Lochan Eck

 

Alec Finlay has two new books out - here I am holding one of them, ready for borrowing at the National Poetry Library in London. Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea features condensed landscapes in the form of ‘place-name poems’, one of which uses a phrase I gave as a title to my book on cliffs: 'the first light greets / the frozen air' (Abergeldie - Brightmouth). These originally appeared in gathering: a place-aware guide to the Cairngorms - there is more information on the Hauser & Wirth website. I was interested to read some of the autobiographical poems in Sealions, including one about Sweeney's Bothy, an artist retreat on the Isle of Eigg which I described here in 2014. There is also a group of poems about Stonypath, the garden designed and maintained by Alec's parents Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Here is one in which he remembers the lochan named in his honour.

LOCHAN ECK 

I miss the skimming
swallows
over the dark lochan 

the waters where I swam
eye-to-eye 
with the blue dragonfly

Alec's other recent collection The Walkative Revolution, published by the Guillemot Press, is a book that takes on ableist attitudes to walking. It is a welcome change from reading about the arduous treks of certain nature writers, which can make even those of us without disabilities feel like we are missing out (see also my comments on the miles clocked up by Richard Long...)  ME and long Covid have reduced Alec's ability to walk, but 'as a ‘not-walker’, the joys of toddling into the fringe of a wood, or along a short beach, are heartfelt and healing. Like so much writing, these texts attempt to heal the experience of exile.' There are poems about paths and proxy walks, a manifesto for minor walks and designs for walking sticks (including a fork-shaped one for Sweeney with the words TIME and TINE). One of the poems concludes 'a chapter of autobiography: Landscapes I Have Sat In' - which reminded me of the Tate's current Edward Burra exhibition, for reasons I'll explain in my next blog post. The book ends with a poem to celebrate the inaugural Day of Access (June 15, 2019), when four disabled people were driven up to an altitude of 720m. 

The Walkative Revolution also describes a new form of 'disability poetics' that Alec has devised: the conspectus. This is explained on the Day of Access blog: 

'Conspectus arose from a frustration that my disability, ME, prevented me walking over and through hilly landscapes. I loved to be in wild places, but my experience of them was bittersweet. ... I found myself, sat on a hillock, an OS map in my hand, knowing I couldn't walk any further, trying to find a new way to belong in the landscape. I began to identify the various summits that surrounded me, picking them out by name. Although I was experiencing distance, altitude, and inaccessibility, from a static viewpoint, I could feel an imaginative connection to the landscape.'

Thus arose a form of 'visual poem / composed from the names of hills / defining the view from a single location ... the conspectus is a place to gaze at the landscape; / a viewpoint where the terrain opens itself to the viewer; / where the eye threads in and out of the circle of hills; /where place-names suggest an ecological narrative.'

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!

A grassy couch

I have written here often about the importance of a viewing point - one of the pleasures of any walk is finding a natural seat from which to survey the scene in comfort. On occasions, my family have expressed frustration at my desire to wait and find just the right circle of rocks or inviting, mossy logs, away from other people, where we can finally crack open a picnic. Ideally these perches allow for both convivial conversation and contemplation of the landscape (and are close enough together to facilitate the sharing of crisps). Sometimes a small bit of harmless rearrangement is required - moving an uncomfortable stone or temporarily pinning back a branch. Those lucky enough to live near the countryside will have favourite natural seats, outcrops of nature that connect the walker with the land; here in the city we have street furniture and park benches that are more like extensions of the surrounding buildings. 

Resting on rocks in the Lake District

I have been reading an old article published by the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America in September 1945 (the month the war ended), intrigued by its mildly amusing title, 'The Symbol of the Sod-Seat in Coleridge' (although I don't think the word 'sod' has any offensive connotations in American English). In this essay, Charles S. Bouslog identifies a 'mild obsession with sod-seats' in the early writings of Coleridge and the Wordsworths. For example, there is the Hermit who sees the ship of the Ancient Mariner from his vantage point: 'He kneels at morn, and noon and eve- / He hath a cushion plump: / It is the moss that wholly hides / The rotted old oak-stump.' And there is Coleridge's 'Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath', a poem I talked about in one of my earliest blog posts : 'Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss, / A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.'

Bouslog identifies three actual sod-seats that the Romantic poets referred to in their writings: 'the "Windy Brow" seat, the orchard seat at Dove Cottage, and the "sod-built seat of Camomile" made for Sara Hutchinson.

• Wordsworth's 'Inscription for a Seat by the Pathway Side Ascending to Windy Brow' warns readers to imagine the relief older walkers will feel on finding this seat (although surely we all enjoy the 'excuse' to rest that a seat with a good view affords...) There is a later 'version' of this poem published under Coleridge's name, 'Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side Halfway up a Steep Hill Facing South' which describes the ascent of those bent double with weak frames until 'at last / They gain this / wished-for turf, this seat of sods'. Here they 'Repose, and, well admonished, ponder here / On final rest.

• At Grasmere on September 1, 1800, Dorothy recorded that "after dinner Coleridge discovered a rock-seat in the orchard. Cleared away the brambles. Coleridge obliged to go to bed after tea." They must have managed the job eventually, with or without Coleridge, because on October 22 "C. and I went to look at the prospect from his seat." The following year there is an idyllic scene in May as William and Dorothy sowed "scarlet beans in the orchard, and read Henry V there. William lay on his back on the seat." Later, with Coleridge gone, Dorothy laments: 'how happily could we sit with Coleridge upon the moss seat!"

