MIX409: SJUSH [ 19-Jan-26 4:35pm ]SJUSH delivers a new mix as part of our series, continuing the Irish artist's recorded output alongside recent releases. Now based in Berlin, SJUSH has been steadily active across labels including DORCHA, Intrepid Skin, and most recently SKUXX. His mix brings together selections from artists such as Randomer, Hertz, Céilí, and Andrew Cairns, and reflects […]
Best New Music: 006 [ 14-Jan-26 5:49pm ]Our first Best New Music feature of 2026 brings industrial textures, acid-leaning club tools, and melodic, peak-time productions from across Europe, featuring new cuts from Hannah Laing, BAUGRUPPE90, and Will Silver. Morbe - DefeatLabel: PTRL WRX Built around a weighty kick drum and pulsing low-end movement, the track leans into deep techno structures with detailed […]
Premiere: Mladen Tomic - Consequences [ 23-Dec-25 5:12pm ]Mladen Tomic ends 2025 with a welcomed return to his Night Light Records imprint, for the release of his two-track 'Consequences' EP. The title track is built around a steady techno framework, combining looping rhythms with layered atmospheric sounds and a sustained sense of movement. The second track 'Take It' shifts toward a tech house […]
Best New Music: 005 [ 22-Dec-25 6:33pm ]This week's Best New Music chart spans trance, house, and techno, featuring new cuts from SWART, Ryan Nicholls, and Christoph Faust - and artists from Germany, France, and Belgium on established club-focused labels. Aether & Momery - FarawayLabel: Watergate Records Uplifting melodies and an acid bassline form the core of the track, supported by harmonising vocal […]
WNDFRM / Live at Nonseq (ASIP045) [ 22-Jan-26 7:09pm ]
After presenting a recording from Salvatore Mercatante on our Bandcamp last year, I wanted to try and keep up this approach on the label by surfacing live sets from our artists wherever possible. I knew as soon as I was immersed in WNDFRM's live set last year, that it would make a great live release and would be enjoyed by anyone who picked up his WVLT release.
~
WNDFRM has long occupied a parallel lane, equal parts reductionist and tactile. His studio output, including his 2025 release on ASIP, WVLT, is often about what isn't there, carving space with restraint and a patient sense of pacing. But in this rare live recording from his appearance at Seattle's Nonseq series in late 2025, we're reminded how those same principles can hum with immediacy, weight, and physicality.
Tim's live set leans even deeper into the tactileness hinted at on WVLT. Over 37 minutes, WNDFRM builds a slow-motion tension through dub-damaged rhythms, brittle textures, and dissolving sequences. Familiar elements, saturated pads, clipped delay lines, off-grid percussion, surface and vanish without resolution. A gradual unravelling from a sound designer in his element.
A huge thanks to Steve Peters, Chloe Harris and the Nonsequitur community for the evening.
2025 Label Compilation - Mixed by todos [ 29-Dec-25 5:18am ]
2025 is probably our first year without a proper ambient release, with this year's annual compilation reflecting how diverse our catalog has grown.
KILN and Monoparts presented music this year that pushed expectations, with KILN's music pretty much in a world of its own anyway, and Monoparts bringing a vocal-heavy trip-hop record to the lineup - two records that would stand on their own on any label, irrespective of genre classifications.
Christian Kleine's second Lost World volume spoke to our true IDM roots of past, and Mikkel Rev's Journey Beyond, to the future perhaps, with a subtle wink to Trance music running through our blood.
A new signing in WNDFRM presented a landscape of micro-rhythmic IDM, as did returning artist Salvatore Mercatante, through a live set that traversed a spectrum of bass-heavy atmospheres.
Tying this all together in one mix has become todos' annual challenge, and he would be the first to admit this one was his most challenging yet. While I would never force this concept on him, if it didn't work, todos has the permission to edit, layer, chop and re-work where he needs to, just like a live set. In turn, his magic becomes a completely new way to absorb the releases from our past year, and an enjoyable way to spot moments you missed.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the label and the artists included here this year.
todos - Continuous mix tracklist
01. Mikkel Rev - 'Fragile' (edit) / WNDFRM - 'WVLT 021' (edit) / Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods' (edit) / KILN - 'Moon Ratchet' (edit)
02. KILN - 'Ptarmigan'
03. KILN - 'Moon Ratchet' / Christian Kleine - 'Beyond Repair' (edit)
04. Mikkel Rev - 'Transmit' (edit) / KILN - 'Solarsystem Breathing'
05. Christian Kleine - 'Slow' / KILN - 'Cadmium Lounge' (edit)
06. Salvatore Mercatante - Extract from 'Live at Public Records'
07. Mikkel Rev - 'LM8182'
08. Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods'
09. WNDFRM - 'WVLT 021' / Salvatore Mercatante - Extract from 'Live at Public Records' (edit)
10. Christian Kleine - 'Closer'
11. Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods' (ASC Remix)
ASIP - Reflection on 2025 [ 19-Dec-25 10:12pm ]
As with all my previous 'Reflection' year-end mixes, I begin with a collection of albums, EPs, and compilations that resonated with me over the past year. From there, I curate tracks to build the mix - a process that's as much about omission as inclusion. Inevitably, many of my favorite tracks and albums don't make the final cut, simply because they don't fit the flow of the mix or get lost along the way. There are plenty of albums I played on repeat that aren't included here, but I enjoy this process much more than creating lists.
As I remind myself each year, this isn't meant to be a definitive "best-of" list. Instead, it's a snapshot of some of my favorite music from the year, distilled into one cohesive and listenable format. Compiling these mixes under self-imposed restrictions is my way of revisiting and celebrating the music I've loved critically, while sharing it with you in a way that's both meaningful and accessible. For me, listening back to these mixes is like flipping through an audio photograph, capturing the essence of my year in music and invoking memories from special moments.
I encourage you to use this mix as a jumping-off point—dive into each artist, explore their albums in full, and check out the labels behind the music. You can find a Buy Music Club list linked below to help you dig deeper. If you're curious about the broader scope of music I've supported this year, my Bandcamp collection is always up to date. And for the ASIP year-end label compilation, that's coming very soon…
~
2025 was nearly the year of breaking point with my time and effort spent on the label. A new job, a third child, and… well that's enough to do it I guess. So as the year-end drew closer, the idea of completing this mix became laughable in its scope and I thought it might be the first year in over a decade I haven't completed one.
It's helped that I haven't done many mixes this year, so approaching it pulled on some much needed creativity, but even when looking back at what music I had supported on Bandcamp and the records on my shelves, it took me a long time to organize, make sure I had it downloaded, and even pull the trigger on items in my wishlist (my wishlist often revolves around vinyl I've picked up with no BC download code offered - gripe). Those who go through this obsessive process know how much time it can take up.
Looking back at the mix now it's complete, I've managed to include around 80% of what was in high rotation for me this year (there's always some that don't make it into mix form) and the styles are on point as usual in reflecting my taste over the year. We're starting with the deep ambient cuts, moving into more IDM and techno, and moving through a lot more energetic tracks towards the end - from Jungle to Trance…
One of the only live gigs I got to emerge from my family life to see was WNDFRM and Patricia Wolf in Seattle, so of course, Patricia's newest installment on Balmat (who also had another epic year as a label) is included. Related to that event, organizer Raica (Chloe Harris) made a return with two albums this year I believe - both worthy of praise, but her piece for (another relentless outpost) Quiet Details was the stand out. A regular on these reflection mixes, MPU101 on Ilian Tape gets another nod- a BoC-vibe regular who always manages to tickle the right part of my ears. Alex Kassian had about three tracks or remixes in my original shortlist (including the lush remix of Spooky) so I had to do my best to not over-indulge - his remix of a classic Pianoman melody will bring back the Global Communication / Tangerine Dream vibes. Skee Mask is still releasing archive material that defies expectations. In one of the most welcome moves of the year, finding All Possible Worlds on Bandcamp made many people ecstatic, not least because of the full release of Irini's odyssey, or the random track found on their profile. Light of Cacti got my Schnauss tastebuds tingling. Anushka Chkheidze has been on my radar for a long time now, so it was a treat to see her collabing with the much respected Robert Lippok across a very interesting record. OPN landed late in 2025, but arguably released one of his more welcomed albums by die-hard fans, hooking me right back into his unique worlds. Simon Littaeur came into my feed through his Instagram videos (normally something that doesn't always result in a quality album) but his production lived up to the visual hype. The album by jp on emerging label Theory Therapy was full of big tracks, and I did my best to make sure one was included on here. Talking of big, Djrum's latest didnt dissapoint, and he'll continue to be classed as an innovator with output like this years. I nearly stopped at the Barker track, as it doesn't get much bigger than that euphoric high, but something told me to bring it back down a little bit more, so into a slight trance we went with a superb debut by Alvar (Teo Bachs) and of course, the masters of hypnotizing techno, Voices from The Lake making a much needed return. The ending comes from vinyl selector Chee Shimizu, a unique piece of music that would bring the sun down on any horizon and one of two great tracks included in the mix from the ESP LA fundraiser.
astrangelyisolatedplace · ASIP - Reflection on 2025Listen on Soundcloud the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app
Tracklist (Artist - Title - Album - Label)
1 - HARZ - 0647 - (polychromatic) [Empty Space]
2 - Roméo Poirier - Picobello - (Off the Record) [Faitiche]
3 - Florian TM Zeisig - Earth Loop - (A New Life) [Stroom]
4 - Patricia Wolf - I'll Take Care of You - (Hrafnamynd) [Balmat]
5 - Saapato - Active Decay (feat. Patricia Wolf) - (Decomposition: Fox on a Highway) [Constellation Tatsu]
6 - Pianeti Sintetici - Part One - (Space Opera) [Astral Industries]
7 - Heavenchord, Infinity Dots - Entering Landscapes - (Landscapes Of The Soul) [Secret Domain]
8 - placa - cityzen - (in trance it) [Non-transparent]
9 - Area 3 - Grass Turns To Sponge - (View) [Khotin Industries]
10 - Cahl Sel - Leaf - (Traces) [Reflective Records]
11 - Raica - Not There Though, Dive - (The Absence of Being) [Quiet Details]
12 - MPU101 - 3100beta2 - (MPU106) [Ilian Tape]
13 - Jo Johnson - Variance Remnants 3 (field recording) - (Variance - Remnants (Alterations)) [Self]
14 - Pentagrams Of Discordia - < - (Triskaidekaphobia Extd.) [Self]
15 - Alex Kassian - Lost in Hanoi - (ESP Institute XV) [ESP]
16 - all possible worlds - untitled - [all possible worlds]
17 - Skee Mask - 32Crescent - (E) [Self]
18 - Rod Modell - Snowstorm in Naubinway - (Northern Michigan Snowstorms) [Silentes]
19 - Strategy - Earthling - (A Cooler World) [Constellation Tatsu]
20 - µ-Ziq - Peppermint Aero - (Manzana) [Balmat]
21 - Lord Of The Isles - Opalescent - (Signals Aligned) [Self]
22 - Plant43 - Skyway Shadow - (Luminous Machines) [Self]
23 - Xenia Reaper - Drift__ - (Nept Polarisation) [Delsin]
24 - Lord Of The Isles - United Wire - (Signals Aligned) [Self]
25 - Martinou - The Last Hour - (The Glow That Lingers) [FauxPas]
26 - Coatshek - Eternal Lovers - (Sound Bath) [Dark Entries]
27 - Light of Cacti - Washed Away In Pink Skies On Brighton Shores - (Neverland is a State of Mind) [Tonights Dream]
28 - Pianoman - Pasion (Alex Kassian's Mandarine Dream Mix) - (Pasion) [Planet Strange Love]
29 - Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok - Uncontrollable Thoughts - (Uncontrollable Thoughts) [Morr Music]
30 - Oneohtrix Point Never - Measuring Ruins - (Tranquilizer) [Warp]
31 - Simon Littauer - Phicet - (Modular) [Katharsis]
32 - arcologies - asleep and dreaming - (PARTICLE SHIFT) [Rabbithole Club]
33 - E.L Heath and Karen Vogt - This Is Spirit - (This Is Spirit) [Plenty Wenlock]
34 - Aural Imbalance - Thermal Isolation - (Edge Of Space) [Auxiliary]
35 - jp - planes - (we're here all the time) [Theory Therapy]
36 - Vivian Koch - September (Gold) - (Colors of September) [Self]
37 - Courtney Bailey - Under The Water - (In Dream) [Music From Memory]
38 - Djrum - Waxcap - (Under Tangled Silence) [Houndstooth]
39 - Roméo Poirier - 12 - Steve A. - (Off the Record) [Faitiche]
40 - Barker - Reframing - (Stochastic Drift) [Smalltown Supersound]
41 - Alvar - Meg og sola - (The Mist LP) [Peak Experience]
42 - irini - The Higher (Lost In Dreams) [all possible worlds]
43 - Voices From The Lake - Aquateo (II) [Spazio Disponibile]
44 - Chee Shimizu - Zeze (ESP Institute XV) [ESP]
Salvatore Mercatante Live at Public Records (ASIP044) [ 05-Dec-25 6:08am ]Last December, we were fortunate to host one of our largest label nights to date at Public Records, New York, one of the most renowned venues in the world for sound system quality. One year later, we present to you one of the recordings from the evening, by Brooklyn's own Salvatore Mercatante.
