Author Archives: martin.p.eccles

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About martin.p.eccles

My practice reflects the experience of my presence in and walking through natural environments. I use a range of methods (predominantly sound and text) to respond to time, distance and place in the landscape.

Northumbrian Rants: Rant 2

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In general this (Friday 27th January) was a cold, still day.  On step 2 the temperature rose to 5C but the rest of the time it was 1C.  I still have the first recording of the day challenge of sorting the wires.  With their unique ability to knot themselves I have to re-establish the sequence in which I put things on – recorder, hat, pick up tripod – and take them off – place tripod down, take off hat, take off recorder.  To do otherwise is to risk having to disassemble the whole lot.

Rant 2 Step 1

Easy parking off a narrow country road.  A short distance from the A1.  A climb over a gate and a walk around the perimeter of the field of winter wheat to get to a final fence climb and the site at the edge of a field of lowland pasture.  I pass a small conifer plantation.  It doesn’t look like a convincing shelter belt and I am not sure what it is for.  Nonetheless, as I walked towards it a Roe Deer walks out before disappearing over a couple of barbed wire fences.  Close to the site and I can (just) step over a barbed wire fence into the grass pasture, close to the junction of two hedges.  With so little wind the traffic on the A1 is audible; the cold still air carries the sound as a distant low roar.  There is not much else to hear.  Walking out the gap and common usage path through the hedge is obvious so there is no need to scale the gate.

hands frozen, hurting

cold

flushed roe deer, hare, pheasant

cold mist sitting on the fields

branches skeletal against the sky, silhouettes

grass field

 

Rant 2 Step 2

I pass through a weather front on the way north so the temperature rises slightly and the sun shines.  Another lowland pasture with two flocks of sheep separated by a single strand electric fence.  The access point is on a minor road but the A1 is close by and I can see the traffic, so no surprise that it is audible.  A derelict circular stone tower that looks like a decapitated windmill and its demesne means that access is at the corner of the field where there is a combination of a broken gate and a severely chopped back hedge.  An initial scramble and a careful step over a perimeter electric fence before walking into the middle of the field.  A Pink-footed Goose flies off calling as does a solitary Curlew.  The sheep initially run back and forth a bit but then settled to continued grazing once I stop moving.  Much less misty.  Walking out is straight forward.

cold

long undulating cloud

outlined tree ridges away to the horizon

sheep, goose, curlew

grass pasture

electric fence

 

Rant 3 Step 3

Step three is on an old estate, now a wedding venue.  The road in is a dead end but the public footpath is marked and it is easy to pull off the road.  Park at the roadside amid bushes shading the road; lots of leaf litter crunching as I walk in.  The footpath runs along the field margin – though there is a retained margin there is no sign of a walked path.  Walking down the hill the lie of the land looks reasonable given the map and it takes me a little while to realise that three fields have been amalgamated into one and I have already passed one of my reference points.  Not wanting to walk into a closely planted winter wheat field I make the recordings at the closest point on the route of the public footpath.  There are a series of gunshots plus their echoes.  By the time I get back to the car my shoes are heavy with soil, clagged onto the soles and around the heel.  I kick off some and end up performing a bizarre stomping dance on the road in an attempt to dislodge the last bits.

frost hollow

winter wheat, cut up fields, lost margins

gunshots

pheasants

tracks – deer, heron

 

Rant 2 Step 4

A remote site that should have been accessible via a public footpath but the immediate vista is the aftermath of forestry clearing.  The trees have gone and two mechanical diggers work to clear the brash.  The finger post is at the start of the path but the stumps and churned up earth means that the footpath is no longer apparent.  After an attempt to follow its line for 20 metres of so I have fallen into a couple of trenches and I give up.  A forestry path looks like it will get me close and I walk along and up on a firm track that eventually turns into an ill-defined grass path.  At the edge of the plantation I scale a gate to walk onto open moorland.  I pick up a barely defined footpath and follow to a set of gateposts – all that remain of an old fence line.  I am still 500 metres short of the site but I estimate that getting there (and back) will take another 40 minutes given the terrain.  The sun is almost down and I don’t want to be walking back through the forest along tracks I don’t know in the dark.  I make the recording at the gateposts and turn around.  All the way I have been able to hear the sounds of the diggers.  By the time I walk back past them they are parked up for the day and are being re-fuelled.  One of the drivers doesn’t return my wave and his two terriers race down to the track to check me out.  When I get back to the car it is dark.

walk in longer, difficult

wind low

sound of forestry diggers carried most of the time

moor frozen

ran out of time

 

 

Northumbrian Rants: Rant 1

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A delayed posting of a fieldtrip on December 3rd last year.  This was the first of four Northumbrian Rants – four sets of four field recordings using a process derived from John Cage’s ‘49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs’ and detailed on my website describing the Fair Isle Reels version (https://mpefairislereels.wordpress.com).

