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Andy Marshall's Treasure Hoard Gazetteer 100 treasures across Britain (with map!)..Lots of medieval and Roman treasures here! - Regina from Bluesky
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The presence of absence: every now and then I come across a scene that is utterly beautiful but not intended to be so...here at St. Lawrence, Beeston St. Lawrence, Norfolk.
"I believe in myth and romance. I believe in poetry and prose, in the wonder of places that speak without words. I believe in the sanctity of nature. I crave the companionship of others, I enjoy the company of strangers, like and unlike me. I seek out the warmth of human nature and believe in the very best that it can offer. I believe in cradling those that need cradling. I believe in the legacy of our lost ones, in their echoes carried forward in our hands and hearts. I believe in the joy of our children, and in the future I would like to shape around them."
Andy Marshall at Repton
The Presence of Absence
I’ve battled with low self-esteem for many years - have been to see therapists about it - especially that persistent sense of feeling like an imposter. Coming from what might be defined as a working-class background, I’ve often struggled to find my voice within the usual circles - the academic, the corporate rounds, the organisational express. I’ve found a way of surviving in the gaps between them, where there is more room to be myself.
Finding a way of being entirely yourself is harder than it sounds. Looking back, there have been periods when I’ve edited myself to fit the expectations of others - holding back ideas, interests and ways of seeing that didn’t quite belong within the conventional frame.
The Digest has become the place where I no longer need to do that. Perhaps fittingly, it too has found a home somewhere in the gaps of the conventional - something many of you have kindly written to me about.
Here I can follow the things that genuinely fascinate me - the emotional pull of places, the traces people leave behind, the strange ways that buildings and objects can reach across time. And threaded through all of that is something more personal - an attempt to understand how paying attention to the material world around us can help us find our footing again.
But there’s something else I’ve been hiding - something that started at Repton as a kind of static fear. It has developed into a kind of internal anger at the direction the world is going, combined with anxiety about my own inertia.
I’m starting to think that many of the answers lie in the gaps between things. Last night I watched a tender video about an artist working through grief. She said something that stayed with me - that sometimes there aren’t really any words, only the spaces between them.
The gaps allow things to reveal their character - the space around a form, the lapse in a conversation, the silence that lets us recognise what we’ve heard. I wonder how much we miss in our eagerness to fill them, and whether noticing them might offer a way through my anger.
The Japanese idea of ma gives a name to this attention to intervals of space and time. In The Gathering Place, Mary Colwell offers this interpretation of manuke: “In Japanese, manuke means fool, literally translated as someone who is missing ma, a person who cannot live in the gaps, an empty vessel which fills a space with the most noise.”
In my most frustrated moments, I tell myself that too many people governing our world are manuke. But once I’ve calmed down, I recognise that I too need to pause - to find some restraint and offer up a little grace in my view of others. It's hard work.
And whilst I recognise my own failings in this, I found many answers in the spaces between the Saxon walls at Repton - an experience that brought me to a kind of resolution and way forward.
At Lastingham, I entered a vacuum so numinous that it brought an agnostic to his knees - the impetus became less to record than to inhabit the space.
At Beverley Minster I became the in-between - a sensory vessel of sight, sound, touch and smell - lowered through the roof boss above the crossing, a living litmus passing bodily through a space I would usually only look into.
Many years ago, I became transfixed on creating a video of a Longton mould maker, Tony Ogen, whose lifetime’s work seemed to consist of making nothing - shaping moulds for vessels whose utility depended upon the void within, giving form to the space between.
When I visited Ewelme in Oxfordshire, I found the gap between clapper and metal in the sound spreading across the landscape. Research in Ewelme hundred found that, in some of the parishes, the audible reach of church bells closely matched parish boundaries. There is something remarkable in that correspondence - the possibility of recognising where you belong through the space between bell and ear.
For me, it also recalls Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:
Ring the bell that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
And in a delicious turn about from light to dark: Tanizaki taught me to see beauty in shadows, as much as John Berger encouraged me to look into a photograph’s negative spaces.
Thus my fascination with doors and windows, ginnels, porches and gateways - what they might reveal, the mystery beyond, thresholds where we are neither in one place nor another.