Live at Public Records captures Salvatore Mercatante at his most unguarded and instinctual, set free from the polish of post-production, delivered to a room of people who gave themselves over to the quiet pull of tension, decay, and harmonic dissonance on one of the best sound systems in the world.
Performed as part of a curated label night inside Public Records' intimate Sound Room, Salvatore's set was equal parts sculpture and erosion. Working with a minimalist setup that belied the richness of the result, Salvatore traced an arc through fractured rhythms, bent tones, and fogged-out signal paths, drawing on his 2024 album 'Ø' and a trove of unreleased and WIP material.
Following a DJ-set by Aspetuck and preceding a live set by OKRAA as part of the label's biggest showcase to date, Salvatore's set was the perfect middle-ground, with signature low-end blooms and crisp drum patterns, reconstituted in real time and massaged by the custom four-point sound system.
Live at Public Records was recorded on December 6th, 2024 in Brooklyn NY, mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw Mastering. Artwork and video taken from photography by Daniel Salemi.
Available as name your price on Bandcamp
Join us for the listening party at 2pm PST Friday
Photos by Daniel Salemi
Photos by Daniel Salemi
Photos by Daniel Salemi
WNDFRM / WVLT (ASIPV056) [ 08-Sep-25 6:09pm ]
WVLT is the newest sonic addition from WNDFRM (Portland-based, Tim Westcott), an album of eight distinct explorations of micro-rhythmic IDM.
Tim Westcott's practice is rooted in an acute, nearly forensic attention to sound. Subtle tones, sculpted drones, and lean percussive gestures, always pursued with a patient ear and obsession with sound design.
With previous releases on Prologue, Home Normal, and Dragon's Eye Recordings, and several live performances at Mutek, a new album from Tim is a rare yet welcome occurrence. The conceptual approach for WVLT began in 2021, mixing synths with drum machines and granular processing. Lightly arced structures slip between gates of rhythm, shifting pulses, translucent washes, and disquieting residue. There's a precision to the hesitation and an insistence in the space between notes, a deft balance of raw improvisation and sculpted quietude.
An exercise in immediacy and response, each track builds and unspools, like form in fleeting motion, driven by the moment's tonal contrasts, micro‑rhythmic interplay, and slight gestures that alter entire planes of listening. It's minimal without sparsity, intense without density.
Available digitally and on limited transparent dark blue 12" vinyl on September 26th 2025. Mastered by Taylor Deupree @12k Mastering and featuring artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding.
Brontës and Boggarts: Jenny Chamarette sinks into Clare Shaw and Anna Chilvers' (eds), 'The Book of Bogs'.
Peatlands are one of earth's most precious and endangered ecosystems. Storing more carbon than the world's forests combined, they are found in boreal regions and tropics - though substantial areas remain unmapped in the Global South. On the twin isles of Britain and Ireland, as The Book of Bogs states, over 80% are damaged or destroyed. Amassed by peat's near-magical capacity to preserve millennia-old remains, bogs, heaths and moors are linguistically and culturally plural landscapes. Histories of cultivation, colonial and industrial exploitation encircle them, alongside communities who seek to preserve these places abundant in myth and science.
In the making of The Book of Bogs, Clare Shaw and Anna Chilvers lit a beacon for writers across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to assemble their craft in honour of peatlands. Fondly self-describing as Boggarts, they spoke up initially for one localised spot, the Walshaw Moor. Situated between Burnley and Halifax, Walshaw is sometimes lovingly referred to as the 'Wuthering Moors', after Emily Brontë's classic novel Wuthering Heights. The Brontës feature amply: from Claire O'Callaghan's 'A Scamper on the Moors', a literary analysis of Emily's early eco-criticism, to icons of storytelling in David Morley's 'Emily Brontë' and Ian Humphreys' 'The Dog Star Quartet', or travelling across media and engrained in Nicola Chester's writing psyche and environmental activism in 'Wild Moors of the Imagination.'
Many essays, like Mike Mayal's beautiful cross-genre experimental piece 'Lystna', identify that Walshaw is under threat from overseas development as a wind farm. My first uneducated response: renewable energy is a good thing, right? But - what if the revenue generated sits with those who have no ethical investment in the land's stewardship? What happens to these wild landscapes whose fragile ecosystems perish under man-made development, but which are vital for our ecological survival: flood defences, carbon sinks, thermoregulation? If renewables come at the cost of CO2 emission from disturbed peat, where is the net environmental gain?
Walshaw and its protection are cyclical returns throughout the collection, which represents startling diversity in thinking, writing and being with moors and mires. Bogs are fine drawn through Johnny Turner's bryology field trip 'The Little Moss That Stayed', in Guy Shrubsole's 'Make Britain Wet Again', an investigation into catastrophic moor burns supplying grouse hunts for uber-wealthy landowners, or Melanie Giles' 'Moss Fox', a creative melding of human archaeology and vulpine life. Bog language is as important as place: Robert Macfarlane's 'In Which Names Are Spoken' demonstrates thousands of localised words that map the moors of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Words make stories, and from stories come truths, wrapped in peat.
Boggarts - eldritch bog spirits that come to live in local dwellings - are everywhere. Half my family descends from the working classes of the North West: Jenny Greenteeth and Will O' The Wisp are embedded in memories of deep slanting rain on Pennine hills. George Parr and Bunty May Marshall bring these centuries-old figures to light in 'The Call of the Moors,' on the mythologies that encircle the bog's deceptive terrains. A boggart comes to stay for one torrential night in Sophie Underwood's fireside story, 'What Came Down in the Flood'. And bog spirits are not exclusive to the Global North, as in Annie Worsley's 'There Are Boggarts in the Tropics Too', a geochemistry-cum-autoethnography of her peat encounters in late 1970s Papua New Guinea.
The collection's four sections track a narrative arc from definition (see Alys Fowler's gently queer 'A Peatland Has Two Mothers') to tension, immersion and, finally, action. Poetry winds throughout, each poem reeling in the anthology's pulse before sending it on its way. Outstanding examples come from Pascale Petit, whose 'Bearah Bog' and 'Beast's Castle' pulsate with life; Patti Smith's mourning song 'Death of a Tramp'; and Carola Luther's Jarman-esque epic poem 'Descent', an angelic conversation of the air between bog and wind turbine. Memoir features prominently too, including Amy Liptrot's 'Ten Revelations of Peat', Polly Aitken and Sally Huband's enjoinder to "believe the ill, or join us" in their cautionary reflection on embodied and environmental breakdown in 'Conversation Overheard on a Peat bog,' and Jennifer Jones' meditation on her in-utero bog-connection, 'Rooted in Peat.'
And then there is the moss. Sphagnum embraces the book in the photography of its fold-out flyleaves; it lands softly in almost every piece. Like the sphagnum that encases it, The Book of Bogs contains fragile, furious, resilient ecosystems of writing, demanding the protection of a vulnerable environment we need more than we know. Consider it a spell, to encircle the wild peat of your heart.
*
Published by Little Toller, 'The Book of Bogs: Stories from a Yorkshire Moor and Other Peatlands' was December's Book of the Month. Read an extract here, and if you're a paid Steady subscriber, an interview with its editors here. Buy a copy here (£19).
Jenny Chamarette is a writer, researcher and arts critic, curator and mentor based in London, UK. Shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo and Nature Chronicles prizes, and longlisted for the Nan Shepherd and Space Crone prizes, Jenny's non-fiction has been published in anthologies by Saraband and Elliott & Thompson, in Sight & Sound, Litro, Lucy Writers Platform, and Club des Femmes among others. Jenny's upcoming book 'Q is for Garden' explores the radical relationships between sexuality, nature, culture and cultivation.
We've re-upped copies of Ciara Callaghan's excellent Slow Grown: Plants, Folklore and Natural Dyeing in our Bandcamp shop.
Published by Common Threads Press, this zine turns our eyes to the great histories of natural dyers.
Women, witches and healers throughout time have practised dyeing out of necessity and joy, and passed down the sacred knowledge to their children. Now rooted in the pages of this zine, we honour these women - the women who taught us how to deliver our babies, to use herbs as medicines, to cook, spin, sew, and dye.
It features 8 dye recipes available to any forager, alongside their accompanying folklore. Including oak, apple, and elder, this zine will teach readers the basics of natural dyeing with local and readily available ingredients, thereby helping in saving the ancient practice of colouring cloth.
Its author hopes that by practicing natural dyeing the reader will also enjoy a new and intimate relationship with the natural spaces around them. Ciara is an artist based in the UK working primarily in textiles. Through her research and practice in dyeing, embroidery and quilt-making, Ciara explores the role of heritage craft in contemporary culture, feminism and the interrelation between object and owner. She is interested in themes of place-making and belonging; the importance of hyper local colour and textile objects in relation to place.
£9 - available here.
Here are the results of our latest newsletter competition…
Last week, we had 3 copies of Garden of Sorts Issue 1 from our very own Bandcamp shop to give away. We asked:
In which London borough would you find the Garden Museum?
And the answer is: Lambeth. The winners are Christine Nevin, Carol Carey and Ruairí McGregor. Your prizes will be with you very soon!
Thanks for all the entires. To be in with the chance of winning our next prize, make sure you're signed up to the mailing list. The sign-up box can be found on the right-hand side of this page.
Adapted from Robert Macfarlane's bestselling book, UNDERLAND is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, 'astronauts of the underworld' travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.
Narrated by Oscar-nominated Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of A Fall), and with a uniquely poetic approach, UNDERLAND is a deep dive into the Earth that ultimately presents a alternative vision for rethinking our lives on this fragile surface.
We're very pleased to announce that we will be digitally releasing the film's score, composed by Hannah Peel, on our Rivertones label on 27th March — the same day the film hits cinemas.
The film's UK premiere takes place at The Barbican Cinema on 24th March, followed by a live Q&A with director Robert Petit, author Robert Macfarlane, and composer Hannah Peel, in conversation with writer and curator Gareth Evans. More information and tickets here.
Nicola Chester contemplates a year of cut ties and broken legs.
January 2025 already had a label attached to it that read, Big Year. Just before Christmas, a book had been written, things had been decided, things instigated. Huge cogs in our lives as a family, had been set in unstoppable motion. The previous September, I'd handed in my notice as librarian in a secondary school. It was a job I loved, at a school I loved and I knew my timing would badly let them down.
I spent the last weeks working out my notice with a full and overbrimming heart. It was the hardest job I've ever had to leave, especially as I knew no one was taking over from me (though thankfully, months later, someone did). I left, hurt, because of that. Other contributory factors to my leaving — things that I'd suppressed, that were a frustration, a trauma, and that I thought I'd managed to tamp down — smoked and glimmered, threatening to ignite.
But I was leaving because I couldn't do it all. Our youngest daughter, traumatised by years of an educational system that labelled her underachieving and 'failing,' left school trailing a two year record of poor behaviour and punishments, no GCSEs, no rewards and no Prom, though she'd turned up everyday and sat all her exams. Now, the system demanded that, because she'd 'failed,' she must keep trying for another 2-3 years. This entailed an hour plus round trip twice a day for me, because the bus was intermittent, and stopped short by seven miles (and has since been cancelled entirely.) With her situation unchanged, there were still distressed calls to pick her up in the middle of the day.
My new book was due in at the end of the year, and though it had taken three years in the thinking, dreaming, researching and living, was really just over half written. I could no longer simply 'write in the gaps.' The writing demanded more of me, and the spaces in between more pressing things, barely existed anymore. When I factored in the challenge of 2025, it was clear I couldn't continue.
We'd decided to move house. After a lifetime in tied or tenanted cottages, and an unexpected spell of too many adults living in a now too-small house the year before (when our son and his girlfriend came back to live with us a while) we recognised a further and deeper precarity. We were all of us now renting in an increasingly unstable and unfair system. Mum had the solution. If we pooled our life savings (with her contribution far outstripping ours) we could build Mum an annexe in her double garage and move into her now too-big house. There would be a bedroom for all, more space, more company for her and a level of security, at last, for us.
With planning permission granted, work began in March 2025 and we began to say a long goodbye to our estate cottage home of 22 years. The house that raised our children, but had never been ours and never felt it. We have lived in the most wonderful places, but every few months, there would be a shock from some quarter, to remind us of our place and vulnerabilty. It might come from a neighbour evicted to make way for staff, a family member, or a sale to facilitate repairs to the big house's vast and aged, Queen Anne roof; or it might be a contractor coming to do work without our knowledge, being verbally abusive about the fact that he had rights and orders, and we didn't. Our sense of security and attachment to the place were complicated, freighted with a kind of feudalism and deep-seated.
By May, our daughter completed the first year of college, and we all decided, enough was enough. She is continuing her 'education' in other ways. Working where she is valued and supported (Employee of the Year, no less) and building confidence and skills through several local volunteering opportunities, and learning to drive (most days still involve at least two, hour long round trips.) She is far happier. Bright, funny and deeply emotionally engaged with the world, as we have always known her. Mum's little house was finished as autumn began. We'd both used up all our savings, and had a tricky moment when we couldn't, not being homeowners, access any kind of loan, or be guarantor at the same time, for the rental on our son and other daughter's places. Mum could though, so we simply paid her instead of a bank. The builders, a local firm, couldn't have been nicer. We were utterly clueless and they proved the best and most trusted of guides.
