Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes, Number Five (an odd one out)

I have been posting excerpts (poems and photographs) from my next collaborative book, Holme Fell: a Sample of Landscapes, developing descriptions of the book as I go. Here, for example, is the most recent post, which features a prose passage from the work: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Four. 

This post, for variety, is somewhat different. I do not quote from the book; I only show the photographs via the book cover, for, yes, we are near to the stage of revealing publication and the publisher.

 

My work as a poet was to comment (if that’s the right word, it’s not) on Trev Eales’ photographs of the Lake District. But I had not visited the area depicted. This was not a problem: I keep the artifice and artistry of photography to the fore in all of my responses (yes, that is the right word). Not going there might be thought as advantageous to the concept and process. But in late April we decided to visit the location. I described it in my diary and what follows is a very lightly edited version of the diary. To repeat, this prose DOES NOT appear in the book. There are a number of posts which do, and you may access them from here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One, a hub post as I call it.

 

To Holme Fell and Hodge Close in it: Diary: Monday the 27^th April 2026

 A grey morning, I set off, towards Ulverston (for the third time in my life) on the train, to meet Trev [Eales]. The weather cleared up after Lancaster, and I abandoned The Guardian, for gazing at the view! Carnforth with its graveyard of diesels and its memories of Brief Encounter though I ruefully recalled that Coward had Weybridge station in his mind, writing the play [where I used to commute]; Grange-over-Sands with its layered streets overlooking not just the waste of sand, but a grass fringe where the water no longer reaches, sheep grazing. At last, at Ulverston, Trev and his car. Off to lunch, alone in a restaurant, and some chat, half about the book. In fact, a message from our publisher arrived as we sat there!

Then off to the Lakes. Driving fast, the peaks appeared and loomed larger, as we accessed smaller and smaller roads, until we trailed Coniston Waters, and remembered Donald Campbell, as people of a certain age cannot fail to do, and found the  ‘village centre’, a phrase I'd not encountered before on road signage. We turned off into a single- track road alongside a beck that appears, frozen in one of the final pages of the book, in both photo and poem. We had to reverse for a large vehicle with a trailer of slate pebbles; you see them now as loose paving in city houses, ‘quarrying’ of a sort back in fashion.

Parked, we walked: up to the edge of Hodge Close. The deep, sheer walls were a surprise, the dark, deadly water at the bottom rather grim. At ground level, everything was blossoming, but there was little sound at all, little bird song, one non-plussed deer. (There had been sheep on the road, black and white cows in the field, alpaca at a farm, on the way.) The ground was strewn with pebbles and there were piles of discarded slate (I took a chunk), and, when you looked, ruins of huts, remainders (and reminders) of industrial machinery. A wall that had helped create a reservoir. Decidedly post-industrial, though re-invaded by nature: fallen trees blocking our potential route up and down the quarryside.

I was surprised by how compact everything was, and remote - the single track road, past the holiday cottages was long. And yet how wide a vista – everything I had seen so far in Trev’s magnificent photographs was bordered. Had borders. But while place is an arena of borders, space is an area – or areas – lacking borders or boundaries. Spookiness grew, too, and a feeling of wanting to … not quite escape… but move on.

To Ulverston. We parked near to Stan Laurel's birthplace. Blue plaque and terrace house. A couple of pubs. More personal chat. A few plans for the book.

And off, in opposite directions, to Barrow and Liverpool.

Apart from ten minutes of dark cloud, a beautiful day, the sort of day Trev hates for photography! He didn't, I should note, bring his camera.

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Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in South Cumbria. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over all those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment, and now in Ulverston, of course. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. 

If you read this blog you know about me, but this may help: Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com : Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social. All posts here are indicated on Bluesky.

 

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Four

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a new collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. I am going to blog one poem and photograph (and maybe more) as the project progresses and draws towards its completion and its publication in book form.

Holme Fell (the place) is one of Alfred Wainwright’s two hundred plus Lake District fells, located a few miles north of Coniston, Cumbria. The lower slopes, cloaked in woodland, mask an industrial heritage: reservoirs rewilded, the yawning chasm of Hodge Close, a post-industrial archaeology of slate quarrying. Ascending the fell, trees give way to open hillside topped by rocky outcrops, and a panoramic vista is revealed. The Langdale Pikes dominate a skyline which brims with Lakeland’s finest peaks. (I saw it this week, but we didn't ascend very far.

