Beating the Boundaries

The Year of the Ghost Lake

This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen - owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.

Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.

Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.

This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge. I could probably walk all the way around the lake site, in one continuous loop. It would take a while. Maybe in the summer I will do that. My boundary stones then might be the places in my book where I layered my own life over the villages and journey points at the lake’s edge: my own house in the little village, Cayton village where my dad’s body lay in the funeral home, Eastfield where I went to secondary school, the Crossgates boulder - the glacial erratic carried here in the belly of the glacier that formed the valley, Crossgates where my working class family lived when I was a child, Seamer, where I went to primary school, Seamer Beacon, my journey marker; and the bronze age cemetery that surrounds it and sits above the cemetery where my daughter is buried, Star carr, my first connection to this place; my obsession, Flixton and the site of Carman’s Spital; and the islands of the Palaeolithic people, Folkton and the Folkton drums where I walked in pilgrimage to remember a child who died thousands of year ago, and back here, to my village, to my house, where I tap on the little desk in my office on this day of mist and low light, on this desk where my pilgrim badges - the little stones, the fossilised shells, the gryphae - the objects that hold time and place, where I tap them gently and remind myself of where I have been, what I have written, the journeys I have taken, the places still yet to see.

I am beating the boundaries, gently, of 2024, and I am feeling thankful.

Thank you to everyone who has bought or borrowed The Ghost Lake, and Blackbird Singing at Dusk. Thank you to all the festivals, bookshops and podcasts who hosted events with me, thank you to

Caro Clarke

and editors at The Borough Press, and Nine Arches Press, for making this the most wonderful year.

The Ghost lake currently has 36% off at Amazon, and there will be deals in local indie bookshops up and down the country and online. I’ll recommend a few (not an exhaustive list) here:

• The Poetry Pharmacy

• Sam Reeds

• The Little Ripon Bookshop

• The Pickering Booktree

• Read

• Kemps

• York Waterstones

Who are all in the physical world and, I think, online and/or at Bookshop.org

My new substack only online course - Thirteen Ways of Looking - begins Friday 10th January.

In 2025 I have a whole range of lovely stuff for paid subscribers which I’ll tell you about soon. I cannot wait

But for now, I hope you beat the boundaries of your own landscape, remember and feel proud of how far you have come, and find peace thinking about all you have waiting for you in 2025.

Until next year

x