The week before easter the morn bright and clear
The sun it shone brightly and keen blew the air
I went down to the forest to gather fine flowers
But the forest won’t yield me no roses.

Resurrection time. I went for a long walk using the path as a time machine. I am winding my way back thousands of years to an elf smithy who requires a coin to shoe my horse. The elements of this walk are few: ground and boot, sky and lungs. Mouth and pork pie. An ever roving eye. I’ve been sloughing off skins for 36 days and nights and now here is the Path, here is the Me. Turns out there’s always more path, still more skins.

The view from Liddington Castle is less of a time machine, more of a punch to the gut. A walloping realisation that we’re a blight on this land and maybe my work studiously avoids that fact. Look at the shit we put on it. Logistics warehouses bigger than villages. Roads wider than rivers. The land is hardly thankful, what if it’s angry. What if it’s fucking angry. There are elf spirits here we would do well to keep onside. And what of our own spirit? Our own wild spirit of rock, wood, blood and air.

That night I walked a loop around an ancient moonlit village. A woman had parked up in her car to look at photos of pigs on her phone. A boy gestured wildly in a cottage window, VR headset wrapped around his head. A badger retreated like a canon ball back into the barrel of his sett as I unknowingly approached through the dark. The world at night is a mysterious, electric, unfrightful thing. The wind whistles in the leaves, the moon is a big porcelain plate. The shadows are not ghosts. I wind my way back to the inn where the landlady has dressed up as the easter bunny.

The path left me with a couple of blisters, a few pages of notes, a slight exposure tan and images that float between my eyes and brain that I will drop into the steaming mug of my work to steep awhile. The question of anger is where the Resurrection lies: Making work not finding it; rising not resting; meeting the earth and sucking down the sky. Be angry. Drop the plough into the field, wait for the crop of rocks.

How many lilies grow in the salt sea
How many ships sail in the forest?