North Pennines: high, rain-glimmering roads, precipitous valleys, gritstone chimneys and shafts abandoned among the cotton-grasses of the moors. Washing-floors and waterwheels by upland streams, stone portals in the flanks of the hills. The landscape of W.H. Auden’s earliest poetry:

Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;

Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below…

The seams of coal and veins of lead below the moors are rich in prismatic minerals as well as in metalliferous ore. Auden wrote in the 1930s of lead mines in decline: ghosts of industry in remote country. But, in the nineteenth century, lead extraction had flourished in Weardale and on Alston Moor as part of the mining which stretched across the north of England from County Durham and Northumberland, to West Cumberland and the Isle of Man.

In the same region there flourished the making of spar boxes: glass-fronted cases filled with assemblages of the minerals found among the veins of ore, sometimes an abstract arrangement, sometimes representations of street scenes or fantastical parks or caverns of crystals and shards of coloured minerals. Sometimes a free-standing arrangement of minerals was made to stand under a glass dome: an arch of specularite and quartz, or a glittering tree of fluorspar and crystal needles. So far the history of this art is little known. A few experts are beginning to piece its history together; records have been recovered of spar box competitions in the North Pennines in the late nineteenth century; and there was a spar box of some two thousand mineral specimens, cemented together by a miner, Isaac Robinson of Nenthead, shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851. It may be assumed that the majority of the makers of spar boxes were the miners of Man, Cumberland and the North Pennines, who had access to the minerals as well as slack periods in which to make the arrangements. This would be wholly consistent with the culture of the northernmost counties of England, with their long traditions of bold designs and technical perfection in many crafts, particularly in the making of quilts and rugs.

At first sight the spar boxes appear to be uncomplicated instances of arte povera, a cheap art as specific to place and conditions as is arctic carving on bone or walrus ivory. Fluorspar, quartz and galena are found in the Pennine mines, hematite and smoky quartz in the mines of west Cumberland. Coming upon these minerals would be a part of the miner’s daily experience. For most of the nineteenth century it would seem that they were available to the miners as a bonus, although with the steady rise of Victorian mineral collecting, some mine owners came to consider the minerals as a profitable sideline for themselves.

The northern mines are often situated in remote country and high among the moors, thus creating the juxtaposition of rough country with the gritstone buildings of small-scale industry which haunted Auden’s imagination. In adverse weather it was often impossible to reach the high entrances of the mines. The assumption therefore is that the Weardale spar boxes are the simple product of this enforced leisure: a craft of expediency practised in the miners’ sparse and irregular leisure hours. Assemblages of what the men themselves called the ‘bonny bits’ from the mines, they prolonged into the twentieth century something of the appearance of the spar and crystal garden grottoes of the eighteenth century. (But no such grotto seems to survive in the mining counties.) There are significant reports, in this context, of a nineteenth-century spar box clearly continuing the grotto taste: shells and coral as well as what were described as ‘Cornish minerals’ formed the decoration. Yet the chief development of the Victorian heyday of the spar box was the construction of street scenes or scenes of fantasy which combine the grotto-aesthetic with something of the atmosphere of the transformation scenes, ‘the radiant revolving realms’, which traditionally concluded Victorian pantomimes. The Victorian peepshow, which often contained street perspectives, may also have been a decisive influence.

It is possible that the link between the spectacle of the Victorian minor theatres, peepshows and the spar box is documented by a unique example, now in a private library in Norfolk. Known affectionately to its present owners as ‘Little Bo-Peep in the Vaults of Death’, it combines minerals, shells, mirrors and figurines into a tableau of a dim grotto with an interior pedimented structure outlined in shells. Inhabiting this ambiguous space is a dressed porcelain figure of a shepherdess. It is not wholly easy to conjecture a date for this artefact, but the middle of the nineteenth century seems likely.

