The Other Love: a queering of the landscape during a circuit of the ‘Other’ Borrowdale
Aim
To explore how we define (place boundaries around) what we consider natural or un-natural, beautiful or ugly, of value or not. In order to do so, this experiment will draw upon Queer Ecological theory during a circuit of an area of the Lake District which has only latterly become part of the National Park, where features such as the M6, mobile phone masts and other features bring such questions to the fore.
Background
This is the third experiment which seeks to create space for voices which might not traditionally have been heard so strongly in landscape / environment (and specifically here the Lake District) contexts. Whereas Do As Dorothy Did explores the experience of those living with disabilities or chronic illness, and Skin Memories encourages reflection on questions of skin colour / race, this experiment asks what a queer perspective might have to offer our understanding of the Lake District and other landscapes.
Queer Ecology is founded upon the argument that both environmental destruction and homophobia / anti-queer sentiment arise from a similar kind of dualistic thinking that splits the world into categories such as "natural and unnatural", "alive or not alive" or "human or not human", when in reality, nature and culture are inextricably intertwined, and exist in a continuous state. On the contrary, according to Queer Ecological theorists, the question of what’s "natural" does not arise as a result of something’s particular qualities, but is instead a result of human perspectives and interpretation. Thus a rusty sheet of metal is just as ‘natural’ as a dandelion, and identifying as ‘gay’ or ‘trans’ is no less natural than identifying as heterosexual. Furthermore, Queer Ecology also probes into the arbitrary ways in which we create boundaries around the world, how these provide frames for understanding, and how different (or less rigid) boundaries might lead us to respond to, and act in, the world in different ways.
Directing conversation here and there and elsewhere
Route instructions
Click on the image above to open an interactive version of the map on Outdoor Active. Otherwise you can download the GPX file of my route here (© OpenStreetMap contributors)
Route: Medium - difficult (11 miles, 2,550 feet of ascent). This is categorised as such as a result of its length, but the route can very easily be shortened in a range of ways. For example, you could choose only to walk one of the two ridges, and return via the path along the bottom of the Borrowdale valley, or to only climb Grayrigg, and to descend to the valley from between there and Whinfell Beacon (by the phone mast station). Please note that paths aren’t always obvious, particularly on the first half of this walk.
Starting point: the viewpoint over the M6 on the A685, south of Tebay.
Accessible alternative: the viewpoint is accessible by car (and was in fact the location where I did most of the writing in the below poem). The track up the Borrowdale valley also starts out paved, and becomes rougher, but wheelchairs will certainly be able to get a short distance up the valley.
Writing & Art Ideas, & Virtual Alternatives
During your walk (/run/wheel), you are invited to focus upon two things: questioning (and complicating) your own assumptions about what is ‘natural’ or not, and noticing the wide range of ways in which the land (and our interaction with it) has been boundaried. Take notes / photos / sketches which are prompted by these reflections. When editing these notes / images, pay attention as well as to your processes of composition. In my own work (below) I have layered the rainbow pride colours over a photograph of reflections in the river - it’s not the most subtle response to the experiment (!), but my intention was to bring to the fore the processes of editing the ‘natural’ image which every photo on this website has undertaken with images which are clearly processed. The poem draws upon ambiguity as a technique to inhabit the between-spaces, as the space where changes of definition and understanding might occur.
As a virtual alternative, why not google the word ‘nature’ and search for images. Use one of the images in the first page of results as the starting point for reflecting on what in the image is ‘nature’ and what is ‘culture’, and how easy it is to separate these two categories. Use your notes as the starting point for a piece of writing. If working in the visual medium, how might you rework the image to place the focus upon ‘culture’ rather than nature?
Route adaptation for walk from home
Where can you think of, near home, which you would describe as the closest thing to ‘nature’? Set out for this place, and follow the above experiment. You will probably be surprised at what you find.
Also engage with the language which you ‘find’ en route, which will give you a starting point for how we ‘categorise’ and ‘frame’ our experience of the landscape in certain ways. Considering the theme of this experiment, I was amused to learn that the name of the track in the picture to the right is ‘Breast Road’ (and that’s it’s currently shut to vehicles for repaid!)
My own poetry and photography
The above sound file is to be listened to while reading the below poem.
This amenity is provided for you
(Lower Borrowdale, April 2022)
i. Pretty Little Things
Starting with a viewpoint
over the motorway -
I piss amongst the dying daffodils.
Ask the passing traffic where you were
and might be going. But no car answers.
As of course.
Speed has a silence about it
so it seems.
The Pretty Little Thing lorry delivers happiness.
It’s speeding elsewhere. Delivering dandelion
wishes caught between the grasses.
Careful what you wish for!
For nearby – it’s set in stone.
The local traffic officer is 6 years dead
and growing.
ii. Sign language
“Access land allows you to explore (on foot)
one of England’s most spectacular
and unique landscapes.
Together with the local rights of way network
there are many opportunities to enjoy it.”
The access man’s feet are firmly planted –
straddling the cleavage between
the contours of the mountain’s breasts.
iii. Appleby Assizes
Been thinking
as of late.
If I could but wear you
lightly. The other love.
I rest my head –
cradled in the shoulder
of you: mountain.
It’s already 1959.
Thirteen men from Kendal are imprisoned
for being gay in Appleby Assizes.
They lose their jobs, are acquitted of indecency.
And me?
I wish of kissing you,
so softly.
To think that this
was so un-natural that we didn’t
even used to legally exist.
iv. Rowan
They fenced the birthing cemetery
and swaddled baby trees in plastic.
Shadow paths of new growth.
Poetry, as the angle of this slope of
Grayrigg Pike, the up yet also down of
my own ambiguous androgyny:
I couldn’t but pretend
I saw
my own reflection
in the mossy summit tarn.
v. The Designated
See?
The Lakeland mountains in the distance
– as if out of range. Am I here nor there.
They bent the boundaries
so that I could be with you?
The motorway fades to a constant
and metallic hum. The mobile phone mast delivers
conversations here and there and elsewhere.
A curve of river, rail and motorway.
Who gets to say what’s beautiful.
I become obsessed by walls and fences, paths and gates
and roads and rivers. Barbed wire, many boundaries.
National parks and counties, countries. This Cumbria is far
less Lakes than Dales – there, across the central
designation of the motorway.
vi. The sheep
The sheep’s eyes are plaintive.
Stuck up to her shoulders in mud.
Her silence is of the slower kind.
I lay my bag down,
take her by the horns and add
my weight to gravity.
Freed: her legs buckle underneath
her. The way she looks at me as if to say
I need not be afraid.
vii. Black Horses
Further on, on my return,
I stop to count the wild black horses.
Leaving behind the bucolic
self-harm savagery of clear-fell slopes
and Breast Road gouged and hollowed
and in urgent need of vehicular repair.
The mountains in retreat before my gaze.
Tomorrow as another borrowed day.
The risk involved in having faith?
Light shrinks soundlessly towards dark.
