southern colours

In September we get to go to Helford Passage, at the invitation of a generous friend, and that gives me a chance to visit some of the Lizard's coastline. The geology of this southern most peninsula of the UK is complex and distinctive: the tip of the Lizard is not really part of the UK geology at all, much of it having formed on another plate, deep within the earth's crust. I have a geological map that helps the understanding a bit but as it is not thoroughly understood by the experts even, what chance have I?

In the number of times I have explored the Lizard coasts I have come to appreciate the singular extent of colour, shape and bedding of these series of rocks. They never fail to surprise me. This time I visited Kennack again, where late holiday makers were still sunning themselves on the fine sands there, but not so at the eastern end, beyond Caerverracks, which I had almost to myself. Last time I came this way it was raining and the colours were very bright in an otherwise grey seascape . . .

A second excursion took us to Porthleven and I was delighted to be able to shuffle along to Parc-en-Als, ignoring notices above the sea defences in the town about cliff falls to get down on my knees to enjoy the beauty of these most singular ancient and metamorphosed slates. On the way to this favourite place I also admired the exfoliating sandstones close in to Porthleven, on the beach there and according to the OS, called Little Trigg Rocks.

If you would like to see some of the pictures I made in these three places you can click on the links below. I think they will need further sorting and perhaps integrating into the other albums made of Kennack and Parc-en-Als . . . but for now they are compiled by date made.

flickr album southern colours: kennack

flickr album southern colours: little trigg rocks

flickr album southern colours: pard-en-als III

I regret that I can't illustrate this blog more appropriately: upload speeds are so deplorable here in rural north devon these days . . .  that's BT Broadband for you . . .

small landscapes

One of the things I have confirmed to myself since embarking on my picture-making on the shoreline is that large landscapes are made up of numerous smaller ones, and they in turn are made up of even smaller landscapes . . . and so-on. . . to where a microscope intervenes between camera and viewer. I like these minature places as they often have quite close resemblances to the landscapes that contain them. I find it interesting to bring out aspects of ambiguity in the images I make, so that scale may be uncertain, sky may be sea, rock may be water, time short (before the tide returns) and long (so slow is the pace of erosion).

After I have recorded a small landscape I often experiment to place the image in a supporting frame,  both to contain and lift the image from where it was found: I do this here, back on the computer.

I am still learning about this process and endeavouring to find strategies to secure or extend particular planes, shapes and forms, without significently altering them from what I first saw. But what is more subjective about this framing perhaps is how it is going to work contained within an actual picture frame of wood and glass.

The way the lens actually limits what can be secured by the camera often results in a new emphasis. Before the viewfinder or screen frames the small landscape the camera makes,  that image remains situated within all the other overlapping and superimposed landscapes of which it is just one small part, and amongst which it can be so easily overlooked.

Framing, both digital and for hanging, should contribute to the making of a picture. I am a bit late in the discovery of this, perhaps. So at the time of writing this I am setting about framing a number of the images shown in the flickr album linked below; Pool Calm has already received the picture framing treatment, very successfully I think  (sorry— I can't show the result here) which has set me on this track . . .

flickr album: small compositions

centennial

It is the third of March and my mum's birthday. She'd be 100 if she was still alive but she isn't and in fact she died 25 years ago in 1991, a victim of pancreatic cancer. I can never remember the actual date she passed away but I always remember her birthday. It would be a little wide of the mark to say that I miss her after all this time but I do often wonder what she would have thought about this or that issue.  I know she was very regretful not to see her grandchildren grow up, because she told me so, just before she succumbed. I do occasionally find myself wanting to have a chat with her, or show her something— not often, but from time to time. She left a hole in my father's life, I know that. I think I was less affected by her death at the time because I was experiencing year one of fatherhood, my focus was elsewhere.  It took a while for it to really sink in that the driving force and anchor of my childhood was no longer there.

Kath gave me lots of things, many of which I did not appreciate until years later. I expect that is a fairly common experience, I don't claim anything special about that. To me she was quite an enigma. I always thought she was somewhere she was not destined to be, that circumstances and situations had played her a poor hand. The war truncated a potential career (Kath had a really good singing voice and was a good pianist too) and then her health was not of the best; child bearing did her no favours . . .  she had a strong intellect, not entirely suited to where we as a family lived.  You might even conclude that marriage was not really in her best interests at the time she and my father signed up. The advantages of growing up at the time I did were so marked compared with the limitations and hardships of the majority of ordinary people coming through the war.

Anyway, what is, is. I am not about to list all her virtues, especially not short comings, given my own – or all I have to be grateful to Kath for. I just wanted to mark this day.

