Quail, 2010
Just been reviewing the work I’ve done for The Way, and trying to decide where I go from here. First of all I did a lot of sketching at the Cambrian Heritage Railway Transport Museum a few weeks ago. Then this past Wednesday and Thursday I walked the existing length of the line from the Whittington Road bridge down as far as the Salop Road bridge, taking photos and just exploring.
In amongst all this I started to pull together a number of small-scale studies from my sketches and photos. I wanted to play around with various images first and see if I could marry them up to various thematic threads that I was becoming interested. The images were all vaguely iconic shapes and forms that had caught my eye as I explored the railway line, the Cambrian yard and the surrounding area. I was particularly taken with the pierced signal post finials, and did a lot of drawings of them. I also drew various bits of the locomotives in the engine shed at the Cambrian museum, as well as various bits of the buildings. I was also interested in things beyond the railway itself – like the mound and holed stone in the new Town Green.
Thematically, I’ve found myself thinking about the railway both as a gateway between Oswestry and places beyond. In its heydey, of course, the railway acted as a conduit to and from the town of goods, services and – most importantly – people. It was interesting to discover that nowadays, even with the railway closed and the line defunct, it is still a conduit of goods, services and people. In the past it was commercial travellers, freight – that sort of thing; now it’s dog walkers, and people using the line as a hidden shortcut around the more visible and better-lit parts of town. It’s not the most salubrious of places, even in the daytime – and there’s plenty of evidence around of the sorts of grey- and black-market activities that take place there under cover of darkness. I’ve begun to see the railway line now as a liminal space – somewhere that hovers between the present and the past, between acceptibility and unacceptibility, between dark and light; somewhere on the edge, not quite here and not quite there. In the anthropological sense of the description, it is a magic place – places you find all the time in archaeology, where the “other” world presses close up against this one; a fragment of the Borderlands.
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