The other source which may be safely conjectured for the spar boxes is the appearance of the mineral-bearing cavities themselves. John Postlethwaite’s Mines and Mining in the English Lake District (1913), a copy of which was owned and annotated by the adolescent Auden, describes this exactly:

There were no discernible rules for the construction of spar boxes. They seem to have been a genuinely spontaneous art, existing on the line between popular tradition and the small industry of mineral-dealing. One mining couple from Garrigill near Alston, John and Sarah Walton, founded a modest dynasty of mineral dealers. An indication of the confluence of mineral-dealing with the world of the spar box is given by the advertisement of John Eggleston, who was active in the 1880s as a mineral dealer in Sunderland, but also dealt in ‘Birds’ Skins, Bird’s Eggs, Butterflies, Moths, Shells, Cabinets, Fossils’. A J. Eggleston of Fairhills exhibited at a geological exhibition in Weardale in 1887, while the greatest of spar boxes was made by an Egglestone, and contained two stuffed birds among its other assemblages. It has been suggested that the aesthetic subtlety of some of the Cumbrian spar-columns is such that more professional artists may have been involved in producing them, perhaps for the mineral shops which then flourished. It also seems likely that the miners from one area themselves occasionally bought in (or exchanged) minerals from other areas for their spar boxes. Certainly, there were exhibitions and competitions in the 1880s and 1890s in St John’s Chapel in Weardale, with competition classes for both spar boxes and for spar models, which could take the forms of columns, arches, rotundas with columns, pyramids or trees.

Papers in the case of a spar box recently sold at Leyburn in Yorkshire, establish a date in the 1830s. This may be the earliest dated English example. Similarly, a pair of small spar boxes, the cases formed as gothick follies, was sold in 2012 by Thomas Coulborn. Conjecturally dated to the 1840s, they seem to look back to the often beautifully crafted mineral souvenirs sold at Matlock and other Peak District towns during the boom in domestic tourism, driven by the wars on the continent, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This was an art sufficiently within living memory to be revived. In the exhibition of spar boxes held at Killhope in Weardale in 2001, there was an example from the 1920s, made by a steelworker from Workington in West Cumberland which, interestingly, also included shells. Experts suggest that there may have been spar boxes being made in northern England, in continuity with the Victorian tradition, as late as the 1950s. Certainly the tradition was dormant for a short enough time for it to be revived easily, and there are again highly skilled spar box makers in the northern counties. A retired Northumbrian stonemason to whom I spoke a decade ago, remembered from decades earlier the technique of rubbing a cluster of minerals gently on the rounded end of a hammer to divide them into prisms and secure the greatest sparkle. He remembered also some traditions of design for the more elaborate boxes, including the use of multiplying mirrors in the back corners of the case. It took him little more than an evening to construct a small spar box, using tile cement as the medium of adhesion. What emerged from the surprisingly rapid process of arrangement was a small cave of glimmering spar with stalactites and stalagmites of quartz adding depth and brilliance to an arrangement which included a receding lake of greenest fluorspar in the most deeply shadowed corner.

Therefore, so far it seems uncertain that spar boxes were exclusively local arte povera, and it is established beyond doubt that Weardale boxes usually contain some minerals bought in from the mines in the west of Cumberland. Records show no fewer than seven mineral dealers in Alston in East Cumberland in the course of the nineteenth century, so a source is clearly identifiable. The population of skilled mining communities is axiomatically fluid: as there are samples of Pennine fluorite in virtually every mineral museum in the world, so it was said in the nineteenth century that one could find a Weardale miner in any mining community in Europe. This might possibly explain the fact that there are in existence spar boxes from Bohemia and Russia, although so far none have emerged from the lead country of south-west Scotland. There are at least two proto-spar boxes in the Kunst und Wunderkammer at Schloss Ambras in the Tyrol. Perhaps mid-seventeenth century in date, these cased assemblages of minerals are formed into miniature landscapes in which small glass figures enact scenes from the Gospels.

The spar boxes now at the Killhope Museum – the selfsame lead-workings of Auden’s early poem ‘Who stands the crux left of the watershed…’ – are themselves the nearest thing there is to a national collection, though there are also examples in museums in Kendal and Newcastle. A description of some of Killhope’s finer examples will serve to give a sense of the art at its most developed.

The Egglestone Spar Box is the grandest in the collection: a substantial Victorian cabinet with two glass-fronted boxes one above the other. It was made by Joseph Egglestone of Huntshieldford, near St John’s Chapel in Weardale, in the first years of the twentieth century. Later it was taken around the local shows by his son, and exhibited for threepence or sixpence per viewing. In the upper case is an assemblage of natural wonders, eloquent of its period, with stuffed birds and mosses arranged behind a proscenium of mineral crystals. Fine pyramids of large pieces of spar stand on the floor of the upper part of the case. The lower cabinet is a superb representational spar box, with a street scene all made of glimmering fragments of minerals multiplied into an infinite boulevard by judiciously placed corner mirrors. There is a grotto-roof of spar and crystals. Little lamp-posts stand amongst pyramids of translucent and reflective minerals. The effect is remarkably reminiscent of the Victorian pantomime transformation scene, with a close of ordinary houses in the process of metamorphosis into a reflecting grotto.

