Common Ground: Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life - Hardcover

Cowen, Rob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022642426X ISBN 13: 9780226424262

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

All too often, we think of nature as something distinct from ourselves, something to go and see, a place that’s separate from the ordinary modern world in which we live and work. But if we take the time to look, we soon find that’s not how nature works. Even in our parceled-out, paved-over urban environs, nature is all around us; it is in us. It is us.
 
That’s what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked—a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism no longer had any use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering its meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive—and he fell in fascinated love.
 
Common Ground is a true account of that place and Cowen’s transformative journey through its layers and lives, but it’s much more too. As the land’s stories intertwine with events in his own life—and he learns he is to become a father for the first time—the divisions between human and nature begin to blur and shift. The place turns out to be a mirror, revealing what we are, what we’re not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.
 
This is a book about discovering a new world, a forgotten world on the fringes of our daily lives, and the richness that comes from uncovering the stories and lives—animal and human—contained within. It is an unforgettable piece of nature writing, part of a brilliant tradition that stretches from Gilbert White to Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald.
 
“I am dreaming of the edge-land again,” Cowen writes. Read Common Ground, and you, too, will be dreaming of the spaces in between, and what—including us—thrives there.
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer whom the Guardian called, “one of the UK’s most exciting nature writers.” He has written regular columns on nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph, and he is the author of Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild. He lives and writes in Yorkshire in the north of England.
 

Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer whom the Guardian called, 'one of the UK's most exciting nature writers.' He has written regular columns on nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph, and he is the author of Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild. He lives and writes in Yorkshire in the north of England.
 

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Common Ground

Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life

By Rob Cowen

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 Rob Cowen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-42426-2

Contents

Map of the Edge-land, 
Preface to the US Edition, 
Prologue: New Year's Eve, 
Crossing Point, 
Ultrasound, 
The Union of Opposites, 
DNA, 
One Day, 
The Turning Time, 
Metamorphoses, 
Last Orders, 
Revelations, 
Epilogue: The Notebook, 
Acknowledgements, 
Notes and Selected Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

CROSSING POINT

I am dreaming of the edge-land again. It has begun to colonise my sleeping mind. Dreams take place in the midst of Scots pines and down among the cold, scrub-scattered banks. I am following a fox, a copper coat floating through the trees. He pauses. A backward glance. Incredible eyes – coronal black holes over exploding suns, that intense face; mouth curled at its edges in the white, greasepaint smile of The Joker. Another step. Am I to follow? He pads up to the lip of a rise and disappears. Suddenly I can't move. I wake. The weak glow of a street light forms an exclamation mark on the ceiling. I dress quietly, shivering in the dark, pick up my notebook and walk out.

Modern life is such that it can be hard to see beyond the present. You think you know somewhere, but really you only know a layer, a moment. Most people don't even notice such things, but just look around you. The moss-swollen pavement crack, the rosette of a dandelion defying a driveway or a gutter-growing sow thistle, these are glimpses of what lies beneath and beyond. The deep past and the far future.

A map drawn by Ely Hargrove in 1798 in his History of the Castle, Town and Forest of Knaresborough: with Harrogate, and Its Medicinal Waters shows the town I call home as little more than two rows of cottages. Harrogate, as the world now knows it, doesn't yet exist. This hilly stack of roads, traffic lights and pristine flowerbeds, of imperialistic hotels, antique shops, churches and promenades, is still open land. Its cottage gardens, fields and marsh-meadows await delineation, diversion, draining and deed. The 'medicinal' wells that will soon lure legions of the aspiring middle classes to holiday here or, should they strike it lucky in the mills and mines, build vast villas on the woody escarpments to the south-west, are little more than mud-edged watering holes. Pigeons pick at salt accretions forming at their rims; only the informed aristocracy and gentry shoo them away to take the waters. The arches, domes and sweeping curves of Regency and Victorian architecture that will soon form the grand structures of 'the English Spa' lie dormant, locked in the gritstone cliffs and subterranean clay of the surrounding countryside.

