A Drift in Eden and The Last Astarologies

Elsewhere, A Journal of Place is ‘an online journal dedicated to writing and visual art that explores the idea of place in all its forms, whether city neighbourhoods or island communities, heartlands or borderlands, the world we see before us or landscapes of the imagination’. It is edited by Paul Scraton, Julia Stone and colleagues. 

It has just published ‘A Drift in Eden’, with a photograph by Julian Hyde. This is an essay on a favourite place, Little Salkeld, in the Eden Valley, Cumbria. It has a noted stone circle, Long Meg and Her Daughters, and a Hermit’s Cave, a rock grotto above the river. The scenic Settle-Carlisle railway runs through the valley. But there is also an abandoned, ruined gypsum works, the ‘drift’ of the title: and on the track to this is a children’s mosaic set in the red mud depicting scenes from the local villages. This is itself now becoming overgrown (photograph: © Julian Hyde). 

 . . .

The Last Astarologies

Salò Press advise there are only 7 copies of Astarology remaining. This pocket chapbook includes:

Thirteen Sisters of Madame Sosostris – fortune-tellers’ advertisements from the 1940s

Moss Queen – topiary, statues, in an old garden

Properties – lots from a strange auction

Rain Instruments – readings from Edwardian weather observers

The Elephants of Claudius – the Emperor’s war-beasts in England

White Hound – a lost chalk hill figure

The Archenfield Reading – the Arthurian Mysteries in Herefordshire

and eleven more short texts.

(Mark Valentine)