I am home from a month in Britain. It was a working trip, field research for a book, a homecoming of the heart. I kept a travel journal and have lumped together some essays to share with you here.
Essay One
On the Land: all the elements
Choosing to spend a month in Britain—and that month being April—is a calculated risk. There’s weather to consider, of course. But any time spent in those old motherlands holds other dangers to one of the wandering daughters of Britain. The calling in the blood and bone, the smell of wet soil, the sound of those familiar voices heard and unheard. These are the clever traps that lure us in and catch us by the heart, wandering daughters that we are. I expect each time that I will venture into a quiet copse and emerge in Ancestral Time where I will sink, unresisting, into the green of those old and tended hills.
Traveling light is bit of thing with me, so I was careful in packing, knowing there might come a day when I had to wear all that I’d brought. So far that hasn’t happened, but it’s early days yet and Scotland (both Edinburgh and Dundee) came close.
Wet. Cold. Windy. We did have the occasional break in the weather but that was a weak and watery Sun squinting at our irresponsible behavior. It was warmish and sunny the day we left the Lockerbie train station but the three Scottish locations—the first week here—gave me a healthy respect for all the possibilities.
Silly to say it but everything here is so damned old. Obviously, I live in the oldest mountains in the world so I am writing here about the built landscape, the tended spaces. Victorian feels newish, Georgian is close to “old,” Elizabethan gets there—and we simply keep going back. Old and tended (and sometimes ruined). Lichened and blackened by age and elements but still holding a primal spot in the human imagination. The cobbled and maddening streets—who walked them before and who will walk after? Even the tacky tourist shops and the KFCs and the perpetual Starbucks—are housed in these sturdy history boats.
A joke-cracking tour guide peeled away the ages of Edinburgh Castle. Starting with the new rubber spikes on the portcullis and ending in a tiny chapel that once stored gunpowder, he led us round the walls and smooth-worn steps. A trip to the cells gave us a glimpse of the last bits of the earliest tower. The winding, slow and carpeted path to the Scottish crown jewels ended in the impossibly powerful Stone of Scone, which I had last seen at Westminster Abbey years before.
Time and history, the machine oil of my imagination, lashed together with grief and memory.
With all the elements, classical and otherwise, in place and the sacred landscape and its Unseen Inhabitants acknowledged, we left the capital and moved north. Through the Kingdom of Fife to the marmalade center of the one-time Empire. Penguin-haunted Dundee.
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