• It is in 'Dejection: An Ode' (1802) that Coleridge wishes Sara Hutchinson had been sitting in the 'weather-fended Wood' on 'the sod-built Seat of Camomile.' Bouslog detects the influence of Wordsworth's The Excursion, written at the same time, which mentions a kind of shelter built by children 'to weather-fend a little turf-built seat / Whereon a full-grown man might rest, nor dread / The burning sunshine, or a transient shower.' Years later the image of such a seat was still in Coleridge's mind, appearing in an unfinished text from 1822 with, Bouslog thinks, a 'tell-tale opium tone'. Its hero enters a deserted garden where, 'beneath a bushy elder-tree, that had shot forth from the crumbling ruin, something higher than midway from the base, he found a grassy couch, a sofa or ottoman of sods, over-crept with wild-sage and camomile.'

Sunlit emptiness

 

West Lake, Hangzhou
Source: Wikimedia

I've just read Love & Time: The Poems of Ou-Yang Hsiu, a slim volume of J. P. Seaton translations published by the Copper Canyon Press in 1989. It includes Ou-Yang's series of ten poems entitled West Lake Is Good, which popularised the tz'u form (ci in pinyin) where verse is fitted into the form of a pre-existing song. His West Lake poems (the lake is in Hangzhou - see my earlier post on it) were written to the tune Picking Mulberries. I guess it would be like someone writing a set of poems about Windermere using the rhythms and rhyme scheme of 'Scarborough Fair'. Ouyang also wrote some beautiful landscape poems in the short shih (shi) style, like 'Drifting at I-Ch'uan' in which a stream grows in a gorge and rapids turn a tiny boat. 'Birds on the sand turn too: / away from me / and fly, to the grove's green tips.'  

Ouyang Xiu (1007-72 - I'm swapping now to pinyin spelling) had the Zuiweng Pavilion constructed at Langya Mountain near Chuzhou. It was built to his design by a Buddhist priest of the mountain, Zhi Xian, and you can now build one yourself – I see that a Lego set is available to buy! Ouyang called it The Pavilion of the Old Drunkard, but as Richard Strassberg writes in Inscribed Landscapes, what Ouyang ‘cares about is to be amid mountains and streams. The joy of the landscape has been captured in his heart, and wine drinking merely expresses this.’ Ouyang’s calligraphy was engraved at the pavilion in 1048 but because it was difficult to make rubbings, Su Shi (1037-1101) rewrote it in larger characters (rubbings of this still exist). Inscribed Landscapes includes a further text on another pavilion ordered near here by Ouyang Xiu: The Pavilion of Joyful Abundance, which is by a spring at the foot of Mount Abundance, Fengshan. 

In 1070 Ouyang wrote his ‘Account of the Pavilion on Mount Xian’ (1070), an early description of the ‘principle whereby a place becomes known through a particular person’, as Stephen Owen says in his Anthology of Chinese Literature. ‘Mount Xian looks down on the river Han', Ouyang wrote. 'when I gaze at it, I can barely make it out. It is surely the smallest of the major mountains, yet its name is particularly well known in Jingzhou. This is, of course, because it of the persons associated with it. And who are those persons? None other than Yang Hu and Du Yu.’ Yang Hu and Du Yu were governors during the Jin Dynasty and Mount Xian, near Xiangyang (formerly Xiangfan) had a ‘stele for shedding tears’ dedicated to Yang Hu.  

Of course Ouyang himself created sites of future literary pilgrimage - not just the pavilions near Chuzhou. Pingshan Hall was built in 1048 when he was prefecture chief of Yangzhou. Su Shi was again on hand to commemorate the older poet, writing a poem after Ouyang’s death on an occasion when he revisited the hall. It can still be visited today - it is in the western part of Daming Temple, on the middle peak of Shugang Mountain near Yangzhou - but it has been destroyed and re-built many times over the years. Stephen Owen’s anthology includes ‘An Account of the Reconstruction of Level Mountain Hall’ written in the seventeenth century by Wei Xi (1624-80). Pingshan means ‘Level Mountain’ and comes from the fact that the mountains from this viewpoint all appear at the same level. J. P. Seaton translated one of Ouyang's poems on this landscape. He looks out and leans into 'sunlit emptiness, / the mountain's colours in the mist / now there, now gone.'

The Path of Perspectives

Last month Dezeen reported on a new landscape intervention by Snøhetta, a 'disappearing walkway' of 55 stepping stones on the Traelvikosen Scenic Route in Helgeland.

'Traelvikosen Scenic Route was commissioned by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. It forms part of the Norwegian tourist routes, which is a series of experiences for road travellers. "Along carefully selected roads in Norway, natural wonders are amplified by art, design, and architecture, with emphasis on the unique landscape and qualities of the different locations," Kvamme Hartmann explained. ... "At Trælvikosen, we wanted to intentionally design the site to ensure visitors were enticed to stay longer than normal," she continued. "To truly experience the details, the time and nature itself, and hence also understand it better, as it offers an opportunity to observe the ever-changing rhythms of our nature."'

It's an interesting thought, that an already beautiful landscape needs some additional help from art to get people to stop and experience 'nature itself'. 

 

 

Last week I experienced a similar Snøhetta intervention on Nordkette, the mountain overlooking Innsbruck. This viewing platform was also reported on by Dezeen - see their article from 2019. I was expecting this to be something like the suspension walkway on Mt. Titlis in Switzerland, where in addition to getting views across the Alps, tourists are given the thrill of looking down from a vertiginous height over empty space. However the Snøhetta platform is built on a relatively gentle green slope so all you see below you is grass. Whether the corten steel design makes a photograph here especially Instagrammable I'm not sure - there were spectacular backdrops already all around this mountaintop. The metal walkway curves onto a trail circling the mountain, the Path of Perspectives, although everyone I saw on it had clambered down a more direct desire path from the cable car station. There are other Snøhetta structures dotted round this trail - benches and viewing platforms - and they have quotes on them in German and English. I see now from the Dezeen article these quotes are by Wittgenstein (this wasn't evident to me, but it was distractingly hot up there, so I probably missed the explanation!) According to Snøhetta, "the words invite visitors to take a moment and reflect, both inwardly and out over the landscape, giving a dual meaning to the path of perspectives."

A magical rain is falling

The Book of Songs (Shijing) contains the seeds of later Chinese landscape poetry.  Its oldest poems are around three thousand years old but here I wanted to draw attention to one rare example that can be attached to a particular date, 658 BCE, when the people of Wei were forced to abandon their capital north of the Yellow River. In his translations Arthur Waley explains that they built a new capital 'in a narrow strip between Shandong and Henan. In their move they were assisted and protected by Duke Huan of Qi, who sent a gift of three hundred horses'. The poem begins by describing the building of houses, oriented according to the sun. Alongside these they planted hazels, chestnuts-trees, catalpas, Paulownias and lacquer trees, 'that we may make the zithers great and small.'  I really like the idea of prioritising musical instrument making when designing a city. The poem then briefly describes a journey to look down on what they had created. 

We climb to that wilderness

To look down at Chu,

To look upon Chu and Tang,

Upon the Jing hills and the citadel. 

We go down and inspect mulberry orchards, 

We take the omens and they are lucky, 

All of them truly good. 

 

A magical rain is falling. 

We order our grooms 

By starlight, early to, to yoke our steeds; 

We drive to the mulberry-fields and there we rest...

This anonymous poem is one of the 'Airs of the States', in this case one of the 'Airs of Yong' (a small principality later absorbed into Wei).  As you read these poems certain lines leap out which transport you to the natural world of ancient China: its fields and orchards, mountains and rivers. As an experiment I tried extracting some of these phrases from the first five states in The Book of Songs, including Yong.

  

Zhou

Climbing a high ridge

Cutting boughs that have been lopped and grown again

Plucking and gathering plantain

Water mallow growing in patches

Cloth-plant spread across the midst of the valley

Blazing flowers of a peach tree

 A 'cloth-plant' (ge)

Shao 

Gathering white aster down in the ravine

Climbing the southern hill to pluck the fern-shoots

Covering with white rushes a dead doe

The flowers of the cherry

Paths drenched in dew

Thunder on the sun-side of the southern hills

 White China aster

Bei

Building earth-works at the capital

Gazing after a swallow

Off in a boat, floating, floating far away

A gentle wind from the south

A cloudless dawn begins to break

On the hills grows a hazel-tree

Chinese hazel

 

Yong

Going to gather goosefoot

I walk in the wilderness

We drive to the mulberry-fields and there we rest

Quails bicker

Thick grows the caltrop

A magical rain is falling

 Goosefoot

Wei

Drumming and dancing in the gully

She rests where the fields begin

She threw a quince at me

Kitesfoot so fresh

Reeds and sedges tower high

The mulberry-leaves have fallen

 

Mulberry leaf

A Room with a View

"I wanted so to see the Arno..."   

Disappointed Lucy Honeychurch gets her wish when Mr Emerson and his son George kindly offer to swap rooms ("women like looking at a view; men don't").  The next morning she wakes and leans from the window, 'out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.'  Forster spends a paragraph describing the scene below - river men, children, soldiers, a tram temporarily unable to proceed.  'Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.'  Eventually, over the course of the novel, Lucy chooses life over culture, George over the aesthete Cecil (memorably played by Daniel Day Lewis in the film), and A Room with a View ends with the newlyweds in Florence again, looking out over the Arno from the same window.

It is landscape - the desire for a good view - that leads to the novel's decisive moment, placing Lucy in the situation where George is compelled to kiss her.  Along with the other English travellers in Florence, they are invited by the chaplain, Mr Eager, to make an excursion into the hills.

"We might go up by Fiesole and back by Settignano. There is a point on that road where we could get down and have an hour’s ramble on the hillside. The view thence of Florence is most beautiful—far better than the hackneyed view of Fiesole. It is the view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures. That man had a decided feeling for landscape. Decidedly. But who looks at it to-day? Ah, the world is too much for us.” 

 

 Alesso Baldovinetti, Nativity (detail), between 1460 and 1462

And so they set off on the excursion and stop on the hillside with its view of the Val d'Arno. The group separate and Lucy finds herself at a place where 'the view was forming at last; she could discern the river, the golden plain, other hills.'  But then she slips and finds herself on a terrace covered with violets.

From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Here, unexpectedly, she encounters George who sees 'the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves'.  He steps forward and kisses her.

In the Merchant Ivory film there are no violets - presumably they couldn't find any on location. Instead there is long grass and poppies and a rather overwhelming Puccini aria sung by Kiri Te Kanawa. The second kiss, which again takes Lucy by surprise, takes place after a tennis match some months later, when they are back in England. As she observes George playing in the fading sunshine, she imagines the landscape of Italy overlaying the familiar surroundings of Surrey.

Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked! The hills stood out above its radiance, as Fiesole stands above the Tuscan Plain, and the South Downs, if one chose, were the mountains of Carrara. She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England. One could play a new game with the view, and try to find in its innumerable folds some town or village that would do for Florence. Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked!

Everything in Forster is tinged with irony (see my earlier post on Howards' End) and of course these lines are there to show how Lucy is unaware of her own feelings, for George and the place he first kissed her.  But having grown up on the edge of the South Downs, I would love to believe that they are capable of becoming the hills of Tuscany.

This grove, these fountains, this interwoven shade

Occasionally you read a sentence in an old book and you become suddenly aware of the vertiginous gulf of time separating you from its writer.  In one of Martial's Epigrams (4.25), written in 89 CE, he describes a region of northern Italy where he imagines spending his old age.  Its first line mentions the coastal town of Altinum and in a footnote to the poem, translator Gideon Nisbet says that its remains 'now lie a little inland.  After its sack by Attila the Hun in 452, its inhabitants, the Veneti, relocated to islands in the lagoon where their descendants would one day build Venice.'  So there is Martial, writing for a civilised and sophisticated Roman audience, unaware of the fate that would befall this town four centuries later, or the whole subsequent history of the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic.  Nor at that point could he foresee that he would spend his final days back in Spain, at Bibilis, the town where he had grown up.  Or that Bibilis too would disappear, to be replaced by a city the Moors called Qal‘at ’Ayyūb, the castle of Ayyub, and which we know today as Calatayud.