In the same week my book, Ghosts of the Farm was published, we moved. The older two children came home to help, and came to my book launch. Each time we moved a bit of furniture the less-than-a-mile down the road, we walked or drove the route between two women's lives that are at the heart of my book: Miss White in the 1940s and 50s, and mine, from the 1980s to the present. There were - are - so many coincidences, hauntings and connections, I am still trying to understand them all.
As we moved and the publication process of the book brought a smattering of events and writing opportunities, as well as some online teaching, I begun to feel justified in leaving my other job for the freelance life (though, it has to be said, being even poorer paid than my near minimum-wage school support job, I can only do it because of my husband's wage as a Paramedic.) We settled in next door to Mum's and it felt right for all of us. After a bitter-feeling tussle to get our significant deposit back on our rented house (£1600 on a two bed house with a tiny box room 22 years ago) we decided to move our old horse away from the estate too and finally, cut all ties. It felt freeing, emotional, and raw. Not empowering. Not yet. But the constant chatter in my head, of a lack of agency, worry and being less, began to subside. The dreams - someone knocking on the door, barging past to claim some piece of furniture, sit on the sofa or take some cutlery, haven't left me yet. And won't, because our two older children have inherited both the dreams and the shocking reality of renting in this country. But, we were home and dry.
And then, I had an accident.
Our young dog, Mum's big young labrador, and a whippet, met in the woods: caught a case of the zoomies, and crashed into my lower leg, breaking it before I hit the ground. Mum was stood right beside me. Thank goodness it wasn't her. Two days later, I hobbled into the X-Ray department, and came out in a wheelchair, with my leg in a cast.
I had to stop. I had to let others take over. My husband took all the driving on, fitting it around his work and other commitments in the community and with his parents. Our daughter stepped up to manage the animals, Mum and friends stepped in too. The first four weeks were hard. I could make a cup of tea for myself, but not carry it, or stand long enough to drink it where I'd made it. Subsequent weeks have been better, but boxes remained unpacked, our plans for the house, and the things Mum needed doing, were all on hold. I wrote, and wrote harder to compensate for my inactivity. But it wasn't enough. I read, but it wasn't enough. I had so many ideas, that were both not enough and too many. Finally, I listened to those telling me to stop. To appreciate this time for what it was and think about what had happened in the last 12 months. Finally, finally, I think I did. I hobbled about the house and got to know it. Hilariously, it is a bungalow. The fitness App on my phone (that I never, ever use) sprung to life, concerned about me: I hadn't climbed any stairs in days, now weeks. I was far less active than I was compared to this time last year, last month. I learnt the house's foibles; its sounds and sighs, smells, sometimes. I learnt to stand in the conservatory for each sunset, for ten minutes of just being, a minute or so earlier each day, as the leaves peeled from the trees and pooled, or fluttered into little vortexes in gusts, as we crept towards the shortest day. I watched the wind shift from south west to north and turn the clouds. I watched the morning sun melt a corner frost and the evening sun gild the gulls' bellies, as they travelled home from the ploughed fields, to roost on the lakes in town, doing my commute for me. I watched the rooks commute out from the Farm I had written so much about, and watched them return again at night. I listened to the radio; even, to podcasts. I cuddled up on the sofa with the dog. I had tea with Mum, or my daughter in the daytime. I paused, I cried sometimes, I sang. I healed my leg and wondered what 2026 would bring, with hope and the excitement of simple things. This had been a big year, no doubt about it. But it had been good. We had shifted, with effort and risk, like a cart being pushed out of the mud, piled high with all our precious cargo and meagre worldly goods, and found solid ground. We had settled. I had stopped. Paused. And just before the old anxiety creeps back in to ask me, have you done enough? Have you made the most of this time? Appreciated it enough? I shall write it all down, to be as sure as I can be, that I have.
*
Nicola Chester's 'Ghosts of the Farm' was a 2025 Book of the Month.
At Snowshill, Gloucestershire — home of eccentric architect, artist-craftsman and poet Charles Wade — JLM Morton muses on frivolity.
On frivolity
at Snowshill, Gloucestershire
Every single clock at Snowshill Manor tells a different time, every corner of every room giving the illusion of existing on a different timeline. Or, the illusion of multiple timelines existing simultaneously. I suppose that if you could peer into the owner Charles Wade's imagination, you might see his vision for the world as a kind of pentimento, a painting in which earlier images, forms or strokes exist under the image we see now; layer upon layer of human ingenuity and invention, intricate beauty and a version of humanity that is somehow its best expression.
Charles Wade was an English architect, artist-craftsman and poet of mixed-race descent who bought Snowshill Manor, a Cotswold house, in 1919. He donated the house, gardens and their contents to the National Trust thirty-two years later in 1951. His grandmother, Mary Jones, was a free black woman who married Solomon Abraham Wade, a white dry goods merchant and beneficiary of compensation from abolition. He purchased the first of several plantations in St. Kitts in 1850, after which the family moved to Kent, England. Solomon gifted Wade's father the money to buy further sugar estates in St. Kitts in 1879, a business which Wade went on to inherit in 1911, making him independently wealthy.
Charles Wade qualified as an architect but was called up in the first world war and served as a sapper. Combat engineers, sappers constructed trenches and fortifications, cleared mines, dug tunnels and built roads. As a way of escaping the atrocities of the Western Front, Wade turned to painting and drawing. A talented artist and illustrator in his own right, he was said to paint vast imaginary gardens and restore whole landscapes and buildings again in his mind after they'd been decimated by war.
About 3.3 million soldiers died on the Western Front, site of some of the most brutal and costly battles of World War I, including the battles of the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele. The very architecture of war alone — the trenches, including those that would have been planned or constructed by Wade — were in part responsible for around a third of soldier deaths. Witnessing the horror and destruction of the battlefields was an experience which must have profoundly shaped Wade's character. Records show that he saw an advert for the dilapidated manor house at Snowshill in a copy of Country Life when he was in the trenches himself. Visiting today, the house has the feeling of belonging to someone who's seen devastation and, as a consequence, chose a very different way of being in the world.
*
We visit in August during the drought when the fields are scorched and bleached to their very bones. I have come with my daughters, trying to find things to fill the time in the holidays before an actual holiday, something to fit in between juggling freelance work and childcare. They are tweens now, poised between childhood and a fuller teenage independence — they've outgrown holiday clubs and, though I love spending time with them, it's getting harder and harder to find things for them to do together that they enjoy and I have this lurching feeling that we're mindlessly killing time. Dragging out the days with activities that are just something-to-do, instead of seizing the days and yielding to the utterly unreasonable social pressure to make memories.
Whoever said that the years are short, the days are long was not wrong.
We have a picnic on a bench in the orchard, a hastily put together lunch of cheap crisps, cereal bars and bits picked up on route. My youngest gasps, half-joking, half not,
'Sushi! We must be rich!'
I feel guilty about the tiny plastic fish that's filled with soy sauce and think about it going into landfill or, worse, ending up in the sea like some ghost double of an IRL sardine. Such waste. We watch the sheep grazing in the field beyond the orchard and the red kite circling overhead, its chestnut body glinting with every direct turn towards the sun. After we've eaten, dusky purple clusters of plums lure me to the tree by the fence. I touch them to see if the skins give with ripeness, but the kids have already plucked one each and are making hmmmn sounds about their deliciousness. I bite into the one that's offered to me. It's sharply and retchingly sour and astringent, a drying kind of bitterness on my tongue. A damson. The kids both bend double with laughter.
*
A kleptomaniac who spent his days prancing about the Manor in costumes and playing with objects he'd bought in English house clearances and auctions, Charles Wade seems to me to have been gloriously and wildly eccentric. Yes, the acquisition of private property and the accumulation of wealth through nefarious means has enabled this eccentricity, but there's something interesting going on here. The volunteer on the door tells us proudly that there are no labels to explain the contents of the house. It's up to us to interpret it how we like, which is just as well, because the volunteer in the first room can't remember anything she wants to tell us about the collection and keeps scratching her forehead and sighing.
There are a few costumes on display from the collection — a jester's cape, a beefeater outfit, a dress made of the first copperplate printed fabric that heralded the birth of fast fashion. Cabinets of curiosity are stuffed with trinkets — a test tube of emerald beetles, another of iridescent moths, carved ivory puzzle balls, a fan, a collection of hat pins, a tin chicken on wheels, a laughing buddha, a glass tiger. The kids pull me on by the wrist to look at this, look at that! On the top floor there is an entire room full of bicycles and carts. Penny farthings hang from the ceiling. There are boneshakers and all manner of lethal-looking contraptions and a volunteer leaning forward to tell us about them as we pass briskly by. There is a glass case full of dolls whose eyes follow us around, half a carriage attached to a wall, rooms full of samurai armour (26 sets in all), musical instruments, swords, clocks. It soon becomes bewildering.
'Over consumption,' declares my youngest.
On the wall above the long pendulum of a clock, 'THE LIFE OF TIME IS MOTION' is inscribed on a beam. Charles bought his first acquisitions with his pocket money as a child — among them, three small bone-carved shrines of St Michael.
St Michael, patron saint of soldiers, defender of truth and justice.
Opponent of evil.
*
On the way to Snowshill we stopped at dad's gravestone and pushed back the weeds, found a trowel we recognised and must have left there when we last came. The girls asked me if they ever knew dad. No, I said, he ran out of time. But he would have loved them very much. We cleared the weeds away from the granite, rubbed the dirt out from the lettering and left a small bunch of scabious and sow thistle on the stone.
*
Wade's collection tells of a life of smoke and mirrors. A dramatized life of fantasy and play, the pursuit of every interest. But what was behind it? 'Let nothing perish' was the motto Wade chose for his own coat of arms. A gesture of expansive generosity perhaps, but it's hard not to wonder what ghosts haunted him, what it was that motivated him to gather so much stuff.
The place feels and smells like it needs a good clean; it has the air of an oily wooden spoon languishing in a deep drawer that hasn't been washed for years. Wade's own quarters were not in the house but in a small cottage in the manor garden, consisting of a bedroom and a bathroom which he'd fitted out with a flush toilet and hot running water.
The kids squawk at the desiccated woodlice piled up in the plughole of the bathroom sink. A thick blanket of dust drapes the furniture, the objects, the beams in the ceiling. Outside the pond is covered in algae — the kids comment on that too, 'like bro, you could at least give that a clean.'
I notice the gardens, by contrast, are cared for, the colours of the high summer dahlias and gladioli orchestrated in deep purples and pinks, petunias and verbena tumble from pots that flank the stone steps. The gardener must have been in just this morning, leaving little fresh clippings of grass in the gap between path and lawn. I decide that it's these very imperfections that make Snowshill such a fascinating place. The messiness of it. The celebration of fun and humour, the open-door policy of friendliness, the realism of its chaos somehow seems gently pitched against austerity, against doom, against sober order and moronic convention. A glimpse of a spirit that might hold something we need to know now.
*
The last time we visited Snowshill was with my mother-in-law. We wanted to take her on a day out that would be accessible but out of the ordinary. I remember getting her a mobility scooter from the National Trust reception desk and we cruised the smooth tarmac paths down from the carpark to the manor. Prompted by the birth of our first-born daughter and some gentle encouragement, my partner had reconnected with his mum after years out of touch. None of us knew that she was dying at the time and would have only a few months left to live, but we were aware of making the most of our time together — of making up for lost time. It would be the last visit she ever made to our home.
We were a little awkward, finding conversation difficult and stilted at times, not the free and easy talk we had hoped for. But there was a sense we were prepared to accept that getting to know each other would take time. The kids were tiny; there were years ahead. Reason enough to make the effort.
I think about that reservedness, this stiff inaccessibility as I weave again through the dark corridors and garden rooms of Snowshill — passed off as politeness, it seems to be at the heart of so many family dynamics and so many social interactions too.
What are we all so scared of?
I wonder if Wade recognised and understood this awkwardness, saw it as a kind of failure of the human spirit, a waste of time indeed. There are black and white photographs dotted around of Wade and his house guests posed in fancy dress. Word of his collection spread among writers and artists in the early twentieth century, and he welcomed several famous figures to Snowshill, including J B Priestley, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. The photos picture scenes of easygoing, frivolous pleasure and a willingness to overstep social boundaries and received norms. Wade seemed to be able to bypass discomfort and stiff convention by using costume and theatre to orchestrate relations. Was that a further denial of reality, a masking — or, by using disguise, did he offer an invitation to his guests to be even more themselves?
Frivolity is defined in the dictionary as 'lack of seriousness; silly, funny' and we all know, don't we, that frivolity is often enabled by the kind of ease that comes with privilege… but Wade shows us that this world of play can be subversive, a radical reimagining of how we spend the time of our lives, a reframing of imaginative plenty as a kind of pleasure that's a powerful antidote to the apocalypse we find ourselves living through in this year of wars, this year of the unconscionable maiming and killing of children, this year of climate disasters and relentless systemic inequality.
I come away from Snowshill feeling something different about life, about the ways frivolity has been dismissed — most likely because it's 'unproductive' — (yawn) and the ways in which abundance (of creativity, connection, generosity, play) can be not only the reality of our daily lives but the guiding principle.
We take the path down from the flower gardens to the vegetable patch where purple beans are growing in trellises. There are courgettes, rainbow chard, pears and apples. The kids see a tree laden with mirabelle plums at a turn in the path, whole branches sagging with untouched fruit.
