“I see
things better with my feet.”
-
James
Holman
Cleadon
Hills rarely looks this busy, this buzzy with people. I’ve seen it like this a
few times: in the depths of December, when families bring sledges up to fly
through snow, and for the Sunderland (International!) air show, in July. Winter
brings memories of home-made sledges ranging from kids caccooned in builders’
merchant bags of hardcore plastic, bouncing down the hills, to the makeshift
ski/board my sister made out of an old pair of Rossignols and a timber
pallet from my Dad’s business, and which my cousins sat on to howl with
laughter down to the fields below. Fingers numbed, bums damp with ice. Hotter
climes bring the planes: Euro Fighters tearing open the sky; Spitifres and
Hurricanes, more modest, reminding us of battles past, conjuring another
England, another Britain, at war, somewhere beyond the sea, the great North
Sea, whose flat blue-greyness sits solid at the back of it all.
 |
© John James Addison
|
But this
image, courtesy of John James Addison, conjures something older still. The couple
– and I assume it’s a father with his daughter, as she looks at least twenty
years his junior, though I cannot be sure – were one of a few anachronisms on
the first weekend of walks for Stringing Bedes: a Poetry and Print Pilgrimage.
Commenting on standout visual moments on the walks, one of the participants
noted this couple, in their old-fashioned attire. A suit, on a July day, on
Cleadon Hills! Others went further, noting that the scene on the hills – families
with dogs, with children young and old, people walking, lying, milling, being
social yet in thrall to something beyond (the planes) – reminded them of a
scene from Lowry. I think that’s spot-on: here we had discernible groups of
people, diverse and spread out, but cohesive in their regard for the spectacle
of otherness, flying machines to the South-East over Sunderland. Artist Mark
Todman said that this was the first point during our walk where we weren’t
going against the tide: people were walking back over from Whitburn, towards
us. Two hours earlier, in Roker and Seaburn, in a dream-like state of bubbles
and Hello Kitty dolls and funnelled Taylor Swift hits, it felt that we were an
outcast group of survivors, going against the whole flow of humanity, thousands
of people, hot dogs and candyfloss in hand, camped out on the beach, waiting
for the roar of engines, acrobatics between the clouds.
 |
© John James Addison
|
At
Cleadon windmill, I read my poem ‘Spelks’, which pays homage to a relatively
unknown piece of folklore set on these hills: the story of Elizabeth Gibbon,
heartbroken daughter of a local nineteenth century landlord, who kills herself
after being forbidden to see her lover, a local sailor, or in some stories, a
pirate. I prefaced the poem, which I’d read only three days earlier in London,
by being thankful that this audience, by and large, would understand the two
dialect terms in the poem: ‘spelk’ and ‘chare’. Chare, of course, being the Geordie
word for an alley, in this case Sandy Chare, which we’d just walked along in
Whitburn. Something strange happens when you read a poem aloud: its meaning
transfigures, becoming – I think – a different experience to that of reading
silently from the page. When the poem is read in situ, so to speak, it is
further transfigured: the aura of the physical site adds permeance to the words
being spoken. When I finished reading the poem, a young girl could be heard asking,
through the gaps in the bars of the gate that prevents people getting inside
the mill, “Who are you?” It was a pertinent question for us, followers in Bede’s
footsteps, as the man himself posed in AD 731, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a very similar
question to his people: who are you, you inhabitants of this island? The more
you dwell on it, in light of ongoing referendum and devolution debates and Eurozone
policies, the more important it becomes. Who are you, and who are we?
*
Writing
blogs in this way, which I’ve now done a few times, thanks to my walks along
the Sefton Coast last summer, it quickly becomes apparent that thoughts tumble
into other thoughts; quotes and lines of poetry and ideas all spiral outward,
and before long it becomes difficult to sift for the accurate meanings and intentions
of the piece. Editing becomes even more necessary. One such line that has just
popped into my head is that by David Shook, who says that “Poetry has a responsibility
if not to contradict the dominant narrative of society, then to bring it into
question.” I found the quote, accidentally, because I was searching though Sean
O’Brien’s volume of essays, Journey to
the Interior: Ideas of England in Contemporary Poetry, for this quote:
“It could be objected
that ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ are not in themselves helpful ideas, that they
resist clarification and contain too many internal contradictions, that the
best way to understand a maze is perhaps to not go into it in the first place.
But as I say, I am already inside the maze, imaginatively speaking, and have
been at least since first I began to read and write poetry over forty years
ago. My concern is with the workings of the imagination, which is not quite the
same thing as the facts. The contradictions and paths into the mire and the
grimpen, the dead ends and false trails, are part of the imagined England in
which we live.”
