Daily photos No. 19: Circles

My friends and I are largely (though not exclusively) child-free and car-free. Quite a few of us like walking and have an interest in the layered, half-forgotten histories of these islands, the bits still to be found tucked away in quiet corners of the countryside, or grassed over because they don't quite fit the Anglocentric narrative of upper-class English domination, Celtic obeisance and the inexorable rise of Britishness. We also love trespassing because we're all fans of the Julian Cope and The Modern Antiquarian, Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside,  The True Levellers' Standard Advanced and resent the enclosure of the commons whether for agri-industry, bird-massacres or golf. Especially golf. Mike Parker's brilliant book on the construction of Powys as a green desert is particularly important to me, as are PJ Harvey's White Chalk album,



RS Thomas's poem 'Afforestation'

and Kirsti Bohata's superb chapter on Welsh responses to the Forestry Commission's erasure of local communities in the post war period, 'The Battle for the Hills' in Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English. 

The Map Twats, our loose collective, regularly went out for walks, subject to the vicissitudes of the British railway system. Dan always had a map and a prehistoric site or interesting flora in mind, and we invariable ignored him and got lost, but there was always a pub at the end. My friends are also quite photogenic. These are from a trip to Corndon Hill, Mitchell's Fold stone circle and Lan Fawr on the Shropshire/Wales border - frequented usually only by hippies and buzzards.

In heroic pose