COMMONALITY by Polly Atkin

 Every evening now we walk on the common. We walk in the gap between work and dinner, which gets longer as we move towards midsummer. We almost always walk clockwise, checking the duckpond for frogs or herons, before moving slowly up the path under the trees, past the metal bench without touching it, and along the last strip of tarmac to the end of the overgrown pond we think of as the heron’s pond. In the wet months the heron is always there, stalking through the reeds, or pretending to be invisible under the weeping tree, or hiding behind the wall of rhododenrons. The maps and guidebooks call it White Moss Tarn – purportedly a favourite skating pond of William Wordsworth’s and the possible meeting place of the poet and the leechgatherer’s – though it’s more of a mire than a tarn, clogged up by horsetail reeds. 

 Here most evenings we turn off the main route, following a thin indentation that curves back almost parallel to the way we have just come. It takes us up and round a crag onto a boggy moor with craggy knolls dotted over it like sleeping trolls, and paths winding between scattered trees. Sometimes we climb a troll and look down towards Rydal Water, which has been creeping further and further away from us these last weeks as we move only on foot. We follow one path, or another, skirting the crags like we are circling a moat, and emerge from behind the wall of an enclosed wood, rejoin the road, pass by the duck pond, and back down to our house. 

 Every walk is the same. Every walk is different. 

Sometimes we are especially tired or the weather is bad, and we only go as far as the end of heron pond, and return on the old path parallel to the tarmac, raised and half-hidden in the trees, that once was the road, before a different route was favoured. The ponds either side have dried up in the strange spring drought. They are leaf-pits now, strewn with weed which dripped from branches in the ceaseless rain of February, and has dried into grey-green curtains of moth-eaten lace. I call it the autumn path, because the ground is old leaves and beech mast all year round. As the weeks roll by we have to stoop further and further to creep under the branches of the big trees as they green. 

We are not alone when we walk. We cross paths with neighbours and greet them from a distance. Sometimes we disturb a deer at the beginning of the walk, in one of the gardens of the large, empty second homes along the road before we reach the duck pond and turn up, or along the path that rises from the pond to the bench. More often we see them on the way home, sleeping in the bracken, or grazing in a clearing. A strange dell sinks and rises behind the duck pond that also has a raised path through it, another old portion of road that has lost its purpose. This dell, like the duck pond, was created when one of the large houses was built in the late 1880s. Trees were felled, and the fell-side scooped out to build the house and its walls. It is waste-land that has re-greened itself into segments of bog and meadow and swampy grove, perfect for deer to hide themselves in. One rainy evening we see a roe buck just standing there in the dell, beyond the raised road, next to a tree we once watched a barn owl hunt from until it got dark around us and all we could see was its white face like a moon. The roe buck watches us watch him and does not run. 

 When I find an antler on the path one day I say this is it: once I find the other that’s me gone out of this shell and into the woods. I half believe it. We are getting better at watching quietly together – at stopping when we hear a twig crag, a leaf rustle – and waiting. 

We see red squirrels leaping from one side of the road to the other, or running along a wall, or chasing each other up the garden trees in their cloisters or the feral trees on the path. There is a tawny owl who hunts along the same route we take. We disturb it day after day without meaning to. Sometimes it sits in a tree and blinks down at us; sometimes it keeps three trees ahead of us. We meet herdwick sheep who have fled their fields to exercise their historic grazing rights on this land that used to be theirs, who watch us cautiously, checking whether we have come for them before they relax. We see birds we are learning to identify with a bird song app that records their voices as we stand and listen, trying to fix cadences in our minds, and we see ones that we cannot mistake: fighty jay, shouty wren, cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo. 

*

The first winter I lived in Grasmere I got lost on the common in the snow. I followed a path I have followed hundreds of time since, but when it reached a portion of open land the clear route vanished into untrodden commonality, as so many paths do. The path went everywhere, or nowhere. I couldn’t work out which. I was less than a mile from home. Maybe only half a mile. But even then, in those days when I thought I had left sickness behind in town somewhere, I knew my limits: my aptitude for falling, and for breaking. I thought of Lucy Gray. I thought of my colleagues on call for mountain rescue. I turned back, retraced my steps. I hated to retrace my steps. I thought to return the same way I went out was a kind of failure. I had a lot to learn. The common helped teach me. 

The second time I took that path it was late spring, May-time, maybe early June. The fox gloves were out. I only remember this because I wrote a poem about it. It was raining, heavily, and I didn’t want to go far from home. I thought the path would become clear to me, that the way through would be easy, but I did not account for the way the season change everything. Paths that seemed confusingly various in the snow had vanished completely into waist-high bracken. I got turned around again. I turned around again. 