Holme Fell (the book, and it IS going to be a book!) is a ‘sample of landscapes’ as the subtitle says, in two senses. Firstly, as a series of photographs of Holme Fell, with a focus on Hodge Close, the old slate quarry, at its centre. A deep cavernous, black watery lake with sheer slate sides. Secondly, as a sequence of poetry and prose that reacts to the photographs themselves, and through which are also woven some historical accounts of quarrying along with the narrative of a contemporary architect escaping her responsibilities but questioning the nature of things as she encounters them. ‘Hodge Close’ operates as an inner section of ‘Holme Fell’, landscape within a landscape, which mimes the geography.

The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them. And look, it's nearly become a book. Here's a coffee table image of the single proof. More news soon nearer publication!

Here is another piece from before the 'Hodge Close' sequence with an image to accompany it. 'Prose fiction' passages, as I said, run through the poem, and this is one. (It gives little of the narrative away.)

15

It’s six months since The Incident, the accusations, the retributions, the shame, all following their well-trodden professional paths. She has ample time, now, anonymously, to tread these other paths, uneven, gravel and grit underfoot, walls hugging tracks to this high point, one of the peaks of Holme Fell, overlooking the reddish hump of Lingmore Fell with its black eyes of rock staring out, a thin wall snaking around its shoulders. Mist down in the valley, a silver gauze, lifts over the hill-face above, vaporising the view. It’s a relief to see solitary sheep in the slanting fields, farmhouses with neat hedges and piles of taut green and black plastic rolls, smoke from lazy chimneys, red cars in driveways, a lone figure sauntering along the gulf that passes for a road, between high dry-stone walls and tall hedgerows. Imaginary birdsong. Rusty foliage on the elms, though some are dead spindles, even here, where the planet’s ills might be imagined as absent. Or impeded by beauty.

            She settles on a warming tussock, opens her copy of an antique volume she bought for solace in the antiquarian shop in Cartmel, Gibson’s The Old Man: … You hold the road to your right, and a precious steep, rugged sample of a road it is; but as you gradually surmount the ascent, you may take a retrospective glance, now and then, at the beautiful vale, or rather dell, of Tilberthwaite, and the mountains with which it is ‘paled in’, all of these being surmounted by the massive Weatherlam, which is seen to much advantage, and shews itself to be a magnificent hill …

            She is interrupted by a vlogger approaching in his boots, shorts, peaked hat, with rucksack and electronics, white terrier sniffing the tufts of grass by the path-side. He doesn’t seem to see her sitting there. He’s mansplaining on video, though his limping wife is trailing far behind and can’t hear his huffing. ‘It’s a beautiful day – a little misty – shame – but look at the farms – Little Langdale – when you stand here – you feel like the king – of all you surveil – believe me!’   

 

 Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in South Cumbria. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over all those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.  

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The first 'showing' (also a Hub post for all the 'Holme Fell' posts of pre-publication excerpts) may be found here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

I've done my bit - as have nine others - for the Secret Service: new anthology

I am pleased to say that I have a poem in this compact anthology Ten Poets Do Their Bit for the Secret Service. Unusually for me I saw the call for submissions (on Bluesky) and responded quickly, writing a poem specifically for the project. (I did cannibalize an unpublished short story for it, partly.) For a number of reasons spying is quite important for me. I’ve tackled the subject before, in ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’s Book of Solid Kremlins and Melting Cromlechs’, as a strand running through this ‘history’ of Russia/Soviet Union/Russia in Unfinish. (Also, there are spies in the family, but I can’t talk about that.) And of course, my version of Thomas Wyatt, is a spy (as Wyatt was) in HAP. 

Perhaps the greatest pull is that described in the introduction to this book, written by either Jon Stone and/or Kirsten Irving: ‘Contemporary poetry, with its dealings in both the culturally symbolic and the ever-expansive inner life, is well positioned to reflect the degree to which our most intense experiences are like those of the imperilled secret agent… The poem is, as you will see, a kind of spy device in itself.’ Perhaps a poet also feels like a spy, moving in a world that the poet deeply interrogates, but which seems to offer no interest back. (How many times does someone say in the pub, ‘I’d really like to read your poetry!’? Never!) You might as well be in disguise.

