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Brian Whalley’s Word of the Month for July 2016 is ‘skerry’, which he examines for both its geological and poetic connotations, showing too the web of connections between the geological, the botanical and the topographical in Nicholson’s works.
Is ‘skerry’ a distinctively Northern word? Read on, and find out about its origins and the place it has in Nicholson’s imagination… |
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The following quotation from Wikipedia will give you a good idea of the term ‘skerry’ and its etymology:
A skerry is a small rocky island, usually defined to be too small for habitation; it may simply be a rocky reef. A skerry can also be called a low sea stack.
The term skerry is derived from the Old Norse sker, which means a rock in the sea. The Old Norse term sker was brought into the English language via the Scots language word spelled skerrie or skerry. It is a cognate of the Scandinavian languages' words for skerry – Icelandic, Faroese: sker, Danish: skær, Swedish: skär, Norwegian: skjær / skjer, found also in German: Schäre, Finnish: kari, Estonian: skäär, Latvian: šēra, Lithuanian: Šcheras and Russian: шхеры (shkhery). In Scottish Gaelic, it appears as sgeir, e.g. Sula Sgeir, in Irish as sceir, in Welsh as sgeri, and in Manx as skeyr.
So, ‘skerry’ is another word, like ‘voe’ (Word of the Month, May 2016), with a Norse and Scottish origin. Nicholson uses it only once, at the end of ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ (Collected Poems pp. 361-2).
A barren slack of clay is slurried and scaled-out over
All that living fracas of top-soil and rock. A town's
Purpose subsides with the mine; my father and my Uncle Jim
Lie a quarter of a century dead; but out on its stubborn skerry,
In a lagoon of despoliation, that same flower
Still grows today.
‘Skerry’ here is used in the sense of a small rock island, as defined above, but I think we have to explore a little more as to why it is a ‘stubborn’ skerry.
For those who visit Millom via Nicholson’s poetry or prose works, perhaps a word of topographic and historical explanation is due. A look at the area via Google Earth will give you an idea of the anthropocene topography mentioned in the last stanza of ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ as quoted above. This link will get you to an aerial view of Haverigg.
The features visible are substantially related to the mining of the rich hematite ore in the limestone below Haverigg. The barriers were constructed to keep out the sea from flooding the mine workings*. The obvious ‘Outer Barrier’ sweeps around the coast and separates a lagoon from the sea and the Duddon Channel. What looks like a curved harbour entrance in the lagoon (not the straight line to the west) is a part-collapsed masonry and concrete barrier. This is the ‘Old Sea Wall’ or Inner Barrier finished in 1890 but which collapsed due to subsidence of the mine shafts and galleries in the limestone below. The Outer Barrier, finished in 1905, was designed to subside with the land and not to fracture as the inner wall had. You can walk all the way along it east from Haverigg village, past the red and white lighthouse and the nearby RSPB public hide that overlooks the lagoon to Hodbarrow Point. Now my OS 1:25 000 map (SD17) published in 1966 shows no lagoon and a complete and intact inner wall. The latter was breached in 1894; the actual collapse was probably a little later. You can find more information about the barriers at: http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=876 and http://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/a-z-of-industries/ports-and-harbours/#millom, as well as in the Museum at the Millom railway station and in Harris’ book (see note below). The last fully revised version of my map is given as 1910-31 and so the filling of the lagoon was some time after this. And here Nicholson can help.
‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ is the second of Nicholson’s later period flower-titled poems, the other is ‘Bee Orchid at Hodbarrow’ (Collected Poemsp. 276), and actually seems to fit as a sequence, with ‘Bee Orchid at Hodbarrow’ being immediately followed by ‘Hodbarrow Flooded’, in the 1972 collection A Local Habitation (Collected Poems p. 276 and p. 279) with ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ in Sea to the West (1981). As well as being about the flower, ‘Bee Orchid’ is also about the lagoon and the barriers:
Fifty years ago
The new sea-wall
Cordon’d and claimed
A parish no one wanted
It finishes with the somewhat perplexing:
Between-tide hour
Of this limestone summer,
Before the sea
Pours in again
In three or four
Hundred years’ time.
‘Hodbarrow Flooded’, continues the chronicle, beginning;
Where once the bogies bounced along hummocking tracks
A new lake spreads its edges
which can be referred directly to my OS map, as indicated above. It continues with,
At seventy fathom
My Uncle Jack was killed
With half a ton of haematite spilled on his back.
We see the drowning of the barrier-enclosed area, and particularly the filling of the tunnels with water, the ‘lungs of a drowned man’, the ‘town’s life-time’.
Incidentally, the precision and lack of plural of ‘seventy fathom’ is because Uncle Jack was killed at the underground level called ‘Seventy Fathom’ by the miners. This extent of this level lay almost entirely between the inner and outer barriers
And, in 1968, the ironworks and Hodbarrow mines closed, portrayed by Nicholson through many of his poems, from ‘On the Closing of Millom Ironworks’ to ‘On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks’, from ‘The Bloody Cranesbill,’ and the memory of Nicholson has of walking with ‘my father and my Uncle Jim’ to where ‘Landward the crag splits vertical down to the old workings’, to the memory of the ‘hummocking tracks’ in ‘Hodbarrow Flooded’.
At the Society’s June 2013 meeting we explored here and,
We traversed the yard-wide col between quicksand and quarry,
and there,
In a cockle-shell dip in the limestone, matted with thrift and rock-rose,
Was Sunday’s flower, the Bloody Cranesbill, red as the ore
It grew from, fragile as Venetian glass, pencilled with metal-thread
The poem starts on a Sunday morning but gradually comes to the present of the poem. The ‘stubborn skerry’ is now just a remnant of stone, possibly of the Inner barrier, left by the rising waters of the flooding lagoon of despoliation. The ‘frail cups’ of the Bloody Cranesbill contrast with the rock of the skerry, stubbornly keeping above water. There might also be an allusion to rising sea-levels hinted at in the previous Norwegian-Scottish poems.
My 1966 map shows ‘Hodbarrow Scar’ at the right-angled corner at the eastern end of the Inner Barrier. This is now under water but it might be another location of the stubborn skerry. Even if not, ‘stubborn skerry’ reads well in the poem with the associated, but unsaid, alliteration of stone and sea.
Two other poets using ‘skerry’ are Edwin Morgan and Basil Bunting. However, in both cases, skerry is simply used as the defined topographic entity.
Morgan, in ‘The Cape of Good Hope’ (1990), says that
Lighthouse and skerry swim in haze.
Dissolve, dissolve, havoc of the cape!
and Bunting, in ‘Briggflats’ (1966), speaks of
surf and the text carved by waves
on the skerry.
I think, with a bit of topographic reminiscence in the ‘Bloody Cranesbill’, it has to be the fact that the skerry is ‘stubborn’ that fully justifies its use by Norman Nicholson.
A brief return to Skear, Kathleen Morris’ Word of the Month, June 2015, is opportune. She notes that, “The dictionary definitions of ‘skear’ are all consistent. It is related to modern Norwegian 'skjaer', and to the English words ‘scar’ and ‘skerry’.” She mentions the gravel bank Priest Skear in Morecambe Bay. There are also scars off the coat of Walney Island. However, in the poem ‘From Walney Island’ Nicholson was looking towards the island offshore to the east (England, see Nicholson, Greater Lakeland, p. 137 ff). On the Irish Sea side there are some sixteen named scars, including: Nanny Point, Limekiln and Lamity Syke. I should have remembered the latter in Word of the Month (Syke) for July 2015. So, to do it some more justice, the photograph below is of students standing on the beach pebbles of a typical Walney, west-facing, scar (Fig. 1). They are examining the glacially-deposited materials (till or boulder-clay) in the cliffs. The sea erodes the till at the base of the cliffs at stormy high tides. The fine material gets washed away and down the coast while the larger stones, cobbles and boulders remain on the beach (Fig. 2). These remaining stones constitute the scars, being the remnants of the drumlins that run approximately east to west – the ice-flow direction (Fig. 3). A drumlin is a landform streamlined by moving ice, usually composed of clay, silt, sand and boulders of various sizes, hence the old term ‘boulder clay’. (More recently ‘till’ or, strictly, a ‘diamict’ are the geologically-approved terms.) For Nicholson’s take on this coastal erosion process read Shingle (Collected Poems, pp. 330-331). The ‘Inch by inch / Rolling round England'. This is not literally the case of course. The stones eroded down Walney’s west coast end up at South End Haws. Some of these stones finally ended up as aggregate in Liverpool docks.
