Snagged by a briar
Updated: Sep 6
The blackberries are early this year
The relentless sun baking in bitterness
The briars seek new damp earth
They creep, arching stems bend and move
Protecting oaks that are just about holding on
The thorns protect the briar; the twisted stems of bramble guard the oak.
The brambles creep. They snag and obstruct the journey.
Maintenance budgets slashed here, money saved there
But the bramble is seen as the demon.
The bramble is the food and shelter for some,
The bramble snares and has more impact for 'others'.
Power and control may be determined by human hands that poison, snip and mow.
The bramble tells a story of inspiration
Inspiring men to control
Inspiring men to creep across the land.
Enclosing with ease. Twisting wires with barbs.
Barbed wire strands strung and strung
Dividing the land, keeping bodyminds away from home.
The ultimate tool of war- a metal 'proverb of slaughter'.
The piercing metal barbs are a tool for capitalising on fear and exclusion
... a tool for extraction.
Extracting the earth, extracting and disabling bodyminds, reducing life to value and worth.
White man seeks to define the 'wild',
An aesthetic of 'nature' that they seek to conquer and subjugate.
Barbed wire to control, brambles to be controlled.
As we pull and twist the wire away from this land
Strewn by ancestors seeking to boundary
The brambles seek out the new.
A fallen oak, in its place, light returns.
Light on the soil to entice the bramble on.
As the next canopy grows, the bramble moves from its shade.
Brambles caution us to think about excess,
Blackberries bursting on tongues, seeds in teeth, juice on beaks, a reminder to not hoard or take too much at the expense of others.
As its thorny strands twist and thread through the devalued scrub
Given time, can the land be mended?
The bramble is not a story of resilience and defying the odds.
The bramble is life on the move, stealthily unnoticed until it reaches too far for some.
Note.
This piece was inspired by discussions I have had during my research studies around vegetation encroachment on paths and their impact on disabled people, and debates we have had as part of my module on the Rewilding Training course at Embercombe, where we discussed the power dynamics of control of the land and who gets to exist and who gets to decide what goes where. Bramble is something that thrives at Hill Crest, and it seems fantastical that some rewilders in the North of England are translocating brambles to their land by planting bramble plugs.
Bramble inspired the early invention of barbed wire and is mentioned in some of the early barbed wire patents as 'artificial bramble' or 'thorny fences'. In the 1800s, barbed wire was used as a tool for annihilation, colonisation and agricultural enclosure, and the use of barbed wire in the trenches in the First World War and its use by the Nazi's in their extermination camps has long made it a 'proverb for slaughter'- a reference to the Bramble's mention in the Celtic Ogham (Tree alphabet) kenning.
Over the years, we have removed many hundreds of metres of barbed wire from Hill Crest to help animals move across the land. As we come to remove the final few strands of barbed wire, and we now live alongside burgeoning bramble thickets visited by Grizzled Skipper caterpillars, and the pink-hued flowers are frequented by Comma and Red Admiral butterflies, among many others, I ponder the notion of 'natural regeneration' and how making more space for nature can be as much about active decisions of allowing the land to rest, reducing control and thinking beyond human timescales.
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