Newsletter, Spring 2026
In Spring,
It is the first real sunny day in weeks, probably months, here in York. I sit in my reading chair to write this newsletter, with the washing machine chirring away in the other corner of my flat and the budgies chattering from a perch somewhere.
As I write this, I wear on the middle finger of my left hand a silver ring borrowed from the grave of Sylvia Plath. I promise to return it when my current poetry project with David Mullin, for Ffwcs Press, is written. At the beginning of February, I accompanied David to Plath’s grave on the anniversary of her death. We are working on a book of poetry in conversation with Plath’s poem ‘Hardcastle Crags’, and we spent the morning collecting the landscape of the poem through polaroids and pocket finds – including the ring. Its shape is the crown and forehead of a Greek goddess, with serious eyes and a satisfyingly sharp nose. I have snagged the cuff of my jumper on the nose. I have an idea that if I wear Plath’s ring as I write the poem it might help me to respond to her work. I haven’t really sat with her poems since I was a teenager, and David and I talked about how it would be a good idea not to read her poems while writing poetry for the book, so this feels like an alternative way of letting her voice in. The reality of this experiment has been interesting. I have found myself pulled back to my idea of Plath through the ring at random moments in my day-to-day existence. At the pub, I imagined Plath’s opinion of the music at the weekly open mic. She was a harsh critic. I wondered what she made of using a fire hose to clear mud from the Artsbarge mooring. She has crept into my washing-up thoughts, casting vivid colours in the soap bubbles and ‘pour[ing] tours’ of the tap. I took her to a nineties disco and gave her a yellow glowstick as an accessory for the night. We made patterns in the laser beams and smoke.
Hardcastle Crags (a working title) with Ffwcs Press is one of the projects I am currently working on. I thought I should at last collect these projects and other interesting things into a newsletter for friends and interested readers.
It is a year, more or less, since my poetry book Unstill Landscapes came out with Guillemot Press. I cannot speak too highly of Luke and Sarah and all the work they do to create a community of writers around this press, or thank them enough for the opportunities they have sent my way since bringing this little book into the world. In March, I am excited to celebrate Unstill’s anniversary in a joint launch event with fellow Guillemot poet Susie Campbell, author of Wastelands. The event is online and we would love you to join us via this link. With Guillemot, I am also looking forward to speaking at the Poetry’s Environments conference at Poetry@Leeds at the end of Spring, and before that heading down to Cornwall for the Launceston Poetry Festival. I will be taking the Adana press I use to print books as Little Hirundine, running some ‘Print Poetry’ workshops building on the series I trialled at Spark York last year. Tickets for the festival are available here.
Speaking of Little Hirundine, work continues slowly and surely, with exciting things ahead. It seems strange to have built a little corner for poetry out of a hand press and a few cases of type, and now to be speaking about this venture alongside other York-based small presses at the York Literature Festival. (Tickets available here.) I am working away one day a week at printing this year’s books, and am currently partway through Breathwork, a twinned poem pamphlet I wrote with Rowan Evans during our field trip to Stanton Drew stone circle in winter 2024. A typical day in the Little Hirundine studio at Spark York involves tinkering for hours and chatting to the other artists, remembering the pages must be printed by the end of the day and cranking on with the press to get them finished, then blissfully getting caught up in admiring the texture of the page or imagining a column of verse might resemble a rain-pocked standing stone. This is why I often call what I do with Little Hirundine ‘slow publishing’; many serendipitous conversations and ideas get caught up in the making when it is left a bit of time to get sidetracked.
In some very exciting print news, I have just begun working with Senate House Library as their first Printer-in-Residence. On Tuesday, I am down to London on the train to visit their newly-opened exhibition on late-medieval printer William Caxton. I will be thinking about how I would translate his incunabula, or early printed works, in a contemporary small press way. In the coming months, I will be leading a couple of print workshops and a roundtable event as part of the exhibition’s outreach programme. I’ll be documenting my work for this residency on my Instagram feed @r.l.drake, as well as collecting my thoughts in this blog. Please do follow along!
Among all this, I am finding small scraps of time to work on my new poetry manuscript. This work is currently helped along by my teaching work. One of the highlights of these past few weeks has been returning to the university classroom to read medieval texts with undergraduate students. We have read Beowulf, Marie de France, and this week Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I have been itching for some time for an excuse to immerse myself in scholarship on alliterative metre to help me translate the interlocking geological patterns of Thornwick Bay, which this week has provided. On Friday, it poured, but I sat in the theatre cafe with Daniel Sawyer’s book How to Read Middle English Poetry and for two hours got blissfully lost in his engaging discussion of alliterative metre.
And now, after the Sunday shopping is done, and the weekly cleaning, and perhaps a wander down the flood plain in this inviting sun, I am looking forward to staying sat in this chair and shamelessly practising alliterative verse-craft.
Becca x
It is the first real sunny day in weeks, probably months, here in York. I sit in my reading chair to write this newsletter, with the washing machine chirring away in the other corner of my flat and the budgies chattering from a perch somewhere.