Sundial from St Buryan Church, Cornwall

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Martial dealt with the passing of time in a poem in praise of his friend, Julius Martial (5.20).  Instead of having to spend time on 'frowning lawsuits and the gloomy Forum' he imagines their days devoted to living well and spending time with books.  'As it is now, neither of us lives for his own benefit; each of us can feel his best days slipping away and leaving us behind.  They're gone, they've been debited from our account.'  That line - bonosque soles effugere atque abire sentit, qui nobis pereunt et imputantur - inspired a fashion for carving the phrase Pereunt et imputantur onto sundials. I've included here a couple of examples.  It is tempting here to digress onto the fascinating topic of sundial mottoes, but I will refer you instead to an Atlas Obscura article (here) and return to the poetry of Martial.
  

Sundial from Exeter Cathedral

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even those of us who enjoy living in busy capital cities sometimes long for a more peaceful and beautiful environment.  Martial wrote (6.64) admiringly of the home of his friend Julius Martial, sited well above the streets of Rome, on the Janiculan Hill, a place 'more blissful than the gardens of the Hesperides'. Here is a late 19th century public domain translation of the next few lines:

Secluded retreats are spread over the hills, and the smooth summit, with gentle undulations, enjoys a cloudless sky, and, while a mist covers the hollow valleys, shines conspicuous in a light all its own. The graceful turrets of a lofty villa rise gently towards the stars. Hence you may see the seven hills, rulers of the world, and contemplate the whole extent of Rome, as well as the heights of Alba and Tusculum, and every cool retreat that lies in the suburbs...  

It is pleasing to think that Martial was able to enjoy a pleasant garden in his retirement.  The twelfth book of Epigrams was written in Spain and one of its poems (12.31) describes a retreat apparently gifted by his patron and mistress, Marcella.

This grove, these fountains, this interwoven shade of the spreading vine; this meandering stream of gurgling water; these meadows, and these rosaries which will not yield to the twice-bearing Paestum; these vegetables which bloom in the month of January, and feel not the cold; these eels that swim domestic in the enclosed waters; this white tower which affords an asylum for doves like itself in colour; all these are the gift of my mistress; Marcella gave me this retreat, this little kingdom, on my return to my native home after thirty-five years of absence. Had Nausicaa offered me the gardens of her sire, I should have said to Alcinous, "I prefer my own."

Vaux-le-Vicomte

Last month we visited the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, just outside Paris.  It was the home of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's finance minister, and was the creation of three great seventeenth century artists: architect Louis Le Vau, painter Charles Le Brun and landscape designer André le Nôtre.  Throughout Vaux-le-Vicomte there are explanatory signs with diagrams explaining how le Nôtre constructed the estate to create optical illusions.  When you look out from the house across the garden (below), you can see a distant slope with a golden statue, but there is no sign of the garden's canal (above) which actually stretches right across the garden.  A sign informs visitors of what they can expect as they walk down into this landscape.  "The Grand Canal, invisible from the château's front steps, appears out of the blue.  The grottos, which seem to be on the pool's edge, get further away as you progress along the main path of the garden and now seem to be on the opposite side of the canal!  The statue of Hercules now seems impossible to reach..."  I think this clever example of 'decelerated perspective' put Mrs Plinius off walking as far as the Hercules statue but, as you can see below, I was not discouraged and went up to get a good look at it.

The sun was so strong that Hercules himself presented two very different perspectives, shadowy on the way up and gleaming magnificently when you looked back down at him.  Although I felt like I was dutifully walking along a sightline, one of those rays on a diagram connected to an imaginary eyeball, it was impossible not to be distracted by birdsong and the crunch of fallen leaves under your feet.  The sharp shadows and bright sunshine were perfect conditions to enjoy the garden's mathematical aesthetic and indulge in the scopophilia of all those viewing points.  But it was still possible to enjoy the feel of the breeze and smell of the damp grass and choose your own ways of experiencing the space.  My sons got caught up in a game of catching the falling leaves.

On the way back to the château, as you round one end of the canal, there is a great example of borrowed scenery (what Japanese gardeners call shakkei).  What you can see (below) is the Vallée de l'Anqueuil and medieval Pont de Mons, giving the impression that Fouquet's land extended into this idyllic unspoilt landscape.  Here, nature is incorporated within the realm of the garden, but this seems relatively modest when compared to the main design where (as Allen S. Weiss has written) infinity itself, in the form of the vanishing point, is brought into the garden's purview. 

The Garden or Evening Mists

Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists is a novel that circles round various mysteries: the life and death of a Japanese garden designer, Aritomo, living after the war in exile in Malaya, and the location and purpose of a prison camp that he may have had some connection with.  The narrator of the novel, Yun Ling, a survivor of this camp, wants to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died there.  This sister had developed a fascination with Japanese gardens on a visit to Kyoto before the war.  Yun Ling goes to visit Aritomo, with the intention of asking him to design a memorial garden, but instead she becomes his apprentice, lover and then the inheritor of his own garden.  Aritomo begins her training with a copy of the Sakuteiki (which I mentioned here once before), written by Tachibana no Toshitsuna in the eleventh century, and explains to her various principles of Japanese gardening, such as shakkei ('borrowed scenery').  Later she writes that 'Aritomo could never resist employing the principles of Borrowed Scenery in everything he did' and the reader suspects something significant in this, that the landscape beyond the garden has some kind of special significance linked to their memories.

