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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
In the middle years of the last decade a photographer called Henry Iddon took to lugging his gear into the Westmoreland and Cumbrian hills of the Lake District region, climbing high into the dusk and screwing his camera to a tripod on the tops of Coniston Old Man, Black Coombe, Thornthwaite Beacon, Helm Crag, Skiddaw, Whin Rigg, to wait for nightfall, and the onset of the darkest hours. Above an invisible auditory ceiling, the soft roar of road traffic fades away, to be replaced by the wind, Herdwick sheep and the occasional cry of a bird as the nightshift takes over. The long-exposure images he made on those journeys captured the darkness and stillness of the fells, the deep ground of the image cauterised here and there by the hot weld of car headlights cutting the path of a main road, or the hotel glare from the tourist honeypots.
But when Iddon opened the shutter for those brief seconds and allowed the night in, he sometimes also caught the distant towns and cities. In the Coniston Old Man image, the camera is pointing south, across towards the Westmoreland coast, Morecambe Bay and the Fylde beyond, though translated into this heightened digital world the lowlands where people live and work look like roiling lava fields, the glowing coals of the distant roads and street lamps and floodlit car parks and retail centres. It’s like seeing the ghost of heavy industry, its long-extinguished blast furnaces and smelting plants and ironworks, all fired up and working again. The edgelands must lie somewhere between this Romantic night and that crucible of molten tungsten, sodium and halogen.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
Robert Frost’s lyric ‘Acquainted with the Night’ suggests an archetypal early twentieth-century urban edge: one last symbol of civility and order in the form of a street lamp burning on the road that leads beyond the outskirts. As such roads become lanes, their last highwalled houses hold on to the only sources of artificial light, beneath a strong moon that outshines all beneath it: the late nineteenth century of Atkinson Grimshaw. Beyond this, all is night.
In early twenty-first-century England, such darkness is much harder to find. There are three kinds of light pollution: ‘sky glow’ is the aura visible above our urban areas, amplified by water droplets in the air and other particulate matter; ‘glare’ is the fixed and intense brightness created by golf driving ranges or distribution centres or rail maintenance gangs; ‘light trespass’ is the general leakage of artificial light from badly designed street lamps or security lamps. Light itself has become toxic.
What does the edgelands night look like? Looking up, a cloudy night can give back anything from a muddy orange to a bruised magenta, with many nuances of pink and red and brown in between. It’s the colour of an artist’s palette, if the different pigments are overworked and allowed to blend together into a warm grey sludge. A meatpaste sky. Gentleman’s Relish.
Depending on where you are in relation to a city centre, one horizon might offer a roseate aura. Sometimes, a compass rose of light can surround you in this way, the glow of several cities. Clear nights can bring a few stars to the edgelands, though the best places to see those are unlit sites of dereliction that our motorways and business corridors have bypassed. Walking past the scrap-metal yards and among the long timber sheds on an industrial estate, with the nearest city centre a few miles away, our stargazing was constantly interrupted by security light. Even when finding a negative oasis of darkness, it’s difficult to see the shades of stars, their spectral colours, and to feel the size and scale of the night.
On the ground, the edgelands are full of places that can flare up suddenly as if lit by a Very light over no-man’s-land. A fox patrolling the perimeters of its nocturnal beat trips the motion sensor on a halogen security light, flooding a loading bay on an industrial estate in a huge and pointless brightness. The fox freezes, its fear and vigilance recorded on CCTV and written in to the cobalt platter of a hard drive.
‘The newer the culture is, the more it fears nightfall,’ wrote the German journalist and historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. There are many ghosts in the edgelands’ never-quite-dark. Post-industrial England is haunted by a future that never happened, and the inescapable truth that these are the results of our long reclamation of the night: a blackbird singing at midnight on a floodlit roundabout; the silvery lake surface of a deserted conference centre car park; the steadfast glow of bus-stop advertisements. Ballardian trickledown meant synth pop stars like Gary Numan could posit a future (from a vantage point sometime around 1980) where there would be no street lights, but no dark corners either. In this future that never happened:
All the buildings had lights in the walls, glowing depending on what time of day it was. As it got darker, they would glow brighter and brighter. Constant light, and everything was white. No humans, all machines, so it was clean; no dust, no pollution, nothing.
