Over the course of 2021 I slowly and incrementally worked on a prose essay that would set to paper some of the things I had been turning over in my mind on long, lockdown walks. The piece begins with an expression of longing for the sea and coastal edgelands, and thinks about how my move from south London to south Manchester during the pandemic offered me a strange, damp surrogate for this landscape.
The essay was published on The Clearing, a blog run by Little Toller Books, and you can read it here. I’m really grateful for the editorial input of Jon Woolcott, who helped to make it a tighter, more focused piece.
There is a dampness that sustains the teeming, liveliness of life on every surface of this landscape.
In the damp waterparks, woods and floodplains of Manchester, the meditative attention given to fossil hunting and beachcombing was translated into a search for fungi, lichens and slime moulds. The essay is about landscape and imagination and how a different kind of attention to the world might transform it. Here’s the link again, in case you are curious about the piece: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/landlocked-by-francesca-brooks/
Here was an alternate world to the rock pools of the coast: landlocked but equally various. The Scarlet Elfcups were radiant wounds in the dark of Stenner Woods at dusk. In the snow the Jelly Ear were rouged and glistening like obscene ripe fruit, their icy crusts peeling as if from plump, chapped lips slick with lip-gloss. In the Birch woods at Chorlton the planetary rings of the Turkey’s Tail were like hovering plates thrown into the hungry mouths of bark: a fungal solar system in orbit of the pale, silver trees. One afternoon, crawling into the low tangle of a den, I found a kind of bonnet mould flourishing on a hollowed, rotting limb. I thought I had found mushrooms hairy with the December frosts, spiked with fine glass tendrils, but this was Spinellus fusiger – the bonnet mushroom transformed into a beaded pin cushion.
‘Landlocked’ for The Clearing
Francesca Brooks 