Garefowl are an international collective of musicians connected to the archipelago of St Kilda, Scotland, combining strings and electronics. Their second album Things That Vanish, released on 2 October on AD 93, was recorded on Hirta, the main island of St Kilda, at night. The soundscapes of Hirta breathe across the record: a quiet rolling swell of winds, waves, birds, and the otherworldly thrum of the snipe.

Taking influence from the traditional folk music of St Kilda, the tunes on the record are inspired by the threatened seabirds of the islands (Puffin, Guillemot, Storm Petrel, Cormorant, Shearwater, Kittiwake, Gannet, Bonxie, and Fulmar). The band were intrigued by the folk stories around these birds, and how they often are depicted to imbue a primal, dark and haunting nature. In such tales, the birds retain a quality akin to a sea monster: preying upon calves and sheep, and believed to be the pelagic souls of drowned sailors or the cursed spirits of cruel captains.

Listen to / buy the record in its entirety here via Bandcamp.

All that is left of this 150-year-long subsistence practice – of collecting, drying and burning seaweed for glass making – are the stone-lined pits where the kelp was burned.

Teän has kindly allowed us to share some images from the project.

Visit Teän’s website here, or follow Teän on Instagram here.

Sound is not sound alone, it’s touch.
John Cotter, Losing Music

My nerves were on edge when I visited the Barbican’s Feel the Sound exhibition two summers ago. I had become fearful of sound and wanted to transform this fear back into love. An energy company had built a hyperscale wind power plant near my Shetland home. The low frequency noise of the turbines rewired the auditory processing in my brain, among other neurological harms. I moved house and slowly recovered but louder sounds continued to cause pain.

I needn’t have worried. I suffered no pain at the Barbican exhibition. The subwoofer bass of the souped-up cars in the underground carpark was a gentle nudge compared to the brain punch of industrial wind turbines. I’m deaf and have long known that sound can be felt as much as heard. It was good to see artists explore this. In a video exhibit, Evelyn Glennie talked of teaching the world to listen but with our bodies, hearts and mind. If I had to choose a book that does just this it would be Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova.

The deep listening in Borrowed Land takes place in the Scottish Highlands. The writing is rich in sonic detail. A cave becomes the inner ear of the glen and birches whisper. I hear the stories told in Borrowed Land but I feel them too. Kassabova’s Highland home place, like my Island home place, is a sacrifice zone. Ecocide is being committed in the name of the energy transition and human health is collateral damage in the pursuit of corporate profit. Kassabova’s lived experience is vital testimony. The low frequency noise of a new electricity substation sends workers home with migraines, panic, nausea, a malaise and Kassabova herself is made ill by the pylons that are built next to her home. She, like me, is forced to leave.

I’ve come to know and love the setting of Borrowed Land while staying at Moniack Mhor, a creative writing centre that sits high on a hillside. The rooms have views across a wooded glen, mountains form the backdrop and the light is always shifting. I mention Moniack’s views deliberately. Those of us arguing that all is not well in the energy transition are accused of being more concerned with views than the climate emergency. If only this were true. A wind power plant called Ballach, with turbines 230 m high, is planned 10 km from Moniack Mhor. If it is built, I would hesitate to stay there again and not because the landscape would change. The soundscape would change, it would become unsafe.

^{Photo: Cliff Green}

Each time that a turbine blade passes a tower, a pulse of low frequency noise is flung out. This noise is too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear but it can still be sensed. Think of sound waves as waves of pressure and of turbine harm as barotrauma. Bats can die from pulmonary barotrauma if they fly near turbines, the blood vessels in their pliable lungs burst. In humans, turbine barotrauma causes neurological harm. My brain was rewired and my heart was hacked, it would race uncontrollably. I could tell if the turbines were on or off without looking. It is difficult to describe sensing a turbine other than to say that it is sensory torture.