Thirty years on and this hygienic brilliance never quite materialised. Instead, our cities are threaded and surrounded by a halflit sprawl. We move through our own murky, night-vision home movies. Driving through edgelands at night can feel like diving onto a wreck.
The obsession with security lights on offices and warehouses has taken such a hold that many of us now feel we need them on our homes. In housing estates on the edges of our towns and cities this sets up a strange pattern, a slow Morse conversation between back gardens, with each ‘dash’ lasting thirty seconds. These give us some comfort. We like them to be working, but how do we act upon them? Do they wake us up? Do they wake anyone up? They offer a useful service to cats, to light up the rodent they are seeking to catch, so the rodent freezes in the halogen glare, giving itself up to the jaws.
Perhaps this suggests another, less publicised, form of light pollution, of a kind that affects poets and lovers in particular. Take Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Sad Steps’, in which the poet ‘Groping back to bed after a piss’, parts the curtains to look out at the night sky and the gardens, and is ‘startled by / The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness’. In a beautiful description of a moonlit suburban landscape, Larkin describes:
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
But now those ‘wedge-shadowed gardens’ would be bathed in daylight-bright halogen, triggered by any passing cat. Moonlight would be hard-pressed to compete.
For the insomniac, there might be some cold and baleful comfort to be found in visiting a motorway in the middle of the night. Just standing on a deserted bridge above six illuminated lanes, watching the lorries heading north towards Carlisle or Glasgow, the red tail-lights of cars zooming southwards towards Warrington and Birmingham. It’s like looking into a river of light, feeling the current of people you can never really know passing through great banks of dark trees and hills. You are not alone. Even a generation ago the country seemed to shut down for the night: the airwaves cleared after the national anthem, the closedown dot melted into the olive ground of the television screen, the milk bottles were put out. We would enter a long tunnel of night. Now, light itself seems to flow swiftly along our major roads, pooling in the backwaters of goods depots and hypermarkets, leaking 24/7 into the texture of our night world.
Seen from military satellites, our conurbations are joined up in storm systems of light. The thirty miles between Liverpool and Manchester are some of the most mature edgelands on the planet. The first railways were laid here, over the mossy, scrubby land, and ever since, a strip of development has grown: the giant IKEA superstore at Warrington; the pallet yards at Flixton; the Ship Canal, the East Lancs Road, the M62 corridor. Invisibly, mobile phone cellular coverage extended along these paths to meet at some point in between the urban centres. And on one uncelebrated night in the recent past, the pixel-per-square-kilometre count in the fields and wasteland and goods yards midway between these two cities reached a saturation point that meant both became graphically joined, a bright miasma connecting both.
O tungsten, o tungsten, how can a light-bulb filament, an eyelashfine coil of wire, evoke such loyalty and nostalgia? Is it the warm russet tinge it lends to a room in the evening? Is it the soft ringing sound that tells you a bulb is dead, as you brush it past an ear? Is it the volatility, the sudden ‘pop’ as the filament breaks? Is it the dusting of black on the inside of the glass left by evaporated tungsten? No wonder tungsten lovers are flocking to buy up the last of the incandescent bulbs, before we make the final switch to low energy.
How little did the inventors of the light bulb (not just Thomas Edison, but – historians argue – at least twenty-two mavericks who played a part in dreaming up the incandescent light) think that they were also inventing a metaphor for thinking itself. A bulb lights up above the head, and an idea is born. So widely understood is this image that it can be used as a universal graphic shorthand for ‘inspiration’. Is that why we lament the loss of the incandescent bulb so much? After all, metaphors can be orphaned by technology. How long will it be before ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ refer only to manoeuvres on computer screens, and any reference to paper, scissors and glue is forgotten?
We need not fear. If anything, the metaphor should become more accurate as the technology changes. If a tungsten bulb has (as its proponents often argue) the edge over low-energy alternatives because of its instant ‘on’ and ‘off ’, then surely it falls down as a metaphor on these same grounds? How do ideas come? Well, mostly they emerge. To borrow a gardening metaphor, you get the seed of an idea in an instant, then it grows as you dwell on it, until it comes to full fruition. If so, that sounds far more like a low-energy bulb. In this case, then, perhaps the technological change will serve to strengthen the metaphor, and we will still be drawing light bulbs (albeit perhaps in a different shape) over people’s heads for centuries to come.
