Issue 11 has gone to print

We’re delighted to announce that our latest issue has gone to print, and for those of you that have pre-ordered or subscribed, you should receive your copy in around two weeks’ time. Thank you so much for your patience and for helping us to steer a course through these unsettled times. If you haven’t had a chance to pre-order issue 11, you can do so through our store page

Photo by Dan Alford

As many of you know, the past 18 months has been a challenging time for us. But after a remarkable crowdfunding campaign, we were able to send issue 10 to print last autumn – and we have been thoroughly heartened by your support ever since, including renewal of subscriptions and pre-orders for issue 11, which we've just sent to the printers!

Here’s what’s coming up in our latest edition, including healing waters in Iceland's Westfjords, memories of the Eiger, unearthing Old West landscapes in Europe, mudlarking on the Thames, a journey to the source of the River Teifi and a 'Russian spy whale'...

Inventory

William Smith’s geological maps; Steller’s sea cow; the history of lidos; photographing the fluid shapes of starling murmurations; 50 words for snow; the Quiet Parks Project; catching mackerel by handline; ramblers’ soap; natural inks; water monotypes; redesigning ghost wear.

Echoes of the Eiger

Revisiting his father’s pioneering route up the north face of the Eiger – famous for being one of the world’s hardest rock climbs – Mike MacEacheran ruminates on the power of memory and mountains, and why we push ourselves to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of the unknown.

A new era of biodesign

Our material consumption has long been out of control. But could developments in biodesign be part of the solution, bringing us closer to a 1960s sci-fi vision of a sustainable ‘Spaceship Earth’?

Nature & artifice

Ministry of Defence domes, tanks and radar towers may seem incongruous with the wild and craggy landscape of St Kilda, but as Bethany Rigby discovers, a military presence can often have beneficial consequences for conservation in remote areas.

Healing waters in the Westfjords

Henry Fletcher explores Iceland’s oldest geological outcrop – known for its runic sorcerers and herbalists, fathomless fjords and weather-beaten mountains, hot pools and cold water surf scene.

Wild West, Wild East

Trigger fingers at the ready, the sound of a whipcrack ringing in his ears, Nick Hunt seeks traces of the Old West in unlikely corners of Europe.

Technicolour scenes

Stanley Donwood is renowned for his Radiohead album covers and eerie drawings of sunken paths in Holloway (2013), but in his latest collection he turns to brash blocks of colour to evoke the rolling chalkscapes of southern England.

Meditations on the River Teifi

Jack Smylie Wild meanders to the source of Afon Teifi, weaving keen observation with childhood recollection, while sounding a clarion call to love and protect our waterways.

Oh hello, Hvaldimir

A cetacean spy or therapy whale? Joly Braime gets to know this big-hearted beluga who just wants to be friends with humans.

River of time

Mudlarking on the Thames: eroded by the ebb and flow of the tide, the crumbling banks of the estuary reveal clues to our evolving relationship with waste.

The humming towers

Pylons have radically transformed our landscapes for almost a century. Gareth E Rees explores the often-haunting symbolism of the metal monoliths that power our world.

On reflection

As flights were grounded and borders began to close with Britain’s first lockdown, Nicola Moyne found herself turning to the inky depths of the Suffolk coast for fresh perspective and purpose. She recounts how the River Orwell taught her to sail once lockdown eased – and reconnect with the wild.

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Owners of the soil

As part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2021, The Fine Art Society presents Owners of the Soil, examining ties between land, identity and ownership through the early Scottish diaspora’s dual identity of colonised and coloniser

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Images courtesy of The Fine Art Society

Will Maclean’s collection of work is based on the narratives of six native Gaelic speakers who were born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the shores of Loch Broom in the village Polbain, Coigach, Ross-shire.

They were from three large families of Macleans, MacLeods, and Campbells. It was accepted that they would have to leave their homes to find a living away from the Highlands either to travel south in the UK or overseas. Mary Ross and Alexander Campbell settled in New Zealand, Rhoda Maclean in Australia, Alexander Maclean and Kenneth Maclean in North America and Murdo Macleod in South Africa.

Scottish historian John Smith, commenting on the Education Act (Scotland) 1872 stated, “Emigration, whether voluntary or enforced was strongly encouraged by education and the losses caused in this way very often of the youngest and the best were irreplaceable and are nowadays simply incalculable.”

