Due to continued lock down restrictions I began online conversations with Deborah Bell and Ros Todhunter. Letters to the void is a way to begin to understand what connects us to landscapes when walking. For me to understand why I am connected to certain landscapes and not others. Can we learn to read the unseen? Can our bodies receive and decode the invisible energy that surrounds us? Can Place be seen as both fluid and deeply rooted?
Deborah is the only female professional water dowser in the UK, her unique sense of connection to the land on which she walks enables her to read unseen landscapes hundreds of meters below her feet.
Ros is a retired mining geologist, her experience of walking and connection to place sits within deep time. Every structure and surface she encounters is understood within a timeframe outside of normal human comprehension. Excavating the land in layers to reveal energy and movement.
‘We lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a transition from a known landscape…into another world; some where we feel and think significantly differently. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, recline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographies, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within countries’
Robert MacFarlane.