Common Ground, Rob Cowen

Following his move to London to the outskirts of Harrogate Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory.  About to become a father for the first time, disorientated, hemmed in by wimter and yearning for open space he ventures out to a nearby edge-land.  Over the following months he discovers its many layers and lives: animals, plant and human.  As the birth of his child approaches his relationship with this space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound.  This is a portrait of people and place through time and an exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

I found this a fascinating read and it has many connections for me: with my own interests and my work on walking and wilderness.  It inspired me to explore and photograph my own local edge land more full over the summer and early autumn.

Below are my main points from the book.

• A feeling of being alive and in the moment. P.5
• Perhaps because of the proliferation of those myths, mine was the last generation to lay claim to the edges in a meaningful sense.  A great societal shift indoors was already in motion.  P.5
• Together they encircled the unmistakeable form of a holloway (ref MacFarlane).  This exuded the same mysterious gravitational pull of all ancient paths; I was drawn into its high-hedged heart, aware I must be tracing footsteps sculpted over millenia. (ref BOW, walking, Macfarlane's The old Ways)  P.7
• For many years I had sought and written about wildness encountered in the more expected places: the rarified national park, the desolate moor, the distant mountaintop, the sweeping coast but I'd forgotten that there is something deeper about the blurry space surrounding us all where human and nature meet.............Enmeshed in every urban edge is also the continuous narrative of the subsistence of nature, pragmatic and prosaic, the millions of things that survive and even thrive in the fringes.  P9
• There is a depth that comes from revisiting a place relentlessly.  P.9
• Once upon a time the edges were the places we knew best.  They were our common ground.  Times were hard and spare but the margins aorund homesteads, villages and towns sustained us.  People grazed livestock and collected deadfall for fuel.  Access and usage became enshrined as rights and recognised in law.  P11
• Humans a re creatures of habit: we still go to the edges to get perspective, to be sustained and reborn......clouds, hyper-real TV shows, 3D films, multiplayer games, online stores and social media networks - these are today's areas of common ground, the terrains where people meet, work, hunt, play, learn, fall in loce even.  P.12
• You see, I still believe in the importance of edges.  Lying just beyond our doors and fences, the enmeshed borders where humans and nature collide are microcosms of our world at large, an extraordinary, exquisite world that is growing closer to the edge every day...........nature isn't just some remote mountain or protected park.  it is all round us.  It is in us.  It is us. (weeds growing out of the pavement down our road).  P.12
  
