LOST IN A LANDSCAPE
Hidden corners, holloways, tracks, and desertion in the deep landscape.
Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf
Barton Turf – White light and angels. It rained, my god how it rained. A bank holiday hex hanging over Easter. And typically the patterns of various occupations in one household left me on my own staring at a refracted sodden world as the cars trundling along Aylsham...
Lost in a Landscape: Scottow
Memory has a strange tonal range. There are sparks of colour in between the washes of grey and flat spots of black or white. I have a very distinct memory of first learning to ride a bike. Oddly for some reason that escapes me, it wasn’t at the hands of a parent...
Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless
Stratton Strawless There is this thing were you travel through a landscape, passing things, that have become lost, part of the blur of the countryside, the unnoticed facets of a landscape which sit just back, away from our arterial routes cut as they are by human...
Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood
There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...
Lost in a Landscape: Trunch
There’s a lot in a name, Trunch has one that doesn't fit in in Norfolk, or in fact in England. Locally it sits uneasily with the profusion of ~hams and ~tons, and ~bys and ~thorps. East Anglia’s toponymy is that of the invaded, repeatedly settled. People who move into...
Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield
Swafield and Bradfield ‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, are something commonly seen on hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways across rural East Anglia and the Fens, it was and is part of a year long routine in Norfolk, especially with summer...
Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham
There's a sea of barley, the horizon a shadowed thin night cloud line of trees. In the late afternoon heat this far from the coast there's no wind, no air sucked in by the heated land to move the thorned tops. Everything is calm. The summer hasn't advanced enough to...
Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh
Lyng Easthaugh The lands to the west of Norwich have only a passing familiarity for me. I grew up in north-east Norfolk where I recognise the landscape facets and how they fit together pretty well, the marl pits and churches and the little winding roads that dip in...
Lost in a landscape: Edingthorpe – Rising toward the surface
The cloud has almost boiled back, the sun chasing a lowering and disintegrating weak ridge of low pressure, there's a space for early summer between it and the next low dragging in from the south west. Temperatures are rising into those of a late summer day, yet it's...
Last breath: Rosary Cemetery
Rosary Cemetery My inclination was to put this into the hidden history category, but then I remembered how often I end up sauntering around with people I've never met, but whose names I can see, in the light and shadows of trees and bushes and stone and thought it all...
Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs
Dogs lead sometimes, our is beige, stinks, is opinionated and prefers woods to beaches, muck and leaf mould to sand and pebbles. There's more to sniff and mark an roll in in woods and fox shit beats dead gull hands down in the scent masking stakes for some...
Coasting – Bacton
Bacton; a place name to conjure with if you know North East Norfolk's emptier fringe. A confusing piece of coast where as you move north of Happisburgh; the cliff drops and as it swings further round and there is a vale where Walcott sits. A series of tiny villages...
VANISHING POINTS
The Landscapes of the Western Front
Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son
There's a focus, out there. You'll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it's a footballer who scored big in 1912 before signing away four years,...
Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood
Bernafay Wood After Carnoy the cloud started to drop, a shield of it obliterated the sun. Within twenty minutes the light had almost completely failed, the air filled with prickles of moisture. It took a good hour to lift as the edge of a small front slid in from the...
Vanishing point: Courcelette
I've been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made...
Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I'm trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn't, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click. I'd set various...
Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban
I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...
Lost boys: Sid Northrop
I recently rediscovered this. It was something I'd put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse Parr's...
Urbanism
Walking the old streets
Jess Macdonald
For anyone who knew her - especially from the old Twitter mob, Jess Macdonald (@Jessikart) left us late in the evening of Tuesday the 2nd of January. She passed with her mum Meryl and her sister Abi by her side. She was one of my best friends, a funny, feisty, riot...
Nick Groves
Nick and I used to speculate a lot between us about the various assortments of stone we’d spot in buildings which probably didn’t originate there. Some of it came from demolished churches, you can find them dotted about like solidified memory in walls and buildings...
Hidden history
What you don’t always sense
Finding Crome
Nick Stone is a contemporary photographer, writer and visual artist, he is the creative mind behind ‘Crome’s Norwich: 1821-2021‘, a photographic exhibition on display at the Museum of Norwich exploring the artist John Crome’s relationship with his native city. It...
Walking the past: St Georges Street – Part Two
Once you get past the nexus of Vikings, Lollards, and antifa missionaries. You are faced with a recent piece of change – a set of traffic lights which supplanted a pedestrian subway much beloved by lots of local photographers, graffiti artists, pooling rainwater,...
The Walled City
The flint and water circle
The Walled City 4: St Augustines Gate
This used to be the back wall of Magpie Print. I remember it being an inside; the inside of a building full of printing gear with 'Mudpie Bob' as we called him at the helm steering it. The trade seas were rough, from letterpress through to photolitho. I used to help...
The Walled City 3: Pockthorpe gate and Norwich city wall
Barrack Street is pretty dull inmost respects these days, a humdrum piece of grey carriageway winding through crossings and traffic islands as it links the Magdalen Street flyover to the nexus; Mousehold, Plumstead, Kett's Heights or along Riverside. It is the epitome...