A Claiming of Place
In the first of three posts on the creation of his debut pamphlet collection, Down the Heavens, Alun Hughes describes the journey to a place that claimed him.
You find me here, ten minutes’ walk from where I live, in a place known locally as The Heavens, from where this collection made its way. It is a disused area of farm and woodland on the edge of Stroud and, like anywhere on our long-occupied land, bears the marks of its history.
In a place now made of hedge-rowed fields and woodland, there are the reminders in the land; the axle stones for the water wheel of a communal corn mill turned grinding mill, the dwellings of smallholders on the old cart track to Bisley and the last remains of pre-industrial weavers’ cottages in the woods with their rectangular weaving sheds beside. Nestled into the land, by one of the two brooks and looking northwest toward the Severn River is the imprint of a Roman villa. It is full of the ghosts of human habitation, there are stepping stones, across the brook at the bottom of a steep track that drops below the cemetery, made from the coign stones of a cottage that once stood nearby.
The last agricultural activity was in 2016 when the tenant farmer, who’d grazed cattle here since the sixties, retired. Without grazing, the fields are becoming exquisite meadows and the woodland and hedges gradually seed themselves into the field edge. Along one of the paths, a grove of fifty oak seedlings stands.
Then there are the people. From early morning, the land is circuited by walkers. There are various fire sites where families come in the day, the children building dams in the brook below and where teenagers party into the night. At the weekends and holidays, some of us dog walkers come with bin bags to clear up after the parties and open the dams so the next day’s children can find it anew.
But the journey of this poetry collection actually begins in 2018, on the top of a small sea cliff, at high tide, in Pembrokeshire. My younger son and his friends were daring themselves to go to ever higher outcrops from which they could plunge into the ocean below. Sat at the top, camera in hand, I was capturing the memory, counting down from three and cheering him on with as much relief for his surfacing intact as congratulation. Haunting my mind though, in that moment, was a question common to many parents, “What of their future? What are we leaving them?”. Natural and age-old parental anxiety, of course, now exacerbated by these times of the sixth extinction event, its accompanying grief and despair and all the other symptoms of our broken system.
When we returned from Wales, I decided to go to the land, hoping for answers. After years of involvement with what some call ‘Wilderness Work’, I have learnt ways to listen, accessing nature via the imaginal that can take hold through nature-based practices, some of which I will share later in this series and hope to offer, as a course that I am currently designing, soon.
I was trying to find a place and, as I crossed the brook by the waterfall I was stopped, suddenly, my boots in the water. The water had become louder, clearer than any of the surrounding sound, the crows, the wind through the trees, as though it had quietened everything else, including my mind, as though the water was running through me. It was claiming me, I knew it in my heart, I knew that this was ‘the place’. So, the work began, I came to this same place, more or less every day, over the autumn and winter of 2018/19, with my questions and listened to the water.
Each morning, I sat on a flat stone I’d balanced on the bank and listened. I asked the water and the land direct questions from my place, notebook in hand and the water answered. It came in glimpses at first but, with time, as it tuned me, the water began instructing me on, funnily enough, the flow of life generally and, more specifically, my own journey and how it related to what I was observing beyond here, in the town, in the humans. Those months saw me re-engage with creation, specifically my own creative life.
The Heavens had claimed me, and my life had reclaimed itself. In the Spring, as people from Stroud and from across Britain occupied bridges and streets in London, glued themselves to oil company doors and ‘locked on’ to street furniture and each other, thankfully changing the conversation regarding climate change forever, I was applying for the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
The best I could do for my children was to realise my life’s dream. To begin to take my place in my own story was an ecologically restorative act. This was the only place I could lay claim to. The rest was out of my control and all that was left was to surrender to the land that had claimed me.
You can buy Alun’s debut collection, Down the Heavens directly from Yew Tree Press here and support indie publishing!
Alun Hughes is a poet and singer living in Stroud, Gloucestershire. In 2020, he received a MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Bath Spa University. In 2021, he was a digital writer in residence with Dialect at the Cotswold Water Park and won third prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. His pamphlet collection Down the Heavens, published by Yew Tree Press, is being launched at the Museum in the Park in July and You Are Here, an album of nine poems from the collection to original soundtracks, made with the band Lensmen, is due for release in the coming months. Follow Alun on social media @alunowl.
Cover of Alun Hughes’ forthcoming book, Down the Heavens (Yew Tree Press, 2022)
