'in the pictures they have seen of my home, there is no attempt whatever to secure harmonies of colour, or form, in furniture. My answer is, that I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon the sensual qualities of form or colour; that, when I want them, I take them either from the sky or the fields, not from my walls, which might be either whitewashed, or painted like a harlequin’s jacket, for aught I care; but that the slightest incident which interrupts the harmony of feeling and association in a landscape, destroys it all to me, poisoning the entire faculty of contemplation. From my dining-room, I am happy in the view of the lower reach of Coniston Water, not because it is particularly beautiful, but because it is entirely pastoral and pure. Were a single point of chimney of the Barrow iron-works to show itself over the green ridge of the hill, I should never care to look at it more.'

'Right in the middle of the crisscross of greenery here Poussin suddenly interjects a partial opening into the sky, and not content with the offer of a roofline and white light that this enables, he puts a marvelous tiny square of white into the architecture, as if finally we are looking at the sky through an empty (ruined?) window.  Or maybe somehow a pane of glass is glinting in the sun.  The blip of white connects with one or two others close by, picking out the sky higher up in the foliage.  But the window is essentially gratuitious - profoundly unnecessary, un-structural.  It is pure delight.'

EA performed by Richard Skelton and the Elysian Quartet: Rivers have occupied much of Richard’s recorded work, including the fledgeling moorland streams of ‘Landings’, the narrow, quick Cumbrian rills and becks of ‘Limnology’, and the tidal-bore of ‘From Which the River Rises’. ‘EA’ continues this fascination with a study of Suffolk’s river Alde as it slows and widens past Snape on the final, estuarine portion of its journey to the sea. It is perhaps his most delicate and lyrical invocation of a waterway. The word ‘ea’ itself is Anglo-Saxon for ‘river’.

Above / Below performed by the Elysian Quartet: During his residency at Snape last December, Richard spent much of his time wandering along the Alde and through the nearby marshland towards Iken. Over the ensuing winter he began writing a textual score based on the names of birds and plants he observed in-situ, found referenced in public information signage, or discovered during later research by consulting books such as W.M. Hind’s The Flora of Suffolk . The Elysian Quartet selected eight species from the score and began working with Richard to develop a musical vocabulary that engages with them, hinting at the diversity of plant and avian life in Snape and its surroundings. The result is a series of miniatures, shifting focus from one species to another, from the earth-bound and air-borne – a sensitively observed journey through a specific environment. The species they chose were: common sorrel, curlew, heron, nettle, oystercatcher, redshank, yarrow and yellow flag. 

Mimesis performed by Richard Skelton and the Elysian Quartet: ‘Mimesis’ is informed by Richard’s experience of the intense tidal surges of early December 2013, during which Snape Maltings itself was nearly inundated. Intimations of this flood-violence are found in the following public information sign along the marshland boardwalk: ‘The River Fights Back: In places along the banks of the river Alde, land was once claimed from the river to create farmland. Defences were built to protect this claimed land. Over the centuries the river has broken through again. The remnants of the defences are still visible, stretching out into the estuary.’During his stay in December, Richard produced a collection of charcoal drawings, the majority of which seemed to describe the same river-like form undergoing a series of contortions. The ensemble have used these images as a kind of graphic score, producing a new work which evokes a river undergoing violent transformation.

'Downhill at the end of plunging tunnels of trunks and branches and over the foliage of the ledges, the lowest stems of which seemed almost rooted in the sea, the European continent fell to fragments in spikes and small tufted islets far below, standing in translucent, pale green water, which darkened as it receded from the rocks to bottle green and the blue of peacock's neck feathers and fled away to the skyline.  The almost still water was stirred by incoming creases as slight as a breath on silk, just enough to hem the join of rock and water with a thin bracelet of white, but too little to interfere with the symmetry of the semi- and three-quarter circles that the rocks sent spinning slowly out to sea again.  Only the ghost of their sigh floated up through the mews and the wheeling sunlit wings of the seagulls.'