They jump up to grab the plums, reaching for the red ones, the sweetest fruits, letting the juice run down their chins and arms, giggling and running on and away when new visitors appear on the path behind us.
*
Image: Charles Wade on the back steps at Snowshill in carriageman's boots, oversized for protection on the road.
JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and arts producer. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from her nonfiction 'Tenderfoot' have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is twice a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection 'Red Handed', was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026 and her debut nonfiction in 2027. Find her online here.
From the Isle of Skye, Bethan Roberts shares a 2025 of lighthouses and sheilings.
I'd been trying to go to the lighthouse for months. Neist Point, Skye's most westerly point. As one of Skye's tourist hotspots it's out of bounds in the summer months - a long single-track road snarled up with campervans. Into the winter months, circumstances haven't aligned, around work, childcare and the weather. I sometimes envy the holiday makers, at liberty to explore the island - their playground. Skye still comes to me slowly, in glimpses. I know its playparks, toddler groups, the place where all the kids have their birthday parties, its famed beauty spots less so.
*
Instead of going to the lighthouse, I pick up Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, published in 1927. It's set on Skye, and depicts the Ramsay family holidaying there, with 'the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them'. Huh? I might not have been out and about much, but this is definitely not Skye. For Woolf describes not Skye at all, but Cornwall, where she spent all her childhood summer holidays - at Talland House in St Ives. There's no clear reason why Woolf chose to transplant Cornwall to Skye as the setting. She'd never been, but knew and loved the writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell about their celebrated journey to the Hebrides, including Skye, in 1773. 'The Hebrides are very angry', she wrote to a friend after the publication of To the Lighthouse, and told Vita Sackville-West of how 'an old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally inaccurate'.
To the Lighthouse makes the shape of the letter H. This was how Woolf drew it in her notebook - 'Two blocks joined by a corridor'. The opening chapter 'The Window', set on a September evening, and the third 'The Lighthouse', a September morning, are the two blocks, joined together by the middle chapter, the corridor, 'Time Passes', which spans ten years during which the holiday home stands empty - 'So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled around'. I'm reading this chapter when I come across the latest statistics relating to short-term lets (holiday homes) on Skye. There are 1558, 1188 of which are classed as potential dwellings. Of new homes built last year, 18.8% are already holiday lets. Woolf described To the Lighthouse as an elegy, and reading this novel in the winter months, I find there to be something particularly elegiac about the extended, poetic description of the empty house, a holiday home out of season, with 'shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs'. 'Nothing', Woolf tells us, 'could disturb the swaying mantle of silence' that takes hold of the place. Silent, ghostly, empty buildings, 1188, ever proliferating across the island, while people struggle to find a place to live here.
To the Lighthouse was a huge success and with the money she made from it Woolf bought a car. In June 1938 she finally visited Skye with her husband, in, I like to think the same car she brought with the proceeds from the novel, transporting her to its purported location. 'Well, here we are in Skye,' she wrote in a letter, 'and it feels like the South Seas - completely remote, surrounded by sea, people speaking Gaelic, no railways, no London papers, hardly any inhabitants.' Ah, remote, that adjective so often applied to Skye, the source of as much ire as creative responses among folk who live here. 'Rural, not remote' is the slogan. I've definitely been guilty of describing Skye as remote, stemming from subjective experience - remote from family and friends, from familiar places. Step aside from your own experience (if you're not from here) and it doesn't take much for Skye to become the centre of the world, rooted in and radiating a rich culture of song and story.
If Skye is actually Cornwall in To the Lighthouse, then even when Woolf is on Skye she still insists on its sort of elsewhere-ness. 'Believe it or not, it is […] so far as I can judge on a level with Italy, Greece or Florence', she writes. 'Remote as Samoa, deserted: prehistoric. […] Hardly embodied; semi-transparent; like living in a jelly fish lit up with green light.' There is a lack of a tangible, grounded sense of Skye - indeed it's 'hardly embodied', although the evocation of the lit-up jelly fish is beautiful. She finds Skye not entirely 'deserted' (although there was indeed a population low in the 1930s, the clearances compounded by losses in WWI) - she records encountering the 'nice red headed brats' of the MacLeod clan at Dunvegan castle, and how 'the old women live in round huts'. Yet for Woolf, the interest and beauty of Skye is 'almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin'. Skye gives her the sense that 'one should be a painter'. In To the Lighthouse the character Lily Briscoe is painting a picture, in 'all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across', albeit not one of place. Lines and colours run across pens and canvases and postcards.
Woolf's layering of western points, Cornwall, Skye, one atop the other, prompts me to think through my own relationship to the west, and with the west, comes 'Celtic', comes matters of language, branching into Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx - Goidelic or Q-Celtic languages - and Welsh, Cornish and Breton - Brythonic or P-Celtic languages. I grew up in northeast Wales, borderlands, and with that comes an uneasy relationship to place. My mother English, my father Welsh. But we've always headed west, my dad with his roots in northwest Wales, in the Conwy valley. He's a Welsh-speaker, but didn't pass the language on to me and my brother. It's a familiar story up here too, the loss of Gaelic. The colonial lies. The language will hold them back. The language has no future. Moving to Skye has in a sense brought me closer to Wales and to Welshness, or perhaps has brought home to me more persistently the deep connectivity between language and place. I'd always thought I'd move back to Wales, finally learn the language properly. Here, instead, I start Gaelic classes, and ride the various waves and surges of closeness and absence, longing, belonging, unfamiliarity, loss. Lostness.
I had most of my own family holidays as a child in Anglesey, Ynys Môn, the island off the northwest coast of Wales. My parents first took me when I was six weeks old and I've been to the island at least once a year since, perhaps missing a year here and there. Anglesey will always be imbued with that glow of childhood memory, to me. Golden sandy beaches, slate-blue seas, gentle green rolling farmland, shelving down to dunes and across clifftops. Hedgerows knitted with hawthorn, ancient sites, gorse. Snowdonia, Eryri, beyond the fertile flatlands, protective. I took my daughter in the summer, caught her too running in that golden glow, it glancing off her, a mirror held up to the past. Time passes. I wonder how her connection to place is being written, growing up on Skye, her Gaelic better than mine.
*
While I didn't make it to the lighthouse, I did make it to the sheilings this year. Shielings were something I'd come to hear about living on Skye but I didn't really know much beyond the name. I signed up to a walk organised by local organisation ATLAS Arts to Àirigh na Creige, 'the shieling of the rocks', in May. The walk was led by landscape archaeologist Michael Given, and Eilidh MacKenzie, a musician, visual artist and educator from north Skye. The walk is given the name 'the soil remembers', and we learn how the soil holds the memory of the way the land has been used in the past. The walk starts near Torrin, a beautiful part of Skye that feels sort of secret, accessed by an easy-to-miss turn off from the main road at Broadford. The road snakes down to Elgol, curving tightly around the top of loch Slapin, the bluegrey shape of Blà Bheinn, outlier of the main Cuillin ridge, stamped on the horizon to the west.
We learn how, sheiling, àirigh in Gaelic, is the name given to the summer pasture and little turf and stone bothies used during the summer months, where livestock were taken to pasture, while women and children lived in the little bothans, milking cows and processing milk into butter and cheese. Eilidh tells of how Gaelic oral tradition remembers shielings culture fondly, a welcome change of scene and routine. We're led to the site of the shielings at the flat valley bottom between the head of loch Slapin and the base of Garb-bheinn, rising grey to green to meet the sky to the fore of Blà Bheinn, the stream, Allt Aigeinn, running down. Over seventy structures are recorded here. I would have totally overlooked this place, but Michael shows us what to look for and how to identify the sites, through the vivid bright green patches of grass, despite the decades of disuse, still verdant from all that manure. As Eilidh notes, it's a colour described by the Gaelic word gorm, seen differently through the lens of language. I can't help but compare this experience of green with that of Woolf, her 'jelly fish lit up with green light'. This green, gorm, grounded, a tangible sense of the past, the memory of how the land was used held and seen in colour.
Later in the year, Eilidh's exhibition of Skye shieling culture opens, 'ùir-sgeul | earth story'. It's beautiful exhibition, bringing together a large variety of materials, the fruits of extensive research and deep care - songs, stories, maps, archaeological reports, as well as materials found at sheiling sites. Eilidh's own artworks also form part of the exhibition, in which she uses pieces of peat, heather and bogwood. It is the ultimate art of place. I'm much better at interpreting words than visual arts, but the colours, dominated by browns, greys and blacks, are those of earth, rock and stone. I see the way the soil remembers, the bothans then and now, the Gruagach stone, the deep connection to and understanding of place, of stone touched and felt, known, lichen, and the mountains rising too, rock on all scales, from all sides.
In her excellent chapbook accompanying the exhibition Eilidh recalls sitting in a shieling bothy, which she likens to 'being in something of a portal'. She writes:
It's a tangible connection to a bygone time of which almost nothing else remains. […] The last people to shelter within the walls of these huts would have had a relationship with the land that was built on generations of indigenous knowledge and communal living, and understood their animals and environment in ways we are no longer required to learn. The sense of loss in these terms feels overwhelming, and not just the loss of the indigenous knowledge and language so intrinsically connected to place, but a way of seeing and being that was completely shaped by belonging to the land.
Her exhibition captures Skye's sheiling culture from the brink of loss, holds it in the present. She also writes of how such aspects of Skye, in danger of being forgotten, are overlooked by the shiny machinations of mass tourism today. Nearly five years into life on Skye, I'm still a tourist, really. Glad I never made it to the lighthouse. Glad I made it to the sheilings.
*
You can read Eilidh's chapbook (to which this piece is indebted) here.
Bethan Roberts is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor living on the Isle of Skye who enjoys thinking and writing about nature, literature, music and film. She is the author of 'Nightingale' (Reaktion Books, 2021) and is currently working on a book about life on the Isle of Skye.
At home and abroad in 2025, Daniel Williams found his perspective framed by trees.
Caught by the Seine
I don't travel as well as I used to do. I've become so rooted in the heathland common landscape in which I live that I find it increasingly hard to leave, for fear of the hiraeth I will experience when elsewhere. Even with the routine of work and chores, home is where I feel most myself, where I can shift at a moment's notice from those obligations into time to walk and think and write and be.
My perspective is framed by trees. I identify strongly with the ones which bound and surround me - the slim, wild Scots pine at the bottom of the garden, its supple trunk bending with the winds; the magnolia echoing one which stood outside a childhood home; and the sweet chestnut and English oak just beyond the front gate. I look out upon them and wrestle with words until their shape on a page pleases me, if no-one else. Increasingly I'm a gnarly old oak myself, mindful in this mast year of the continuation of the species, trying to be as productive as I can, spreading out a carpet of acorns beneath my canopy. Robert Forster once described the unwillingness ever to leave where you're from as a 'Cat's Life', a thing he couldn't understand, until he could. Something of the feline seems to have come over me.
Nevertheless, I do manage to tear myself away from home from time to time, and this year took trips to Manchester, Newcastle and Paris. Inevitably, having made the effort to travel, I find myself inspired and enthused by the differences from my daily lot. A professional interest had me visiting Manchester's Mayfield Park, created around the cleaned-up River Medlock, and noting green walls and other elements of beneficial urban design in Newcastle. We are adapting our cities to the climate, knowing now that we have to do so alongside decarbonising, balancing realism with the hope that we must try never to lose in the face of our bloody-minded attempt to extinguish life on earth.
The same attempt to make the urban realm more resilient and biodiverse has been happening in Paris since I last visited. The Seine has benefitted both from traffic being rerouted away from the bank, and a billion-euro clean-up of the water, so that this year, after a century-long ban, public swimming is once again allowed in the river; the Olympic Games was just a staging post in the environmental effort. It's a much greener city than it was. Seeking relief from the summer heatwave, I'm struck by the oases that have bloomed under Mayor Anne Hidalgo's transformative administration. While you can still find plenty of examples of clipped, boxy shade in the formal gardens and parks, there has been a move to more naturalistic planting, softening the streetscape, making it more inviting, not to mention cooler, and ultimately more resilient to climate change. And then there is Paris Respire. Paris can indeed breathe every Sunday, due to the car-free scheme launched in 2016 and still going strong.
In the August heat, we drift by the Seine where once cars used to rattle along. It's been fifteen years since my last visit to Paris, and thirty-odd since the first. Inevitably memories are awoken and reflections set in motion as the sun glints and plays across the rippling surface of the water. Moments where my path and the Seine's intersected, here and downriver in Rouen and Le Havre. On the passing of time; how cities change and yet somehow stay the same; the Babylonian pleasures of language; and the nature of parental influence (or otherwise), for my daughter is about to start living and working in this fabled place.
If I can claim any influence over her embarking on a second half-year stay in France, three decades after my own six-month stint, it's to have helped foster a perspective which looks out from our island and doesn't imagine the coast as walls. When I was growing up, France was little more than a once-visited campsite near Calais with an on-site restaurant which served up andouillette (sausage made from the lower intestine of pigs) to my unsuspecting brother. The language I was learning at school was an academic exercise, a Molière stage play, not a living, breathing thing. Thinking back, the real source of my Francophilia was likely the Style Council, through both the piano-heavy À Paris EP - the cover of which features Paul and Mick looking impossibly cool next to a fountain with the Eiffel Tower in the background - and the torch songs and Gallic jazz inflections of the Café Bleu LP.
