To Bryher by Foot

[steepholm]

sovay mentioned the writer Bryher the other day, and now she's turned up again, this time in her insular aspect. I've always felt an interest in both Bryhers, not least I suppose because we who are named after islands enjoy a natural kithship; also because she published the most expensive book I ever bought (not for myself), a copy of Mary Butts's Last Stories, which was meant to have been pulped after the author's death in 1937 but a few of which escaped the shredder. Also, now I think about it, Bryher is linked in my mind with Hope Mirrlees and Alice B. Toklas, all being in some sense the talented but junior partners in their respective relationships with other women, at a time when it was largely necessary to design and build that ship as you were sailing it. Probably this is a facile comparison - but the association is there, for better or worse.

Anyway, this entry is mostly to recommend people who share my liking for accounts of low-tide walks and of drowned lands to listen to today's Open Country, which documents a walk across the once-inhabited landscape between Tresco and Bryher, now usually hidden by the estranging sea but revealed at spring low tide. I like to think that both Bryher and HD - that most archaeological of poets - would have enjoyed it.

Comments

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link, I do like those things! I've just finished reading about the Broomway in Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love that book! And the Broomway chapter is possibly my favourite.

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

I loved it too! I really enjoyed all the stuff in that chapter about Doggerland, and about the eroding East Anglian coast (which is a slight personal obsession of mine). Also the bit where he talks about swimming over the drowned streets at Dunwich, and realising that as you swim further out to sea, you're also going back in time...