When I explain turbine acoustic harm to people, they ask if noise cancelling headphones help, or sound absorbing panels. The answer is no. Blade pass emissions cannot be stopped from entering a home, or a body. These pulses can be as low as 0.1 Hz which means soundwaves that are vast in scale and travel many kilometres. I now live 14 km from the hyperscale power plant here in Shetland but I can still sense the turbines in settled weather. The taller the turbine, the worse the blade pass pollution. Ballach wind power plant must never be built.

Building wind power plants a safe distance from homes and workplaces would increase construction and operation costs and decrease profits. This is why the wind industry claims that turbines are safe. They argue that the harm is psychogenic in origin (we are simply stressed because turbines have been built in our view). Despite mounting evidence of direct harm to human health, governments concertedly look the other way and for a while I did not understand why but in Scotland, at least, the reason is becoming alarmingly clear.

Renewables produced more electricity than is consumed in the country for the first time in 2022. The construction of new energy infrastructure continues apace because Scotland is being positioned as a ‘green’ data centre superpower. Twenty-six hyperscale AI datacentres have been proposed so far. As Kassabova astutely observes in Borrowed Land, renewable energy infrastructure is being built in Scotland to open new markets for profit and not for the good of the planet. These profits do not stay in Scotland. Promised jobs do not materialise and fuel poverty remains. The energy company responsible for ecocide and harm to health in Borrowed Land is the same company that built the hyperscale power plant here in Shetland. Its main shareholder is BlackRock, named by the UN as complicit in the economy of genocide.

Shetland is not a wooded place and I am drawn to Kassabova’s portrait of a low impact forester called Dylan. He extracts timber with Nomad the horse, a process that Kassabova describes as hard toil and bright joy. We meet him sitting on his cabin porch listening to rain falling on leaves. In spring, he listens for the sound of sap rising before planting trees. It used to rise in March but now rises in February. The power company intend to build a pylon where he is constructing a barn for Nomad. If he does not agree to leave, the land will be compulsory purchased. As Dylan concludes, We need renewable energy, but this is just wrong. Borrowed Land is a book ahead of its time, a clarion call that cuts through all the corporate energy company noise.

^{The 103 turbine Viking Wind Farm, Shetland. Photo by Sally Huband}

*

Kapka Kassabova’s ‘Borrowed Land: A Highland Story’ is out now and available here, published by Jonathan Cape (£20.90).

Sally Huband’s memoir, ‘Sea Bean’, won the Highland Book Prize and ‘saltwaterisland&’, produced with Gaada, recently featured in the Dundee V&A Design and Disability exhibition. For ‘The Book of Bogs’ anthology, Sally co-wrote with Polly Atkin an innovative call and response piece on turbine acoustic harm.

In the verdant home counties, among chequered fields and kite-flecked skies, is an Oxfordshire estate that appears much like any other — an arcadian emblem of Englishness; a signifier of assumptive hereditary power. But something radical has taken root. Since the 1970s, the Lord of the manor has been practicising organic farming on some of the estates’ lands, has opened up some of that land to others, and around this, a mixed community of growers, rural skills keepers and heritage craft makers has formed. Currently transitioning to become England’s first community-owned estate, the Hardwick Estate will soon be handed from its heirs to the non-landed-gentry residents who have made their lives and livelihoods there over the decades.

Touching on so many things that tangle back to the rot at the heart of contemporary England, Hardwick is the setting for Nick Hayes’ spirited investigation into hereditary land ownership in the UK, its inextricable links with ongoing global colonialism, and the contradiction at its centre, between owning land and belonging on it.

Estates have their tentacles around the world, gaining their wealth by extracting it from elsewhere, and this particular estate has the origins of its wealth ensnared with railway expansion across Canada — the opening of frontiers that enabled the thieving of land and resources from Indigenous populations who lived there. This period saw a clash of two very different worlds. One had a reciprocal relationship with the animate land on which its sustenance and flourishing depended. The other had a rational, alienated conception of land as something that must become the exclusive possession of a person, usually a man, by right of a deed written on paper. Hayes deftly sets this up as a kind of magical thinking — a spell we have been hoodwinked into.