Nearby is the beautifully restored spar box made by Robert Ridley at Allenheads in 1896. This is a work of the highest fantasy, with magnifying lenses let into the upper part of a magnificent case to give peepholes into a cave of quartz, aragonite and fluorite. The main window in the lower part of the case shows a mirrored street-scene, with two Victorian bow-fronted villas, with lace curtains, facing each other across a shimmering yard. The scene is so organised that you catch a glimpse of your own face framed amongst the transformed villas and paths and pyramids of spar. Originally, the case had provision for the villa windows to be lit by candles.

The Killhope collection has also, under glass domes, cones and arches of spar. There are a pair of rotundas of three spar columns with a circular roof, like the Temple of Vesta in translucent metamorphosis, all made of green fluorspar and white quartz. There is a vast pyramid of purple fluorite, galena and needle-crystals. There is an extraordinary stylised pine tree made up entirely of refracting and translucent minerals. This is a work of art of such strangeness, such confidence and assurance in its use of materials, that it echoes (presumably unconsciously) not so much the eighteenth-century tradition of fluorite grottoes, as the prodigious objects of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities.

Miners working the deep seams of northern England (or the mine galleries running under the sea) sometimes hacked their way into the loughs, geodes walled and roofed in spar and crystal, stars under earth in the lights of their lamps. It must have been like breaking into a spar box, into a place of glimmering points of light, constellations of crystal. These translucent stones were still thought, when mining was becoming a science, to be ‘water frozen beyond thawing’. Thomas Browne wrote in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1658) that

This echoes Bede’s speculations on the composition of the stars: that, while some are created out of water which has become solid in some unknown fashion, others ‘turn to crystal in frost, form from snow, or are turned to ice by the cold’.1 Bede wrote elsewhere of the stars travelling below the earth: ‘Concerning the five zones of the world and the journey of the stars below the earth’.2

Frozen water below the earth; frozen water in the winter sky. Northern pastoral and the winter stars. These are the strands through which my friend the artist Tim Brennan explores aspects of the north, with all his poetic ingenuity. His point of departure and arrival is his native Sunderland. The sea off Sunderland became L.S. Lowry’s metaphor for the attrition of time in a life. Yet Lowry came to Sunderland because of his affection for a place which was to him the essence of northern England, with ships and industry on the shoreline, and the hayfields behind.

Tim Brennan’s landscapes, created with a mobile phone and standard processing programmes, are an anthology of moments in which the quotidian world offers an aspect of ‘the beautiful’ as that term was understood in strict eighteenth-century aesthetics. These are images to set against the attrition of time: images of consolation and of homecoming. Each one is produced by an act of recognition – that the light falling across the roundabout or beyond the car park fleetingly illumines images from territories of dream, history and memory.

Recollections of the paintings of Cotman, Turner and Whistler. These are glimpses of a northern territory – occluded, but not lost. The paradox and delight of these images is the means which brought them into being, the informed skill in selection which has winnowed electronic screens until the quality of ‘the painterly’ has revealed itself.

John Sell Cotman made two of his most intense watercolours in County Durham and Yorkshire, during his northern travels of 1805. They are a precise counterweight to Brennan’s camera landscapes: quotidian subjects transfigured. Cotman’s Drop Gate in Duncombe Park is only two palings hanging over a ditch; his On the Greta near Rokeby is only a little driftwood against a bank, water darkened by summer trees. That is all, and yet both have the scope of his great, cloud-shadowed prospect of Durham Cathedral. A mobile phone is no more intrinsically vicious than a brush – instruments are indifferent. What is crucial is the use which is made of an instrument. It is a notable act of poetic ingenuity to use the very technology which is accused of blunting our visual senses, to produce images which Ruskin himself would have praised for their truth and beauty, for their right relation to nature.

Painting was heavily influenced, particularly at its ‘picturesque’ high point in the later eighteenth century, by ways of travelling, looking and seeing. There are eighteenth-century ways of placing the self in relation to a prospect, a scene or a view, sometimes using optical instruments, which seem, in hindsight, cognate with the experience of the photographer. Anyone who can place themselves in the landscape and frame a view with an optical device, turning and adjusting until an aesthetic goal is attained, is making art of landscape. The high degree of technical skill required by the discipline of transcribing landscape in painting or drawing is only one part of such a spectrum of responses. The manipulation of a mirror or a lens is also a possible strategy. These landscape photographs, in all their ingenuity and technical humility, reflect on the way in which the photographic picture (the instant, widely achieved image) is anticipated by late-eighteenth-century ‘picturesque’ ways of relating a real landscape to a painterly ideal.

