A short story, for a film, that explores the nature of place, weaving myth and systems thinking to tell the story of iron in Princetown on Dartmoor National Park. Written in 'stream-of-consciousness' style and giving priority to expression over grammatical correctness, my explorations with this technique have been inspired by writers Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf. The additional commas give indication to the reader on phrasing. On the wise advice of Ellie, a fellow MA student on the MA Poetics of Imagination programme at Dartington Arts School, I allowed the land to guide and shape the story.
Iron Bird
It is told in legend that once, on Dartmoor, a couple by the name of Fice, once lost and tired and shrouded in a mist that choked their eyes and clouded all sense of place, came by a brook. With a palmful of water, sipped from its spring, had vision restored, gifting them with clarity and granting them a path to safety.
Many eyes since have come be healed by the waters from the well on this spot.
*
Day falls away, and a dark December night unfurls across Dartmoor, blanketing the hilltop village of Princetown in crystals of frost.
A surging wind hurls over a hill, whistling past a telephone mast.
A new moon sets, unseen in the light of a falling sun, as the ice-crisp and darkening sky whispers goodnight to the silver thread that follows her lunar curve.
Only starlight from the brightest stars now lights the moor and walls below, piercing through the mist like welder’s sparks, arc-like, in constellation.
Deep below and opposite, Earth’s soil cradles creatures hibernating, warmed by the heat of a great iron belly, hidden below this frozen crust. Molten magma swirling and stoking the great hearth, where embers glow eternal.
Here, below Fice’s Well, the Great Mother rests on this darkest of nights, shielded subterranean and sheltered from the arresting wind and its bite.
On this dark moon, each December, a scout on a mission rises here, taking a gulp of its water, granting it the gift of sight to seek those hidden, unseen, in the middle of the night. Its mission: to trace the path of one earthly element and map its threads in the great living web.
This year it’s the turn of Iron Bird, named a million moons ago as Ruben, after red earth, sent to trace the path of iron embedded in the lands above.
What’s this? (Rumble) – It must be time!
Flying up, the shock of the cool air creates involuntary gasp.
A trace of amber magma, still clinging to chest from the journey through molten rock, lights the night like a tiny fiery satellite. Soon, in ferrous form, it turns to rust on meeting the oxygen in the air.
A bright fleck falls; a wandering spark, and lands on a carpet of moss below, cushioning its fall, where years ago, prisoners living in this dreary and barren place, would roll up this sphagnum moss like carpet, process and package it and send it off to mop the iron bloods of world war.
Gliding now, a keen bright eye reflects the glaring glow of security lights below, swallowing the stars in a gulp. Their light sweeps upwards to reveal a tall silhouette.
A grand tower with golden windows. What’s this? a place to gather?
Feathers Fly fast through the mist and, suddenly an impermeable 20-foot granite wall.
The prison gate - the only portal. With rows of iron soldiers guarding each door, a sign to the left reads ‘HMP Dartmoor’.
Ruben swoops down, catches a glimpse of rusted lines in the grass, dark metal marking redundant tracks of the train once known as the Old Iron Horse; the path of the workhorse, that once carried prisoners to Princetown, to serve their toil in Dartmoor’s jail.
On now, past the ‘Prince of Wales’ lit up, rows of Jailer’s Ale on the bar, iron pints glinting, as Ruben flies onwards, to the sound of cheering inside.
Below a rippling leat, where water is orange - where earth cracks and iron seeps.
Back to the jail now, and past the sculpted iron bars, barring bodies from moving into the cool night air. An outstretched hand, a whistle fills the air.
“Here, beauty,” whispers insomnia, through the lips of a man who cannot sleep.
Is this where humans hibernate. A palace for torpor perhaps?
Ruben flies in and rests upon a sleeping chest, sensing a beating heart, pumping iron in the imprisoned dark, drawing oxygen in, haemoglobin rolling.
Shattering the quiet, a contraband smart-phone - not smart enough to remain silent, rings through its iron speaker, across the snores, startling owls.
Now the man below Rubens feet wakes, anxious and alert:
Leaps up to listen to its signal - it’s his daughter saying, “I miss you”.
The message in his heart grows strong, passing its baton to words formed in the lung, passing up through throat and transmitted through metal phone, past bars and up to the mast on the hill, catching its transmitter, then his voice beams out across the sky towards Windsor.
With fast footsteps triggered, iron keys clang and Ruben takes flight.
Whose keys are these?, he wonders.
Over the moor below, sees a kestrel hover above iron giants waiting for dawn, blades poised, ready to plough worms from their mycelium home.
Around a red iron telephone box now, windows scoured opaque through decades of attrition, by specks of gale-blown granite and quartz, whipped high amidst whistling winds.
Then, meeting the warm morning rays, a bell.
The iron toll, peeling out though Princetown’s fog, created as a gathering call, to draw the people under the great hulk-hall, arched over having given shelter in the greatest storms - crafted by a thousand shackled hands, lives stolen and bound.
Looking up inside, a tiny shiny pupil meets the iron eye.
And now, as day breaks across browned winter bracken, rusty and withered, a haw frost meets the morning sun on a frond of fern, whispering “Tonight, you shall go to the ball, after all”.
Ruben sings in the dawn amidst the chimes of six.
Silvery roads glossed in morning mist, iron boxes gliding down them, wheels to work, to school, to the Spar, in Princetown below. Passing the forests of moss, quenched by dew, crowning each wall on the way.
Back to the Well glides a weary bird now, mind and heart fed, diving down to the core, destined to tell the iron body below,
that above,
iron is alive and well.
By Grace Rodgers.
