Beyond thrilled that this drawing has been published in Dark Mountain issue 26 'Dark Ocean' this month.

Chalk. It's everywhere in this far South Easterly part of England.

Walking, thinking, drawing. Walking. Thinking. Learning this place. Its chalks and sands and soils. The warmth of its brick. It's oaks and alders and willows.

Dartmoor. Grimspound. The four of us. February mist. Ghosts and fairies and sheep’s wool caught on sedge. Chips in the pub.

I miss you. Bright streak of childhood hedgerows. Winged splash of sunlight in the twigs.

There was a footprint, held in the baked earth of the garden this spring. Blackbird? Thrush? I’m not sure.

There’s a funny sort of intimacy in making your own pigments. Memories of the day you found them, earth, stone, twigs, bones. The rain in your face, the smell of the mud by the river, in the woods, on the moor, threads of conversation.

Thinking about traces. Bodies in landscapes. My own and those of everyone else. Fox, badger, grass snake, beetle. Intimate glimpses into passing stories; unquiet ends and bright beginnings.

I collected the twigs not long after she fell, sometime after the big storm last Spring. It seemed the least I could do. I wrapped them in tin foil, and tended them through their journey in the flames one long evening that May.

Once, long ago in the future, before cars had been invented and shortly after they had ceased to exist, Fox was not killed on the road that baking August night.

Owling: It’s cold, clear. Quiet now the birds have settled. She’s not here. I watched from the brambles on the side of the hill as she left to go hunting a minute ago.

Stag beetle: Found by a Mrs Berrenclot sometime around September, 1688, and sold, for six shillings, to famous naturalist William Courten…

Owling: It’s clear and still. 4ish. The children will be home a bit later than usual and I have a while free for owling.