‘What would he not have written had the majestic Thames employed his muse’, exclaimed the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, getting the matter exactly wrong. The lines from Burns quoted at the close of the ‘Postscript’ to the River Duddon sonnet sequence ought to have alerted the reviewer to Wordsworth’s poetic intent. In the verse letter ‘To William Simson, Ochiltree’, Burns declares that, ‘Illisus, Tiber, Thames, an’ Seine’ having all been celebrated in ‘monie a tunefu’ line’, he and his fellow poet should now rather seek the Muse ‘Adown some trottin burn’s meander’ in their own locality,
to ‘gar our streams and burnies shine / Up wi’ the best’.  Wordsworth read this poem almost as soon as it was published in 1786, quoted from it throughout his life, and adopted its forthrightness as he began his celebration of the river with the
barbarous name.'

1. Wordsworth's first sonnet announces his theme - not the spring of Bandusia, not some Persian fountain, not an Alpine torrent, but 'long-loved Duddon'.
2. This river is 'remote from every taint / of sordid industry' and has remained unchanged, long after the surrounding forests have vanished 'where stalked the huge deer to his shaggy lair / through paths and alleys roofed with darkest green.'
3. Wordsworth sits and prepares to 'paint' the river in words.  No monument marks its birthplace but instead the river itself has 'shed a gleam / of brilliant moss, instinct with freshness rare.'  
4. The Duddon is like a snake, threading 'with sinuous lapse the rushes, through / dwarf willows gliding, and by ferny brake.'  
5. After the solitude of 'sullen moss and craggy mound' the river becomes shaded by green alders, ashes and 'birch-trees risen in silver colonnade'.
6. He describes the flowers that grow by the side of the river: wild strawberries, thyme and 'trembling eyebright ... sapphire blue'.
7. A 'love-sick Stripling' might envy the plucked rose lying on his lover's breast, or imagine himself her caged bird singing, but those with 'calmer mind' would rather be an 'unculled floweret or darkling wren / that tunes on Duddon's banks her slender voice.'
8. The poet wonders what kind of man first came upon this stream.  Whatever his ancient beliefs, the river's role was then as it is now, to heal, restore, soothe and cleanse.
9. There are some stepping stones in the river.  Crossing here, when a flood runs 'fierce and wild', the Child puts 'his budding courage to the proof', whilst 'Declining Manhood learns to note the sly / and sure encroachments of infirmity.'
10. The stepping stones again, and this time two young lovers cross, she blushing and holding out her hand, he teasingly withdrawing it, and then both of them feeling the thrill when their hands touch.  
11. A flight of fancy in which tiny dancing elves are imagined dancing by their 'sunless cleft' and stealing a baby.
12. As if realising that this sort of thing will try our patience, he exclaims: 'On, loitering Muse--the swift Stream chides us--on!'  It is all too easy for the river's features to become the 'toys of Fancy.'
13. We zoom out to an open prospect of fields and a hamlet under a green hill.  Wordsworth imagines the pleasures of a warm hearth here in cold weather, 'when bleak winds roar / through the stiff lance-like shoots of pollard ash'.
14. The river seems to seek its own solitude, attended only by its own voice, leaving behind the solitary shepherd and his cottage.
15. From a 'deep chasm, where quivering sunbeams play', he sees a kind of 'gloomy niche' in the rock where some ancient statue might have been placed, sculpted by men perhaps, or fire, or the waters of the Deluge.
16. A continuation of the theme, in which Wordsworth describes the caves and rock drawings of Native Americans.
17. He hears the croak of a raven on a blasted yew and an eagle 'shedding where he flew / loose fragments of wild wailing.'  Sheep sleep by the remains of the old Roman fort and the ancient stone circle of the Druids.
18. The sonnet is entitled 'Seathwaite Chapel' and suggests that the vale of the River Duddon protects 'Truth's holy lamp', alluding to the ministry of the Reverend Thomas Walker of whom Wordsworth wrote a short memoir, appended to the poem sequence.
19. A tributary: 'waters, from their aery height / hurrying, with lordly Duddon to unite.'  Its musical murmur announces a source of refreshment to the thirsty fields.
20. On the flowery plain of Donnerdale, the waters are slow and serene, but further on the course is rougher and the river dances from rock to rock.  
21. 'The cloudy stall / of Time, breaks forth triumphant Memory' and Wordsworth recalls those he once roved with on the banks of the River Duddon.
22. In a sonnet called 'Tradition' the story is told of a love-lorn Maid who yearns for a primrose reflected in a clear, blue pool and, it is implied, drowns there.
23. Banishing such sad thoughts, he recalls the 'blithe cheer' of boys shouting and dogs barking whilst sheep are washed in a pool formed where bands of rock check the stream.
24. Now he finds a good place to rest, 'with woodbine hung and straggling weed ... half grot, half arbour', enclosing both the body and the mind.
25. Here he can imagine 'the One for whom my heart shall ever beat / with tenderest love' being brought.  But without her, 'the waters seem to waste / their vocal charm.'
26. Memories of childhood: 'fondly I pursued, / even when a child, the Streams--unheard, unseen; / through tangled woods, impending rocks between.'  He has learnt much from the river.   
27. He describes a ruined castle, 'quietly self-buried in earth's mould'. 
28. He rises to continue his onward journey, while cattle avoid the heat of the day by crowding together 'under rustling trees / brushed by the current of the water-breeze.'  
29. There are no stories of battles fought over this landscape, but to those who lie buried and unremembered,'the passing Winds memorial tribute pay'.
30. In life, Wordsworth suggests, it is best not to yield to sudden temptations or swerve away too far from innocence.  He is content to 'saunter o'er the grassy plain' here, chained loosely to the river, knowing when he leaves that he will always return to it.
31. The 'Kirk of Ulpha' is a welcome sight and he imagines reclining among its graves or marking the distant moonlit mountain summits, faintly shining, 'soothed by the unseen River's gentle roar.'  
32. This penultimate sonnet is pure landscape: a description of the lower reaches of the river, 'gliding in silence with unfettered sweep'.
33. The original sequence ends with the sea that the Duddon flows into - here there are no warships, just humble sailing boats.  Wordsworth would like to end his days like the river, 'prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind / and soul, to mingle with Eternity!'

