River Songs #2

So, where did you go?

An ugly boat beached on the break

Only the salt and wind will want that now.

Gulls hang like kites over the old Sea Winds hotel

And you slipped away from the nowhere coast

So no-one would know your name.

By the time I was 16 I’d climbed into a de-commissioned air base, to the top of a broken gas tower, into abandoned farms, houses and up masts. In the intervening years there have been boats, mine shafts, train sheds, crofts, mansions, factories and quarries added to that list. One night a friend and I climbed through a barrel hatch into the basement of a bingo hall. We tip-toed around the dead hulks of heating units, dropped by time from the rafters, before climbing through a suspended ceiling and loft to drop into the ruins of the Lonsdale Cinema. That place, on Warwick Road in Carlisle, held memories from our childhoods, and we were determined to see it again before it was torched and buried by the developers. Projectors languished on the upper floors, stripped of their capacity to bring light.

I’ve always been fascinated by places where human life has departed. That sounds dark, but…

Though we’re capable of beautiful things, en masse we present ourselves as a deeply destructive force. So when a shell is left, it can be soothing to see nature take it back - to watch, hear and smell the power shift as the walls crumble and the glass drops from the frame. It can be intoxicating to quietly inhabit someone's space - a life played out in crumpled bingo tickets that fluttered to the floor years ago. A postcard to a child, growing up in a tiny croft on the Scottish coast. Where's the man now?

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Islands of Abandonment’ by Cal Flyn. I highly recommend it to those who are drawn to abandoned spaces. In an unexpected twist it has given me great hope for the survival of the human race, but let’s see how that goes…

I’ll finish with a passage from Cal’s book: ‘In the US, agricultural abandonment on a large scale began as far back as the 1860’s, as farmers left the rocky, acidic soils of New England in favour of converting those boundless flat expanses of the Midwest into America’s ‘breadbasket’. I myself have walked in the woods of New England, through dense and apparently untouched forest, only to stumble across a tumble down stone wall, furred with lichens and moss, marking the boundary of what was once a carefully tended field.’

The photos above were taken at Roa Island, near Barrow Furness on the Cumbrian coast.

Thanks for reading River Songs. Take care.

Dom