Beautiful prose about connection with the scrub scraps of wildness just around the corner in suburbia:
I discovered my edgeland a few years ago on New Year’s Eve after moving back to my home county of Yorkshire in the north of England following a decade living in London. My wife, a London girl, had chosen the town of Harrogate, 180 miles north, because of its access to theaters, cultural pulse and coffee shops. But I’d visited it only a handful of times. We had planned to relocate together, but her job then kept her in the capital, so I found myself suddenly living alone in a strange town, in a strange house, in the depths of winter. All the maps I’d navigated my life by seemed redundant; my world was stacked up in boxes in an empty hallway.
Looking for the nearest open space was instinctive, but to my surprise it didn’t turn out to be one of the ornate gardens or parks of Harrogate’s center but a patch of vacant land a mile the other way, strewn with pylons and threaded with the varicose vein of an ancient river. Like me, the edgeland seemed caught between states, lost somewhere between past and present, and I felt an immediate sense of alignment with it.
[…]
To walk into such places daily is to be delivered into the possibility of escape — from ourselves, our fears and worries and the increasing madness of this human world. To do so reminds us that we are part of a greater and more beautiful planet than we often take the time to remember. And right now we need that as surely as we need anything.
Edgeland.
I love the word.
tinfoilparachute 