The Saltmarshes
The row of houses — bungalows, seaside shacks— stretches out for about half a mile either side of the straight road that runs parallel to the shore. Some are newer than others, some more rundown, different colours, shapes, construction. They all make me wonder who lives there, in each one, what happens, why. A film set, like the whole area, a naturally grown, accreted stage for the mind to perform possibilities and wonders out across the wide flat green land under the row of pylons stretching into the faraway where the just visible dual carriageway bisects the landscape. To enact ritual.
If you drive there, the roads circumnavigate a woozy parallelogram bordering a broad low-lying plain — The Saltmarshes. It’s autumn now and the lonely twisted trees on the edge of the fields overhang the roads, markers for imagined witchery at the time where the veil is thinning. Places of portent, signs and augurs. Magpie, crow. Watching me as I drive. Under the trees, the stones and earth and bones of the old country. This open inner space is outlined by the sea on one side, seawall, M R James flatlands wound through with mute pathways beckoning on and on, rising up to a lazy curving low upland, a high street of reeds and sand to walk over and along and off into the far away.
There is the hint of M R James here — haunted with the ghosts of the sea and salt, something out there drifting, so slowly approaching — but much more so is that deeply chilling (to me at least) presence of Algernon Blackwood. The Willows, The Wendigo, adrift in landscapes that encroach upon and transfigure the protagonists, forever changing them beyond the human, unable to ever escape their experience. The Saltmarshes feel like they could do this if they wanted to, if they woke, if they noticed me passing through.
The music comes on in the car — Nick Cave, Distant Sky. “They told us our dreams would outlive us . . . but they lied.” As it starts I’m in the centre of the Marshes, stretching out all around me as a diorama, a tilt-shifted 360 degree image, dotted with sheep and shrubs and those pylons again, always, plotting out the land into faraway. I take a road I’d never noticed at it narrows so much, descending then rising, higher and higher until it opens out up above the Marshes and out into the Estuary towards the land of grey and pink, light flaring then fading, and the song is ending with the words “Set out for the distant skies . . . this is not for our eyes . . .”
That amber autumn light, with grey pale, the sun weaker this time of year behind a mountain of cloud.
It’s a Hammer film set, a perfect location. So many corners and edges and spaces, old broken fences and gates, collapsing buildings hidden behind walls of overgrowth, brutal brick utilities beneath the pylons, dirt roads winding away from the concrete into folklore and legend, leaves fallen picked up and swirling in the wind, something just behind the hedgerow there, something moving, something waiting. A perfect location for a rural Quatermass and the Pit (a masterpiece of urban cosmic/folk horror, interplanetary dawn of time hive minds, ritual population sacrifice, aliens as gods and modern mass psychosis. So much going on in this terrifying diamond of a late 60’s Hammer film) — an archeological dig, a crew, they find ancient remains, power emanates across the flatland, the pylons involved and someone who has lived on the marshes for decades has arcane knowledge and civilisation is coming unmoored, out here as I drive and wonder, the road curving into high hedges and opening into unfolding vistas whose hidden history remains forever undiscovered.
