A WINTER AFTERNOON IN AVALON
7 minute read
Catherine Fairweather, writer, editor and journalist, explores the vast landscape of the Somerset Levels, recollecting the countryside's unique past and how its geography serves as vital inspiration for the artistic processes of renowned creative minds, including her husband Don McCullin.
It’s a waiting-game; I sit in a hide on the Shapwick nature reserve of the Avalon Marshes, watching steam rise from a thermos of coffee, condensation vapours lift off milky water meadows. These are the rewilded peat bogs of neolithic man that define the landscape of the Somerset Levels. The minutes slow and thicken, the meditative sense of peace wraps around you.
Summer gives this habitually water-locked landscape and this county it’s name and raison d’etre - for Somerset, ‘land of the summer people’ is where, for centuries, cowmen have brought their herds down from the hills and homesteads, as cold, wet weather abates, to graze. Rich pasture, below sea-level, emerges from the seasonal floods.
But, winter is the time when the Levels reveals its more essential self; when the ubiquitous willow stands stripped, like a sentinel in a naked landscape, where you can properly see the grid of rhynes and ditches, reflecting a unique metallic light.
Here in the hide, in the fading remains of the day, winter is a mood heightened by the rustling of the reed banks and the wind in the bullrushes. You can almost taste the peaty soil, and the iron-tang of December. Only when the sun begins to set in Okavango shades of red over the wetlands, spreading like a blood stain, do the starlings gather. You don’t ever know they will appear, despite the starling hotline set up by the Shapwick Nature reserve, but as afternoon moves into dusk, it’s an explosive, expansive murmuration of thousands; a balletic airborne display, like the shape-shifting dance of the Northern Lights, in avian form.
"HERE IN THE HIDE, IN THE FADING REMAINS OF THE DAY, WINTER IS A MOOD HEIGHTENED BY THE RUSTLING OF THE REED BANKS AND THE WIND IN THE BULLRUSHES. YOU CAN ALMOST TASTE THE PEATY SOIL, AND THE IRON-TANG OF DECEMBER."
The sky lowers and turns pewter. The pollarded willows, like weary amputees, lean in to stare at their reflections in the black pools; a scene straight out of a Don McCullin landscape photograph. He first came here as an evacuee and was entranced enough by the countryside to return, decades later as an adult, to live on the edges of the marshland, photographing the peaceful landscapes as a healing way out of shooting conflict zones. Yet, the characteristic brooding interplay of light and shadow in these landscapes, the drama of the skies, is such that in McCullin’s hand a depopulated flooded Somerset field looks like the Somme.
He also captures the otherworldly sense of the region’s storied past, the atmosphere of mystery and magic which Clementina Stiegler, a ceramicist, artist and long-time resident of the Somerset Levels, cherishes, though she says her corner of West Sedgemoor is gentler than McCullin’s Levels. “There is a quality here that makes the 21st century seem very remote” she agrees, throwing her arms open to the view beyond her mill and ponds; the wilderness of wetland and moor framed by a smudge of the Blackdown Hills. Only a lone telegraph pole gives the century away. “Secretly” she says. “I welcome the winter, the flooding, and the gift of silence that comes with it.”
I try to imagine, aloud, what it must have been like living in the remote edgelands in the 1960s for her worldly parents; her Polish refugee father, Caziel, the Abstract artist and friend of Picasso and Brancussi, and her English society beauty mother, Catherine Sinclair, whose father was head of the Liberal party, and advisor to Winston Churchill. Yet England was home, for Catherine at least, a feeling strong enough to lure them away from the bohemian life of Paris and the convivial community of the French. The ancient mill in the village of Isle Brewers was then a desolate corner of West Country; it had not welcomed a newcomer in a hundred years. They renovated the place themselves, Caziel planted lines of poplars to remind him of France, “they sound like the ocean when combed by the wind”.
And they were happy here, emphasises Clementina; as artists, inspired by the changing interplay of water and the vapourised light, the energy of a landscape that is myth-saturated and psychically charged. For, invisible, imagined channels of energy called leylines are believed to extend along former byways connecting all the landmarks; the towers and summits of iron-age hills forts to the hills and mounds that rise from the flats; Burrow Mump, Brent Knoll, and above all, the needle tower of Glastonbury Tor, rising from the swirling mists as through from an inland sea, drawing the gaze like thread.
JOURNEY
A PHOTOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE WITH DON MCCULLIN
Uncover the raw beauty of the West Country on a photographic journey with award-winning photographer Don McCullin. Accompanied by professional photographers and wildlife experts, explore the entrancing Somerset countryside, practicing skills on carefully designed photography workshops.
