta Hawkes, whose lover J. B. Priestley is quoted as having said of her "What a woman — ice without and fire within!"  Ashton's visual imagery echoes the script with shots of standing forms and foaming waves, but what is most distinctive is the way he uses Hepworth's sculptures, placing them around the landscape in compositions that have a surreal quality (see below).  The clip embedded here shows Hepworth in her St Ives garden (which Priaulx Rainer helped design), at work with her mallets and files, but around the three minute mark we see a finished piece lying on the sand to be polished by the waves.  "The waves beat on the stone and the yielding wood, claiming them back from the small plans of man, they give them the shape of the earth and its tides, but the carver cuts deeper with her seeing eye."

Barbara Hepworth's Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) (1940) 

in front of mounds of china clay in a scene from Figures in a Landscape.

   "But others came cheerfully to dig for china clay. They piled the dark moors with soft white cones that stood in the staring light of the sea, bright light that breaks into colour."

A new exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World starts next week at Tate Britain and it will focus on the way her work has been presented or imagined in different contexts, including the landscape. 

Landmarks

You might feel you have read enough about Landmarks over the last few days - an essay by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian introducing his new book (which, as I write this, has been 'shared' 39,000 times), reviews, excerpts, interviews, even an unfunny parody.  I will not add much to all this here, although as the book explores the literature of landscape as well as its language, there are many pages it would be nice to quote.  I will restrict myself to one example, from a chapter devoted to 'Edgelands', where Richard Jefferies (writing in 1883) is read as a philosopher of vision, anticipating geography's phenomenological turn and those contemporary artists and authors who approach landscape as bodily experience.

'Often Jefferies wobbles our sense of reliable vision, showing the impossibility of achieving a privileged position of perception: 'Even trees which have some semblance of balance in form are not really so, and as you walk round them so their outline changes.'   If you 'walk all round [a] meadow ... still no vantage point can be found where the herbage groups itself, whence a scheme of colour is perceivable.'  Repeatedly, phenomena refuse to resolve into order: a wind blowing across water makes 'wavelets' that 'form no design; watch the sheeny maze as long as one will, the eye cannot get at the clue, and so unwound the pattern.''

The pattern may be indiscernible but the phenomenon can be named.  In Landmarks the 'Waterlands' glossary offers for wind-blown ripples on the surface of water the word cockles.  In Gaelic there is a term for the 'first slight ruffling of the water after a calm' (caitein) and in Scots there is a word for 'a splashing or dashing in small waves or ripple' (jabble).  Jefferies worried that we fail even to see such things and it is the details in landscape that Landmarks celebrates, rather than its broad sweep.  Under 'Pools, Ponds and Lakes' the words for the largest bodies of water are well-known to anyone who has used a map in the British Isles - llyn, loch, lough, tarn.  But focus down and you reach less familiar terms - large ponds are grimmers and hassocks, small ponds are mardles and pulks, puddles are swidges and blatters, little puddles are pudges.  The Gaelic word lodan can mean both a little pool and 'water in one's shoe.'

Some Robert Macfarlane readers coming to this after his previous books may expect more action and less quotation.  No doubt there will some arduous activity in Underland, the book he is now writing on caves.  In Landmarks he does praise the 'unostentacious bravery' of Roger Deakin, borne along in the swell of a tide, 'locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape', and he quotes the 'exceptionally intrepid' John Muir, surfing an avalanche in the Sierra Nevada ('on no part of the rush was I buried.  I was only moderately imbedded on the surface or at times a little below it...')  However, the only hint of risk-taking is in the Cumbrian fells where Richard Skelton invites him to explore a tunnel in an old quarry.  Earlier that day, before the rain set in, Robert had been reading a story (in Richard's journal Reliquiae) from The Kalevala in which a similar cleft in a hillside must be entered by the hero to find 'the lost words'.  The coincidence provokes 'an eerie tremor of recognition'.  They explore this tunnel by the light of a weak torch as water courses through the roof, 'showing silver in the beam, like silk.'  After a few minutes they retrace their footsteps and return to the path, now running with water, wet but unscathed.  'I could feel feel rain streaming down the inside of my trousers and into my shoes.'  Water in one's shoe - lodan.