Rant 1 Step 1 

At the first site I had expected the sounds to be the local hamlet and the distant main road so was a little surprised to find that the main sound was the tractor and hedge trimmer doing the seasonal work of neatening up the hedgerows.

windy

stiff gate

exposed field

sheep

sparse hawthorn hedge

improved grass

chimney smoke

valley bottom to moor top

 

Rant 1 Step 2

On to the second site – as I walked in to the bottom field and looked up towards the site up the hillside and the other side of a belt of trees I registered the fact that a horse started galloping off to the north.  Thinking no more of this I carried on and was about 400m into the field when the noise of galloping hooves became audible followed a few seconds later by the horse in full gallop heading for me.  There was nowhere I could get to before it would be with me so it was fortunate that the animal pulled up with about 50 metres to go and then proceeded to graze.  Still, I didn’t want to risk antagonising it so opted to make the recording on the road side of the field gate.

estate land

outbuildings

planted trees

shepherd

up the hill

on the edge of new ash planting

caledonian pine on the hill top

cows

sheep

 

Rant 1 Step 3

The third site was a root vegetable field just to the west of the east coast mainline.  As a rule I don’t walk into crop fields but here there was more than enough space to walk in and still avoid the crops.  A very short walk in but going through the patch of low brambles I still managed to trip and measure my length.  After that it was easy.

beet field

railway

wind turbines

fall on the way in

feels rather desolate

 

Rant 1 Step 4

The final site was across the county, just to the north of Hadrian’s Wall.  This was the longest walk in of the day and was across sheep pasture, still frozen even towards the end of the day.

upland farmland

tracks

shooting pond

light fading

low sun

fell along the wall into the stream

military road

kestrel

crows

ram in harness

 

Each of the sites has its own distant mechanical ‘roar’ – usually traffic and usually quite ill defined.  It is the sort of sound that normally gets filtered out as we concentrate on something else – the wanted versus the unwanted, sound versus noise.  However, listening to the recordings the sound is present – the microphones don’t filter and on playback the sounds that were filtered out on site become part of the subject of the recording.

Rievaulx: a sense of place

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During a recent visit, I was forcibly reminded that Rievaulx and its surroundings have, for me, a strong sense of place; it generates in my thoughts words like ‘peaceful’, ‘tranquil’, ‘restful’ and I’d like to try and work out something of why this might be.  My recent visit was on a clear, crisp December morning.  The sun shone all day and whilst it was never anything other than cold the day was invigorating.  It being a week before Christmas meant that few people were around and the valley was quiet.  So, the conditions were conducive to my thoughts of peacefulness but I have been there before, in bad weather, when more people were around and the sense has still been there, so while context may have contributed to my sense of peacefulness on my recent visit, it doesn’t feel like the whole story.

Rievaulx is a hamlet of about 20 dwellings in Ryedale, a steep sided river valley on the south-west edge of the North York Moors.  It’s most striking feature is a ruined Cistercian monastery dating from the 12th century and closed in 1538 during Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries.  It would be possible to assume that a sense of tranquility was linked to its religious history or some sort of enduring spiritual presence.  Yet, the monastery hasn’t functioned for 400 years and during its 400 years of functioning, life would not have been easy, tranquil, or necessarily peaceful; Cistercians were noted for their austerity; on one occasion the monastery was sacked by Scots and on another the monks were badly afflicted by the plague.  After its closure it was the site of an iron foundry for a further 100 years until local supplies of timber for charcoal were exhausted.  So, whilst Abbot Aelfred wrote of Rievaulx’s peacefulness and tranquility, a ruin doesn’t automatically translate into a sense of peace.  Rievaulx’s abbey ruins became a destination of romantic travel in the 18th century and the then landowner created a valley top walk to the north of the abbey with specifically cleared lines of sight down to the ruins to facilitate its viewing.  So, the valley has been through periods of being a religious center, an industrial complex and a romantic ruin, but the current sense of place is about more than the abbey – the nearby ruined Cistercian abbey at Byland shares many of Rievaulx’s historic and architectural attributes but not its sense of place – what are Rievaulx’s other enduring dimensions of place?

When viewed from a number of standpoints, the valley with its constituent buildings have a sense of harmony – of materials, colour and scale.  With many of the extant buildings of the hamlet being part of the original abbey precinct there is harmony of materials with all the buildings built of various types of local sandstone (2012).  There is harmony of colour with the worn sandstone of the buildings sitting alongside the natural greens and browns of the valley bottom fields and hedgerows and the grey browns of the heavily wooded valley sides.  Finally, there is harmony of scale.  With the tallest building, the ruined abbey, tight up against the 70 meter high, near vertical, northern side of the valley and the smaller buildings at valley tree top level, nothing protrudes above the natural skyline – it feels as if the buildings are held within the landscape rather than dominating it.

Whilst Rievaulx is not isolated, with the busy market town of Helmsley only three miles away, the two roads in and out of the valley are narrow and steep and there is little invitation to casual through traffic.  Local traffic is relatively sparse and the overall effect of this is relatively low levels of traffic and other mechanical sound.  The absence of roads means that to explore the valley to any extent you need to walk.  Couple this human pace of movement with the low levels of mechanical noise and the shape of the valley and there is a sonic clarity within the valley.  The shape of the valley – steep sided and relatively narrow – lends something of an amphitheater effect to listening in the valley; Jackdaws flying over calling are easily heard.  Finally, the river, providing the sound of running water, whilst not widely audible, adds the slightly mesmeric sound of running water into the general soundscape.

Bur Rievaulx does not exist as an abstract idea and its ‘sense’ is a consequence of my interaction with the place.  All I have written so far is thinking about my current interactions with Rievaulx but a final dimension of Rievaulx is my personal history of association with the place.  I was introduced to Rievaulx as a child by my parents and it was a happy childhood destination that I then revisited as a young man.  It has a similar place in my wife’s family history and together we have visited it repeatedly.  So, what I have written has emerged from a lineage of experience of over 50 years.  No wonder articulating this is complex.

 

Rievaulx Abbey. Available at: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/rievaulx-abbey/.

(2012) Strategic Stone Study: A Building Stone Atlas of North Yorkshire East and York: English Heritage.