The Solway Wild

It is not always clear to me what people mean when they talk about ‘the wild’. To my father, an early and avid fan of David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest programmes, ‘the wild’ meant Africa. My mother disagreed. Born in the 1920s in what was The Orange Free State, the daughter of a railway engineer, to her Africa meant the cosmopolitan serenity of Ladysmith – not at all wild, notwithstanding the thirteen foot python skin she kept wrapped in tissue in her bedroom which I took to school on Show and Tell days. My childhood Saturdays nearly always included a staggering-back trip from the library with huge wildlife photography books in my arms. I loved the huge, the colourful, the seldom-seen creatures of the world. Then, as I grew up it meant National Parks and conservation areas, latterly the threatened Arctic. It was vast, it had a Hollywood soundtrack. It was photographed and filmed on mountain ranges, under the oceans and in deserts in voluptuous colours. It was an aerial view of Paradise over which the latter day Sir David Attenborough spoke sadly and softly. But these days, the ubiquity of the superlative in wildlife documentaries and something of a middle-aged shifting of my life frontiers, it has come to mean just outside my back door.
+++++My afternoon walk along the shore takes me past Natterjack toads hiding from spearing herons in the salty pools on the estuary. The wild begins at the stream by my house where kingfishers speed seawards, where dippers apparently drown themselves and dragonflies briefly shimmer. The wild is taking over the woodland beside my house, sycamores soaring over the parkland shrubs that once lined a formal walkway. Brambles scribble across the ground, the lakes silt up and turn muddy and only the constant walkers with their dogs and the playing children keep the paths clear. In autumn the wild in the woods is most rampant – I learnt in the Foot & Mouth Spring, when access was forbidden, what five years of unchecked wild Galloway woodland might look like.
+++++It was never clear to me either what meteorologists meant when they talked about ‘local conditions’ until I came to live on the Solway estuary at Powfoot. All the times since that I have walked under a band of sailor’s-eye blue sky and watched cumulus pile up over Skiddaw to the south and over Criffel, to the east, I have known that the Solway estuary enjoys the kindest of local conditions which makes it often an Eden by the sea. To walk, alone and observing, under that avenue is a blessing.
+++++I never knew that an estuary beach changes with every tide, that a year can move its channels into fresh writhings through mud and silt, vertical banks sculpted by the constant creep of river water, so that it seems it must always have flowed right there. Samphire glows green across the flats between tides. This is a stone, mud and silt world, the small streams that cut through it have banks with clay enough to make a fireable pot but the sand patches move from year to year as if avoiding picnickers. Oyster catchers and lapwings make pointillist studies along the water line; they are the only crowds here.
+++++I watch its changes with a sense of wonder. I had thought that erosion was one of those slow processes that can only be noted by years of observation. Not at all. Erosion is stealing the high turf banks of the western beach in daily forays. Gorse and broom stalks pierce the rough grass, leaving the roots scratching pendulum sweeps in the raw layered soil. Beach rabbits, scrawny and watchful for buzzards, gnaw the prickles and spikes along with the rare sweet stems while the seeping streams, the tides and the scouring wind work their way along the beach. I can count the weeks before the concrete stanchions from the explosives factory grounds will slide down the bank and lie among the shattered bricks and ironwork on the eastern beach. I wonder why pebbles and rocks arrange themselves in so pleasing a manner and why man-made building debris lies in such ugly heaps when they are both made up of small pieces of mineral.
+++++The western beach is a playground for humankind, machines, horses and ecstatic dogs. Flat and hard as a billiard table the mudflats gleam at low tide, inviting the fresh imprint of footprints, tyre tracks, hoof and paw marks on their bare surface. Pedal bikes and motor bikes press endless arcs; some ancient instinct at work closes the circles each time. Those that seek to wrestle with the wind come with kites and sand-buggies, the kite flyers often pulled off their feet, the sand-buggies toppling over on the turn. Some take to the water with sailboards, just now and then catching the wind right, skimming the sea at speed. Their howls of fear and ecstasy can be heard half a mile away. Most come barefoot in Breughel packs with their to-and-fro dogs attached, to stride out the half mile to the low tide mark where the mud is newest and strange sea things may be found for a dog or a small child to carry home. They tread a wide berth around the horses that come for salt therapy in the water, high stepping through the waves, eyes wide and nostrils flaring as the cold water splashes their bellies.
+++++A little further to the west the winter months turn the Solway estuary into something of an international airport for wild geese; five species gather to pick at stubble fields and merse-land alongside two species of swan, the statuesque mute in full make-up and the noisy Bewicks, minus mascara. At Caerlaverock the feeding hours on the ponds include all manner of squabbling ducks and darting moorhens amongst the bigger birds- an RSPB ranger with a wheelbarrow broadcasts grain onto the banks and the water and a hungry flotilla forms in an instant, pecking at the food and each other. It’s a watery Serengeti – a place of migration, vast numbers of creatures on the move, just five miles from my back door. This year I’ve been writing poetry for a chapbook and reading performance under the banner of ‘The Wild Goose Chase’ across Dumfries & Galloway so I’ve been looking at geese as carefully as any safari trecker checks out his elephants. I’ve watched their unique flight, their unique walk – ‘jizz’ is the word that ornithologists use – listened to their calls, watched them feed. I’m a beginner (a goose ‘virgin’ my collaborators call me) but that very innocence allows me to indulge my poetic enthusiasm so that if a particular goose seems to me to be something of a dancer, I can say that. They seem exotic to me, these huge painted birds. With heads as small as my fist, an even smaller brain contains a navigation system more complex than any traffic-control computer.
+++++The image is like a science fiction. My feeling of alienation, of division, is closer to my new concept of the wild – something physically close to me that is unknowable by me, something that starts at my feet which is all around me, growing, seeding, decaying in endless repetition while my one life ticks onwards. Its one motif in my ears and eyes is the daily mewing of the buzzards that spiral with the thermals above the woodlands – a sound that pierces my heart – the call of one unfettered creature to another, needing no translation. It is the summons to life itself that symbolises the wild beside me.
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Vivien Jones lives on the north Solway shore in Scotland. She is a semi-professional early musician along with her husband, Richard. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland – her first themed collection of short stories, Perfect 10, was published in September 2009 by Pewter Rose Press.

Her first poetry collection – About Time, Too – was published in August 2010 by Indigo Dreams Publishing. In August 2010 she won the Poetry London Prize, her work chosen by Michael Longley.  She has been awarded a Writer’s Bursary from Creative Scotland for her next project on the theme of women amongst warriors. For more on Vivien’s work visit www.vivienjones.info.