Both those times I only took that path because of bad weather. I didn’t know the name of the place then, that it was the common called the White Moss, a name I only associated with the car parks below on the main road. I would not know for many years the range of the common, the vastness of it, how many small and various worlds it encompasses. I had only wanted to walk out but stay close to home. The path sent me home, but not the way I planned. 

*

I moved to Grasmere to study how the Wordsworths made it in to their home and called into being a myth of home so powerful it has shone through the centuries like a beacon, luring others to the hot centre like moths. 

It may be impossible for me now to write about my relationship with Grasmere without plagiarising or self-plagarising, parody or self-parody, or all of them at once. I tell people I came to Grasmere by mistake.[1] I went to Grasmere to live deliberately.[2] I went to Grasmere to research a doctoral thesis about other people living deliberately, and learnt to live deliberately. I retired to the mountains to make work that might live.[3] I retired to the mountains to live. I had a mysterious sense of pre-existence of a life I might lead there, a prophetic instinct of the heart.[4]

I theorised that one of the many ways the Wordsworths made Grasmere into home was through repetative local walks, circling the valley they had settled in – the ‘huge concave’ of Grasmere, ‘this circular vale’.[5] I wrote about walking as a way of knowing and getting to know – of familiarisation and claiming – walking as ritual. I began, little moth, to do this myself. 

*

As the evenings lengthen we go out later, shifting our wandering hour with the deers’ and the daily briefing. 

Some evenings in May we follow the stony bridleway instead of the thin path, going down past the old quarries, and back along the river to the shores of Grasmere, through the mossy woods, bluebells ecstatic in the low light. Half way down we stop and look for evidence of the hutments we know once stood there: a shanty town built to house workers on the Manchester waterworks at Thirlmere. 

In January 1886 various papers ran the same bulletin: 

The plant for commencing the Thirlmere Waterworks is rapidly entering the Lake District. During the past few days cabins for the navvies have been constructed on White Moss Grasmere, and labourers are swarming into the district. 

There are photographs that show the hutments, bare and functional against bare crags, Dunny Beck at the lower boundary, a pale rough road leading up from them towards the tarn, though the tarn itself is unseen. White Moss Common looms over the hutments. It’s hard to place now, standing at the same point. The tree growth is so great, it seems a different landscape entirely. 

We stand on mossy cushions on rocky outcrops and try and pictures the huts, the scene un-greened, un-treed. We examine remnants of wall, smashed pots and glass bottles along the beck. Evidence of habitation. Of working lives. 

In 1890 it is estimated that there are 450 of ‘the pipe track people’ living in Grasmere.[6]

They would not have all been living in the shanty town on the common, below the summit of the moss, where now bluebells sway under pine trees broken by their own weight, and deer weave between beeches and birches, and squirrels skitter from high in oaks that sprout out of rocks and moss and look as if they have always been there. 

But they haven’t. This is an ancient wood, and a new one. Cleared centuries ago, regrown through generations of un-use, of abandonment. Natural and not at all. 

*

I begin to walk on the common commonly for two reasons: because it is close to home; because it leads nowhere. 

In 2015 my partner and I move to this hamlet where I had my first home in Grasmere, to a cottage directly opposite the one I lived in when I got lost on the common eight years before. In that time I have got iller, the distance I can walk shorter. 

The common is close to home; feels far when I cannot go further. 

I walk there particularly in winter, when my energy levels are lowest. As the bracken dies back in the autumn the paths rise out of it. I learn the paths in winter so I can keep them in my mind in summer. In wet seasons paths sink into bog. In dry seasons old paths appear like scars. 

I love it because it leads to nowhere but itself, but will never lead you quite the same way twice. But I also love it because I trust it. I know which paths are safe in which weather. I know how to go there and not hurt myself.

For a long time after I begin to walk there I only go so far, and turn back. When the ground feels uncertain, I retrace the path I know. I keep safe. It is the common who taught me this. 

I know there is a way to cross from the pond side of the common to the lake side, to the old road, but I can’t find it. One winter afternoon I think I have it, following a wall which I know meets the road, but I lose the way in the undergrowth, the overgrowth spilling out from the garden of the big house over the wall. 

The big house is empty most of the year, and the garden belongs to the birds and the animals. I see red deer there. I see squirrels. 

It is a deer who shows me the way. A roe deer, who I meet on the old road one November afternoon. I watch where she goes, how she turns to look back at me. I wait until I can’t see her anymore, and I follow her hoofprints in the wet earth. 

I know the circle now. I know how to go through.

*

The common is a diversion, a nothing-place. A place to stop because you can, because it belongs to the commoners, because it is the common. There are no gates, no stiles, no fences to cross. 

You could look at it and think it a wild place that has always been wild, but it is edgeland, industrial wasteland, domestic margin. You might be trespassing on something when you walk it, some home, some borrowed belonging. 

