Landmarks (15 page)

The night before I first met Richard Skelton and we ended up going into the hill together, I read a story taken from the great Finnish folk epic, the
Kalevala
. The story’s title caught my eye on a contents page: ‘Vainamoinen Finds the Lost-Words’. Its hero, Vainamoinen, is trying to build an enchanted ship of oak wood in which he will be able to sail to safety over the
‘rough sea-billows
’. But he is unable to conclude his shipbuilding for want of three magic words, the utterance of each of which will perform a task: speaking the first will ‘complete the stern’, the second will ‘fasten the ledges’ and the third will ‘finish the forecastle’. Synonyms are no use: the power of each word is specific to its form, and only the utterance of all three will render the ship seaworthy. So Vainamoinen – whose name comes from the Finnish
vaina
, meaning ‘stream-pool’ – sets out in search of the ‘lost-words’.

He looks for them first in ‘the brains of countless swallows’, then ‘the heads of dying swans’ and then ‘the plumage of the grey duck’, but does not find them. He looks on ‘the tongues of summer-reindeer’ and in ‘the mouths of squirrels’, but still without success. So he travels to the Deathland of Tuoni, a perilous island that is reached by passing through fen, forest, mead and marsh, then by a week’s walking through brambles, a week through hazel and a week through juniper. At last he reaches the island, where he almost succumbs to an evil enchantment intended to lull him to sleep and into lifelong imprisonment. He escapes from Tuoni, but is still without the words. He is sitting on a hillside, wondering where he should next seek them, when he is approached by a shepherd. The shepherd tells him that he must enter the underworld and find the dead hero Wipunen, on whose tongue can be found ‘a thousand words of wisdom’. He offers to show Vainamoinen the road that leads to Wipunen’s grave, deep within the earth – but warns him that to reach it he will have to ‘journey over the points of needles, the edges of swords and the blades of axes’.

Wary of this warning, Vainamoinen goes to Ilmarinen the smith and asks him how to pass over swords and axes unharmed. The smith answers by stoking his furnace and forging a pair of copper soles for Vainamoinen’s shoes. Wearing these, he approaches the place where Wipunen is buried. It is marked by a cleft in the hillside, guarded by a tree. There, Vainamoinen sings a song to bring Wipunen back to life, and as Wipunen opens his vast mouth – the cleft in the hillside – Vainamoinen steps through it and into the tunnel of Wipunen’s throat. The floor of the tunnel is, as the shepherd had foreseen, lined with the blades of axes and swords. But they cannot pierce Vainamoinen’s copper soles. He reaches the ‘spacious caverns’ of Wipunen’s vitals – and once he is there Wipunen begins to sing.

Wipunen sings for three days and three nights, telling his knowledge and reciting each of his spells. At the end of this time, Vainamoinen has learnt ‘all the wisdom of the great magician’. He returns along the tunnel of swords and axes, and emerges into the sunlight of the outer world. Ilmarinen is waiting for him, and asks if he will now be able to finish his vessel. ‘I have learnt a thousand magic words,’ Vainamoinen replies, ‘and among them are the lost-words that I sought.’

The morning after reading the story of Vainamoinen, I left my parents’ house in the north-western Lake District, where I was staying, and drove out to the Cumbrian coast near Whitehaven, before turning south along the sea road. It was 30 October and a westerly gale was sweeping squalls off the Irish Sea. I saw the nuclear power station at Sellafield in silhouette, backlit against a sky of storm. Dome, pylon, stacks, chimneys, ash, beech, wind-shorn hawthorns, two firs, a cemetery and its crosses, all struck in black, and then the land dipping away and down to meet the silver sea. Clouds as big as islands rushed inland overhead, rain-bearing.

I had a strong sense of darkness rising, of the winter solstice not far distant, and of the world as disturbed. Cows with pale hides galloped behind barbed-wire fences, tossing their heads uneasily, and trembling in the gold light when they stopped. Water was rife from a fortnight of steady rain and a night of torrent. The asphalt showed
silver, and in towns the drains bubbled over. A tall monkey-puzzle tree shivered in the wind.

