Beyond the Fell Wall

Beyond the Fell Wall is Richard Skelton's meditition on his explorations of a particular landscape of one valley high in the Cumbrian hills, where he lived and worked for many years. Part prose-poem and part word-hoard recording the ancient names for landscape, it offers a singular and compelling view from one of our most original writers.

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Richard Skelton 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 were spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his observations and thoughts about this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the life of an seemingly inanimate landscape - its otherwise 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, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. At the heart of the book is the fell wall itself: vast and serpentine - a vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape.