Review by Peter Reason
Ghost Lake is a paleolithic, extinct lake that lies between the Yorkshire Wolds and Scarborough. In prehistoric times it was a real lake, the centre of a flourishing Mesolithic culture; now
… just a watermark on the land, visible only when the mist rises and fills it, like a bowl with milk, or in the deep black of the valley night, when the lights of the surrounding villages illuminate the lake border.
This is Wendy Pratt’s land, her place. She grew up in a rural working-class family rooted in this part of the world. She tells us she has ‘never lived more than 19 miles from the hospital where I was born, in Scarborough’. Her father came from a long line of tenant farmers and farm labourers, although he broke this tradition to become a bus driver; her mother from a ‘large, chaotic family’ in Thirsk. Her grandparents and immediate ancestors lived here, and beyond that she identifies with the long line of human inhabitants, reaching back to the Mesolithic people who lived here in prehistoric times. She writes about her book on a social media post:
… as I reached my forties and looked around me I realised the background landscape that I thought I knew well, was still background. I set out to know my landscape, to explore the place I lived in detail, to connect to the stories the land held and the people and nature living within it.
Pratt describes a happy, aspirational, childhood in a hardworking family that while not poor, lived close to poverty. She also describes herself as growing up ‘feeling at odds with the world’. Indeed, she emphasizes ‘There was, there is, something slightly odd about me… I do not fit in’. She thinks she may be autistic, but without a formal diagnosis is reluctant to claim this word. But to acknowledge that she experiences herself as ‘odd’ is both ‘liberating and terrifying’.
I came across this book by chance, catching sight of Pratt’s Substack post celebrating the appearance of a short review of Ghost Lake in the Guardian; the review itself caught my interest; and as I was visiting family in York, I was able to quickly buy a copy in the city’s Waterstones where Pratt was shortly to offer a reading. Ghost Lake is her first full length book, although she has a considerable reputation as a poet, editor and workshop leader; and has contributed to collections of nature writing, notably Women on Nature edited by Katherine Norbury.[i]
Ghost Lake is very personal and very local. It fits rather neatly into the genre of ‘new nature writing’,[ii] which is described in an article by academic Joe Moran as explorations of ‘human meaning-making not in the rare or exotic but in our everyday connections with the non-human natural world’. Moran (as does Pratt herself) quotes Robert Macfarlane as seeing this as a genre which rescues the word ‘parochial’ from the associations with provincialism and insularity and revives the original sense of referring to a parish or small area. The challenge in this form is to find the balance between the personal and the natural history: too often, in my readings, the personal narrative overwhelms the more-than-human, or the ‘natural world’ becomes a vehicle for the personal story.
Pratt grasps this challenge, telling us that her book ‘is a journey of interior landscapes as much as it is about exterior landscapes, because for me the two are intertwined.’ She is entirely successful in this integration. The unsympathetic reader might get impatient with her anxieties, her griefs, her ‘oddness’; but these very personal concerns are always knitted back into the recent and deep history of place, bringing to life a landscape that is both quite ordinary and yet remarkable. In this way, Wendy Pratt’s writing aligns with the view of the American landscape photographer Robert Adams:
Landscape pictures can offer us three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together… the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact – an affection for life.[iii]
The very great tragedy Wendy Pratt carries with her is the death of her daughter, immediately following a premature birth. She wonders if people may think she is too sensitive, but nevertheless refuses to ‘discard’ her daughter, insisting that she was a ‘actual person, my person’. She experiences a further loss when her beloved father dies while she is writing the book. Ghost Lake shows the connections between the graveyard memorials where her daughter is buried and the monument sites used by Neolithic and Bronze Age people, mounds built on the high ground of the beacon and ‘made to be noticed, to be seen’. What could be maudlin dwelling on death becomes a reflection on the ways landscape holds memory and memory creates landscape, over untold generations.
The chapters in Ghost Lake recount a series of pilgrimages to places in the landscape that hold memories of contemporary and ancient lives: to the Woodland Cemetery where her daugher is buried, and then to the ancient sites at Seamer Beacon, Star Carr Mesolithic settlement, Folton Drums on the Wolds, to the farm where her grandparents were tenant farmers, to the site of the Lake itself. She tells of these journeys around the land in the present time while peeling back the landscape to reflect on the layers of inhabitation and the natural cycles of evolution and creation. These narratives are offered in a clear, unfussy, yet elegant literary style with close observation and just the right quality of detail to draw the reader into the experience:
I tune in to my senses. The air feels damp, loamy. The smell of the reedy mere, the body of water I’ve just passed, is all around me, and the ground is puddled with black water. I am no more than ten feet into the trees when the sound, or lack of it, becomes a close, comforting thing. As I enter the terrarium of trees, the air becomes thicker, the ground becomes softer; I’m walking over the lifecycle of trees…
At the end of her book, Wendy Pratt tells us what she has already shown us so well:
All landscapes are personal. The landscape you live in is not just an archive of past lives, past geological and natural events, but an archive of your own story.
She invites us to reconnect to the lineage of the land.[iv]
This is a book that deserves to be widely read by those interested in place and nature writing, those engaged in family history, those engaged with grief and grieving, and those who love beautiful writing. In these days when I lament the pile of disappointing books on my reading table, I am so pleased to stumble across this one.
[i] Katherine Norbury, Ed. Women on Nature. Unbound, 2021.
[ii] Granta 102: New Nature Writing edited by Jason Cowley, 2008
[iii] Robert Adams. Truth in Landscape. In Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture, 1996.
[iv] I have been fascinated by this theme and have recently published a series of posts in Learning How Land Speaks: Seeing, feeling and hearing the world; Seeking qualities of pirlirr, liyan, and wirrin in Western culture; Living and Learning with Land in Umbria.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Wendy Pratt, The Ghost Lake (Borough Press, 2024). 978-0008637378, 272pp., hardback.
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