Duncan Mackenzie, a Crofter of Coigach, is quoted in the 1883 Napier Commission, a public inquiry into the condition of crofters in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: “Now I am an old man and I have no family - they have taken wings and flown away, they were not of such a kind as would remain in this place”.

Alongside Maclean’s collection are Shaun Fraser’s works in glass, bronze, ink and print that focus on Nova Scotia, an area dominated by Scottish settlements with place names that displaced First Nation Mi’kmaq titles. Incorporating peat and organic matter, Fraser’s work holds an innate link to the locality upon which it draws.

You can view Owners of the Soil until 28 August 2021 at the Fine Art Gallery, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ. You can also view the exhibition online.

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A pie glossary

From ‘gobbets’ to ‘coffins’, Steph Wetherell delves into the weird and wonderful history of the pie

Illustration by Sue Gent

bakemete (noun)
A Middle English word meaning, quite simply, a pie.

chewitts (noun)
A ‘one-bite’ pie common in the late medieval period.

coffin/coffyn (noun)
Original name for a pastry case, made into elaborate shapes and patterns.

forcemeat (noun)
Lean meat, such as veal, that was ground or chopped finely and mixed with fat then formed into balls and baked in a pie with sweetmeats or marrow.

gable (noun)
The raised and decorative edges to a pie, often visually representative of a local castle.

gobbet (noun)
A term referring to a piece of meat or flesh.

saucer pie (noun)
A thin pie made from leftovers, baked in a saucer.

umble pie (noun)
Filled with the minced or chopped innards of an animal (usually a deer), and the origin of the term ‘to eat humble pie’.

Words: Steph Wetherell; thelocavore.co.uk

You can read the full feature in issue 7 of Ernest Journal, currently on sale at 20% off along with our other back issues. Sale ends midnight 31 May.

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The Uncanny Scenery of a Dream

In his upcoming exhibition at the Jealous Gallery, London, Stanley Donwood showcases his mesmerizing illustrations inspired by the poems of Thomas Hardy

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Our paths through flowers (2021), by Stanley Donwood

Many may recognise Stanley Donwood's artwork from the cover of every Radiohead album since The Bends in 1995 , and his Brothers Grimm-esque illustrations for Rob Macfarlane and Dan Richards' bestseller Holloway.

Donwood’s latest body of work, The Uncanny Scenery of A Dream, draws inspiration from the rural Dorset landscapes described in Thomas Hardy’s Selected Poems, which will be published in a new hardback edition from The Folio Society later this year. To create the series, Donwood travelled to the areas that inspired the author’s poetry, creating a series of sketches on scraps of paper, old envelopes, maps and torn pages from yellowing books. In appreciation of the strong abiding affection Hardy felt for Dorset, Donwood immersed himself in the romantic landscape and rendered atmospheric layered drawings, providing a new way of visualising Hardy’s Wessex.

In his illustrations Donwood explains he has “tried to encapsulate the vague air of solitary melancholy” he interprets from Hardy’s work. Many drawings depict a lone figure in isolated environments with boundless sky above, and flocks of birds transcending the page and earthly plane.

The Uncanny Scenery Of A Dream runs from 27 May - 20 June 2021 at Jealous East, 53 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3PT, then the exhibition continues at their Crouch End Gallery, 27 Park Road, London N8 8TE from 24 June - 18 July 2021. Find out more at jealousgallery.com

In our upcoming edition of Ernest, author Dan Richards speaks to Stanley Donwood about his new artworks depicting the chalkscapes of the South Downs.

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Above: In A Solitude of The Sea and Our Paths Through Flowers, by Stanley Donwood

The Welsh Camino

In his new book Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning, Peter Stanford explores how pilgrimage provides the modern age with a means to take a longer, slower and hence more profound look at life, stretching all the way back to when the first pilgrim put one foot in front of another. In this extract, he describes how the ‘Camino effect’ has rippled its way to a forgotten trail in the North Wales countryside

The Abbey ruins on Bardsey Island, North Wales. © History collection 2016/Alamy Stock Photo

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm on your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

This traditional Celtic blessing has been adopted by the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way. It sums up both the spirit in which walkers take up the challenge it offers, and the ever-present connection to an earlier age that the route provides to all-comers. In early Christianity, the wind at your back would have been readily understood as the Holy Spirit, but for the new generation of pilgrims there is no requirement to talk of the visible in terms of the invisible. What is openly expressed, though, is the ambition that this trail should be regarded as the ‘Welsh Camino’. In 2009, Jenny and Chris Potter had walked the Camino in Spain. On their return to North Wales – where Chris served as an archdeacon in Saint Asaph, which boasts the smallest Anglican cathedral in Britain, built on the site where another Celtic saint, Kentigern, established himself as a bishop in the sixth century – they were inspired to explore the history of the neglected pilgrim path that passed right by their doorstep. 

