This week I took refuge in the land, sky and sea. We cleaned rubble and rocks from a holy well while the tea brewed - how quick such work is with two sets of hands. It will take me a while to process what the Mediaeval misericords, Harvest Moon, wild bees, white rocks and red ochre said to me. So, instead, while next week’s essay percolates, here is a visual dive into the red ochre closest to my heart.
When I came to return to my flat yesterday, the UK train strike meant I was home very late, then spent many hours packing bright earths and soft clays, oak galls, berries, feathers and reeds for my natural art materials students at the Found and Ground course at Dartington tomorrow.1 So, I write to you late from a bed in Bristol, where I am staying with friends in preparation for heading to teach tomorrow, hopefully bringing people, land, and creativity into good relation. I record the audio for this piece a week later than usual, on my return, apologies for my croaky voice from week’s teaching.
This afternoon was spent with my great friend Nick Hunt and his photogenic dog Otto. Years ago Nick stumbled upon a valley near Bath, the site of a now defunct ochre works which ran for hundreds of years. When he sent me the pictures of Otto’s red feet I could not believe the intensity of the colour, I had never seen anything like it. Within a week a parcel of uncanny weight arrived at my boat and on opening it I found the deepest red haematite powder, with mica sparkles. Imagine looking at a deep purple-red velvet cloth with tiny silver sequins spread across a woodland floor and you will get an idea of the sumptuousness of this pigment. That year, I went to collect a little for myself with Nick, and now we return when we meet to walk the public footpaths, visit the great trees, gather a little earth and to visit the wild bees whose hive is a gnarled oak. There is more about this colour from our collaboration for the Wild Pigment Project, here.
We have now visited in every season: spring with its wild garlic and lords-and-ladies, summer, with circling herons, autumn (today) with bees feasting on the honey-scented final flowers of the year - grape ivy blossom, and winter, with bare black branches hard against white sky and red earth, in alchemical clarity. The site is no pristine place; it has abandoned mine foundations, a huge open cast quarry at the end, disused rail lines, ochre tailings dumps and inscrutable industrial fittings in amongst the trees. But I love this place precisely for its lack of purity, the hallucinogenic glades sit beside gritty rubble, sandwiched as it is amongst agricultural land, a private estate and an industrial quarry.
The first time I made paint from red, orange and yellow sent from Clearwell Caves I knew that ochre was something that would one day loom large in my life. Last year I took some of the Bath ochre to Jonathan the Freeminer at Clearwell, and we compared the colour, mica content and depth of the reds and purples, speaking in rushed words and hushed tones. For the relatively small amount of people around the globe for whom ochre is an abiding fascination, these shared red moments are the stuff of dreams.
Now, with a few small bags full of red, purple and yellow, freshly gathered today from under fallen trees and fox dig spots, in a place already abandoned by industry, I will be able to take the students through the ethics of foraging, the refinement of pigment and finally their ‘uses’, with earths I love and have gathered with my own trowel.
But what is this place at heart for me?
It is a vast chapel, replete with the finest stained glass, the green canopy, with the greatest terra cotta floor, graced by earth worm casts of pure Rosso Inglese.
So now I am again well-red. I lunched on oat cakes and cheese with Nick beside the humming bees, flowing back to their hive with pollen sacks of bright yellow ochre, while Otto rested in peaceful land-joy against the cool loam in an oak root frame made for his long nose.
This feeling is not unique to dogs. We humans know it too, if only we would humble2 ourselves a little. I am lucky, ochre bids me bend low to know her. So, this creature finds her best medicine beside a murky river, in the edge lands of a town, in the wake of crumbling empire (that never should have been one…) in the company of good fellows, canine, human, apis and arboreal.
If you too are here in the UK and want to share locations of ochre spots, red rock places, and ruddy cliffs or fields with me then get in touch. I am beginning to research an exciting project that I mentioned briefly last week, which hopes to plot walking routes between ochre places, holy wells and springs of southern England, at first, then hopefully further afield. This will take shape over the coming year so if you’d like to be a part of creating it, just let me know. I envisage some great walks and works along the way, before it becomes a public offering, with perhaps a map and guide. Greetings to you from my journey west. A more structured article will appear next week, following on from last week’s piece about yielding, but for now, enjoy the sounds of bees and the iron oxide colours of good red earth. Peace on your week ahead.
This week’s good thing: The Red Tent. My friend and Dark Mountain colleague, Charlotte DuCann has now joined Substack. I cannot recommend her writing enough. Her books 52 Flowers That Shook My World and After Ithaca are both trenchant, instructive and full of wild beauty, myth and a fierce desert light. Her great piece Seven Coats is well worth your time and is a good place to start while you await her essays here. There are more good links on her welcome page. Welcome, Charlotte!
This course sold out, so if you’d like to join me this autumn, come to Rome, Italy in a few weeks’ time.
From humus - ‘earth’.
I’m in Kent so most of my walks are on chalk. But I’ve come to love watching water flow up and over chalk from local springs.
The bees!!!