Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and Writing Britain at the British Library

A few weeks ago, I finally went to the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition at the British Library. It was in its final two weeks, so my friends and I got in just under the wire. I knew that I couldn't miss it, as I'd had this exhibition earmarked as one of my cultural highlights of the year for quite some time. Concentrating on the importance of place and landscape in British literature, Writing Britain featured so many of my absolute favourite books and writers that I wondered if I had been personally consulted on the exhibition and then fed memory-loss pills so that I would forget all about it. (I am not sure in what scenario exactly this would take place.) From Susan Cooper to Kenneth Grahame, from a Heart of Darkness graphic novel to a letter to John Betjeman complaining that the order of the stations in his poem 'The Metropolitan Railway' was wrong - this was very, very much my cup of tea.

Broadly, the places and movements featured in the exhibition included the following: rural Britain; the gradual vanishing of rural Britain due to the Industrial Revolution; industrial landscapes such as the coal mines of Wales and the Midlands; wild places such as the moors, and their interactions with humans; sacred places; London; the suburbs; rivers; and the sea. London is, as always, primarily a place of darkness, but a remarkably varied one, from Gautam Malkani's Londonstani to the original title for Eliot's The Waste Land, "He do the police in different voices", to Conrad's pre-Le Carré and Orwell vision of The Secret Agent and a city haunted by terrorism. The suburbs are both homely and threatening: the Metropolitan Railway invited middle-class commuters to embrace "Metroland", but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, the suburbs are often settings for dreadful crimes (one of the manuscripts featured was 'The Retired Colourman', where Holmes investigates sinister doings in Lewisham.)

Many poets appeared in Writing Britain. Ted Hughes's collaboration with Fay Godwin, Elmet, was there; 'Belfast Confetti' by the wonderful Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson; a video about Simon Armitage's Stanza Stones project, which carves poems into the natural landscape of Yorkshire; Wendy Cope, Sean O'Brien, and many, many others. Also featured was the much-loved poem by Edward Thomas, 'Adlestrop', in manuscript and in a recording read by his wife. Here is the poem:



ADLESTROP (Edward Thomas)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


'Adlestrop' gives me a strange feeling of looking in on - almost interrupting - something I find moving but don't entirely understand. I can't help wondering if you have to be English to entirely grasp its emotional import. It was written around the start of World War I - which killed Thomas, like so many others - and there is a sense that he is seizing a quiet, simple moment in the English countryside and storing it away, later to imbue it with even deeper meaning. It has also been pointed out that all the young men of some villages were wiped out in the war, and Thomas may have wondered what the fate of this place and its people would be.

I do think that British landscapes, whether urban or rural, are a palimpsest; their own self-contained beauty or terror, with the human traces which have defaced or celebrated them continually overlaid. I've said before that I tend to see places through a lens of literature and art, and this is particularly the case with Britain. Some of the landscapes are spectacular in themselves, but they tend to be understated, and not technicolour, like some other parts of the world. When you know about the great works of art or the acts of human endeavour that they have produced, the terrible or beautiful events and the echoes that they have left, these places have a hundred times more meaning.

The painting is The Hay-Wain by John Constable, one of the greatest of English painters, though I've always found it much easier to love JMW Turner.

'Tal-y-llyn': Wales and Ten Years Gone

Photo of Lake Tal-y-llyn by mattbuck. Used under Creative Commons license



TAL-Y-LLYN (Clarissa Aykroyd)


No one knows the nature of water.
I was never so close before.
It is created through contact
with the eye. There was nothing
beneath the slope, until the curve. Now
my eyes ache with the strain
of water's presence. The lake
is blowing away to a gap in the sky.

The surface is almost ready
to be walked on. Soon
I will know the way. Above
sky dissolves to air. Steam rises
from the cold conjunction.

The lake is waiting patiently
to be created. Waiting
for silver light to liquefy,
for the mountains to unfold their revelation.
For the touch of an eye.


© Clarissa Aykroyd, 2012. Not to be reproduced without permission.


I wrote this poem almost ten years ago, in August 2002 (although this is a recently and very slightly tweaked version). This was just after I moved to Dublin, and also just after a trip of a few weeks in Wales. I spent a week at the International Arthurian Society conference in Bangor, and then about ten days travelling in Snowdonia, from Caernarvon down to Aberystwyth.

I can't believe that ten years of my life have gone by since I left Canada. It has gone by very quickly. Anniversaries - good and bad - tend to be a big deal for me, so I am preparing for a lot of soul-searching in July, when it will be ten years since I moved to Dublin, and seven years since I moved to London. Or perhaps I should just have my crisis now. (I had an early crisis when I turned 30, for example - about six months before the fact - and that worked quite well.)

My trip to Wales still holds a very special place in my heart. I keep meaning to go back, but I almost wonder if I should just leave it there, pristine and exciting and amazingly beautiful. The IAS conference was great fun, though I was well out of my depth - most of the people there were professors or well on their way, but what touched me was that they were delighted to have someone who was more of a novice in their midst. Then I travelled for ten days around Snowdonia, more or less on my own, and fell quite hopelessly in love with the place. I stayed with my relatives' friends in a centuries-old house up in the hills near Mount Snowdon; I remember a feeling of delighted shock at how beautiful and ancient it all was, when I walked out in the morning. I walked in the footsteps of Susan Cooper's characters from her great The Dark Is Rising series, which is how I came to Tal-y-llyn Lake. It was exactly as described:


His aunt had called it the loveliest lake in Wales, but lying dark there in the grey morning, it was more sinister than lovely. On its black still surface not a ripple stirred. It filled the valley floor. Above it reared the first slopes of Cader Idris, the mountain of the Grey King, and beyond, at the far end of the valley, a pass led through the hills - away, Will felt, towards the end of the world. (from The Grey King, Susan Cooper)


Those books also led me to the Bearded Lake above Aberdovey, and other locations. There are few things in travel that I love so much as seeing places in books, so it was pretty wonderful. I also tracked down other locations from Arthurian legend, and walked a mile up a hillside in the rain to get a glimpse of Bron-yr-Aur, where Led Zeppelin worked on their third album. The culmination of the trip was my trek up Mount Snowdon by the Watkin Path - one of the most difficult routes - with two lovely Israeli guys I met in the hostel. I am more of a city girl than a nature girl, and I'm not much of an athlete, but that day I felt like I had summitted Everest.

After that trip I settled into a life in Dublin, and everything became progressively more complicated, as a life does when you build it anywhere. London has been complicated, too. Perhaps my memories of Wales are so shining partly because it was a moment caught in a glass bubble - in between Canada and Ireland. It will always be there, ten years ago, and it will never stop being perfect.