Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 9 January 2026

A warm welcome to all and a Happy New Year!

Kind words about the Genius Loci Digest

...your words deeply touched me and even made me cry. The photos are beautiful, and your writing so wonderfully describes what I felt too when we discovered some of these places on our last holiday. E from Bluesky

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Photo-hoard

✨Glorious Gothic - multi-view at Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire, England taken with my trusty tilt shift.

Words

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
(Act V, Scene I) A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shakespeare.

Observations

The Metaphor

Little did I know that out of the darkness of breakdown - a decades-long grounding process of visual literacy and observation - might also prepare me to navigate a shapeshifting world.

During the course of 2025, against the backdrop of world events, my travels in Woody began to feel like a kind of dreamstate.

It marked a transformation from the post-breakdown version of myself into a place where those foundations were being repurposed - not for growth or ambition, but for survival in a new world order.

It feels to me, more than any time in my life, that I’m unable to participate fully in the discourse of my own future. There is a persistent, niggling lack of trust in everything I see and hear. Over the turning of the year, I increasingly began to feel that I was living in a world where images can’t be trusted, fact is fiction, and truths are untruths.

Last year, as AI imagery began to be created beyond the camera, it dawned on me that I needed a new way of grounding myself in reality - a viable method of observing what is true. What concerns me most about this lack of trust is what happens when my own sense of personal confusion scales up into the workings of a nation-state.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about survival. About protecting my own mental health by anchoring my values, amid the swell of change, in the best of the human aggregate attempt. It’s more an alignment with ‘classical worldviews which have a much longer history of mental inhabitation, existential testing, and practical implementation [which] might provide more fulfilling ways of living than their short-lived modern counterparts.’¹

This year feels like a new beginning. One that draws the truth of the human condition from my lived experience. Not only from, say, the laughter of my son and daughter from across a room, or the smell of percolating coffee, but also from the angst of spilt milk, the grieving from the loss of a friend, the soulful searching after an argument. Truth lives in the cracks. That’s where the light gets in.

But there’s something else.

It began with a visit to Lastingham in October last year. Since then, there has been a growing awareness of the spirit and art of place - not only to steady us, but to generate an overwhelming sense of understanding, hope and direction.

There’s a quote by Pablo Neruda: “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

It was Shakespeare who gave me my first hint and helped me break through my first glass ceiling - for his work is seeded with universal truths, smuggled beneath the thinnest veil of words, and still speaking clearly to our own age. I came to him from a position of unknowing - a working-class lad from North Manchester - with no grasp of nuance, irony or metaphor. But I was driven by the scorn of my peers to lock myself in my bedroom and read through Macbeth over and over again.

I remember rolling out a piece of blank wallpaper and listing every character in the play and following their heights and depths with different coloured lines. What emerged was a kind of tachograph for the human condition. Once I’d finished it, there was an overwhelming sense of being initiated into something beyond my comprehension - into the genius of another human’s mind, and a new way of observing truth.

And, oh my, after that, there was no stopping me seeing it. I saw it in the line of a Lennon song, the timbre of church bells, the patina of a latch, the wink of an eye. The bullies and the braggarts had me no more, because I could see. From then onwards, until my breakdown, life shifted from a single note into a polyphony.

Those were the seeds that later carried me through breakdown and depression. Without realising it, I had been building another tachograph - through the felt sense, observation, emotion, and through the cracks. This Genius Loci Digest is a roll of wallpaper.

Over the recent holidays, in the space created by boredom and rest, the mists of exertion, self-doubt, and obsession began to clear. A way forward through this synthetic world presented itself - personally, at least. For me, the answer lies not in what is in front of us, but in what sits behind and beneath. How the latent memory of place, a single line from a poem, a piece of music, or a revelation from an artwork can re-orient the world on the spin of a coin.

With that clarity came the recollection of a place that has shaped me deeply - not only in its physicality, but also as an emblem for how I want to move forward this year.

The recollection didn’t arrive like a bolt from the blue. It came first as a feeling. Then, on the radio, I heard a quote from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that seemed to hold its essence:

“They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the spring from coming.”

And suddenly, I remembered the place - and the journey that led me there.

It came at the end of a drive into Yorkshire that felt less like travel along Britain’s B-roads and more like a linear narrative written by buildings and landscape. I encountered the heights of human ambition in the spire of St Patrick’s at Patrington, and then the depths of sorrow in Easington, where a tent had been set up in the chancel to warm those who cannot afford to heat their homes - or have none at all.

In spite of all that was presented before me, Shakespeare helped me see both the irony and the truth in that.

Leaving the church at Easington, I couldn’t shake the sadness. I closed the van door and paused. How can such small acts of kindness counter the destructive tilt of the world?

Yorkshire's Lands End: Spurn Point - courtesy of Google Maps.

Seeking solace, I drove on to the place that became a motif: Spurn Point - a liminal place, barely distinguishable against the vast North Sea.

This tapering spit of land curls around the Humber Estuary as if offering protection from the sea’s unforgiving force. It is one of the world’s fastest eroding coastlines. Life and death coexist here in constant renewal, shaped by the same forces that threaten its existence.

