Beyond the Fell Wall

Richard Skelton has spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley, high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days are spent beating the valley’s bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls.

Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his thoughts and observations on this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape – its unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things – animal, vegetable and mineral. At its heart is the fell wall itself – a vast, serpentine entity. A vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape. The dark heart about which all of life and death revolves. With illustrations by the exceptionally talented print maker Michael Kirkman, Beyond the Fell Wall will is set to become a highly sort-after and collectible volume of landscape writing that follows in the footsteps of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s collaboration in Holloway.