Nationally many apple and other orchards have vanished; abandoned or grubbed up because there’s no longer any money in them.
There’s a mournful chapter on the country’s last orchards in Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England.
Yet, here in London one group of people have set out to plant a series of new orchards, filling South London with saplings of hope.
Easy access to the internet and faster broadband, for many in the West at least, mean that anyone interested in landscape, nature, geography, topography and related areas can now spend vast amounts of time casting their eyes over an almost limitless territory of online landscapes and environments.
As a result, it is quite possible for people to devote many more hours gazing at digital photographs of places near and far, than actually spending time in them.
If it is possible to be haunted by a place, then I think that I am. In this case it is Ashley Vale in Bristol – an exceptional urban oasis caught between the tracks, containing allotments, woods, hilltops and a pub next door to a farm.
Brandon Hill aside, other hills in the city have their own distinctively languid charm and grace, such as Park Street, while a few are simply brutes.
One of these is the short and abrupt St Michael’s Hill, stretching from Upper Maudlin Street to Cotham. The lower slopes are dotted with attractive iron street furniture, step-work and historic buildings – including the pretty Colston Alms Houses – but don’t let these architectural gewgaws deceive you – it’s a bastard.
From the blurb on my copy of H is for Hawk it was pretty clear that the book was about Helen Macdonald and Goshawks and TH White and grief. I didn’t mistake the book for the Observer Book of Goshawks and feel outraged by all the snot and tears.
I read it and loved it. Only then, did I discover that there are, apparently, very strict rules, about how Nature Writing should be done…
I had a Charlie Brown moment this morning.
Up early, I glanced out of the window and was struck dumb by the sky.
Over a wall is a river foreshore busy with gulls and expectant cormorants – right in the heart of London.
For a long time it didn’t have a name. It was just the lane that ran along the back of Mum and Dad’s bookshop…Sometimes I’d dare a peek over the top of the wall, but all that could easily be seen was an area thick with buddleia and other wild flowerings.
My imagination was quick to populate the space further with various other unnamed horrors and I’d quickly scramble back down to the ground and in through the door before sliding the bolts back across in delicious relief.
How a once-derelict patch of ground, is helping to galvanise a community in one corner of South London.
Squashed gothic churches, beheaded saints, mysterious alleyways and a preponderance of dustbins.
As a child of second-hand booksellers I had ready access to books and their offshoot – bookmarks. I recently rediscovered a box filled with some that once upon a time I had hoarded.
It doesn’t take much to make a familiar place unfamiliar. A change in the weather – rain, bright sunshine, or more dramatically, snowfall or fog can all do it. Smells too – who hasn’t found themselves aware of sniffing more consciously than normal when drains are blocked, or there’s a whiff of barbecue, bonfire or worse in the air?
And then of course there are a place’s distinctive sounds.