As I write this, I wear on the middle finger of my left hand a silver ring borrowed from the grave of Sylvia Plath. I promise to return it when my current poetry project with David Mullin, for Ffwcs Press, is written. At the beginning of February, I accompanied David to Plath’s grave on the anniversary of her death. We are working on a book of poetry in conversation with Plath’s poem ‘Hardcastle Crags’, and we spent the morning collecting the landscape of the poem through polaroids and pocket finds – including the ring. Its shape is the crown and forehead of a Greek goddess, with serious eyes and a satisfyingly sharp nose. I have snagged the cuff of my jumper on the nose. I have an idea that if I wear Plath’s ring as I write the poem it might help me to respond to her work. I haven’t really sat with her poems since I was a teenager, and David and I talked about how it would be a good idea not to read her poems while writing poetry for the book, so this feels like an alternative way of letting her voice in. The reality of this experiment has been interesting. I have found myself pulled back to my idea of Plath through the ring at random moments in my day-to-day existence. At the pub, I imagined Plath’s opinion of the music at the weekly open mic. She was a harsh critic. I wondered what she made of using a fire hose to clear mud from the Artsbarge mooring. She has crept into my washing-up thoughts, casting vivid colours in the soap bubbles and ‘pour[ing] tours’ of the tap. I took her to a nineties disco and gave her a yellow glowstick as an accessory for the night. We made patterns in the laser beams and smoke.
Hardcastle Crags (a working title) with Ffwcs Press is one of the projects I am currently working on. I thought I should at last collect these projects and other interesting things into a newsletter for friends and interested readers.
It is a year, more or less, since my poetry book Unstill Landscapes came out with Guillemot Press. I cannot speak too highly of Luke and Sarah and all the work they do to create a community of writers around this press, or thank them enough for the opportunities they have sent my way since bringing this little book into the world. In March, I am excited to celebrate Unstill’s anniversary in a joint launch event with fellow Guillemot poet Susie Campbell, author of Wastelands. The event is online and we would love you to join us via this link. With Guillemot, I am also looking forward to speaking at the Poetry’s Environments conference at Poetry@Leeds at the end of Spring, and before that heading down to Cornwall for the Launceston Poetry Festival. I will be taking the Adana press I use to print books as Little Hirundine, running some ‘Print Poetry’ workshops building on the series I trialled at Spark York last year. Tickets for the festival are available here.
Speaking of Little Hirundine, work continues slowly and surely, with exciting things ahead. It seems strange to have built a little corner for poetry out of a hand press and a few cases of type, and now to be speaking about this venture alongside other York-based small presses at the York Literature Festival. (Tickets available here.) I am working away one day a week at printing this year’s books, and am currently partway through Breathwork, a twinned poem pamphlet I wrote with Rowan Evans during our field trip to Stanton Drew stone circle in winter 2024. A typical day in the Little Hirundine studio at Spark York involves tinkering for hours and chatting to the other artists, remembering the pages must be printed by the end of the day and cranking on with the press to get them finished, then blissfully getting caught up in admiring the texture of the page or imagining a column of verse might resemble a rain-pocked standing stone. This is why I often call what I do with Little Hirundine ‘slow publishing’; many serendipitous conversations and ideas get caught up in the making when it is left a bit of time to get sidetracked.
In some very exciting print news, I have just begun working with Senate House Library as their first Printer-in-Residence. On Tuesday, I am down to London on the train to visit their newly-opened exhibition on late-medieval printer William Caxton. I will be thinking about how I would translate his incunabula, or early printed works, in a contemporary small press way. In the coming months, I will be leading a couple of print workshops and a roundtable event as part of the exhibition’s outreach programme. I’ll be documenting my work for this residency on my Instagram feed @r.l.drake, as well as collecting my thoughts in this blog. Please do follow along!
Among all this, I am finding small scraps of time to work on my new poetry manuscript. This work is currently helped along by my teaching work. One of the highlights of these past few weeks has been returning to the university classroom to read medieval texts with undergraduate students. We have read Beowulf, Marie de France, and this week Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I have been itching for some time for an excuse to immerse myself in scholarship on alliterative metre to help me translate the interlocking geological patterns of Thornwick Bay, which this week has provided. On Friday, it poured, but I sat in the theatre cafe with Daniel Sawyer’s book How to Read Middle English Poetry and for two hours got blissfully lost in his engaging discussion of alliterative metre.
And now, after the Sunday shopping is done, and the weekly cleaning, and perhaps a wander down the flood plain in this inviting sun, I am looking forward to staying sat in this chair and shamelessly practising alliterative verse-craft.
Becca x
Spurn Head
The two of us sit cross-legged on the pebble beach, spines settled, facing the North Sea as if it is preparing to tell us something. A fable, perhaps. Between us, the battered green flask with a burn mark on the lid from where I once hastily stubbed a cigarette getting out of the rain. From it, tea steams into mugs – the flask cap, and a battered enamel mug with a ring of dancing elephants. The tea has that taste of milk kept too long warm, and a hint of apple. R rummages in a backpack on the stones, fishes out a Mars Bar, grinning like a kid. I pull a second bar from the bag and, slowly with numb fingers, peel back the wrapper to submerge the chocolate in my tea. It melts reluctantly.
The freezing wind is relentless.
I look at R, huddled in his coat and winter things, holding his knees like a Lost Boy. He catches me looking and grins, digs around in his coat pocket for the packet of cigarettes and a lighter. I watch him wrestle with the wind for purchase of fire, which takes a very long time, until eventually he breathes out in relief. I pull the lapel of my jacket up to cover my mouth and light a cigarette that way. The two of us sit, defying the East Wind with cradled flame.
Just metres past our feet, so it seems, a cargo ship drifts eastbound carrying five static caravans on its back. Their muted green sides heave quietly.
I say: “That is how I would like to escape. In a caravan, somewhere distant and curled up with a book.”
“You would be cold,” R says.
“I would grow flowers in a row of pots along the balcony, or I’d hang them over the side of the ship and see if they gather barnacles.”
“What would you eat?”
“Maybe the barnacles.” The logistics of this statement preoccupy me for a while.
Meanwhile the ship has inched a little bit further east and my fingers have lost all feeling.