Kath would be amused that the marmalade she used to make for lots of people is still being made by at least two of her offspring. As a former graphic designer I have taken to off-the-wall labelling of the marmalade I make and give away — so it seemed a good idea this centennial year to dedicate the production to my mother, who first got me interested in the marmalade making process: that's my label for this year's output, below.

Here's to her memory– thanks, Kath!

blegberry bright

It is just one of those few days, sandwiched inbetween cold frosted moon-bright nights. The tides just right, a chore fetching me out earlier than usual, so away earlier too, arriving thereafter on the almost windless coast, the sea barely moving at all. We found ourselves on this bit of shore just after christmas and I remembered then that I had not turned north from Blackpool for at least ten years;  thought I must come back here again when the weather is better. The air is cold to breathe in at first but silky smooth and as delicate as clear spring water.  once down below the cliff base there is no wind at all and I can take off a layer.

One thing is for sure: it gets no easier to make one's way across the acute angles left in the cliff stumps. Especially as I find myself called further away from the back of the beach by this line of water or that rib of stone. The result is that I have to struggle across these striations until I eventually arrive at the stretch below where the Hoche anchor has lain for 134 years. In the times I have passed by it has not been shifted by storm or even human effort, — the wreck's boiler too seems to be as it was when I looked down on it from the cliffs for the first time, twenty-eight years ago. But this time I note that the rudder plates I photographed last time I was here have finally succumbed to rust — or have been carried elsewhere by the tides. Anyway, I can't find them.

After a while then, and it is as much a relief as in previous scramblings around here, the teeth of sandstones relent, give way to the top of a  slatestone anticline, smoother, laminated and layered, running off to the sea west and disappearing under the cliff-foot boulders eastwards.  It is this Blegberry beachstrip then where I bask in winter sun and approve the limpets' choice of where to hang out between the tides. I love the linear qualities and the worn-smooth finish of this bit of foreshore, contrasting as it does with the jutting sandstone stump-lines either side.

The wear of the sea is obvious but the speed at which it takes place, here anyway, is slow, in human terms at least. I doubt one would notice much difference in a life time, beyond the more sudden slumps and cliff falls and the occasional arrival and disappearance of sands and shingle.

You can see a few more pictures I made on this visit on the Flickr album blegberry bright


Watching TV at the weekend – see this shoreline, as well as the famous wee house at the entrance to Blackpool beach, featuring in the BBC Le Carré thriller The Night Manager. Glad there were no telly crews there when I passed by! I can report that they left little trace of their use of the place although there is some rubbish by the outhouse that ought not to be there . . .

overland to everest recalled

In 1977 I decided to get away from an apparently terminal domestic situation and a frustrating design job, together with a friend (DH) who found himself in not dissimilar circumstances, — to take off, leave it all behind, and go to find the highest mountain in the world: jobs terminated, marriages dissolved. I decided straight away that I would travel as light as possible, dispensing with any notion of trying to record the adventure in photographs. That is why there are no snaps, but instead, drawings, made afterwards.

Scraping as much money together as I could, I hoped to be able to survive for several months away, keeping in reserve enough dollars to be able to fly back when the mission was accomplished or if self preservation recommended it.

So we set off for Asia in August by bus, (Budget Bus, £89 one way) on what was then sometimes called The Hippy Trail. It was quite a journey, with 35 or so passengers of different nationalities, shapes and sizes, on a decrepit bus that broke down with tedious regularity and sometimes in inconvenient places. We travelled through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, stuck for a while in Afghanistan, then Pakistan and finally India, about six weeks after setting out from the UK. As you might expect we had quite a few bizarre adventures en route, the numerous breakdowns giving us the odd opportunity to see something more of the country along the way, notably in Afghanistan where a number of us hired two minibuses to go and see the 1000 year old Bamiyan rock-carved Buddhas, subsequently destroyed by the Taliban.

From New Delhi DH and I took another long bus journey to Katmandu in Nepal and eventually set off on our epic big walk, backpacking up and down amazing country all the way to Khumbu. We could not employ porters to carry our stuff, as was the norm for western trekkers, we discovered later, not rich enough. We camped out (we had a small tent) or stayed in lodges or houses. After leaving the road out of the capital we did not see another road or any form of road vehicle; our routeways were now footpaths or droveways, often busy with local people. The pack animal was homo sapiens until we got deep into Sherpa territory where we met with yaks as load carriers. It took us fifteen days to walk to the Sherpa capital at Namche Bazar, about 125 miles I think.

