Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. Of never being resigned consoled; never turning over in bed to face the wall and drift asleep again as if nothing had happened; as if nothing could happen.

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I named my Substack The Inner Garden because that is how I envisage the place my imagination takes me most of the time. The ‘garden’ has always been a beautiful sanctuary for me to retreat to and dream. But sometimes imagination takes inspiration from another location, or landscape. Ruins have captivated their spectators for centuries. And in the British imagination at least, they have been associated with melancholy and fatalism since the Anglo-Saxon period.2 Since the English Reformation of the 1530s, the ruins of monasteries were particularly symbolic of an ancient England that had been destroyed with the conversion to Protestantism and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.3 There is always a ghost story that emerges out of the mystery of these gothic ruins, out of the shadow side of religion and the Anglo-Protestant view of Catholicism.

Binham Priory, now a ruin three miles from the North Norfolk coast, holds this mystery and has served as a mirror to the projections of fantastical imagination since its fall to ruin in the sixteenth century. The village of brick and flint cottages glow rosy on a June evening, and people spill out of the pub into the white thin mist rolling in off the North Sea. Up the hill and round, and there’s the priory, nestled in the dip, its grey ruins spread out across the mounds of grass that stretch down to the fields. The priory was founded in 1091 by Peter of Valoines, nephew of William I, as a cell of St Alban’s Abbey under the Benedictine order. It was endowed around 1104, and the building work was completed in the mid-thirteenth century. In its heyday the church would have had a tall spire and the priory complex would have sprawled out across the fields, gleaming with white limewash.

The management of the priory passed from irresponsible prior to, with the exception of Richard de Parco, irresponsible prior. Binham had only six monks by the Dissolution of 1539. The site was granted to Sir Thomas Paston. Only the church continued to be used, and even then, it was only the part that the laypeople were allowed to enter originally that remained. The current east wall built on top of the original pulpitum that barred the laypeople from entering the quire, presbytery and high altar beyond. The Tudor domestic window was added, around which the Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, now faded, were painted.

On warm summer evenings, when a gentle mist rolls in off the sea and the grass is soaked with dew, the church is a concert venue. The church is bathed in golden light, decorated with flowers, and the still summer air is filled with the sweet sounds of Baroque Venice, Hamburg and Paris. At the last concert I went to, in July, they played Dario Castello, Isabella Leonarda, Tarquinio Merula, Arcangelo Corelli and Barbara Strozzi. All was a sweet kind of liveliness imbued with a gentle form of mystery and mysticism that emerged from the spiritual inner world of Leonarda, an orphan in a Venetian convent. After the concert, we wandered back to the car through the empty arches with the mist and sunset pouring through. The tree in the old central garden cast a long shadow over where the cloisters used to be.

Years ago, one of the concerts fell in August, when the night fell earlier. We would explore the ruins in the dark during the interval. The tall arches and low walls seemed to emit their own moonlike glow. Though the evening was warm, I would shiver. At the most eastern point of the ruins, lay the original high altar. Even though it was completely exposed, it seemed to be bathed in shadows rather than light. Here was mystery in its darker flavours.

In 1935, two women reported seeing a monk with a black Benedictine cowl appear on a ledge near the church door, then walk slowly along the length of the church. Others saw him by the Gaol Gate at the entrance to the priory.

Another local legend holds that a monk haunts the grounds at night, emerging from a tunnel that links the priory to Walsingham Abbey, three miles to the southwest. This same monk has also been seen by the altar at dusk. Some say he guards a lost relic buried beneath the ruins.

The whereabouts of the entrance to the tunnel is now unknown. A fiddler once went in, playing his violin so he could be followed overhead. His music played out, muffled, but distinct as the villagers followed above ground. Suddenly the music stopped. His dog began to whine. That night, there was a storm. In the morning they found the entrance to the tunnel had collapsed. The fiddler was never seen again.

Sometimes a ghostly little dog can be seen wandering sadly along the fields, and the distant music of a fiddle rises up and hangs eerily in the air.

Even when the site was a functioning priory, superstition leaked through. In the early thirteenth century, a former Prior of Wymondham had gone insane through overstudy. He would break out in a frenzy. Eventually, he was flogged and kept in solitary confinement at Binham until his death. He was buried in chains in the churchyard. Could the apparitions of monks be an echo of the darkness and shadows of the priory, a memory held within the stones?

