epilogue

'The swifts which leave Kilburn in August do a round trip of up to 15,000 miles, and then most of them do not land even once during the 9 months they are away.'

'It's the returns (mine, the swifts')and the very differentiation of temporalities that lend continuity. But the returns are always to a place which has moved on, the layers of our meeting intersecting and affecting each other, weaving a process of space-time.'
-Doreen Massey For Space 2005

It was a sunny March day. I was working in Totnes and, unexpectedly, I was given an afternoon off. I spontaneously decided to walk to High Cross; I hadn’t walked through the estate since my residency had finished in December. 

On the way, I saw signs of the terrible floods of January 20014; a tide mark high up in the trees along the Dart, the ground still sodden, a gate wrenched off its post and deposited further down the river. I had a strange sense of nostalgia as I walked through the ornate gardens of Dartington. The place was empty, apart from two men with chainsaws carving up a tree which had fallen in the storms near the Henry More statue. Pink magnolia petals, not the leaves of autumn, lay all around. I passed the swan fountain, the statue of Flora with her faded blooms, and headed out of the gate towards High Cross. 

I wanted to see if the ‘rabbit run’ I had made by raking leaves across the lawn in front of my studio window was still there. I didn’t bother going to the entrance, but nipped through my hole in the hedge and in to the garden. The ground was covered in pale yellow primroses. I could see, faintly, the imprint of the ‘rabbit run’, on the grass. To my surprise, there was not the faintest trace on the ground of the compost heap that I had helped my friend and fellow artist in residence Sue Deakin to make .

I sat in the sun at the picnic bench in the garden. There was a small aluminium compass attached by a rusting chain to the bench. It had been used for children’s activities before the house had closed, and its plastic face was steamed up from rain water. There seemed no point in it still being there so I liberated it and attached to my keyring as a good-luck charm for future projects.

The house sat behind me silent, and strange. I peered through the window. It looked the same; parquet floors, modernist chairs, pink sofa, but it seemed cold. No lights on, no volunteers, no artists, no tourists. The house seemed irrelevant to the burgeoning spring activity of the garden.  
I didn’t hang about for long but headed off, past the community farm. The  pigs empty pen was still there, but no fence. I could still see the tracks of the trailer which had taken them away.

I walked past the ruined building, jumped the gate into the green field, and on impulse I took a new route, one that took me right over the top of the hill and down to the edge of the estate through the woods. Usually distances feel longer through unfamiliarity, but was the shortest way back I had ever taken.

On the day that I wrote this, in May 2014, I walked into my garden with a cup of tea at half past six in the morning. I noticed, for the first time this year, a group of swifts swooping around in the sky. A sign of summer returning.







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