landscapes lost, abandoned, forgotten, mythic
A5, Perfect Bound, printed on fine papers
154 Pages, B&W Text and Images
PRICE: £13.50 + £3.50 P&P (UK & EUROPE) + £9.50 (USA)
PUBLICATION: 15th AUGUST 2024 – bookmark this page for updates
PRE-ORDERS from 29th JUNE 2024
Perhaps our most ambitious journal to date, ECHTRAI Edition 4 represents a major turning point as our journal crosses over into international territories, capturing and documenting the spirit of lost and marginalised landscapes from across the world.
Fuelled by the success of our online journal THORN, and supported by a much wider and more diverse lineup of writers, poets and photographers, we have here assembled some of the finest place writing from an international roster of creatives.
We are inching ever closer to aligning with the original dreams and intentions for Echtrai, traversing other cultures, widening our view, and spanning much broader and undocumented territories – we are truly excited to finally launch this edition, complete with a new look cover design. Pre-ordering commences at the end of June, so please keep watching these pages and our social media for updates.
PREVIEW OF CONTENTS
Tinning House, Treforest – Bukunmi Oyewole
Photography with accompanying image
Ozark Solastalgia – Jared Phillips
“It’s hard to grieve when the changes wrought by others have made your home an unfamiliar country. Over the last few years our community has lost many of its elders, the folks who remind us why we do the work we do.”
Return to Eden -Bob Beagrie
“They knelt before the raised green finger, placed their foreheads upon the holy palm. Given mortals are reliant upon food the hand refused to eat anything but a daily drop of honey. Of course, it thinned in slow emaciation until it resembled an animated image of death carved out of old ivory. “
Great Glen Way – Sharon Black
“ forestry tracks, drovers’ paths,
desire lines traced by deer and fox and badger –
as many ways as all these masts of cotton grass
waving their white flags at once..”
Walking the Wood Road North Pt3 – David Gladwin
“Buildings deal with valleysides in the same way as trees, by adjusting their rooted foundations and lower portions to allow upright growth for the main bulk of their structure. These buildings are home to a variety of creatures and numerous plant species. Nothing like so many as the woodland trees but, given time and climate change, things could well even up. Trees decay, digested and recycled. The human is the only organism creating waste.“
Scars – Wendy Uchimura
“Deep underground, reindeer bones rattle.
Children’s voices echo through the cavernous passages.
The seeping of water. Permeating down through phreatic loops, covered over by pockmarked fells. A myriad of shakeholes, sinkholes, potholes, and the yawning, darkening mouths of caves.
The cellar door creaks.
The Footsteps of Sarah Murphy – David Lewis
“..And yet there are sensory echoes of past lives all around us, things that we can still hear, still see, touch, smell, even taste. Sarah would have seen the clocktower, erected in 1876 perhaps to replace a lost market cross, and around the market there were buildings and narrow cobbled places that she would have known, tiny private streets become alleyways, unexpectedly sunny on this cold winter’s day. “
Now Speaks the River – Bran Graeme Nairne
“Water is a language that few can speak, and even fewer understand. Each river, each body of water has its own dialect of inflections and subtleties, cascading, flowing, coursing through the land, through language and into the imagination.”
Cape – Sarah Cahalan
She slips into the fish-
Grey sea
wet drapery around
A body that
Remakes itself as smoother,
Colder
Milnsbridge / Dreamscape – Anna Evans
“In this valley, where the river Colne met the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, all the histories of the town coalesced. In stages of the journey, a window of impressions that are sometimes paused for a few moments. Factory Lane, where the bus leaves the Manchester Road..”
We Have Zero Visibility – Belinda Guerriero
” When I discovered the documents about the plateau, a subtle nostalgia took me, as if I already knew the place, as if I had already been there. I needed to go and see, if only to be sure of what was real and what imaginary; and also to find which entity had collected and scanned the documents in the USB memory I had received. “
Catchment – Judith Willson
“..Moorland, though, is not empty, nor wilderness, nor even entirely natural. Land was drained and walled but intake farms often survived barely a couple of generations. Chapels and mills completed an arc from construction to abandonment in little more than two hundred years…”
Three Poems – Jenny Vuglar
” A place where the earth gathers the cold deep.