At Ravenglass I turned north-east along the Esk Valley, and just past Muncaster Fell I went up and over to reach the plateau of low crags, moor, bracken and beck known as Birker Fell. Birker is a scarce place, and lonely. Once well wooded – its name is from the Norse
birkr
, meaning ‘birch’ – barely a tree still stands there now. There are two fragments of pine plantation,
one of which shelters a Quaker burial ground from the eighteenth century
, in which none of the dead are named or known.

Steeply then down the south slope of Birker Fell to Ulpha and Dunnerdale, and at Seathwaite I left the car and set off on foot, up a path that followed a beck-line and led me first through birch and larch woods, the stones gold with the millions of larch needles dropped from the trees by the wind and rain. Then I passed out of the trees and onto the bare stone-slopes of a conical mountain called Caw. A mile led to a pass between the shoulder of Caw and a lumpy low crag called Brock Barrow. This was the path’s high point before it dropped again into the Lickle Valley. The pass was a brief but sharp-sided gorge, the sides boulder-strewn, and among the boulders was a jungle of juniper, which lent the scent of gin to the air.

I scrambled up between the boulders to the top of Brock Barrow. A summit stone was stained purple and white, with a black feather snagged by its vanes in the bilberry at its base. In the shelter of this ravens’ perch I hunkered down to wait for Richard – for this was the place he had suggested we meet (no street corners or house addresses for Richard: just a grid reference and a crag name). Clear cloud layers, the shine of the estuary to the west, mudflats shimming the scant light, and the metalled sea beyond. A couple of ravens cursing and cawing. The rocks slick with the night’s rain; the wind hefty.
From the pass two old tracks diverged across this hard country: one leading south-east to the Lickle Valley, and one due south towards the tiny settlement of Hoses and the fells of Dunnerdale. Ulpha Fell was to the north, and in that wild weather it was possible to imagine a wolf pack running there, through bracken and copse, past crag and over ghyll.

I watched the southerly path, getting colder, eyes rheumy in the wind. After half an hour, I was too cold to wait any longer. I dropped off the south slope of Brock Barrow and followed a high drystone wall towards Hoses, grateful for the wall’s lee. A high stile crossed it. I climbed steps to the stile’s summit and there at last was Richard, coming towards me over reedy ground, stalky and thin, moving with a shepherd’s gait and in shepherd’s garb too: a full stride, gumboots clacking against his shins, a flat cap, a long black coat, hands jammed into pockets to pull the coat tighter around. We met each other, grinned, shook hands, hugged. Years of letters, and now meeting here at last, with Dunnerdale suddenly patched green by sun to the north, and to the south the silver of moor-glisk.

Richard Skelton is a keeper of lost words, and I had come to see him to learn some of his language, in its place. He is – what else is he? A musician, a writer, a glossarian, an archivist. Landscape, language and loss are the three great subjects of his work, and they are at its heart because of a tragedy.

In 2004 Richard’s wife Louise died. I don’t know how she died; I have never asked and he has never told. She was in her late twenties; he also. Richard, born and brought up in Lancashire, retreated to the West Pennine Moors of that county, close to his birthplace. There, struggling with grief, he began to walk the moors of the nearby parish of Anglezarke. His walking soon took on the status of ritual: a pilgrimage-like beating of the moor’s bounds, a labyrinth-like exploration of its interior. In his own words, he
‘limned the edges of its streams
and rivers, followed the contours of its hills, the eaves of its woods’. The purpose of the walking was unclear even to him, perhaps especially to him: some mixture of distraction, diversion, expiation and commemoration. He began also to note the moor’s phenomena, to record its languages (natural and human), and to explore its history in the relatively few archives that documented it.

His existence at this time of his life was solitary, tending to spectral. A haunted man, he was drawn to haunted places: ruined steadings, abandoned mine-workings. He came to know the moor’s fall-lines, its adits and its hags. He reached and counted the
‘seventeen thresholds that grant access to the moor’
. He made hundreds of hours of field recordings of its sounds, and he also began to make music about and upon the moor. Some of this music was fugitive in composition and performance, played once on violin at the crook of a stream or the mouth of a swale. Some of it he recorded. Some of these sites he returned to repeatedly, playing music at them over and over again. He restrung his violin with heavier and heavier gauges of wire, until it possessed the reverberatory power of a small cello, and trembled his body as he played. Gradually, over five years of walking and working, a major body of music – echoic, repetitive, faded and fading; a minimalist sound-palette; shades of Arvo Pärt or Brian Eno – emerged, itself ghosted by missing partner-pieces: all
those compositions that had been played to no audience but air and the moor grass.

