nature – Literature & Landscape

With six outdoor events from a boat trip to walks through woods or over a salt marsh to – literally – a walk in the park – we watched our plans teetering as Storm Amy and the festival weekend closed in, locked in embrace.

Last year had been all sunshine and gloriously filmic early autumn light that made everything glow. Too easy. This year we were in the weather’s sights.

Jake Fiennes flagged it up first – nearly a week ahead. But that was a week ahead. Forecasts exaggerate. Things looked fine on Thursday.

Day one dawned with an email – 90 primary school children… not safe to walk them up the road in these conditions… could we send our author down instead? 9am Carl Sayer and Jonah Tosney regretfully cancelled the first walk of the weekend – beavers in the Glaven Valley. Beavers take no account while beavering away undermining trees for the risks to those who might find themselves beneath those trees in high winds. Holkham Park would have to close on Saturday – Nick Trend’s walk would be just a talk.

With the Friday afternoon boat trip scheduled to launch our programme rain clouds were thickening over the channel. Would Nick Groom give a red light? Not till everyone is on the quay, he said. Passengers gathered, dressed for the weather, looked at one another – and climbed on board. Things began to turn.

While those who preferred to keep dry sat down to enjoy a film in the Maltings, our cancelled beaver walk became a new River Glaven walk with Charles R-W.

Holkham walkers got to go outside after all, led by their host

Intrepid salt-marsh walkers headed out with Jake, unperturbed, for a two-hour walk that became a three hour expedition from which they returned exhilarated.

You can’t embrace landscape or get close to nature without experiencing the weather in all its moods. And on the north coast of Norfolk there is as they say no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

Final result:

Festival 6: Storm Amy 0

Thank you, Patience, for your response below to this post:

I was one of the ‘intrepid’ walkers with Jake and if anything storm Amy only enhanced the experience! The whole weekend was great. Fresh air, fun, life enhancing and much food for thought – all in beautiful Norfolk. Thank you so much.

It seems rather gloomy to describe creativity in medical terms. We’ve been hearing such a lot about mental health for a while now that – on the good side – we hope we now have an environment in which people can feel freer and more confident to open up about their secret struggles without worrying they might expose themselves to judgement and alienation. Sometimes, on the other hand, it can seem disconcertingly as if half the population feels overwhelmed and isolated by their own thoughts, is constantly checking its own state of mind, and sliding downhill.

This where creativity is so transformative. It can be as simple as reading a book – itself a kind of creativity in which your mind gets to work building believable worlds out of lines of letters on a page. Creativity takes you out of yourself by giving you total focus on something else. Your attention is directed intensely outwards – at whatever you’re observing and what you’re creating, channelling your conscious and subconscious via a process which translates the subject into the object. You might be hunting for an image to photograph, composing and timing your shot; scrutinising the soundscape for some essence you can turn into words or music; trying to recreate in designs and earthworks a lost marsh landscape or river; controlling your hands and eyes to steadily apply decorative marks on a sheet of paper – all instead of cycling through thoughts that take you nowhere. Once you’ve finished your work you have a new and separate thing that stands for itself, that you can share. This is hard to beat.

We included two workshops in our programme – one for writing poetry and one for drawing with sticks. John Ruskin said that you never really connect with a place fully until you’ve tried to capture it in lines, words, forms or sounds. When you describe it you see it properly. We think this is an excellent point and we invite fans of landscape to try it.

Last term a teacher at a local school mentioned that many of her pupils love creative writing. Over a school career, as the curriculum gets busier and exams appear on the horizon the space that once existed for inventing poetry disappears. In later life the challenges of managing your responsibilities and keeping yourself and family going make it even harder to find the time to write or paint or even to commit to the potential embarrassment of starting all over again.

Why not consider picking up a stick or a pen on Saturday morning and having a go? It will be a lot of fun, you will almost certainly surprise yourself, and you are very unlikely to regret it.

James Cockburn, who will be leading the workshop on drawing with sticks, draws or paints every day. In the blurb for this weekend’s exhibition this is how he summarised his artistic approach: ‘Be positive – life is worth living. See each work as a gift – don’t leave anything out. Bring something new to the party – don’t repeat yourself.’

After the rain had stopped this afternoon, James created this picture of the reed beds at RSPB Titchwell seen from the west-end first hide. He used reeds dipped in Indian ink.