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'RISING GROUND', BY PHILIP MARSDEN
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/992ef6f2-59eb-11e4-8771-00144feab7de.html#ixzz3H6CJxRTi
October 24, 2014 4:59 pm
Review by William Taylor
ornwall has its own flag as well as its own language, customs and
folklore. No doubt one day it will have its own parliament. And in
the meantime, in Philip Marsden, it has its own itinerant philosopher,
heir to the roving antiquaries of old.
It has certainly had a few of these over the years. With a copy of
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin in their knapsack, successive
individuals have gone in search of the meaning of the Neolithic stone
circles on Bodmin Moor and the Arthurian traditions of Tintagel,
as well as those granite tors and tombs scattered across the far
western tip of this island finger. It was a left to a group of
Victorian clergy, some of whom clearly had a bit too much time on
their hands, to consolidate a range of theories about the Druidic
origins of such monuments.
All these characters ornament Rising Ground, but as an interpreter
of ritual landscape Marsden himself remains cheerfully agnostic. Of
Glastonbury Tor he writes, "maybe it really is the energy lines,
those hidden channels of power that converge at this place to give
it its aura and generate its miracles. Or maybe it's simply the shape
of the hill."
Marsden himself is not a native of Cornwall (he grew up in Somerset)
but he was a frequent visitor from early childhood. In The Bronski
House (1997) he describes crossing the river Tamar into Cornwall
over an old stone bridge and relishing that feeling of passing into
an unfamiliar place: abroad.
That continuing search for "abroad" took him to Ethiopia, Armenia
and Russia (as his back catalogue attests) but he has more recently
found himself back in Cornwall again and writing within the parameters
provided by a couple of days' hike. In Rising Ground he wonders whether
all along his real interest has been in the shaping importance of
place and what he calls "the capacity of places to create mythologies
around them".
This train of thought is triggered by a move upriver, like a returning
salmon or bass, into a new home in the middle of what sounds to me
like absolutely nowhere. As his family settles in, Marsden sets out on
a parallel journey to search for this spirit of place, walking west
across the county towards that dangerous cape where land disappears
into sea.
Others who have travelled this path have got lost with their esoteric
theories in the moors, trying, like George Eliot's Casaubon, to
search out the key to these mythologies. This number includes the
Tudor topographer John Leland who ends up, burnt out and exhausted,
with an incomplete manuscript; and the 20th-century chronicler John
Blight, who finishes his days in a Penzance asylum. "Certain subjects
have the capacity to swallow you whole," Marsden warns, "and one of
these is the interpretation of ancient monuments."
However, it is Marsden's close attention to the immediacy of his
experience - the shape of the particular hill, the sound of the
curlew's cry in the early hours, the feel of heather crunching beneath
his feet - that keeps him, and us, interested in this journey.
And when his own ideas get too speculative he typically takes a scythe
to a thicket in his garden or pulls on his walking boots and heads for
the hills. By letting go of the attempt to find an epic resolution to
the quandaries he has set himself, he settles for occasional moments
of lyric apprehension. His nowhere momentarily becomes a somewhere.
And as it does, Marsden vividly shows us the importance of
particularity as a doorway into inhabiting our deepest understanding
of what it means to be a human being walking this earth.
If "crossing the Tiber" (after the river that separates the Vatican
City from the rest of classical Rome) refers colloquially to the act
of converting to Catholicism, then "crossing the Tamar" could equally
well refer to the moment of being seized by a fresh sense of the
holiness of landscape. Marsden is our apostle here, though a modest
one, more poet than preacher, as he invites us to join him in gazing
upon a succession of Cornish wonders. And not a dowsing rod in sight.
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, by Philip Marsden,
Granta, RRP£20, 368 pages
William Taylor is a clergyman in the London Borough of Hackney and
author of 'This Bright Field: A Travel Book in One Place' (Methuen)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/992ef6f2-59eb-11e4-8771-00144feab7de.html#ixzz3H6CJxRTi
October 24, 2014 4:59 pm
Review by William Taylor
ornwall has its own flag as well as its own language, customs and
folklore. No doubt one day it will have its own parliament. And in
the meantime, in Philip Marsden, it has its own itinerant philosopher,
heir to the roving antiquaries of old.
It has certainly had a few of these over the years. With a copy of
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin in their knapsack, successive
individuals have gone in search of the meaning of the Neolithic stone
circles on Bodmin Moor and the Arthurian traditions of Tintagel,
as well as those granite tors and tombs scattered across the far
western tip of this island finger. It was a left to a group of
Victorian clergy, some of whom clearly had a bit too much time on
their hands, to consolidate a range of theories about the Druidic
origins of such monuments.
All these characters ornament Rising Ground, but as an interpreter
of ritual landscape Marsden himself remains cheerfully agnostic. Of
Glastonbury Tor he writes, "maybe it really is the energy lines,
those hidden channels of power that converge at this place to give
it its aura and generate its miracles. Or maybe it's simply the shape
of the hill."
Marsden himself is not a native of Cornwall (he grew up in Somerset)
but he was a frequent visitor from early childhood. In The Bronski
House (1997) he describes crossing the river Tamar into Cornwall
over an old stone bridge and relishing that feeling of passing into
an unfamiliar place: abroad.
That continuing search for "abroad" took him to Ethiopia, Armenia
and Russia (as his back catalogue attests) but he has more recently
found himself back in Cornwall again and writing within the parameters
provided by a couple of days' hike. In Rising Ground he wonders whether
all along his real interest has been in the shaping importance of
place and what he calls "the capacity of places to create mythologies
around them".
This train of thought is triggered by a move upriver, like a returning
salmon or bass, into a new home in the middle of what sounds to me
like absolutely nowhere. As his family settles in, Marsden sets out on
a parallel journey to search for this spirit of place, walking west
across the county towards that dangerous cape where land disappears
into sea.
Others who have travelled this path have got lost with their esoteric
theories in the moors, trying, like George Eliot's Casaubon, to
search out the key to these mythologies. This number includes the
Tudor topographer John Leland who ends up, burnt out and exhausted,
with an incomplete manuscript; and the 20th-century chronicler John
Blight, who finishes his days in a Penzance asylum. "Certain subjects
have the capacity to swallow you whole," Marsden warns, "and one of
these is the interpretation of ancient monuments."
However, it is Marsden's close attention to the immediacy of his
experience - the shape of the particular hill, the sound of the
curlew's cry in the early hours, the feel of heather crunching beneath
his feet - that keeps him, and us, interested in this journey.
And when his own ideas get too speculative he typically takes a scythe
to a thicket in his garden or pulls on his walking boots and heads for
the hills. By letting go of the attempt to find an epic resolution to
the quandaries he has set himself, he settles for occasional moments
of lyric apprehension. His nowhere momentarily becomes a somewhere.
And as it does, Marsden vividly shows us the importance of
particularity as a doorway into inhabiting our deepest understanding
of what it means to be a human being walking this earth.
If "crossing the Tiber" (after the river that separates the Vatican
City from the rest of classical Rome) refers colloquially to the act
of converting to Catholicism, then "crossing the Tamar" could equally
well refer to the moment of being seized by a fresh sense of the
holiness of landscape. Marsden is our apostle here, though a modest
one, more poet than preacher, as he invites us to join him in gazing
upon a succession of Cornish wonders. And not a dowsing rod in sight.
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, by Philip Marsden,
Granta, RRP£20, 368 pages
William Taylor is a clergyman in the London Borough of Hackney and
author of 'This Bright Field: A Travel Book in One Place' (Methuen)