I wish to
discuss those ‘facts’. O’Brien is right: the facts of an English identity –
indeed, the facts of nearly anything – are not the same as the ‘facts’ the writer
creatively, liberally, uses and which the reader imaginatively interprets.
During the walks this weekend, I was struck, as were many of my fellow walkers,
by how little we know of Bede’s autobiography; how uncertain we are that he ever
even walked this route, which we have spent an entire weekend tramping, and
will spend many more months mulling over and transfiguring into poems and
artworks. And the maze. Yes, it is labyrinthine. The little girl asking, “Who
are you?” is me asking “Who am I”; is George Osborne telling us who we should
be, who we should despise; is poets and writers and artists and rebels up and
down the land saying “fuck you very much”; is Bede and his fellow monks, in
centuries past, studying and thinking and writing on the banks of the Wear and
the Tyne, pondering this great question, this series of questions: “Who are we,
and how do we fit into this island and its past and future?”
*
To pepper
the walks with thoughts and ponderings, to set conversations going between
strangers, and to contemplate the ‘meaty’ topics of Bede’s mammoth oeuvre, walk
leader Keith Bowey ensured that each participant was furnished with a ‘contemplation
card’ at the start of the day, which they were to keep secret and mull over,
until after lunch, when they were instructed to pick a partner and discuss their
ideas. The source of the quotes was eclectic, covering everything from Auden (‘As
I walked out one evening’) and Neruda (‘The child’s foot is not yet aware it’s
a foot’) to Tristan Gooley (The Natural
Explorer) and Wilco Johnson (‘Caught up in a jam...’). Furthermore, the contemplation
cards exercises were built upon by five-minute contemplation spells: moments of
silence, at given points along the route, in which we were told, simply, to
stay silent and contemplate.
One of
the most pertinent of these contemplations occurred in Primrose, Jarrow, on
Sunday. Myself and four or five of the other walkers stood on a little wooden
bridge above the Don. I stared at a Crack Willow tree, shivering in the breeze,
and thought about the course of the little tributary of the Tyne below my feet.
Just as
we were nearing the end of our collective ponderings, a young family approached
the bridge. The first intrepid explorer, a boy of about five or six, dressed in
a Spiderman onesie, stopped short of the bridge, mouth slightly parted in the
way that can only say “I have no idea what this means.” His expression was
mirrored perfectly by his late-twenties parents, who crossed the bridge with a
polite “Alright, there”, but with faces that reeked of absolute bafflement. Who
were these people, their looks said, and why on Earth are they simply stood
here, silently, at half past three on a Sunday, staring down into this river?
Another significant,
but very different, moment of contemplation took place on Saturday, at Bede’s
Cross in Roker. Bede’s Cross, a monument erected in 1904, is often mistaken for
a War memorial, or even worse, is ignored entirely. I must admit that despite
having walked, cycled and driven along Roker promenade several hundred times in
the past, I’d not noticed it. Which is a shame, because it is a magnificently
intricate piece of public art which pays homage to one of the region’s most
important sons. It seems that several thousand other people all missed it on
Saturday, too. Surrounded by Spongebob Squarepants balloons and Army propaganda
(quick, pilot the helicopter and pretend you too are scouting for insurgents in
Syria!), the proud cross, standing some twenty-odd feet into the air, went
unnoticed, mired as it was between a makeshift climbing wall, some portaloos
and the back of Army HQ and its generator. Ignored, that is, by all but us:
sixteen walkers, pilgrims paying a trip to this cross overlooking the sea, admiring
the beauty and detail of the stonework, pondering over the words from and to
Bede, considering the anachronism of its significance – its testament to peace
and harmony – amidst cynical attempts to corral the youth of the North-East (remember,
this is still the region of England with the highest level of unemployment)
into careers as little more than canon-fodder. If all of that sounds deeply
subjective and unashamedly biased, it’s because it is. David Shook is right:
what is poetry if not to contradict the dominant narrative of society? As we
cling to the military industrial complex, and as the baggage of our Empire
status precedes us, are not moments of contemplation, moments of reverence for
the diversity of life, at sites such as Bede’s Cross not more important now
than ever before?
