“Born from stones, dirt and grasses”

-

In a recent interview with The Line Of Best Fit, I briefly mentioned how much the natural landscape has played a part in my recording process. This connection is apparent in many of the titles which appear on my albums – names such as “Box of Birch” and “Crow Autumn”, which can’t help but conjure something grounded in earth, and bound by the seasons.

The first recording of mine which took landscapes as its explicit focus was “A Moraine” by Clouwbeck. The title is a reference to the process of glacial land formation and the ensuing accumulations of earth and rock deposited by moving ice sheets. More abstractly, it alludes to the idea of being remaindered – that which is left behind. The names of the album’s three pieces of music are also the first explicit reference to the landscape of Northern England, and more precisely, to Anglezarke, in the West Pennine Moors. “Andelevesarewe | Anlauesargh | Anlewesearche” are three of the old names for Anglezarke, a name which harks back to the settlement of this region by Norse people in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. “A Moraine” can therefore be seen as an attempt to bridge the gulf between an ancient, geological past and a more recent human history – to somehow root a connection with the landscape through the names that previous peoples have bestowed upon it.

My interest in the human history of the West Pennines began about five or six years ago, when I discovered a number of ruined farmhouses on the borders of Anglezarke and Rivington Moor. These places exuded a palpable sense of pathos, by virtue of their dereliction. They seemed wretched and forgotten. And yet, when I looked at modern maps of the area, many of these places were still marked, nearly a century after they were last inhabited. What’s more, they were given names. Evocative names. Those of people long vanished. Old Rachel’s. Higher Hempshaws. Simms. Parson’s Bullough. But as I began to research a little more of their history, I discovered that countless more farms had disappeared from the current cartographic record, and that those remaining structures hovered on the brink of oblivion. Out there on the land, there was little to distinguish one heap of broken stones from another. So why, I wondered, had Stoops and Brown Hill farm vanished from the record? Maps were clearly far from a simple topographical resource. They also offered an account of history, but one which didn’t seemed even-handed or objective.

This diary excerpt describes my discovery of a photograph of one of the farm’s last occupants, and my feelings on subsequently visiting the place:

A woman in white stands just outside the entrance, hands on hips, head slightly cocked, looking squarely into the camera. A girl crouches beneath the window cradling an infant, almost receding into the wall itself. She looks downwards, as if expressing her reticence to be involved in this depiction of rustic domesticity. And last but not least, all but hidden by a wall, a young man stands, arms folded. A century’s passing has since transformed this building from family dwelling into desolate ruin. Home only to occasional wild birds and the sound of the breeze through the Yarrow vale. A slow process of collapse, decay and gradual surrender.

And as I clamber over wood and stone, trying to trace its perimeter – to distinguish it from the moor which threatens to engulf it – I dislodge bits here and there, unintentionally becoming complicit in the process of decay. And how to stop the rot? How to salvage something from time’s passage? How long before the map makers decide to erase this structure completely? Before it becomes a nameless ruin? And then a mere pile of stones. Mossed over. Forgotten. How long until they lift its name from their charts and from our collective memory?

The only thing I can do is fill the place with music. To pour sound between wood and stone.

Into each fissure and fault-line.

Like rain on an April morning.
But sound, too, falls into decay and eventual silence. Perhaps a fitting medium for such a commemorative gesture? And just like the dissolution of this once well-delineated structure, the sounds of my bowed steel strings spill outwards. They cannot be contained. Fixed. Charted. They ripple across the moor. Losing shape and form. Accruing ghostly, shimmering overtones. Mingling with the sound of larks high above me, and the shrill dissent of curlews from across the river banks. An elegy born from stones, dirt and grasses.

This fragment of writing raises many of the themes which have occupied my work for the past half-decade – memory, mark-making and commemoration; the gestural significance of the creative act; the life-affirming, redemptive qualities of music; the importance of names, and of name-giving; and the unerring cycle of decay and renewal.

I recently collected together many such fragments and published them in a limited-edition book, entitled “Landings”, on my own Sustain-Release Private Press. The book was accompanied by an album of music of the same name, which has just been released on Type Records. It literally is music “born from stones, dirt and grasses”, as many of the recordings had their genesis in particular locations on Rivington and Anglezarke Moor – in the ruins of Old Rachel’s farm, by the banks of the fledgeling “Green Withins Brook”, or within the dark chambers of “Noon Hill Wood”.

The result is a record of my own personal journey through a landscape that I thought was familiar. But once I’d granted it the dignity it deserved – by listening, by dwelling within its sacred precincts – it began to speak to me with a very different voice. To slowly reveal its hidden narrative. And even though I approached the creation of “Landings” without any ulterior motive, I will certainly think it has achieved its purpose if it persuades other people to do as I did – to open themselves to what lies just beyond their doorstep.

Richard Skelton