Robert Macfarlane - Ghostways

ALSO BY ROBERT MACFARLANE

Underland

The Lost Words

Landmarks

The Old Ways

The Wild Places

Mountains of the Mind

ALSO BY STANLEY DONWOOD

Catacombs of Terror!

Slowly Downward

Small Thoughts

There Will Be No Quiet

ALSO BY DAN RICHARDS

The Beechwood Airship Interviews

Climbing Days

Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth

ROBERT MACFARLANE,
STANLEY DONWOOD,
and DAN RICHARDS

GHOSTWAYS

Two Journeys in Unquiet Places

Foreword copyright 2020 by Robert Macfarlane

Ness copyright 2018 by Robert Macfarlane, Illustrations copyright 2018 by Stanley Donwood

Holloway copyright 2012 by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards

Ness first published in the UK by Quive-Smith Editions 2018, first published by Hamish Hamilton 2019

Holloway first published in the UK by Quive-Smith Editions 2012, first published by Faber & Faber Ltd 2013, Faber & Faber Ltd paperback first published 2014

First American Edition 2020

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Cover design: Steve Attardo

Cover art: Stanley Donwood

Production manager: Beth Steidle

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN: 978-1-324-01582-6 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-324-01583-3 (ebk.)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

Contents

by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood

by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards

The Irish phrase iteanna Tana usually translated as thin places, or places of the shade refers to those landscapes in which the past is eerily restless, or the thresholds between realms are slender. The book you hold in your hands tells two stories of two such places. In keeping with their unsettled subjects, Ness and Holloway both shift between forms, and both are the work of more than one maker. Both were written in part to be read aloud, or at least sounded in the minds ear and also to flash upon the eye in their mixing of word and image. In them, landscape is not a smooth surface or simple stage set, there to offer picturesque consolations; rather it is complexly constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried conflicts and strange animisms.

Ness takes place in a version of Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast of East Anglia, shaped and reshaped by storm, tide and longshore drift. For seventy years (19131983) this isolated untrue island was used by the British Ministry of Defence to conduct secret weapons tests: from air gunnery and bombing during the First World War, through to the stress-testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 60s. There is no English landscape that has come to fascinate me more than the Ness, or to disrupt my usual ways of seeing. Produced by a collision of human death drive and natural life, it is unnerving in its juxtapositions: decaying ferroconcrete laboratories are recolonised by moss, bracken and elder to become green chapels; black-backed gulls build their nests in broken control panels; brown hares big as deer lope across expanses of shingle cratered by explosions, and the wind sings in the wires of abandoned perimeter fences.

Holloway takes place in a deep-sunk lane in Dorset, near the south coast of England; a hollowed way used by walkers and riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down into the soft golden bedrock of the region. Such holloways have long served as refuges; for recusant Catholics fleeing persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; for wild creatures seeking shelter from intensive farming and human interference; and for individuals who wish to slip out of the present for a while. I first explored the Dorset holloways early in the 2000s with a dear friend called Roger Deakin. Roger died not long afterwards, far too young, and ever since these sunken lanes where time loops, folds and echoes have been haunted sites for me, to which I have frequently returned, including with Holloway s coauthors, the writer Dan Richards and the artist Stanley Donwood.

A recurring image in Ness is the hagstone; a flint pebble with a hole worn naturally through it. In folklore across Europe, to look through such a stone is to see into the future, the past or the afterlife. Ghostways holds a hagstone up to landscape, and shows the skulls beneath its skin.

Robert Macfarlane, 2020

AWRE/6/79

QV06 79 76D/00

WE-177A

Look five forms moving fast through the forests to Ness.

Look here it comes, its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed & trussed with fishing line. It is drift: it has cuttlefish nails & sea-poppy horns, it breathes in rain & it breathes out rust.

Look here he comes, his bones are willow & he sings in birds. He rises in marsh, slips forwards by ripple & shiver. Between his tree-ribs birds flutter, then swoop ahead to settle, sing, quiver. His head is a ravens, his eyes are wrens nests. By day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts.

Look here she comes, her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi, she breathes in spores & she moves by hyphae. She is a rock-breaker, a tree-speaker, a place-shaper, a world-maker.

Look here they come, their eyes are hagstones & their words are shingle. They rise on the shore, rock-cored, flint beings, scattering chert to signal their passage, sending stones through time to foretell their seeings.

Look here as comes, who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal, cannot be grasped or forced, is the strongest & strangest & youngest & oldest of all the five, slipping through trees, past houses, rolled by the wind at years each minute rolled by the wind as if through time & in it.

it , he , she , they , as

All five know where they must go &

with what they must grapple &

where they must go is to the Green Chapel

Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.

Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception.

Ness speaks pagoda, transmission, reception, Ness speaks pure mercury, utmost secret, swift current, rapid-fire.

Listen again. Listen back. Listen to the pasts of Ness. Listen inland to the long-gone wood, which rings with the cries of wildcat & brock, heorte & hind, doe & bocke, hare & fox, wild fowle with his flocke, patrich, pheasant hen & pheasant cock, with green & wild stub & stock .

Listen to the wrench of the door in the Centrifuge Dome. Listen to the rise of the still encroaching ocean. Listen to the silence of the merman who would not talk, een when tortured & hung up by his feete . Listen to the rumoured motion of the rumoured bodies on the rumoured shore.

Shut up & listen, though, will you? Really listen. What the fuck is that, coming from the Green Chapel?