Time could pass differently out here, at the end of the world. In the space of a clouded lungful of air, everything and nothing changes. Wind steals breath and sky swallows sea. On the long walk in across the washover and Chalk Bank, birds lifted from the beach in smoke swathes and the path was wrapped in the dusty webbings of brown tailed moths. Wandering through the empty shells of gun posts and abandoned cottages on the island, we found a bird’s nest in the recess of a concrete pillbox. White feathers looked warm enough to touch, as if the bird were coming back. I could have watched long enough to see the feathers breathe of their own accord, but R waited at the top of the stairs, afraid to enter the dark. Wandering on, we broke unexpected into the middle of a herd of cows so large they might belong to giants. A lone bull faced us head on, its horns as wide as R’s arm span, pointed tips glinting. Then at an unheard signal, it raised its head and let us pass.
It is such a rare thing to sit out here and breathe the ice in the air. I’ve become used to rushing around, to scrabbling for money, time, and meaning, and finding not much of any of these things. On the walk in from the car R and I talked excitedly of dinner, which will be cheese fondue with friends. There will be roasted cauliflower and new potatoes, those par-bake rolls that come out of the oven like fresh-baked bread, grapes and cake for pudding. Earlier, we stopped at the lighthouse, unpacking cheese and pickles for lunch (saving the Mars Bars to have later with tea on the beach). I forgot to buy bread to put them in sandwiches, so we ate cheese sticks, the kind my friend gives her toddler to pacify.
The day is glorious.
I am thinking about the beach. I am thinking about how it is a collection of other beaches, broken apart and put back together in the wrong place, or the right place, like two boxes of puzzles that got mixed up and redistributed across cardboard boxes. The latest pile-up at Spurn Head happened some two-hundred-and-fifty years ago. Before that, there was an island nearby called Ravenser Odd, until a storm sunk it. In another fifty years perhaps the present island won’t be here, but some new land might have taken its place.
I look again at R. His cigarette is coming to an end. Mine is already used up. I breathe them too deeply. Or I talk too much and the fire goes out. I have yet to master R’s way of talking without words. The years have been difficult for us both, each a bit harder and leaner than the last. I feel we could be like the beach we sit on, unavoidably whittled down. Both of us need a break, a storm to rise and reposition the land around us into new islands. Or if only there were a way of pressing pause on the slow progression of the shipping lane, or of stepping out onto the water, or of actually stealing away into one of the clean green caravans to grow flowers on a balcony.
The cigarettes are finished. We zip our coats up beneath our chins again and get to our feet, brushing grit from our clothes. And rounding the beach, we quibble over whether a crow or a cormorant flies on ahead of us.
On Missing Things, Tolkien and the Sea at Sandsend
Photograph of the sea at Hayburn Wyke (not quite the sea wall that inspired this essay, but also not quite different from it).
From the sea again, a thunder. This is the way to describe it. A ‘deep-voiced echoing’.(1) One long-armed wave heaves its body back then slumps the sea wall, flattening breath, flattening sound, flattening time. You stop talking mid-sentence and look out to sea.
Still there. Still unresolved.
Just before, your companion was saying something about blood and belonging. How you could spit yourself into a test-tube, know you were a part of something more. Landed. You think of all the times you have spat into the sea to lose the bitter taste of a wave.
Today, you planned to find the barrows at Sandsend. There are five of them, beading the walking route between Kettleness and Lythe. Bronze Age. The largest of them, Butter Howe, was excavated in 1918. You remember the only other barrows you have seen, at Sutton Hoo. The indescribable sense of reaching through centuries. Of repeating the past or making sense of the present. Perhaps, this is what draws you towards them now.
You planned the walk one afternoon last week, weighing against the weather forecast options of difficulty, daylight and curiosity. There would be four hours to complete the walk, given sunset in mid-afternoon, given your inability to wake before sunrise in the winter and begin before mid-morning. You spread a camera, a field mic, a book of routes over the big table in your flat, tracing the route and the five dotted circles with your finger. As if you were already out there. Playing at being explorer.
On the walk, your conversation has turned to poetry, the desire to write, to make sense of things, which you pin somewhere around reading Tolkien in your childhood bedroom, his prescient verses like stubborn adventurers winding out the window and over the main road into the cow fields.
Last night, in the hour before bed you read again the chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are stolen to the Barrow-downs.
‘Splendid!’ said Frodo. ‘If we make as good going this afternoon as we have done this morning, we shall have left the Downs before the Sun sets and be jogging on in search of a camping place.’ But even as he spoke he turned his glance eastwards, and he saw that on that side the hills were higher and looked down upon them; and all those hills were crowned with green mounds, and on some were standing stones, pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums. (2)
The hobbits are adventurers. Convinced they can cross from the lands of the living into the lands of the dead and back again before dinner. You think you might be like them. You also have to be past the barrows by sundown, back in the car and en route to York for evening teaching. In your backpack, the dinner you will have, sitting on a grassy knoll with a view of Butter Howe–a cheese and pickle sandwich (the pickle is one of your dad’s better recipes), a handful of walnuts, the last slice of Christmas cake and a flask of apple tea.
But you are more like the hobbits than you realise, and the walk hasn’t gone to plan. You got distracted by the hogback graves at a nearby church, losing time in their whorls and grimaces. Then you got halfway through the first field and struggled to find the first gate, flipping between the map in the book and the lost track in the field like a bemused detective before you decided it was a lost cause and headed down to the sea.
Now, with the planned walk given up on, the headland and the barrows lost over your shoulder, you walk along the sea wall between Sandsend and Whitby, thinking about missing things.
