Landings

by Richard Skelton

Richard Skelton is an artist from northern England. Since 2005 he has produced a series of musical recordings and books that engage with the hidden histories and ecologies of specific landscapes. Landings is a collection of texts for the West Pennine Moors of Lancashire, UK, drawn from various sources, including historical treatises, maps, parish records, census data and the artist’s own diaries, notebooks and essays. The book obliquely documents his use of music, writing and photography as means of ‘colluding’ with the various agencies of the the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard, the ‘real’ and the imaginary, the living and the dead. Originally published in 2009 as a modest 96-page book, Landings has grown over the ensuing years as it attempts to record, transcribe and archive the voices of the here and now, the lost and forgotten.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Music, Fiction

326 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

About the author

Richard Skelton is a British musician. Following the death of his wife Louise in 2004, he began to make music as a way of coming to terms with the tragedy.

His music, which uses a number of instruments – principally guitar and violin, has been compared with that of Arvo Pärt among others. His recordings explicitly reference places of emotional resonance, specifically the West Pennine Moors, and the area around the sparsely populated parish of Anglezarke.

Reviews

[Ken Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books are page turners, something to rush through. This is quite different, a book to percolate, sip, ponder. Each page is a meditation of the small four-square-mile parish of Anglezarke, Lancashire, England that is drawn from personal observations and from historical records. It made me consider my relationship to the places that I find special and revisit frequently.

[Benjamin Potash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still working through it, but not a regular read for me. Very cool poetry/exploration of space and landscape and more. Has really interesting companion music that he composed and performed - mostly (all?) in the spaces he writes about! Really creative and interesting and richly atmospheric art.

[Mark Ames · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful just beautiful modern poetic study of landscape, place, history. Hard to describe really.

[Paul Besley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent

[Correy Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

After suffering an immense personal grief, Richard Skelton returned to his birthplace and began wandering the moors, creating music in the land, and writing. I’m glad to have read about Skelton’s story (through Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks), and to have listened to his music—bleak, minimal, ethereal—prior to reading Landings (the companion book to the recordings), for the way they enrich each other.

The book is a fascinating project—part poetry, part journal, but also very much a historical and archival project, exploring the history and ruins of the farms that once populated the moor—not a major theme I was expecting. All together, it is a rumination on (and a grappling with) a deep sense of loss: historical, and personal. “Had we really been here at all?” he asks at one point, losing sight of his own footprints in the damp earth.

I couldn’t help but feel like Skelton was continually hiding his personal grief beneath his more intellectual and philosophical concerns, and I wish he’d let that aspect seep through in the writing more fully—which is where the companion music can be helpful, alerting us to the emotional undercurrents of the project in its entirety.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

book is good. music is life changing.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartfelt and profound. The accompanying soundtrack is amazing