And the crux of his argument is that the colonialism that allowed for the accumulation of such wealth and power was begun, tested and perfected, on home soil. The very methods by which Indigenous people are colonised around the world — the theft of land, exclusion from means of sustenance, as well as the cultural genocide committed by the distruption of ceremony and the banning of song, dance, language — much of this was practiced first when the commons were taken from the peasants of England. We find ourselves a landless people, deprived of our indigeneity. Now this claim might be a risky one to make if handled less nimbly, and a review short as this one can’t do justice to the way this is done; you will simply have to read the book. But to condense to a sentence: belonging to land is not about descent but instead relation. We are at the far end of a process that colonised countries and peoples are still undergoing — that is, almost absolute alienation from the land and its spirit. They honed their spirit-breaking on us. We have more in common with the peasants of the world than we are led to believe, and it is only for the good of the powers that be that this is disrupted and hidden from us.

Hayes finds glimmers of an animist past lingering in English stories and traditions, but much of his evidence comes from what he finds growing at Hardwick, where a land-based culture has been given space to flourish. Before arriving at Hardwick, lots of its inhabitants were squatters, drifters, boaters, travellers. In its ways, the community is fumbling towards a memory of being-of-this-land (we might call it indigeneity where we take this to be about being-in-relation) — at Hardwick new shoots appear from something severed but never killed off entirely. There is no going back to the commons, but neither are we detached from its history.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical of this book and its premise at first. That comes from my own prejudice against what I will call philanthropic landlordism. Like with another such landed-gentry-redemption-story that has taken the publishing world by storm in recent years (I’m talking about Isabella Tree’s Wilding) there is something of the fervent platforming of decent acts by people with the means to undertake them that rubs me up the wrong way. Why do we so enthusiastically praise the inheritors of wealth for being a bit less rubbish with their massive assets? Often these rewilding initiatives come about because the estate can’t turn a profit and there are grants available to change their land use. Hugh Crossley, heir of the Somerleyton estate in Suffolk, told Countryfile that his main motivation for rewilding his own estate may have just been to be contrary to the Victorian-garden-sensibility of his father. I don’t trust philanthropy, I don’t trust leaving important work to the whims of rich people, holding out for those whose vastly disparate worldviews might line up with your own on some ethical planes or whims.

Likewise, where estates are opening themselves up to the enterprises of us commoners, it’s not even necessarily from a sense of responsibility or even generosity, but rather that deteriorating estates have become harder for one family to manage. Let someone set up a vegetable enterprise in the crumbling kitchen garden! I have twice been to the Organic Growers Gathering, a small festival that has taken place on the Hardwick estate, and attended talks on exactly this tactic of landless landworkers approaching estates in order to get access to land on which to grow food for a living. There was a bristle from some in the crowd, it felt like coming with a begging bowl — a bit too on the nose in its likeness to feudalism. A comparative viewing of the recent film Our Land (based on another arm of Hayes’ land-rights work, the Right to Roam campaign) gives countervailing profiles of three estate owners who are wholly against (or tepid in their acceptance of) peasants even setting foot on their land for an afternoon stroll, let alone giving them over to community ownership and disinheriting themselves. Isn’t Hardwick just a utopic anomaly, reliant on the whim of a guilt-ridden heiress?

