Burham Quarry Tunnel: report on the first investigation, 16 March 2009

The goal today was to find the entrance to the tunnel photographed here by Jack Hill: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/26581
marked by a red circle on this map:



Walking from Aylesford via Eccles, the village just visible in the southwest of the map, I arrive at the junction and turn left towards Burham.



Immediately the road turns quite steeply down a hill and round a sharp bend. According to the map the path that leads to the tunnel entrance is somewhere around here, but there are no accessible paths from the road opposite Little Culand, Culand Farm and Petts Farm. There is a fence beyond which is a dense overgrown thicket and beyond that what appear to be paddocks. There is no footpath along either side of the road and cars appear quickly around the bend making it impossible to stop anywhere to take photographs. Around the corner on the right there is a bus stop and a byway leading off the road up a slight hill, shown as a green line with cross lines on the map.



A little way on the right is a bridle path, shown on the map as a broken green line, which I take. It runs along the edge of a field. After a while I reach a short but steep incline to the right of which is a wooded area. With farther exploration I find that the dense thicket here comes to an edge and then a drop of about 20 metres.



This, according to the map, is immediately above the tunnel entrance, however looking down I can see no sign of it. From the original photograph it would appear to be set back into the cutting, which might explain why it is not visible from above. Turning left to follow the bridle path it is possible to reach the disused quarry that the tunnel is supposed to lead to, and a strange and interesting landscape it is. I walk a treacherous path around its edge.



Future action: return visit on a quieter day with less traffic and investigate a possible connection with this place: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/877686

observational-note-taking-behaviour

Around More London [1] people are behaving photographically in front of views of City Hall/Tower Bridge.

They are tourist-behaviour-photographers.

One man [2] is in the artistic-behaviour-photographer mode, photographing objects close-up, including a bronze sculptural-relief-model-map of the area, complete with rough hewn bronze models of City Hall and Tower Bridge, River Thames, More London... upon which someone has placed a small pair of children’s spectacles with pink frames.

I, of course, am in observational-note-taking-behaviour mode, scratching in my notebook, music on headphones [3].

Weather’s fine.



[1] Taking a walk on the way home with my bag of shopping [1a].

[2] The man is dressed in black leather jacket, black jeans, he is olive skinned with dark hair and unshaven, he looks intense, a determined expression.

[3] ‘Repercussions’ by Distance



[1a] One organic white tin loaf from Flour Power City bakery; 500g of Balmaadi Estate coffee, ground for cafetiere from Monmouth Coffee; a chunk of Keen’s Cheddar cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy; two bottles Marqués de Cáceres 2007 Rioja Rosé (£2 off when you buy two bottles from Majestic Wines).

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90 degrees between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island was made for Figuring Landscapes

Figuring Landscapes

Artists’ film and video on themes of landscape from Australia and the UK

This weekend at Tate Modern:
http://www.figuringlandscapes.co.uk
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/figuringlandscapes.htm

explicate this process

Beginning eight days ago
some men began
to erect scaffolding around the adjacent block.
Built in 1975 of light ochre bricks, it now has an exoskeletal form,
but not quite a shell.

Beginning in 1971
six designers and many other men
spent six years erecting a building in Paris.
15,000 tonnes of steel exoskeletal form,
something like a shell.

In 1942
a French poet spends some time pursuing the challenge
that objects offer to language.
A revelation drives his repeated attempts to to explicate this process,
something of an exoskeleton of revision and frustrated refinement
of phenomena of the everyday sublime.



Things that I am not in writing this concerned with:
the revelatory,
the sublime,
the spectacular,
the phenomenal,
the extraordinary,
the allegorical, or
the ineffable.



But then it snowed.