Words

 Carve the Rune then be Content with Silence - Erland Cooper

A piece of music yet to be played, think it will be at the Barbican, but the words provoke a thought.  The working of a rune on an old stone.  Usually for a burial memory to an important person,  carved on old stone in Scandinavian history. Runes come from the Germanic language and the earliest use of them is from  150 AD.  The quietness after chipping away the stone to form the runes, a silence released from noise.  The Vikings carved runes in the prehistoric tomb of Maeshow situated on mainland Orkney.  The terminology for these writings is graffiti.  And to quote the words of Hilary Mantel, which I came across this morning.

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”

We live on shifting sands, magnified by media that chatters incessantly in the background trying to make sense of it all.  This wretched government mistakes that are unfolding at the moment will be resolved eventually by a sharper sense of fairness on the part of the greater population.  At least I hope so, turning to other things.

Yesterday, this was just an exercise, when I plotted a journey to Eskdalemuir via Langholm, though I could have caught the train to Lockerbie and then a taxi to Eskdalemuir.  The landscape in Dumfries and Galloway at the time caught at my soul, the sheer loneliness of it.  There were things that were negative, great tracts of planted forestry trees, also bare hillsides where the trees had been shorn from their surface.  

The town of Langholm itself seemed a miserable place, we went into shop and buy petrol but it was about 15 miles from where we were staying, I loved the length of loneliness in the travelling time though.

Sadly there was an air of decay and abandonment in the village of Eskdalemuir where we stayed, the solitary church on the outskirts, our hosts in their house overlooking the river.  Time had forgotten, though there was the slight flourish the Tibetan monastery brought in for the renting of holiday homes - few and far between.

One thing I had been keeping my eye on was the buying of parts of the Langholm Moor for rewilding by the community.  They were charged millions by the owner of course but they acquired just over 5000 acres and there is a second lot being bid for.  The moors original role had been grouse moor but I think in Scotland people are getting just a little cross at private ownership and the disregard of all the other creatures of the moor, and slowly gamekeepers are brought to law when found poisoning prey birds illegally.

Funnily enough this train of thought comes from reading a book at the moment which is set round Langholm,  "The Crow Trap" by Ann Cleese, a nasty way of catching crows.  You shut a live bird in a cage and its flapping around will cause others to come, and they in turn get trapped.

It seemed to have been sunny on our visit, it is strange how these few days haunt my memory.  It can be truly said of Britain that wherever you go the countryside will be different.

Stones are like the fulcrum of my life.

This photo always invokes the smell of the trees and the brown river we wandered down to.

This church yard is a couple of miles from the village but has no church

Almost a good place to be buried.

The white stupa I think of as a wedding cake