There also emerged a book, eventually titled
Landings
, published in its first form in 2009. Like the music that accompanies it,
Landings
’ acoustics are shaped by dearth. Both sound and text are devoted to a kind of echo-location, used to measure the relations of distanced entities. The terrible absence of Louise is compensated for in
Landings
by means of a pained record-keeping of the Anglezarke moor – a textual summoning-back of its lost and forgotten. The book possesses an archival intensity: long lists of the names of farms once active on the moor, retrieved from historical maps; or lexicons of Lancashire dialect terms, presented as litanies spoken against loss:

Hare-gate
:
an opening in a hedge
sufficient for the passage of hares.

Slack
: a hollow between sand-hills on the coast. Also a depression between hills.

Water-gait
: a gully or rift in the rock, which in summer is the bed of a streamlet, but in winter is filled with a torrent.

Landings
is a work appalled by amnesia, by the torrent of daily forgetting – the black noise that pours always over the world’s edge. In
Landings
, all omissions are losses: it aspires to a completion of memory that is impossible. Nature is sometimes seen as fabulously memorious (pollen records that archive the species composition of forests that vanished 3,000 years ago) and sometimes as rife with loss (the bodies of creatures mulching unseen into the moor). The book’s knowingly hopeless wager is that if a moor’s memories might somehow be retrieved in full and perfectly preserved, then so might those
of a person.
‘Could I reconstruct
the landscape from its stress pattern? From the rhythm, the cadence, of its utterance? … Is there a clue within each subtle voicing, which, when gathered together, provides a key with which to sound the landscape?’ Completion is the work’s futile ideal, and a deep sorrow seeps through it, sprung from the knowledge that no place can be fully mapped, and that the dead can never return to us. Simultaneously it longs for that power of utterance also sought by Vainamoinen: the magic words that might finish the forecastle, or entreat the vanished back to sight.

Slight signs of hope are present, though, in both the music and the text that Richard produced in the course of those sad years. Among the obscure private rituals he developed on Anglezarke was the burial of objects in unmarked places on the moor: boxes, photographs, notebooks. He gave these items to the landscape as future relics, finding in that act a means to mitigate the erosion of memory. Something desperately dear had been taken from him without his consent, and he responded to this by giving: in the face of disappearance, offering; in the face of theft, gift.

And this was how I first came to know Richard: as a giver of gifts. Packages would arrive through the post: a tiny glass phial with granules of quartz-sand in it; an ash-box containing found items. Books, chapbooks, pamphlets, all exquisitely printed, containing poems and prose-poems, rich with words – glossaries of place-terms, lists of place-names, threaded through with dialect quotations, lexical relics from Gaelic, Icelandic, Old English or Manx.
‘Where before I collected fragments
found on … the moor,’ Richard had written near the end of
Landings
, ‘I now gather words that were once used to call upon the landscape.’ I liked that phrase ‘call upon’, with its two contrasting senses: one magical, grand, powerful (to summon
the forces or spirits of); the other homely, intimate (to visit a friend, to drop in or drop by).

We shared a passion for word-hoards, dictionaries, etymology and precise place-language. Both of us felt that this largely lost vocabulary of landscape was obscure but not obsolete, and that its retrieval might be of value.
‘Perhaps there is a glimpse
of something behind such words,’ Richard had written:

a hint at a way of looking at the world that is now also lost, an attention to the form of things and a care, a generosity in the bestowing of names.
Brog
is not simply a branch, but a broken branch.
Lum
is not just a pool, but a deep pool … Each word has its own feel on the tongue, its own sound, an inherent poetry. Moreover, each word tells us something subtly different about its referent, and our attitudes to it … Could these old forms vivify and invigorate contemporary language, by virtue of their difference, their strangeness?