Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

I think of W. G. Sebald’s writing about landscape and the relics of violence; how his narrator in The Rings of Saturn, walking the tranquil but chronically militarized coastline of East Anglia, becomes preoccupied to the point of ‘paralysing horror’ by the combination of an ‘unaccustomed sense of freedom’ in the landscape with ‘the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’. I remember taking a friend to the former nuclear weapons test site of Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast – where Sebald had also been – and seeing her weep uncontrollably on its shingle bank by the brown waves of the North Sea. The state violence latent at the Ness had caused the surfacing in her, unbidden, of memories of a cruel relationship in which she suffered for several years. The violent event persists like crushed glass in one’s eyes. The light it generates, rather than helping us to see, is blinding.