When Aritomo first explains shakkei to Yun Ling, he mentions Tenryuji, "Temple of the Sky Dragon, the first garden to ever use the techniques of shakkei."  Here's what I said about this garden, designed by the great poet Musō Soseki (1275-1351), in another earlier post: 

'The temple of Tenryū-ji, was built by the shogun Ashikaga Takauji in memory of the emperor whom he had deposed.  Musō wrote a sequence of poems about the landscape garden he helped create there, 'Ten Scenes in the Dragon of Heaven Temple.'  Some of these scenes have survived the centuries, like the lake Sōgen-chi where moonlight still strikes the waters in the dead of night; others have gone, like Dragon-Gate House where Musō observed the most transient of images, two passing puffs of cloud.'

Aritomo goes on to list the four approaches to shakkei:  "Enshaku - distant borrowing - took in the mountains and the hills; Rinshaku used the features from a neighbour's property; Fushaku took from the terrain; and Gyoshaku brought in the clouds, the wind and the rain."  Years later, looking again at their garden, Yun Ling wonders whether the wind and clouds and ever changing light had been part of Aritomo's design.  And if the mists were an element of shakkei too, gradually thickening and erasing the distant mountains.

The calmness of that beauty

I was pleased when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize last year, partly because I loved The Buried Giant, despite the misgivings of some critics.  Of all his novels, the one that seems to be most universally admired is The Remains of the Day, the story, in Salmon Rushdie's phrase, of 'a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life.'  It is narrated by the butler Mr Stevens as he slowly makes his way to the West Country on a rare holiday from his duties, hoping to be reunited after twenty years with the former housekeeper of Darlington Hall.  Near the beginning of his journey, he stops the car and climbs a hill to enjoy the view.  His idea of what it is that we appreciate at such moments encapsulates some of the novel's most important themes.  It hints at his misguided allegiance to an outdated idea of Englishness, exaggerated through a lifetime of service and deference, and it exemplifies his belief in the importance of restraint, something that will be shown to have had regrettable consequences for the course of his own life.

'...when I stood on that high ledge this morning and viewed the land before me, I distinctly felt that rare, yet unmistakable feeling - the feeling that one is in the presence of greatness.  We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may be those who believe this is a somewhat immodest practice. Yet I would venture that the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty adjective.

  And yet what precisely is this greatness? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.  What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.  In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.

   The whole question is very akin to the question that has caused much debate in our profession over the years: what is a 'great' butler?...'

lllustration by Finn Campbell-Notman for

 the Folio edition of The Remains of the Day

Cattle and their doubles in the lucid shallows of the bay

This little book, Letters on Landscape Photography, was published in London in 1888.  By then there were numerous such books dedicated to the hobby, but many people, like its author Henry Peach Robinson, were old enough to recall the days when photography was still in its infancy.  It would take almost another century for the question that underlies the book - can photography be art? - to be definitely settled by museum curators in the affirmative.  Robinson writes that ‘more than twenty years ago, when the opposition to art in photography was at its fiercest, there was a capital article on landscape painting in a now dead review.’  The author of this article had criticised the idea of the landscape photographer with an anecdote about a trip to the Highlands.  There, one day, he had settled down to paint en plein air, having found the perfect spot in a ‘wide open space of sea and sky, with a glorious foreground of cattle and their doubles in the lucid shallows of the bay.’  He was soon painting quietly...

'The ripple hardly broke louder than my pulse.  Presently a stoat bounds into the road, and I had time to observe what enjoyment of life there was in the unalarmed, untamed step of the creature.  The heron rose near me; and as I was beginning to take it all in with half-shut eyes, and to remark how the powerful tones of the cattle, fawn and flame colour, white and yellow, blood-red and black, seemed to give infinitude to space – a photographer walks briskly before me, and with an air and noise of satisfaction begins to open and adjust his box.  I give you my word that the look of quiet horror that came over the scene was unmistakable – not horror exactly – did you ever remark the face of a girl when she sets it?  It was precisely that.  Not only did the stoat disappear, but – I don’t know whether it was the creaking of the machine, or the business-like stare of the man – the cattle grew conscious and uncomfortable, and it was not without satisfaction that I saw a mist creep up from the sea, and steal away the shimmer and the charm.  I left him some cows lashing their tails, some blackthorn and Scotch fir, and the average coast formation.’

Robinson concedes that this is prettily written but thinks ‘this sort of tip-tilting of the nose at photography as an art is only possible now with fifth-rate painters, or, in the press, with their friends, or those who have failed in the art.’  It's a good example of the never-ending arguments about how to behave in the landscape and have an 'authentic' experience of nature.  These will return every time there is a new technological development that provides a novel means of 'capturing' the view.  I note that the title of Hamish Fulton's new exhibition, starting next week in Munich, is called 'Walking without a Smartphone'...  The paragraph is interesting too from a gender perspective, where the painter is permitted to see the view in its natural state, while the business-like 'stare of the man' with his camera prompts nature to set her face.  You half expect the photographer to be set upon by dogs like Actaeon.  And yet there remains an impression that the painter himself has not really been seeing what is before him, apparently and paradoxically able to 'take it all in with half-shut eyes...'

