Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

The physical act of closing a loop of grief

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 beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation - this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.

Here is the image I have of myself. It is 2009. After six years of trying to have a baby we are about to embark on our one go at IVF on the NHS. The NHS had immediately stopped funding when we slid onto the bottom of the waiting list. We had been waiting for three years. We were not the sort of people who could afford private treatment, though after my daughter’s death we plunged ourselves into debt trying to get back to where we had once been. At that point, in 2009, we were certain we were only going to do IVF once. In the time between going on the waiting list and receiving the letter inviting us to the clinic, I had sunk into a depression so bad that it nearly killed me. It took years to recover, and the nature of that depression meant we would most likely not be able to adopt. I’d fucked it for us both. Or rather, I had been debilitatingly unwell to the point of not wishing to be alive and the ‘not wishing to be alive’ bit was a big no no for adoption. I’m simplifying the situation. But at the time, this was how it felt; as if our future balanced on the tip of a needle. At this point we have moved house to help me get better, selling our tiny terrace and moving into another terrace, an ex council house in a village on the edge of the town. And now, suddenly, IVF funding is reinstated, and we receive a letter to tell us that we have finally, finally reached the top of the list. This is the image I have of myself. I am terrified that if it fails I’ll end up back in the place of utter darkness I have just emerged from.

On this day I am walking around the stubble edge of a field near our house and I am thinking about the upcoming IVF. My teeth are already tingling with anxiety, it is unbearable anxiety, it is stripping my nerves back to live electric wires and I do not know how I will get through the months of treatment and am desperate for some sort of sign that will tell me it will be worth it. As I turn for home I can see Seamer Beacon on the edge of the valley. It is my home-journey marker, the emblem of return and refuge to me. I have looked out for it on every journey away and back to the place I was born. There it is, in silhouette, whale-backed and bristled with trees. At my feet at this very moment I find my sign: the best gryphae fossil I’ve ever seen. The fossil is the shape of an early foetus on ultrasound. I hold it up to the light, head on one side, squinting, the fossil between myself and Seamer Beacon.

Here is the image I have of myself. It is 2021 and I am trying to accept and forgive myself for a whole life time of things I blamed myself for that were mostly not my fault. I am trying to move forward. I am writing a book about the process of reconnecting to landscape, of knowing where you belong and the liminal places I feel I exist in. The book is a series of pilgrimages in which I overlay my own life onto the past lives of the ghost lake, the paleolithic lake site I live on. I have decided to treat the working, ordinary-looking landscape as precious, and my existence on it as precious; myself as precious, and am revisiting earlier versions of myself to methodically acknowledge that I existed here and am a vital part of the story of place, as we all are. I am undoing and fixing and knitting the good to the bad so that I might move forward. I am still in the process of fully embracing childlessness. On this day I am walking up the steep incline towards Seamer Beacon and the bronze age cemetery complex, a place that sits just out of view above the cemetery where my daughter is buried. I am aware that I am placing myself between the modern cemetery and the ancient cemetery, and feel myself connected between these two points of grief. As I climb a hollowway so steep I have to hold on to the tree trunks and branches around me, I notice a sandy stone sticking out from a beech tree’s roots. I pick it up; it is an eroded ammonite. I hold it up to the light, head on one side, squinting, and now seamer beacon is in front of the fossil again and I am behind it, but this time my daughter is in the ground behind me. My body has found that place of automatic muscle memory that is the place of holding small things up to the sky to see them better, and time has sluiced between these two memory points; these two places of muscle memory, and my daughter has gone with it, and the miscarriages, and the IVF and look, here I am, and I am ok, more than ok, not just surviving but thriving. I am closing some sort of grief-loop. I am moving up, and away and forward and yet still carry all of the other versions of myself, the other muscle-memory body poses of myself with me.

The paperback version of my nature-landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake comes out on 24th April 2025. It’s currently available to buy as a hardback, an e book, and audio book with myself reading it. It’s also often available to loan from your local library. If you can support an indie bookshop, it’s always worth doing.

Until next time

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