The artist Richard Billingham is probably best known for the photographs he made of his family, collected in Ray’s a Laugh, but towards the end of the Nineties he returned to Cradley Heath in the West Midlands and started photographing again. By 2003 he was working on nocturnes:
I felt a great longing for these little places, street corners, bits of waste ground and brick walls, places that I would play in as a kid or pass through on the way to school or to run an errand for my mom. I also realised my relationship with my home town had begun to change at this time . . . I wanted to see how my relationship to my home town had further changed. This time I decided to take more detailed photographs on a medium-format camera and at night using long exposures. Making much slower work in this way forced a different kind of attention before taking each picture. I also found that my senses seemed more heightened at night due to the silence and the darkness and the fact that no one else was around.
Billingham’s images of the Black Country from this period are arrangements in black and gold, post-industrial Whistlers. Cars parked up for the night; deserted streets; gaps in crumbling walls that lead on to waste ground. The yellowy, sodium light of street lamps is intensified during the long exposures, gilding and burnishing brickwork and pavement. We’ve all seen these places without really looking at them, but in these photographs, instead of an attempted beautification, the stillness and abandonment of our edgelands at night, in their never-dark, is allowed to slow-burn through.
Where there are lights, there are cameras. Artificial light and surveillance have long been associated with one another, even before photography was possible. In fifteenth-century England persons on the street at night were required by law to bear a lit torch, so they might make themselves easily visible. During the French Revolution in 1789 gangs of protesters worked their way through the Paris streets smashing the lanterns they associated with an oppressive regime. These same mobs hanged their victims from street lanterns. Street lighting was seen as a means of control and order. Our cities today are policed with the help of telecoms, lighting and CCTV. The cameras move, guided by toggle switches in monitoring suites: the twenty-first-century panopticons.
Remember, Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was never actually built – it was designed by Bentham as a utopian, super-efficient prison in 1785, where the imprisoned would be unable to tell when and if they are being watched, thus creating the illusion of constant surveillance – yet it has become synonymous with surveillance, a model for the way we are overlooked and compromised, subconsciously altering our behaviour accordingly. The figures are terrifying: there is said to be one camera for every fourteen people in the United Kingdom, and an individual might expect to be caught on camera 300 times during an active day in a busy urban setting.
Over the past decade, though, there has been a change in the way we might think of the panopticon. Traditionally, the flow of information was always in favour of the powerful, an Orwellian observing and controlling by a few privileged individuals of less privileged multitudes. But surveillance happens in so many other ways as well now, to serve so many different purposes, whether those are focus groups being observed by market researchers or real-life police-chase shows, consumption or titillation, military campaigns or domestic deterrence. And the process increasingly seems to cut both ways. For example, the powerful can now routinely find themselves scrutinised and observed in ways unimaginable a generation ago, and the markers and conditions for privacy have shifted.
We begin to consider the edgopticon. It already exists, in parts. Webcams posted on weather stations, updating images of masts and sunshine recorders through a rain-freckled lens every few minutes; a security camera overlooking the glassy expanse of a conference centre car park at night; the fringes of retail parks and power station checkpoints and fences surrounding storage depots, the aprons of petrol station forecourts, all monitored around the clock; braking distances of hard shoulder and grass verge picked up by speed cameras. But the edgopticon still has many more blind spots, places to be invisible.
Now we have a complicated relationship with our street lights. The future equivalents of those French revolutionaries smashing street lights might be militant wings (yet to emerge, but imaginable) of anti-pollution protesters, punishing the authorities who have lined the streets with light-polluting devices – too tall, too ill-directed. According to the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, light pollution in the United Kingdom increased by 24 per cent in the last seven years of the twentieth century.
