Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

pook heap of new-mown hay that has been cut and turned and is awaiting baling West Country

  prink of crops or seedling plants: to emerge from the ground East Anglia

  risk to cut grass with a sickle Shetland

  sock liquid manure Staffordshire

  swarf line or row of cut grass as left by the harvester Kent

  swedeland countryside as perceived by someone from a town or city English (urban slang)

  swipe to beat down bracken with rotating flails from the back of a tractor Exmoor

  ted to turn over hay Staffordshire

  walter of corn: to roil and twist about in heavy wind and rain East Anglia

  wayzgoose scarecrow Cornwall

  wharve to turn over mown grass with a rake Shetland

  wind-rows hay raked together in rows, so that the wind may dry it Northamptonshire

  zwar crop of grass to be mown for hay Exmoor

  Fields and Ploughing

  addle headland of a field Northamptonshire

  balk ridge between two furrows, or strip of ground left unploughed as a boundary line between two ploughed portions agricultural

  berhog sterile piece of ground Shetland

  browings cleared areas that were formerly brambled East Anglia

  bukli tan waste-ground by the roadside Anglo-Romani

  cant corner of a field Sussex

  capper crust formed on recently harrowed land by heavy rain Suffolk

  centroid point in a field from which the Rural Payments Agency takes the Ordnance Survey references official

  chart rough wasteland or common Kent

  cockshot, cockshut glade where woodcock were netted as they flew through Herefordshire

  cowlease unmown meadow Exmoor

  dallop patch of ground among growing corn that the plough has missed East Anglia

  dwarf money old coins turned up in ploughing Herefordshire

  eddish second crop of grass; also lattermath, aftermath Northamptonshire

  elting-moulds soft ridges of fresh-ploughed land Northamptonshire

  end-rigg last row of the plough Scots

  fairy darts, fairy money prehistoric arrowheads/coins turned up in ploughing Herefordshire

  first-earth first ploughing Suffolk

  flinket long, narrow strip of land, whether arable or pasture Northamptonshire

  fog poor-quality grassland on which cattle could fend for themselves in the winter months Derbyshire

  hawmell small paddock Kent

  intack enclosed piece of common Lancashire

  konsas areas or corners of land suitable for making camp on Anglo-Romani

  ley-field grass field ploughed for the first time Galloway

  marsk high, rough pasture Cumbria

  okrigjert stubble field Shetland

  pightle small grass field near a house Essex

  pingle enclosure of low shrubs or brushwood Fenland

  plough-pan compacted layer in cultivated soil resulting from repeated ploughing agricultural

  queach unploughable, overgrown land Northamptonshire

  sillion shining, curved face of earth recently turned by the plough poetic

  strip lynchet bank of earth that builds up on the downslope of a field ploughed for a long period of time agricultural

  vores furrows Devon

  warp soil between two furrows Sussex

  Livestock

  after; afterings to extract the last milk from a cow; last milk drawn from a cow Staffordshire

  al’mark animal that cannot be restrained from trespassing on crop-land; sheep that jumps over dykes or breaks through fences Shetland

  antony runt of a litter of pigs Northamptonshire

  báini-báini used to call pigs to eat Irish

  beestings first milk from a cow after calving Staffordshire

  beezlings third or fourth milk from a cow after calving, said to be particularly rich Suffolk

  belsh to cut the dung away from around a sheep’s tail Exmoor

  billy-lamb lamb reared by hand Northamptonshire

  bishop over-large heap of manure Herefordshire

  buttons sheep dung Exmoor

  caoirnein globule of sheep dung Gaelic

  chook-chook-chook call to chickens Herefordshire

  ciorag pet sheep Gaelic

  clart clot of wool or manure on an animal Galloway

  crew-yard winter yard for cattle Fenland

  crottle hare dung hunting

  dilly-dilly-dilly call to ducks Herefordshire

  doofers horse dung Scots

  dottle sheep dung Scots

  eksben thigh bone of a slaughtered animal Shetland

  faing enclosure for holding sheep Gaelic

  flop cow dung on pasture Suffolk

  fumes deer dung hunting

  gibby child’s name for a sheep Exmoor

  gimmer ewe between the first and second shearing northern England, Scotland

  grit-ewe ewe in lamb Galloway

  heft; hefting herd of sheep that have learnt their particular boundaries and stick to those areas throughout their lives (thus doing away with the need for fences); the skill by which sheep are taught to do this agricultural