Beneath the waves lie the remains of Ravensor Odd - a town built on a previous sandbank, lost to the sea during the Grote Mandrenke storm in the C14th.

Despite being swallowed by the brine, Spurn Point always returns anew, remade by the tidal forces that threaten its existence - and it’s because of this that I feel a sense of hope, and a better understanding of how small acts of kindness, like those at Easington, have their part to play in our world.

For when this spit was smothered by the sea, out of loss and destruction arose a new place from just a single grain of sand, and then another, and another, until even the might of the North Sea and the raging swell of the Humber could contain it no more.

What I wrote in my diary that day led me towards a metaphor that spoke of incremental and unstoppable hope and renewal, a feeling that has resurfaced over the past two weeks - one that will be threaded through this digest and through my travels in 2026. This digest feels like my own small grain of sand, set down in the belief that even though so much is cut back or lost, the conditions for return are already slowly forming one grain of sand at a time.

Quotation taken from 'Why We Believe - Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times.' Alister McGrath.

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I don’t think these moments arrive all at once, or announce themselves in an obvious way. Over time, something begins to take shape - not through force or certainty, but through attention and observation. What starts as a single encounter slowly becomes a way of orienting oneself in the world, a means of staying steady when the ground feels less secure.

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Hotspots

Grains of Sand in My Travels Last Year

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

William Morris

St. Wendreda, March, Cambridgeshire

Their survival would articulate a faith in the long view; it would signal that we still have the capacity to consider future generations, even when we are not here to witness the fruits of our labour.

Ely

Walking through it is a wonderfully absorbing experience, akin to wandering through Pompeii or Herculaneum.

The Nag's Head Shrewsbury

As I sketch, the people of this town come and go – their conversations rise and fall. The bar staff change shifts; time dissolves, and outside, the timber framing stands unmoved.

St. Wystan's, Repton

The weight of history here is a press. I am so taken in by what I see that I sit down on the cold slab to absorb it. This is a place that has held fast in the eddying tides and swells of chaotic times.

Biddlestone Chapel

Despite the epic scale of the moorland, it is the smallest thing - a chapel - that animates the landscape.

St. Mary Magdalen, Ripon

Here’s my chance to have parity with the generations that might listen to the final note of Longplayer in 975 years’ time. Here’s my chance to look down upon a thousand-year thread of time and try to comprehend what this building means to me.

St. John the Baptist, Burford

I feel a jolt, a sudden shift of perspective. The tension between the refined above and the stark reality beneath is palpable. Hidden in plain sight is a narrative on our own mortality – a memento mori.

St. Oswald's, Widford

Whilst I stood and waited for its return, I envisioned notions of time loosening its grip - of fog as a veil not just over landscape, but over centuries.

St. James's, Llangua

Looking after the building and its context speaks to something profoundly human – the impulse to invest ourselves in things that extend beyond our own lifespans

Paris, France

Part of the joy I feel as I sit with a vin rouge, watching life ripple through the square, is a deeper sense of connection and gratitude.

Southwark Cathedral

And so, when I step inside and the nave stretches out towards the chancel, I see it unencumbered, without expectation - through the eyes of a beginner. The impact is almost overwhelming.

All Saints', Billesley

It seems this church lies beyond the lens of our blinkered world. Yet I cannot forget that there was a younger, desperate man who once came here in wracks of anxiety, uncertain where his fragile vocation might lead, or what he might find within these walls.

Beverley Minster

This is how the masons who built this place would have seen it – and now this realm of rarified air, this dwelling place of angels, is soon to be joined by a humbled human being.

Cowside, Yorkshire Dales

Now, more than ten years since that first arrival, I find myself once again beside the Wharfe in search of something. I’m seeking patterns, I’m seeking coherence, I’m seeking sanctuary. I walk the track again, but this time during a kinder season. As the hill rises before me I can’t help but feel the valley sides gather me in.

Temple Church, London

And yet, for all its grandeur, Temple Church reminds us that this longing isn’t abstract or unreachable - it lives here, among us. Beneath the ribs of the vaulting, the ache of the infinite settles into the ordinary. It’s found in the scrape of a chair on the floor before a concert, in the smell of polish and candlewax, in the low hum of conversation over tea and biscuits after evensong.

Rudston

Breathless, I make it to the sweet spot and turn to face the monument. Before I can fix the camera to the tripod, the scene before me stops me completely. I’ve reached the monument not only at the edge of sunrise, but on the brink of the metaphysical - as if I am the final piece in a vast jigsaw; I, myself, a conduit that draws together time, space, history, light, and landscape.

St. Mary, Lastingham

It is as though the earth during its infancy first carved out a fold - a hollow that sat somewhere within the realms of Fibonacci - a proportion drawn from the same geometry that threads itself through constellations.

Van Life

On My Coffee Table

BOOKMARKED

With thanks to Jonathan Calder (who has one of the oldest blogs on the planet) for mentioning my All Time Best Pubs digest:

FILM AND SOUND

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Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....

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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with iPhone 17 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro.