Along the not so old straight track

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.

Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through The Woods.

Beyond blunt economics there are few clear benefits to closing down a railway line. In Britain the loss of a former branch or main line – whether due to Beeching’s axe or otherwise – tends to be mourned.

There are a few places though where the end of the trains has had a small positive side-effect: the creation of a public footpath for walkers and cyclists.

In Bristol, where I grew up, a section of the old railway line to Portishead is now part of a planned walking route – The River Avon trail. A stretch of this runs along the foot of the Avon Gorge beneath Leigh Woods. Look skyward at the right spot and you can gaze up to the underskirts of Brunel’s Suspension Bridge, the city’s iconic landmark. A little further on and you pass through an old train tunnel through the rocks.

As a teenager walking along this path I remember experiencing a brief moment of doubtful panic as we entered the tunnel – what if we were wrong? What if trains did still pass through this way? Having recently watched Stand By Me, the bridge crossing scene sprang to mind and I didn’t feel entirely at ease until we reached Pill and pavement clearly intended for pedestrians.

Not far from where I currently live in North London is Parkland Walk, which runs for around three miles between Finsbury Park and Highgate in the southern section and then with a gap before the northern section continues on from Cranley Gardens to the edge of Alexandra Palace park.

Before it became a walk, the line was once a branch of the Great Northern Railway. According to Nigel Welbourn in his book Lost Lines: London, in the 1930s plans had been mooted to transfer the line to the control of the Underground and make the route part of the Northern Line, but the idea was dropped after WWII. Crouch End station closed to passengers in 1954 and all freight traffic in 1970. Stroud Green Station closed in 1954. A fire in 1967 destroyed most of the building – which stood at the bottom of Ferme Park Road on the junction with Stapleton Hall Road – the rest was recently demolished to make way for a new development. The former station master’s house is still there on the opposite side of the road and is used as a community centre and charity offices.

Now using one of the many entrances it’s easy to leave the side streets of Haringey, or in one small stretch Islington, and pretend you’ve slipped out of North London and into a slither of countryside. If you just squint a bit and turn your head at the right angle you could almost believe that you’re on some Hardy-esque drovers’ path, or leaving The Shire on the East Road. That is until the dog shit and plastic bags waving in the trees snap you out of it.

I quite like the place for its utter inbetween-ness. An elevated former railway line, cutting through a large swathe of North London that allows anyone on it to glimpse through the bushes to the lives of those in the houses and streets that back onto the path.

However, it’s a very, very leafy and suburban kind of ex-railway line. If you’re after the thrill of passing through ‘the city’s ripped backsides’, as Iggy Pop styles it in The Passenger you won’t find it here. Parkland Walk is too far from the centre of things to conjure a spectacular juxtaposition between semi-wild green space and the city around it. For that you’ll need to visit somewhere like New York’s High Line, running through and over the streets of western Manhattan. Or in London, take a ride on the Highbury to Shoreditch High street section of the East London line, which until recently was itself a disused stretch of former railway – though as you pass through Haggerston and Dalston these days it’s more a case of the city’s gentrified backsides.

Up in London’s Northern Heights things are rather more sedate, with the facts of urban life intruding less obviously onto the former tracks. Look beyond the Buddleia and Cow Parsley though and they are there: back garden incursions onto public land – a little extra ground nicked off here and there, or more blatant abuses such as the dumping of unwanted garden refuse, old mattresses or worse.

Then there are the people. Parkland Walk doesn’t seem to suffer from the almost open warfare between Cyclists and pedestrians that exists on parts of the Regent’s Canal, but there’s a similar range of users. Depending on the time of day – late morning to early afternoon being peak hour here – cyclists mix it with dog walkers, families of strollers, Twitchers, Tai Chi practitioners, wailing toddlers, bored teenagers, earnest Crouch End graffiti artists – cursing in their finest mockney patois – and some simply escaping the city for five minutes a fag and a spit.

There are also lots of runners, many of whom, in unconscious tribute to the land’s former railway status, progress along the path as if fixed on some kind of rails themselves and find their pounding legs unable or unwilling to deviate from their invisible track. I’ve seen one or two sent flying by dogs, or other people who are not so focused, or ‘in the zone’ and instead amble absent mindedly across the path of the oncoming tracksuits.

Of course being in a big city, later at night, though sometimes in the middle of the day, Parkland Walk attracts others with more furtive purposes, but on the whole if you want some space to think, run or walk it’s an uncommonly pleasant place to be.

As you progress along its course there is an extraordinary range of plant life to take in on the walk – including an area of precious south facing acid grassland which plays host to such creatures as the rare cuckoo bee and the mining bee.

The trees that grow alongside the track play a big part in the route’s atmosphere, in some places almost reaching over to each other and forming green arches. The variety is great – with Alder, Ash, Oak, Mountain Ash, Wych Elm and Yew just some amongst their number.

Adding further to the unique identity of the walk are very human touches, from the ever morphing multi-coloured graffiti under bridges, to the Crouch Hill Spriggan, half climbing out of the stonework in an old archway. In Katherine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies, Spriggans are described as ‘grotesquely ugly’ creatures, a kind of guardian spright; not to be confused with Green Men. This one, sculpted by Marilyn Collins, has an unnerving, half-sneering grin, but perfectly embodies the feeling of somehow being between two states, or types of place, that you can pick up on the walk.

Reinforcing this edge lands feel, are the various bits of former railway paraphernalia that suddenly reveal themselves along the way, in eruptions of stone platform, or piles of crumbling brickwork. They remind me, on a much smaller scale, of the miles of ruined stone walls – remnants of old farms – that can be found in the woods of New England in North America. Some of these can be seen along the New York state and Massachusetts section of the Appalachian trial. Susan Allport writes in Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York – “Hikers come across stone walls in the woods and are surprised, puzzled until they dig back in their minds for the key that opens the lock of these mysterious works of backbreaking effort, as out of place and evocative as a shipwreck on the ocean floor.”

Most fascinating and seemingly out of place of all for me are the blocked-off tunnels at Highgate, which gated and ironclad as they are, always feel more like an invitation than the end of the line.

Map, Links and books

View Larger Map

The Friends of Parkland Walk

Parkland Walk Map

Haringey Parks in Decline

River Avon Trail

Allport, Susan – Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York, Norton, 1990

Briggs, Katherine – A Dictionary of Fairies, Allen Lane, 1976

Welbourn, Nigel – Lost Lines: London, Ian Allan, 1998

Behind Bristol’s Closed Doors

Locked door, but this one’s in Port Eliot not Bristol.

One day in the late 1970s, when I was around eight years old, I was walking up University Road with my Dad and younger brother after a trip to the eye-widening Aladdin’s Cave that was the children’s section of George’s Bookshop (now much smaller and a branch of Blackwells), at a time when book and record shops seemed to march unstoppably up Park Street. On the way back to the car we passed the side entrance of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, for some reason my brother and I decided to knock on one of the imposing wooden doors set into the wall on the right. To our surprise a man in a kind of brown lab coat answered. He turned out to be a museum curator and was working in the storerooms.

With a reluctant, but secretly delighted Father in tow, we were given a brief glimpse behind the scenes at the museum – to nick a phrase from Kate Atkinson. We saw stuffed animals in antique glass cases, stacked Victorian paintings of landscapes and domestic scenes, boxes of fossils and curious small relics of Egyptian and unknown origin.  After a few minutes we thanked the man and stepped back out into the student filled streets. Ever since this encounter, and probably from earlier in life, I’ve made an effort to get inside and have a nose at buildings and sites not normally accessible to the public.

London’s Open House and the various equivalent days in other places such as Bristol’s Doors Open Day, give people an official, but limited opportunity to take a peek inside buildings and behind doors normally closed to the public. These events are great, if you can take the queuing – but always a little frustrating. Nothing can beat the frisson of getting in somewhere you wouldn’t normally be by other means – blagging and stumbling I’d suggest, rather than going equipped – but now, if you’re interested in Bristol, there’s another option.