Stourhead

 

When we arrived at our Somerset B&B en route to Wales I told the owner we had chosen to break our journey there to visit the landscape garden at Stourhead.  "That's it over there" she said, pointing out of our bedroom at a distant tower rising above the trees on the horizon.  While the garden itself was hidden from view on the other side of the hill, this outlying folly 'took dominion everywhere', turning the wider countryside in the warm evening light of late August into the kind of ideal Claudian landscape admired by the tower's creator, Henry Hoare II.  The following morning we drove the short distance to see it.  King Alfred's Tower was completed in 1772, having been conceived a decade earlier with multiple patriotic intentions: to mark the end of the Seven Year's War, the succession of George III and the place where Alfred rallied his Saxon army to defeat the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun.  I was not that surprised to find the door locked, preventing us climbing its 205-step staircase to admire the view - I mentioned here a similar experience at Hadrian's belvedere in Tivoli earlier this year.  It was frustrating though, and I fantasised about returning, kitted out like an urban explorer, to just break in and climb up anyway.  Perhaps I should start travelling the country at weekends, 'place hacking' other National Trust properties...?  Just as I was starting to imagine the possibilities I was subjected to urgent requests for coffee and cake, and so we drove off to find the tearooms.

In his book The Arcadian Friends Tim Richardson describes Stourhead in terms of the circuit one was expected to take in the eighteenth century.  The first viewpoint provided 'a vista across the lake to the circular, domed Temple of Apollo high above, its tall columns accentuating its height, with the medieval church and village of Stourton in the middle ground below, and to the left on smooth sward.'  The eclecticism of the landscape was therefore apparent immediately - Gothick and classical in one view.  Stourhead has no overriding narrative and while there clearly is symbolism in some of its statues and inscriptions, the design more closely resembles a painting - 'a charming Gaspd picture' in the words of Henry Hoare.  Setting off on my own circuit of the garden I found myself experiencing a gallery of views framed in foliage, like the one I photographed below, where the eye is drawn across the lake to the temple of Apollo and then beyond to the distant countryside.

After descending to the lake, the garden's original visitors would have continued over a mildly perilous fretwork bridge (no longer extant) and then through a woodland path to the grotto.  This rather dank 'house of the nymphs' inevitably recalls Dr Johnson's quip that a grotto was indeed am appealingly cool habitation in the summer, "for a toad".  Within it you can still admire the landscape, where gaps resembling the mouths of caves create views over the lake to the Temple of Flora.  Emerging from the semi-darkness you ascend to the Pantheon, a remarkably beautiful design that must have improved with age (all Stourhead's temples are mottled with patches of lichen - the example below is from the Temple of Apollo).  The Pantheon was shut up so we were unable to go in and see the statue of Hercules, whose biceps were modelled by sculptor Michael Rysbrack on studies of the eighteenth-century prize fighter Jack Broughton, but we were able to admire the Callipygian Venus in a niche outside.  This figure, the 'Venus of the beautiful buttocks', is derived from an old Greek story of two sisters who asked a man to assess which of them had the finer bottom.  It is a timeless story, recently replayed for the digital age in online newspaper reports of the competing 'belfies' posted on Instagram by Kelly Brook and Kim Kardashian.

Walking the garden circuit and then picnicking by the water, it was very apparent to me how important the lake is to Stourhead's landscape design.  You can see this in the first photograph below - a view taken from the convex slope leading up to the Pantheon - where my son seems to be watching the drama of the clouds play out on the screen of the lake.  Ripples break the reflections of trees into horizontal strokes, as if the planting had been arranged to create a painting in light on the lake surface.  In Arcadian Friends Tim Richardson says that eighteenth century visitors would have been able to experience the garden from the lake itself, an option not normally available now, 'presumably for reasons of health and safety.  I had the opportunity of boating on the lake at Stourhead and it does constitute a completely different way of seeing a garden, as you bob along at the lowest level possible, enjoying constantly shifting perspectives of the temples and landscape scenes around.'   

The only person out on the lake when we were there was a man on a small dredger, clearing the water of pond weed.  He seemed unwilling to take a rest and the relentless noise of the engine made me wonder what the soundscape would have been like in Henry Hoare's day, with nothing louder than birdsong, fountains and the faint strains of music and conversation emanating from one of the temples.  Every few minutes, or so it seemed, a plane flew overhead; it would be impossible now to think of designing an arcadia secluded from the wider world.  Coming to the end of my circuit I re-entered the woods where I had left the others, following the happy sound of children's voices.  It was 'Forest Friday' and my sons were queueing to climb up ropes into the canopy of the old trees.  Equipped with hard hats they slowly made their way up as I watched, a little enviously, from the 'soft mossy turf' (as novelist Samuel Richardson described the grass here in 1757).  And so, after finding ourselves prevented from ascending King Alfred' tower, the boys at least were permitted a privileged  prospect of the garden.

The wild pastimes of the cliff

 

View of Árainn Mhór from Inis Meáin

Yesterday we sat on a cliff on the Aran Island of Inis Meáin, looking out over a perfect blue sea.  It was here that J. M. Synge used to come whilst writing his book The Aran Islands - 'as I lie here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows.'  Hardly anyone was around and although quiet contemplation of the Atlantic Ocean stretching away to the west was not easy with two small boys climbing about, I could see why Synge used to go to sit sheltered by the stones on what is now called Cathaoir Synge (Synge's Chair), to be alone with his thoughts.  In his book Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, Tim Robinson mentions the coincidence that both Synge and Lady Gregory first visited the islands in May 1898, when 'Aran was still unfrequented enough to afford the luxury of solitude and the excitements of anthropological pioneering.'  As she wrote later, 'I first saw Synge in the north island of Aran.  I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt quite angry when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people.  I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and sea-weed gatherers.'

