Wendy Pratt’s memoir The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing. It certainly could be read as a book from the margins in some senses. There is the geographic: it is centred around Pratt’s explorations of the Neolithic and Iron Age burial sites around Filey, Scarborough and the Vale of Pickering. The linguistic: Pratt references how her North-East Yorkshire accent was mocked cruelly by some members of the literary establishment. The social background: as she is a working-class writer, sadly still unusual in literary circles.
In common with many original artists and thinkers, there is also neurological marginalisation. Pratt struggled socially at school and, while writing the book, she was waiting for an assessment for autism.
Yet this neurodivergence, she comments, brought with it a creativity and talent for language that enables her to move imaginatively beyond the confines of self, to craft a book that is very much about belonging and connection. It should speak to anyone who calls Yorkshire their home.
Cynefin and grief
Paradoxically, I want to borrow a Welsh word to describe this book – cynefin. I am a Welsh language learner and this word means, as far as I can discern, something like ‘habitat,’ but it applies to people as well as to animals – a sense of connection to place, to its history and to the community of beings who share that place. Pratt writes lyrically about the many animals, birds and plants in her part of the world, as well as acknowledging the fragility of nature – how easily it can be, and is being, destroyed in her locale and globally by the economic systems we find ourselves locked into.
Threaded through the book, in heartfelt prose, are Pratt’s recollections of the loss of her daughter in childbirth, the work of grief itself a work of raw animality and keening. Her explorations of the past allow her, however, to establish commonality of experience with those who lived before her: for instance, parents in neighbouring villages, the lives of whose children are commemorated in war memorials. Or, in the poignant cases of the Folkton and Burton Agnes Drums (the Burton Agnes Drum was described by the British Museum as “…the most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years”), found buried in the graves of children.
These rare and beautiful artefacts from the Neolithic era are, as Pratt comments, not easily accessible to local people: available to view only in the British Museum in London.
Class and gentrification
Pratt describes her struggles to become a writer and to be accepted in a community that is still overwhelmingly middle class. Much nature writing, she notes, is actually written by middle class urbanites who have relocated to the countryside. In a particularly powerful chapter, she references the gentrification that has taken place in coastal communities with their holiday lets and second homes forcing, she writes, working class people into the periphery in their own places of birth – cleaning, perhaps, for those who keep the fine views for themselves.
Seeking to open her situation to deeper aspects of time once more, she notes how history, for instance in the example of the enclosures, is mostly written by the powerful and the conquerors, and how ordinary people’s lives are often erased from the landscape.
Access to nature and land
Pratt had a close relationship with her father, who died not long before this book was completed. He came originally from a tenant farming family and longed to return to the land. After a working life of long hours, he saved up enough money to buy a smallholding, where he is now buried.
Yet Pratt is keenly aware of her vulnerability as a solitary woman walker in the farming landscapes she loves and knows so well. She records vividly an act of intimidation and aggression by a four-by-four driver on a country lane and recounts other shocking stories from female walkers. This rests on inequities of power, which I remember well growing up in a rural environment not many miles away, where sometimes it seemed that much hadn’t changed in that regard for a thousand years.
Honouring of place
I have particular reasons for recommending this book, coming as I do from a similar part of the world and from a similar background to Pratt, and loving as I do the natural world. Many might think that, away from the coast, this area has a quotidian quality. Indeed this is in many ways true, and Pratt references this herself in descriptions of its waste, its factories, its new housing schemes – but balanced by her sense of deep time, history and folklore.
Truly, though, what this book presents is a re-enchantment with an overlooked place and people in passages of writing I have not found more moving since the publication of Liz Berry’s poetic paean to her home ground, Black Country. It is a hymn to the local at a time of collective forgetting and globalisation; and to those who came before, their struggles and achievements, the caretakers and attentive ones who took and take time to notice and find beauty anywhere. And it is also a plea – look after your own familiar locale, wherever you may be.
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