There’s a line in ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs’ in the Fellowship where Tolkien describes the voice of a wight casting a spell to keep the hobbits underground and tethered in the mound. Beyond the revenant’s ‘horrible sounds’, strings of words ‘shap[ing] themselves: grim, hard, cold’, he describes the disconnected longing these sounds call into being, rooted in the space of the barrow: ‘The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered’. It is a slippery unbalanced sentence of opposing logic that doesn’t quite stay put. An idea at the edges of what you can touch. The drama of these words doesn’t seem out of place, carried in your mind alongside the sea at Sandsend. Tolkien writes about longing for something you both want and don’t want; like the sea understood, or a poem resolved, a question answered, an end achieved, home.
The sea here, booming the sea wall, reminds you of another of Tolkien’s poems– ‘The Horns of Ylmir’. It took Tolkien several attempts to write this poem. He returned to the draft repeatedly from 1910 to 1917. In the final version, the sea is a furious presence as the speaker describes,
I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea
Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency…(3)
As you walk, these lines echo in your head. You resist repeating them aloud. It is one of those moments where language seems to call something into being, as if without Tolkien’s invocation of sea in your head it wouldn’t exist in reality. The almost déjà vu makes your head reel.
Of course, there’s nothing really to suggest that Tolkien ever wrote about this stretch of coast. Certainly, he never wrote about this sea. Housed at Roos during the First World War, just 2.8 miles (as the crow flies) down the coast from Sandsend, he might have kept this coast as his stomping ground for a while. But there is no proving that Tolkien ever walked these cliffs, stared down these barrows, even if it is comforting to imagine. This sea exists only now, and grows further from the sea it was a moment ago with each subsequent crashing wave. This cannot be Tolkien’s sea. Even so, the thought of your literary hero understanding a sea like this is captivating. It is a feeling like catching a conspirator’s eye across the room at a party or an obligatory meeting and knowing you are both off somewhere else entirely.
You think again of missing the barrows. You will not see them today. Maybe you will see them next week, or in the Spring when the longer days leave time for getting lost and found again. You could return to these cliffs season after season, looking for the perfect light to view those mounded backs to the past. There could be multiple drafts of this adventure. Perhaps, you will find them, cross out Sandsend in your list of place names to visit in your quest to understand this coast. Or perhaps, you never will.
As the sun sets, a sudden dark ices the dampness that has all day dogged the pavement. You lead your companion back up the steep cliff road to the car, where you buckle in, turn on the headlights, and follow the winding path over the moor towards home.
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Horns of Ylmir’ (1917).
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Harper Collins, repr. 1991), p.134.
3. Tolkien, Fellowship, p.137.
Still there. Still unresolved.
Just before, your companion was saying something about blood and belonging. How you could spit yourself into a test-tube, know you were a part of something more. Landed. You think of all the times you have spat into the sea to lose the bitter taste of a wave.
Today, you planned to find the barrows at Sandsend. There are five of them, beading the walking route between Kettleness and Lythe. Bronze Age. The largest of them, Butter Howe, was excavated in 1918. You remember the only other barrows you have seen, at Sutton Hoo. The indescribable sense of reaching through centuries. Of repeating the past or making sense of the present. Perhaps, this is what draws you towards them now.
You planned the walk one afternoon last week, weighing against the weather forecast options of difficulty, daylight and curiosity. There would be four hours to complete the walk, given sunset in mid-afternoon, given your inability to wake before sunrise in the winter and begin before mid-morning. You spread a camera, a field mic, a book of routes over the big table in your flat, tracing the route and the five dotted circles with your finger. As if you were already out there. Playing at being explorer.
On the walk, your conversation has turned to poetry, the desire to write, to make sense of things, which you pin somewhere around reading Tolkien in your childhood bedroom, his prescient verses like stubborn adventurers winding out the window and over the main road into the cow fields.
Last night, in the hour before bed you read again the chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are stolen to the Barrow-downs.
‘Splendid!’ said Frodo. ‘If we make as good going this afternoon as we have done this morning, we shall have left the Downs before the Sun sets and be jogging on in search of a camping place.’ But even as he spoke he turned his glance eastwards, and he saw that on that side the hills were higher and looked down upon them; and all those hills were crowned with green mounds, and on some were standing stones, pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums. (2)
The hobbits are adventurers. Convinced they can cross from the lands of the living into the lands of the dead and back again before dinner. You think you might be like them. You also have to be past the barrows by sundown, back in the car and en route to York for evening teaching. In your backpack, the dinner you will have, sitting on a grassy knoll with a view of Butter Howe–a cheese and pickle sandwich (the pickle is one of your dad’s better recipes), a handful of walnuts, the last slice of Christmas cake and a flask of apple tea.
But you are more like the hobbits than you realise, and the walk hasn’t gone to plan. You got distracted by the hogback graves at a nearby church, losing time in their whorls and grimaces. Then you got halfway through the first field and struggled to find the first gate, flipping between the map in the book and the lost track in the field like a bemused detective before you decided it was a lost cause and headed down to the sea.
Now, with the planned walk given up on, the headland and the barrows lost over your shoulder, you walk along the sea wall between Sandsend and Whitby, thinking about missing things.
There’s a line in ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs’ in the Fellowship where Tolkien describes the voice of a wight casting a spell to keep the hobbits underground and tethered in the mound. Beyond the revenant’s ‘horrible sounds’, strings of words ‘shap[ing] themselves: grim, hard, cold’, he describes the disconnected longing these sounds call into being, rooted in the space of the barrow: ‘The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered’. It is a slippery unbalanced sentence of opposing logic that doesn’t quite stay put. An idea at the edges of what you can touch. The drama of these words doesn’t seem out of place, carried in your mind alongside the sea at Sandsend. Tolkien writes about longing for something you both want and don’t want; like the sea understood, or a poem resolved, a question answered, an end achieved, home.