Dim ond lleuad borffor
Ar fin y mynydd llwm,
A sŵn hen afon Prysor
Yn canu yn y cwm 

• Robert Adams - the major survivor from the New Topographics group whose 'pessimism about culture's impact on nature has evolved into a broader melancholy.' 

• Mark Klett - part of the Rephotographic Project that returned to document the sites originally photographed for the U.S. Geological Survey; his images are not 'elegies for a raped landscape', instead they show how the West can be Sublime even with modern additions like a TV antenna.

• Robert Dawson - a documentary photographer whose work describes 'the ecological and social complexity of the California landscape'.  There is a Design Observer article by Mark Klett on the Water in the West project that Dawson founded with Ellen Manchester.

• Peter Goin - a Water in the West photographer whose 'Nuclear Landscapes is an anthology of deadpan images of nuclear-war production sites.'  Solnit has some reservations about this - the 'captivity' of such work within the art world may undermine its educational value.

• Richard Misrach - a photographer greatly admired by Solnit and whose work features in another of her essays,'Scapeland', his 'lush documents of political catastrophe point out that politics has invaded the landscape.'

• Linda Connor - focusing on 'manifestations of the spiritual on the land', she is, like Misrach, a photogapher with whom Solnit has collaborated (an encounter with Connor's work in 1986 'opened the door' to a new understanding of landscape and representation).

• Meridel Rubenstein - her Critical Mass project on Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb, is deeply Solnitesque (is there such a word yet?) and features in another excellent Solnit essay, 'Lisa Meitner's Walking Shoes.' 

• Masumi Hayashi - her images of the Japanese internment camps comprising mosaics of narrow-angle snapshots 'seem to address the reconstructedness of memory, the fractures of truth'.

• Zig Rising Buffalo Jackson - his photographs of signs on the borders of Indian reservations expose the arbitrariness of any boundaries, 'testimony that the story is invisible and the sign has only begun to tell you where you are.'