Inevitably we pass something of ourselves onto our offspring - genes, tastes, attitudes, perspectives, opinions - even if we are wary of that process. But as often as not they define themselves for themselves - neither in contrast, nor as updated replicas, but through the trial-and-error process of opportunity and engagement with the world beyond home. This I like (music, gymnastics, languages). This I do not (football, scratchy indie records from the 1980s, blue cheese). Music was always in the air, but it wasn't force-fed. My daughter's taste is very much her own, not that of her parents, save for a grounding in Gershwin and the Beatles with a dash of Tracey Thorn (singing not 'The Paris Match' but Tinsel and Lights). Equally she is now creating and defining her own version of Paris, free of the influence either of The Style Council or Georges Perec. And while I hope it'll be a while before she settles into any kind of cat's life, that's her call.
*
Visit Daniel's website here, or follow him on Instagram.
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Anton Spice measured 2025 in bell strikes and ancient ice.
'Feeble was the sound they made … on frozen nature's winter omnipotence.'
I've spent the last few months of the year reading the 600-page epic Independent People by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness. First published in 1934, it follows the fortunes - or more accurately misfortunes - of shepherd and farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses, who spends much of the book and the decades it tracks fighting in vain to retain a very particular version of his independence, often to the dismay and suffering of those around him.
Independent People is a book about the crushing inevitability of capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, about the power of superstition, nature, industry, politics and economics being greater or more irresistible than the power of the individual. Life on Bjartur's remote croft in the Icelandic countryside begins in myth and magic and ends in debt and legislation. Progress pokes at the edges of his world and then marches straight through it. A road is built, Christianity is taught, local economic systems are replaced by wider co-operatives, and the effects of war and revolution ruffle a community that was until then entirely self-contained. America appears on the horizon. Loans accumulate. Sheep, cows and children are born, raised, and buried. And throughout it all the only thing that seems to make life worth living is drinking inexplicable quantities of coffee.
I don't live on a remote Icelandic croft, but I do feel like rapid change driven by forces beyond my control is accelerating. As a writer, I feel like I am being constantly asked to adapt and adjust my relationship to the to the tools I use and account for the work I do. And I too feel a Bjartur-like resistance rising in my chest whenever I am asked to contend with its coming impact. In response, I've found myself drawn to longer arcs.
In November, I made a trip to the John Taylor & Co. bell foundry in Loughborough, which is the last remaining bell foundry in the United Kingdom. The workshop and tuning rooms feel Victorian. The casting hall, positively medieval. Forges are atavistic places, the elements in which they trade outdate the bells they cast and outdate the very notion of time that we cast bells to keep. Return clients at the foundry can be three or more generations apart. Most of the cathedrals in the UK have had their bells restored in the last hundred years, and as such won't need them looked at for another few hundred. New bells are not in demand, but I have come to see a casting.
It's cold up on the gallery. I am a good thirty years younger than everyone else here. Below us, a furnace burns green hot. Fired up to a temperature of over 2000 degrees Celsius. We wait in anticipation for the temperature to reach the requisite level. One by one, the founders enter the room, nodding to one another that the time has come. They gather around the furnace, pull visors down over their eyes and gloves up to their elbows. Their movements are choreographed and perfectly timed. The molten metal is tipped on a pivot into a large vat that is suspended from the gantry. Sparks fly and smoke rises.
Once the final drops have been poured, the vat is winched down the centre of the room towards a sand pit, where the chimney of a bell mould is poking out of the ground. John Taylor are one of the few foundries to still cast their bells underground, a nod to the itinerant founders who used to travel the countryside, digging holes and casting bells in churchyards as they went. The founders assume their positions. The wheel is turned and the vat tips forwards, slowly emptying its contents into the top of the mould. Instructions are given to speed up. The regularity of the pour is essential to ensure consistency in the metal, and therefore also consistency in the tone. Solid turned liquid turned solid. The bells are made to withstand up to a quarter of a million strikes a year. For hundreds of years. Millions of strikes. Everything about them speaks to a scale beyond the human. Rarely seen, always heard. Too heavy to move, too solid to break, exhumed from the earth like ancient relics in an act of high ceremony. Archaeology in reverse.
There are 8,760 hours a year. If a bell strikes the time of each hour, it will strike 156 times a day and 56,940 times a year. According to the Office for National Statistics, I will live to be an average of 84 years old. Such a bell could toll 4,782,960 times in my lifetime. After which it could outlive me by a thousand years.
Shortly before my trip to the foundry, I spent a day at the British Antarctic Survey ice core laboratory in Cambridge to record the sound of the world's oldest ice being melted and analysed. Scientists use ice cores to reconstruct the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature change that has been the basis for our understanding of human-made global heating. Until last year the longest continuous ice core record dated back 800,000 years. This ice is thought to be double that, anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million years old.
At this age, the ice has been extracted from a depth of several kilometres, each centimetre of which is said to account for roughly 500 years of highly compressed snowfall. The samples are cut to size and fitted vertically into a plexiglass scaffold and slowly lowered onto a hot plate where the air bubbles and water droplets are separated for analysis. It gurgles as it goes. The ice is melted at 1.5 centimetres a minute, meaning that every hour, 45,000 years of environmental history melts away before my eyes. So how many bells is that?
Ice cores are regularly referred to as archives because the molecular information they contain take us back in time. Since the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels have rocketed to heights not seen in a million years. The scientists at BAS are now just waiting for the temperatures to catch up. Maybe Bjartur was right. Time for another coffee.
*
Find Anton Spice's previous work on Caught by the River here, and follow him on Instagram here.
2026 will be the year of looking to your neighbour, writes Cally Callomon.
Shadows, Reflections and Ponderings above the sea of fog
or
Flashes From The Archives Of Oblivion
(How things actually do fall apart — but only if we allow it)
30 nine-year-olds sat at their desks in Primary School, me at the back, and we listened to Miss Raine ask us who we thought 'They' are in response to someone suggesting that "they should ban them from the toy shops". Thus Miss Raine introduced the concept of there being no 'they', no us-and-them. Only us. A life lesson learned — two words henceforth to be used judiciously; both 'They' and 'Should'.
Breakfast, a week later my father tried to explain to my older brother that the red plastic toy soldier that was included in the Kellogg's Corn Flake box was not actually 'free', that we had paid for it over all the previous Corn Flake purchases. "But it says it's free" argued my brother, who never understood. He went on to be a financial consultant arranging mortgages. A life-lesson learned: nothing is ever free.
Teatime a week later my mother quizzed why I thought The National Front was making the world a better place and I had no answer for that. Politics was big at our table. A life lesson learned: we must embrace the otherness of others.
My mum ran a tight household budget. I wanted to borrow money to buy a cassette recorder so that I could tape concerts. The parents never loaned me a penny, I had to save up my paper-round money, buy it outright and now I have cassettes of those bands I surreptitiously recorded, copies of which I sold to classmates and a life in the music industry followed. (Strangely none of my pals wanted the recording of Can at The University College London "it's just drumming" they said).
A life lesson learned: Home taping wasn't killing music.
I probably learned a few more things at that age where a developing brain is open to ideas, influence and imagination, before the great shut-down of our thirties forgot so much of it and we failed to acknowledge the privilege of a welfare state, of health and happiness, of not having our houses demolished by pilot-less drones.
2025 — this was the year of a country wanting something for free: lower taxes yet more public spending. The Americans would say "go figure" or "do the math(s)". If we don't get this we will blame 'them' and we'll make the world a worser place.
This last year seems to be the time when things that were threatening to fall apart fell even further apart. We have benefits creaking at the seams, benefits my parents fought hard for which we sold off on the open market whilst we built nuclear power stations and railways we cannot afford, yet seem oblivious to the needs of communication and how simple these could be if only my Suffolk home could get a 'phone signal more than one blob, could stream things beyond a buffer and could get a DAB signal for the wireless that didn't keep submerging into an audial fishtank. I then tell myself not to say that "they should…"
We make our own entertainment.
Author, broadcaster and MP (before he saw the folly in that) Rory Stewart's new book Middleland concerns itself with his early days in Westmoreland where he worked as a reporter on a local level. Like my Suffolk a county of dissent, Westmoreland is a place so cut off from The Central Government Of They one has to think and act along local lines. He writes how a local community knew it needed more homes (not 'housing') especially for those who were just starting families, and so the local community chose the site (making it harder for objections) approved the planning, and built the homes using local labour, before setting up their kids to live in them.
I dearly hope these are not seen as rungs on the obscene 'housing ladder' not 'starter homes' but are seen as homes forever. Stewart goes on to describe the much needed, and oft-disregarded localism as a way to run a household (like my mum) and thus to run a community, town, county, country, and, yes, a continent we somehow still call Europe.
By doing that we may see migration as a world problem, one that has existed for millennia, the solution and accommodation to which has to be solved on a global, yet local level, much the same as the perils faced by our environment — which must include humans in that misleading word 'nature'. As long as we see outsiders as others we are doomed.
Not long after I was nine I got to see Roy Harper play for free (it WAS free, it said so in the Melody Maker) in Hyde Park. The rest of my sixty years has been spent with Harper at my side. He's a good deal older than me but he managed a second leg of his farewell tour this year. Though I had tickets for his Birmingham Symphony Hall concert — the usual rowdy celebration of all things Roy — I somehow managed to see him in a tiny pub in Clonakilty beforehand. Something I won't ever forget.
As I get older I find music suits pubs better than almost any other venue. Where I am we are surrounded by fantastic thriving pubs, so many of these pubs host sessions in them, 'big' names drop by to play, and if this local intimate setting is our substitute for some vacuous arena on an industrial estate then I know where I'd rather be.
To get into these pubs requires no 'dynamic pricing' ticket, no internet scramble, no bag search, no queue at an overpriced 'merch' table, no jostling for beers at London prices, no pillock next to me on his phone checking his share prices, and no missing the last train home complete with bus replacement service.
Somehow the year's fog grew denser. A welcoming embrace with the ever-thrilling recent Burial release of Comafields / Imaginary Festival. At three minutes shorter than Nick Drake's 28-minute epic Pink Moon, Bevan the Burial makes music with the listener uppermost in mind. This is true folk music, the sound of south London in collaged shrapnel and indistinction once again served up as an enigmatic soup.
When desperation sets in and we crave clarity, sometimes the opposite reassures us that the solution is up to us alone. 2026 will mean look-to-your-neighbour — keep it local on a global setting.
Dan Richards reflects on a year of sharing stories of darkness and light.
2025 was a strange old year, quite a lot of which I spent on tour with Overnight, a book which sought to shine a light on the work, care, dreams and wildlife afoot whilst most of us sleep.
It's weird touring a non-fiction hardback because, inevitably, things change - the world doesn't stop or remain in place just as and because you wrote it down - so as I went around having conversations and telling stories, I was constantly having to tweak and update my narrative.
Some things came to an end, even before the book was published.
In Autumn last year, Royal Mail ceased operating mail trains. The final East Coast mainline service ran on June 14th 2024, piloted by driver Keith Buckley, in whose cab I rode as part of my Shadows & Reflections of 2023.
The age and increasing maintenance demands of the trains, the difficulty to obtain spare parts, and the cost of electricity were all flagged as key factors in Royal Mail's decision to move away from rail transport in favour of road and air. 'Only 3% of mail is transported by rail', a press release explained - as if that wasn't a decision Royal Mail had made - before noting that no jobs will be lost because rail staff would be redeployed driving lorries; all of which rather suggests that Royal Mail is aiming for Net Zero in the same way I daydream about a Nobel Prize. Altogether, a rather abject slipshod end to a historic storied service after 194 years.
In happier news, 2025 marked 100 years of the BBC's Shipping Forecast. Announcers Ron Brown and Viji Alles came along to Overnight's London launch and Ron read from the Late Ships chapter to a spellbound Brick Lane Bookshop. I also had the pleasure of sharing a stage at Hay with Meg Clothier, whose book celebrating a hundred years since the first broadcast is a maritime marvel.
Sadly, in a very BBC move, perhaps anticipating jollity and anxious to both-sides-it, as of April 1st, 2024, the Shipping Forecast was cut from four daily broadcasts to two on weekdays (00:48 and 05:20) and three at weekends - the daytime long wave-only transmissions at 12:04 and 17:54 are no more; a loss to listeners of Test Match Special and analogue sea dogs alike.
Bat numbers at Buckfastleigh crashed shortly after my first visit - at which point, I really did begin to feel like a nocturnal Jonah. Although the cause turned out to be more Strigiform than Cetacea.
'Owls moved into the roost in 2024,' explained Pam to a packed-out room at the East Gate Bookshop, Totnes, on the evening of Overnight's publication. 'They disturbed the breeding females who tried to move to nearby roosts, but were there too disturbed by owls, so fled.'
Most of the main South Devon roosts are monitored but no substantial increase in numbers was detected, so nobody knows where the bats went or where a large number may still be. At one point only 12 bats were counted in Buckfastleigh on a summer night when several hundred might have been expected.
Thankfully, numbers have since increased. Speaking to me in September 2025, Pam reported 'seeing about 500 in our usual spot, so I'm estimating that 1,200 have returned to the roost', which is great news.
Many other good things have happened, fresh dawns.