Launched this month, Bristol Opening Doors let’s you “go behind the scenes …revealing the secrets of the city’s best buildings through photographs, films and stories.” Featured buildings include: 29 Queen Square, Bristol Old Vic, Wills Memorial Building, All Saint’s Church, The Exchange, Old Council House, Horizon House, Colston’s Almshouses, Bristol Heart Institute and St James Priory.

The site and app can be found here: http://bristolopeningdoors.org/#

Thanks to the Bristol Culture blog for bringing it to my attention.

On failing to notice a hill in the flatlands

Cherry Hill, Ely

I recently read Peter Ackroyd’s London Under. A kind of subterranean coda to the author’s magnificent London the Biography, the book provides a tantalising glimpse into the world beneath the city; from well known structures such as Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers and the Tube, to better hidden examples like the catacombs of Clerkenwell’s House of Detention and the network of passages and chambers beneath central London that radiate out from Whitehall.

Reading the book reminded me how easy it is to fail to notice specific sites we pass by regularly. Being unaware of man-made passages beneath our feet is one thing, but ambling about, preoccupied with the stuff of everyday life, I’ve often missed intriguing places that in retrospect were really quite obvious.

In Prague a few years ago I wanted to visit the casemate at Vysehrad – a series of vaults and corridors beneath the site of a 17th century fortress on the hill. We arrived at the supposed entrance and couldn’t see any way to get inside. Disappointed I leant against the wall of the bridge we were standing beneath only for it to move. A large iron studded door creaked open behind me. We peeped in and saw a man sitting behind a desk reading a newspaper. He looked up and asked if we had come to see the Casemate.

Viewing the place from the perspective of a time-pressed western tourist, I’d been expecting to find queues and signs indicating the ‘attraction’ I wanted to visit. Thankfully at that time Vysehrad was far more discretely managed and we benefitted from a personal torch-lit walk through a vault called Gorlice – where soldiers used to assemble – to a large under lit chamber where some old and weather-worn statues from Charles Bridge are stored, like petrified, silent versions of the real men who once gathered nearby.

More recently I’ve failed to pay proper attention to an intriguing mound in Ely’s Cherry Hill Park. Ely is somewhere I have been fairly often, as my sister-in-law lives there. Until my last visit, I’ve tended to amble through the park, noting the horses in the adjacent field, along with the unmissable cathedral, but not ever really registered the strange, tree-covered little bump in the landscape.

Horses in Cherry Hill Park

On my last visit I finally clocked the mound properly and began to wonder what it was – just a random hill, a medieval rubbish dump? In a famously flat and unhilly part of the country it literally sticks out.

I asked my sister in law if she knew anything about it. As far as she knew the mound was the Cherry Hill that gave the park its name. A little further investigation revealed that Cherry HIll was also possibly the site of Ely Castle – a motte and bailey – built by William I with the intention of stamping his authority on the Isle of Ely’s recalcitrant locals.

Speculation regarding the exact purpose of the castle has inevitably tied it in to the story of Hereward the Wake and local resistance to the Norman occupiers, but there seems to be no definitive historical evidence about who built the fortification here, when or why.

An uncertain history is always manna to a writer, and Paul Kingsnorth has recently published a novel called The Wake that is set during this period and concerns events after the Norman invasion and occupation of England. The Wake can be found at http://unbound.co.uk/books/the-wake

If you find yourself in the area, Cherry Hill/Ely castle/ancient dump, whatever it is that I repeatedly failed to notice, is just one element in a pleasingly dramatic landscape. Close-by is the impressive Ely Porta – a three-storied gatehouse, while across the fields looms the great bulk of Ely Cathedral itself, which dominates the surrounding countryside.

Ely Cathedral

A great way to get a feel for Ely is by following the city’s Eel trail created by artist Elizabeth Jane Grosse. The trail was commissioned to mark Ely’s pride at its connection with the mysterious Eel itself – creatures that are still caught locally in the Great River Ouse. A series of sculptures dotted through Ely represent different stages in the life of an eel and culminate with a giant-scale eel hive in Cherry Hill park, a structure that’s large enough to be walked through.