But Hayes has preempted my reservations. Hardwick isn’t allowed to stand simply for goodness prevailing because alongside it is the neighbouring, evil twin estate, Mapledurham. This tale of two estates does a fine job of tempering any optimism with the futility of what we are up against. Hayes’ friends on Mapledurham face eviction from the house they have lived in for decades, and their story is as horrific as it is ordinary. Their change of fate at the passing of the land to its new heir reveals the precarity of philanthropic landlordism, and its dependence on the whims of a landlord’s personality or politics. And yet more dispiriting still, the landed gentry are a dying breed. Hurray! But wait…the new aristocracy that replaces them are multinational corporations and globally, extractivism is more intense than it has ever been. These corporate bodies can’t be hoped to have a change of heart about their dubious inheritance — they’re not even people. The lord of the manor starts to appear a rather simpering, tame foe…

The Medicine Tree gives us something to work with, a vision, and visions can be replicated. Visions can be multiplied and stacked, so that you might imagine every manor house taken over by the common people. This isn’t unprecedented — there are communities living in the derelictions of wealth and power across the UK: old Georgian rectories, halls, and once-stately houses. The Old Hall in Suffolk, or Braziers Park, also in Oxfordshire, are examples. The book stokes more militant impulses too. Will Hayes throw a rock through the window of the evil estate’s mansion? Might we be incited to storm and squat all the stately homes that sit empty? And what if we just ignored it, this magical thinking of landlordism? A nice accompaniment to reading is to go along to the William Morris gallery for their current exhibition Earthly Paradise: Radical Alternative Living in the UK, for more on the UK’s colourful history of squatting, or taking the housing it needs.

But I think the main thing I have taken from this book is that community, given the means, wants to be, it flourishes. Hayes puts specifics on what exactly it is you are missing when you are yearning for ‘community’. It’s a Ceilidh band. It’s dancing, it’s creating new rituals. But most importantly it’s mutual aid, coming to the help of your ‘kith’ and knowing this will be reciprocated. “I’m wondering if land culture just grows like weeds,” Hayes ponders. So too, community. There is a sense of completeness in that, at a place where the walls once guarded exclusive flourishing, mutual aid has popped up like dandelions. This answers in a way my initial hesitance at using a setting that doesn’t seem replicable — because it’s not so much the rock Hayes is showing us, but the moss. Community need not wait for the perfect conditions (like a disinherited estate) to be able to build itself. Hardwick’s community built up over the decades prior to the estate’s handover. What Hayes shows us is that even where its future is on shaky ground, might collapse or have the rug (or housing) pulled from under its feet, community wants to be.

Peasantry is in vogue, on the very fringes of the UK at least. Courses on landwork offered in London are churning out Level 2 qualified organic horticulture students, and an opening in a market garden in the city will receive hundreds of qualified applications. Training centres are setting up, offering more routes to land skills, like the Apricot Centre in Devon or Black Mountains College in Bannau Brycheiniog. This training pulls in first generation land workers from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them burnt out from modernity, and looking for a way to reconnect with the land around them, myself included. Across the country, it’s difficult to get an entry-level grower job without first undergoing a good deal of unpaid work. This is the tiniest bottle-neck, and it is unbeknownst to most of society. But it’s there and it’s wearing dirty Blundstones. It feels to me sometimes like we might be living through a back-to-the-land moment like was had in the 70s. But whereas the 70s iteration was a movement towards self-sufficiency, this time, we will go together.

It is only a taboo against the tearing of pages from books that stops me from slicing Hayes’ illustrations out to frame them. The book is lively, pacey, and the embeddedness of Hayes living in and from his subject is snug to the book’s own endeavour for placeness — he’s in the Ceilidh band with the rest of the book’s cast of characters. It’s participatory writing, and you feel swept up into the throng of it too. The eponymous tree of the book’s title has a mythic quality, in the way it conducts all of the topics of the book like a lightning rod. It’s almost uncanny the serendipity with which the tree, the setting, and our narrator all fit around the subject, and this manages to never feel ham-fisted. You get the feeling Hayes was born to moor his boat next to the Medicine Tree, to write this book, which might in part carry forward the land-movement he calls our attention to. It might sit alongside its moment in a similar way that Wilding does against the current appetite for ‘rewilding’ land, but instead adjacent to the land’s re-commoning. The Hardwick community has set the tone. One heiress is already atoning. Pick up the pitchforks then, let’s go.