2025 is the 80th anniversary of Tove Jansson's first Moomin story so I was doubly delighted to publish an account of ice fishing on the twilit Baltic with Marie Kellgren and her father, Viking, in a recent issue of Scotland's excellent Gutter Magazine.
'Some big changes' Marie emailed me last month, 'I'm not fishing anymore, dad still does with Grandpa [but] I got the opportunity to work for Martha.' - The Martha Association, a Finnish non-profit citizens' organization founded in 1899 with the aim was to promote public education among women across Finland - 'So I'm now working with a Smartfish project teaching kids in school how to prepare and make food out of fish. It's been really interesting and I get to see some more of Finland as well.'
Congratulations to you! I wrote back. Your knees and sleep patterns must be thrilled. Good luck!
Once I'd hit SEND, I sat for a while recalling the bite of the Finnish winter, the roar of Viking's chainsaw cutting holes in the ice. Hard work, long days through the sunless Winter months; the blinking lights far out at sea, the trees of Pellinge doubled-over with snow in the blue-dark of January.
The crews of Anstruther RNLI and HM Coastguard helicopter Rescue 912 continue their 24 hour vigils, ready to deploy and race to those in peril and distress.
The outreach teams of St Mungo's are out every night of the year as ever more people turn up on the streets needing help. The front page on their website is frank about the UK's current homeless situation: 'Rough sleeping is on the rise. With the increased pressures of the cost of living crisis, we need to prepare for this to continue.'
No light without darkness.
Following a book talk in Bristol, I received message:
When I read about the book, the excerpts and descriptions resonated so much with my life (night owl, working in A&E, a trainer for those working in sleep studies) … we aren't the heroes everyone thinks but real people who struggle to find worth and peace in a chaotic world. I was a classicist who left to become a medic so I could be useful to the modern world. It's made the pandemic (and memories of it) manageable. Good luck on your tour.
Last week, after a Manchester event with the brilliant Jean Sprackland, another:
I just wanted to send you a message to say how much I appreciated you sharing your experiences while in critical care at the event this evening. I'm an anaesthetist and have a lot of those kinds of conversations & it's so valuable to hear and be reminded how it feels from the other side. I'm so sorry that it felt lacking in comfort - for some people we're the last person they ever speak with & the weight of that is something I think about often…
These are two of many.
What can we all do with these memories, this trauma carried by people within and without our creaking systems of care?
The news cycle that rolls on and over us all - the deathly euphemisms, lack of accountability; the way people talk of the end of the world like it might be avoided, might never happen, when it's happening every day and night to someone, someone's family.
With this in mind, in 2025 I've tried to find and celebrate the good and humane, help those helping even though it sometimes felt futile, and find and share stories of connection rather than schism - because it's all fun and games pointing out how fucked everything is, quite another to soothe and unify, amplify a sense of belonging.
I've found strange and galvanising connections in all sorts of odd places but perhaps the most affecting occurred after an Overnight event with the brilliant Rozie Kelly in Ripon, North Yorkshire, I stood with a small crowd of onlookers to witness a hornblower 'set the watch', an ancient ceremony dating back to AD886 when Saxon King Alfred the Great presented Ripon with a horn after granting the city a Royal Charter.
At 9 o'clock every night of the year, without fail, a horn is blown at the four corners of the obelisk in Ripon's Market Place to announce that a watch has begun against crime and disorder. The horn is then sounded three times outside the mayor's house to confirm that the watch has been set. The tradition commemorates the time in the Middle Ages when Ripon's first citizen, the Wakeman, was responsible for crime prevention in the city from 21:00 until dawn - an early law enforcement officer who pledged to ensure the peace, enforce a city-wide curfew and compensate any victims of burglary on his watch. At 1139 years and counting, this continuous act of observance has a good claim to be the longest unbroken human ritual there is.
So I've been thinking about that - benevolent acts, the solidarity manifest in looking out for each other, especially as the nights, already dark, grow colder.
Who wrote that hope is a verb? I don't know. Somebody wise. I remember that Bob Hoskins said it was good to talk, and I've seen this past year how folk love stories about lights in the dark, kindness generates kindness and 'Thanks' is a word best said aloud.
*
'Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark' is out now and available here, published by Canongate.
On the crofts of Annie Worsley and Kirsteen Bell, pine needles puncture the shimmer and shade of winter.
Dear Kirsteen,
Belated Happy Winter Solstice, Christmas and New Year. I'm piling everything into one joyful bundle because I've been completely hopeless with cards and seasonal greetings. I hope you all had a wonderful time?
I can't quite grasp how swiftly this year has flowed. I am about to enter my eighth decade and feel the run of time as a river in spate. I flip from bone-weary tiredness to over-the-top exuberance. Life is a cycle of fast and slow, up and down, pain and pleasure, but one thing is certain, it never stops surprising me.
R beat me to 70 (in November) so we enjoyed a few days in Torridon, a wee gift from the family. The weather was cold but kind. Crystal clear air revealed summits and slopes where every nook and cranny was visible. It's rare to see so much topography and fine geomorphological detail and a joy to walk on relatively dry ground. There was a lot of path restoration work in 2025. Once I'd have preferred a tougher, wilder scramble amongst boulders, heather and tumbling burns following a faint trail. 50 years on, I'm very happy to place booted feet securely on sturdy rocks and gravel. I can gawp at the peaks and see where the path is heading.
In the weeks before Christmas we were busy cutting hedges back to both restore them and regain our mountain views. We've been loath to do too much trimming in the past because these big old hedges have done a wonderful job of interrupting and reducing the severest gales. They've saved our roof many times in big storms. And they're home to lots of wildlife. But if we allow another year of growth, they'll no longer be hedges but woodland. There are so few hedges here in coastal Wester Ross the incentive to maintain them properly is now an important part of our overall croft management plan. They connect our small patch of mature woodland to areas of gorse-scrub containing emerging trees such as rowan and aspen and to our newest 'infant' woods. They're small corridors for wildlife and they provide shelter for grandchildren hell-bent on playing outside in 50 mph winds!
Do you have hedges on your croft? Are there many in Lochaber? I've often wondered why there aren't more here acting as protection from stormy weather but guess it's due the long history of crofting and because every available corner of ground was needed to support the crofting township. Fences only began appearing in recent decades. I once asked my neighbour about enclosures and she said apart from the grand old dyke wall surrounding South Erradale, there were none. Only when crofts were bought from the laird or ownerships exchanged were they fenced. Posts and wire are a sign of modern practices and the need for legal boundaries rather than the open mutually shared practices of my neighbour's youth.
Everything has settled back into the earth. Once tall tufts of grasses are bleached of colour. They've shrivelled or have been whittled away by the cold and wind. The turf is pale and shrunken but it creates a dense protective matt covering seeds, hibernating insects and invertebrates from the worst ravages of winter. For ages, I watched a few pale gold leaves cling to one old birch by the river. From a distance they looked like small flecks of gold leaf. And then they vanished.
This year, I found the weeks leading to midwinter especially dark. Relief came from the gangs of goldfinches dashing back and forth, from field to garden feeders and back again. I love their Christmas colours. They flicker like fragments of wrapping paper in the gusting winds.
The solstice seemed to be bound in a corset of wild weather, cinched hard at the waist as if by a strong belt. I yearned for the release and time to draw long deep breaths of cold fresh air. And then, just as the family arrived, skies cleared, temperatures dropped and the valley opened out like a flower.
Yuletide and Hogmanay have been joyous; our hearts have been full, despite the darknesses in the big wide world. It's been wonderful to have a baby in the house again. Flashes of every kind of light have brightened the days — glinting ice-covered hills, the sparkling fast-flowing river, the laughter of children — then meteors in the night sky (did you see them?). We played on the beach in glorious winter sun, frolicked in the snow, looked out at the moon.
The growing pile of pine needles on the floor made us laugh. We remembered our own spell of parenting — young and exhausted with four little ones. I'd hang my best glass baubles on the highest branches of our Christmas tree. Some belonged to my grandmother. Our children could not keep their fingers from fiddling with the decorations. By twelfth night the lower half of our tree would be almost bare. If we'd had a time-lapse camera the result would have shown a tree with mobile tinsel and trinkets, creaturely, with rippling skin of shiny colours and stippled texture.
This year we've come full circle. A house bursting with noise and mayhem. Another tree bare of needles below a bauble-filled upper half. The old glass survivors, now more than 100 years old, are still placed high, out of reach.
And then, an unexpected extension to the family holiday. More snow; deep and crisp and even. Our wee sloping track became a sledging-slope of unconfined joy. The ponies — guests on the croft — caught the contagion and cavorted. The baby, cocooned in many layers, laughed out loud.
The family stayed on. A (age 6) was delighted. The roads were too difficult, the journey too long for little ones in such conditions (deep snow, a -80C wind chill), so we were blessed with a few precious extra days.
And now? Slush, snow, silence. Inside and out, the clear-up begins. Slàinte mhath! Ax
*
Dear Annie,
Coming to write my reply to your letter was, as always, a welcome moment of reflection after our own hectic festivities. I do love the celebration of light and life in these dark days, candles and fairy lights in amongst the evergreens. I also love the calm of January when I can sink into that dark quiet for a while.
I did manage to see the meteors - driving round the loch at 6am to beat the Christmas Eve shopping chaos! A single falling spark through indigo skies, above black trees blurred by my own speed along the road. Little moments of magic stitched through the busy-ness were their own kind of gift. The kids are getting old enough that we borrowed the Icelandic tradition of gifting books on Christmas Eve, and the half hour of hushed reading afterwards is up there on the scale with shooting stars.
There is a sweet spot somewhere in the shimmer and shade of winter. December brought cloud inversions, freezing fog that clung low to the loch. Shoreline, hills, houses all evaporated in soft, opaque light. The spell broken only occasionally by the shining slope of a seal head at the surface, or the slap of cormorant wing hidden in the mist. Where it cleared, the revealed landscape underwent its own kind of inversion, dark branches whitened by hoarfrost, and pale sky turned heavy as steel.
Now we have flipped back again, swarms of snowflakes bringing sky to land. When I take the dog up the hill for her evening walk, the normally bright streaks of birch are shadows in the dusk against silver-blue shine of snow. Unlike you, I have always preferred a path to a scramble, and I have been getting smug walking the same route up the snow-covered slope and into the woods. My body tilts in remembered rhythm over hidden dykes and ditches, and fallen branches turned into deceptively smooth white mounds. Not so smug, mind, when I forget to dip low enough under an outstretched branch and receive three inches of snow to my nape.
We don't have hedges here, as such. There is shelter in parts from hazel grown thick along the drystone walls, and the post and wire fence runs alongside those lines of moss and stone. As I understand it, before the 'improvements' of the nineteenth century, hedges or boundaries were rarely needed as pre-Clearance townships worked their shared land in rigs. When people were moved to the crofts and when boundaries were necessary, they would have had to make do with available materials, and as our own differing landscapes show, each township would have different needs.
Many of the crofts on our stretch of loch have the same old stone boundaries, and this land gives stone in plenty. Just in the few square metres of the polytunnel, still I lift stone after stone, as the frost wheedles more from the depths. This croft is so small that giving ground deliberately to hedge for shelter would have taken valuable grassland, and I think that story will be common with most crofts around here. Our survival doesn't depend solely on these few acres in the way it would have done to those first wallers, I suppose they might consider it a luxury that we can think about planting hedges.
As you say, two or three shelterbelts on even the smallest of crofts have value now, especially when we're no longer using the in-bye for grazing or hay alone. We have no yew and juniper here; I have been contemplating planting both to eventually replace the pallets blocking weather from the west end of the polytunnel. It is a luxury that I can go online and order saplings to be delivered to my door. Our predecessors would have had to work considerably harder to acquire cuttings on land once emptied of woodland.
I loved to read of your rich hedges and the visiting goldfinch. We've had charms of them here too in the past, along with long-tailed tits, and even a rare bullfinch. However, there is nothing quite so confronting to my romanticising of the winter landscape than having cats.
Part of me is loath to write to you about it. It is difficult to admit to what we have introduced to the wildlife here. As hoped, they are good croft cats, that is, efficient mousers. They don't limit themselves to rodents though. We see fewer birds now. I remind myself of the damage mice can do to wiring, or to new green shoots, attempting to absolve us from the choice we made. The realities of that choice were never clearer than on New Year's Day when the tom brought in a woodcock.
Did I ever tell you about my first footer a few years ago? L rescued a woodcock from the road. While we were busy lining a cardboard box with moss and ferns, it came out of its shock and began padding about the house, bronze feathers and dark eye gleaming in our lamplight. It left little white splotches on the laminate as it eventually taptoed out of an open doorway and back into the night. I decided then it was a positive omen, pontificating in my writing that January on how we might blend with the other lives in the land.
Not so this year. This poor bird was caught in one of the clothes horses. It was too late for me to do anything but take it back outside and place it high on the bank under stone and fern, whispering my sorries to the night. That was as close a balm as I could get.
We hung onto the Christmas tree for a few days longer than we perhaps should have, searching for that sweet spot of peace just a little longer until we couldn't avoid our own growing pile of pine needles either.
With love, and wishing all good blessings to you and yours for 2026.
