NUMINOUS LANDSCAPE

The Power of Dartmoor

27th May 2024

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Greetings,

During April I spent a week on the south coast of Devon, a wonderful part of the world in itself. However, it was the lure of the wild and lonely moor which called to me, and just for one day I made a foray to its fringes. This was the first time I had visited, despite its relative proximity to where I live in the south east of Wales. Although Dartmoor and I were unacquainted there was a certain familiarity which has been alive in my imagination over the past ten years, largely through the work of Martin Shaw, and in this communication we peer into his 2016 book Scatterlings. Martin is from this place, or as he would say, of this place. An important distinction, and one well worth pondering, as it speaks of deep rooted more-than-human connections that go far beyond 'place' as only a physical location.

"Scatterlings is about holding up the corner of the earth that has claimed you...It's recklessly insistent on the urge to kick your boots off, get down on your knees and kiss rough soil, crawl under barbed wire fences and touch the bark of holy trees, hoot and strut and weep and let the wild darkness get its beautiful paws on you once again...Unrefine yourself. Uncivilise yourself. It's about the hundred secret things. For all its bookishness, for all its insistence on study, make no mistake, what this tale desires most is to get you out where the buses don't park."

Scatterlings, p.1 

Martin is known for being a mythologist / author / storyteller / speaker. He has worked alongside such luminaries as James Hillman, and Robert Bly. More recently there has been engagement with Stephen Jenkinson through writing forewords in each others books, and he initiated the Poetics of the Imagination MA course at Schumacher College in Dartington.

I can highly recommend Martin's Substack, where as a subscriber you will receive regular readings, musings, and storytellings, spoken by the man himself. It has been enriching to sit down in my studio each Sunday morning through the course of the seasons over the past year or so, when his latest from Dartmoor (or wherever he may be) reaches the inbox. His website offers these few words as an invitation, which for me evoke something of his work in general and what it feels like to be in its company. This can really take you someplace, and in my experience it has been a deep dive into the fertile soil of mythic imagination that lives within these isles.

Imagine we’re sitting in my study (on the edge of Dartmoor) with good coffee and rain against the window. Time to stretch out and enter a treasury of stories and deep ideas. Shall we go?

• Video introduction to Martin Shaw and his book Scatterlings, filmed on Dartmoor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0T7UP1U1Ts

• Website - drmartinshaw.com

• Substack - The House Of Beasts And Vines

• Instagram - instagram.com/drmartinshaw

Dartmoor is three hundred sixty-five square miles of wilderness in the far southwest of Great Britain, the last county before you get to Cornwall. It's rugged, with vast granite tors, mires, seemingly endless stone circles and tribal remnants, sudden mists, and small ponies that are mad for roaming. Our waters are usually flowing, not still, rivers heading green and silver to the ocean. It's still easy to die up here.

Scatterlings, p. 43

Staying in Dartmouth (towards the south east corner of this map) I was a short distance from the moor, but getting to "out where the buses don't park" is rather tricky when you are relying on them to transport you! Starting on foot from South Brent offered an experience of transition into a completely different world—both inner and outer—that driving and parking, or even staying on the moor would not offer. Immediately away from the suburban edgelands into the heart of the old village, past the Church, along the river footpath to a very old and tiny stone bridge, then the occasional house or farm building. Approaching through lanes and farmland as the incline steepened towards the moor, I became aware of a clear boundary (perhaps see R.Skelton's Beyond The Fell Wall). Upon crossing that threshold there was a vastness, with the ancient human embedded within it - the site of a tomb (top image). I found myself surprised by how it felt to be on Dartmoor, there was a striking immediacy to it, taken aback by the distinct potency of it as a being, a sense of really entering into something very, very old, that was somehow still present now.

In the video introduction to Scatterlings (link above), Martin says that whilst it may no longer be possible to find true wilderness in Britain, wildness is most certainly available. I had the sense of a distinctly defiant spirit here, something that would ultimately resist any attempts to subjugate it — I was here before you, and I will be here long after you have gone. There's no evidence of this in the photo's, but it was a day with such a strong wind from the north that at times gusts knocked me off balance, and when walking into it even breathing was challenging at times. Hat, gloves, many layers all required.

It is an insult to archaic cultures to suggest that myth is a construct of humans shivering fearfully under a lightning storm or gazing at a corpse and reasoning a supernatural narrative. To make such a suggestion implies a baseline of anxiety, not relationship. Or that anxiety is the primary relationship. It places full creative impetus on the human, not on the sensate energies that surround and move through them. It shuts down the notion of a dialogue worth happening; it shuts down that big old word animism. Maybe the ancient storytellers knew something we have forgotten.

Scatterlings, p. 3

What does it mean to be claimed? Well, it means giving up the landlord's portion. Adherence to study. Getting so smoked, so weathered by a tuft of ground, that maybe, just occasionally, you become its eyes. 

Scatterlings, p. 7

At the end of the walk before returning to to the coast, I reflected upon aspects of my art making and some of the reasons why I don't usually depict specific places, give them titles that refer to a location, or promote the work as being 'about' the land which may have inspired it. For the most part it has to do with the central importance of coming into relationship. Yes, there may on occasion be times when I have been somewhere previously unknown, and experienced a strong sense that a piece of work needs to be made. Usually however, there is a process of getting to know somewhere, repeated visits over time, perhaps we could use the term courting. Whilst I might seek to embody aspects of my experience in images I am now working on, my sense of what I encountered was that to suddenly say 'here is a body of work about Dartmoor' would be unwise, that further wanderings and encounters are first required; the experience of being claimed.

From the foreword to Scatterlings

Over the past fifty years a range of psychologists, writers and poets have...

...brought a nourishing wildness into contemporary psychology, a sense that even today the human mind is secretly and steadily fed by a clamor of conflicting energies, daimonic powers seething in the inexhaustible deep of our collective psyche. Yet there was the rub; most all of these writers assumed that the tumult of forces revealed in the old, oral stories resided somewhere inside us—that the gods, goddesses, demons, and spirits afoot in the tales could be traced to powers that lurk within the largely unconscious depth of the collective human interior, and hence that the tales had real relevance only to human persons and not to the spider weaving its web in the near corner of the room, or to the raucous crows hollering outside the window, much less to the hordes of salmon that once muscled their way upstream, or clear-cut mountainsides and dripping glaciers, or the thunderclouds now massing on the horizon.

...Stripped of its stories, the land is beginning to fall mute. No longer an expressive, animate power, the local earth soon comes to be seen as a purely passive background or backdrop against which human life unfolds.

— David Abram

Thank you for reading. See you next time.