De Quincey calls it ‘that rocky and moorish common (called The White Moss)’.[7]

Dorothy Wordsworth calls it ‘This White Moss a place made for all beautiful works of art & nature, woods & valleys, fairy valleys & fairy Tairns, miniature mountains, alps above alps.’[8]

In 1802 it is an inhabited fairyland. A through-route. Useful and used. Not an empty world or a private one. Dorothy’s next sentence is ‘Little John Dawson came past us from the wood with a huge stick over his shoulder.’ 

On June 14th she writes about being driven from walking on the path ‘by the horses that go on the commons.’[9]

There are records of people making camp on the common long before the Thirlmere works and the hutments. People walked there, worked there, slept there, wandered there, begged there, let loose their horses and got fines there. People fell into the quarries and died there. People lost their eyesight to quarry blasts there. A man was stabbed in the leg by a young girl there. People foraged and harvested the growth of the land. Commoners fought for their rights and landowners pushed at the commons edges to make space for themselves and their own plans. 

Walk there now and you would see none of this. Only fairy wilderness. If you look closer, fairy ruins. 

*

In early March, when I still take my walk alone, before Lockdown shifts our timetables and our boundaries, I go looking for frogs in the tarn. Something shiny catches my eye by a log and I poke it with my toe. Green glass, goblin. I dig with a stick, and then my hands, and a whole bottle emerges, with a slightly damaged companion next to it. Victorian gingerbeer and aerated water bottles, made by W.W. Hodgson in Outgate, Ambleside. 

Another day I take my partner to the same spot, just to show him, and more glass glints from the path. We find two more intact bottles and some debris where the earth was giving up nothing just days before. 

Everywhere we walk during these locked down weeks we find treasures of old waste, as though the ground is pushing them up just for us. A lemonade bottle. Shards of porcelain. Thick glass annealed by a fire. Glazed pottery. One path is so strewn with fragments it looks like mosaic. 

 It seems the floods of February followed by these long dry weeks have uncovered old dump sites. 

In December 1890 the Lakes Herald ran a news story headlined ‘An Interesting Boghole’ that recounts one of many arguments about ‘obnoxious refuse’ marring the beauty of the Lake District.[10] It records ‘complaints about deposits of refuse near White Moss’ and how the Lake District Defence Society ‘wished to impress upon the Board the necessity of keeping the roads free from heaps of rubbish which were so obnoxious to tourists’. The interesting boghole is White Moss Tarn, which the council were using as a sump to sink waste in. It thought that’s all it was good for: just a boghole, just an edgeland, a nowhere, of no importance. But it seems some people thought it an interesting boghole. A boghole with Wordsworthian associations, with plantlife of particular note. The rubbish is dug in further, covered-over. A promise is make to move the dump and save the view and tourism. The boghole becomes a destination in itself. 

130 years later, the rubbish is still resurfacing: proof of life, proof of lives. 

*

To live with illness is to live with uncertainty. To live with illness is to live with disruption. The only certainty is that disruption will come. All planning must circle contingency. Everything circles. 

I am realising now, in a way I did not fully understand before, not in my body, in the risky fringes of the body, that there are people who have never had their life disrupted by illness. There are people who have never been forced to accept uncertainty, or certainly not as a one of their life’s guiding principles. They have never known the boredom of illness, or the repetition. How living with illness is living with a different relationship with time. 

I see how those people have been struggling and I remember the rage and frustration I felt as a teenager, when I first really understood what it meant to have a body that would always take priority over any plans you might make for it.  How every time I broke a limb or ligament I would cry with frustration certain my life was over because it was on hold for six weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks. Months spent at home, half-years lost waiting for tests which yielded no useful results, half-decades lost chasing wrong diagnoses. I try to remember all this and remember how it felt to think stopping the usual progression of my life for a matter of weeks was equivalent to ending it, and try to feel empathy for those that feel like that now. 

I remember how it felt, in my mid-30s, to finally find out why my life was like this, and that it was always going to be like this. That I was ill, that I hadn’t been imagining it, or wishing it, as I had been told so many time by so many doctors. That it was genetic, in me at the very core and in the very smallest parts of all of me. That it was me, and me it, and we had to learn to live together. That I could stop, finally, pretending to believe that I could have a life uninterrupted by sickness. Stop pretending I could keep going forward, and learn to live with disruption, diversion, repetition. 

I think of all of this as I walk the round of the common, as I stop to catch my breath, or watch a bird, or click a joint back into place, or to rest, or to listen for the deer whose unseen watchfulness has raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I try to find toleration for people’s anger and frustration at lockdown. We talk about risk, about how everyone has a different measure of risk. How ill and disabled people must account for risk and plan for contingency and can never forget it. 

