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Ebook387 pages5 hours
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this ebook
In 2010, Philip Marsden, whom Giles Foden has called “one of our most thoughtful travel writers,” moved with his family to a rundown farmhouse in the countryside in Cornwall. From the moment he arrived, Marsden found himself fascinated by the landscape around him, and, in particular, by the traces of human history—and of the human relationship to the land—that could be seen all around him. Wanting to experience the idea more fully, he set out to walk across Cornwall, to the evocatively named Land’s End.
Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived?
Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.
Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived?
Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.
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Author
Philip Marsden
Philip Marsden has written several highly-praised and award-winning travel books – including ‘The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians’, ‘The Bronski House’, ‘The Spirit-Wrestlers’ and ‘Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance’ – and one novel, ‘The Main Cages’. He lives in Cornwall.
Read more from Philip Marsden
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Rising Ground
Rating: 4.35 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
10 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a wonderful and surprising book - surprising because finding it on the Library shelves was serendipitous but also because it was well-written and fascinating. I found it hard to put down and have been back to the Library for more of his writing.Marsden's exploration of place as opposed to space is close to the Maori idea and emphasis on place in New Zealand - having a turangawaewae (a place to stand) and also belonging to a place so that one says this is my maunga (mountain) - this is my awa (river). The idea of locus amoenus - the delightful place, is explored too pp.93-4My only other encounter with standing stones and megaliths has been visiting the dolmen and menhir of Brittany and Stonehenge circle. His early chapters about the circles and lines of Cornwall were really interesting.He included just enough personal stuff such as the renovation of the old house they bought at Ardevora, so that the reader learns something of him too. This is cleverly and finely balanced.He introduced me to three Cornishmen I had not heard of before: Charles Henderson, Peter Lanyon and Jack Clemo. Wonderful stuff! And New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield is mentioned too!! The maps are great and the index is really useful. A great book!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The well-known phrase of the estate agent; location, location, location; where the right spot can be very beneficial to your financial position. But in this book, Marsden is looking for something much, much deeper in meaning than that superficial statement, and what he wants to consider is the word place.
Certain places affect people in very different ways, some are what they call home, and that isn’t always where they are currently living, others are where people feel great spiritual meaning or significance. There are places that have a long history of ritual activity, and as he travels around places near his home in Cornwall, he starts to peel back the layers of time, even going as far back as the Mesolithic.
He visits the still visible Neolithic landscape on Bodmin Moor, and with the help of an expert learns what it may have meant to the people then. In Tintagel, home of the Arthurian legends, it is packed full of myths but very little in the way of solid evidence and yet still draws the crowds to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the place. The granite Tors that spike the skyline on the Cornish moors have held men’s gaze for millennia. There is even evidence of bronze age stone rows on the Scilly Isles, the islands far from the end of Cornwall. Lands End too comes under his gaze, it is a more contemporary place, a focus for end to enders these days, but it is a remote place of dramatic cliffs.
It is such a lovely book to read too, not only is the prose careful and measured, almost haunting at times, but he has a way of weaving the history, the landscape and the sacred into a beautifully written book. I like the way that each chapter begins with a place name, a definition and an image to set the scene of the next location; it is a clever addition to the book to set some context.
The evocative way that he describes the landscapes makes you want to go too, absorb the atmosphere as others have done before, and contemplate the personal and real meaning of that place to you. All these places are deeply ingrained in our culture and psyche now, and as much as we have formed them, they have moulded us too.