Landmarks

Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write;

Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.

Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.

To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink – and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied.

Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.

these words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers;

I relish the etymology of our word thing – that sturdy term of designation, that robust everyday indicator of the empirical – whereby in Old English thynge does not only designate a material object, but can also denote ‘a narrative not fully known’, or indicate ‘the unknowability of larger chains of events’.

Language is fossil poetry,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, ‘[a]s the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

What we bloodlessy call 'place' is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always 'in', never 'on'.

Kimmeridge (n.): The light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing’;

The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

Once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit.

In Northamptonshire dialect 'to thaw' is 'to ungive.' The beauty of this variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift -- an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.

The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.

I have learnt that magnitude of scale is no metric by which to judge natural spectacle, and that wonder is now, more than ever, an essential survival skill.

We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.

Looking from afar - from present to past, from exile to homeland, from island back to mainland, mountain-top at lowland - results notin vision's diffusion but in its sharpening; not in memory's dispersal but in it's plenishment.

Before you become a writer you must first become a reader.

perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.

although we have our compendia of flora, fauna, birds, reptiles and insects, we lack a Terra Britannica, as it were: a gathering of terms for the land and its specificities

Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on top of a mountain I just say, "Wow.

I am Hansje, born and bred in the north Netherlands where I bathed from age one in lakes, river and cold-water outdoor pools. Here in Warwickshire, where I have lived for some thirty-three years, I am among other things a swimmer, and if you ever wish to swim in the beautiful Avon, then do tell me and I will show you to the best and secret places. I have never experienced the profound sense of loss of someone I have never met as when I learnt that Roger had died. Many sentences in each of his books are as if engraved in me, find a resting place, a recognition, they are magnifying glass, lens and microscope to the natural world, a watery surface through which I look to see the earth clarified.

walking sunwards through snow late on a midwinter day, with the wind shifting spindrift into the air such that the ice-dust acts as a prismatic mist, refracting sunshine into its pale and separate colours; or out on a crisp November night in a city garden, with the lit windows of houses and the orange glow of street light around, while the stars blinter above in the cold high air.

Yes, melancholy steeps Davidson's language, and melancholy differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer lasting, is lived with rather than died of.

meaning indifferent to the distinction between things. It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As

A life lived as variously as Roger’s, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves.

his sculptural work with dry-stone walls, that looped across hillsides and fields with such cursive elegance that they appeared a natural landform – as spontaneous in their rhythms as rivers.

A slow capillary creep of knowledge has occurred on Lewis, up out of landscape’s details and into language’s.