• Anthony Hernandez - like Misrach, he produces 'gorgeous images of the bleakest parts of American culture' but the focus for Hernandez is on the poor and disenfranchised, as in his series Landscapes for the Homeless   

• Cynthia Rettig - her photographs of family vacations at an artificial lake near the Hoover Dam, where shooting and gun play was all part of the fun, recall the original conquest of the West: 'people repeating a history they cannot remember at a vast lake that is itself the result of manipulating the landscape.'

A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river, which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so near a house. The moon, which I had seen, a pallid crescent, all afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put it, à la belle étoile.  [...]

All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell pattering over me from the oak. Yet, on this first night of October, the air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.

I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more than any wolf. [...]  I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog - for I knew his bark - making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the hill-top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with gold. In these high regions of the air the sun was already shining as at noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space.

A is for Arthur's Chair.  A few days after setting out from Hereford, Gerald and Baldwin had reached Brecknockshire.  He describes there a 'lofty spot most difficult of access, so that in the minds of simple folk it is thought to have belonged to Arthur, the greatest and most distinguished King of the Britons'.  Cadair Arthur was the name given to this place, formed by two peaks (Pen y Fan and Corn Du), and at the summit there was a well-shaped pool, fed by a spring, in which trout were sometimes seen.  Gerald mentions King Arthur at several points, drawing on what Geoffrey of Monmouth had written in his History of the Kings of Britain.  More intriguing are descriptions he gave in two later books of the discovery of Arthur's tomb, in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey (Glastonbury, he writes, was once called Ynys Gutrin, 'the Island of Glass, no doubt from the glassy colour of the river which flows around it in the marshland.')

B is for the island of Barry. 'In a rock by the sea where one first lands on the island there is a small crack. If you press your ear to it, you can hear a noise like blacksmiths at work.'  As will be seen below, Gerald usually has stories to associate with unusual landscape phenomena, but this one is simply recorded for what it is.  'One would well imagine that a sound of this sort would come from the sea-waters rushing into hidden orifices beneath the island, but it is no less loud when the waves draw back, and it can be heard just as well when the shore is dry as when the tide is up.'

C is forCaerleon.  The ancient City of the Legions, Caerleon 'is beautifully situated on the bank of the River Usk.  When the tide comes in, ships sail right up to the city.  It is surrounded by woods and meadows.  It was here that the Roman legates came to seek audience at the great Arthur's court.'  Gerald describes a lot more of the Roman city than can be seen today, including its impressive walls.  He found evidence of immense palaces, 'a lofty tower, and beside it remarkable hot baths, the remains of temples and an amphitheatre.' 

D is for St. David.  According to Gerald, this devout man (said to have been the uncle of king Arthur), 'preferring the eremetical existence to the pastoral one', moved the archbishopric from Caerleon, the City of the Legions, to 'a remote corner of the country, looking out towards the Irish Sea.  The soil is rocky and barren.  It has no woods, no rivers and no pasture-lands.  It is exposed to the winds and to extremely inclement weather.'  It was this alleged archbishopric, independent of Canterbury, that Gerald  himself strove unsuccessfully throughout his life to re-establish.  There was a story that Gerald includes in which St. David himself changed the landscape: one day 'in full view of an astonished congregation, the ground on which he was standing rose up in the air.'

E is for Eyri. 'I must not fail to tell you about the mountains which are called Eyri by the Welsh and by the English Snowdon, that is the Snow Mountains.'  Eyri means haunt of the eagles, and Gerald writes of one remarkable eagle that perches on a particular stone every fifth feast day, 'hoping to satiate its hunger with the bodies of dead men, for on that day it thinks that war will break out.  The stone on which it takes its stand has a hole pierced nearly through it, for it is there that the eagle cleans and sharpens its beak.'

F is for a floating island.  This can be found in the mountains of Snowdonia where the strong winds continuously blow it from one bank of a lake to another.  'Shepherds are amazed to see the flocks which are feeding there carried off to distant parts of the lake.  It is possible that a section of the bank was broken off in times long past and that, bound together in a natural way by the roots of the willows and other shrubs which grow there, it has since become larger by alluvial deposits.'