In a video post made in early May, Miranda Hart compared living with Chronic illness with living in lockdown:

‘Chronic Illness is lockdown, it is quarantining. Anyone who is finding lockdown hard, imagine being the only one in lockdown […] Imagine having dreams for your life, then being told to go into Lockdown: that is Chronic Illness.’ [11]

Chronic Illness for many is a kind of permanent lockdown, but the lockdown most people have experienced this year is nothing like Chronic Illness. It’s more like breaking a bone. It’s horrible, it’s inconvenient, it changes your plans in the short term, but for most people it won’t last forever. People have found themselves limited to their homes or a short circumference around their homes for the first time in their lives. As lockdown eases, their boundaries will expand. For me and millions of people like me, they won’t. If anything, they will shrink back further, as the risk of moving through the busy world only increases. I struggle to imagine any ground we could share, even if we wanted to, any common land that could take us all. If we are in anything together then this thing must be as changeable as the common is, as personal to each participant. I tweet I’ve been in plaster casts that have lasted longer than this lockdown. I try and think about how it would be to fear the itch more than the falling. 

*

There is one crag – the highest and largest of the common’s sleeping trolls – that gives a panoramic view of both Grasmere and Rydal. For a long time I avoided it because I thought it was too hard for me to climb alone, that there was too much risk of falling. Now I know the easy ways up, and down. It is low enough and high enough that you can see both lakes, and down both valleys. The angles implausible. Its sides fall into slopes and terraces that feel both man-made and geologic. The top is flat, a natural or unnatural stage – a boggy centre surrounded by a walkway of stone. It feels purposeful. An ancient fort or settlement. There is an uncanny feeling there – both peaceful and watchful – that it was occupied a very long time ago, and is occupied still.  Every time I sit there, on one of the perfect seats formed from the rock, I think I might never be able to turn my eyes away and leave. 

Dorothy wrote about the light there, the strangeness of the perspective: 

‘There was a strange Mountain lightness when we were at the top of the White Moss. I have often observed it there in the evenings, being between the two valleys. There is more of the sky there than any other place. It has a strange effect sometimes along with the obscurity of evening or night. It seems almost like a peculiar sort of light.’ [12]

 There is more of the sky there than any other place. 

It is the summit of the common and the strange light there that makes Dorothy feel ‘more than half a poet’, when she climbs it at twilight on the way back from fetching the post in Ambleside in March that year. She describes how ‘night was come on & the moon was overcast. But as I climbed the Moss the moon came out from behind a Mountain Mass of Black Clouds – O the unutterable darkness of the sky & the Earth below the Moon! & the glorious brightness of the moon itself! There was a vivid sparkling streak of light at this end of Rydale water but the rest was very dark & Loughrigg fell & Silver How were white & bright as if they were covered with hoar frost.’ [13]

I have read this passage so many times and never noticed where she was when had this revelation, but now I know, I understand. Anyone who eats the moonlight there could never be the same again. 

*

I love the safety of the common and it’s familiarity. I love the strangeness of the common, it’s uncanny uncommonness, it’s particularity. How it is both open and closed. How it opens and closes around you. I love it’s communality, how it is shared, but also it’s refusal of the communal. It can never be shared, not even with yourself. It is a different common every time you go there. 

Now we walk together we find new paths every day. Sometimes it seems like the deer or the sheep must make them overnight, and yet when we follow them, we see they must always have been there. 

I could walk the common for a thousand years and never know it. I could walk the common for a thousand years and always find a new path I’ve never seen before, which will lead to a tree, a view, an angle on the village I’ve never seen before. A pocket of land that seems to have opened up from a rock. Sometimes I think I have been walking here a thousand years already, that we’re long lost to the woods. Who will recognise us when we meet them on the old road, in the gloaming? Will we still have something in common? 


Notes

[1] ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’, Bruce Robinson, Withnail and I (1987). 

[2] ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, Henry David Thoreau, Walden. 

[3] ‘the Author retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary Work that might live’, William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the 1814 Edition’, Prose Works, III, p.5

[4] Thomas De Quincey, ‘Lake Reminiscences, from 1807-1830, By The English Opium-Eater, No.1’, in The Works of De Quincey, ed. by Grevel Lindop and others (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), I, ed. by Julian North, p.44.

[5]  William Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’; A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, in Prose Works, II, p.151.

[6] Westmorland Gazette, 9 August 1890. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive. 

[7] Thomas De Quincey, ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson’, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Grevel Lindop, Barry Symonds ??

[8] Dorothy Wordsworth, 2 June 1802, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. by Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.104

[9] Dorothy Wordsworth, 14 June 1802, p.109

[10] ‘An Interesting Boghole’, Lakes Herald, 5 December 1890. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive.

[11] Miranda Hart, Instagram Post, 2 May 2020 < https://www.instagram.com/p/B_r_gNuFHVR/>

 [12] Dorothy Wordsworth, 8 February 1802, p.64

[13] Dorothy Wordsworth, 18 March 1802, p.81