• Most people don't even notice such things, but just look around you.  The moss-swollen pavement crack, the rosette of a dandelion defying a driveway or a gutter-growing sow thistle, these are glimpses of what lies beneath and beyond.  The deep past and the far future.  P15
• A long, rectangular block of masonry and concrete, green with algae, was almost entirely consumed by bare vegetation.  P.19
• The railway's closure in 1964 heralded an unglamorous downfall.  Unneeded, unnoticed, I found it shut off, shackled and destitute, left to the plumes of dead Oxford ragwort and buddleia that bristled from its cracks.P.21
• The red fox....However, unlike many rural mammals in the UK, which have seen a sharp decline brought about by hunting, modern farming methods and the privatisation and monoculturism of land, the fox has adapted to whatever environment we have thrust upon it, sticking for the most part to its own set of territorial rules.  P29
• This centuries old (scots pine) tree begs to differ.  With its resplendent poise and beauty, it is the very essence of wildness and craggy moor, a poster boy from the ancient Caledonian Forest.  P31
• Perhaps, but the edge-land provides a mental and physical transendence greater than I've felt in any gallery.  P34
• The corrals or 'parks' were therefore prime spots for the hunt, carefully maintained and policed by 'Foresters', the local workers who lived on and around the land.  These men enforced William's brutal forest law over the rest of the community.......P122
• It's a fact that never fails to jolt my brain: the idea of private ownership of land as we know it today is only a few hundred years old.......Britain's patchwork of farms, fields and woods today is an almost entirely privatised plave, three quarters of which is owned by the wealthiest 1% of the population.  P126
• They knew of equinoxes and solstices and rejoiced in those heady high points in the wheel of the year.  The felt a sense of belonging difficult for our removed minds to comprehend or understand............Everything changed with enclosure.  P128
• Wealth would be made from the land...............Many thousands were dispossessed and the peasantry reduced to selling labour to a rising class of tenant farmers who, requiring far fewer men to manage sheep no longer needed their work.  P129
• Our profound alienation from the earth continues.  We're the landless and listless, so estranged from our planet, so removed from the decision-making that governs it, so isolated from each other and the life we share this world with that we're seemingly unable even to come together and prevent global human and environmental catastrophe.  P.135
• There is that rich smell of wood from the houses, the clean linen aroma of detergent swilling down our drains.  Our tangle with the lnd is a messy business.....  P136
• There are voices today that call for 're-wilding', the rmoval of the human hand from the land altogether......vanished species reintroduced......trees spring up over sheep-cleared hills.....part of me craves this too; I want to believe that this could only be a good thing, but there are nagging doubts: where are we in this picture?........................ ..........................................................................  P137 Whole page relevant
• It is a paradigm for where past realities meet our now mediated existencies.  Perhaps there's something in that.  Of course we have to live in this modern world, but we must get our boots dirty too.  We need to slip between these semi-permeable states, for just as we need our homes and X-rays, we need the intimacy of nature, the empathy and the sense it brings of our participation in a larger, living world.  Crucially we need to be in in order to connect on this physical, emotional level, down among the soil and the stems.  P.139
• .......the sublime where you least expect it; when you most need it.  P. 195
• That feeling of being fully in the moment and fully aware the moment won't last. (Over Owler Tor Sunrise)  P.204
• Right now I can sense something bigger in the curvature of the horizon, the birdsong, the unearthly crawling of insects and the immeasurable flowers.  Something exquisite, enriching, frightening, indifferent, immortal.  And I realise it doesn't care whether I'm here or not.  Nature/the planet is indifferent.  ref Gaia.  Also talk by Ray Mears, 2.11.17, on caring for the environment: "Whatever we do to damage it the planet will rock on.  It is the ecosystem that we depend on that will cease to exist.  The planet has managed perfectly well without the dinosaurs"  Also a point made in my CS extended essay: "We may be the first species to orchestrate its own extinction."  P.204
• We project all we are and all we know onto landscape.  And. if we're open to it, the landscape projects back into us.  Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love.  Again Ray Mears: "Being involved in bushcraft  is a way of connecting with the landscape.  P.205
• Town-bruised, town-battered, the birth of the edge-land has been a messy one. P.223
• ......the first hurdle was trying to understand who had responsibility for this liminal space.  P.230
• No what happened was largely a letting-go, an end to the human interference or management, aside from the few still-worked fields (my edge-land) and the council's yearly cutting of its hay meadows. (Ref George Monbiot's vision of rewilding)  P.233
• .......being written only three years after the clean-up, it testifies to the speed and sponteneity with which nature had reclaimed the ground. (Rewilding)  P.234
• All I can think about is how I don't want those men hacking away.  How I don't want them interferring, cutting down things that they don't know or care about.  How I don't want any part of the edge-land, my edge-land, to be ruined.  And how I can't do anything about it. (Ref The Horsefield -my edge-land and the possible building of a new stadium for Grimsby Town on it.)  P.248
• Thanks to my mother and father the fringe had always been a mysterious and wild adventure playground, a refuge, frontier and portal since childhood.  P250
• It's moments like these that make you think places have a memory of their own.... ..............It's hardly a theory, more a feeling born of so long spent outside, but what if landscapes somehow become repositories of personal and collective memory?  What if traces are imprinted or stored in an imperceptible or intangible way and the land itself retains the culture of the place?  Then what if when a certain set of stimuli is triggered, a kind of molecular union occurs between that place and a person whereby memories and experiences are passed on like the sting of a nettle? (My feelings exactly and for some while I have been wrestling with ways to represent this idea of landscape and memory photographically.)  P.270

The image below is of my local edge-land The Horsefield.