But there is another strand to Brennan’s work: the recognition that places and experiences which we are taught to think of as banal can, if viewed by a sufficiently trained and sensitive eye, be seen as beautiful. They can be shown to be of aesthetic significance to equal any of the places – the Lake District, the Cotswolds – to which travellers from the eighteenth century to the present have gone in the conscious pursuit of beauty. I think there is a precedent for this in what might be called the ‘off-duty’ pictures of John Sell Cotman, but also of Eric Ravilious, in the latter’s machinery, wind-pumps, abandoned vehicles, farmyard lumber – all of these daily things painted with a level of technical skill and intensity which renders them the equal of any prospect of abbeys or downs.

Eric Ravilious was in some degree a Cotman for the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from the coincidence of their both being Englishmen born into modest circumstances who, by charm and good looks, moved with surprising ease through English society, Ravilious shared Cotman’s delight in the place where the path gives out and the brambles begin. Both were astonishing technicians with water-colour. Like Cotman, Ravilious’s poetic is very much one of abandoned backwaters and waste lots. He painted machinery and industrial things out of a fascination with how they worked. There is testimony in his letters of the 1930s to his desire to paint, rather than anything else, his own picturesque of rusting machinery and wire fences.

Tim Brennan is picking up an underground current that has been moving for two centuries – and perhaps the snatching of images from the most ordinary moments of daily life began in the Netherlands long before that. One thinks of the beauty and spontaneity of the sketches of nineteenth-century academicians in contrast with the blunted formality of their finished paintings, as well as of Cotman’s mysteriously epic pictures of palings and scraps of wilderness amidst the pathless trees. And Ravilious with his flawless, dry watercolours of greenhouses, cement works, and wind-pumps, also captures daily experience, and transfigures it. The relationship between the unconventional works of these artists and Brennan’s recent pictures of places is a resonant and complex one.

When I was a student, I was adroitly instructed in the history of the British admiration for the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Poussin. I was told that eighteenth-century fortunes were expended in laying out the parks of country houses to counterfeit the compositions of these painters, and was told likewise – without further nuance – that an eighteenth-century aesthetic traveller, when confronted with a particularly fine view, would turn their back on it and look at it in a special mirror. At this point, sadly, with a few disapproving remarks about nature and artifice, the subject was abandoned. Nobody told us about the Scottish mirror-pavilions, the little buildings full of mirrors which themselves act as lenses for the landscape, situated at Dunkeld or at the Falls of Clyde. It is only recently that I have come to think seriously about the instrument which those picturesque travellers used, the darkened convex mirror called a Claude Glass. And only recently, reading Arnaud Maillet’s breathtaking study Le Miroir Noir,3 did I realise how this shaped and shadowed reflector worked to reduce the incoherent splendour of the broadest prospect to a semblance of the landscape paintings which the era most admired.

Thomas West’s 1778 guidebook to the Lake District (a defining and classic work in its day) lists the equipment which would be needed to enjoy the landscape to the full:

So how does the Claude Glass work? The point is to assist the spectator (or indeed the painter with a Claude Glass hung on the easel) by putting the vastness and breadth of the landscape into the order admired in works of the most celebrated landscape painters. The process is well described by a nineteenth-century advertisement:

The mirror also reduces tonal contrasts. The experience of looking at Derwentwater is thus rendered more like the experience of looking at a well-composed contemporary picture of Derwentwater. The convexity of the glass automatically creates a curved foreground to frame the recession of the view. The dark tint of the mirror reduces tonal contrast to the preferred range of an era which relished twilights and mists in tone as well as in composition. Umber, sepia, grisaille.

Early guidebooks assumed that travellers would want to see landscape trembling on the verge of transformation into landscape painting in their glasses and lenses. The way of seeing landscape advocated by Thomas West and his contemporaries is not a continuous process, but a series of halts or ‘stations’ from which the landscape is viewed in the glass. When the tour of the Lakes became popular in the later eighteenth century, Keswick Museum sold ‘Gray’s landscape glasses’, named for the poet Thomas Gray who had written his ‘picturesque tour’ to the north of England.

