We were asked to read the chapters Power and Wire from Edgelands (Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S., 2011).  

Wire

Of the two chapters, Wire for me was the closest to bringing to life Edgelands, an area that marks a boundary between town and countryside marked by a “cross-hatch of wire”.  The chapter talks of wire acting as high and low security, for me, as someone living in the countryside, wire acts as a dividing line between different people’s property or areas; I have never really considered them as performing a security function, more a tapestry of connecting lands marked by the wires that can be crossed if following paths but often interspersed by climbing over turnstiles and trying to avoid the wire, “Years of crossing have given this wire a permanent sag, as if cowed by its own weight.”

The passage talks of barbed wire, there is certainly plenty of that where I live and yes, I think this is why “fences with razor wire provoke particular terror. It’s a boyhood memory of that tricky moment when you swing one leg over the chain-link fence and try to get a foothold on the other side. For precious moments, as you make the transition, your crown jewels are inches from agony.”

The passage goes on to liken the coiled or chain link fences to the coils of wire used to make computer memory (not any more of course) and asks if there are memories stored in the fences.  When I look at fences and see them falling away, this resonates for me.  Maybe not as a magnetic memory but the decay, the vegetation growing up alongside or around it all tell a story of their own.

The passage talks of abandoned military bases and their decay.  Once heavily patrolled and surrounded by chain link fence, they are now left to rot away, will they become historical sites to be visited like we visit old manor homes today?  Maybe, certainly the wildlife and vegetation starts to reclaim the territory very quickly. 

Lastly, the chapter talks of the relatively recent phenomenon of flowers and memories being tied to fences at the scene of road traffic accidents.  This for me is not something that signifies an edgeland, this is something seen everywhere, perhaps at the time of writing this was less the case. 

Power 

In this chapter, the proposition is made that the sight of cooling towers is a sure sign that we have reached an edgeland, no signs needed.  I agree with that, but also for me these are transitory edgelands rather than an actual place, something that is seen on a journey.  This is different to wires, I can walk around an area cross crossed with wire, I am in that place whereas I simply pass a cooling tower on the way to somewhere else. 

The passage does acknowledge that normally these towers are seen from a distance and that this gives them a special property in that the way they look can change, “Seen on a cold dawn, they seem to shimmer over the frozen landscape, mirage-like; while the last late light of June catching their upper reaches 300 feet up can find in their grey concrete a warm range of pinks and purples like a mesa sunset.”.  This I agree with, I remember seeing the station outside Nottingham on many journeys and marvelling at the different look of the place depending on the weather.  

The passage asks “Are power stations a marker of edgelands?  Are they a defining characteristic?”, it goes on to say “they do bear one of the hallmarks of edgelands buildings – a function we cant live without, but don’t want to live with”.  I feel this redefines edgelands as a larger space than I had envisaged with Wires.  For me, power stations sit a long way out of towns whereas wires begin a lot sooner.  On reflection this does not make them outside the edgeland, more that it extends the space that the term edgeland defines.  

The passage goes on to argue that this ‘space’ is growing further with the advent of wind power where we are “pushing” wind farms further out into our rural landscapes.  This is true but for some reason, perhaps because it is non-polluting in terms of gas emissions, this move does not seem to me to be damaging the countryside or creating a new edgeland.  When I drive through an area such as Cornwall, which is littered with wind turbines, I enjoy seeing them (whereas I don’t enjoy seeing coal fired power stations) but maybe my choice of verb, littered, belies a different truth.  

Reflection

Both sections of the book have caused me to think about the areas of land, which I would now also call edgelands, in a different way.  What interests me is the interplay between the land and the things found there.  Do those things really change the land, and, as those things fade away to be consumed once more by nature, does that enhance the space to something more than it was before.  If edgelands are becoming a photographic trend, as the passage claims, then the period between being built on and the decay beginning is merely a transitory state and not an end state in its own right.  When, if ever, does the land stop being an edgeland and simply become land once more? 

Bibliography

Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S. (2011) Edgelands, Journeys into England’s True Wilderness.