Beyond the Fell Wall

Acclaimed composer and musician Richard Skelton has written his first book about the dry-stone wall that threads around his fell cottage in Cumbria, exploring the history, meaning and power of this object in the landscape.

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RICHARD SKELTON has spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley, high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days are spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his thoughts and observations on this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape - its unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things - animal, vegetable and mineral. At its heart is the fell wall itself - a vast, serpentine entity. A vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape. The dark heart about which all of life and death revolves. With illustrations by the exceptionally talented printmaker Michael Kirkman, Beyond the Fell Wall will is set to become a higly sort-after and collectable volume of landscape writing that follows in the footsteps of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood's collaboration in Holloway.