To view a landscape thus from a predetermined station is to enter a deliberate aesthetic relation to it which is somewhere between painting and observing, between gazing and composing. The landscape thus viewed has something of the indeterminate status of the planned trees and designed slopes of the landscape garden. The appearance of reality is modified to the ideal published by William Gilpin in the illustrations to his accounts of his picturesque tours. The landscape tour was close to what might be defined today by an artist such as Richard Long as art: the composed and recollected placing of artist-traveller in relation to the place. West’s guide goes also into extraordinary detail about seasons and times of day for viewing particular prospects or scenes, with supplementary details about the effects of mist and moonlight. Even the aesthetics of early landscape photography were influenced, and sometimes dominated, by the Claude Glass, by the oval or circular form and the curving of the foreground to enclose the middle-ground and distance.

Tim Brennan’s mobile phone-camera landscapes have, in their use of an inclusive and humble technology combined with an educated aesthetic awareness, much in common with those ‘land artists in anticipation’, the picturesque tourists with their telescopes, coloured filters and Claude Glasses. Many of these images demonstrate the paradoxical, pleasurable ambiguity between photography and painting. The composition and light-quality alike allude to watercolours of the Norwich School. The after-storm light falls on stone, path and the stems of the silver birches; a shadowed arch of trees articulates the foreground; the rainbow draws the eye up into the sombre clouds. An intensely blue Scottish hill on a summer evening is painterly in reference to Scandinavian depictions of summer evenings at the turn of the twentieth century. It is evocative of a precise northern moment when the sky after sunset, during the longest days, is saturated in cobalt and sapphire. Or a coastal nocturne, a view out to the dimming sea is a study of greys warmed by reds, the last buff-coloured light defining the horizon and silhouetting a shadowy boat far out towards the horizon. Another view out into the North Sea is equally haunting: the last of the light is going in slate-grey and mist, and the sea is motionless at the end of summer. Colour lies in even bands across the image, across the still evening. Or with a group of trees on a roundabout in fading sunlight, nocturne turns to elegy: the slanting light of the first days of autumn falls on the brightness of the fallen leaves, and sends long shadows of their trunks across the grass.

These images take an atemporal idea of the beautiful out of time passing; out of daily reality. When they were first exhibited, they were paired with intricate watercolour paintings of nebulae, images which looked like marbles, like fine geological specimens, like stars caught in the veins of figured stones. A Baroque yoking of ideas, with precedent in Baroque science: Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1664-5) tabulates and illustrates the prodigies below the earth: veins of fire, portraits revealed when stones are split and polished, unearthly voices muttering in the dark. For centuries the artists of Europe drew stars conventionally as a spiked assemblage of rock-crystal spears, radiant in clarity, blazing with cold. The photographically captured images of stars resemble gems, and it is in this way that Tim Brennan has painted them. All this is rooted in the present place and time. The light in the north and the stars under the earth.

Tim Brennan is an athlete as well as an artist, a walker and distance runner (in the tradition of Cotman the walker, Ravilious the tennis player). Many of his works are guided artist’s walks through a city, forest or landscape, his manoeuvres. It is always wonderful to arrange a meeting with him, especially in his native county, which he knows by heart. He arrives to the second, at the precise place or map reference, as on the freezing sunlit February morning when we found ourselves at precisely 11 a.m. kneeling side by side at the tomb of St Bede in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral. Or on a summer morning in Aberdeenshire at 9.35 a.m. on the bridge below Huntly Station, ready to take off into the hills, a pure John Buchan moment, a moment which was in itself a small, flawless work of allusive art.

We have evolved together an unrealised, probably unrealisable, scheme to film Auden’s early dramatic text Paid on Both Sides, a story of a blood feud played out on the high lead-measures across the watershed between Durham and Cumberland. Auden’s text is indirect, elliptical in its fitfully swift and violent action, with many sections given to a chorus, many long soliloquies, a dream sequence, and after all the characters are dead in the final gunfight, a desolate, measured elegy.

So we began to speculate about images and sequences of action, the visual images which we could put on screen when these remarkable verses are being spoken between the bursts of action: the ambushes, charades, night raids, rugby matches, courtships, and betrayals. We imagine opening sequences – establishing period but also establishing something wrong, something up.