Ely is also lucky enough to be home to a rather excellent bookshop – Topping and Company http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/ , which when you have had enough of ancient monuments and eels affords a different way to wile away time in the small city.

As for Cherry Hill, this small hump in a flat land has reminded me that wherever you find yourself – especially in a country that has been continuously occupied for as long as England – it’s worth remembering that local landmarks and distinctive places are not always immediately obvious to the casual observer. I’ll be keeping my eyes open, because who knows what lies beneath or even alongside us as we wander by.

LINKS & REFERENCES

Ely Eel Trail

Ely Castle

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth

Prague’s Casemate

Peter Ackroyd’s London Under

Subterranea

View Larger Map

What we read about when we read about ghosts

 

Highly credulous stuff, but entertaining and a great cover

This article first appeared in the Journal of the Ghost Club, first quarter 2013. I’ve been reading about ghosts since I was about eight years old, starting with, I think, the Usborne book of Ghosts. This is a little of what I’ve learnt. 

The internet has been good for ghosts; or at least those who are interested in reading about them. A quick search will throw up page after page of links to almost every kind of phantom, haunted house or supernatural entity you care to imagine.

Search ‘ghosts’ and you’ll soon learn that – to paraphrase Agent Fox Mulder – ‘You are not alone’. Perhaps the best thing about the internet if you’re interested in ghosts is that there’s always someone, somewhere talking about them. You’ll find reports, articles, photos, footage and groups online - from the academically serious to the seriously deranged. A small percentage of what you discover may even be relatively sane and well-balanced.

However, for me, when it comes to reading about the subject, you can’t beat a good book for detail, depth and interest. But what makes a good book about ghosts?

Over the years I’ve found a useful thing to do is to learn how to spot the typical negatives of what I’ll term ‘true-ghost books’ and work backwards.

Here is a quick spotters’ guide to some of the more common tropes, clichés and themes that crop up time and again in the genre. In each case, I’ve noted underneath the positive qualities brought to the subject by writers who do it rather better, making their books worth seeking out rather than avoiding.

1.    Stale material.

Once you’ve read a few books about ghosts and hauntings, you’ll quickly realise that many of the same famous ones keep turning up. In a standard round-up of British ghosts, for example, you’re pretty certain to come across at least some of the following:

Borley Rectory, 50 Berkley Square, Berry Pomeroy Castle, The Screaming Skulls of Agnes Burton, Lord Soulis of Hermitage Castle, the menagerie of ghosts at The Tower of London, the Royalty and serving staff of Hampton Court, the ‘monster’ of Glamis, the ghostly Roman legionaries of York, and – no laughing at the back – Scratching Fanny – The Cock Lane Ghost.

Of course at some point these stories will be new to people – there’s always a first time. My problem is that the same selection of hoary old tales is often included by writers and anthologists almost by default. So many writers rehash them that you begin to feel as though the old stagers concerned are haunting you personally – drifting from book to book and growing duller by the page.

What the better writers do with these famous examples is to add something fresh in terms of insight and information. Recent reports of related activity will be included, anniversary ghosts are checked out in person when due to appear and eyewitness reports are examined carefully. The stronger collections also include less well-known stories, along with more contemporary reports and sightings.

2.    Cut and paste jobs

You’d think the very least that someone putting together a volume detailing apparently real hauntings could do would be to visit the sites they cover. Far too many books simply repeat stories without their investigations taking them any further than the cuttings library.

A clue to this kind of book can be found in the way they introduce their ghosts; if a sentence begins with something like: “It is said”, “Many years ago”, or “About 1870 some boys were…”, then be sure to treat what follows with caution.

Quite a few collections on the ghosts of specific regions or cities are guilty of this sort of behaviour – the kind of thin volumes you can usually find in the town museum or tourist office. Often written by local authors or journalists, you’d think they’d have no excuse for not taking a closer look into things, but you often get the sense that even accounts of hauntings round the corner have gone unchecked.

Another thing to look out for with this type of guide is the name of the author. If, like me, you stumble across a book apparently written by persons named Mr and Mrs P. Dreadful, it’s probably best not to take it too seriously.

