We walk through collapsed burial-mounds, along worn tarmac, salt-marshes, quagmires of mud, black crows impale insects; congregating, conversing, across the floodplain; the curves of the river reconfigured over time by many indentured hands. Chalk-stone-white. The land and its inhabitants becoming only subjects and resources for consumption by each successive ruling entity.
Seven Sisters, the English Channel. We stand on the beach-head, the sky darkening, suspended in a container of fog, where earlier, they raised a spider-web of steel-scaffold to block the encroachment of fascism raging across Europe. The remnants of shipwrecks pierce from the waters; mercury and sodium-nitrate leaking from their hulls; essentials of industrialisation and warfare, far more valuable than any human cargo. We breathe in the centuries of blood and salt in the air and feel at home.