  hefting skill by which sheep are familiarized with and thus stay within one territory on hills or fells, without resorting to fences or walls to pen them in agricultural

  hogg, hogget young sheep of either sex from nine to eighteen months (until it cuts two teeth) agricultural

  ho-ho-ho call to cattle Herefordshire

  hummer gentle murmuring neigh a horse makes when it hears someone it likes approaching or the fodder being brought Suffolk

  kepp-kepp-kepp call to poultry Herefordshire

  koop-koop-koop call to horses Herefordshire

  krog to crook or crouch when taking shelter from the weather under some high overhanging thing, as cattle do Shetland

  lamb-storms storms near the vernal equinox, often hurtful to new-weaned lambs East Anglia

  langle to tie the forelegs of an animal to prevent it leaping Galloway

  licking last meal given to cattle before milking Staffordshire

  maxon heap of dung Sussex

  oo wool Galloway

  pirl single globule of sheep’s dung Shetland

  plat cow dung Scots

  riggwelter sheep that has fallen onto its back and can’t get up because of the weight of its fleece Cumbria

  scalps rinds of turnips, left by the sheep in the fields Northamptonshire

  scrave bench for cleaning a fresh-killed pig Essex

  sharn cow dung for spreading on the fields Shetland

  sheep-hurk permanent winter fold Northamptonshire

  si-ew-si-ew-si-ew call to pigs Herefordshire

  skelloping of cattle: rushing around the field Herefordshire

  spancel rope used to tie up goats Northern Ireland

  sussing noise made by pigs when feeding Suffolk

  teg sheep in its second year Cumbria

  ting to cause a swarm of bees to settle by means of ‘tinging’ a house key against glass or metal East Anglia

  transhumance seasonal movement of grazing animals to and from pasture agricultural

  turdstool very substantial cowpat south-west England

  twinter two-year-old cow, ox, horse or sheep northern England, Scotland

  ujller unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill Shetland

  wigging removal of wool from around a sheep’s eyes to prevent wool blindness Cumbria

  9

  Stone-Books

  I first met Jacquetta Hawkes’s name as the author of an approving quotation on the cover of Clarence Ellis’s The Pebbles on the Beach (1954). ‘Mr Ellis writes simply and well about the natural processes which compose, shape and transport pebbles … he is a most excellent guide,’ said Hawkes – and she was right. Ellis’s was the book that we took as a family when we went treasure-hunting for stones on the coasts of Britain: wandering bent at the waist, eyes peeled for rough orbs of agate, quar
tz prisms, purple jasper and elusive amber, hard to tell in its unpolished form from the flints among which it usually lay. I pored over Ellis’s book as a child, especially the colour plates that carried glossy close-up photographs of stones – ‘fragment of gabbro’, ‘ovoid of quartz-veined grit’ – arrayed on sand. I appreciated the calm teacherliness with which he approached his subject from first principles (‘What is a pebble?’ ‘How have raised beaches come about?’) and the hint of moral duty with which he infused the study of geology (‘We paid some attention to sandstone in the last chapter, but we must examine it more closely’). I prized the insider tips he offered: that serpentine discloses its identity by means of its ‘wax-like lustre’, or that if you break a quartzite pebble ‘into two pieces and strike one against the other in darkness’ there will be an ‘orange-coloured flash’ and a ‘difficult to describe’ smell.