G is for the Golden Rock. This is 'a rocky eminence that dominates the River Severn' which has a gold sheen when struck by the sun. Gerald thinks that 'if someone who was skilled in such work would only dig down into the mineral deposits and penetrate the very entrails of the earth, he might extract sweet honey from the stone and oil from the rock.'

H is for hawk.  At Haverfordwest, the falcons are 'remarkable for their good breeding, and they lord it over the river birds and those in the open fields.'  Gerald concludes one chapter of the book with the story of how one of these noble birds killed Henry II's carefully bred Norwegian hawk.  'As a result from this year onwards Henry II always sent to this region at nesting-time for some of the falcons which breed on the sea-cliffs.  Nowhere in the whole kingdom could he find more noble or more agile birds.  That is enough about falcons.  Now I must return to my journey.' 

I is for the mountains of Ireland.  These can be seen on a clear day from St David's and Gerald writes that when William Rufus came to this spot and looked across the sea from the headland he said "I will collect a fleet together from my own kingdom and with it make a bridge, so that I can conquer that country."  Gerald himself had been in Ireland for a year, travelling there as chaplain and adviser to Prince John in 1185.The Journey Through Wales was Gerald's third book, written after two books on Ireland.

J is for Jerusalem. Gerald had himself taken the cross and his whole party expected to leave for the Holy Land when their mission in Wales was complete.  In 1189 he and Archbishop Baldwin sailed for France but Gerald was sent back to England by the new king Richard, following the death of Henry II.  Baldwin went on and died at the siege of Acre in 1190.  Two years earlier, as he and Gerald approached Bangor along a valley with many steep climbs, they had dismounted in order to practise walking in the exhausting conditions they expected to find on the road to Jerusalem.  'We walked the whole length of the valley and we were very tired by the time we reached the farther end.  The Archbishop sat himself down on an oak-tree, which had been completely uprooted and overturned by the force of the winds, for he needed to rest and recover his breath.'  He asked for a tune to soothe his tired ears and a bird in a near-by coppice started to sing.

K is for the knight and the King.  Gerald tells of 'a knight from Brittany' who was sent by Henry II to see how the land round Dinevor Castle was fortified.  He was conducted by a Welsh priest who took him along the most difficult and inaccessible paths.  'Whenever they passed through lush woodlands, to the great astonishment of all present, [the priest] plucked a handful of grass and ate it, thus giving the impression that in time of need the local inhabitants lived on roots and grasses.'  The knight reported to the King that the land was uninhabitable and the King made the local Welsh leader swear an oath of fealty but left him to his own affairs.

L is for Llanthony. Gerald praises the location of this monastery in the vale of Ewias, so suitable for a life of contemplation.  'As they sit in their cloisters in this monastery, breathing the fresh air, the monks gaze up at distant prospects which rise above their own lofty roof-tops, and there they see, as far as any eye can reach, mountain-peaks which rise to meet the sky and often enough herds of wild deer which are grazing on their summits.'

M is for Manorbier.  Gerald devotes a whole passage to the beautiful landscape surrounding the fortified mansion of Manorbier, visible from a distance on a hill near the sea.  'You will not be surprised to hear me lavish such praise upon it, when I tell you that this is where my family came from, this is where I myself was born.  I can only ask you to forgive me.'  He mentions a fish pond, an orchard, and a ready supply of wheat and wine.  'A stream of water which never fails, winds its way along a valley, which is strewn with sand by the strong sea-winds.'  There is a rocky headland: 'boats on their way to Ireland from almost any part of Britain scud by before the east wind, and from this vantage-point you can see them brave the ever-changing violence of the winds and the blind fury of the waters.'

N is for Newgale Sands Here in the winter of 1171-2 a great wind blew 'with such unprecedented violence that the shores of South Wales were completely denuded of sand, and the subsoil, which had been buried deep for so many centuries, was once more revealed.  Tree-trunks became visible, standing in the sea, with their tops lopped off, and with the cuts made by the axes as clear as if they had been felled yesterday.  The soil was pitch-black and the wood of the tree-trunks shone like ebony.'  This wind was so fierce that it blew fish into the bushes and high rocks, and people came down to collect them. 

O is for one-eyed fish. A lake among the mountains of Snowdonia 'abounds in three different kinds of fish, eels, trout and perch, and all of them have only one eye, the right one being there but not the left.  If the careful reader asks me the cause of such a remarkable phenomenon, I can only answer that I do not know.'

P is for the two pools that burst their banks.  This happened in the Elfael district on the night that Henry I died (1st December 1135).  One was artificial and its water simply rushed down the valley leaving it empty.  'But, remarkably enough, the natural lake reformed itself, with all its fish and whatever else lived in it, in a certain valley not more than two miles away.'  

Q is for quicksand.  Gerald and Baldwin took the coast road from Margam Abbey, fording the river Avon, where they were delayed by the ebbing water, and approached the river Neath.  There they encountered quicksand where Gerald's own pack-horse 'was almost sucked down into the abyss.'  They got him out, but 'not without some damage done to my books and baggage.'  Hurrying made things worse - 'it is better to advance more slowly and with great circumspection over such dangerous terrain as this.'  Eventually they made it to the Neath which they crossed in a boat since it was too dangerous to ford, 'for the passages through the river change with every monthly tide and they cannot be located after a heavy fall of rain.'

R is for Rhyd Pencarn.  Near Newport, Gerald describes a stream that is 'passable only be certain fords, more because of the way in which it has hollowed out its bed and of the muddiness of the marshland which surrounds it than through the depth of its waters.'  Rhyd Pencarn, the 'ford beneath the hanging rock', was the subject of a prophecy by Merlin Sylvester (Gerald believed there had been two Merlins in Wales - this one was Scottish).  Merlin had said that the Welsh would not be beaten by a strong man riding over it with a freckled face, a description that matched the appearance of Henry II.  When Henry did cross the ford in 1163, the Welshmen who watched his approach knew that they would be defeated.  

S is for the magic stone of Anglesey.  This stone in the shape of a human thigh-bone will always return no matter how far it is taken away.  Henry I tested it by throwing it into the sea, attached by chains to a much larger stone - the next morning it was back in its usual place.  'It is also said that if a couple come to have intercourse on this spot, or near by, which they do frequently, great drops of sweat drip from the stone.'  As will be clear by now, Gerald's Wales is scattered with strange rocks and stones.  Also on the island of Anglesey you can find Listener's Rock, and 'if you stand on one side and shout, no one on the other side can hear you.' 

T is for the river Teifi.  In describing this 'noble river', Gerald writes a lengthy digression on the habits of beavers, for this is the only place in Wales where they can be found.  These clever creatures plan their lodges so that they just protrude from the water, building several stories linked with connecting doorways.  'As the years pass and the willow-wands keep on growing, the lodge is constantly in leaf and becomes, in fact, a grove of willow trees, looking like a natural bush from the outside, however artificially constructed it may be within.'

U is for the river Usk. Gerald says that salmon abound there in summer (whereas the Wye has them in winter).  The finest salmon in Wales can be found in the river Teifi and there is a spot there called Cenarth Mawr where a waterfall roars unceasingly and the fish leap the height of a tall spear into the concave rock above.  When Gerald and his companions reached Usk castle and preached the Crusade a large number of men took the cross, including robbers, highwaymen and murderers.  The road then took them to Newport via Caerleon and they had to cross the river Usk three times.

V is for the Valley of Roses. This was the site chosen for the cathedral of St David's.  Gerald observes that 'a better name for it would be the Valley of Marble, for it is in no sense rosy or remarkable for roses, whereas there are plenty of rocks all over the place.'  One of these rocks was used as a bridge over the River Alun and called Llech Lafar, the Talking Stone. One of the prophecies of Merlin held that a king of England who had just conquered Ireland would die as he walked over this bridge.  As he had at Rhyd Pencarn, Henry II defied this superstition by boldly walking forward.  Calling Merlin a liar, he entered the cathedral to pray and hear Mass.

