Publishing my Edward Thomas

Hollow Ways and Robert MacFarlane's new book.

I have written about the marvellous books by Robert MacFarlane, especially the Edward Thomas-inspired 'The Old Ways.' Now Robert has produced a new, very attractive slim volume.


On the forest poems again.

'I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink....'

Edward Thomas knew  many of the deep ancient tracks that are the subject of  Holloway, produced with  Dan Richards and illustrated by Stanley Donwood.   Robert wrote about the Chideock Holloway he  had explored with Roger Deakin in 2005 in The Wild Places. It was rather a favourite chapter of mine as it seemed somewhere I could imagine myself exploring. That or somewhere like it.

On his friend Roger, who died far too young, Robert wrote:

'There is wildness everywhere if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.' To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.'

This was very much Edward Thomas's way of looking at the country he was exploring, whether new or  thoroughly familiar.  The Combe is very like Robert's Chideock Holloway with its significant past and hidden nature,

The Combe

 

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

By beech and yew and perishing juniper

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots

And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,

The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds

Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,

Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark

The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,

Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,

That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

 

 

 

 

 

Robert MacFarlane, along with Faber and Faber, are asking people to photo and record their deep ancient holloways across the country or even abroad. He says that such paths are at least 300 years old, and it is the passage of people over the centuries that keeps them open. Edward Thomas's   The Path is one such slight but important route:

The Path

RUNNING along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
On top, and silvered it between the moss
With the current of their feet, year after year.
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.



geolocation.ws

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Faber and Faber have  set up a site where people can post their own images of holloways and sunken paths.

The site is here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/holloway/  Use flickr to be able to post or send your photos to johng@faber.co.uk, with a note saying they're for the holloway gallery, and with any info about location, photographer and such like for a caption.  It will lead, perhaps, to a really valuable record of  the location of such paths and their history.

I took much of the above information from the great blog, dovegreyreaderscribbles.