The sea here, booming the sea wall, reminds you of another of Tolkien’s poems– ‘The Horns of Ylmir’. It took Tolkien several attempts to write this poem. He returned to the draft repeatedly from 1910 to 1917. In the final version, the sea is a furious presence as the speaker describes,
I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea
Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency…(3)
As you walk, these lines echo in your head. You resist repeating them aloud. It is one of those moments where language seems to call something into being, as if without Tolkien’s invocation of sea in your head it wouldn’t exist in reality. The almost déjà vu makes your head reel.
Of course, there’s nothing really to suggest that Tolkien ever wrote about this stretch of coast. Certainly, he never wrote about this sea. Housed at Roos during the First World War, just 2.8 miles (as the crow flies) down the coast from Sandsend, he might have kept this coast as his stomping ground for a while. But there is no proving that Tolkien ever walked these cliffs, stared down these barrows, even if it is comforting to imagine. This sea exists only now, and grows further from the sea it was a moment ago with each subsequent crashing wave. This cannot be Tolkien’s sea. Even so, the thought of your literary hero understanding a sea like this is captivating. It is a feeling like catching a conspirator’s eye across the room at a party or an obligatory meeting and knowing you are both off somewhere else entirely.
You think again of missing the barrows. You will not see them today. Maybe you will see them next week, or in the Spring when the longer days leave time for getting lost and found again. You could return to these cliffs season after season, looking for the perfect light to view those mounded backs to the past. There could be multiple drafts of this adventure. Perhaps, you will find them, cross out Sandsend in your list of place names to visit in your quest to understand this coast. Or perhaps, you never will.
As the sun sets, a sudden dark ices the dampness that has all day dogged the pavement. You lead your companion back up the steep cliff road to the car, where you buckle in, turn on the headlights, and follow the winding path over the moor towards home.
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Horns of Ylmir’ (1917).
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Harper Collins, repr. 1991), p.134.
3. Tolkien, Fellowship, p.137.
Therapod Footprint, Long Nab
On the first day of the new year, I go to the coast in search of a dinosaur footprint. This seems a fitting start. To find such a rare, unlikely thing this early should be suitably auspicious for the year to come. Better, even, than bird watching–or coming face to face with blackbirds, herons, crows–, this might be the year I stand toe-to-toe with a T-Rex.
My path today begins at a memorial above Cloughton Wyke. The blue-painted bench, positioned to look out to sea, holds court to a small garden of bedding flowers planted around it, and an engraved bronze plaque dedicates it to a former member of the Scarborough Rambling Club. I imagine someone walking these cliffs, year after year, until the cliffs wear indelibly their footprints. When a foot presses into earth something is lost on both sides. Part of the footprint leaves itself behind in the earth and part of the earth leaves itself to follow the footprint, perhaps to be left again in another step just down the path, or perhaps further away. In another field. Along the road. In the footwell of a car. On the doormat of a flat. There is not just erosion at play, but also composition.
I keep walking. I stop to pee. Reading fantasy books as a child, it always irritated me that none of the heroes stopped for a toilet break. They would walk for pages and pages, for long enough to exchange walking songs and poems, even entire histories of fallen worlds. Surely, the need to go must have been agonising, but they never did. I have since learned that often literature doesn’t see the point in writing about the everyday things, the things people take for granted. In medieval romances–the forerunners of the modern fantasy novel–there are many treasures. Beautiful enchanted cloaks that keep a man alive or make a woman the object of desire, magic swords, clairvoyant knights. Few of them pay attention to the things people do, day in, day out. Equally important things like fishing, eating, adding to the town midden. Finished with my toilet break, I hastily stand up and am relieved to see the headland still empty around me. No one saw. I am amazed to see the stream of urine I have created spilling boldly down the dirt track. It bends at a root, curves around it like a crooked finger, vines itself a full two metres before the earth absorbs it and dulls its glistening surface. So easily might my body be taken into this coastline.
By the time I reach the place where the therapod footprint is supposed to be planted at the bottom of the cliff, the tide has already wound itself into the rock. Indignant for a moment–had I not checked the tide times, planned to wake early to avoid the sea like this?--I sit on the bench at the top of the cliff and stare down through long grey breakers to where it would be on the map. I can’t see it. It would be quite large, I think. At least as big as my chest, probably bigger, as wide across as the length of my body. I could lie down next to it to measure its reality. When I was planning the walk, this might have been what I imagined. Lying my body down to make a shallower imprint next to the deep impression left behind by a creature millions of years before me. Or maybe I planned to plant my foot in the middle of it, or both feet, like a child jumping with both feet together into the middle of a puddle. This way, I might have achieved time travel. Very briefly, I consider jumping feet first into the sea to meet the footprint underwater, perhaps from lower down the cliff. Hunger distracts me from this fantasy, and I unwrap the Christmas cake I have brought with me, and a flask of black coffee which quickly cools in the icy wind.
The book of coastal walks I have also brought with me in my backpack says the footprint belongs to a therapod. This could mean anything from a microraptor to a T-Rex, and includes all two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs. I try to imagine the years the footprint has lain quiet, folded into rock, and the years it will take for it to quietly unfold into the sea with the twice daily washing of the waves, or into the land via a gradual clinging to the grooves of human boots or the naked skin of seabird feet. I imagine the force it would take for a creature to press a footprint into time, to exist both in the past and the present simultaneously. I wonder if a creature any less than a T-Rex could do this. Sometimes, I think about writing as this kind of pressing. A pen held too hard and digging into paper leaves a mark through the page, and the page after, and perhaps the page after. This has been a bad habit of mine since school, where the mark of a pencil never seemed enough and the temptation to trace and retrace the letters until the page was dark with graphite led to incomplete exercises and tellings off. It is a habit I mind less to correct as an adult. When I write by hand, using paper and pen, it is often not to lay out a complete narrative but just to begin, to let the ink settle in the grooves of a few slowly formed letters, then to think. The mark making is a contemplative and deliberate act. Very different from how I imagine the therapod, perhaps lumbering, perhaps racing, perhaps wandering along the coastal flood plain, but this too is a writing.
‘To write something down’ is to press thought into the page, push memory into a surface, or beg a landscape to remember a moment of touch. I came here to read a footprint, only to find the page of the book temporarily turned and the promise of touching the past disappointingly out of reach. The footprint is there, hidden beneath the mud-grey water. I just can’t see it. Its edges grow smoother with every lick of a wave; with every inrush it becomes less itself and more a part of the coastline. It won’t be long before there is nothing left to see, before the sheen of the past wears off and all that lies beneath the waves is a smooth new page awaiting fresh imprints. Even then, the footprint will remain, whether or not I can see it.
My path today begins at a memorial above Cloughton Wyke. The blue-painted bench, positioned to look out to sea, holds court to a small garden of bedding flowers planted around it, and an engraved bronze plaque dedicates it to a former member of the Scarborough Rambling Club. I imagine someone walking these cliffs, year after year, until the cliffs wear indelibly their footprints. When a foot presses into earth something is lost on both sides. Part of the footprint leaves itself behind in the earth and part of the earth leaves itself to follow the footprint, perhaps to be left again in another step just down the path, or perhaps further away. In another field. Along the road. In the footwell of a car. On the doormat of a flat. There is not just erosion at play, but also composition.
I keep walking. I stop to pee. Reading fantasy books as a child, it always irritated me that none of the heroes stopped for a toilet break. They would walk for pages and pages, for long enough to exchange walking songs and poems, even entire histories of fallen worlds. Surely, the need to go must have been agonising, but they never did. I have since learned that often literature doesn’t see the point in writing about the everyday things, the things people take for granted. In medieval romances–the forerunners of the modern fantasy novel–there are many treasures. Beautiful enchanted cloaks that keep a man alive or make a woman the object of desire, magic swords, clairvoyant knights. Few of them pay attention to the things people do, day in, day out. Equally important things like fishing, eating, adding to the town midden. Finished with my toilet break, I hastily stand up and am relieved to see the headland still empty around me. No one saw. I am amazed to see the stream of urine I have created spilling boldly down the dirt track. It bends at a root, curves around it like a crooked finger, vines itself a full two metres before the earth absorbs it and dulls its glistening surface. So easily might my body be taken into this coastline.
By the time I reach the place where the therapod footprint is supposed to be planted at the bottom of the cliff, the tide has already wound itself into the rock. Indignant for a moment–had I not checked the tide times, planned to wake early to avoid the sea like this?--I sit on the bench at the top of the cliff and stare down through long grey breakers to where it would be on the map. I can’t see it. It would be quite large, I think. At least as big as my chest, probably bigger, as wide across as the length of my body. I could lie down next to it to measure its reality. When I was planning the walk, this might have been what I imagined. Lying my body down to make a shallower imprint next to the deep impression left behind by a creature millions of years before me. Or maybe I planned to plant my foot in the middle of it, or both feet, like a child jumping with both feet together into the middle of a puddle. This way, I might have achieved time travel. Very briefly, I consider jumping feet first into the sea to meet the footprint underwater, perhaps from lower down the cliff. Hunger distracts me from this fantasy, and I unwrap the Christmas cake I have brought with me, and a flask of black coffee which quickly cools in the icy wind.
The book of coastal walks I have also brought with me in my backpack says the footprint belongs to a therapod. This could mean anything from a microraptor to a T-Rex, and includes all two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs. I try to imagine the years the footprint has lain quiet, folded into rock, and the years it will take for it to quietly unfold into the sea with the twice daily washing of the waves, or into the land via a gradual clinging to the grooves of human boots or the naked skin of seabird feet. I imagine the force it would take for a creature to press a footprint into time, to exist both in the past and the present simultaneously. I wonder if a creature any less than a T-Rex could do this. Sometimes, I think about writing as this kind of pressing. A pen held too hard and digging into paper leaves a mark through the page, and the page after, and perhaps the page after. This has been a bad habit of mine since school, where the mark of a pencil never seemed enough and the temptation to trace and retrace the letters until the page was dark with graphite led to incomplete exercises and tellings off. It is a habit I mind less to correct as an adult. When I write by hand, using paper and pen, it is often not to lay out a complete narrative but just to begin, to let the ink settle in the grooves of a few slowly formed letters, then to think. The mark making is a contemplative and deliberate act. Very different from how I imagine the therapod, perhaps lumbering, perhaps racing, perhaps wandering along the coastal flood plain, but this too is a writing.
‘To write something down’ is to press thought into the page, push memory into a surface, or beg a landscape to remember a moment of touch. I came here to read a footprint, only to find the page of the book temporarily turned and the promise of touching the past disappointingly out of reach. The footprint is there, hidden beneath the mud-grey water. I just can’t see it. Its edges grow smoother with every lick of a wave; with every inrush it becomes less itself and more a part of the coastline. It won’t be long before there is nothing left to see, before the sheen of the past wears off and all that lies beneath the waves is a smooth new page awaiting fresh imprints. Even then, the footprint will remain, whether or not I can see it.