Again those who do it well tend to visit the sites of supposed hauntings, dig out first-hand accounts, question contemporary witnesses of phenomena and generally delve a little deeper.

3.    I want to believe

With some authors you get the impression that they’d believe much pretty anything they are told or read about. Every last Orb, moving object, shadow, strange noise and fantastical incident they encounter seems to be included and given the same weight as everything else.

The sad thing is that there may be something to the some of the stories, but with such credulous guides it’s difficult to separate a potential haunting from mere hearsay. In these books witnesses are either absent, or their accounts go unquestioned and unverified.

Andrew Mackenzie in his book Hauntings and Apparitions (one of the good ones) notes that in the years before the founding of organisations such as the SPR or The Ghost Club, writing about ghosts tended to be: “heavily encrusted with the stuff of folk belief, legend and superstition”.

The sad thing is that many modern-day books continue to fall into the same trap, accepting everything at face value and making no serious attempt to get to whatever truth may lie beneath the surface.

The more considered contributors set apparent hauntings in context; look into dates and check that stories tally up, by delving into first-hand accounts and cross referencing. Then if any witnesses are alive, they find them and talk to them.

4.    The sensationalists

In these cases, the facts don’t matter, the story is all. Sometimes such authors include details that in relying on secondary sources they cannot possibly know. A serial offender in this area is Elliot O’ Donnell. Take this example from his 1954 book Dangerous Ghosts, concerning a female ghost at Fair Snape Fell, Lancashire, a Belle Dame sans Merci style, evil faerie-temptress type who appears to a man crossing the moor:

“she smiled provocatively and beckoned to him to come to her. He needed no second bidding…”

I’ll bet he didn’t. Though of course quite how O’ Donnell knows what expressions were pulled by our spectre or how her victim felt about it, is never explained.

Entertaining though this kind of thing can be, the problem is there’s rarely any context or specific factual information supplied and accounts are often ripe with campy horror and speculative exaggeration.

There are of course some examples of authors taking the opposite course and dismissing absolutely everything and anything ghostly in a rationalist rage, which doesn’t make for much fun. On the whole though, the better balance a writer achieves between genuine interest and valid scepticism, the more worthwhile the book tends to be.

So there you have it a short guide to some of the positives and pitfalls of ‘true-ghost books.’ If you like that kind of thing it’s almost as much fun tracking them down as reading them: from White Ladies, Black Monks and Poltergeists to Angry Ghosts, Time slips and Revenants, not to mention haunted houses, inns, castles, theatres and cars, there are volumes about them all.

I’ve also found that so-called true ghost stories can turn up in the most unexpected places, in books that are in the main about something totally different – I’ve found examples in actors’ autobiographies, history books and recently a terrifying aural experience one night in Chanctonbury Ring on the south downs, in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.

If you want to read more about ghosts, head for the library, while that increasingly rare breed the local second-hand bookshop  always seems to have one or two ghost books knocking around, long after they probably should have vanished into the night. If your interest runs a little deeper, join The Ghost Club.

A few personal favourites to look out for are:

Mark Alexander -  Haunted Inns, 1973, Frederick Muller Limited

Andrew Green – Ghosts of Today, 1984, Kaye Ward

Our Haunted Kingdom, 1973, Wolfe Publishing Limited

Phantom Ladies, 1977, Bailey Brothers and Swinfen

Andrew Mackenzie – Apparitions & Ghosts and Hauntings and Apparitions

Andrew Martin – Ghoul Britannia, 2009, Short Books

Leon Metcalfe – Discovering Ghosts, 1972, Shire Books

Diana Norman – The Stately Ghosts of England, 1963, Frederick Muller Limited

Will Storr – Will Storr vs. The Supernatural, 2006, Harper

Coping with the ‘to read’ pile: confessions of an English book-eater

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” Oscar Wilde

All book lovers and avid readers, whatever type of book or subject matter they’re into, are faced with one great big non-negotiable truth – YOU’LL NEVER READ THEM ALL.

