Faintly, Faintly, Salt

plaited paths & mermaid tails

Groyne at Walcott, Norfolk, 13 August 2024.

Hello friends, and welcome to this Full Moon in Aquarius edition of Bracken & Wrack.

Here in north east Norfolk we have had a long spell of hot dry weather, which has tempted me to take my first coffee of the day to the beach most mornings, even if only for 20 minutes or so. It’s not surprising, then, that this issue has a definite tang of sea air about it.

The August sun itself has even worked its way into the contents this time, albeit subconsciously. I’ve realised that the two poems ‘Mark’ and ‘Circle’, between them actually describe the astrological and astronomical symbol for the sun, which is a circle with a dot in the middle!

This symbol is also used in alchemy, with the specific meaning of gold - gold like the sun - as the most perfect of metals. For the alchemist, it’s said to represent the perfection of all matter, including that of the mind, spirit, and soul.

So on that glittering note, here’s a summary of what’s inside this edition of Bracken & Wrack:

• Poems of the sun-wheel and its axle

• Old Lammas

• ‘The Blackberry Picker’ - concluding episode

• The Long Coastguardman - an eerie legend from the Norfolk coast

• Sea Stories hatched in the caravan garden

Bacton mermaid, spotted 24 August 2021.

MARK

Like pins pressed into a map

our church towers impale the land 

anchoring the patchwork of fields 

and rising above everything. 

In some spots you can swivel 

and see three or four at once, 

standing sentinel, unchanging 

through famine, flood and plague, 

built in stages season after season 

from good Norfolk chalk and flint 

drawn upwards as gift, petition, 

plea for soul-favour. 

Watch-place, danger-warner. 

An echo chamber for bells 

and bells are magic 

with names of power 

inscribed incantations 

and subtle spells

released with each swing of the rope. 

How their harmonics resound

in our chests, in our ears, in our bellies, 

the clapper finding the hollow walls; 

now caressing, now hard and fast 

and the chimes are birthed, let loose, 

bringing us the chime hours. 

No wonder the storm demons 

flee from their compass. 

Magic circle with a tower at its heart - 

nothing happens without a midpoint. 

Look at those daisy wheels 

scratched into stone, circling a centre. 

Touch the middle and you may feel the very mark 

that the pattern revolves around. 

The north star is circled 

by the great bear and a proud queen, 

and if you make pilgrimage 

to Hereford, to the mappa mundi

(which is of course the entire world 

spread out before you) you can see 

the mark in the middle, the pinprick 

at the very centre of the universe. 

Imogen Ashwin

Hethel church tower, Norfolk, 19 August 2024.

On the top of Salle church tower, Norfolk, not yet daring to look down over the patchwork of fields below, July 2014.

OLD LAMMAS

If you like to celebrate Lammas on the first day of August rather than at the midpoint between the midsummer solstice and the autumn equinox, it turns out that the equivalent date before 1752 would have been 14 August. For me, the feeling as I post this newsletter still echoes this tide, and looking back at my videos from last year I found this one which explores quite a few Lammas-related traditions. Rather than covering the same ground again, I’ve popped it in here in case you’d like to see it.

The blackberries we’d picked along the way had been small, tart and sharp, so I took one only out of politeness, but when I put it in my mouth it was like no blackberry I’d ever tasted. Smooth, sweet, a burst of rich claret autumnal flavour, and in the background, faintly, faintly, salt.

‘You thought blackberries had passed, didn’t you? Or you’ve eaten them and thought you didn’t like them. No, you need to wait until the last moment, that moment between perfect and spoilt. The blackbirds know that moment. And if the mist comes right then, laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift, when you think summer’s over, and the good stuff has all gone. They’re a gift.’

Raynor Wynn, The Salt Path

THE BLACKBERRY PICKER - Part 4

It’s a funny old year here for blackberries. There are actually plenty if you’re patient and get your eye in, but certainly the long dry spell we’ve had has done the berries no favours. Plenty of them are small and dry looking or haven’t developed at all, so I haven’t felt inspired to go out with my colander as I did every single day during the harvest season a couple of years ago when I wrote this essay. How are your local brambles doing?

