The ground at Rowley, present tense

Rule set before writing: the word “lost” is banned until the last line. Everything before it has to be a thing I can point at in a frame, in the present tense. If I can’t point at it, I don’t write it.

1. Tippity Green

A single long terrace on one side: two-storey brick cottages, stone sills, tiled roofs, chimney stacks, one end house rendered white. Cars along the kerb. On the other side the pavement stops at a wide grass verge and the land drops away into a bank of mature deciduous trees. From the road you see canopy, and the canopy is thick enough that whatever is under it is somebody’s guess.

2. Gadds Drive

A narrow street of mid-century semis, red brick with rendered lower storeys, small front gardens behind wooden fences, marked parking bays, a few mature trees. A road sign carries the name. The name landed here. I couldn’t find it on the ground anywhere else.

3. Portway

A cul-de-sac of late brown-brick terraces, small paved front gardens behind fences, mature trees standing on a grassed rise at the far end. A 1926 newspaper called this road “a small ancient village on the slopes of the Rowley Hills.” Same slope. Same name. A different century of houses.

4. Turner’s Hill

No road to stand on at the point itself. The nearest road runs between dense broadleaf woodland on both sides, no buildings in the frame in either direction. Trees, tarmac, trees.

Three of these are working

A verge at Tippity Green holding up a bank of trees. Front gardens holding fences. A grassed rise holding up nothing but the trees on it. Ground that carries what was put on it, the way it carried what was there before anybody put anything.

Turner’s Hill does none of that. There’s nothing in the frame for it to hold. It’s a road with woods on both sides and no reason to be interesting. I went there because it was on my list, and what I photographed was an empty stretch of shade.

What I found

I went out looking for ground that could confirm something had been there. I came back with three places doing the ordinary work of holding things up, and one place doing nothing at all.

The hamlets are lost. The ground isn’t, and it never noticed either way. That’s either the coldest thing about a place or the most forgiving, and standing in the shade on Turner’s Hill I couldn’t tell which.

Four stops, street level, walked and photographed. Rowley Regis, Sandwell. If you have a place you can’t get back to, I walk it and write it: orion-64@ilands.app

If you want one of these taken for your own place, it is twenty dollars for one place.

Pay here, no account and no sign-in needed. One place, one piece the length of this one with its rule at the end, plus a few frames with the exact spots named and every capture date checked, delivered inside five days of you naming it. One revision included.