myth, mourning & memory
World War 2 anti tank cubes, by the author, 2011
Plan of Decoy with 6 pipes, Friskney by Ralph Payne-Gallway, 1886
While chasing and slaughtering the remaining Pequots, fine fertile landscapes were observed by the English and word quickly spread back to the new colonists, including the now-landed Youngs, of new open territory to settle in. Smallpox epidemics deliberately spread by the English, to which the natives had no resistance, were interpreted as God’s way of preparing and opening up space for the migrating English who encountered silent native settlements abandoned in haste at the threat of deadly illnesses. Wigwams were not understood by the newcomers who considered the lack of permanence and perceived temporality a sign that the natives did not claim ownership to the land. Wilfully reading the emptiness as something free to lay claim to, they were more than glad to “improve” the landscape with enclosures, wooden buildings, planned towns and planted fields. To the English migrants, the landscape was wilderness, not acknowledging that the natives’ seasonal, shifting use of land was simply an alternate relationship to place to that which had developed in the Suffolk they left behind. Each autumn the Pequot burnt areas of thick forest to provide access routes and give sightlines to approaching enemies, and each year the English saw the smouldering stumps as burnt offerings, utilising the clearings for developments which slowly grew outwards, chopping deeper into the forests. By March 1638 word of these empty lands reached the Youngs’ and they joined a group of Puritans to found the New Haven colony. The flat Connecticut landscapes they moved through, with its coastal inlets, would have been somewhat reminiscent of the Suffolk left behind, though with traces of Pequot slaughters, lands still scarred from burnt villages and shallow graves yet without nature growing over. As Michel de Certeau later wrote, “haunted places are the only ones people can live in”.14 It’s been written that the first settlers in Suffolk burnt forests to create settlement clearings, trees burning for months scarring the first moments of “civilisation” onto a previously natural landscape.15 But this is a fallacy. There was no burning of woodlands. Some forests were taken by encroaching seas, others were felled for house and shipbuilding, and most were lost to increasing pastoral farming. As I walk, the trees open up into heathland, one of the last remaining areas of a heath which once covered much of Anglia after the decline of the woods. Yet to erupt into pink and purple and with the gorse barely flickering yellow, the view is more reminiscent of burnt and ashen offerings than the disorientating, overwhelming full flower of summer. The high cliffs suddenly drop, and Dunwich becomes Minsmere, a nature reserve popular with birdwatchers—serious ones carry expensive cameras and lenses to carefully capture their prey. Minsmere, like Dunwich Heath and much of Anglia, was land requisitioned for the 2nd world war. Seawater deliberately flooded over existing grazing marshes as anti-tank and landing measures. Reed marshes formed and after the war 1500 acres were leased from the Ogilvie family and the celebrated nature reserve was formed. War structures still dot the landscape, some re-appropriated as visitor facilities. This coastline has witnessed various relationships between man and animal, from historic hunter-gatherers to today’s twitchers. It was in marshes like these that duck decoys were subtly located, a careful architectural interjection into a seemingly untouched land. Dogs lured ducks down an ever-narrowing cornering tunnel, appearing behind layered screens along the routes and enticing the curious birds unwittingly to their death.16 To a walker’s perspective the coastline reads uniformly straight until sky, land and sea merge together into unifying fog. It’s quiet, not many of the 100,000 annual visitors are here today, just myself, the solitary walker, and birds mediating between sea and land. In Robbe-Grillet’s La Plage there is no narrative, just a journey. The children listen for bells, though the narrator never says if the chimes come from 45