Entry, 06.05.24 . Spring . 'Voicing the Beck' Workshop with Tom Branfoot and St Nicks nature reserve, York
On a Friday lunchtime in York with the rain still deciding whether or not to fall, I pack up the day’s teaching materials and drive over to St Nicks to meet Tom Branfoot ahead of his ecopoetry workshop on the grammar of water with Tang Hall beck. By the time I arrive at the environment centre it is raining, as if the water wants to be heard. When Tom arrives, already a little sodden, we make straight for the tea that St Nicks’ staff have kindly put on, already needing to warm up.
Tom’s is the second of a series of poetry workshops entangling students, researchers and local creatives with St Nicks nature reserve in Tang Hall, York. With the guidance and support of Anthony Capildeo we tested a ‘prototype’ workshop in November (you can read about it here), using the responses from this workshop to apply for funding for a further four workshops throughout the Spring and Summer of 2024. These workshops explore our relationship to water in a city that is historically prone to flooding, our role in water management, and how we learn to live with and understand our place in a landscape that water can alter drastically. In today’s workshop, I am keen for Tom to bring his experience in poetic research into the urban environmental and socio-historical pasts of Bradford, which he explores in his debut collection Boar (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), to help us understand water at St Nicks. One of the aims of this workshop is to find ways of gathering and archiving the nature reserve through found poetry, repurposing archival records of flood and St Nicks’ site history.
We begin the workshop by asking everyone there what they understood by ‘ecopoetry’. A mixture of local poets, undergraduates and researchers from the University of York, and St Nicks staff, their responses vary: ecopoetry is poetry about nature, poetry that places the human/urban alongside nature, poetry that explores the politics of human involvement with nature. We ask, what has been their experience of St Nicks? It is a place of recuperation, wellness, an escape from the city. This introduction is followed by a brief history of the nature reserve site from its Victorian brickworks, to landfill, to nature reserve, led by St Nicks’ David. Tom then asks us to read Zaffar Kunial’s ‘Ings’, from England’s Green (2022). We think about how you capture a sense of place through poetry, the way Kunial captures the town of Ings in the poem. We ask who accesses nature, and whether the urban or anthropocene interrupts or enhances our interaction with nature in the poem. Following this, Tom picks up on the concept of -ings as a way in to thinking about a grammar of water. This must be movement, an opposite of stasis, a way of creating openings through which to think water. He leads us down to Tang Hall beck (it is still raining). To begin encountering the nature reserve through poetry, Tom gives us a set of instructions to practice the grammar of water. These are almost spell-like: first listen, and write five ‘-ing’s to record the water; then walk five steps; then listen again, and write five more ‘-ing’s; and so on…
whiting
breaching
rusting
whistling
blotting
warping
sickening
pricking
weightening
furring
rooting
bogging
shuddering
singing
absorbing
resting
unmoving
trolleying
encountering
existing*
breaching
rusting
whistling
blotting
warping
sickening
pricking
weightening
furring
rooting
bogging
shuddering
singing
absorbing
resting
unmoving
trolleying
encountering
existing*
With these watery gatherings, we return to the environment centre to write and reflect. We take archival flood reports, and text from St Nicks' website, using our -ings to write into these and to recreate a version of the reserve voiced through the grammar of water.
How has my understanding of water changed, having thought with this grammar of water? In the week’s preceding the workshop itself, I took Tom to St Nicks to show him the site – the ‘text’ he would be working with. As we sat in the pouring rain by Tang Hall beck, we reflected on the strangeness of nature writing that excludes the urban, or the built human, from ‘nature’. St Nicks is neighboured by residential streets, busy roads, and working yards. It is as much a listening bowl for bird song as it is for cranes, diggers, and electric white noise. On the day of Tom’s workshop, the water level in the beck was lower than I had seen it before, despite the rain; emerging from the receded surface was a rusted, warped shopping trolley. As a group, we joked about this large act of littering – could we see which supermarket it belonged to, and did Asda, Tesco, or Aldi want it back? But the trolley is present in the notes of almost every workshop participant, rooting itself in the working of each poetic line of enquiry, a shadow of the noisy city we have come here to forget. The becks of St Nicks are as much formed of these human shadows as they are of ‘nature’.
*With thanks to the attendees of this workshop, Sián, Mia, Rebecca, Arabella, Fran, Eithne, and David, for their permission to use extracts from their work.
Entry, 12.12.23 . Autumn . 'Voicing the Beck' workshop with St Nicks nature reserve, York
The following post documents the first in a series of workshops aimed at exploring and archiving St Nicks' environmental history, past and present, through poetry. If you are interested in being involved in future workshops, please email [email protected].
On a rainy morning in November, the River Ouse had flooded its banks. It had completely submerged Dame Judi Dench walk at the bottom of Museum Gardens, rising up past the elaborate stonework of the arches by Lendal Bridge. Keeping close enough to the river to observe it, I hurried in my raincoat through town, along Walmgate then Lawrence Street and turning off at Bull Lane – past the mosque and the backs of brick terraced houses – to St Nicks Nature Reserve. From one flooding waterway to another, I had come to this layered place to listen to two becks where they meet, as part of a Water Poetics workshop led by poet/researcher Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Green Corridors officer Maria Gill, and myself.
*With thanks to the attendees of this workshop, Sián, Mia, Rebecca, Arabella, Fran, Eithne, and David, for their permission to use extracts from their work.