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This blog is listed under the heading 'On Language and Landscape' in the Landmarks select bibliography.  The best way to find relevant posts here is to click on the 'language' label, although I suspect I have not been rigorously consistent in the way it has been used.  I have tended to append it to posts talking about words themselves, like the one I wrote this week on the old rune poems, but other entries may also be of interest, like those I wrote earlier this month on landscape as metaphor in the poetry of John Donne and the Chan Buddhist monks of China.  Looking back I see that the second post I ever wrote on this blog, back in 2005, was on language and landscape.  It quotes one of the books that influenced Landmarks, Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.  'For Lopez, language is not imposed on the landscape, it evolves from a conversation, and “a long-lived enquiry produces a discriminating language”.'

The Broken Road

The latest New York Review of Books carries a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn on Patrick Leigh Fermor and the posthumous publication of The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos.  Apparently Lawrence Durrell once referred to the 'truffled style and dense plumage' of Leigh Fermor’s prose and Mendelsohn suggests that 'what you think of his writing, and indeed what you make of the final instalment of his most beloved work, depends on your taste for truffles and feathers.'  Well I'm certainly not averse to them now and again, and I found myself as entranced by this volume as I had been by the earlier two (which have been mentioned here before).  Some feathers feature in this landscape description, which comes towards the end of the book, in December 1934, when PLF is just days away from his final destination and has reached the wooded slopes on the edge of the Black Sea.

'Downhill at the end of plunging tunnels of trunks and branches and over the foliage of the ledges, the lowest stems of which seemed almost rooted in the sea, the European continent fell to fragments in spikes and small tufted islets far below, standing in translucent, pale green water, which darkened as it receded from the rocks to bottle green and the blue of peacock's neck feathers and fled away to the skyline.  The almost still water was stirred by incoming creases as slight as a breath on silk, just enough to hem the join of rock and water with a thin bracelet of white, but too little to interfere with the symmetry of the semi- and three-quarter circles that the rocks sent spinning slowly out to sea again.  Only the ghost of their sigh floated up through the mews and the wheeling sunlit wings of the seagulls.'

As he continues through these woods, the late afternoon sun strikes them at an angle parallel to their slope, 'filling the clearings and striking the tree-boles and the foliage with layers of wintry gold, hanging rafts of light in the leaves, falling through the wood in long spokes and breaking up the loops of shadow over the surface of the water with horizontal windows of radiance.'  This perfect moment of solitude and peace in the 'celestial light' is full of the promise of what he imagines he will soon experience in the islands of the Aegean.  Later that day however, after the sun has set, he becomes lost among the rocky headlands, slips into a freezing pool, drops his torch and almost gives up hope before stumbling upon a cave where a group of shepherds and seamen revive him with fish, lentils and raki.  As Neil Ascherson points out in his LRB review, the description of what follows - a 'night of mighty bardic song, feasting and ancient dances' - may not be literally true to what happened on the journey, but it constitutes one of the book's most memorable set pieces. The evening finally ends with firelight ebbing on the walls and the stalactites while this extraordinary young traveller, unable to sleep, lies looking up at a high gap in the cave's wall where the stars of Orion are visible, blazing 'like a slanting lozenge of ice-crystals.'

Three-Mountain Pass

'Autumn Landscape'

A sample page from Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương 

made available on translator John Balaban's website.

When the Copper Canyon Press published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương, the New York Times discussed it in its Technology section.  'A nearly extinct ideographic script known as Nôm, similar to Chinese but representing Vietnamese, was painstakingly put into a computer program, and thus did the works of Hồ arrive in Western bookstores. Considered one of Vietnam's greatest poets, Hồ was born in the late 1700's and wrote with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic undertones for her time.  Hồ's work really ''jumped from woodcut to digitization, skipping the whole Gutenberg process,'' said John Balaban, the North Carolina poet who translated her folk poems and helped oversee their presentation in the strikingly designed book. Each poem is presented in three versions, across facing pages: in the original Nôm, in modern romanized Vietnamese, and in English.'  One of these is shown above; another translation is reprinted in full at the Smith College Poetry Center site, so hopefully it is OK to include it here:

Three-Mountain Pass

A cliff face. Another. And still a third.
Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:

the cavern’s red door, the ridge’s narrow cleft,
the black knoll bearded with little mosses?

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

At first site this is a simple landscape poem but as the New York Times notes, Hồ's poems tend to have 'shockingly erotic undertones'.  This is partly facilitated by the tonal nature of Vietnamese - words can take on second meanings depending merely on the pitch of each syllable.  In John Balaban's notes to accompany 'Three-Mountain Pass', he says that Maurice Durand, a French-Vietnamese scholar whose edition of  Hồ's poems remained incomplete at his death in 1966, thought that the poem probably describes the Đèo Tam Điệp mountains, 'but, he adds innocently, "l'on n'a pas de grotte avec une grande ouverture."  While an actual landscape may have suggested this poem ... the particular contours, the active pine and willow constitute a sexual landscape as well. Pines traditionally stand for men; willows for women.'  'Three-Mountain Pass' is about the compulsion to explore both the landscape and the body - perhaps, it suggests, the differences are no more than a matter of tone.