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I, for one, am reminded of Michael Camille’s The Gothic Idol, on the reading list for my undergraduate art history paper. While depictions of the good and saintly were done in a formal, abstract (deliberately distorting God’s image because a deliberate attempt to make an exact replica would be impossible and therefore an insult to God’s perfection) and discrete style, Camille wrote that the medieval devil, when drawn, was alive. Walter Map told a story of a monastic artist who was tormented by nightmares brought on by the devil, so he painted grotesque portraits of him around the room and the horrors stopped. Evil was something that was real, and it had a devil’s body.

[M. R.] James…knew that nothing is more terrifying than that which we cannot see. Partly for this reason, I think, people in the Middle Ages sought to face the devil more directly as a fact — to make him visible but also, because depicted and controlled through the agency of visual signs, capable of being overturned and erased.4

What we call the supernatural, they saw in their everyday lives. At Binham, in the mists or the moonlight, it is easy to understand why the world might have been perceived in this way. In the darkness and ruin, away from the warm candlelight of the church, the medieval devil seems to lurk between the crumbling stones, hidden in the shadows of the swaying trees. The summer air suddenly turns cold. Of course it’s the wind off the nearby sea, but the imagination still runs wild.

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If you enjoyed reading this instalment of ‘Pictures of a Place’ — a blend of travelogue, history and reflective memoir — you may like the first article in this series, on Elba:

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I.

The candle is lit. Evening falls later now.

said Rainer Maria Rilke.1 I am alone tonight. My best friend lives four hours away and my lover in another country. Last year we were all living in the same city, but now has come the temporary separation. I have only the wind, the trees and the endless stretch of fields. Oh yes, and the moon and stars. It makes me sad, sometimes, especially as night falls and I can’t just go out and drink with them. And so, in this time of solitude, I find that joy and warmth in my own company. This is my evening routine for sweetness and serenity at the end of winter.

II.

Into the bath, where I lather myself in the scent of pomegranate and then lie submerged in the hot water, reading. I always bring my orchid into the bathroom with me. The heat and humidity feel like home for it.

Books I’ve loved recently that are perfect for bathtime or bedtime reading:

1. Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life

2. Elia Kazan, Acts of Love

3. Mary Stewart, Touch Not the Cat

4. Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories

5. Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers

III.

Diary entry.

Evening falls later now. The moon has risen, bright and full, bathing the countryside in a pale, silvery blue. The night is painted so pale, I can trick myself into thinking it is 10pm in June, when the sun has just set and a warm, white night has begun.

If it were a hot summer’s night I would put on a silky nightdress the colour of the clear morning sky.

But when I stick my head out of the window, the air fresh and crisp. And cold. At the threshold between winter and spring there is still time to embrace the final remainder of the cosy evenings. I’ve done it so well this time. Every day I have kept myself nourished, warm and exercised (mind and body). My mornings and evenings feel like rituals. They are blessed moments for gently awakening myself and then putting myself to bed.

The depth of winter is never long. At its darkest and most dormant, it is the period of winter festivals — Diwali, Hannukah, Christmas — and out of the bleak midwinter twinkle an abundance of warm, cosy lights. Then, in January, the buds start to appear as the daffodil shoots poke out of the soil, and the snowdrops scatter the banks and woodlands with white freckles. The bellies of the pregnant ewes grazing in the fields are full. It’s nearly lambing season. Spring is already at the door.

IV.

Tea and a treat. I had some cherry-flavoured Jaffa Cake dupes from Lidl. The dark chocolate and cherries were perfect, not too sweet. And I am also finishing the last of the Lebkuchen. They won’t come back in stock until the autumn, so perhaps I am in love with the winter more than I think.

I like to watch something in this final hour before bed. I find inspiration, beauty and relaxation in French Countryside Diary on YouTube.

V.

Before I get into bed, I have to spray myself with Santa Maria Novella’s Tobacco Toscano. Its delicious smoky vanilla mixes with the lingering scent of sweet tobacco, which has always felt very sexy and comforting for me because all my boyfriends have been smokers. My bedsheets are soft and enveloping. Tomorrow there will be tea, things to write, things to read, the world to view with fresh eyes. I slip into a dream.