Anyway, here we are at the final part of The Blackberry Picker. I began serialising the story in At The Whim Of The Waves so that it would unfold in tandem with the ripening berries. I hope you’ve found it evocative of the season, and that you haven’t been confused by the out of date references to previous years. But most of all I hope that you’ve had a chance to pick and enjoy the fruits of your own local blackberry harvest of the wild places and wastelands.

Part 4

But I am not a Bronze Age woman. I have no need to be wary of the wolf, but yesterday there had been an empty, parked car pulled into the end of the track. It’s an unusual sight at this time of the evening, although you will usually spot a dog walker’s car or two around here during the day. I was certain, at least in my rational mind, that this was the exact reason. The day had been sweltering for dogs as well as for humans, and an evening promenade made perfect sense. 

Alone in the gathering dark, with woodland to my left and the gorse-fringed entrance to the heath on my right, old alarm systems had taken hold. As they should. After all, they had served my prehistoric ancestors well or I would not have been there that evening marvelling at the unbidden perfection of this dragonfly display against a rose-azure sky.

Tonight, as I turn the familiar corner, I wonder whether I will find myself alone with the dragonflies; maybe even sit on the dusty lane where some of them had skimmed fast and low, plaiting a path above the warm sticky grit. 

What I hear then, takes me by surprise. It’s not the whirring of wings. It’s more of a tap-tap-tap on the tarmac; staccato and coming closer. Something is approaching out of the half light. It’s low and level, not bounding or leaping but just that regular tap-tap-tap. The size, perhaps, of a big fluffy cat, so heavily furred that its legs almost disappear beneath its coat.

Coming out of the tree-shadowed gloom, white stripes gleam. Black and white stripes. It’s a baby badger. It’s a baby badger and I’m standing stock still in the lane and it’s coming towards me, quickening its pace. It’s almost lolloping.

I hold my breath. It feels exactly like the moment when a cat realises there’s a human nearby who may be susceptible to its charms and be ready to give it a nice stroke and tickle behind the ears. Where are a badger’s ears, anyway? It seems ridiculous that I can’t recall their exact position, having seen so many images of badgers over the years. 

There’s plenty of evidence of badger activity nearby. Setts that are known to locals, their location described to newcomers as an interesting feature to seek out and maybe one evening they will be lucky. I’ve known about the one in Acorn Wood since my first days here, and sometimes climb up the slope to try to ascertain whether there’s been recent activity or whether the tracks are weathered and neglected. But hereabouts, the badger folk keep very much to themselves, and in these rural farming communities they are probably wise.

I’d seen a badger only once before since coming to The Old Shop, and never at all in my two previous homes in the Norfolk countryside. But on the path leading to the heath, one evening last summer, I heard a rustle in the dry leaves under a tunnel of bleached-out gorse. I spun round. Out onto the track in front of me crashed a rather dazed-looking adult badger. It all happened in a flash and I was probably rather dazed-looking myself.

Never in my life had I had such a close encounter. One night, years before, a badger had crossed the road in front of our car; just a glimpse of pale fur in the headlights and away. And winding our way from the cliff top onto a Cornish beach one evening, one had allegedly been standing right across the sandy path between the foxgloves and sea grass. It would be wishful thinking if I said I saw it too. My husband was in front of me on the narrow path and my view was blocked, so I’m not convinced that I actually did witness that flicker of brindled grey as it turned tail.

My baby badger does not turn tail, and I almost feel alarmed for it. Don’t trust humans, little badger. I stay motionless, resisting the temptation to crouch down, put out my hand to stroke, murmur words of affection. 

The tap-tap-tap stops, perhaps a couple of metres or so from my trainers. The badger looks up at me, and freezes. Then it jumps, skitters around and fairly gallops back along the lane until it dives between the brambles and bracken to my right. There’s a momentary rustle before the lane again falls silent, except of course for my pounding heart.  

Well, as silent as dusk ever is. How many other gleaming eyes are peering out from the dry stalks, unobserved by me or by any other blackberry picker who has ever ventured out just as the sun is setting?

Harvest sunset, Crostwight, Norfolk.

CIRCLE

How natural it feels to inscribe a circle. 

Humans always have.

Look at the hut circles, the barrows:

dish, bowl, saucer, ring we call them

all circles by any other name.