In principle this is fine. You can’t argue against time. Even in the unlikely event of a massive lottery win, which paid out enough ‘Fuck-off’ money to free somebody from the daily grind and allowed every waking hour to be spent consuming books, they couldn’t do it.

Nobody, not a modern-day Hercules of reading – a Booker judge for example – could ever hope to complete the task.

But the trouble is, if you’re anything like me, whilst acknowledging all of the above, you’ll still try, you’ll ignore the realities of everyday life and the passing of the hours and blithely continue to accumulate books like so much gathering dust.

The bulk of these will be bought on numerous unnecessary forays to bookshops, (both new and second-hand ), during raids on hapless charity store shelves and via absent-minded clicks on websites.

In acknowledging your addiction, you must also factor in the random arrivals: volumes given as gifts, acquired from friends who work in publishing, or the book trade, still more borrowed from libraries and colleagues, single volumes pressed into your hands by family members, and once in a while, whole piles of the things dumped on you by people having clear outs.

Some of these you will actually read. Most of them, most of the time, will be added to the dreaded to-read pile, next to your bed, armchair, car boot, tree-house, shed, or double-stacked and wedged forcibly into already groaning shelving.

This is why the stack never really goes down. Every time you actually read one of the books, give one or two away, or hide a few, the temptation cycle kicks-in again and blows apart your best intentions.

I can’t even manage to stop adding to the pile when I’m in the middle of reading something that I’m really enjoying. I’ll be properly drawn in, revelling in that delicious tension between the desire to race to the end of a book and not wanting it to end, when something else hoves into sight and BAM I’m sidetracked. I can handle it though, it’s fine, just a little non-fiction here, a spot of poetry there, a cheeky short story or two. Nothing to worry about.

Whatever else you do with your life, if you have a passion for reading, you’re in trouble. There’s always, always an excuse for allowing yourself to wander off into the arms of another book.

Temptation is everywhere. All it takes is a half-decent review, an interesting blog post, a table top two-for-one offer, a Booker Long-list, a personal recommendation, an end-of-year newspaper book pages round-up, or the merest hint of a great cover design, on a book a stranger is reading on their way in to work.

I recently finished reading War and Peace and allowing for its length (it took several months of small commuting chunks followed by a mammoth Christmas binge as I raced to finish the actual story and then plough on through Tolstoy’s closing remarks on the writing of history). During this time, I was fairly well behaved, honest. I only meandered away from Pierre, Andrei, Natasha and co. once or twice, for the following:

The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane

My excuse – after enjoying Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places so much, I HAD to read it as soon as it came out. He was also appearing at a festival I was going to.

Into the Wild John Krakauer

Picked it up in Oxfam Bloomsbury, read the first page, couldn’t stop. Watched the film on DVD too.

Real England: The battle against the bland Paul Kingsnorth

My big brother gave it to me. I have a gnawing hunger for reading about pubs, canals, orchards, high streets and other things that are lost or about to be.

Pure Andrew Miller

The 2011 Costa Winner came out in paperback as I was about to go on holiday at my inlaws – and I quite like graveyards.

American Gods Neil Gaiman

On the same holiday I was unable to resist an intriguing journey across the epic, ever-changing landscapes of small town USA, especially one centred on a battle for the soul of the country, between various gods of the Old World and the Mammon driven techno-fiends of the present day, fought not in the big cities but in the backwaters and in-between places of America’s Deep South and Midwest. And by-heck can Gaiman spin a story.

Communion Town Sam Thomson

Long listed for the Booker. I like multi-stranded tales set in cities, interweaving love affairs, ghosts, gangsters, mundane urban life into strange, half-recognisable dreamlike cityscapes.

White Bicycles Joe Boyd

I’m a sucker for well-written music/social history memoirs. It’s a 1960′s England’s Dreaming – another fantastic music/social history book.

Looking at the above list now, I feel a little guilty that there are no women on it, but if you look carefully at the photo at the top of this piece, you’ll see that on my current to-read pile there are a couple there at least.

I promise that in 2013 it’s going to be different, this time I’ll read the to-read pile books before I bring home any others. Unless of course I get distracted.