I like to think of it as part of a Grand Tour I am undertaking in sections. It is a Grand Tour that encompasses the world, beyond Italy, beyond Europe. It is also a Grand Tour that is fun, yes, but more intellectually and culturally grounded than the conventional rite of passage for the eighteenth-century male aristocracy. My travels are more akin to those of Germaine de Staël or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. That is, pursuing both the sensual and the philosophical. Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie and Goethe’s Italienische Reise and Erotica Romana or Römische Elegien illustrate this.1 I had read them as part of my research for my Enlightenment paper the previous winter, which I eventually collated in an essay entitled, ‘German Idealism as a Reaction Against Napoleon in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807)’. Combined with my dissertation on the final three years of the Napoleonic Wars, with a lot of it dealing with British diplomacy in Tuscany, Elba was the perfect location.

I flew from London to Pisa, and from there I took the train to Piombino (the port where ferries to Elba depart) via Livorno. When I returned from my trip, I read Michel de Montaigne’s journal of his time in Tuscany during the summer of 1581. Most of it is yucky descriptions of him passing his kidney stones in the baths at various countryside villas, the Renaissance equivalent of a luxury wellness retreat. But I was fascinated by his brief characterisations of place, not least because I had been there too, over four centuries later.

Except for the Arno and the beautiful way in which it flows through the town, these churches and vestiges of antiquity, and its private works, Pisa has little distinction and charm. It seems deserted. …it all has a marshy taste.2

Four centuries later, and Pisa still feels the same. Before I left for Italy I had scoured Google Maps and TikTok for places to visit during the afternoon I would spend in Pisa before catching my return flight. Like the contrarian Aquarian (or snob) I am, the idea of going to the Leaning Tower and taking those photographs next to it abhorred me. There were a few churches and art galleries and, of course, the H&M with the Renaissance interior, but, as Montaigne thought, nothing with much distinction. Not like other Italian cities.

But my brief impression of Pisa, on a hot September evening, was one of Sagittarian fire: a warm river, golden lights, medieval memories and glittering stars. The surrounding landscape felt very different, and not merely because I saw it under grey midday skies. It certainly felt marshy, of the sticky and humid variety, but there was something very, very ancient about the place that was captivating. The farm buildings looked like they had been there since the days of Rome — built in that simple rustic Roman style also found in rural areas in other parts of the old Roman Empire, like Nordrhein-Westfalen — and the umbrella pines and mountains seemed to hold the memories of an even older primordial time.

And so began my recurring feeling of nostalgia for The Past. Not my past and my memories of this life, but The Past of historical periods — maybe past lives — tracing right back to what the Idealists called the Ursprache. Jacob Grimm described the Ursprache as ‘the realm beyond words’, a time prior to language formation which was the ‘core’ of human experience, lost in the mist of history.3 For this core reality, the Idealists believed, we were all homesick, nostalgic for an irrecoverable place in time, and were trying to find our way back home — the Heimweh.4

In the final chapter of Staël’s Corinne, the titular heroine is dying with her lover, Lord Nelvil, at her side. Through the window she can see the moon, half-covered by a cloud. It is the same moon that she and Lord Nelvil saw on their way to Naples when they had been (almost) unreservedly in love and had (almost) felt complete happiness. Too weak to speak, she can only point. J. G. Fichte, with whom Staël discussed German philosophy, believed that humans communicated with nonverbal forms of communication, like pointing, during the Ursprache era. These gestures were and still are universally understood, regardless of how language has developed in its ever-growing branches.5 Lord Nelvil sees it, and remembers, feeling what she feels. They both are taken back to that memory, finding their way home to their own core reality: love.

I, too, was rendered speechless on several occasions during my journey. My silence and my mouth slightly open said, I feel The Past whispering from the mountains, the pines, the sea. My core reality was The Past, but as my trip progressed I began to feel like it was something more, something closer to myself…

Like Montaigne, I also headed from Pisa to Livorno, where the sun came out. Sunflower fields and marshes intersected with drainage dykes (almost exactly like the Fens) suddenly gave way to breathtaking cliffs adorned with hot pink flowers, and the dazzle of the azure sea. How many others had made the same journey from marshy Pisa to witness the sun glittering on the Tyrrhenian, and the blue islands rising out of the waves, islands as far out as Corsica, on a clear day?

