Landscape writing

I have been reading older seasonal journals I have written. I started this project in 2005 but as I have said this is the first one I have written/published on-line. The earlier Journals are hand-written notebooks, covering two autumns and two winters. I was surprised to see the differences in style between those older 'books' and this Journal. This Journal has to be more explanatory and more in the nature of a letter to a friend than a diary; I find myself explaining things and wondering whether my reader (hello Mum) will get a full picture of the season happening here. One reason I love living in the countryside is the immediate opportunity it has given me to explore new ways of writing about rural landscapes. My published work has covered Liverpool's history and urban landscapes and the urban and rural landscapes of Southport. But I also spent six years assembling a loose collection of more experimental urban writing called The City Notes, loosely a diary of Liverpool street journeys; I wrote up long walks and journeys taken with friends or alone across the city, wrote down odd thoughts and descriptions of city life and my experiences in other cities, recorded odd overheard stories about buildings and places, wrote down my dreams of the city drowning or being consumed by fire, or simply devoid of twentieth century buildings; anxiety dreams masquerading as city journeys. About 80 pages survive, approx 40,000 words. It is a snapshot of my life in the city nearly ten years ago, awkward and sprawling; I imagine it is unpublishable.

The Notes grew out of straightforward recording of overlooked urban landscapes (especially street names) discovered through walking, and was an attempt as a writer to find a language for the articulation of fleeting, splintered urban experiences, on a very basic level of verb and noun and adjective and the structure of sentences. I am not sure if I succeeded! I did not wish to find a new language for the city, just for my vision of it.

So now I hope to start taking these urban notions of landscape writing apart and begin to find a voice, a personal, a unique, way of writing, for rural landscapes and journeys. One immediate result is time travel; the sheer age of ordinary place here, the gentle accessibility of medieval church or Bronze Age spring/religious site. Another immediate result is this blog, this journey through a season; I hope to do more of this kind of work in the future and to develop a manner of rural landscape writing that I can be happy in and with. Watch this space!