  Ellis also broke open the language of stones for me. He struck names against roots to produce flashes and smells: ‘Gneiss (pronounced “nice”) is a word of German origin, derived from an Old High German verb gneistan, “to sparkle”. In sunshine, especially after rain, it certainly does sparkle, as it is a highly crystalline rock.’ ‘Schist (pronounced “shist”) is derived from a Greek word schistos, meaning “easily split”.’ I began to collect stone-words as well as stones: the axe-knock syllables of quartz, jet, chert, onyx and agate, the classical complexities of carnelian and citrine. Ellis clearly loved language for its capacity to grade and sort perception, but also for the poetry it carried. As an ordinary-looking pebble could be sliced and polished to reveal dazzling patterns, so could a word. Ellis taught me swash, backwash and fetch as the terms necessary to help understand ‘the rudiments of wave action … upon the movement, the shaping and the smoothing of pebbles’; he noted swales and fulls as being respectively the ridges and hollows of shingle formation on the seaward-side of long shingle banks. He gave me crinoid and calyx, piriform, foliation and xenoliths: the last denoting those stones that have been transported by glacial action far from their origin, often identifiable by the striations (Latin stria, ‘a groove’) that showed where they had been scraped along by a glacier while ‘frozen into its underside’.

  About the only sentence of his book that I didn’t understand was its third: ‘Collectors of pebbles are rare.’ Really? For as long as I could remember, my parents and I had picked things up as we walked. Surfaces in our house were covered in shells, pebbles, twists of driftwood from rivers and sea. We weren’t the only ones. Everyone I knew seemed to gather pebbles, and line them up on window ledges and mantelpieces, performing a humdrum rite of happiness and memory-making. Spot, stoop, hold in the hand, slip in the pocket: a kind of karmic kleptomania. In their Cairngorms house my grandparents kept special stones in glass bowls that they filled with water to keep the stones shining. They even constructed a makeshift Wunderkammer: a wall-mounted cabinet, the white-wood compartments of which held a pine cone, a rupee, cowries, a dried shepherd’s purse, a geographic cone-snail shell with its map-like patterns, and polished pebbles of chalcedony and onyx.

  Ellis helped turn me into a petrophile; he also helped turn me into a logophile, and when he wrote of nineteenth-century pebble-hunters who ‘combed the beaches with painstaking zeal … and compiled glittering collections’, he might have been describing my own subsequent dictionary-fossicking and word-list-making. ‘All I know is that at the very early stage of a book’s development,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov, ‘I get this urge to gather bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles.’ Like Nabokov, I am a pebble-eater and a straw-gatherer: my own books have begun as gleaned images, single words and fragment-phrases, scribbled onto file cards or jotted in journals. They have also emerged from actual stones, gathered while walking. These stones – among them a heart-sized stone of blue basalt from Ynys Enlli, an eyeball of quartz taken from the black peat of Rannoch Moor, a pierced flint from Chesil Bank (Chesil from the Old English ceosol or cisel, meaning ‘shingle’), a clutch of fossilized polyps from the Palestinian West Bank, a rounded boulder of zebra-striped gneiss from the Isle of Harris – have served as triggers when I have begun to write: a means of summoning back memories of a landscape at the instant of finding (the scents and temperatures of the air, the nature of the light, the ambient sounds). Each stone is a souvenir in the old sense of the word; collection spurs recollection.

  ~

  Ellis’s The Pebbles on the Beach was the stone-book of my childhood; Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land (1951) that of my twenties. ‘I have used the findings of the two sciences of geology and archaeology,’ Hawkes declares at the opening of A Land, ‘for purposes altogether unscientific.’ So – candidly, audaciously – starts her strange book, a deep-time dream of 4 billion years of earth-history, whose ‘purposes’ are to demonstrate that we are all ‘creatures of the land’, substantively produced by the terrain on which we live, and to advance a synthetic cosmogony of consciousness, culture and geology. Passionate and personal, A Land became a best-seller upon publication in May 1951 and remains one of the defining British books of the post-war decade. It reads now, sixty years on, like a missing link in the tradition of British writing about landscape, but also as prophetic of contemporary environmental attitudes and anxieties. It feels both a period piece – as of its year as the Festival of Britain, the Austin A30 and The Goon Show – and Delphically out-of-time in its ecstatic holism. ‘The image I have sought to evoke,’ Hawkes declares in her Preface, ‘is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece.’

