Davina Quinlivan
All these images, I cannot shelter from,
as one might shelter from the rain. They fall and fall,
and fall and fall, in perfect, perfect liquid lines.
Things go, they burn out brightly,
they reach the surface of my mind.
The weather, the people, at the edges,
bordering what goes on between and behind.
Walking the same spot 2000 times makes its own inscription on your heart; it gives a shout and a bellow each time you wonder, wander, about it, or miss it because you have been away. Over the years, the family I have loved and lost somehow become etched into the rhythms of the circular walk I take each day, which is also a kind of literal, cyclical time. Walking in a straight line is one thing, but walking in a circle has its own way of working you, walking you, waking you. Here, an oscillation of time and space flowing backwards, flowing forwards.
I did not imagine this circular walk to be anything other than a pleasant activity to pass the time, to walk with the children, or the dog. I had observed it on an ordnance survey map long before I had moved to Nether Exe, a tiny hamlet in Devon. Born out of an obsessive curiosity, I viewed some of the walking route via google maps. Back then, I remember the camerawork took me as far as the first set of red-brick barns at the end of my road but no further because that was where the circular walk begins and the track turns abruptly into dust and gravel. Switching to an aerial view, there is the wider perspective on the division of land, the warp and weft of the farm, which has existed here for centuries, and the gently encroaching lines of the River Exe.
The walk encircles a field, or two. Here, I’ve gotten into a habit of watching ghosts. There’s my father, sometimes my mother, too, or my aunt and my grandmothers; they take turns as solid light, or spectral memories made flesh, eerie projections I have installed and allowed to play out, over and over, as I pace the length of the two-mile circular walk which runs past my house and all the way to Exeter, just under six miles away. I tramp over and under things, through all that has become as familiar to me as the back of my hand. There are the cycles of growth in the hedgerows and in the paddocks by the Saxon church where we have all sung carols by candlelight at Christmas, the yawning cattle gates and the ‘kissing’ gates, my fingers landing on the endless swirl and sweep of the frothy-headed cow parsley, pink valerian growing out of every stone wall, dog roses, sow thistles, wild geranium. And always, always, the ancient, chattering wind-swept oaks which seem to huddle ever closer each year. Adrift, my family ghosts got tethered to the fields. A snatch of yellowing wool pinned by a gust of air to a wire fence.
Sometimes, these projections of my family sharpen and expand, especially as the likelihood of extreme weather increases and the simmering clouds send an alchemical wavelength into the heart of their strange shadows. You can almost hear it as the air alters around you. Spring arrives, as it always does on the farm, with the sound of the lambs calling out in the fields. The projections of my family are cloaked in birdsong and haloed by dandelions spinning in the breeze. Rain sends its glittery shards over their silhouettes and makes everything gauzy, as if I am peering through net curtains at them, like the ones my aunt had in her home in Ealing. They are the new buds of the russet trees, the smell of sodden straw from the barns and all the undergrowth, sickly sweet with yesterday’s blooms.
In the summer, I can hardly see the projections of my family out in the field, since the barley grows so high that it reaches their shoulders. I can just about see the tips of their ears and, when the sun is at its highest point, my father’s ruddy hands shielding his eyes from the glare. July brings the haybales which sit in the fields like spare, handwritten notes on a page. My aunt’s inquisitive, open features are reflected in their static glow. In autumn, the bitter frost arrives and sheets of rain pelt down on the freshly ploughed fields, breaking open the ground so that it exhales the smell of petrichor, phosphates, clay. My mother and my two grandmothers sit cross-legged and trace the lines of the fields with their fingers, as if searching for grains of rice.
Under the pallid firmament of winter’s clouds, the River Exe is finally brought into contact with these fields and marks the end of my walking, because the lanes flood and the water rises to the height of my knees. I wade through the depths. Every bloody time, I wade through those depths, with a kind of stupid, determined optimism until I realise, each year, that I can go no further without getting stuck. My family are replaced by the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean. I see ships as tall as the hills. Jittery Jacana birds and bulbuls circling the Devon, grayscale skies. There is the smell of an oil slick, rusting chains winding, over and across acres of sargassum seaweed, and shining, orca whales dipping below the tide.
When the floods are at their worst, you can hear the not too distant movement of the water like a deep, synth bass, which lets loose a torrent of sequential harmonies, binding itself to every living thing. At night, the rush and roar of the water appears to be so close that I fear it is travelling towards my bedroom window. It is as if the whole of the River Exe threatens to enter my house. Strictly speaking, the house itself has never flooded and it is unlikely to owing to its specific design which implements deep foundations. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that the lanes will flood in the future and at some point, in around three decades, the house will become an island.
According to environmental reports, a significant proportion of Devon will be under water by 2050, but I don’t need to read this to understand that the ditches the local farmer tends to, clearing them and ensuring they are serviceable, run high with water every winter, as the rain runs off the fields. My fields, the ones outside my window, will probably be well under the water line by 2050. There are blindingly obvious, unavoidable warning signs all around. There are flood warning notices and water gauges, which tell me in no uncertain terms that the problems are already here. A few miles away, towards Killerton, a National Trust property, there is a hamlet called Columb John which is dangerously water-logged in the darkest months. Sticking casually out of the roadside, there are several water depth gauge boards which measure between three and four feet of water – the gauges go up to five feet. For the record, I am around 5” 3 inches tall.
Jacqui, my beloved neighbour lost shortly after the pandemic, once pointed out to me during a walk that the snow from Exmoor settles, melts and then flows off the land, reaching us in the Exe Valley, along with the surface water and overflow of the Exe. In between our conversations about her younger life as a market trader in Camden and the poet John Clare, Jacqui was the one who grabbed my arm and told me to look closer at everything, watch the skies, listen to the air, because none of it will remain unchanged and all is vanishing. She made a trick of vanishing before my very eyes.
Troubled by the oscillation of time and space penned into the rhythm of the floods, I take my phone out and make a video of the water spilling through the ditches. Making pictures, somehow, mediates the reality of it. I collect images in the sieve of the camera: a whirlpool of nettles, the recesses of the deep, deep under carriage of the tracks and borderlands between the fields and the hedges. I tread through wide, wide pools of surface water and try not to slip because I don’t drive. I know this is not sustainable. I carry my smallest child through the water just so we can get to the city and forget, for a moment, where we are in all of this.
Spring arrives and the lanes dry out again. Time to walk. I pick up bits of trailing ivy and shove them into the wire fences on the other side of the field. Here, remember me, I seem to say, as I slip them under the hedgerow. Perhaps, it is a bit like talking to God, but I’m not particularly religious, so let’s call it a reaching out, or a glancing back, a nodding at the future, at any sliver of hope, including the times when it has all but left me. A feeling founded on the foundations of a high house in Devon. A field forever preserved now in my memory and, in my heart, absolved of the ruin of the oncoming flood.
Davina Quinlivan is the author of Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (Little Toller, 2022). For many years, she was a Senior Lecturer in Film at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. She is currently an AHRC Story Associate with The Story Society, Bath Spa University. She lives with her family in rural Devon.
Call To Action: Go outside, take a look around and then look again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ea2bVLki7yc