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Daily, from next Monday: In Pursuit of Spring
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How did it all start, and what was it in the material I found that invoked me to set out in pursuit of spring this month - a journey that carries the trace of a shattered self and yet holds the possibility of healing, discovery and hope?
It was my first commission with the Churches Conservation Trust that helped shape the way I interacted with the places I visited. I was asked to photograph the medieval wall paintings in sixteen churches over a period of weeks in the winter of 2011.
Before that, I had spent several years building my relationship with the historic environment - volunteering as an assistant conservation officer at my local council and completing a postgrad dip in historic building conservation. It was my thesis, Genius Loci in Architecture, that crystallised my outlook on our built heritage. In it, I went a little off piste from the usual approach - others wrote about lime mortars and the conservation of historic materials - whereas I explored the intangible aspects of our heritage - the gaps, lapses and silences, the latent memory, the embodied histories.
"It was my thesis, Genius Loci in Architecture, that crystallised my outlook on our built heritage."
I asked the awkward question: what value was all that embodied energy – the history, the funding, the skills, the attention to detail, all that hard work – if people were not interested or no longer able to perceive the wisdom these places hold? My conclusion was that we needed to clean the lens through which we view our heritage – to wipe away the grubby film of modernity and to develop an emotional relationship with our historic places – how these places make us feel. To my surprise, I won a prize for the thesis – a camera lens.
The volunteer work and the postgrad dip were undertaken purely to inform my photography through a deeper understanding of my subject matter. I carried that understanding into the first embryonic journey through the painted churches of the CCT and shared it via Posterous - later transferred to Tumblr.
It was these Tumblr posts that I recently discovered were still intact.
On that journey - every day - I posted a blog called End Of The Day, recording my findings and reflections on each church. Those posts were the first seeds that would lead to the Genius Loci Digest, and they harbour many of the things I still hold most dearly - the light, the beauty in the mundane, the sense of layered history:
At Capel St. Thomas I wrote in February 2011:
“I needed a quick visit to the loo when I arrived at Capel Saint Thomas, so the church keyholder instructed me to go to the farm toilet - ‘around the corner, at the lean to, next to the duck pond’.
Such a base and practical start to my visit might explain my overwhelming reaction to the vista that awaited me inside the church as I opened the door to a nave blessed with diaphanous light, sliced and quartered by a crown post roof.”
And at St. Peter, Preston Park:
Sometimes, I feel like one of those French pigs that ferret around looking for truffles. Only with me, that is, I am ferreting around looking for nuggets of light.
It was like that today - the spandrels of an arch brought to life and then gone again - the cusp of a misericord emboldened for a minute or two - and the warp and weft of the altar frontal glistening like dew until it receded into the chancelscape.
On my first ever visit to St. John the Baptist in Inglesham I wrote:
I was lucky enough to get a good day, and what joy to watch the sunlight briefly kiss the stiff leaf and then move on to caress the pews.
At St. Nicholas, Freefolk:
But there’s another kind of beauty here too.
It can be found in the mundane - like the hinge to the west screen.
And finally, at St. Mary, Tarrant Crawford a vague glimmer of self-recognition:
At the end of the shoot, I noticed the silhouetted man still out in the field.
Braving the fence I walked over to find him pacing patiently along the furrows with a metal detector.
He had chapter and verse of our country's history in the palm of his hand: from Roman coins to Medieval buckles and brooches.
I have to admit I was a little jealous as I walked away back to the car, but then I consoled myself with the fact that I had been part of a more rewarding, yet less tangible story - a chronicler of light they might have called it then.
For the fifteen years since that journey, I have been working out how best to share the sense of wonder I feel when I enter a historic environment with others who may never see the places I visit.
The Genius Loci Digest became my answer. It grew out of Posterous and Tumblr and was re-energised during the Covid crisis, when people longed to travel to such places through the mind’s eye.
Part of the process after my breakdown involved grieving the loss of my bold and confident former self. In its wake, I struggled with low self-esteem - and with it came an inability to recognise the value of my own practice. I could see the buildings clearly enough, but not myself within the work. The years of early mornings, of patient looking, of refining how a story unfolds from wide frame to worn threshold - all of it felt ordinary to me. Even shaping the earlier Tumblr posts seemed less like a developed discipline and more like something I was simply trying to sustain.
I failed to see that cultivating a way of seeing - of sequencing, articulating and engaging others through place - takes years to refine. I also resisted acknowledging its impact. I have always been more comfortable standing behind the buildings than recognising the time, energy and persistence involved in sharing them. What I regarded as instinct was, in fact, practice formed over many years.
It took some generous words from a post on LinkedIn to interrupt that narrative and make me look again at my work. For a moment, I was able to step outside myself and recognise that what I had been treating as habit was a rooted and inherently connective language. The post reads:
“This is the most organized and organically unfolding photo essay I have ever seen on LinkedIn, and for that matter, many other sites. From the bird’s-eye view opening shots to the intimate close-ups, all beautifully composed and lit, there is an unmistakably personal and lyrical flow. It achieves a cinematic quality that most cinema doesn’t.” - James DeYoung
And now, on the cusp of another journey - In Pursuit of Spring - beginning this Sunday, I feel as though the van is packed not only with equipment, but with the generosity of people like James and the enduring memories of those winter weeks among the painted churches that first set this path in motion.
I want this new journey to be rooted from those embryonic times. I want this journey to be a living sequence - both theatrical and cinematic - shaped by what has come before. I want the landscape to become stage and screen at once - hills, valleys and coastlines carrying winter toward its release in a slow reel of burgeoning light.
But this journey is also something more personal. It is an acknowledgement - to myself - of the years invested in learning how to look, how to wait, how to translate experience into something others can enter. It is a recognition that the time, energy and devotion poured into this work matter. On the cusp of spring, it feels right not only to continue the story, but to start to like the person who has been telling it.
But most of all, through this journey, my long apprenticeship will gather into something shared, threaded through it all will be Edward Thomas, reminding us how even in the deepest winter hope springs eternal.
“While still my temples ached from the cold burning
Of hail and wind, and still the primroses
Torn by the hail were covered up in it,
The sun filled earth and heaven with a great light
And a tenderness, almost warmth, where the hail dripped,
As if the mighty sun wept tears of joy.”
March, Edward Thomas.
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In Pursuit of Spring
I’ll be setting out on 15 February - heading north from England to Edinburgh, and then on to my official starting point at the remarkable site of Portmahomack.
Before that, I’ve been invited to Sunday Service at Stobo Kirk on the 15th - a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, and one that feels like a meaningful threshold moment before the journey begins.
From Portmahomack, I’ll start moving south - visiting places I haven’t seen before - before reaching Whitby and the abbey, then through the Midlands and on toward the Quantocks, where Edward Thomas once followed his own pursuit of spring.
There’ll also be a brief diversion into South Wales to visit a remarkable cathedral - before crossing into Cornwall, where several locations await on my camino.
Here is a map of some of the locations I may be visiting during my journey:
An Accordian of Art
I'll be sketching and painting in a new sketchbook which stretches out like an accordion. It will be a little bit like the Bayeux Tapestry - where I will be sketching my experiences in a kind of continuous and linear way.
I've already finished the title. Can't wait to fill in the rest.
I'll be sharing my sketches every day in the Daily Digest Posts.
Daily Digest Posts
During the journey, I'll be writing a daily post for the Digest - these won't be posted out via email - but the links will be posted out live, every day, on my WhatsApp channel (see below). If you’re not able to follow on WhatsApp, the Friday Digests will summarise and link through to the posts - and will also have new additional content.
I'll also be posting out on my social media channels: Bluesky / Instagram / Facebook / X /
In Pursuit of Spring - The Road Companion Playlists - On Apple Music
I've pulled together 4 playlists for four stages of the journey here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
In Pursuit of Spring WhatsApp Channel
I've created a WhatsApp Channel for this journey. Followers will receive live updates. Followers won't be able to respond to the updates - but will be able to add comments to the daily posts that I share from there. It's a great way of keeping in touch.
You can follow the channel by scanning the QR code above, or following the link below:
More here on In Pursuit of Spring
Andy Marshall
Woody has travelled a total of 92,000 miles on my camper-van-camino. Every single mile has been rewarding. Inclusive of the journey to the start point, I'll be travelling another 2000 miles.
Andy Marshall
I'm taking a veritable library of books to help inform my journey, including these below:
If you're interested in my other recorded journeys on the digest - check out my new Field Notes section:
Andy Marshall
Kind words from a subscriber:
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.
🔗 Connect with me on: Bluesky / Instagram / Facebook / X / Tumblr / Flickr / Vimeo / Pixelfed / Pinterest / Flipboard/ Fediverse: @fotofacade@digest.andymarshall.co
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