Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 13th March

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Photo-hoard

In Pursuit of Spring Sketchbook

I just want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, the person who bought my sketchbook and then asked me to keep it.

There is always great joy in letting work go when it finds its way to someone who connects with it, so this unexpected generosity moved me more than I can say.

Words

"There are certain moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season.
You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again, its face is as specific as a momentary glance across a table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale."

John Berger.

Observations

Whilst walking to a photo shoot yesterday, I passed a small urban copse of sycamore and beech. A gravel path meandered through it, but outside its edge another track had formed - a line cut through grass with hardened soil and tree roots exposed. This was the unofficial route, a desire path: the mark of convenience - where most people had chosen to go.

It is a revealing kind of line. The copse becomes something to negotiate as quickly as possible - a softness bypassed in favour of efficiency, the shortest line from A to B.

I took the slower route, of course. Inside, the trees gathered around me, birdsong rose above the urban hum, and for a few moments the hardened edges of the town dissolved.

It struck me that we now inherit digital desire paths too - prescribed ways of seeing shaped by devices, repeated through social media, where buildings, landscapes and places are presented not only as images to consume but as experiences to rank - as though something as ephemeral and complex as a mountain might be assigned three stars out of five - while the deeper art of experiencing slips from view.

What worries me most is who is doing the prescribing. What kind of logic sits behind these algorithms, and whose values are being coded into what is shown? Taken to its natural conclusion, that same logic would have little patience for the urban copse I crossed on my way to the photo shoot - the trees removed, the curve abandoned, the route rationalised into a straight paved line.

Additionally, what slips away in the digital process is not simply detail, but whole registers of perception - those out-of-season elements of place that resist capture, the things that do not declare themselves at once, the qualities that cannot be flattened into an image or performed for an algorithm.

Some places ask more of us than that. During my recent journey through Northumberland and the Highlands of Scotland, the intangible qualities of place came so near that, alongside the visible and the manifest, I felt myself entering something parallel - another realm, faintly present, just beyond the material world - and at its centre was a particular quality of light.

I noticed a difference in the light along Scotland’s east coast, and then southwards into Northumberland. Not a sudden revelation - nothing theatrical - but rather a gradual raising of awareness, a slow internal adjustment, as though my perception were being tuned by exposure to a different spectrum.

During my journey the light possessed a gathered composure: ambient, subtle, meditative. Silver and white, diffused in such a way that it did not fall upon the world so much as enter it, and in entering, enter the body too. There are forms of light that illuminate surfaces, and there are others that seem to pass through the visible world and settle somewhere inwardly. This belonged to the latter - a kind of broad-field radiance that did not announce itself in any singular instant, but gradually bathed the whole being until I realised that mood, thought, and even breathing had altered under its influence.

At Portmahomack, where archaeologists uncovered evidence of a vellum workshop within the remains of the Pictish monastery, and where illuminated manuscripts may once have been prepared close to the edge of the Dornoch Firth, the word illuminated took on a different meaning. The air itself appeared manuscript - light laid delicately across the village as though applied by hand.

At Dunkeld, where Saint Columba’s relics made the town a spiritual centre of medieval Scotland, the effect deepened further. Intermittent snow flurries drifted through a deadpan sky, and the whole place became an optical chamber - silvered, suspended, acoustically softened too, as though the atmosphere had thickened enough to absorb sound. The light seemed not merely to reveal the town, but to hold it in solution.

What struck me most was that this quality of light belongs only to certain places, and only at certain times - beyond the register of the influencer, perhaps - where the ephemeral comes close enough to feel tangible, as palpable as moisture suspended in air. Latitude and seaboard combined to create a saturation that scattered light in every direction: a natural diffuser, broad and democratic, softening shadow without erasing form. It silvered edges rather than sharpened them, allowing buildings, fields and distant hills to inhabit rather than occupy the places they stood.

Further south, along the exposed ridges of Hadrian’s Wall, breaks in the cloud altered the register again. Diffusion remained, but now a pearl light emerged - a finer, more angular brilliance that caught the outlines of farm buildings and dry stone walls and made them shimmer in ways difficult to hold in language.

At Hexham I stopped for provisions and, caught within a pewtered light, found myself thinking of Saint Acca - the saint rumoured to have saved the town from raiding hordes by blotting out the light with conjured mists.

It felt, in that moment, less like legend than atmospheric memory: light and vapour, close companions in these northern places, each shaping what can be seen and what must be imagined.

In winter and early spring there is another accomplice - snow on the high ground. On the day I travelled north, the mountains still held enough white to act as vast reflectors, sending light upward into cloud, then back again through layer after layer of vapour until the whole sky seemed engaged in a diaphanous exchange with the earth. Reflection, filtration, return - so complex a scattering that it became hypnotic, as though the day were lit from above and below all at once.

Of course, there are times when a desire path is necessary. Life often asks for directness - for getting through - because circumstances demand it. But if that becomes our only habit of movement, we risk missing the remarkable world that lies just beyond the worn track: those intangible elements of place that disclose themselves only when we let go of the world and its judgements and expectations.

Much of what matters most in a landscape exists beyond the influencer’s register - beyond the frame of an Instagram filter, beyond the compression of a TikTok meme, beyond the quick visual shorthand that persuades us we have already seen enough. Certain qualities do not announce themselves to hurried looking: a silvering of air, a softening of sound, a steadiness of light that enters slowly and alters feelings before thought catches up.

To resist that reduction is not merely aesthetic; it carries moral weight. Because each time we refuse to let efficiency, habit, or mediated expectation dictate the terms of encounter, we make room for a fuller belonging - one in which the world is not consumed at speed, but met with patience, humility, and a willingness to be altered by that which cannot immediately be named.

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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....