I haven’t posted (& probably won’t, much) because I’m writing. But here’s a bit from a 1984 notebook, which some may recognise in its more written-up form–
We were looking down into a deep Gothic ravine, at the dry bottom of which a well-defined path curved up-hill between overgrown screes. Along the lip of the opposite wall, which was sheer and divided like a layer cake by long horizontal cracks, grew a few thin bent larches and firs. Half a mile or less to the south a high limestone scar rose under the grey sky. Northwards, the path climbed abruptly into the recesses of the cleft and vanished. A light rain had begun to fall; I could hear it pattering quietly on the dead larches, alien and lichenous, scattered over the heaps of scree where some winter wind had flung them.
We walked in silence out of the little bare wood along the cliff edge and stood in the rain to stare at the long featureless green sweeps of moorland stretching north. The head of the ravine was a stony cleft hardly wide enough to admit two people. The path came up to meet us, and we followed it along a small dry valley, sheep scattering in front of us. At the junction of two drystone walls we climbed a stile.
From Trow Gill the path domesticates for two miles, gently losing height amid the lush mixed woodland and cultivated shrubs of the old Farrer estate until it reaches Clapham, a stony, picturesque and prosperous village which once served generations of Farrers and now, squarely astride the A65 Kendal to Keighley road, logically serves tourists and second-homers instead. It’s an attractive enough place in summer, if a little reserved; but it was chilly and almost deserted when we got there. A few dowdy mallards honked from the shallows of the stream. A woman in a head scarf and gumboots stopped gardening to watch us pass, trowel in hand, eyes indifferent. Out on the main road, we waited half an hour for the Kendal bus. When it came it too was empty, but for one bronchitic old man and his sly red-eyed collie.
Reading: Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky, because I so much enjoyed the HE Bates-like atmosphere of Fire in the Blood. Listening to: Bowie, Diamond Dogs.
Thank you for recontextualising “domesticates” for me.
Hi John Fred. That usage sits nicely in the middle of the Oxford definition, “to tame or bring under control”. As you lose height, the moor gives way successively to rough grazing, pasture & finally garden; a steady domestication. In its heyday the Farrer estate was also one huge park or garden of, I think, Himalayan plants. So it seemed like a good word to use for the transition between a limestone gorge & a woman in wellingtons…
(Mind you, there’s nothing up there which isn’t, in a sense, domesticated–that whole landscape is a fossil of human use from the Bronze Age on.)
I’d forgotten how keen you are on the names of roads (the A65). They crop up every few pages in Climbers, The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. Now *that* is domestication. Every man uses them as conversation, even when he has no interest in the subject.
Until I was married, I had never noticed that roads had letters and numbers. I just thought of them in terms of what was on them (Brough to Scotch Corner, say, a nice road if you’re not caught behind an artic, with a useful pub at Appleby) or where they went. But my father-in-law and brother-in-law called it the A66. So I started doing it, since I had nothing else to talk to them about. It does loads of work on the verisimilitude front, somehow.
Hi Andrew. I love that they’re a net, a pattern of use, a pattern of association. I loved chanting their names off when I started to go climbing because they were a net of pleasure, a promise of pure pleasure. 1978, I had Tom Petty running obssesively through my head & I was learning to write (at last), & I was learning to climb. Internalising that web of roads helped internalise all the other webs, from syntax to “Adagio enchainment showing first through fourth arabesques” (for “The Dancer from the Dance”) . I sat in cars in a daze of happiness, in love with hot air shimmer above the tarmac. Next bend: Stoney. Next bend: Ravensdale. Next bend, “Home Town Blues” somehow entangled with quiet, happy exhaustion, bloody hands & an image of an arete with the evening sun coming round it. The sound of a pair of jackdaws stealing the chocolate out of your luggage 80 feet below. What’s not to love about roads ?
Well, the A14, a crap road. But I do love them, usually. I like driving a lot, especially runs up to Scotland (which I do a fair bit). For the back roads I’ve got an old Mini Cooper in British racing green which feels as if it’s doing about 90 as soon as you’re over 45. I love being that low down. You know that line of Thom Gunn’s (which he later disowned): One is always nearer for not keeping still.
It is a crap road, the A14.
Why did Gunn disown that line ? It has full-tilt zen. (Maybe that’s why he had to disown it…)
Sorry to be slow responding. Have been exploring French roads (A26, A1). Can you believe the toll on the autoroute from Calais to Paris is €19.60? An outrage. Nice backroads in the Pas de Calais near Guines, though.
Then I came back this evening (M20, huge queue at Dartford, M25, M11, huge queue near Cambridge, crap A14).
Gunn thought it didn’t make any sense. “Nearer to what?” he asked in his old age. But you’re right, that was what was good about it in the first place. His early poems are really wonderful, I think. Especially The Wound and Carnal Knowledge and the stuff from Fighting Terms. Then he got very good again towards the end (from The Man with Night Sweats on).
Boy, do I love the A65, being what we call the Kirby Lonsdale road and the freeway to Scotland and freedom at last. The A14 never held any problems for me, but then I only went as far as the A1 north…
For me, the worst road has to be the A470 switchback through Wales: north to south non-stop. And the best experience is driving in to Applecross on the zig-zag mountain Pass of the Cattle, when the sun sets into the corrie and its rays flood out of all the crevasses between the cliffs.
After me came ninety-nine Honda Shadows on a rally. A ‘Dark, wide realm where we walk with everyone.’ – Thom Gunn