Month: June 2022

A walk with you all up the track, old friends, new faces. Up the hill, this iron age land of circles, defensive and home see us sitting and taking it all in. A sound bowl ushers in the poetry we made, me and her for this place on this day of light. Warm conversations and cups of tea. Time to leave and walk back a different way to the cars at the roadside where we all agree what a splendid time was had. We leave our words on the hill.

Thanks to Rebecca Sharp for our excellent collaboration on this site specific, poetry and walking performance.

Ebb tide, mudflats. Scrap metal craning into a waiting ship. The red of the Forth rail bridge, pilings, slack water. A corroding ferrous tang.

A wild road. Roodyards, a small highway, bounded by high walls and fencing connected Broughty Ferry Road and East Dock street in Dundee. It runs north south, overlooking a four lane thunderous dual carriageway, the east coast mainline train track, gas works, the docks and finally to the Tay. This crumbling one hundred and fifty metre crumbling tarmacadammed thoroughfare is now abandoned, left to its own devices. It is impossible to see its entire length, now overgrown with bramble, dockan, buddleia and more, you get the picture. On the left is an old cemetery, it lies beyond the old city limits, originally the final resting place for strangers and seafarers, their small headstones simply declaring their date of death and surname. To the right stood a factory, the ground now levelled, fenced, cctv’d. Once shipyard workers would have climbed this small incline to the pub at the top. Now young Dundonians tag the fences and walls, discarded bottles and househld dumpings furnish this space. Yet, the wildness of this corridor pushes out and through and up. A friend and I attempt an inventory of the plant species present. We find 41, not counting grasses, there are proabably more but here are a few -toadflax, bristly ox-tongue, shining cranesbill, maidenhair spleenwort, danes blood, stinking hawksbeard as well as bees, butterflies and a pair of juvenile wrens. All of these flourish in the midst of the city’s incessant momentum, a reclamation, as exciting an exploration of any wild place, this road.

Early morning the breeze rises with song – goldfinch, linnet and lark above the green scent of summer, swooning, in love.