*

‘The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England’ by Nick Hayes is out now and available here, published by Allen Lane. Read an extract from the book here. Read an interview with Nick Hayes here.

Abi Andrews is a writer, researcher and conservation worker. Her debut novel ‘The Word for Woman is Wilderness’ was published by Serpent’s Tail, and she is currently working on a nonfiction book about solidarity with animals.

_{Victor Neuburg in haybales, West Sussex, early-1920s. Photo copyright Justin Hopper}

In 1924 the poet, publisher and occultist Victor Neuburg was visited by unidentifiable spirits in his cottage in a small Sussex town. As he later put it, these voices ‘dictated’ poems to him – streams-of-consciousness pieces of prose steeped in esoteric symbolism. He wrote them down, nearly 100 pieces of writing, into the form of a book he called The Water Bearer.

And no one would touch it. None less than Ralph Shirley, the editor of The Occult Review, told Victor that these were unique, wholly original, works, but ‘what publisher would risk it?’

For the next 100 years these poems sat, mostly unread, in a family chest. Until now. Victor Neuburg is best known as the magical (and sexual) partner of Aleister Crowley; as the man who discovered the poet Dylan Thomas; as a funny name that comes up when mentioning just about any aspect of early-20th century British counterculture. (An anarchist who advocated for gay rights and prison reform; the living connection between the Decadents and the Surrealists; friend to Austin Osman Spare and inspiration to Peter Warlock; early champion of nudists and yoga; the list continues.) His published poetry books now sell for hundreds or even thousands, but perhaps his greatest-ever works – those which best espoused his bizarre hodge-podge of occult and spiritual beliefs – have been read by almost no one alive.

Vine Press will be publishing these works as one of the last wishes of Caroline Neuburg, the poet’s granddaughter, who dove deeply into them – her copious notes on the symbolism in the works will act as introduction to the book The Water Bearer and Other Lost Works of Victor Neuburg.

You can pre-order, and help make it all happen – a century in the making – until 30th October via Kickstarter.

With the initial funding target reached, the project is now aiming for a stretch target of £18,500. If this amount is reached, a new reward will be added to the pledges (at no additional cost) — a zine of Victor Neuburg’s unknown 1920s writings about his beloved county of Sussex, its folklore, history and landscape. Everyone who ordered a copy of the limited-edition hardback book of The Water Bearer will also get this zine, at no additional charge.

_{Victor Neuburg (almost certainly), Rites of Eleusis, London, 1910. (From The Bystander, 1910)}

In March last year, we shared news of the Dartington Hall Trust’s intention to end the lease of The Agroforestry Research Trust’s groundbreaking 2 acre food forest project — housed on the Dartington Estate for the last 31 years. The garden has brought over 50,000 visitors to the estate, hosted important scientific research on carbon storage, and become what is often described as the best example of a food forest (or forest garden) in the temperate world.

Excitingly, ART now has the opportunity to purchase the forest garden, which will safeguard it in perpetuity!

ART has already raised some of the funds, but are looking to raise £100,000 towards the total needed to cover the sale price and legal fees. Whatever you can afford, it will all help and you will know that you have contributed to securing the forest garden for future generations. If you are a UK taxpayer then ART can also claim Gift Aid on your donation.

Forest gardens (also known as food forests) are long term sustainable integrated growing systems including trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and fungi. They produce food or other crops while being highly resilient to pests, diseases and weather extremes; and at the same time storing a large amount of carbon. In the light of the climate crisis leading to a rapid increase in extreme weather events, the need for forest gardens has never been greater.

Almost half the money has currently been raised, with donations closing at the end of the month.

You can find out more about the project and donate here.

Adapted from Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book, directed by Robert Petit, and scored by Hannah Peel, Underland is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, ‘astronauts of the underworld’ travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.

Stream / order your CD copy here via Bandcamp.

A world premiere of the score takes place as part of the Hannah Peel In Focus series at the Barbican on 23-24 October 2026, for which very limited numbers of tickets are still available.