Birthday Edition - Part One!
Thanks for coming along
On the 9 May I'll be celebrating a significant birthday. I'm so glad to have made it this far!
Apparently, in the next couple of weeks, I'm in danger of being whisked away - but am not quite sure what that means, or how it will all pan out. In anticipation of the unexpected - I'm sharing with you, over the next two digests, some of my favourite places - but with a twist - new writing, new text - and a new book.
Once I find out where I'm being whisked - I'll share it with you - how exciting!
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The Basin Cut
This digest revels in the in-between, the transitional, the presence of absence. My camera with its dials and knobs and sharp focus has taken me into the blur of things. Because something can't be measured it doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Anything is possible.
Blossoming.
Out in Cheesden, in the Rossendale Hills, there is a track deep-cut into the hillside which arches the distance between a brace of mouldering Regency mills sat within the valley basin.
It’s a route that has drawn me in for years: a deep-gouged passage, scuttled with flecks of patterned encaustic. It curves and rises through the landscape, a snaking repository of two hundred years of subsistence in a valley cut by glacial waters ten thousand years ago.
The chimney at Washwheel is the lodestar of the valley and marks a waypoint along the route.
It’s barely discernible against the faded hues of winter — a darkened line obscured by hawthorn skirting and intersecting its border.
Whilst I have walked its length, it has been the bony-fingered hawthorn that has kept me company amidst the culling of the light on the darkest winter days.
Feral they have become, now that we have shunned their original clipped and bounding, purposeful intent.
In the winter it’s as if they’ve reacted to our diminishing patronage with rage...
...but in the spring they blossom with joy at the breaking of their shackles.
It might be that the roots of this tree of myth and mirth, this symbol of death and life, knew the warmth of the hands that cut this track. It might be that it benevolently harboured the activities of the road within — a working tree, like a sheepdog, cheek by jowl to human enterprise.
Time-lapse the valley from above for a year, and for a brief May flash (like the revelation of a branched owl by midnight lightning), the boundaries and trackways of our blossoming wants and needs are divulged. It’s as if, for a fleeting moment, the landscape has been embossed with a memory of endeavours gone by.
Endeavours that included cobs saddled with textiles, heads down, hocks bent, clawing their way in the sun-baked clay. Immigrant workers from another distant county, with families in tow. Scouring liquor slopping in barrels, sidling along the humped foundations of the hedgerow. Carts laden with stone for the chimney at Washwheel. White streaks of lime dissolved into the rutting before its slaking.
The hawthorn is the only surviving witness to the hopes and fears, the prophylactic, evil-warding bottles and bones, the manure and detritus trod into that ground.
This fickle-looking bush, bent to our will throughout the land, has a mystical taboo that lies deep within the well of human consciousness.
Even in an age governed by the rational — and not knowing the why and wherefore of it — it takes a brave soul to plant one in their garden, and an even braver soul to keep a blossoming branch within their house.
But if they were brave enough, they might, through the old magick that they have rent, conjure up the ruin of a mill that so pleases the eye — it might have been extracted from the pages of a Byron novel.
Well, against all odds, it does exist.
I’ll never forget my first glimpse of the ruin at Cheesden Lumb — just a mile uphill from the hawthorn track.
If the Grand Tour were still a rite of passage, this would be one of its stopping places — visited not for splendour but for its pleasing dereliction.
I can imagine Byron brooding in the wheel-pit, whilst Wordsworth might dance around the waterfall.
On the day I visited, the poet's spirit lingered.
The light was a sonnet scrawled across the factory wall — lifting the stone from blank verse to lyrical stanza, its metre undercut by bathos: the presence of absence, the windows all gone, the roof slates all shards.
For everything there is a poet — no matter how inanimate or diverse or abstract or small. They live up in the ether, hovering around like Lyra’s Pan. Champions of the soul, the spirit of place, the genius loci. Like the hawthorn’s magic, it’s the best kept secret of this land.
It seems the mill, too, keeps its secrets. For as spring leans into summer, and the waterline retreats with the lengthening days, like the hawthorn, the building begins to blossom.
In the final stanza of raking light, etched into stone, surfacing from the receding flow — a guardian of the deep, a carrier between worlds — a dolphin, leaping through the veil of time.
The Cheesden Valley is lodged between the border of Bury and Rochdale in Greater Manchester.
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 14 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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