The following are selections from published and unpublished works that will be used in some form in my book – The Land Incanted
Please note, all of these works are subject to copyright controls and cannot be used unless permission is obtained from the author – email: Echtraijournal@aol.com
Some of these works are presented on this site as archive selections, short excerpts, or experimental / exploratory works that may or may not be used in the final book when it is published. Some of the previously published works will almost certainly be subject to revisions and further editing.. such is the writer’s prerogative.
NOW SPEAKS THE RIVER
(from an introduction, as yet unpublished)
If rivers are the reflecting mirrors of deep time, they still flow darkly through us. Through our veins, our blood, filtered through our silent imaginings, and back into the mists of the distant past. If the ancient myths of the Cairngorms are long lost or forgotten, then what remains is locked into the land, preserved in the names of those aqueous places that have survived the centuries, and linger still in the modern mind. Rivers were the natural boundaries that defined old clan territories, as well as being a source of life and renewal. Rivers run through us, and always will.
River – the shapeshifter, River – the blood of the land
THE MOOR, THE MIRROR
On High Ground
The seasons change like reckless clocks, time, compressed into life, resounding, exuberant, and then gone as if passed in the night, lost in inclines, blown to the wind. A slow scarp, a froth of fern and moss tethered in clusters, fugitive tenants of vale, gill and beck, the smoked whin retreats into glassy pastures. Like first steps, the eye is trained to see the ghosts within the moor’s compass, scouring the land through narrow waists of rock, skirting the hare-paths, shaking the hollows free of dissolved peat and wild weather. Only the sullen hawk preaches to a silent congregation from the heights, hanging there- in the mist, and below, a circle of blackened faces, open for salvation.
Hawthornmonth
Overwintered, the skyline fringed with life, in Hawthornmonth the seeds disperse into unbounded solitude, stranded between weathers, held in motionless waves. Shapes shifting, and sheared and wafted onto shingle spits, or coastal plains. Beyond the track rise, and lost in seclusion, the antlered man waits, and sits in silent animation.
Darkriver
We are leaves lying weightless on the dark river, eyes cast to the skies, and the floodland seethes under pale peaks; as snow falls, fragile, particulate crystals dissolve on water like drowning angels. Ancient boats sit greening under moss as the haar draws in, sucking freezing air, helical wisps of it curling upwards, outwards into great grey clouds swollen with thunder. An uncut tomb sits immured in time, ramparts spilling off into ripened clusters of sundew.
BUT THYSTEL, BENTE, AND SANDE
(an extract)
Tide and breath, ebb and flow. Even the wind itself has a rhythm that arrives as a subtle movement, a liminal exhalation felt at first on the skin as a fleeting caress, made manifest in the ripple of marram that flickers at the edge of my eye, the remaining light catching the glinter of its edges. This wind too appears as if breathing – inwards and outwards, inhalation, exhalation, and I recall the semantic relationships between the two – wind and breath –
anemos – wind
anima – breath
animare – to give life
A breath of wind that gives life. It should bring us comfort. But the wind is not always so benign.
At Forvie, the wind’s moods alter and morph the sandscape, carving, sculpting the coastline into something altogether otherworldly. These sands have a shifting, uncertain geometry. There are no fixed points, no precise co-ordinates, a malleable, dynamic terrain where little settles, where roots may not anchor. All is unstable, and the mind stays restless, captured in the movements of wind and sand alike. Everything is in motion as if still in search of something just out of grasp, something numinous, ineffable, like an ethereal pulse.
SMALL DIVINITIES
(an extract)
I have sleepwalked in someone else’s dreams. Walking alone at the fen margin, a false dawn has broken – the sun gently breaks through a thick pall of black cloud that has cloaked the landscape since early light. As sun-rays beam down, insinuating themselves into the land, into its fissures and crevices, all is bathed in a golden, incandescent glow. Haloes of hover flies twist and entwine, a complex language of movement captured in mists and motes, amongst the marsh grasses which scream into life in the sun’s radiance. It is mid-morning, and with senses raised, walking amongst the early frost and marsh-scent, I know that here – in this place – two epochs meet and elide.
THE CABRACH – a dream, a summoning, an incantation
(an extract)
As I walk the twilight paths that edge the river, light reflects off the surface in splintered constellations. They course into me like an offering – filling me with liquid forms.
A group of Storm Petrels skim the river’s banks, the white flash of their tails visits the eye, and then they explode into sky in quick, luminous smears.
Water seeping from high up on the pale slow hills, in burns and rivulets, meandering paths into the imagination – water is embroidered into us. Water is memory. Water is life, cloud and mist – a shape-shifter, a constant, from source to sea. The Deveron, a black amnesia, gathering and losing itself; alive in the senses, and only briefly – infinite.
And then gone.. the river smokes its way into the blue distance , a cold feral drift that seems eternal.
