To Beckon

I remember talking with Eric, the rogue who taught me to climb. We were having one of our whisky-fuelled BS-about-climbing sessions on the front step. I had just asked him what was so special about a particular remote climbing area. A wry smile crossed his mouth. “It’s tingly up there.”

It made perfect sense to me. It described the beckoning of the hills, the beckoning of the remote places, the wild places, the places that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Places where you can almost feel the magic on your tongue.

It’s this liminal sensation that keeps me going back. It’s the austere nature of the mountains and crags and the quiet hidden stories embedded there.

It’s taken a while to adjust my sense of space and nature, coming from Canada. But I’ve come to like the idea that in the UK there have been hundreds of footsteps on every bit of land. It’s a strange concept to like, I know, but one that opens you up to the thousands of histories that cross the paths and how unfazed the landscape is with your story. This gives the places here a different kind of “tingle.”

It’s the ephemeral magic that I try to capture in my photography—an almost sinister wildness and an uncaring landscape of forgotten stories. Not the average landscape photo.