“Insight is born in the gap between experiencing and recognition, between an inkling and an understanding,” wrote Mary Colwell during her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
er me again and again since the start of my vocation, and they are telling: there are other ways of thinking, seeing, inhabiting. And this matters because what we overlook shapes our lives as surely as what we notice.
Taking all that into account you might be able to understand, having found my voice in the gaps, my complete and utter excitement at the opportunity to travel through a landscape that offers a pause between two worlds. On Sunday I will begin my 100 mile Offa’s Dyke walk through the borderlands between England and Wales.
I’m fascinated by places where cultures overlap and rub against one another, where something slips across the designated line and becomes enmeshed with what is already there. I want to listen for it in the tangled phonetics of Welsh and English place names, in their sounds and rhythms, as much as seek it out in the hybrid vernacular of the settlements.
On previous visits to the Marches, I’ve noticed that things haven’t quite been tidied into categories like elsewhere. Continuity here seems woven from many coloured threads - some running loose through isolated farmsteads and others gathered into the tight nucleated knots of villages.
The landscape is vocal here. Mike Parker in his book All The Wide Border notes: "There is no mistaking that this is contested territory, torn between masters, yet servant to none. Lumps and bumps of old forts and fortresses appear round every corner. Castles have crumbled into farms, while farms (and barns and churches) look like castles..."
Perhaps walking will help me work out my relationship with this world - at a pace where I can notice, listen and respond. I want to leave room for the ghost-gaps, and silences, for connections that take time to become apparent.
This coming week I’ll be taking that curiosity onto the path, with my camera and watercolours and enough room, I hope, for the unplanned. There are things I want to look for, but what excites me most is what I haven’t yet encountered - the bonhomie that changes the day, the opening out of a view, the pause in the landscape that becomes a place of accretion rather than attrition.
We have a lot to learn from the presence of absence:
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Walking Offa's Dyke
Traditionally attributed to Offa, the eighth-century king of Mercia, the Dyke was linked to him by Asser, writing a century later. Its purpose remains debated - part boundary, part statement of power, it may have served his imperial ambitions - a monumental assertion of authority as much as a practical frontier barrier.
There is a growing school of thought that the huge earthwork operated within a landscape already occupied by communities, routes, obligations and inherited claims and it's circuitous and serpentine paths are a physical embodiment of such things.
Offa’s Dyke is more than an ancient bank of earth. Along these borderlands, it raises questions about power, passage and belonging - about what separates us and what allows us to live alongside one another. As I walk, I’ll be looking for the human stories held within and beyond its line.
I’ll be walking through the heart of Offa’s Dyke country, from Hay-on-Wye to Llangollen - taking in hill and valley, old market towns and churches, earthworks and aqueducts. It is a journey through the many flavours of the borderlands, where languages, histories and ways of living meet, overlap and mingle.
Follow Me Live ⚡️
All subscribers can come with me into the borderlands. My live journey page brings together a map, photographs, watercolours and notes from the road - a chance to follow the walk as it unfolds, share the discoveries and pause over the details. Open the field journey, bookmark the page and see what we might find together.
Click below, sign in to bookmark the page, and follow live 👇
Andy Marshall
On previous trips, it has been so heart-warming to receive your comments - so I've added a comments section to the live trip page.
Here's a short video about following a field journey:
David McGlade
It was the Romanesque that first taught me to see the spaces between the physical mass and form of a building - to notice how curved arcades and singing triforiums give shape to the air, and how the gaps can hold as much presence as the stone itself. 🐇 🐰🕳️
👇
Andy Marshall
🙌 Repton made it onto my Treasure Hoard Gazetteer: 👇
Andy Marshall
✨ Members' Supplements - A new hub! ✨
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We are very close to another free photography shoot for a historic location!
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Andy Marshall
StoneMind
Tom Brown is a Master Stone Carver, educator and co-founder of StoneMind Studio.
In the Digest, I have spoken often about the capacity of places and the material fabric around us to restore our sense of belonging. Tom’s work approaches that same possibility through the hands. What moves me is how carving can give someone who has felt excluded a way into our shared heritage. It’s such a powerful thing.
Here, Tom reflects on the craft that has shaped his life, and how helping others to shape stone can change how they see themselves. 👇
Andy Marshall
Thank You!
Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with iPhone 17 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro.
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