It seems that landscape and the physical geography of place keep popping up as reoccurring subjects in my thought process which is starting to raise questions about why this may be. Geography as a subject and the immense nature of physical geography has always fascinated me. It brings back memories of geography trips to see Old Harry’s Rock or being blow away with the idea of erosion and the power of the elements to change change landscape. These memories also evoke feelings of powerlessness and an almost overwhelming feeling of fear of what the land could do. These words come to mind:
Suffocation
Drowning
Falling
Whirlwind
These worlds bring back memories as a child or reading Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh
or films such as Wizard of Oz or Dot and the Kangaroo where the protagonist child has an out of world experience in which nature is the force that leads to this.
This has got me thinking about my own childhood memories and memories linked to place, these include
Getting lost in sand dunes off the beach of poppit in West Wales
Sinking mud in the Swale/ getting into a dingy boat to row out to my dad’a wooden boat
Mountains- Frenni Fach- Westwales
In these vivid memories, I tried to make sense of the unique landscape. Imagination melted into fantasy, where the dunes seemed far more imposing and threatening. The thought that these dunes were purposefully trying to disorientate, appearing out of no-where to prevent me from getting to the safety of my grandma or the mud from the swale was going to swallow me up and my father would be hopeless to help or the moss on the mountains were in fact the minute forests of small elf like creatures who were being destroyed by my monstrous footprint.
Feelings of:
Guilt
Fear
Loneliness
The Swale
The Swale- Old Anglo Saxon Word meaning “swirling, rushing river”
https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=swale+mud#id=AF01DAF5EDA3C6DCBAFC1142D64DB724B9CBA7E7
Most vivid are my trips to the Swale in Kent- a muddy estuary where the landscape and geography has changed little for thousands of year. It feels like a primitive and desolate place. My father moored an old wooden boat here and has done for the past 40 years-a place both familiar yet eerily unfamiliar to me. Trips in the boat would be both exhilarating-feeling out of control as the boat would jolt and lean, feeling at anytime that the water would drag you in. Combined with this trips on the boat would be equally filled with monotony and boredom - time would slow down and learning as a child, ‘to just be’ was at times excruciating.
Translucent orange buoys would mark out mud banks and obstructions as well as as marker points, measuring distance until arrival. I recall this being misleading and disorientating, the buoy seemingly moving further away than closer, heightening my feels of anxiety and confusion. Running a ground was a common scenario- waiting sometimes hours for the tide to turn and move us back on our way. Sometimes the boat would end up leaning precariously on the mudbank which brought humour to a seemingly hopeless situation- Sat at an angle with the translucent orange life jackets, the same colour as the buoys suffocatingly wedged up to our chins.
Regardless of the time of year, the swale seems to always have a cloak of grey sky and chilly wind. Its Dickensian landscape has been added to over the years, with shipwrecks and now derelict forts scattered around.