*
This, of
course, leads neatly on to the question of faith, or religion, and how – and if
– it fits into this project. Right from before the walks even took place (and
remember, we’re only halfway through: places are still available on our return
leg in August!), we were keen to stress the inclusivity of the project. We
welcome people of all colours, creeds, genders, beliefs and anything else you
can put an ‘s’ suffix on to. Speaking at the start, in front of St. Peter’s,
Keith declared himself an atheist, but it was obvious that such binary concepts
were not going to hold firmly very long on this walk. Introducing my part in
the walks, I read a short passage from the Lives
of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow:
“A year later, on
Egfrid’s advice or, more accurately, at his command, Benedict [Biscop] chose
seventeen monks from the community with the priest Ceolfrith as abbot to form
the nucleus of a new foundation at Jarrow, dedicated to the apostle Paul and
built on the understanding that the two houses should be bound together by the
one spirit of peace and harmony and united by continuous friendship and
goodwill. As the body cannot be separated from the head, through which it
receives the breath of life, and as the head dare not ignore the body or it
would die, so neither was anyone to attempt to disturb the brotherly love that
would unite the two houses just as it had bound together the two apostles,
Peter and Paul.”
I read it
not only to ground the geographical specificity of the walks in a historically
documented context, but to suggest that it was the community of the era, the
working together and accepting differences, that made the two sites significant
and showed that perambulations of the route, both historic and contemporary,
were and are inextricably bound up in encountering challenges, differences of
opinion and multifarious scenarios in which the spirit of goodwill and peace
would be championed above all else. As a person interested in what a working
socialism might look like in 2015, in light of Corbyn-gate, I am fascinated as
to how the act of walking (no problem that can’t be solved by a good walk)
might help us to put some flesh on to the bones of these ideas and how we might
move forward together, physically and mentally, from this era of the
Self-above-all-else.
*
The University
of Sunderland’s WALK (Walking, Art, Landskip and Knowledge) research group, out
of which this project, loosely, was born, was also cited at the beginning of
the walk, as the group stood on the North bank of the Wear, adjacent to the
National Glass Centre. Here, it should be noted that ‘Landskip’ is not a typo
of ‘landscape’. Landskip is a Dutch word, which stems from that nation’s belief
that we exist within and part of our landscapes; that they aren’t just objects
to be rearranged or disposed of or otherwise utilised (for personal,
collective, national or any other kind of ‘gain’, in a neoliberal sense). Keith
reminded us that, in Bede’s day, we would have been standing in the river, as
only centuries of river and land management, and the subsequent and intensive industrial
processes of shipbuilding and the like, meant that the course of the Wear and its
estuary was altered to lie lower down, as we know it today. Academically speaking,
this accretion of layers ties in very neatly to the research I am about to
begin for my PhD, but outside of the niche boundaries of my own interests, the
concept is an interesting one, and its subtleties were to be found throughout
the route.
It is
important at this stage to say a word or two about the route: where it is; what
it passes through, over and under; and, perhaps most significantly, how both
specialists and the public might approach and engage with it now and into the
future.
Bede’s
Way, formally, was introduced by Sunderland and South Tyneside Councils in
2004, working in partnership with the church communities of St. Peter’s and St.
Paul’s. Spanning a twelve-mile course between the twin monasteries, it takes in
a huge range of environments in a relatively small area. From the former
shipbuilding capital of the world on the banks of the Wear to the rolling sands
of Seaburn and Roker; to the coastal village of Whitburn; on through Cleadon
Hills and down into the southern edges of South Shields; it then winds a
zig-zag course through the heart of South Tyneside, following the flats of
Whiteleas and Boldon, through the historic Boldon Colliery, along and over the
A19; then the undulations of Hedworth and Primrose, all adjacent to the river
Don, before winding up at Jarrow Slake (‘Jarra Slak’; ‘Jarrow’s Lake’) at the
south banks of the Tyne, beside the current industrial trajectory of the
North-East: Port of Tyne, where Nissans from the nearby factory in Washington
are loaded onto ships and all sorts of goods, including coal – yes, coal,
coming into the Tyne! – arrive and are ferried off to the arteries of the rest
of the region and country.
That’s
the (kind of) touristy blurb done: what I’m really interested in are the
Go-To-Bed-At-Noons, the Linnets which used to be miners’ cage birds; the
thousand-year-old farm – Newton Garth – recorded in the Boldon Book; the smell
of diesel from the A19; the haunting image of the rope tethered to the viaduct
at Brockely Whins, where once coal wagons would have shunted black diamonds
from deep below the Great North Forest onto South Shields. I want to know more
about Pineapple Weed and Pellitory-of-the-wall; Purple Toadflax and Black
Medic; Yellowhammer and Redshank. I want to get to know the young lad and his
sister (daughter?) who politely stopped for us in Station Burn nature reserve,
the engine on their mini quadbike ticking over, his “Nee bother, mate”, before
he kicked the throttle and sped off towards Simonside. I want to be there, next
year, for the 1,300th anniversary of Ceolfrith setting forth across
the Wear and down to the Humber to board a ship to Rome, Codex Amiatinus in
hand, to present to the Pope.
We walk
again in August, will you join us?