To draw a circle around ourself is to keep out that

which makes us fearful.

It’s a place of invitation too. 

Come into the circle.

Party games: the farmer’s in his den.

Squeak piggy squeak.

Circling the maypole.

Circling the stones. 

All fall down together

if we are going to fall down at all. 

Pass this stick around the circle. 

It’s a talking stick and everyone has 

the chance to speak in turn

until the circle is joined.

Sitting around the fire

held safe and comfortable 

in a circle of flame.

Sitting in sweet darkness

in a sweat-lodge yurt  

hot fragrant smoke and steam 

spiralling out, marking the middle 

while we, the edge-people

sing and chant and exult and grieve.

Mandalas on the beach.

Oh, let’s just make a shape, any shape

but whatever other ideas you may have

it will end up as a circle.

Imagine twirling around, arms outstretched, 

eyes closed, twisting a circle into the air 

with the compass of your earthly body.

And see - a little beyond - 

the dancing rainbow hues of your soul. 

Imogen Ashwin

Circle on the beach, Newborough, Anglesey, 30 July 2024.

Circles on Old Lane, 14 August 2024.

THE LONG COASTGUARDMAN

It’s always exciting to discover a new piece of folklore from your local land. Having recently had the good luck to find The Fabled Coast: Legends and Traditions from Around the Shores of Britain and Ireland by Sophia Kingshill & Jennifer Westwood in a second hand bookshop in Wales, I found several snippets in the East Anglia chapter that I hadn’t known about at all. And that included one from just a couple of miles away, at Bacton.

In the nineteenth century there were many reports of an eerie apparition seen nightly, walking north from Bacton towards nearby Mundesley just as midnight struck. ‘He left no footprints, and could not be seen when the moon was shining. Loving a high wind, he shouted and sang at the top of his voice during storms, and in moments of calm could be heard laughing loudly.’

His history is unknown, but in History and Legends of the Broad District (1891), Ernest Suffling reports that although no-one he questioned had ever seen the apparition they had all heard of him, and many of them claimed to know someone who had witnessed his nightly walk. He was known to all as the Long Coastguardman, and I am afraid to say that his presence wasn’t an entirely benign, as he was said to sometimes cry for help in order to lure people into danger.

Of course I was curious and although I didn’t wait until midnight last night, I did go down to Bacton beach in the dark to see how it might feel at the place where the apparition began his nightly wander. Although it was full moon, heavy cloud cover and haze meant that not a chink of light got through. I lit a little fire on the sand and sat for a while as the warm August evening drew on, looking north towards Mundesley - and listening for laughter.

Bacton beach in the dark, 19 August 2024.

SEA STORIES

During the summer of 2018 (and indeed, 2019) I was living in a small caravan in my front yard. Things with the cottage renovation were not going as I’d imagined, and rather than being actively involved I was pretty much pushed aside by the builders. Fortunately I’d been able to scrape together savings from here and there to live on, and the summer was a long, hot one. I absolutely loved my wild and simple way of life with just the basic necessities. There was no electric light in the caravan so all illumination was via candle flame, and all hot water was boiled in a kettle. It was an amazing novelty to live so close to the sea - the nearest I ever had in my life, though I’d always dreamed of it - and I found myself there at some point every day.

My art practice was all over the place - well, my whole life was all over the place - but I had recently discovered the joys of Instagram, and for a while fell into channelling most of my creativity into a daily series of ‘Sea Stories’. (The rest was channelled into what I called my caravan garden, a little bit of paradise on the broken concrete outside my temporary abode.) Looking through my photos for summer images I found I had saved quite a few of these stories to my library. Strangely enough, although they were born of necessity I was quite moved by them and felt that I’d lost something by not having a daily practice like that any more. Now I have space to spread out, yet these little stories have a spontaneity that I really miss.

Time to start again, perhaps? Or maybe the stories are of their time and a new practice calls now, as life changes again in unexpected and beautiful ways.

I’d love to hear in the comments if you have any ‘tiny but mighty’ creative practices you really do keep up - if not daily, then fairly regularly. Meanwhile, in keeping with our theme, here are a few of my Sea Stories.

Until next time.

With love, Imogen x