The young master taking his gun and going out rough shooting, meeting another tweed-clad squire, and they level the shotguns at each other. Stand off, nod, and each retreats back into his own territory. A guarded party on the terrace of a big greystone house in sight of the moors. A white-shirted climber scrambling in fine late-summer weather to the top of the escarpment, pulling a pistol from his pocket and checking that it’s loaded before he turns a careful circle on his point of vantage, gun sweeping the horizon.

A picnic, mostly of women, on the high moors, with long views down into blue distances in the dales, a flawless day of high summer. A keeper with a shotgun, guarding them. A chauffeur at some distance, leaning on the car, oiling his revolver.

One or two figures leading horses across a ford among the bog-cotton and thin spinneys near the headwaters of the Wear. The same repeated action seen in far distance, close up, middle distance, half hidden by leaves, at different times of year. Similar long shots of cross-country runners, splashing through a ford, rainbows in spray, or mudded as an autumn afternoon draws in.

A figure in the entrance of a horse-level of a lead mine. Half-seen, lurker, watcher in the shadows. Perhaps a scarecrow figure – scarecrows caught in some of the landscape shots too – who manifests as the ragged doctor in the dream sequence at the mid-point of the action. All of it adding up to a general evocation of a perversion or dislocation of the stable society from which all the expeditions set out in the world between the wars.

Shots of ships leaving docks. Dock gates. Snow on the port of Sunderland. Small railway stations at night. Factory gates chained shut (an undercurrent of the text is that these gentry families up on the moors are bad employers, their lead mines are failing, they are living on rack-renting in the cities at the mouths of the rivers.) Images from Auden’s other early poems: a chained-up gate, a game-keeper turning a walker back at a bridge or boundary. Boats at night leaving small harbours, under the shadow of treeless cliffs.

Sport is the recurrent image of the poetry of Paid on Both Sides, of the fragmentary conversations between the characters before the shooting starts again. Images of sport shade (as always in early Auden) into images of conflict. The principal actors in the feud playing rugby, loosening ties, hanging heavy tweed jackets on hooks in matchboarded rooms, bathing. Of course they smoke pipes and cigarettes every moment when they’re not actually playing. This could move to another level up on the moors: an up-and-under kick and forwards charging for the skyline as though they were going over the top in World War One. We seek out anonymous black-and-white photographs of local football and rugby matches from sixty, eighty, years ago: mud and trodden grass, mist creeping across the pitch, cold light going. Poetry of a lost, Corinthian north.

There is another recurrent image in Auden’s text: the spirits of those killed in the feud returning as visible ghosts when the snows come down on the high moors. A long view, as down a corridor, to a shaft of light cutting across the darkness outside an open front door. It would have to be light of just the right, haunting quality, like the beams of ancient car headlamps. Revenants, young men, standing motionless and expressionless in snow whose thickening flakes turn in the sparse light. What do ghosts wear in this world? Athletes from before the war, perhaps: loose shorts, great cable-knit white sweaters, vast swathes of scarf around their necks. At the end of Auden’s text there are twelve slow-moving, flawless lines of elegy for all the young men killed in the mysterious action, which has been at once that of a Norse saga and a cheap thriller.

Near where I live in the north of Scotland, there is a wonderful art-deco swimming pool, with a pavilion, the whole ensemble cracked and abandoned now, the building boarded up and the sleek, maritime lines of railing and sun deck covered in forbidding and disclaiming notices. This remote lido is set in a rocky coastal land-scape, with an amphitheatre of steep cliffs behind and the wide North Sea breaking on its outer wall. If this place could be captured very early on a summer morning, in the disturbing, unrecognisable light of the earliest hours of the day in the far north, it could become the site of a haunting by a handsome ghost, with a pre-war haircut and swimming costume, his shadow cast on the cracked concrete under water, the light-catching drops of water beading his wet hair as he walks along the outer wall, on the boundary of the still pool and the moving sea. Absolutely alone in this ruined place of pleasure, broken for decades, he becomes a figure expressing every vanished summer morning, every holiday lost even in memory, lost eras, friends, chances, years.

1 ‘Sidera autem alia sunt in liquorem soluti humoris foecunda, alia concreti in pruinas, aut coacti in nives, aut glaciati in grandines’, De Natura Rerum Liber, Chapter XI.

2 ‘De quinque circulis mundi et subterraneo siderum meatu’, De Temporum Ratione, heading to Chapter XXIV, Vol. 2, p. 1.

3 Paris: Kargo & L’Éclat, 2005.