We encountered rough, steep and bewildering mountain country, high passes and deep gorges, leaches and flies, some challenging weather, intriguing local people, basic but mostly wholesome food, exotic wildlife, terrifying bridges over swollen rivers, — and partially as a result of our fading map, got lost amidst trackless bear-populated forests and gorges for a number of days. But we made it without major mishap and after further trekking in the higher Himalaya, camped across the way from the bulk of Everest, well above the last habitation. Bitterly cold at night, thin air, avalanches, sleeping on the edge of a frozen lake, snow blindness to avoid by day. From there we did our own thing: I climbed as far as my worn out boots would allow on Kala Patar and the south ridge of Pumo Ri one day (to peep into the Western Cym) and then trekked up the Khumbu Glacier to Everest base camp the next . . . It was good to be alone with one's own thoughts up there: I saw hardly a soul; for a while at least we were amongst a handful of folk on top of the world. It is not like that these days.

Anyway. I kept a sort of diary, a log of our trek/climb/walk. Not the bus journey, although I started to: opportunity was often absent on the road and I decided it would be a tedious repetition of suffering, discomfort and grumbling! The Himalayan journey was my objective so in the absence of a camera I wrote it up. My take on the walk to Everest was eventually typed up for me by a good friend (BG) and I think I have placed a link to that below for anyone who would care to dip into it. It's not of a very high order of literacy, but it gives the gist.

Subsequently back in the UK I tracked down and acquired reasonably accurate but expensive maps of pre-war German origin (1:50000 and 1:25000). Then National Geographic undertook a new arial photographic survey of the Everest region for their new 1988 centennial map. On this extract of the map, I've marked our high camp site and an approximation of where I went from there in red.

1:50 000 map showing our final camp and my various explorations

It was this last map that I decided to show my son, when he was visiting us recently. He took some digital pictures of the maps I have and dipped into my original diary, took out my only momento from the trek, two crumpled prayer flags I had picked up from expedition detritus left at Everest Base Camp. The day after Adam returned to where he lives I receive his e-mail with a link. As is the way with our digital generation we seek our info on the internet. But it had never occurred to me that there would be anything out there about the August 77 Budget Bus trip. As far as I was concerned the only images of that life changing journey were in my head! But the son-and-heir found the diary of a fellow passenger on a blog and that led to images and a group snap taken in Kabul, on the day we left Afghanistan and went down the Khyber Pass! For the first time, thirty-nine years after the event, I see Colin Clews' picture. And then he has others too, thankfully without featuring me. 

I hope Colin does not mind me reproducing that group picture he took, here. I am the only guy in shorts, crouched down seemingly praying for deliverance!

Heading for the Khyber Pass, Budget Bus, 4 September 1977, photograph by Colin Clews

I have only occasionally regretted not taking a camera on that trip. It would have been difficult and expensive: no 32GB SD cards then, no whopping digital zooms and long life lithium batteries, but instead expensive delicate film in canisters, processing and storage complications and costs . . . indifferent cameras to carry and keep safe, seeing things through the meaness of a view finder . . . I made the right decision. Now however, it would be a different story . . .

Everest: east face to south col route illustration

The only people from Budget Bus I subsequently had anything to do with were DH (with whom I eventually shared a house for some years) and Stephen Venables who I bumped into in Blackwells Record Shop, Oxford. Stephen, with Lindsey Griffin used the Budget Bus to transport climbing kit out to Kabul for an expedition in the Hindu Kush. As a result of our re-acquaintance in Oxford I subsequently designed and illustrated a number of fund raising identities for expeditions he was involved with to various parts of the world. Stephen was the first climber to conquer Everest via a new east route (Kangshung Face), first UK climber to summit without bottled oxygen, surviving the highest ever bivouac, alone. I illustrated his account of this singular climb with a annotated drawing of the east face of the mountain, for Pan Books (left). In those days there were no queues for the summit, and there still are none for this most difficult way up.

So! I think I am grateful to my son for finding my likeness in Kabul after all these years. And I am intrigued to refresh my memory of the bus bit of the adventure through Colin's blog and his Flickr Album. Trouble is, I can't as yet recall Colin at all (although I reckon he was one of the back-of-the-bus-boys). And that goes for most of the passengers on that jaunt, just can't remember who was who. Like him I did not form any particular bond with anyone although there were definitely a smallish number of folk I would have happily met up with again. I would have liked to have been able to put names to faces but I can't!