Envirographic instruments

Last week I visited the Architectural Association Gallery in London, where there is an exhibition devoted to the British Exploratory Land Archive, a collaboration between architects Mark Smout & Laura Allen (Smout Allen) and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG.  You probably all know BLDGBLOG, but in case not, my earlier post 'Landscape Futures' included a few of its ideas, taken from The BLDGBLOG Book.  One of these, I now see, was that Rachel Whiteread should begin filling whole cave systems with plaster to create monumental sculptures.  This exhibition gives an idea of what that might look like, in the shape of a 3D-printed rendering of the Nottingham Cave systems.  These tunnels in the 'frozen Sahara' beneath the city were explored in a long BLDGBLOG post last year.  The exhibit's white plastic gives their warm desert sandstone the appearance of ice.  The model reveals a hidden structure to the caves which, I imagine, would be difficult to describe even by someone familiar with their twisting underground passages.

BELA call this work 'a Speleological Pantograph for the aboveground reproduction of subterranean spaces, objects and volumes. Although functioning very much like a traditional pantograph, this device will instead act three-dimensionally, connected to tools of volumetric analysis installed in underground spaces, such as caves, mines and basements, in order to reproduce those spaces on the Earth's surface.'  Imagining the reality of Nottingham's old sand mines from a pale plastic facsimile might seem as futile as trying to envisage a living snake on the basis of its discarded skin.  But the pantograph, in rescaling an object, always alters it (imagine how Rachel Whiteread's sculptures would fail if they were reduced in size).  The Tate, incidentally, have an etching, Head, by Eduardo Paolozzi in which he used a pantograph 'assembled wrongly to distort his original drawing by curving and elongating it.'  Presumably it would be possible to reprogram the Speleological Pantograph in order to create an uncanny transformation of some well-known underground space.

This photograph shows another speculative envirographic instrument being tested in the slate spoil heaps of North Wales.  It is a 'Clinometer', which 'combines 2D and 3D graphic mapping languages into a faceted 3D form composed of nine triangular aluminium sheets, upon which hanging weights are fixed. The device can be assembled in numerous configurations, using a bungee cord laced across the face of the sheets through eyelets along their edges and lever arms attached to the weights.' How would this actually work, I wondered, looking at the stack of metal triangles on the floor of the gallery.  This might simply reveal my ignorance of survey techniques, or it may be entirely missing the point, like asking how Tarkovsky's Stalker navigates the Zone by throwing bolts.  Looking at the photograph above, the Clinometer seems to operate through some metonymic principle, unfolding itself to resemble a fragment of the landscape.  And you can imagine its aluminium surfaces reflecting the surrounding spoil heaps, like the zig-zag mirror piece Robert Smithson made in 1969 at an abandoned open-cast mine further south at Tredegar. 

The exhibition includes photographs of other instruments in situ.  A Capture Blanket for soil-remediation on the side of Parys Mountain resembles the spent parachute of a planetary probe.  A Sniffer for aerosol sampling in a field of corn gave me the idea for an anti-hayfever device (yes, I write as a sufferer...)  However, BELA are also thinking about installing instruments on a larger scale where they 'become indistinguishable from landscapes'.  The Flywheel Reservoir (below), designed for Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary, would be 'a constellation of architectural features, geological augmentations and topographic ornaments that 'harvests' and smooths the fluctuating electrical supply' generated by the London Array, the world's largest offshore wind farm.  The model resembles Walter De Maria's Lightning Field.  'Power levels and flywheel capacity is displayed in an elevated point cloud of laser light that ebbs and flows in the air like a mist over the landscape.' 

It was mist over the Isle of Sheppey that reduced visibility and caused a 130 vehicle pile up recently on its new road bridge (sixty people were injured but none killed).  Thinking of this makes me wonder how safe a vast landscape battery under the island would be.  BELA worked on the design with Williams Hybrid Power whose flywheel technology was developed for Williams Formula 1 cars.  The island in their architectural model resembles a circuit board and beneath the table (under the bonnet, as it were) wires dangle, waiting to be connected.  What kind of subterranean architecture would be needed to keep the 'garden of flywheels' going?  Perhaps like the old slate and sand mines this site too would eventually be abandoned, left for exploration by future architects and then taken as inspiration for a new cycle of landscape speculations.