But equally, our street lights have become nostalgic objects, even symbols of childhood (like the lamp post in Narnia), and some will go to great lengths to keep them. A pensioner in St Andrews, Bristol, chained himself to one of his local 1920s lamp posts to save them, when Bristol City Council came to replace them with new tall steel posts. The council said the old cast-iron lights were too low, too dim, and that the significant levels of car crime in the area could be countered by brighter lighting. While some councils look to brighten their streets at night, others want the power to dim them. Surrey County Council has decided to replace its 89,000 orange street lights with brighter white lights, but then put them all on a dimmer switch in Guildford, so they can adjust the level of light according to need in different parts of the county.
Recent research by a team of biologists from Bristol University has shown that our passion for brightly lit streets is having a detrimental effect on the lives of bats. Evolution has hard-wired these creatures to avoid daylight, to make them less vulnerable to predators, so if the flight path between their colonies and their feeding grounds is served by sodium street lights, the bats avoid the light and take the long way home, which may expose them to greater risks from birds of prey.
Perhaps, in the future, town councils will invite C-list celebrities to turn off their lights for Christmas, to celebrate the festive season by plunging all the streets and squares into planet- (and money-) saving darkness. Then as the lights go out, the assembled members of the public will hold up their mobile phones like candles at a vigil.
CCTV has become a way of looking at ourselves, and of seeing the banal present crumbling into pixelated myth and horror. The timestamped images of the toddler James Bulger being led from the New Strand Shopping Centre, while his mother bought lamb chops from A. R. Tyms butchers, will resonate for a generation, but they might have led us to consider how there was an edge to such surveillance, a blackout zone in our midst where cameras were far less frequently stationed. The boys who took James from the brightly strip-lit arcades and bargain shops of the Strand headed out into the gloom of February, taking the child on a long and desperate two-and-a-half-mile march through busy streets, where they were picked up again on cameras, but, in the end, some awful escalation of events on that cold evening finally led them on to the railway, near a disused station, the kind of place well known to truanting children and teenagers as a private space, a space where nobody could see you.
There are still darker places, beyond the city’s edgelands. Ten years after the Bulger murder, in the summer of 2003, the country was puzzled and disturbed by the disappearance of a doctor called Richard Stevens, who was last seen arriving for work on a Monday morning at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. With his jacket on the back of his office chair, his briefcase on his desk and his Audi ticking in the car park, he walked out of his life and was gone. Apart from the CCTV footage of his arrival captured on an antiquated workplace system, he had simply vanished without trace. An international police search turned up nothing, bar a few false sightings and leads: a tourist picked up on CCTV at John Lennon Airport was mistaken for him; he was spotted on a flight to Florida. In the end, Dr Stevens’ body was found — six months later and in the dead of winter — by walkers inside a disused slate mine on Coniston Old Man, a dark place beyond the reach of surveillance and high above the distant incandescence and glare to the south. The coroner ruled that he had taken his own life.
Just as the world neatly divides into people who have peeled the rubbery rind off a golf ball in order to find out what it’s made of, and those who haven’t, so there are people who have always wanted to open up and peek inside the white louvre shutters of a Stevenson Screen, and those who haven’t.
It looks like an abandoned art installation in the landscape, or a holy site of worship. Electric druids who had recourse to B&Q. Tuned in to and highly sensitive of its surroundings, it feels physically apart from them, although it’s easily passed by and overlooked. It’s quiet in the low hills to the east of the M6 near Lancaster, apart from the odd car tooling down the back lanes hidden by hedges; the distant, soft, constant roar of the motorway; a dog barking in the boarding kennels you passed on the way up.
Before our evening weather bulletins, following on from the news, before the effortless, studied or graceless handovers from news anchor to weather person, before the country is seen as a shiny whole, as if from the height of an observational satellite, before predictions are made with much priestly gesticulation and the sweeping of hands, before all that come places like this: a weather station a hundred or so metres above, and a few miles inland from, Morecambe Bay.
Weather stations can – indeed, have to – be found scattered everywhere across the country, although the physical interference created by the human-built environment means their sites tend to favour out-of-the-way edgelands, where they are also less likely to interfere with a view. Not that many people see them. From a car, maybe a mast set back from the road, a strange obelisk, and what looks like a beehive on stilts. Then it’s gone.
All weather stations are at once different and the same. Different, in elevation and aspect, local topography, the method of information capture – some are live and linked to the Met Office, providing hourly, synoptic readings, others have an archival function – but similar in the deployment of standard operating features and kit you’d expect from a unit that exists solely to provide clean and accurate climate data for analysis. The whole set-up is like a capillary action between the elemental and the empirical, a place where sea mist rolling in off the bay or a blustery shower is being translated into raw information.
In a manual station, it’s also a kind of landlocked lighthouse-keeping, a real edgelands job. Somebody has to be here – in this case, every morning at nine o’clock – to make the vital observations. Morning rounds with one gigantic patient.
This one has a shed, which, like all the best sheds, is busy inside with arcane clutter: superannuated meteorological equipment, a grey metal locker full of torches and spare wellies, a computer workstation. The implausible phone does occasionally ring. A few times in the course of a year, somebody will need to know exactly what the weather was doing locally at a given time. Loss adjusters and insurers query the sudden shower that is claimed to have turned a road greasy, or the strong sunlight that dazzled a rear-view mirror and blinded a driver. The weather station itself might be overlooked and unseen, but it is constantly vigilant and recording.
The site is dominated by a 29-metre mast, secured with metal hawsers, a lone starling singing at its tip; an O2 mobile mast – smaller, railed off and crowned in smaller dishes, screens and spiky aerials like a metal fetish statue – squats in its shadow, a shadow that, when the sun is low, you can imagine needling across miles of open country. We begin our rounds.
Climate is recorded slowly, over time, an imperceptible, glacial drip. A weather station, looked at closely from the ground, might also record our capacity for imagining and test our ability to wonder. Memories of long-ago freezing bored field trips are perhaps re-engaged; a horror of clipboards. It just looks like a scattering of vaguely familiar but oddly abstract constructions. The turf-wall rain gauge, a bricked-off, circular indentation a few feet in diameter with some kind of nozzle or aperture at its centre, like a small civic fountain that has dried up and grassed over; anemometers spinning slowly like failed garden appliances; a brick plinth like a deluded, low-level trig point, or a garden centre altar to sun worship.
The imperatives of global warming mean that amateur weather enthusiasts – previously bracketed with other British eccentrics like collectors of jam labels or men with narrow-gauge railways in their back gardens – are now feted as eco-heroes. Kids make simple rainfall gauges at primary school and set them up in the back garden. Pensioners hang thermometers outside the kitchen window, and peer out in the morning to read the mercury. But amateur forecasters no longer need rely on barometers like wall clocks, tapping on the glass each time they pass. Now high-street stores sell digital home weather stations, complete with read-outs of temperature, humidity, pressure and a handy icon like the TV weather forecast to tell you whether cloud, rain or sun is on its way. Some even have an audible storm warning, to wake you in the middle of the night so you can watch a storm. Not only do these home weather stations tell you the temperature in your kitchen, they also include at least one external sensor, to be nailed to the wall of your shed, which sends constant readings back to your kitchen to keep you abreast of any changes.
For an amateur weather enthusiast to make the news, though, they need to be a cut above the average record-keeper. In the mid-Noughties a retired paper-maker from Kirkcaldy made the newspapers when the Royal Meteorological Society got interested in his notebooks. Mr David Grisenthwaite had kept a detailed record of when he had cut the grass in his garden for the previous twenty years. The story these records told – that the grass-cutting period had extended by a month in two decades – has become part of the scientific debate on the pace and implications of climate change.
But Mr Grisenthwaite is not alone in his rigorous record-keeping. The science of phenology is enjoying a boom at the moment. Phenology is the study of the seasonal patterns of weather, plant and animal life, which is rooted in long-term and accurate keeping of as many records as possible. In autumn 2000 the UK Phenology Network was set up by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology to promote this amateur record-keeping to as wide an audience as possible. They now have upwards of 50,000 recruits keeping records: the first flowering of horse chestnut, first flowering of hawthorn, first arrival of swallow, first recorded flight of orange-tip butterfly.
Everybody knows the Beaufort Scale, but it’s surprising just how much meteorology on the ground relies on scales of observation. The ‘state of ground’ patch, a small plot of earth never raked or hoed and tended free of weeds and grasses, like a grave. The tubes and fastenings of ground thermometers only thicken the plot: a Seventies premature-burial kidnapping. The patch is examined every day, like the inspection of a tiny sports pitch or course to see if play or a meet is possible, and like everything observed here it is graded according to preordained categorisations, coded on a scale that runs from ‘frozen’ or ‘drenched’ through ‘moist’ to ‘dry’. Visibility is measured by landmarks: towers or buildings at known distances are quickly clocked and recorded. It’s almost the opposite of the proverbial and pastoral folkloric forecast: ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.’ You forecast in poetry, but you collect data in prose.
But some of the measuring equipment installed in weather stations is ingenious and beautiful. The tipping-bucket rain-gauge, hidden just below ground, collects rainwater on small measuring scales that tip when full and can be linked to sensors, making it fully automatic: a device so mechanically simple and resourceful it seems to connect the world of Al-Jazari and the Arabic Middle Ages with the world of the semiconductor. The Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder is even more elegant: a glass crystal ball, mounted facing south, that tracks the movement and power of the sun across the sky by burning a moving hole across a sheet of time-graded card. Throughout the year, three seasonal cards need to be used, depending on the angle of the sun, and weather-station recorders learn the rhythms of these cards, looking forward to when the winter card will be replaced by the equinoctial card as much as the rest of us might welcome the clocks going forward. On sunny days there is a fresh, scorched smell hanging in the air like incense when the sunshine recorder is approached.
And then there is the Stevenson Screen. A white (to reflect solar radiation) wooden box, its door faces north and its walls are double louvred (to permit a stable airflow). It was designed by Thomas Stevenson to create a stable environment in which to site temperature and barometric pressure-measuring equipment, though Stevenson was better known in his day as a lighthouse designer, as were his brothers and his father Robert Stevenson, who was also a builder of roads; but one of his sons, Robert Louis Stevenson, broke with this dynastic, paternal vocation of scientific engineering and lighthouse-building. It caused a great deal of bitterness within the family.
And yet. The Stevenson who wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island was originally trained as an engineer. His earliest published work was a paper — ‘On the Thermal Influence of Forests’ — presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1873. The engineering achievements of his father and uncles and grandfather underwrote the writing life Stevenson undertook, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest he was keenly aware of this, and of the discrepancy between those towering achievements and his own smaller literary accomplishments. Not that the world saw it that way: in 1886 Stevenson wrote an angry letter to Scribner’s complaining at the lack of public recognition his father had received, comparing his own fame and success:
. . . I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward.
Around the same time, Stevenson wrote the poem ‘Skerryvore: the Parallel’. ‘Skerryvore’ was the name of the house in Bournemouth that Thomas Stevenson bought for his son’s wife; Skerryvore itself was the name of a rocky reef to the west of Mull that had claimed many ships, until a lighthouse was erected there by Alan Stevenson, the novelist’s uncle.
Here all is sunny, and when the truant gull
Skims the green level of the lawn, his wing
Dispetals roses; here the house is framed
Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain pine,
Such clay as artists fashion and such wood
As the tree-climbing urchin breaks. But there
Eternal granite hewn from the living isle
And dowelled with brute iron, rears a tower
That from its wet foundation to its crown
Of glittering glass, stands, in the sweep of winds,
Immovable, immortal, eminent.
Later, in the Samoan Isles, Stevenson, while working on his Records of a Family of Engineers, wrote home asking for his father’s engineering pocket book: ‘I cannot do without it.’ In some complex way, Stevenson always fretted over the usefulness or true value of art, art compared to the practical, life-and-death construction work of the engineer. Strange now that even the lighthouses of our inshore waters are all automated and unmanned, though his father’s simple and elegant screen for meteorological instruments is still an absolutely standard piece of kit.
What’s worth more in the end: art or practical utility? As Matthew Arnold put it: ‘Doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear, watches that go, and a thousand more such good things, are the invention of the Philistines.’
Edgelands do weather very well. The aesthetics of weather are enhanced by the forms and colours of the place. Rain at night is often beautiful, but look at slant rain at night, falling on a fenced-off yard full of identically liveried vans or brand-new cars, lit by powerful security lights; the multiple tones and rhythms of torrential rain on metal roofs and doors. Then there are the squalls of rain that blow across a motorway to settle over pools of unnamed standing water, rattling through the scrappy copses beside the water. As Paul Muldoon says in his early poem ‘Wind and Tree’, ‘most of the wind / Happens where there are trees’.