  Hawkes knew she had written an unclassifiable work. It is, she observed in 1953, ‘an uncommon type of book, one very difficult to place in any of our recognized categories’. The difficulty of ‘placing’ it arises in part because it dons and discards its disguises with such rapidity. It appears, at different points, to be a short history of Planet England; a Cretaceous cosmi-comedy; a patriotic hymn of love to Terra Britannica; a neo-Romantic vision of the countryside as a vast and inadvertent work of land art; a speculative account of human identity as chthonic in origin and collective in nature; a homily aimed at rousing us from spiritual torpor; a lusty pagan lullaby of longing; and a jeremiad against centralization, industrialization and our severance from the ‘land’. It is all of these things at times, and none of them for long. Its tonal range is vast. There are echoes of the saga, shades of the epic, and tassels of the New Age. It is tagged throughout with poetry (Wordsworth, Hardy, Lawrence, Norman Nicholson). It is flamboyant enough that I can imagine it re-performed as a rock opera. It brinks at times on the bonkers. Hawkes disarmingly refers to the book as a memoir, but if so it is one in which she investigates her past with reference to the whole of planetary history. It is a work of back-to-nature writing that advocates a return not just to the soil but right down to the core. In its obsession with clear and firm forms, A Land reads like Roger Fry on rocks; in its preoccupation with synchronicities, like Gurdjieff on geology; and in its fascination with the particularities of stone, like Adrian Stokes on acid. Its politics are occasionally troubling, but mostly animated by a federate vision of the nation as a union of loosely linked locales. It is not a jumble, exactly, for out of its contradictions arise its charisma. It is not wise, exactly, but its intensity approaches the visionary.

  A Land’s apparent solipsism and its disciplinary waywardness dismayed academic specialists when it was published, especially pure archaeologists, who reacted to Hawkes’s projection of self into her prose either with foot-shuffling embarrassment or with intellectual aggression. But such responses misunderstood Hawkes’s ambitions. Harold Nicolson, whose rave review of A Land in the Observer helped turn the book into a best-seller, knew straight away what he was dealing with. ‘There is,’ he noted with awe, ‘a weird beauty in this prophetic book … it is written with a passion of love and hate.’ H. J. Massingham compared Hawkes’s prose to that of Donne’s sermons, possessing ‘something of their imaginative range, their recondite knowledg
e, their passion of exploration, their visionary sense of integration’. A Land was, he concluded, ‘a germinal book and may well herald a change in cultural orientation that bitter experience has made tragically overdue’.

  Hawkes later attributed that ‘passion’ to the flux of her emotional life at the time of writing. A Land was composed between the spring of 1949 and the autumn of 1950. Her marriage to her first husband, the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes, was breaking up; she had recently met the man who was to become her second husband, the writer and broadcaster J. B. Priestley; and she had three years previously lost to sudden death her lover, the poet and music critic Walter Turner, to whom she had been devoted. By her own account, she was at a ‘highly emotional pitch’, which expressed itself as a ‘vital energy’ in the prose. A Land, she later recalled, came ‘directly out of my being’: ‘Wars can stir up personal lives to revolutionary effect … life took hold of me, and quite suddenly, my imagination was opened and my sensibility roused.’ She sat down to write out of a wish to contribute something ‘to our understanding of being and the overwhelming beauty and mystery of its manifestations’.

  The book was an eccentric move for her to make in terms of its register. Hawkes had from ‘an absurdly tender age’ wanted to become an archaeologist. Born in Cambridge in 1910, her childhood home was located on the site of both a Roman road and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. She grew up in an ‘extraordinarily reserved’ family, who were ‘as silent as trees in our emotional lives’, but intellectually dedicated (her father was a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins). At nine, she wrote an essay declaring that she would be an archaeologist; at eighteen she was duly admitted to Cambridge University to read archaeology, graduated with a first-class degree and travelled to Palestine – then under the British Mandate – to take part in the excavation of a Palaeolithic-era cave dwelling on Mount Carmel. In 1933 she married Hawkes, then an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, later to become Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, and for the next seven years she worked as an independent archaeological researcher, writing ‘only the most severely technical of articles and books’. But the upheavals of the Second World War and her love affair with Turner caused Hawkes to become distrustful of academic archaeology’s distrust of the imagination. She decided to use her ‘scientific archaeology’ for ‘more imaginative purposes’. The success of A Land launched her as a public intellectual, and she remained well known for the rest of her long life as a broadcaster, writer and culture broker.