 

And here it is. You’ll have to buy the book to read my poem, though I was pleased to find my lines ‘There will be meetings in places unspecified/ with persons unknown’ quoted on the back cover. I tried to make the poem evasive and discontinuous, as is our perception of real spy stories. How did that MI5 officer end up zipped into a suitcase on the outside and his death registered as suicide? Indeterminacy as realism, one might say.

 Ten Poets Do Their Bit for the Secret Service - Sidekick Books

The blurb for the book – the cod spy language is reproduced in author bios and prelims  – agrees with what I’ve just said: ‘Poets are spies by nature. Nondescript these days, they’re subtle and ever-watchful. Shifty in their skins, you might say. They are practised at fleeing and giving pursuit, and quick to reach for a pen (which may conceal a poison dart). They keep eyes on one another, crossing paths in out-of-the-way places to exchange vital capsules of encoded information. Most importantly, they are experts at slipping the grip of rival operatives, at least one of whom is their own dark double. For a time, anyway. And when called out of retirement to do their bit – well, take any reticence with a pinch of cyanide salt…’

Contributors are Alison Brackenbury, John Clegg, Michael Conley, Grace Ellis, Jac Harmon, Safa Maryam, Claire Orchard, Jess Richards, Jeremy Wikeley, and me. 

Thanks to the two editors.

Check out the website for other Sidekick books, including others in the Ten Poets… series: Books Archives - Sidekick Books

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Unfinish may be read about here: Pages: My REF statement describing my Veer volume UNFINISH, and purchased here: Robert Sheppard - Unfinish - Veer Books.

 HAP is described here: Pages: Robert Sheppard Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt's Petrarch published NOW.

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Three

Holme Fell, the place, is one of Alfred Wainwright’s two hundred plus Lake District fells, located a few miles north of Coniston, Cumbria. The lower slopes, cloaked in woodland, mask an industrial heritage: reservoirs re-wilded, the yawning chasm of Hodge Close, an archaeology of slate quarrying. Ascending the fell, trees give way to open hillside topped by rocky outcrops, and a panoramic vista is revealed. The Langdale Pikes dominate a skyline which brims with Lakeland’s finest peaks.

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of the collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, the old quarry, as its central node or focus. I am blogging one poem and photograph (and maybe more) every few weeks, as the project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public, that is: appearing as a book, which is nearly ready now. Reveals on the way! Watch this space!

But for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ we shall present poems and images that relate quite closely together.

Here is a piece from the middle of the sequence and an image to accompany it. There is a sort of 'poem within the poem' that is named and numbered 'Hodge Close' that focusses upon the quarry and its past activities and takes on a distinct post-industrial feel. Hence the use of found list material, and quotation from a nineteenth century source. 

 Hodge Close 1

 

Tilberthwaite, Coniston

13½ miles [22 km] WNW of Kendal

 

Owners:

            1900s - James Stephenson & Co.

            1910s - Tilberthwaite Green Slate Co. Ltd.

            1940s - Buttermere Green Slate Quarries Ltd.

 

Output:

            1896 - Slate.

            1897 - Slate.

            1900 - Slate.

            1902 - Slate.

            1905 - Roofing slate.

            1915 - Slate.

            1921 - Slate.

            1922 - Slate.

            1923 - Slate.

            1924 - Slate.

            1925 - Slate.

            1929 - Slate.

            1930 - Slate.

            1935 - Slate.

            1945 - Slate.

 

 

The water’s a mirror

with no depth; surface is all

we’ve got down here, inversion,

bouncing the

view back on itself

 

Scree has vomited to the water’s edge

and back up again. Formed

from the rumour of explosions:         

                        crashed slate,

                        sheeny walls rising from isolated firs to

                        a dishwater sky

 

                        and jagged rock torn from the earth

                        hanging over its own reflection

 

 

‘… as you approach Hodgeclose, you pass one or two very awful-looking chasms, yawning in close proximity to the road. These are slate-quarries, which have, for many years, been placed upon the superannuated list. At Hodgeclose, you must turn from the road, pass through the farm-yard and a wood-girdled field or two, to inspect an adjacent slate-quarry, in which inspection you will find the proprietor an intelligent and obliging cicerone. He will first conduct you by a subterranean passage two hundred yards long, to the principal quarry, where the men are busy boring and blasting, and loading the carts with masses of slate metal, technically called clogs. It is in truth a strange looking spot this same quarry, being about eighty yards long and twenty wide, with perpendicular walls of living rock rising to a height of, at least, fifty yards, fringed at the top by low trees and bushes, the circumscribed portion of white clouds and blue sky appearing, from below, to rest upon the tree tops. The only exit is by the level through which you entered…

 

Alexander Craig Gibson, The Old Man; or Ravings and Ramblings Round Conistone, 1849.