Pine needles stitch the ground bare;
stumps, black with melt water, mark rows,
an army of amputees. There is no comfort of snow,
only the bleak habitations of old stones. “
Beneath the Sightlines – Phil Dickinson
“..All the mysteries, the murders, the mistakes, all the lies and the love songs, deep time, dream time, their sediments stack up like swamp mud and yellow clay beneath our feet. Their energies leak out when we least expect it, leave puddles in the parking lots and gutters, splash heavy across the sidewalks as we drive through them on our way to the store…”
Horizon Line – Ellen Harrold
“..The sky lies pierced in five pinpoints, wound atrophied
as nettles climb and mortar blooms, spilling dew to collection points...”
Time is a Complete Circle – Anna Chiara Bassan
“ Time is a complete circle.
It grows in the backyard, sprawling against the walls and filling the air with the scent of evening primrose. As it rises with steam from the summer soil, it infuses the present with the past…”
Ebb and Flow – Amelia Hodsdon
“..At my feet is a small and nearly overgrown plaque, put here by the Friends of Purton in 2011. It is the only sign of the Mary Ann, built in Gloucester in 1870 and beached here in the December of 1936. The signs began at the truncated railway and for the next mile I follow them through what remains of the wooden vessels until they end with a final salute at the concrete wartime barges…”
What Was Left Behind – Emma Willsteed
“..This is a harsh landscape, formed of granite older than the Atlantic, once part of the mainland and covered in hardwood forests of oak and elm. Omey, off the western edge of Connemara, became a subtidal island when the glaciers melted. Three hours before low tide you can walk from Claddaghduff, a kilometre across the rippled sand…”
Nameless – Bonnie Radcliffe
“..I do not remember all of it and even what I do remember cannot be trusted. Memory is no solid thing, but a being of shifts and shades, of twists and dances, insubstantial, impossible to grasp by the scruff of the neck and shake till the truth falls out. It is only a haze, a floating shape, as changeful as the swirls that ripple across the sand..”
The Domain of Demons – Colin Watts
“..Watching them from north of the church, this yew
would likely have offered the demons shade
and shelter as they left the building, so
they could share in their gossip and tall tales..”
The Dún – Amelia Hodsdon
“..The songs and spells uttered here collect in my cracks; offerings decay into soil, become home to new flowers, gifts for future rites. They bloom, fade, return unused.
You people, your volume is rising and the weather is rising to meet you: storms crash nearer and stronger, the sun blazes and dries out things that have never before been dry…”
Modern Nature – Laurence Mitchell
“..Shingle has been banked up against the outside walls as additional reinforcement, a stone buffer against any experimental mishap, a comingling of the natural and manmade. This was the desultory architecture of war. The gated entrance to the laboratory resembled the portal to a baleful underground car park. Inside the building, looking up to the bare brickwork and the skeleton of the roof, the scene was more akin to something out of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – a menacing zone of annihilation, a landscape for waking nightmares…”
Ghosts of a Green Sahara – Nick Holt
PHOTOGRAPHIC SEQUENCE
The Moon in the Well – Stella Sebellin
“..It is indeed an architectural wonder, and the trapezoidal stairway suggests an invitation to descend into the womb of the Earth. The monument is composed of three parts: vestibule, stairwell, tholos hypogeum chamber.
The vestibule is the part in front of the stairway where the offerings for the deity where placed…”
The Island of Hoo – Rupert Griffiths / Lia Wei
“..Moving through labyrinthine architectural remains pushes the body firmly into a sensuous and embodied present. Simultaneously, it orients the mind towards the past and what is beyond direct experience. As a body standing amongst stone and concrete, one inhabits a point of intersection between lived experience and the longue durée…”
Echtrai Education Programme – Student works from : Veronica Bernardi, David de Vivo, Astro Boi
AnMór Studio 