It has been thanks to their efforts – a perfect illustration of the ‘Camino effect’ rippling outwards – that a route was identified, mapped, tested out in 2011, waymarked, and then officially opened in 2014, complete with its very own pilgrim’s passport, which can be stamped at churches, shops and pubs on the way. In some places the trail mirrors the one original Celtic pilgrims would have taken, its identifying landmarks being small, low-lying ancient churches and sacred wells that are scattered all over the North Wales countryside, along with distinctive Celtic crosses such as the tall, thin tenth-century ‘wheel cross’ in a field at Maen Achwyfan in Flintshire on the route near the village of Llanasa (‘the enclosure of Saint Asaph’). It features intricate knot patterns in its weather-beaten carvings, as well as a shadowy figure on the lower panel. Their exact meaning is lost in the mists of time – like a lot of things with Celtic Christianity. Meanwhile, one suggestion for this ‘wheel cross’ being in such a lonely location is that it marks what was once a hermit monk’s cell, built to be far away from any distraction save nature and God.

Place names that begin with Llan- generally indicate a sacred past, but there are so many of them in North Wales it didn’t really help in pinning down a definitive pilgrims’ route. So, notably at Abergwyngregyn around the halfway point, where the route joins the already established Wales Coast Path, the Pilgrim’s Way opts to make use of existing infrastructure. If this is not a perfect recreation, then it does successfully link four key locations from 1,300 years ago: Holywell, Gwytherin, Clynnog Fawr and Bardsey. The first three share a close association with two presiding presences on the pilgrimage, uncle and niece Saints Beuno and Winefride.

Penmaenmawr stone circle, photo © Hansjoerg Lipp (cc-by-sa/2.0)

Like so many other Celtic monks Beuno, who died around 640, came from a privileged background. He embodied the missionary spirit that was a key part of vocation. His personal pilgrimage was as much about finding souls to convert as it was seeking personal enlightenment. After ordination in Bangor, now a popular starting point halfway along the Pilgrim’s Way for those on a tight time schedule, he spent his days travelling all around North Wales, bringing people to a God whom he saw in every bit of the dramatic natural environment around him, bounded as it is by the sea on one side and the spectacular mountain range that includes Snowdon, Wales’s highest peak, to the other. Often when he moved on after such a mission, he would leave behind a simple church building and a well. Water had special significance to Celtic Christians, who used ‘triple immersion’ in baptism ceremonies (in contrast to today when a tiny scoop of water is deemed sufficient). And Beuno was never happier, legend recounts, than when praying half-immersed in cold water, punishing his body to bring his soul closer to God.

Water also possessed healing powers, he believed. The pagan roots of this typically Celtic belief are plain. Indeed, one of the features of the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way is that it encompasses, alongside Christian churches and crosses, pagan holy sites such as the stone circle at Penmaenmawr (pictured above), and the 4,000-year-old yew in the churchyard at Llangernyw. On account of their extraordinary longevity – making them a symbol of (near) eternal life – yews held a special place in pre-Christian belief systems. Springs and wells, too, as well as groves of trees, were believed to be sacred, and became the backdrop to pagan rituals. Emerging Christianity sought not to confront and wipe away such patterns of worship, but rather to merge them in its own approach to the divine. Some anthropologists refer to this process of assimilation as ‘baptizing the customs’.

This is an extract from the chapter ‘The North Wales Pilgrim’s Way: Celtic Revival’ in Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning by Peter Stanford (Thames & Hudson: 2021)

In partnership with Thames & Hudson we’re giving away three copies of this beautiful book on Instagram – head over to our feed to find out how to enter.

Thames & Hudson are also providing Ernest readers with a 25% discount off the book - just enter ‘PILGRIM25’ at the checkout when you order through their website.