Click on this line if you would like to dip into my Everest Trek Diary

I was pleased to find good drawn renditions of Ama Dablam on the back of some of the rather classy Nepalese paper money of the time. This distinctive and unclimbed sacred mountain lies south of the Everest group and overlooked the last high villages on our route to the Khumbu Glacier. The King of Nepal (Birendra) depicted on these notes met an untimely end in the Royal Family Massacre of 2001, and the temples shown were decimated in the recent earthquake. This currency probably cost more to produce than the face value of the smallest value note: at that time a Nepalese rupee (the grey one) was worth about 5p!

morus bassanus mort

morus bassanus, mort

My favourite 'white' seabird, if I had to have just one, is the northern gannet. Beautiful, elegant, fearsome. Not often seen from the land except on the stormier days, but sometimes can be spotted flying low over the waves round the tip of a headland or in a gang, plundering a fish shoal in a tidal estuary.

So it's sad to find the remains of one on the shoreline. This one was only a little above the low water mark so would soon be washed away again as casually as it was brought in. Despite the affects of the sea and decomposition, it struck me that the way this bird was deposited on the sand was a sombre reflection of the nature of this fish eater with overtones of some sort of fossil remain in the making.

The distinguished french photographer Lucien Clergue used to take photographs of bird carcasses he found when he was making his pictures in the Camargue. I gradually came to admire the way those images (often of pelicans) seem to confirm so much about being alive and about the spirit of the casualty before death.

From time to time I have found and recorded shoreline remains which seem lyrical, like this one, a fleeting final ending . . .  a ghost bird, seemingly still in flight. It was reclaimed by the sea within minutes . . .

northam burrows

No cliffs here. And it's only occasionally really deserted, given the proximity of several overlapping communities nearby, and road access. A lot of sand and a deep foreshore, prone to winds and sky. As the tide retreats extensive pebble beds are exposed stretching across to the South Gut but there is no bedrock to be seen alongside the channel down which the Taw and Torridge rivers finally reach the sea.

Then, one day while walking out to get exercise and enjoy the big skies, we were caught by a violent storm far out on the beach, saw colour sapped out to gun-metal grey, rearranged. The soaking was worth it, the post-storm brilliance quite singular. At my feet I found the theme of this place for me, which is how these pebbles lie in the sand. Almost every time I go there (in winter, when the north light really works) I find another aspect of these beds, another expression of the land sea sky interface. I can make or miss an image here in seconds.

It is often time itself that is the hardest dimension to handle because things can happen in an instant. I saw this stone receive its crown of foam from a retreating breaker. Within seconds the crown had disappeared for ever. Unremarkable maybe, and repeated again and again up and down the pebble bank, but never again at that precise moment, lit that way, with me hanging over it to record it. I took another, similar, I took lots, but never quite saw this again. I missed better ones, just as I miss them every day it is happening and I am not there.

Another visit, when a walk on to the South Gut sands was to blow away after affects of new year celebration, clear cold sunlight on sand infrequently exposed by the tides revealed a number of wonderful pool-studded ridges and banks of wind and water-tempered sand.

There are long views, large sandstone pebble fields and even some wild fowl in winter on this strand. Big skies, long fetches . . . and rather a lot of dog walkers (but it is a big place) . . . and if one looks down as well as around, there is always something to like.
There's an album of my last visit here: Flickr joy of shape by northam 

somerset levels

The Somerset Levels have a close association with the sea through the rivers which discharge from these low-lying pastures, marshes and fens. The water world of the Levels this winter is not as extensive as it was two winters ago. We are able to get to places and do not need to go the long way round.

The Parrett river is just overtopping its levée this afternoon and pouring into the adjoining meadows; the bridge we walk over to cross the river is scraping the top of the water heading seaward.  The short winter day wears on so we take minor roads from Muchelney across to Grey Lake Bridge and visit the bird reserve nearby. It is satisfying to find it deserted although very recent reed and coppice cutting is in evidence.

Our walk along the King's Sedgemoor Drain to the far-most hide is heavy going and surprisingly quiet as far as wildfowl are concerned.We return and branch off to the main hide, negotiating a pair of mutes and their seven adolescent cygnets who have settled on the edge of the reed cutting that has been in progress hereabouts. As we reach the hide, the sun gets out from under the cloud edge and the whole area is gold-lit. This is where they all are.

From within the hide we watch the reserve regulars present in numbers. They are flighty, performing flocking manoeuvres, fly-pasts and evasions specifically it seems for our delight. All the usual suspects are represented but widgeon and lapwings are in particular abundance. The whole scene is briefly re-orchestrated by a marsh harrier after which there is a general settling down as the light levels dip and dusk arrives. Late starlings pass by to get to their roosts on the other side of the ridge.

I've made a short album of the few pictures I made: flickr january somerset
There's another album from january 2014 here: flickr wet levels