April Write-A-Thon: Day Twenty Four
Signs
The April Write-A-Thon is a course designed for paid subscribers, but today, to celebrate the launch of the paperback of my nature-landscape memoir, The Ghost lake, I’m posting without a paywall. If you’d like access to the rest of the course, you can become a paid subscriber here:
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And now, to the prompt…
Day Twenty Four
Forgive me for the self promotion. Today is the publication day for the paperback edition of The Ghost Lake, and that’s where today’s extract is coming from.
A memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire.
I am setting out on a pilgrimage through an ancient landscape.
I will begin at my daughter’s grave.
Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years, but today, all that is left is a watermark.
Wendy Pratt brings readers on a pilgrimage around its periphery, to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she finds refuge in nature.
The Ghost Lake is a lyrical meditation on local history, changing landscapes, and the lives and legacies of rural working-class people.
You can buy The Ghost Lake at your local bookstore, order it online, as an audio book and as an ebook and do think about asking your local library if they will order it in for you.
Here’s an excerpt of the audio book.
The Extract
There is a piece of rock poking out of the soil, and when I prise it out I see there is a fossil in it. I can’t tell what kind - maybe a coral or a fern, maybe an eroded ammonite. It feels like a sign. It reminds me of the gryphae I found in the field where I walk my dog, the field from which I can see Seamer Beacon, the hill that I am journeying towards today. That day I was looking for a sign, anything to give me reason to believe the IVF - our one and only NHS go at IVF - would work. The anxiety was eating at me, and I was searching for meaning in magpies and signs in the ground. And there it was, a huge curl of a thing, a ‘devil’s toenail’, which fitted perfectly into the palm of my hand like an enormous sleeping woodlouse. It was the biggest, most perfect specimen I’d ever found. It has sat on my desk ever since. When I look at it, I can see myself holding it up, on the day I found it, examining it in the sunlight, just like I am holding this fossil up to the light now. Both times I have been facing the beacon and the burial mounds, only this time I am so much closer, and my daughter is below me and time has sluiced through the middle of it all.
The prompt
Have you ever searched for a sign? Have you ever counted magpies or looked for something in the world around you that would tell you what the future held? Think of a time in your life when you either searched for, or were presented with, something that felt like a sign or a signal to help you make a decision, or something that seemed to tell you what the future held. Was it true? Was it the correct decision? What did you learn from the experience?
Here’s a previous piece I wrote expanding the experience of a pilgrimage to a bronze age burial ground:
Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon
An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is …