Now, of course, those islands have a greater brevity, granted by the mythic presence of Napoleon in our historical imagination. That’s why I continued further south along the Tuscan coast to Piombino, a town that feels strangely deserted and bustling at the same time. It has a quaint medieval centre and a busy port, though the rest of the town feels tired and rundown. It was a similar juxtaposition as the views from either side of the train: one side was stereotypical, beautiful Italy, with cliffs and sea and flowers; the other was agrarian and post-Industrial, with a lot of old and rusty coal mines.

Wandering through Piombino’s medieval centre, you soon reach the sea again. You find yourself standing on one of the points of the star-shaped fortifications, recently bordered with an elegant balustrade. Here the warm, salty air soothes your skin from the hot sun. The sea is so blue, and so are the mountains, and so is the sky. All blend into each other, blue into blue into blue. And then, commanding nearly the whole of the western horizon, is Elba.

Yet again, I was rendered speechless from feeling The Past. Elba, along with the other islands in the Tuscan Archipelago, is said to be made from the jewels of Venus’s diadem. But when viewing the island as a prospect, it looks far more masculine. It may just be that mythic presence Napoleon commands, but I swear it looked like Napoleon was there. I turned my gaze northwards to the open sea and could almost see Sir Neil Campbell’s ship making its way from Livorno to check growing suspicions that Napoleon was planning an escape. He had. He was already leaving. I imagined Napoleon’s fleet sailing towards France in February 1815, disappearing into the blue haze.

I spent my week on Elba in the fishing village of Cavo. It is a small but vibrant place sprawled out along a wide bay looking out towards mainland Italy, nestled at the foot of the hills densely wooded with pines. At midday, everything is vivid and glittering under the hot sun. As evening falls, the light softens. The sun is now low over the other side of the island, and the pine trees begin to whisper to each other in their deep shadows. The sea is no longer turquoise and ultramarine, but lilac and lavender. The sky turns a gentle pink. From the northwest blows the mistral wind, picking up speed as the night draws in. Across the water, the lights of the port at Piombino blink and wink up at the moon.

I sketched out a few couplets for a poem in my Notes app:

The soft sighing of the sea
The blinking lights of Italy
...
Eternal sight, eternal sound
The waking dream of a life once lived

The lilac sea faded to black. The house and the pines on the rocky promontory were now silhouetted against the deep blue night, which complimented the golden glow from the lights on the ground. The palms shimmered and danced in the mistral. Now the beach was quieter, the waves sounded louder and louder as they crashed against the shore.

On my first full day on the island I made the pilgrimage to Villa San Martino, Napoleon’s summer residence up in the hills, 5km from his main house in Portoferraio. The approach is up a long, straight and uphill drive. At the bottom, souvenir stalls selling Napoleon busts and tote bags and military paraphernalia blast out Beethoven symphonies into the blazing heat. A little overdramatic, perhaps? In comparison to the entrance of Villa San Martino, it’s nothing. The gate decorated with swords and spears, and is guarded by two fierce stone eagles. Through the gate is the Galleria Demidoff, a work of imposing neoclassicism despite its relatively small size. Inside its cool marble gallery is an exhibition of paintings, engravings and figurines depicting Napoleon, Elba and the military figures of the Napoleonic Wars. The villa itself is located on the ground above, accessed via a steep, winding pathway.

Villa San Martino sits quaint and pretty between the olive trees. It is painted pale yellow and pink, just like the shades of vanilla and strawberry ice-cream. The rooms are small, but the breeze blowing through the open windows makes them cool and airy. It’s not exactly Versailles, but the pastel frescoes are charmingly done. If neoclassical architecture and interiors were originally intended (in the 1750s to the early nineteenth century) to replicate the residential arrangements of the ancient Romans, then Villa San Martino is the perfect example of neoclassicism.

From the south-facing windows, the house looks out over the roof of pines between it and Portoferraio, to the Medici Fortress, the highest point of the town, and the azure bay and mountains beyond. On the other side of that headland is Cavo. But it is the entrance hall of Villa San Martino that really ties it to my overall experience here. The walls are painted with an Egyptian landscape. In the centre of the room is a circular pool of water, and above is a pyramid-shaped lantern and the zodiac wheel.

Now, first look at the image of ‘The Star’ card from Robert Falconnier’s 1896 Egyptian Tarot displayed below:

And then have a look at this illustration of the symbolic ties of Aquarius, Mary and the North Star from Symbolic Studies.