Hindsight imbues the map with the feeling of land on the cusp. It has the death-stare of ground destined to be choked with high-density housing, tower blocks, supermarkets, shopping centres, warehouses and car dealerships. In a matter of decades the two little rows of cottages will bloom into an urban mass that consumes the surrounding land and villages. Eventually it will reach an ancient settlement a mile and a half to the north marked on Hargrove's map with a green blob – a legacy of its past life as part of a royal hunting forest. Between the 1950s and 1990s, the sprawl will swallow Bilton almost entirely, appropriating its Celtic name – farmstead of 'Bilain' – for the suburb thrown up around the scattering of old homesteads and farms. But it will be a last meal. For now at least, Harrogate will reach no further in this direction. Bilton will become edge-land. There will be no protests, no public outcries or petitions, no organised lines of conservationists standing in front of diggers or activists hauled down from centuries-old oak trees. The ground won't resist sublimation. After all, it has always been a place of transience and transformation. It has known innumerable beginnings and endings.

In contrast to the raw, jump-in-head-first shock I'd felt on the night of its discovery, my preliminary forays into this new-found land were to take more methodical lines. Confronted with this unknown world stripped bare by winter, I planned to navigate via its most obvious physical structures and landmarks in an effort to map and taxonomise it. I felt I needed to gain a sense of its definable perimeters and the logical starting point was its western edge.

In the 1840s, Britain's burgeoning railway network reached Harrogate. Or, more accurately, it reached its outskirts. A decree had been passed to prevent the town's reputation for restorative waters, clean air and new regal façades from being besmirched by steam-spewing engines and dirty tracks. Instead, it was decided that the first rail link should end a mile to the east, down a hill at a cluster of old houses named after the little stream that flowed past them. Starbeck station birthed a thriving community. Rows of terraces, pubs and hotels sprang up around the marshalling yards and engine sheds. Horse-drawn coaches more aesthetically acceptable than coal-fired trains carried the great and the good up the hill to the unsoiled spa resort. Meanwhile, financiers and speculators gripped by the frenzy of nineteenth-century Railway Mania had already turned their eyes to the land beyond, prospecting its gullies and ridges for potentially lucrative routes that would lead further north.

The intention of the hastily formed Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company was clear from its name: to connect the thrusting might of an industrialised Leeds with the outlying city of Ripon and the market towns of Thirsk and Northallerton. Starbeck soon changed from terminus to thoroughfare. Track was hammered at startling speed along a contour heading north-north-west, skirting Harrogate in a sweeping curve, colluding with natural features where possible and running over earth-stacked sidings where it wasn't. Lying on its path like a body on the tracks was Bilton.

Seated in an ornate Leeds office, no doubt with a ticking clock and glowing dog grate in the corner, a suited and bespectacled planning clerk drew a line in pencil. That was all it took. The course of the railway sliced scalpel-like through the community, straight over Bilton Lane, an old drovers' road that had already seen 400 years of foot- and hoof-fall. The bisection created an 'X' of road and rail, necessitating a level crossing. Probably no more than two white-painted wooden gates with lamps on top, it was a crossing nonetheless. X marked the spot and it still does, for today this is the edge-land's point of origin, its moment of departure from the housing estates, cul-de-sacs and crescents; it is where town becomes something else.

I'm sure such coincidences must occur frequently in the buffers between urban and rural worlds. Over time, people and landscape leave unintentional impressions on each other. Things assume significance impossible to predict or design in the moment they are conceived. Though the planning clerk is dead and the railway gone, the crossing point remains.

It was an afternoon in January and I had finished work early and returned to follow that pale seam of rubble and mud, heading north-west from where it jutted off at ninety degrees away from the divisions of tarmac, B&Q plank fencing and houses at the end of Bilton Lane. The dismantled railway line was much as I imagined it would be with rail, sleeper and shingle removed: its edges grew unchecked with bramble, dog rose and willow...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022642426X
• ISBN 13: 9780226424262
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar