Climbing Nerôche: Landscape Experience and Performative Writing (Part One)

Part One: The Context 

I’ve spent the past couple of months preparing a proposal for a PhD project in Geography and Theology at Exeter University; a sort of religious psychogeography with a bit of feminist theology and queer theory thrown in for good measure - and to add extra spice. As part of the research I've been reading Dr John Wylie’s work on Glastonbury, in particular his description of the road from Bristol to Glastonbury and his account of ascending Glastonbury Tor. His visit to South Somerset had two purposes: ‘to explore the possibilities of writing performatively about landscape experiences’ and to suggest ‘a theorisation of landscape in dwelling and temporality’ (Wylie 2003).

My own thesis draws heavily on ‘landscape experiences’, albeit from a religious perspective, and Dr Wylie’s essay has played an important part in shaping my initial ruminations. So, during the purdah between submitting my application and receiving the proverbial green light (the odds are stacked in my favour, according to my potential supervisor), I thought it might be appropriate to indulge in a similar exercise in a not dissimilar landscape, one that exerts a strong hold over my febrile emotions.

Nerôche from the pastures near Staple Fitzpaine. No matter where I am in south Somerset, Nerôche seems always to loom on the horizon, a brooding presence.

Nerôche – strictly speaking Castle Nerôche – is a 300 metre-high prominence in the Blackdown Hills that overlooks the girt, lush Taunton Deane and holds its own with the more popular Quantock Hills on the other side of the vale. It is topped by a Norman motte and bailey castle that last saw action during the 12^th century Anarchy and is underlain by a thin layer of clay with flints and a thick outcrop of Upper Greensand. The northern scarp is steep in places, heavily wooded towards the summit but a patchwork of pasture lower down where the village of Staple Fitzpaine nestles as if it had been plucked straight from a John Betjeman poem. The southern slopes dip gently towards Ilminster, a cute and capricious market town which boasts two curry houses, both of which require the diner to bring her/his own booze.

Much of the land is owned by the Forestry Commission and Crown Estate and is the focus of the Nerôche Landscape Partnership Scheme and the Liberating the Landscape project. These have been instrumental in restoring the Herepaths, important trade and communication routes between settlements during the ninth century and often referred to as people’s paths.

My first encounter with Nerôche was during the hot and sticky summer of 1988 when, in my previous incarnation, I was delivering parcels across south and west Somerset. Twenty five years ago, almost to the day, but still I can recall my senses working overtime as the trusty red van began the long climb. First through the leafy – and not so leafy – suburbs of Taunton then up, up and away; a sinuous and sensuous journey across a landscape which seemed to peel away another layer each time I pressed the clutch to engage a lower gear. But like a burlesque artiste it was revealing itself provocatively, little by little, and every time it showed a little more flesh I knew it was concealing more than it was exposing.

Twenty five years ago, almost to the day, and I’m still exploring Nerôche’s deep and dark declivities and still it refuses to yield its more intimate secrets. Which is why, in the midst of a very English heatwave, I set out on a labyrinthine walk which I hoped might act as an open sesame and grant me entrance to  Nerôche’s esoteric pleasures. And like Dr Wylie, I set out with the intention of recording my emotions.

As is ever the case, the hunter soon became the prey.

References

John Wylie: Landscape, Performance and Dwelling: a Glastonbury Case Study in Country Visions, Paul Cloke (ed): Pearson 2003

Nerôche, Liberating the Landscape: http://www.nerochescheme.org/index.php

Herepath trails: http://www.nerochescheme.org/herepath.php & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULbEhspe25A&feature=channel_page

Dry County

The thunder had arrived late in the afternoon after a sapping accumulation of cloud and heat. From the moment they lifted their heads from the pillows that morning, the entire population of the City of Wells became aware that only a deluge would shatter the lethargy that had descended upon the town, wash it away with the dust. Moods swung, tempers rose and fell; those inclined to emotional instability sensibly closed the curtains and locked themselves in.

DCI Lefebvre couldn’t work through a storm, even the mere hint of one sent her into paroxysms of delicious anticipation. She was certain that there were fewer storms nowadays than when she was a child, just like snow. But the summers were undoubtedly drier, hotter, so her love of extremes was satisfied. It was a difficult balance to maintain. She would pull up in her car, switch off the engine and gaze lovingly over the bleached, parched fields around Priddy. The rain would change all that, restore fecundity and growth but even she knew it would take a monsoon to make good the soil/moisture deficit. She needed the storm, she could live with the risk, what would be infinitely worse would be the disappointment if it didn’t live up to her expectations. 

María Inés de la Cruz: Ruega por Nosotras Pecadoras (Pray for us Sinners), Libertad 2009 (my translation)

I'd set my class of teenaged English language students an essay entitled 'Party every night, party every day: You only live once so why bother with the tedious and the mundane? Discuss'.

I'd expected - hoped - they'd go along with my irresponsible hedonism but it soon turned out I was in a minority of one. A disturbingly mature sixteen year-old pointed out that if one does, party every night and party every day then the act of partying itself becomes tedious and mundane. Out of the mouths of babes and Italian teenagers; Nicola had a point and deep down inside I know he's right but I can't possibly bring myself to agree with him.

I've been applying Nicola's philiosophy to the current 'heatwave', well aware that at some point, probably sooner rather than later, it's going to come to an end - that is has to come to an end - but that doesn't stop me looking out over the increasingly-waterless Levels with in intensity of emotion that, at times, comes close to sexual ecstacy. And like an insatiable lover I want the heat and the sun to come at me harder, faster until every blade of grass is baked into to a frazzle, a la 1976.

Last weekend, as the mercury rose to heights not witnessed since 2006, I set out on a private pilgrimage to Castle Nerôche, then crossed the Levels from Ilminster to Somerton. More of that journey anon, suffice to say that the heady combination of heat and dust played havoc with my emotions and brought me, on a couple of occasions, quite close to tears. As is my custom, I approached Nerôche via a series of sinuous paths - it's not a hike to be rushed or the spell won't work - and the landscape, wild pasture, ancient woodland and farm buildings crumbling into disuse slowly revealed itself, layer after layer. 

With one black shadow at its feet,

         The house thro' all the level shines,

Close-latticed to the brooding heat,

         And silent in its dusty vines:

A faint-blue ridge upon the right,

     An empty river-bed before,

      And shallows on a distant shore,

In glaring sand and inlets bright.

       But "Aye Mary," made she moan,

            And "Aye Mary," night and morn,

           And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone, 
          To live forgotten, and love forlorn.

Every time I make this pilgrimage - and it can only be done in high summer - I worry it won't work, that this phantasmal Somerset will fail to materialise and I'll be left walking through the tedious and the mundane; just as worry that one day I worry I'll be waiting outside Las Amazonas and María Inés de la Cruz won't turn up. Each and every time I worry and each and every time my fears are unfounded. So maybe I was right and Nicola was wrong; another victory for sentiment over common sense.

Über-Somerset

Some of you might recall the short-lived BBC soap opera, El Dorado, which ran for a year in the early 1990s. Set in the fictional town of Los Barcos on the Costa del Sol it purported to portray the lives of British and German expat communities, in all their gory detail. 
Okay, so maybe you don't remember the series; you haven't missed much, suffice to say that expatriate communities often create landscapes which are more country of origin than the country of origin itself. And it doesn't just apply to northern Europeans, it was said of the Arsenal striker Jose Antonio Reyes that walking into his London home was like entering a miniature Spain, or that Chicano communities in Los Angeles immerse themselves in a mexicanidad more mexicana than Mexico itself.
It might take a girt, humungous stretch of the imagination to apply similar theories of cultural or ethno-landscapes to rural Somerset but it was a line of thinking that struck me on a hike across the scarp that overlooks King's Sedge Moor and is capped by the infuriatingly appealing village of High Ham. Under a soft and sultry sun, with the Levels stretching out to the north and west, the brooding bulk of Castle Nerôche and the Blackdown Hills to the south and the ever-visible Glastonbury Tor always on the eastern horizon I walked through a Somerset that was more Somerset than any guide or gazetteer has ever tried to convey.
But Somerset has always seemed different to me, curiously un-English, its red-tiled roofs and blue lias walls reminding me of France and Spain.
It was the orchards that tipped the landscape over the edge and into that Über-Somerset dimension. I should mention here that I have an almost erotic obsession with orchards that may or may not have something to do with visions of prelapsarian landscapes in which a deliciously transgressive Eve defies God and plucks the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. And if you look at it that way, Eve's act becomes one of subversion and rebellion, like sticking a finger up to a pedantic, petulant God. Whenever I walk past an orchard of gnarled trees, bursting with flower or heavy with swollen fruit I think of Eve and the heady pleasure of succumbing to temptation which, in a neat twist of theology, turns her from villain to heroine. 
The Levels shimmered in the heat, beneath my boots the red earth was bone-dry, as if the sun had baked it to a sacred dust. Everywhere I looked was Somerset, every step I took was a step out of the tedious and the mundane and into my imagined Somerset. And like Eve I surrendered, not as a passive, unwilling victim but as an active participant in my own self-sacrifice. I let Somerset into my mind and my body, let her explore every deep and dark declivity; for the briefest of moments I was Somerset and Somerset was me; we tripped out of history into a universe where the sun, heavy with age, had entered into one eclipse too many and where the stars had cut great swathes into the sky with the incessant passage of their weary orbits. 
Somerset was, Somerset is, Somerset always will be.

Can't see the love for the hate

Here's a confession that'd get me expelled from any gathering of psychogeographers and academics: I can't stand London.
No, let me rephrase that. I hate London with a rage so intense it would shake the city to its foundations if I could tap its energy in seismic form.
It's not an urban thing. I love Mexico City with an equal passion; I tell my students that if you put your ear to the pavement you can hear its heart beating. The same goes for San Salvador and not just because it's where I first set eyes on the sultry shape and form of Maria Ines de la Cruz. I've spent many hours difting through the streets and suburbs of both cities, usually without aim but occasionally with a purpose, such as the evening I traversed downtown San Salvador and circuited the bohemian Colonia Centroamerica in search of the city's elusive gay nightlife - a sort of queer derive (there is, as a matter of fact, a 'strip' but you'd be hard-pressed to find it. And if you're a gay woman you're going to be very disappointed).
From the queer derive to the theological derive. Several years ago, whilst doing fieldwork for an MSc in Latin American politics, I spent the best part of a month criss-crossing San Salvador interviewing nuns and other religious leaders; a quest which took me to parts of the city rational enquiry couldn't reach. Even two bungled muggings - and they were shamefully amateur attempts - failed to douse my ardour; if anything the sense of danger they evoked only made the place more attractive.
I've been mugged in London too, as it happens; another botched job, in 1999, in Stratford, before the Olympics and urban regeneration were even a twinkle in Boris and Ken's eyes. I spent the best part of three years living in what might euphemistically be called the 'East End' but didn't really have the feel of the mythical East End. What I remember most about my time amonsgt the fun-loving criminals of what will surely, one day, be sanitised by the heritage industry then repackaged and resold as 'Kray Country', was my landlord and his partner dragging us along to Benjy's 2000 on the Mile End Road.
'Nuff said!
But the truth - perhaps the sad truth - is that whenever funds permitted I fled the city and sought refuge in the rolling hills of Dorset or the brights lights of Weymouth. I was like a woman on the run, though pursued by what I still don't know. 
As an itinerant tutor I have cause to visit London once or twice a year and, last month, on as part of journey entirely by rail (apart from the Dover-Calais ferry) from Bristol to Malaga, I crossed the city from Paddington to London Bridge in the early hours of the morning. Still the anger was there, still my mood shifted rapidly through the emotional gears until it was working at full-tilt outright hatred when I arrived at the phallic landscape of The City, just as dawn was breaking, cold and windy. I hate The Shard, I hate The Gherkin, I hate the Canary Wharf Tower - sorry 'One Canada Square', talk about unashamed, unadulterated conceit. 
From the monarchist nonsense of Buckingham Palace, the imperialist pomposity of Whitehall to the looming bulk of Thames House which is all eyes, eyes, eyes over those who pass beneath its ugly facade, all I see are the overblown relics of a failed state trying desperately to cling on to its faded glories. Does anyone still believe this hubris? London doesn't just take itself far too seriously, it demands those who visit it do so too; insists they pay homage at its shrines.
Too arrogant, too regular; too hard and angular. And too Protestant, aesthetically-speaking, at least. London, to me, lacks the curves and the kitsch of a Catholic city. It doesn't yield and I find myself stuck between a nook and a hard place.
I've probably got it all wrong, spend too much time seething and looking at the city through my own, probably gender-obsessed lens. I should just lie back and think of London, bask in its undoubted commitment to and belief in the personal and social tenets I hold dear: multiculturalism and diversity.
At about three o'clock in the morning I'm in the heart of The City, approaching Cannon Street Station (this, to me, the heart of the evil empire). I'm trying to remember the lines of The Wasteland; trying to conjure up TS Eliot's Unreal City:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Trying, also, to roll back the years to 1999 when I spent the best part of a year working in the head office of a major, multinational investment bank to fund my postgraduate studies which were increasinglt focusing on liberation and feminist theology. 
Talk about selling your soul to the devil.
For reasons I still don't understand I was trying hard to retrace my route from Mansion House station to my former place of work and getting increasingly frustrated. Then, in the midst of all this turmoil, an angel, of sorts, appears. He is driving a red London bus, a regular service, and has pulled up at a red light. He opens the door and asks whether I'm okay, whether I'm lost; tells me to hop on board and he'll drop me off somewhere more safe and suitable at this time of night. 
HIs isn't the only act of kindness I experience during those short, madragudal hours and I hate myself for hating the city so much. And I know full well that when I get to Paris Gare du Nord in a few hours time, and take a stroll across the city to Austerlitz, I'll love each and every square metre of the French capital, and for the very same reasons I hate the English one.
London. Can someone turn my hate into love?

New boots and panties

Talk about chalk and cheese; we make an odd couple, the unerringly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I. Whilst I loiter around La Villa Ramblanista in spandex trousers and a big, baggy t-shirt looking like a cross between Nena and Joey Tempest’s twin sister, she’s preening her thick black tresses and gazing at herself in the mirror, the spitting image of ... well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So you can imagine her surprise when I announced I was about to purchase a brand new pair of boots. And not just the cheap tat I usually buy; when I said I was forking out one hundred and ten of your English pounds she very nearly fainted. Then I said they were hiking boots; if looks could kill ...

Poor María, she never will understand. She’ll never understand the unrequited love a Ramblanista has for her hiking boots; she’ll never quite comprehend why I’m so reluctant to part with my now decrepit pair of Karrimor boots – seventy quid from Great Western Camping in Dorchester – that have been laced to my feet for more than a thousand of your English miles, along the Camino de Santiago and beyond. Listen, if she had her way they’d be out with the refuse, awaiting collection by the oxymoronically-titled Somerset Waste Partnership. 

The old boots - can you feel the love?

So I never let them out of my sight, not even now I have a go-faster pair of boots, purchased from the lovely shop assistant at Wells Outdoors – get yourself a website and start tweeting, Mr Wells Outdoors!

You know what they say about the sudden manifestation of children destroying an ideal relationship? We might say the same about my new boots. It didn’t help when I joked about wearing them in bed because the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz knew perfectly well I was only half-joking. When my boots and I returned, yesterday, from our inaugural stroll together – along the thin tongue of higher ground which separates West Sedge Moor and Curry Moor – she retreated to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her shouting ‘you’d better make your mind up, Juanita – it’s the boots or me’.

She’ll calm down. Strange thing is that although she took the gin with her, I didn’t really care. I sat myself down on the sofa and spent the remainder of the evening ogling my new boots.

The new boots - if these don't get your lovejuices flowing nothing will

Our Lady of the Landscape

It’s a little-known fact – an increasingly little-known fact since the ecumenicalisation of the Catholic Church – that the month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Like many of the more ‘earthy’ and Marian Catholic celebrations it has its origins in popular belief rather than Vatican dogma which is reason enough for the excruciatingly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and me to pour ourselves a couple more girt, humungous G&Ts.

It was a subject we pondered during an exquisite, sun-baked hike that took us over the deliciously horizontal levels of Somerton Moor then up and along the Polden Hills where we followed the almost-eponymous Polden Way and reminisced about last year’s Camino. It was, observed María, a year to the day since we set out on the long journey – we took the train, then the boat, then the train to get to St Jean Pied de Port; something else to celebrate.

You don’t have to be a student of Mariology to work out the connection between May and Our Lady. Several years ago I wrote a paper entitled – with more than an eye for the controversy – Our Lady of the Libido: Towards a Marian Theology of Sexual Liberation which was published in the Journal of Feminist Theology. In it I mused that ‘a fortnight after Easter the earth was finally involved in its own delicious and sensual resurrection and in popular tradition, of course, May is the month of Mary.’

The relationship between Mary and the month of May emerged in Medieval and Tudor England and flourished throughout Europe from the eighteenth century. I can even recall celebrating May pageants at my own, fervently Catholic primary school in the mid-1970s but within a decade the custom had all but died out. The passing was only part-mourned by one parish priest who wondered if it were not wiser ‘to encourage people to have a strong devotion to Mary through imitating her in their own lives instead of focusing on statues’ (The Tablet 2001:577). Such thinking seems to permeate a strand of contemporary thought that seeks to rein in the more pagan aspects of Marian devotion – and with garland and petal strewn processions and maypole dances there can be little doubt that there exists within these May revels a strong link to fertility rites.

Dr Sarah Jane Boss of the Marian Study Centre suggests that the identification of Mary with the month of May was an attempt to rescue it from the pagan festivities that marked the beginning of summer. In her seminal – and I do mean seminal – work on the Cult of the Virgin, Alone of all her Sex, Marina Warner writes ‘all over medieval Europe on May Day, the Queen of the May was crowned and sometimes married to the Green Man, in an ancient fertility rite, that in some places, has survived all bans, Catholic and Protestant alike.’ It was, she suggests, this ‘frivolous’ aspect of Catholicism the Reformers loathed and tried to stamp out (Warner 1976:283).

And if the Reformers loathed it, you can bet your bottom Euro that the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I will love it to bits.

'Les Tres Riches Hueres du Duc de Berry: a hunting party of elegent and decorative young courtiers set out in a wood bright with new young leaf. They\wear budding branches in their broad-brimmed hats and some wear bright green surcoats too - the vert gai - the traditional leit-motif for the beginning of summer on the first of May' (Warner 1976:283).

In Our Lady of the Libido I argued that the discontinuation of these syncretistic practices has been to the detriment of a feminist Mariology as they represented an intimate communal celebration of the fecundity of nature: fecundity and desire, Our Lady of the Landscape, imbued with a sensual, erotic magic.

But before I come over all Glastonbury-ish, an important caveat from Ms Warner: ‘The fact that the cult of the Virgin was capable of assimilating so much classical fertility worship reveals that much thinking on the connection between mother Goddesses and matriarchs is erroneous: it is conventional wisdom among some mythographers and feminists to invoke a golden age when the social power and position of women were recognised and reflected in mythology and worship’. There is, insists Ms Warner, ‘no logical equivalence in any society between exalted female objects of worship and a high position of women’ (Warner 1976:283).

   Sadly, both Maria and I feel compelled to agree. No Golden Age, not yet, anyway. And as Ms Warner admits, ‘a goddess is no better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman’s club to which ladies are only admitted on special days’ (Warner 1976:338).  

Bibliography

Sarah Jane Boss – Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and the Gender of the Virgin Mary – Cassell (2000)

Marina Warner – Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary – Vintage (1976)