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Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in south Cumbria. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. 

During autumn and winter, if the weather is interesting, he is often found wandering the fells hoping that the changing light and colours will present a photographic opportunity.

He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

 All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.  

The first 'showing' (also a Hub post for all the 'Holme Fell' posts) may be found here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

Poem and image recovered for Hungary this morning

from Motivist Suite

                              for Michael Egan

 

 

 

Freedom tosses her garland into the stormy sky

 

sun catches the wall plaster turns it

to sandpaper angled in sandy light at sundown

a jay jaywalks across the crazy paving

 

a halo could strangle a struggling saint

what chance the nymphs with pitchers on their heads

tangled in the tresses of the fountain’s willow?

 

the rough monument fingers the flag at half mast

 

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This poem, part of a long suite written in 2011, came to mind last night with the defeat of Orban in Hungary. It also reminded me (the ‘sandy light’ etc.) of this photograph I took of a wall in Budapest. I used it before on this blog to dismember and unremember the death of Mararet Thatcher, but, it too, seems to have found a second ‘moment’ this morning.

Here is where that image was, with different texts of mine: Pages: Thatcher Dead.

 

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Two

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. 

Here's a second poem and photograph. The project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public, i.e. PUBLISHED. More details later. 

While the presentation of text and image may differ from this format, for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ I will present a poem and an image that relate quite closely together.

Here is a second piece from the sequence and a second image to accompany it. 

10

 

Blue peaks, shiny but wrinkled,

under the ragged underbelly of thick cloud.

 

The sandy alluvial fingers of the middle distant fell.

 

Far off: icy caps, hunkering down,

unvisited.       

 

            A sample of landscapes

            for human choice:

 

            I cannot think myself unstunned

            by their rival majesties even

                        through recourse to evasions

                        of the artifice of selection

                        and election,

                        a window on diverse

                        confluences

 

Unpopulated space but not unpeopled

(even through planet time):

the stone wall pens in speckled ground,

be-ribboned by its shadow,

and stony paths trail down upon thick woodland

 

On a road or track

at the base of the far blue rockface, tracing the valley:

a speck of white van or truck pinpointed

 

How much of that prickly sliced-raw cliff face

was once worked

the human unworked

by its sharp treachery?

 

 

John Casson, 27 November 1901, aged 25, Quarryman. Deceased was turning off a new working when a huge mass of rock fell from the side and buried him. No one suspected any danger from the quarry side, as it had been in the same condition for quite a dozen years.

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This is the first poem to introduce documentary text into the 'flow' of the sequence, and, hopefully, of the book. (More of that later.) There are a number of such pieces, particularly as the text becomes more 'post-industrial'. No video this posting. 

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Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.  

*

The first 'showing' (also a Hub post for all the 'Holme Fell' posts) may be found here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

ELLE A VERSE NOVEL Reviewed

I’m pleased to announce that Billy Mills has reviewed my latest book, Elle – a verse novel on his impressive blog.

The review may be read here: Two Broken Sleeps – Elliptical Movements.

 

I thought his description of the main ‘character’ spot on: ‘And then there’s the titular Elle, or “She”, Belle without the B, who is both a character and not one, and who merges at times with Christine, the woman murdered in the Brighton story.’ The text is based on Belle de Jour and 'the Brighton story' is of a terrible murder. I particularly hope other readers will concur with Billy’s reflection: ‘What the book achieves, in the end, is to replace the double victimhood of Christine, once at the hand of her husband and again at the hands of his judge and jury, with a sense of her power, of her being, in spite of everything, in control of her choices.’ 

I describe the process of writing the ‘novel’ here, with some account of the backstory that is described in more detail in the book’s ‘Afterword’: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition. I also described the book again, on its publication, here: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.  

‘It’s a tour-de-force of a book,’ Billy concludes, ‘in which Sheppard makes the verse novel his own.’

Elle may be bought here: Robert Sheppard - Elle, a Verse Novel | Broken Sleep Books.