A skerry is a small rocky island, usually defined to be too small for habitation; it may simply be a rocky reef. A skerry can also be called a low sea stack.
The term skerry is derived from the Old Norse sker, which means a rock in the sea. The Old Norse term sker was brought into the English language via the Scots language word spelled skerrie or skerry. It is a cognate of the Scandinavian languages' words for skerry – Icelandic, Faroese: sker, Danish: skær, Swedish: skär, Norwegian: skjær / skjer, found also in German: Schäre, Finnish: kari, Estonian: skäär, Latvian: šēra, Lithuanian: Šcheras and Russian: шхеры (shkhery). In Scottish Gaelic, it appears as sgeir, e.g. Sula Sgeir, in Irish as sceir, in Welsh as sgeri, and in Manx as skeyr.
So, ‘skerry’ is another word, like ‘voe’ (Word of the Month, May 2016), with a Norse and Scottish origin. Nicholson uses it only once, at the end of ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ (Collected Poems pp. 361-2).
A barren slack of clay is slurried and scaled-out over
All that living fracas of top-soil and rock. A town's
Purpose subsides with the mine; my father and my Uncle Jim
Lie a quarter of a century dead; but out on its stubborn skerry,
In a lagoon of despoliation, that same flower
Still grows today.
‘Skerry’ here is used in the sense of a small rock island, as defined above, but I think we have to explore a little more as to why it is a ‘stubborn’ skerry.
For those who visit Millom via Nicholson’s poetry or prose works, perhaps a word of topographic and historical explanation is due. A look at the area via Google Earth will give you an idea of the anthropocene topography mentioned in the last stanza of ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ as quoted above. This link will get you to an aerial view of Haverigg.
The features visible are substantially related to the mining of the rich hematite ore in the limestone below Haverigg. The barriers were constructed to keep out the sea from flooding the mine workings*. The obvious ‘Outer Barrier’ sweeps around the coast and separates a lagoon from the sea and the Duddon Channel. What looks like a curved harbour entrance in the lagoon (not the straight line to the west) is a part-collapsed masonry and concrete barrier. This is the ‘Old Sea Wall’ or Inner Barrier finished in 1890 but which collapsed due to subsidence of the mine shafts and galleries in the limestone below. The Outer Barrier, finished in 1905, was designed to subside with the land and not to fracture as the inner wall had. You can walk all the way along it east from Haverigg village, past the red and white lighthouse and the nearby RSPB public hide that overlooks the lagoon to Hodbarrow Point. Now my OS 1:25 000 map (SD17) published in 1966 shows no lagoon and a complete and intact inner wall. The latter was breached in 1894; the actual collapse was probably a little later. You can find more information about the barriers at: http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=876 and http://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/a-z-of-industries/ports-and-harbours/#millom, as well as in the Museum at the Millom railway station and in Harris’ book (see note below). The last fully revised version of my map is given as 1910-31 and so the filling of the lagoon was some time after this. And here Nicholson can help.
‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ is the second of Nicholson’s later period flower-titled poems, the other is ‘Bee Orchid at Hodbarrow’ (Collected Poemsp. 276), and actually seems to fit as a sequence, with ‘Bee Orchid at Hodbarrow’ being immediately followed by ‘Hodbarrow Flooded’, in the 1972 collection A Local Habitation (Collected Poems p. 276 and p. 279) with ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ in Sea to the West (1981). As well as being about the flower, ‘Bee Orchid’ is also about the lagoon and the barriers:
Fifty years ago
The new sea-wall
Cordon’d and claimed
A parish no one wanted
It finishes with the somewhat perplexing:
Between-tide hour
Of this limestone summer,
Before the sea
Pours in again
In three or four
Hundred years’ time.
‘Hodbarrow Flooded’, continues the chronicle, beginning;
Where once the bogies bounced along hummocking tracks
A new lake spreads its edges
which can be referred directly to my OS map, as indicated above. It continues with,
At seventy fathom
My Uncle Jack was killed
With half a ton of haematite spilled on his back.
We see the drowning of the barrier-enclosed area, and particularly the filling of the tunnels with water, the ‘lungs of a drowned man’, the ‘town’s life-time’.
Incidentally, the precision and lack of plural of ‘seventy fathom’ is because Uncle Jack was killed at the underground level called ‘Seventy Fathom’ by the miners. This extent of this level lay almost entirely between the inner and outer barriers
And, in 1968, the ironworks and Hodbarrow mines closed, portrayed by Nicholson through many of his poems, from ‘On the Closing of Millom Ironworks’ to ‘On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks’, from ‘The Bloody Cranesbill,’ and the memory of Nicholson has of walking with ‘my father and my Uncle Jim’ to where ‘Landward the crag splits vertical down to the old workings’, to the memory of the ‘hummocking tracks’ in ‘Hodbarrow Flooded’.
At the Society’s June 2013 meeting we explored here and,
We traversed the yard-wide col between quicksand and quarry,
and there,
In a cockle-shell dip in the limestone, matted with thrift and rock-rose,
Was Sunday’s flower, the Bloody Cranesbill, red as the ore
It grew from, fragile as Venetian glass, pencilled with metal-thread
The poem starts on a Sunday morning but gradually comes to the present of the poem. The ‘stubborn skerry’ is now just a remnant of stone, possibly of the Inner barrier, left by the rising waters of the flooding lagoon of despoliation. The ‘frail cups’ of the Bloody Cranesbill contrast with the rock of the skerry, stubbornly keeping above water. There might also be an allusion to rising sea-levels hinted at in the previous Norwegian-Scottish poems.
My 1966 map shows ‘Hodbarrow Scar’ at the right-angled corner at the eastern end of the Inner Barrier. This is now under water but it might be another location of the stubborn skerry. Even if not, ‘stubborn skerry’ reads well in the poem with the associated, but unsaid, alliteration of stone and sea.
Two other poets using ‘skerry’ are Edwin Morgan and Basil Bunting. However, in both cases, skerry is simply used as the defined topographic entity.
Morgan, in ‘The Cape of Good Hope’ (1990), says that
Lighthouse and skerry swim in haze.
Dissolve, dissolve, havoc of the cape!
and Bunting, in ‘Briggflats’ (1966), speaks of
surf and the text carved by waves
on the skerry.
I think, with a bit of topographic reminiscence in the ‘Bloody Cranesbill’, it has to be the fact that the skerry is ‘stubborn’ that fully justifies its use by Norman Nicholson.