In Cavo, Mary has her statue by the harbour, where she opens her arms to the sea and the sailors. She is the Star — the guiding light — and Aquarius — the bearer of the sea. It is an archetype that is perfectly captured by the fragrance description for Aqua dell’Elba’s perfume ‘Stella’:

Stella è … [u]na composizione che unisce due anime: il calore delle terre ocra delle isole mediterranee, i profumi intensi di una macchia mediterranea baciata dal sole, le cicale e il vento come sottofondo musicale di uno spettacolo unico; lo sguardo che si perde all’orizzonte, il mare che abbraccia queste terre e riflette le stelle in una calda notte d’estate. … È il Mediterraneo del sud, la terra rovente e il vento che porta con sé i profumi sottili della vegetazione. Il fondo della fragranza è caldo, solido e strutturato … capace di orientare chi la indossa, come le stelle nel firmamento guidavano la rotta degli antichi navigatori.6

Stella is … [a] composition that unites two souls: the heat of the earth on Mediterranean islands, the intense perfume of Mediterranean scrub kissed by the sun, the cicadas and wind as the background music to a unique scene; and the gaze that gets lost on the horizon, the sea that embraces the land and reflects the stars on a hot summer’s night. … It is the southern Mediterranean, the scorching hot earth and the wind that carries the subtle scents of the vegetation. The base of this fragrance is warm, solid and structured … capable of orientating the wearer, like the stars that guided the course of the ancient sailors.

I am an Aquarius, and ever since I learned how the read Tarot I have felt a strong connection to The Star card. This trip felt fated. And why? For a return to The Past? Yes. But more so, for a return to myself. I went to Elba right in the middle of the Year of the Snake. Much has been discussed on here and on the rest of the internet about how this was the year for shedding, releasing and rebirthing oneself over and over again. It was a year when jobs fell through and friendships suddenly turned sour all because they weren’t steering me away from my true course. My Elba trip was in the thick of it. It was also when I realised who was going to stay, too.

On the second morning in Cavo, I awoke nice and early and went out onto the balcony, which looked out to the wooded hills behind the village. The air was warm, fresh and salty, with the scent of tobacco lingering from the night before. I poured the Dior Solar Sublimating Oil over my skin and massaged it in, until I was glittering gold and perfumed with the scents of almond and meadowfoam. I still associate these scents with Elba, and they waft towards me on an imaginary humid sea breeze. Then I packed my market bag and headed along the sea front, up and round the promontory, and down a narrow path fringed with pink flowers and orange hibiscus to Cala delle Alghe, the most magical little cove. I sat on the rocks in my bikini, like a mermaid, or Venus, and watched the little boats dart to and fro across the glittering water, the waves crashing and foaming against the black rocks, and the distant islands promising another adventure.

As I was waiting on the quay for the boat to take me away from Elba, I saw three speed jets, each containing a grandma and grandpa looking very young for their age, set off from the harbour. The grandpas were at the wheel in speedos; the grandmas leaned back, poised gracefully in their bikinis, looking for all the world as if they were still in their twenties or thirties. They raced off into the early morning sun, already bright and blazing over the expanse of turquoise sea. Here I gained sight of where I was navigating myself towards, guided by the Star within myself. In those moments when I was reduced to silent awe, I felt at peace. Elba was a portal to The Past. And more than that, it was a portal back to myself. It was my journey home.

For a history of Elba from the Etruscans to the mid-nineteenth century, see Anna Benevuti, Breve storia dell’Elba. Dalle origini al 1860, published by Pacini Editore.

You can expect a whole variety of articles, but there are two main essay series:

1. MEMOIRS IN MINIATURE

   Self-reflective writing moved by the seasons

2. PICTURES OF A PLACE

   Travelogues and reflections on places lived in

You will also find regular compilations of favourites — recommendations of books, music, films, beauty, fashion, art exhibitions, and more nice, gorgeous things.

The author is a writer and (baby) historian in her 20s, living in the English countryside. She has published serious academic stuff, but, for now at least, The Inner Garden is her fun, creative and anonymous outlet.

In the 18th century, authors and readers would pass around their manuscripts to share and discuss their ideas.

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Much love,

Gwendolen

The Inner Garden