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From the medieval period to the present day, St Nicks in Tang Hall has been a site of fluid and straying environments. It has been fishpond, marsh, meadow, landfill, and now nature reserve. At each stage of its history, the site's landscape has been altered by the city's residents. The way we understand our relationship to this environment is also in flux, moving from land management for resource use to land management in conservation. Most recently, as part of their Green Corridors project, the staff and volunteers of St Nicks are rewilding Osbaldwick Beck to restore natural water flow.
In a city that is historically prone to flooding, how do we understand our relationship to water? What is our role in water management and how do we learn to live with and understand our place in a landscape that water can alter drastically? These were the questions we had come to St Nicks to answer, calling to its two becks, Tang Hall Beck and Osbaldwick Beck (called ‘Ozzy Beck’ by its more frequent visitors) for poetic response. |
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A collection of local poets, researchers, and students, we met at St Nicks conservation centre. Emerging in drips, we sat steaming by the welcome heat of the centre's stove -- icy rain hung over the trees outside. To begin, we gathered the strands of St Nicks’ environmental history. From Maria, who works for St Nicks as Green Corridors officer, we learnt about its development from monastic land in the Middle Ages, to common land (or ‘stray’), to its use as a landfill site and eventually its reclamation for wildlife under the conservation of St Nicks.
Next, Anthony Vahni Capildeo invited us out into the nature reserve to ‘listen concentrically’ to the becks. We listened for ‘water’ in all its forms: liquid [beck flow, rain drop, mist, breath, mud]; animal [bird, human, squirrel, water vole ?]; plant [tree, leaf fall, leaf crunch]. We wrote its voices onto a map – the borderlines of St Nicks - archiving an echo or run-off of beck voices:
Next, Anthony Vahni Capildeo invited us out into the nature reserve to ‘listen concentrically’ to the becks. We listened for ‘water’ in all its forms: liquid [beck flow, rain drop, mist, breath, mud]; animal [bird, human, squirrel, water vole ?]; plant [tree, leaf fall, leaf crunch]. We wrote its voices onto a map – the borderlines of St Nicks - archiving an echo or run-off of beck voices:
rumble – reversing warning – flowing folding – traffic
gulls calling – crow speaks – Reversing? Reversing?
speaks speaks echoing between trees
…
(by Jessie Summerhayes)
gulls calling – crow speaks – Reversing? Reversing?
speaks speaks echoing between trees
…
(by Jessie Summerhayes)
sounds that sound / move like water
scrunch
crow plop ripple.
caw plop ribble
aah rissle
kraa ribble
(by Anthony Vahni Capildeo)
scrunch
crow plop ripple.
caw plop ribble
aah rissle
kraa ribble
(by Anthony Vahni Capildeo)
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Maps and Images
fig. 1, Risograph outline of St Nicks nature reserve, credit Becca Drake and Lily Clementine Orsino
fig. 2, Osbaldwick Beck, credit Google Maps
fig. 3, St Nicks Nature Reserve, credit St Nicks
figs. 4 & 5, Poets at St Nicks, credit Becca Drake
fig. 6, Poem map of St Nicks' environmental history, credit Anthony Capildeo
fig. 1, Risograph outline of St Nicks nature reserve, credit Becca Drake and Lily Clementine Orsino
fig. 2, Osbaldwick Beck, credit Google Maps
fig. 3, St Nicks Nature Reserve, credit St Nicks
figs. 4 & 5, Poets at St Nicks, credit Becca Drake
fig. 6, Poem map of St Nicks' environmental history, credit Anthony Capildeo
With thanks to Dr Francesca Brooks for her generous mentorship in heritage outreach workshops such as 'Wordcraft' which has greatly inspired and laid the groundwork for this work.
Entry, 15.06.23 . an illustration . 'Figures of Wood'
This week I have been on a kind of pilgrimage to 'Florrie's places', that is, the landscapes around Coanwood, Lambley, and Haltwhistle where my Grandmother grew up. More on this family fieldwork in another post. It was a lovely surprise to wake in my tent, groggy-eyed and in desperate need of coffee, to find Layla's email in my inbox sharing her illustration of one of my poems from the Hull Maritime Project. Layla emailed me a few weeks ago asking if she could illustrate one of my poems to submit as her entry for the Northern Illustration Awards. Her beautifully textured greyscale work is so highly evocative of the bleak (but beautiful) land/waterscape of Spurn Point, about which and where Figures of Wood was written, that she seems to have looked inside my head as I was writing it.
© Layla Jabbari, 2023
Figures of wood at Spurn Point, 2020
Leaning on the grog, lines of lives
of women waiting a watch, those wives
of the North Sea, stooped. Some fall,
some crumble, some drown, and some stand
tall, reeling around this finger of land
the spool of hours between the tides.
Leaning on the grog, lines of lives
of women waiting a watch, those wives
of the North Sea, stooped. Some fall,
some crumble, some drown, and some stand
tall, reeling around this finger of land
the spool of hours between the tides.
Layla Jabbari is a freelance illustrator from Hull, UK, longlisted for the World Illustration Awards 2023. She works closely with clients on work that often has story-telling and community at its centre. Her projects have involved a variety of outcomes from prints and zines to community art. Her clients include the University of Hull and the Environment Agency. She has had work published in Artist Responding To magazine and the Critical Fish publication. Her work playfully combines materials, collage, paint and photography layered in the digital space. You can view more of Layla's work here.
Layla's work is published on this site with her kind permission. All copyright belongs to the artist and this work may not be reproduced or shared without her permission.
Layla's work is published on this site with her kind permission. All copyright belongs to the artist and this work may not be reproduced or shared without her permission.