A brief return to Skear, Kathleen Morris’ Word of the Month, June 2015, is opportune. She notes that, “The dictionary definitions of ‘skear’ are all consistent. It is related to modern Norwegian 'skjaer', and to the English words ‘scar’ and ‘skerry’.” She mentions the gravel bank Priest Skear in Morecambe Bay. There are also scars off the coat of Walney Island. However, in the poem ‘From Walney Island’ Nicholson was looking towards the island offshore to the east (England, see Nicholson, Greater Lakeland, p. 137 ff). On the Irish Sea side there are some sixteen named scars, including: Nanny Point, Limekiln and Lamity Syke. I should have remembered the latter in Word of the Month (Syke) for July 2015. So, to do it some more justice, the photograph below is of students standing on the beach pebbles of a typical Walney, west-facing, scar (Fig. 1). They are examining the glacially-deposited materials (till or boulder-clay) in the cliffs. The sea erodes the till at the base of the cliffs at stormy high tides. The fine material gets washed away and down the coast while the larger stones, cobbles and boulders remain on the beach (Fig. 2). These remaining stones constitute the scars, being the remnants of the drumlins that run approximately east to west – the ice-flow direction (Fig. 3). A drumlin is a landform streamlined by moving ice, usually composed of clay, silt, sand and boulders of various sizes, hence the old term ‘boulder clay’. (More recently ‘till’ or, strictly, a ‘diamict’ are the geologically-approved terms.) For Nicholson’s take on this coastal erosion process read Shingle (Collected Poems, pp. 330-331). The ‘Inch by inch / Rolling round England'. This is not literally the case of course. The stones eroded down Walney’s west coast end up at South End Haws. Some of these stones finally ended up as aggregate in Liverpool docks.
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Fig 1. Students examining the boulders in till cliffs, Walney Island. The stones in the foreground and out to sea constitute one of the ‘scars’ on the coast. Photograph W. Brian Whalley CC BY 3.0.
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Fig. 2 Students on the pebble beach sea-ward of the cliff at Fig. 1. This is Limekiln Scar (SD 26 185 657). It is not immediately obvious, until you dig through the pebbles, that they do no go far down vertically. The till of the drumlin is below the pebbles and cobbles and forms a sloping ‘pediment up to the base of the cliff. The sea has enough energy to erode the till cliff only at high tides with on-shore storms. Photograph W. Brian Whalley CC BY 3.0.
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Fig. 3. View south on Walney from across White Horse Scar towards South End Haws with the tide in. The gravel and pebbles in the middle ground have been flung up by a high tide storm to cover the grass of the area between two drumlin ridges. The profile of the low hill left to right is of a typical drumlin on Walney, eroded by the sea on the right. Photograph W. Brian Whalley CC BY 3.0.
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Curiously, given his geological knowledge, Nicholson does not seem to mention the word ‘drumlin’ in his poetry (with one exception) or even in his topographical prose work, Greater Lakeland. ‘What we can see of Walney and the other islands, consists, in fact, almost entirely of boulder clay, sand and the like deposited by the glaciers .’ (Greater Lakeland, p. 137). Drumlins occur not only on Walney but around the mountain core of the Lakes, including especially in the Vale of Eden – but Nicholson doesn’t mention them. The exception is the occurrence in On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks (Collected Poems, pp. 359-360):
Slagbanks ploughed down to half their height, all cragginess,
Scrag-end and scree ironed out, and re-soiled and greened over
To long sulky drumlins, dumped there by the look of them
An ice-age ago. …….
Here Nicholson uses the drumlin landform to suggest ‘glacial’ processes having reduced the size of the slagbanks; grading, smoothing and re-vegetating them from ‘long’ ago. Brilliant!
Thanks to Charlie Lambert for reminding me of this occurrence of drumlin.
* see Harris, A. (1970) Cumberland Iron, The Story of Hodbarrow Mine 1855 – 1968, Truro: D Bradford Barton Ltd.
Nicholson, N. (1969) Greater Lakeland, London: Robert Hale.
Slagbanks ploughed down to half their height, all cragginess,
Scrag-end and scree ironed out, and re-soiled and greened over
To long sulky drumlins, dumped there by the look of them
An ice-age ago. …….
Here Nicholson uses the drumlin landform to suggest ‘glacial’ processes having reduced the size of the slagbanks; grading, smoothing and re-vegetating them from ‘long’ ago. Brilliant!
Thanks to Charlie Lambert for reminding me of this occurrence of drumlin.
* see Harris, A. (1970) Cumberland Iron, The Story of Hodbarrow Mine 1855 – 1968, Truro: D Bradford Barton Ltd.
Nicholson, N. (1969) Greater Lakeland, London: Robert Hale.