  Wave-pounded cliffs in Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934)

Looking across to the north island, Árainn Mhór (Inishmore), it was hard to reconcile it with my memories of the turbulent black and white seascapes Robert Flaherty shot in Man of Aran.  There are calmer moments in the film, but even they have a sense of life lived on the edge; one I'm glad my sons hadn't seen involves the Man of Aran's young boy sitting with his legs dangling over a high cliff, playing out a line of string baited with crab in order to catch fish.  He abandons all thought of this fishing when he glimpses down in the sea below a basking shark, and the film cuts to the fishermen who are already heading out in a boat, armed with a harpoon.  The ensuing scenes staged by Flaherty were anachronistic, as sharks had not been hunted in this way for fifty years when the film was made.  After toiling to bring in one shark, the men go out again, but the weather changes and the film becomes a total submersion in the aesthetics of the Sublime, with storm waves crashing over dramatically lit cliffs and the tiny figures of the mother and her son looking anxiously out to sea.  Eventually the men make it back, but the boat is smashed to pieces.  There will be more to say here inspired by our short holiday in Ireland, but I will end here with two clips from British Sea Power's 2009 soundtrack to Man of Aran: the first, 'Boy Vertiginous', accompanies the cliff-top fishing scene and the second, 'Man of Aran', works particularly well with the film's opening sequence.

Lipstick Traces

Earlier this month I received an email from cultural geographer Hayden Lorimer tipping me off to a Radio 4 programme he had written called 'The Perfumed Mountaineer': "Listeners are promised a potent brew: photography and perfumery, lipstick and landscape.  All of it beribboned in the story of one man's life-world."  This turned out to be an exploration of the 'double life' of Walter Poucher (1891-1988), a pioneer mountain photographer who also worked for perfumers Yardley, where he invented the Bond Street fragrance.  Producer Tim Dee describes his experience making the programme on the Radio 4 blog: 'Hayden does know his hills, he runs up and down Scottish ones for pleasure, he has also always seemed properly fragrant, so, I was very pleased to set off with him into the English Peaks and Scottish Highlands but also down Jermyn Street in central London to the back rooms of a perfumery in pursuit of people who either knew the man himself or knew about the life and works of Walter Poucher.'  The programme is no longer available to listen to but Hayden has sent me the script from which I quote below.

'The print titles of Walter Poucher’s photographic books run down their spines, and they’re just irresistible, toying with the topographical imagination: A Camera in The Cairngorms, The Backbone of England, Peak Panorama, The Surrey Hills, Highland Holiday, Lakeland Through the Lens. At the height of his photographic career, Walter Poucher functioned as the Great British viewfinder. Prolific and bestselling, across 50 books, most appearing in the 1940s and 50s, he compiled a picturesque geography of mountains, high hills and summit panoramas. If he had the magic eye, success didn’t tempt him to widen his range. "I was never interested in taking pictures of nudes, towns or churches because many people do it. I’ve never wanted to photograph anything but mountains"' Poucher used that iconic twentieth century camera, the Leica, but he was as precise at noting down and recommending viewpoints as an eighteenth century follower of the Rev. William Gilpin. 'At the back of each book appear technical notes and photographic data: what month of the year, what time of day, lens, exposure, aperture, filter. Even exactly where to stand: Click. Click. Click.'

So, Walter Poucher has a significant place in the history of British landscape photography, and his work for Yardley produced the three volume Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps (1923), now in its 10th edition. But what intrigues Hayden is the way Poucher didn't separate the two halves of his life: as he hiked over the uplands of Britain he would wear the make-up he had worked on - 'an extreme form of field-testing, and out of pure enthusiasm for Yardley’s products.'  The programme highlighted the funny side of this and re-told the story of Poucher's encounter with Liz Taylor, who 'wished more men took as much trouble with their appearance.'  But it also hinted at interesting questions around our assumptions concerning appropriate or expected behaviour out in the landscape.  In his academic work Hayden has been a key figure in cultural geography's 'performative turn', a shift from the study of representations (the kind of analysis that would highlight the absence of people in Poucher's wilderness vistas) towards an investigation of experiences and ways of being in the landscape.  He sees Poucher as 'someone who made the staging of self into his life’s work; even when it was mountain scenery that was his subject.'  And this is the context for Poucher's appearance in one of the most frequently repeated clips in British television history.  When Grace Jones attacks the chat show host Russell Harty it is for paying too much attention to his other guest: an elderly mountain photographer, seemingly from a different era, until you notice that he is wearing golden gloves and sky-blue eyeliner. 

 

Grand View Garden

There is a wonderful description of landscape design in Cao Xueqin's Hong Lou Meng ('Dream of the Red Chamber', c. 1760 - translated by David Hawkes as The Story of the Stone).  The daughter of Jia Zheng has been selected to become an Imperial Concubine, but will be allowed to see her family again on a special Visitation.  To prepare for this event, the Jia family grounds are re-designed, creating a new Separate Residence and garden, the Da Guan Yuan, or Grand View Garden.  Eventually the work is complete and Jia Zheng is asked about the bian, those calligraphic boards hung in Chinese gardens with poetic phrases, often taken from classic literature.  '"These inscriptions are going to be difficult,' he said eventually. 'By rights, of course, Her Grace should have the privilege of doing them herself; but she can scarcely be expected to make them up out of her head without having seen any of the views which they are to describe. On the other hand, if we wait until she has already visited the garden before asking her, half the pleasure of the visit will be lost. All those prospects and pavilions - even the rocks and trees and flowers will seem somehow incomplete without that touch of poetry which only the written word can lend a scene.'"

One of Jia Zheng's literary friends offers a solution to this dilemma: provisional names and couplets can be composed and written on lanterns; then, when the Imperial Concubine arrives, she can decide which ones to make permanent.  Zheng agrees but worries whether he is up to it (I can't resist quoting what he says as I think I know how he feels): "In my youth I had at best only indifferent skill in the art of writing verses about natural objects - birds and flowers and scenery and the like; and now I that I am older and have devoted my energies to official documents and government papers, I am even more out of touch with this sort of thing than I was then; so that even if I were to try my hand at it, I fear that my efforts would be rather dull and pedantic ones."  As Zheng and his friends start their walk through the garden they encounter Zheng's son Bao-yu, whose behaviour has constantly disappointed his father, but who has started to show some promise in composing poetry.  The humour in what follows comes from the exchanges between father and son: Bao-yu repeatedly manages to come up with better phrases than his elders.   