Kx
*
Kirsteen Bell is a Scottish writer of narrative non-fiction and sometimes poetry. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as Paperboats, Caught by the River, The Guardian Country Diary, The Lochaber Times, and Northern Scotland Journal. Kirsteen can also be found at Moniack Mhor, Scotland's Creative Writing Centre, where she is Projects Manager and Highland Book Prize Co-ordinator.
Annie Worsley is a writer, crofter, grandmother and geographer with an enduring love of the Scottish Highlands. In 2013 she and her husband moved to the crofting township of South Erradale near Gairloch. While her husband was a community pharmacist, Annie worked on Red River Croft. She began a blog about life on the croft and then wrote essays on nature and environment for various publications including Elementum Journal, Women on Nature, the Seasons' Anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, Caught by the River and Inkcap Journal. Her first book about life on Red River Croft and the natural history of Wester Ross, 'Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands', was published by William Collins in 2023, and is out now in paperback.
Polly Atkin looks back over a year in lakes.
I have been swimming all year round in the lakes, tarns and rivers of the Lake District where I live since winter 2018. I keep a casual diary of my swims through photographs and film, social media posts and notes to friends. So when I agreed to write a short book about swimming through the year, I expected it to be a simple enough proposition. I had the material, and the structure. And yet this short book became one of the hardest things I've written. I'm not sure why. Partly perhaps simply that I was exhausted before I began. But like a body of water of water I did not know, I could not find the way in. I spent a long time just standing in it, barely up to my knees. I could not get in far enough to float off. I watched leaves fall around as I stood, shivering, in its shallows. It was deep autumn before I could see my route forward.
The year before I began swimming through the year, I had started running a monthly poetry reading group through the Wordsworth Trust. Each month we would gather to read and talk about four poems: three seasonal ones and one which reflected what was going on in the world at that time. We met by the fireside in Dove Cottage for the first couple of years, reading and talking about poems in that space haunted by poems and the production of poems, by the history of tourism and the history of literature, and the places where they overlap and leach into each other. In 2020 we moved onto Zoom, and continue to meet virtually. Eight years of reading seasonally and sharing seasonal writing - of talking about the seasons with others - has shifted my relationship with seasonality and transitions in the year just as swimming year-round has. I have learnt through immersing my body in bodies of water and other people's bodies of work to feel the seasons differently, especially the autumn and winter months.
I am a cold person with symptoms made worse by the cold. I struggle physically and emotionally with the short, dark days of a Northern winter, and particularly with the pressure to keep active through them. Come November my impulse is to sleep, and stay mostly sleeping till February. Every year I think I can make something useful of this time, when what I need is to not think of anything much at all.
In the short days of midwinter, it is too easy for me to miss the light entirely. I get distracted working, or wait to see if the cloud lifts, or a hint of sun in the distance touches the village. Grasmere is a small bowl of a valley, a cupped palm, as I put it once. In midwinter, the sun barely reaches in at all, spends an hour or two before noon creeping down the fells and trees and houses, a couple of hours after creeping back up.
Meeting daylight on its inward or outwards journey becomes increasingly unlikely if your body, like mine, is not amenable to movement in the morning. So often I go just a little too late, reach the lake with the watery sun already falling away behind the fells, or a shroud of cloud lying over them. There is a heavy greyness on a day like that, all the colours muted. The water greyish-brown like the fells, like the woods. The vivid colours of November swept away by a bitter wind.
But even on a cold, dank day, even when I miss the light, there is something to find at the lake. If I do manage to catch the light, I might be lucky enough to see the lake's ghost rising from its body as mist and grey wagtail.
When the sun does shine, it is dazzling. It turns everything along the lake shore a pale gold in its glare - reeds, trees, walls.
There is so much colour, so much light to be found in this time I used to think of as a smudged void. That I used to want to erase, or erase myself from.
So why was I finding so hard to write this? I don't swim for challenge or for sport. I swim partly for exercise, but mostly for pleasure. That was what I wanted to share. Not a record of achievement or personal growth. I wanted to offer readers what I've found in other people's poetry of the seasons - a path through the year - a way in and a way out again. But I needed to see my own way through first.
I have found myself having to learn and relearn the same lessons, year after year. Slow down. Prioritise rest. Prioritise care for myself and others. Listen to what my body needs, and do what it asks, not what I want. Not what others want or ask. Maybe I haven't taken these lessons to heart, or into practice. I realise this is a cycle too. Forgetting, remembering, being made to remember.
This has been a year of being made to remember. I must attend better to what I already know. I must attend to it with my whole self, and not just my good intention.
Each time I go to the lake in winter, it reminds me that the winter world is not asleep at all. The birds are as busy as ever. I watch them as I swim, and as I change they move around me. Shoals of long-tailed tits swoop from tree to tree, trilling. Noisy blue tits and great tits hop from bush to bush. A wren shouts from the sidelines. There is a robin carolling from the mossy oak, goldcrests cheeping. I love to be in their company, they who never expect me to explain anything to them, yet always have something to say to me. Best of all, I love the grey wagtails, who always remind me that light is still here, even in the darkest times, even if hidden under an outstretched wing of grey.
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'Swimming The Seasons: A Freshwater Almanac' will be published by Saraband in May 2026.
Here are the results of our latest newsletter competition…
Last time, we had 3 copies of Edmund Newell's Herne the Hunter: Seeking Shakespeare's Ghost, Windsor's Demon and Wicca's God to give away, courtesy of Herne Books. We asked:
The earliest written account of Herne comes from which of Shakespeare's plays?
And the answer is: The Merry Wives of Windsor. The winners are Richard Wilding, Sharon Sanderson and Richard Woodward. Your books will be with you very soon!
Thanks for all the entries. To be in with the chance of winning our next prize, make sure you're signed up to the mailing list. The sign-up box can be found on the right-hand side of this page.
Musician Laura Cannell shares a year of Red Kites, lighthouses at night, and making up with the sea.
Last week I watched 43 Red Kites gather and settle in for their communal roost. My sister and I were walking down a lane near where we grew up in South Norfolk, and the Kites were calling and wheeling. Watching so many raptors together was emotional, their distinct fork-tailed shapes soaring on a backdrop of clouded greys. The scale was so strange, a flock of eagles who appeared like rooks from a distance, their movements and calls like a renaissance polyphony of multiple choirs and soloists filling the cathedral sky from every corner.
According to the RSPB they have gone from almost extinct in 1995 to an increase of 2464% in 2023. The lane we walked down is where we used to catch the school bus in 1995. I don't think I was aware of 'nature' then, I was just in it — I've always just been in it (except when I was at music college in London, thinking about it now it makes perfect sense that it was completely the wrong environment for me to be in physically).
Every day, my half-a-mile walk, sometimes lugging my cello to the unofficial bus stop (oak tree) on the corner. We were off the beaten track, one of the awkward stops outside of the villages. I used to feel so exposed in that moment, going from being alone in the trees and lanes and my thoughts to suddenly on a bus full of loud people, the driver taking off before I'd sat down while I tried desperately not to knock the bridge out of the cello in its canvas case as I bumped it along the narrow gangway, past everyone to the only available seats (the bridge did get knocked out a few times).
Being in this place with my sister felt poignant and positive. I truly felt like the Kites were going to save us all from ourselves. Let's give it all back, everything. Start from here, look at how they behave, let them take charge: they are not consumed with money and power and greed and death machines. Let the Kites gather in their roost and work it out, let them hold a mirror to human stupidity and remind us that we can work together, dream together but still be independent.
My sister and I often joke about having two tables 'for one' pushed together. We each need our space — our own creative output requires a magical discipline that can only to be developed and produced with a large amount of time alone — but it's also good to feel part of something bigger. In that moment, watching the Kites roost at dusk, I felt like there was a lot of hope.
A while ago, when I wrote for CBTR more regularly, I talked about falling out with the sea. I couldn't bear to look at it, it was barren and bleak, and I took alternative routes when I had to drive to avoid glimpsing it.
The sound was constant, it was driving me mad, and I was scared that if I got too close, my life would fall over the edge. As I change in life, my feelings have changed towards the sea. I realise that it is a private need, a personal love that we have. I cannot be there in the summer watching and hearing a coast made busy with too may people. Bright, exposed, open, with a forced smile to be jolly in the summer. The summer does not make me happier, it's taken me this long to realise that my instincts and comfort go against light = happy, dark = sad. Like when someone very early on tried to teach me that music in a minor key sounded 'sad', and a major key sounded 'happy'. I couldn't get my mind around this, the minor keys made me so happy, because they were full of feeling and nuance. The major keys just felt like they were telling me to feel something positive, happy or jolly when I wasn't. Not that I was unhappy — I just felt like I didn't fit any of the rules. I was obviously taking it very literally as a 7 or 8 year old, but perhaps this was the beginning of realising that I could not get on board with ideas of rules in music. Darkness and minor keys equal atmosphere, imagination, melancholy, depth, joy, intrigue, dissonance, passion, life, determination, manifestation, emotion, grit, power, love and so much more. They are autumn, winter and spring.
Maybe summer is the major key for me, it's all laid out in front, brightly for you to see, no mysteries here. But I need the search, the hunt and the mystery, I need to always be exploring and growing in both nature and music. I need the sea in the autumn, the winter and the beginnings of spring when it speaks to me the most. The times when everything is hidden, shrouded, covered in leaves or growing in new directions, unseen and unspoken. Where the sound on the violin is in my body waiting to be let out through the pressure of my bow. Like the life which happens out of sight between the seabed and the crashing waves above.
I have learned that the sea, though constantly shifting stays the same, but I am always moving, emotional fluctuations, emotional plasticity. I don't get to decide that I have fallen out with the sea, I was just there at the wrong time. When you come up against something so huge that you are not ready to deal with — death, grief, sickness or great changes — you can always find ways to avoid it. But eventually, when the time is right and you have the inner strength to have a conversation, you know you will go back and often be surprised by the response.
My emotional response to the landscape and the seascape is so much bigger than the way I think about people. There are a handful of favourite people who I need to see or speak to, but my urge to soak in sea with all of my senses is overwhelming.
Standing in Walberswick on the south side of the Harbour, the stretched beam of Southwold Lighthouse swept across the sea and the salt marshes. This tiny village that sits on the edge of the sea and corner of Blackwater was ours for a few moments. Quiet in the off-season before Christmas, no cars, no walking families, just the light and faint noise of The Bell pub. The air and water made the lighthouse sound like it was whooshing in time to a soundtrack. The gossamer clouds were glowing from the lamp room beam and maybe from the stars behind. Within minutes it became a sparkling dark starry sky, and a dream of winter, of quietude, of magic, of movement even when I am still. I am happy to know that the sea is there for me whenever I want to come home to it.
This year I read, wrote, recorded and released a lot of music, soaking up inspiration from medieval bestiaries, Icelandic folklore, the Anglo Saxon lyre from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, landscape photography created from from NASA image archives, ancient Christmas carols, hauntings, weird dreams and so much more. I had a very quiet year in terms of performing live, and an intensively rich year of making and creating. I fell back in love with traditional fiddle music, and started playing it for myself again as part of my practice routine. I wrote several albums and EPs for production libraries with no compromise.
My releases have been in the Official UK Album Download Charts (3 releases), on the radio (BBC 3, 4 and 6Music and more), in the Guardian, on the television (in surprising places like Emmerdale and Horrible Histories, Race Across the World & news programmes).
My music has travelled the world, and I have been rooted for the first time in years. I have turned down performances in other countries because of anxiety; it has not all been easy, but I haven't stopped creating and making and believing that music makes a difference, not only to me, but to anyone that it reaches and speaks to. I am learning the boundaries of comfort and my own needs, what priorities can be. Music has its own life, and I am excited to see what happens next. It is, as we all know, completely made up, and as my sister Sarah says, "we are all weird aliens on a blue green planet spinning through space, everything is completely ludicrous and incredible", so why not make up good stories? What if it all works out, and the sea can be our friend rather than an overwhelming ledge?
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Find all of Laura's musical releases here.
'The Cold Collar' by Andrew Wasylyk (feat. Gruff Rhys), released today alongside a visualiser by Tommy Perman.
Taken from the album Irreparable Parables, due for release on Friday 6th March 2026 via Clay Pipe Music & State 51.
Andrew Wasylyk (+ ensemble) Live Dates, March, 2026
03 March - Tolbooth, Stirling
04 March - The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen
05 March - Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh
06 March - St. Mackintosh Church, Glasgow
07 March - Maryatt Hall, Dundee
08 March - The Attic, Leeds
10 March - Pan-Pan, Birmingham
11 March - The Lantern Hall, Bristol
12 March - Rich Mix, London
13 March - Gosforth Civic Theatre, Newcastle
Find all tour tickets here.
Rob St John considers how archival material informed his Are You Lost? project — a 2025 series of community-minded film, sound and textile installations across the Forest of Bowland. Photos: Ray Chan.
A tradition worth passing on: John Weld, ecology and community in the Forest of Bowland
Adapted from the Lord of Bowland lecture given at Browsholme Hall in the Forest of Bowland in October 2025 reflecting on learning from historical archives to shape socially-engaged artwork as part of the Are You Lost? project.
This year I've been working with the John Weld archive - held at the Harris Museum in Preston - as part of my Are You Lost? project. Weld was a Victorian landowner, antiquarian, naturalist and painter who lived at Leagram Hall in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire. Born in 1813, he made detailed written and visual records of both the local area and the places he encountered on travels across Europe. One document has been of particular interest to me - and to the communities I've been working with - a notebook titled: The Flora and Fauna of Leagram and Neighbourhood. Written through the mid-19th century, this ledger - a collection of field notes, sketches and paintings - reveals his naturalist's eye and artist's sensibility coupled with a keen awareness of Bowland's changing landscapes.