But it’s not just rain. Have you seen the sudden, filmic light effects of low winter sun across a ruined factory, the hard-cut shadows and blinding reflections off broken glass? Late-afternoon sun on a clear day throwing giant shadows like ink fields on the scrubland behind power station cooling towers? Or milk morning sun brushing the tops of willowherb, nettle, thistle, in the unkempt field behind the car-crushers? Perhaps it is because we are so used to seeing the edgelands used as a movie set that this angled sunlight seems so dramatic, so designed.
And is it the brokenness of the edgelands that renders them so susceptible to weather, so apparently responsive to it? Many people with broken bones will claim, years after the break has healed, that they can still tell when the weather is about to turn by an ache at the point of the fracture. Muldoon’s poem ‘Wind and Tree’ goes on to describe two trees, entangled by the wind:
Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,
It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.
Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,
Since my own arm could not and would not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones
I tell new weather.
While not as birdy as some edgelands places (cf. sewage farms), weather stations nevertheless seem to be good places to watch avian comings and goings. Maybe it’s the general observational frame of mind we’re in, or the shed – if there is one – that easily doubles as a hide, or simply all of those posts and masts and plinths available for perching, that makes a place like this feel a bit like an unofficial bird reserve. It’s too early in the year here for the curlews and oystercatchers and lapwings, which are still feeding out in the estuaries of the bay, but atop the mast, a starling continues to work its way through a low-key, late-winter version of its collaged song, a cut-and-paste job made out of curlew calls, assorted rattles and hisses and metallic clicks.
Starlings are keen mimics, the mynah birds of the north (to which they are related). They’re the samplers among our avifauna, able to incorporate all manner of human, animal and mechanical sounds into their repertoire, and urban starlings are well-known copyists of telephones and doorbells, even dial-up modems. The song-learning process in birds is well studied, but still somewhat mysterious: researchers in this field believe that understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie imitative song-learning is the Holy Grail. But imagine a starling that enriches its individual repertoire by imitating some distinct and regular mechanical noise. This ability might crystallise into the vocal performance of a mature adult, and so might also be copied both by direct offspring and other impressionable, immature birds looking to extend their own vocal abilities. Starlings have been observed at abandoned human settlements recreating the noises of former human or mechanical activity: a squeaky water pump, even though the pump is long seized up, or the rasp of a bandsaw, even though the woodshed is long deserted. Could it be that the starlings that gather here sing a song made from bits of the area’s former soundscape? These low hills were once the site of much industrial activity, dating back to Roman times, and the landscape hereabouts is littered with the sites of limekilnsand forges. Dirty, unpleasant work. The area has always been a kind of edgelands, but could it be possible that starlings still carry within their complicated songs some of the sound elements of that former industrial world? Thought of this way, the birds themselves are a kind of information storage system, a winged databank.
The spring of 2010, and the first signs that iPhone birdsong apps are being abused, as people begin to play the pre-recorded warblings and alarm calls of various confused species back into the trees and bushes. We see the first occurrences of a new kind of edgelands flash mob: at first light, hundreds gather in the silent places outside of towns and cities, lit by the firefly glow of their phone screens, and at the preordained exact moment play the songs of their chosen birds, a digital dawn chorus made possible by lightweight flashmemory technology.
Later in the day, starlings begin to assemble in long minatory Hitchcockian strings along the mast’s cables. As evening approaches, they take to the air as one and gather into the swarming shapes familiar from our city centres and beer commercials, heading north towards the huge winter flock that forms near the Lune. Maybe because they form such huge murmurations, starlings are more broadly local, learning each other’s calls and exchanging information in the vast shoalings we see at dusk. According to meteorologists, there are three types of twilight: civil twilight, once the sun has sunk six degrees below the horizon; nautical twilight, when the sun is twelve degrees deep and the horizon is difficult to discern; and astronomical twilight, once the sky has turned completely dark. But there is also starling twilight, that uncanny borderline moment when the birds’ collective mind decides it is time to fall into its night-time roost, and the great display comes to its sudden and mysterious end.