Having named a miniature mountain, a pavilion on a bridge and a small retreat surrounded by green bamboos, the party reach a miniature farm with an orchard of apricot trees and enter a thatched building 'from which all hint of urban refinement has been banished'.  Bao-yu's father lectures him on the beauty of this 'natural' simplicity, but his son is not impressed: "a farm set down in the middle of a place like this is obviously the product of human artifice."  He says he is not sure what the ancients meant when they talked of things as being 'natural': '"For example, when they speak of a 'natural painting', I can't help wondering if they are not referring to precisely that forcible interference with the landscape to which I object: putting hills where they are not meant to be, and that sort of thing.  However, great the skill with which this is done, the results are never quite..."  His discourse was cut short by an outburst of rage from Jia Zheng.  "Take that boy out of here!"' 

But the work of writing poetry onto the garden is not complete, and Bao-yu is called back.  They resume their walk, considering other garden features like the place where 'a musical murmur of water issued from a cave', recalling to mind the Peach-blossom Stream of T'ao Yüan-ming (which I described here in an earlier post).  Eventually they complete their circuit back at the foot of the artificial mountain and Bao-yu is allowed to 'get back to the girls' (as a character he is rather like Proust's narrator in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs).  It is not until the following year that the Imperial Concubine, Bao-yu's older sister, makes her Visitation and it is quite striking how many of the garden inscriptions she does choose to amend or reject.  Coming, for example, by boat over a lake to the landing stage in a grotto named 'Smartweed Bank and Flowery Harbour', she says '"Surely 'Flowery Harbour' is enough by itself?  Why 'Smartweed Bank' as well?"  At once an attendant eunuch disembarked and rushed like the wind to tell Jia Zheng, who immediately gave orders to have the inscription changed.'

Statue of Cao Xueqin in Beijing

Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree

In the video clip embedded above the environmental philosopher David Abram talks about the way landscape no longer speaks directly to us.  In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes that in oral cultures, ‘human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word.  Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the sense.  A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.  It is an active participant in those occurrences.’  These conclusions come after a description of the importance of location for Western Apache storytelling.  An ‘agodzaahi narrative always begins and ends with a statement explaining where it happened, using one of the language’s evocative place names (which read like compressed poems).  Abram cites the work of linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso, who found that these place names occur with remarkable frequency in Apache discourse.  I was intrigued by this, so I looked up the original Basso article (in Cultural Anthropology, May 1988), where photographs of specific locations are reproduced to demonstrate how well their Apache place names fit: “Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree”; “White rocks lie above in a compact cluster”; “Water flows down on top of a regular succession of flat rocks.”

According to Basso, ‘the great majority of Western Apache place names currently in use are believed to have been created long ago by the “ancestors” (nohwizá’ yé) of the Apache people.  The ancestors, who had to travel constantly in search of food, covered vast amounts of territory and needed to be able to remember and discuss many different locations.  This was facilitated by the invention of hundreds of descriptive place names that were intended to depict their referents in close and exact detail.’  What's particularly interesting about these names (for readers of this blog) is that they assume a specific point of view, like a landscape:  'Western Apache place names provide more than precise depictions of the sites to which the names may be used to refer.  In addition, place names implicitly identify positions for viewing these locations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can be observed, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them.  To picture a site from its name, then, requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot, and it is to these privileged positions, Apaches say, that the images evoked by place names cause them to travel in their minds.’ This travel is both “forward” (bidááh) into space, and, following the memory of their ancestors' wanderings, “backward” (t’ aazhi’) into time.

The falls of Cora Linn

The Clyde at New Lanark, March 2011

On Saturday August 20th 1803, Coleridge and the Wordsworths arrived in Lanark.  William headed off immediately to look at the celebrated waterfalls, leaving the others to find an inn.  Rejecting the Black Bull, whose 'genteel apartments' turned out to be 'the abode of dirt and poverty', they opted for the New Inn, where they sat in the parlour (tables unwiped, floor dirty and the smell of liquor 'most offensive'), grateful for a rest.  Dorothy's diary records that 'poor Coleridge was unwell', struggling with withdrawal symptoms, but she set off after William, hoping to meet him by the falls.  Evening was drawing in though, and she found that 'the Falls of the Clyde were shut up in a gentleman's grounds, and to be viewed only by means of lock and key'. Next day however, all three were able to see the falls of Cora Linn, where they sat on a bench placed specially for the view.  Dorothy was struck with astonishment, 'which died away, giving place to more delightful feelings; though there were some buildings that I could have wished had not been there, though at first unnoticed.'

'A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls.  Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall.  Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before.  'Yes, sir,' says Coleridge, 'it is a majestic waterfall.'  'Sublime and beautiful,' replied his friend.  Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.'

Cora Linn Falls

I mentioned in a previous post that 'the 'astounding flood', as William described the falls of Cora Linn, appears less impressive now that hydroelectric power has been introduced to the Clyde.' This is evident in the photograph above which I took on Saturday.  The site today is a nature reserve, part of the New Lanark world heritage site, and the sign at Cora Linn explains that the electricity produced there 'is important not only for people, but also for wildlife'.  Other notices nearby warn visitors to stick to the path and be aware that the hydroelectric power station can cause water levels in the river to suddenly change.  Not that I was planning to have a dip - the walk itself was rewarding enough - and half way between Cora Linn and the falls of Bonnington Linn I stood for a while watching a peregrine falcon (its nesting site well signposted).  It is a steep walk back up to Lanark and I had a train to catch back to Glasgow and thence to London.  Dorothy Wordsworth and the poets returned for one more night at the New Inn where they 'ate heartily' of a 'true Scottish' dish: 'boiled sheep's head, with the hair singed off.'

Hydroelectric pipes near Cora Linn