Its first line reads: 'Fifty or sixty years ago many birds were common in this district, that are rarely met with now. Many usual winter visitants then, are very casual, or more than rare occurrences at present. The universal use of guns, the general discontinuance of corn cultivation, the reducing much woody waste, and marshy land to comparative cultivation, with the great preservation of game that now exists, encouraging the destructive instincts of keepers especially of late years, are amongst the principal causes of all but the total disappearance of many kinds, and of the greatly reduced numbers of others.'
The first theme that stands out is Weld's use of 'met with' as a way of describing his encounters with the natural world. There's something quite charmingly modest and reciprocal about the phrase, which recurs throughout his ledger. And related, a second theme is the sense of uncanny contemporary resonance. The idea of shifting baseline syndrome - that each successive generation tacitly accepts an increasingly degraded version of their local environment - is a central theme to contemporary landscape thought. But here we hear directly from Weld that this isn't solely a modern phenomenon - that even two centuries ago communities were witnessing a deadening of Bowland's ecosystems as a result of human activities. So the Weld archive encourages us to look again at Bowland's landscape, to ask: what has been lost in our encounters with the natural world, and what might be recovered?
Weld's ledger begins with birds of prey. Describing sea eagles, peregrine falcons, merlins, red kites and marsh harriers across Bowland, Weld's proto-environmental ethic is filtered through an aristocratic civility and unease with the way in which biodiversity in the landscape is being lost. He writes, 'some have been very common whilst others in late years, have only been rarely met with. A war of extermination against all the tribe has been latterly carried on, too successfully by the gamekeeper, by means of his ever-ready gun and by different engines especially pole traps.' There's a tension here. Many birds - even tiny ones like the wheatear and goldcrest - appear in Weld's ledger after being brought to him by gamekeepers for identification after being shot. So the agent of their destruction is also the envoy of their description. Weld has the collector's zeal of many wealthy men of his age, and his writing communicates the implicit idea of a landscape in need of documentation: his ledger a cabinet of Bowland curiosities.
There's a beautiful sense of local naming for wildlife in Weld's writing. The kestrel is the 'windhover' (also the title of an influential poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who studied and taught in Bowland in the 1870s); the great grey shrike (which creates its own larder of insects by impaling them on hedgerow thorns) is the 'butcher bird'; the grey heron is the 'Johnny Gant', the 'Long Neck', or, for some unknown reason, 'Frank'. And Weld has a rich descriptive turn of phrase for telling stories. When discussing a sparrowhawk he writes - faintly absurdly - that, 'a fine male was taken in the drawing room at the hall September 16th 1877. It had dashed through a pane of glass, shivering it to pieces, a case of hummingbirds near the window was probably the cause of the intrusion.' However, the impact of the modern invention of grouse shooting in Bowland - part of the wider British aristocratic fashion of 'Balmoralisation' popularised by Victoria and Albert in the mid-to-late 1800s - is rarely far from the surface. Weld writes about owls of all sorts - long-eared, short-eared, barn and tawny - and corvids being, 'very common all through the district in my recollection but will soon be almost extinct as far as this neighbourhood is concerned. Through the rapacity of bird collectors, and the indiscriminate zeal of gamekeepers, killing everything that in their opinion might possibly be hurtful to their charge.'
Weld documents birds no longer seen or heard in Bowland like the corncrake, the golden oriole and the bittern, and highlights the abundance of those whose numbers had dropped, such as the house sparrow. He also notes the arrival of unusual migrants like the gannet, or solan goose. He writes about finding a gannet asleep in a field in November 1872 after a gale, its six foot wingspan looking, 'like a small drift of snow in the sunshine.' He continues, 'I was enabled to steal up to the bird and seize it by the neck, and with some difficulty, succeeded in carrying it home.' There's something quite daft and tragic about this picture: a throttled gannet, its wings like a gleaming snowdrift being carried across the fields, back to the manor to be added to the collection. These documents of Bowland's wildlife are so specific and strange that they seem almost mythological, when really, they resided in the memory of those who met with them just a few generations ago.
Weld's writing hints at the prevailing attitude to wildlife in Bowland at the time. He cites a monk from nearby Whalley describing a church erected at Chipping after the departure of the Romans, suggesting that the 'neighbouring country was a frightful wilderness of impassable forest full of foxes and other wild beasts.' There's a neat etymological link here. The word 'wild' in modern English evolved from variants of weald and weld in old English, denoting a wooded or untamed area populated by wild animals. Weld is appropriately named to survey a landscape which, while rich in biodiversity, was having its wild nature dulled by human stewardship. The monk's words remind me of the language used in the descriptions of the enclosures across Bowland through the 16th and 17th centuries, which commonly refer to the fells as 'upland wastes'. It was in this period that the opportunistic and often anti-authority demarcation of farmland - patterns of land tenure we still know today - took place in a process known as 'assarting'. Weld writes that the wildcat was, 'not infrequently met with 35 years ago,' below Fair Oak fell, a last refuge from the gamekeeper's strict control. Similarly, he describes Wolf House at the foot of Parlick fell: a respite for travellers from remnant populations of wolves, which could be shot through an aperture in the door. One local story goes that the last wolf in England was chased from the Bowland fells and killed at Humphrey Head on Morecambe Bay sometime in the 15th century. Regardless of this tale's accuracy, the traces of a wilder Bowland remain in its non-human names: Wolfhole Crag, Cat Knot, Kite Clough, Foxdale Holds, Wolf Fell, Boarsden. And likewise, in Weld's writing, we glimpse the historical ebb of the wild and the waste in Bowland: how they have been framed, and how they have been tamed.
Weld's writing also evokes a historical soundscape of Bowland: where the nocturnal summer song of the nightjar echoed across Longridge Fell; the bittern boomed in marshes which had yet to be drained; and the corncrake croaked in farmer's fields and meadows. But this isn't solely a nostalgic reverie for a lost world: Weld's writing documents the shifting use of Bowland's landscape, and the ways in which nature moved with it. In addition to the rising persecution of wildlife in the mid-to-late 19th century he also notes the biodiversity which has disappeared with changing agricultural practices. He describes the decline of birds like the common partridge and jay which benefited from the cultivation of corn in the area - a process that declined following the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846 by Robert Peel, himself the son of a Lancashire farmer. Nearly two centuries later, projects across Bowland are exploring the potential of regenerative and nature-friendly farming approaches to help farmland biodiversity to recover whilst supporting sustainable livelihoods in communities squeezed by rising costs and isolation.
These dynamics resonate with deep historical research undertaken by John Porter and Mary Higham in the 1970s and 80s, the long-term ecology work based on pollen cores by Anson McKay in the 1990s, and the recent archaeological work undertaken by Rick Peterson: all of which in different ways reveal the shifting dynamics of Bowland's landscape through history. Porter and Highams's work highlights the interplay of people and nature across Bowland since the 1500s: the clearance and ordering of the landscape for the royal hunting forest; and its subsequent marginalisation and spontaneous rewilding, too far from the urban court to be of regular use. For all that the modern imagination of Bowland might be akin to a static picture - empty fellsides and quiet villages in a state of living history - these historical accounts, like Weld's, reveal a landscape that has never really stayed still. And the memory maps drawn by hundreds of people in village halls, shopping centres, workshops and walks across Bowland in Are You Lost? attest to this idea of a storied terrain: the places where communities explored, trespassed, proposed, skinny dipped, gathered, grew and harvested, spotted rare birds and flowers, came out to their family, fell in love, campaigned for access, bivvied out, marked where their ashes will be scattered, and experienced "life changing intimate moments amongst the bilberries," amongst many others. Then, as now, Bowland has never been blank space.
Weld's own sense of specificity in documenting the natural history of Bowland reminds me of a country vicar, writing more than a century earlier in Hampshire, whose archive has become so influential that it has never been out of print. Published in 1789, Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is regarded as a founding document in modern ecology. Like Weld, White surveyed the ecological intricacies of his local landscape in a manner which might now be called citizen science. Unlike Weld, White's archive found wide public attention, drawing praise from Charles Darwin among others. In an era of ecological crisis and climate emergency, this sense of close attention to the fluctuations of people, place and wildlife shown by both Weld and White is vital, both in documenting our changing world, and in helping tell powerful stories about the need for its conservation and restoration. In Weld, we have a very local inspiration for this task, and my work in Are You Lost? suggests that this spirit of curiosity and attention has a valuable role in helping communities connect to Bowland's landscape. As one attendee at a workshop said - so poetically - of this process, "the first step ripples out across lifetimes." And as the wider project has suggested, public access to landscapes like Bowland which have historically been closely guarded by private ownership can help foster new forms of attention, care and responsibility towards their flourishing in the future.
The Weld archive shows how people and nature ebbed and flowed across Bowland in the 19th century, in particular the patterns of ecological diversity and abundance in relationship with changing land practices across farming and grouse shooting. These dynamics reveal a landscape always on the move. As such, the Weld archive undercuts the narrative which legitimitises the bulk of environmentally damaging activities in Bowland - the burning of the fragile moorland and peatland; the trapping, shooting and snaring of non-game 'vermin'; the secretive wildlife crimes imperilling birds of prey like the hen harrier - based on a seemingly-timeless imagination of grouse shooting in the landscape. By working with historical archives, we see that this framing - so dominant, and scaffolded by invisible strata of capital and privilege - is the product of only a brief moment in the deep landscape history of this place. This insight resonates with the contemporary work with communities in Are You Lost?, which has engaged a significant and well-informed public, both across and around Bowland, who would seek to see its management shifted towards more environmentally just and democratic forms, and to ask difficult questions about how it is managed, and for who. You can hear these community perspectives and voices in the film we made together and toured across Bowland this summer.
The Weld archive also highlights how plants, birds and animals which have been largely lost from contemporary imaginations of Bowland - like the corncrake, bittern and sea eagle - are commonly met with, just a few generations ago. Perhaps if we can take inspiration from the archive when thinking about the future of Bowland, the imperative is not about restoring the landscape to some pre-industrial baseline, but instead to learn from a dynamic past to collectively shape how it might flourish in the future, both for people and for nature. I often think about the abundance of Weld's world when on the depleted fells; where the only sound is the rustle of the Molinia grass and occasional clatter of a grouse. I wonder how they could be more: a sponge for water, carbon and life of all kinds; a life-support system for the environmental, social and economic pressures of an increasingly stressed world. As another community collaborator said in a workshop on Bowland, "this is a place steeped in memory: can we allow it to dream?"
Something I've learnt in this project is that encouraging wider public access to Bowland's landscapes can help cultivate new forms of imagination, openness, and accountability in how they are managed. And learning from the past can help guide this work. Archives can help us get under the skin of a place, even when we might not be able to get there ourselves. Archives are themselves landscapes: joining up threads of time and space; always open to being remade. Navigating them with new communities helps us unearth connections and glean visions; to expand the frame of what this place could be, and for who. Weld's fine-grained attention to the dynamics of wildlife, people and place in Bowland formed the basis of an early conservation ethic rooted in care for his local environment. We find communal forms of this ethic in citizen science, community ownership and rights of nature movements that are helping bring landscapes back to life across the world today. As the work in the Weld archive in Are You Lost? suggests, fostering a deeper sense of place and belonging through engagements with the past can help shape productive and democratic imaginations of the future. We might call it an ecology of hope. As workshop collaborator Zainab Maria writes of Bowland in Home in the Hills: A Manifesto, 'let this be an invitation: to slow down, to listen, to ask what kind of future might grow from care, not control… To belong is not only to take from the land, but to give back. To tend, to listen, to share. That may be the beginning of a tradition worth passing on.'
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Are You Lost? was a series of film, sound and textile installations across the Forest of Bowland which explored the diverse voices and perspectives of the communities that live around the area. A series of temporary installations were shown across the National Landscape in 2025, both in accessible venues and more remote, largely-unused spaces.
It was produced with the Forest of Bowland National Landscape and Lancaster Arts, and commissioned by Nature Calling, the first national programme of new art commissions by the National Landscapes Association.
Explore films, podcasts, writing and resources from the project here.
The John Weld collection is held by the Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library, Preston. It is also being interpreted by artists Ian Nesbitt and Ruth Levene in new work.
Drowned in Sound is counting down our favourite albums of 2025.
Every year is a great year to be a music obsessive. 2025 was a year that felt like music was both a catalyst for change and the much needed escape hatch.
It was also a year where profit-driven corporations went gloves off with non-consensual AI and humanity raised its collective fist aloft. Being human, whether that's being wonderfully weird or painfully honest or building sonic landscapes peppered with easter eggs for lyric-decoding fans, feels like the dominant theme in all the records we adored this year.
Resistance, rage and resilience feature too but those themes are perhaps a given every year if you've been paying attention to our album of the year lists for the last 25 years.
We'll share our top 10 later this week but for spoilers, listen to this week's Drowned in Sound podcast where we chat through our favourites and a pile of honourable mentions. Listen on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Anyway, in the words of Stealing Sheep, let's gooooooooooooo!
just some of the obvious greats...
Dunbar worked on a record by Jackson Browne!