W is for the waterfowl of Brecknock Mere.  There was an old saying that the rightful ruler of the land could order these birds to sing.  One winter Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Tewdwr (a great uncle of Gerald) did just this.  The water of this lake 'sometimes turns bright green, and in our days it has been known to become scarlet, not all over, but as if blood were flowing along certain currents and eddies.  What is more, those who live there sometimes observe it to be completely covered with buildings or rich pasture-lands, or adorned with gardens and orchards.  In the winter months, when it is covered with ice, and when the surface is frozen over with a smooth and slippery coat, it emits a horrible groaning sound, like the lowing of a vast herd of cattle all driven together in one place.  It is possible, of course, that this is caused by the cracking of the ice and the sudden violent eruptions of enclosed pockets of air through vents imperceptible to the eye.'

X is for Exmes.  Gerald's digressions occasionally take him outside Wales itself - Exmes is actually a castle in Normandy.  Near it there is a certain pool whose fish fought each other so violently on the night Henry II died, 'some in the water and some even leaping in the air, that the noise which they made attracted to the spot a vast crowd of local people.'  This story parallels that of the two pools in Wales (see 'P' above), associated with the death of Henry I. 

Y is for Ynys Lannog. This place, Priest's Island in English, lies off the coast of Anglesey.  Gerald says that if the hermits who live there quarrel, a species of mice who live there will come and consume most of their food and drink 'and befoul the rest.' When the argument is over the mice disappear. 'No women are ever allowed on the island.'

Z is for Zeuxis.  The Journey Through Wales ended where it began, in Hereford.  After completing his account, Gerald wrote a second, shorter book, The Description of Wales.  In its Preface he says that some readers of his earlier topographical writings took exception to the choice of subject matter.  'They see me as a painter who, rich in precious colours, the master of his art, a second Zeuxis, strives with great skill and industry to portray a humble cottage or some other subject by its very nature base and ignoble, when they were expecting me to paint a temple or fine palace.'  But Gerald, on the contrary, was proud of having adorned the rugged country of Wales with 'all the flowers of my rhetoric'.

Fiennes's camera tracks slowly around its bunkers and underground passages with their pools of water, shattered urns, piles of broken glass, puzzling numbers on the walls that evoke the tattoos of concentration camp inmates and so on. Her visual style brings to mind the lengthy contemplative shots in Tarkovsky's Stalker, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice, and we think of blitzed cities, battlefields, the death camps, the post-industrial world and the impermanence of civilisation. The film's title is a quotation from the Bible and one inevitably remembers Eliot's line in The Waste Land: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

'Taking responsibility for a portion of Sierra ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. ...  This Thoreau-inspired wilderness encampment, real as it appears, is underwritten by the requirement to represent itself as a topic for thesis writers, a reluctant paradigm.  A magnet for approved visitors, students, localists, or anyone needing to understand if this thing can be managed: a self-funding, functioning centre that is not a retreat, but a resettlement...'

'The Claude Glass was an optical device which took various forms, of which perhaps Thomas Gray's was the most typical: 'a Plano-convex Mirror of about for inches diameter on a black foil, and bound up like a pocket-book.'  The convexity miniaturised the reflected landscape.  Except in the foreground, details were largely lost, and something like a beau ideal emerged, freed from particularities and deformities. [...] Its 'complex view' helped the apprentice painter; and, for the non-painting tourist, its darker tinting and distortion helped to superimpose something like a Claudean idiom on British landscape.' - Malcolm Andrews The Search for the Picturesque

 

 

'Speedwell, give me my glasses.  Where's my Gray?  (Speedwell gives glasses.)  Oh! Claude and Poussin are nothing.  By the bye, where's my Claude-Lorrain?  I must throw a Gilpin tint over these magic scenes of beauty.  (Looks through the glass.) How gorgeously glowing!  Now for the darker. (Looks through the glass.)  How gloomily glaring!  Now the blue.  (Pretends to shiver cold.)  How frigidly frozen!  What illusions of vision!  The effect is unspeakably interesting.'

 'I'll throw a Gilpin tint on him.  (Looks through the glass.)  Yes, he's gorgeously glowing.  I must not view him with the other lights, for a husband should not be either glaringly gloomy, or frigidly frozen; nor should I like to be haunted by a blue devil.'