I have seen the river and its ghosts. I have learned to be still in its presence. I read the river like a book.
EYNHALLOW
(an extract)
This is an island of loss, a loss that cannot be seen, only felt, intuited, or heard in the mournful whispers, howling in the winds, in the plangent cries of the avian multitudes that nest here – fulmar, skua, arctic tern, sea eagles and the constant presence of curlews among many others, a cacophony of wing and feather haunting the fringes of the island, scouring the waves for food and sustenance, and a continual searching for something else. Something ‘other’.
THE MOOR, THE MIRROR
(an extract)
The moor is a mirror – an earthen sea ablaze with brilliant emerald stars
and peat-choked sullen meadows, birthed in the bruise of night
their words and whispers lost in mirror-pools; and each dark reflection scaled with liquid forms
like hidden language
Now sentient walls glow honey-brown on rutted trails , clefts and corries, all scored like wounds in moorland flesh. I mark my way with gifts of roots and seeds, and wings of feathered things and salt and lead , borne on the wind; washed up from parched channels, amongst the clustered tongues of ferns,
and on those barren shores, the dust of slate.
Only here lies my salvation
my way home
FOR NOW, I AM A BIRD
[ extract from FOR THOSE BORN WITH WINGS a collaboration with Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, author of THIN PLACES ]
On the mountain.
High above me, a group of Fulmars cycle in loose concentrics, floating like glowing embers. Their shrill, summoning calls pitched through the wind. I am edging the precipice, arms extended. Awaiting flight. My eyes capture the dying of the sun as it drags its weight across a grey muscle of sky. The last of this day’s light.
I stand unmoored. Untethered. Ready to take to the dark. Their voices still resounding, beckoning me onwards. Like anamnesis. A gathering of forms – awaiting the final transition. My body loosens. I am suddenly weightless. Alert. ALIVE. My skin has been drawn back, inwards, and the cold seeps in. Blood coursing. Eyes now black, distended, keened to the air.
The wind scours the trees below, shifting them like loose fabric, stirring the chilled air into waves and vortices. I crouch and take a deep breath. A slow inhalation. Feathers now fully formed, wrapping me tightly. Bones hollowed, lightened. Cartilage, sinew, stretched taught. Making ready. I look out, and down, into the darkening valleys. Down onto the world below. This is not the end. If I fall. This is not the end.
MOOR INCANTATION
Here in the rains of places
in sight of majestic boughs
lost
in the melancholy clouds yet wind-scarred the tokens of the faithful
left in isolation amongst the black stars the cavernous wastes
earth celebrant pitched like fire the click of a bird-bone pin
or split hazel sticks possessed in dark aether
encircling scree-paths and gathering waste
the logan stone baptised in mists and long hollows
the century twitches into a blind summit
an altar-place a gift of salt
floral votives eyebright frog orchid milkwort
inviolate and perfect
immersed in celestial dew
THE MIST AT WOLF CLEUGH field notes from an abandoned farmstead in Northumberland
(an extract)
As I stand just inside a broken doorway, the walls leak back the cold of the night, I can feel it pinching my skin. I start to explore, looking first from the outside into vacant windows, trying to dowse for energy, revenants, every sense now attuned in search of lost voices. A solitary owl (is it an owl? ) sits in the murk amidst the crumbling rafters, its amber eyes lucent, ablaze with a visionary light. It materialises in my eyeline, as if it has miraculously slipped through from another world. Its faint arrival catches me unaware.
And then it is gone.
The distorted, disarticulated geometry of this place now seems to be constructed on no known paradigm, a strange vernacular form, its old purpose now long silent, erased – lost over the years. A shadow-violence of neglect, a gradual dissolution, making an offering of itself – a slow sinking back into the cold indifference of the moor.
I strain my ears to listen for something beyond the threshold of stone-silence – but the old prayers which once haunted this place remain unsaid, the hymns unsung, the words left unspoken – I hear nothing but the sounds of my own making.
RUBHA AIRD DRUIMNICH
Blind and frosted, sea-born, on pale shell sand
pristine, transcendent swells wash over a dark veiled spine of ancient stone
a basalt spell kindled in the high tombs
outland
of furrowed heather brows and whirlpools of air
a tethered beast that scours and defiles the land.
Here sits the crumbling croft, its rooms open to the sky
with granite walls that pool into cold fingers of storms,
leaden grey
hidden in the hollows
yet angled such, it has desire lights
stitched into the formless mass of rain swollen clouds
a whispering haze of sea-spatter amongst wild marram, couch,
and bearded lichens, crenelated by the wind
in dimming light, a winter moon tips the frozen straths,
threads cracked and shallow causeways,
skims the dead bogs and their buried secrets,
dreamt into the earth by clans long since forgotten
and breached barren by the century’s end.
The Land Incanted [ Earth & Memory ] 