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Exploring the microcosm
This week’s digest is a little different. I’ve taken a short time off following some general surgery (many thanks to those of you who sent kind wishes - I have made a full recovery!), and in the opportunity that the quieter moments gave, I came across some words that I wrote a couple of years ago that have stayed with me and helped the healing process.
It brought to mind some other words that I have written and I've combined the wisdom that I have gained from both into a new piece of place writing.
I’ve re-written the piece with fresh eyes, a deeper sense of connection, and some new imagery to accompany it. It explores the idea of awe through the smallest of details: lichen-clad stone, weathered surfaces, and the intangible spirit of historic places. It’s a meditation on the microcosm - and how, even in the tiniest crevices of an old wall, we might glimpse something vast and moving.
This edition also sets the scene for the next couple of digests, in which I’ll be exploring new places that have instigated in me a profound sense of awe. These are new journeys, each offering a chance to consider how certain landscapes, buildings and atmospheres can stir something deep within us. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you - and who knows, perhaps these places might become your destinations in the spring and summer?
I prefer lichen scrolling to doom scrolling...
“Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants’ sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic.”
― Duncan Harper, Witch of the Fall
For me, more than any diamond-encrusted piece of jewellery, I find myself captivated by the visceral beauty of a lichen-encrusted churchyard.
These places are such rare spaces because they defy our need for order and cleanliness. On rainy days, the scent of petrichor rises from the earth, mingling with the tang of stone and leaf mould. There’s something ancient in the air - and yet it’s alive, shifting, flourishing. The sculpted cherub, the gothic script, and the turned baluster are extruded through a curious combination of place, time, and nature into a wondrous visual broth that induces a profound sense of awe.
I feel the same kind of awe when I look up at the stars in the sky. Indeed, our lichen fields are a kind of cosmos. There is something about their beauty that is indefinable, otherworldly, and seemingly infinite.
I remember standing at All Saints’ in Brixworth, Northamptonshire, where my mind lurched from the glory of an Anglo-Saxon doorway formed from Roman brick to the boundary wall nearby. Here, as I moved from the macro to the micro, I discovered a nested complexity that felt infinite in scale. The interplay of texture, time and growth seemed to vibrate with a luminous intensity.
It brought to mind another moment - at a church I once photographed in Gloucestershire - where, for the briefest of seconds, on the cusp of night turning into day, I saw what I can only describe as a kind of bioluminescence play across the west front. The lichen on the facade shimmered into life, luminous enough to present the building like a fairground attraction. I didn’t have my camera to hand - but I sketched out what I saw afterwards, in what I call a lichenograph.
In many ways, I had been prepared for that moment by a previous encounter with bioluminescence inside the Saxon crypt at Hexham. After a ten-minute exposure in the dark, I discovered - completely by accident - a Milky Way of organic forms, in every colour imaginable, occupying the repurposed Roman capitals on the wall. I was overwhelmed by the fact that this dark, cold space for the dead, when observed through a different lens, was so completely alive.
Ever since then, my perception of a world I thought I knew has expanded exponentially. It’s led to new ways of seeing.
One late afternoon in November, I wandered into a place where that sense of awe returned with full force. But even before I arrived, along one of the narrow lanes that leads to my destination, I experienced an unexpected shift in perception, perhaps an augur of what was to come: the subtle revelation of lichen shadows. They grow not at random, but within the symmetry and reach of a tree’s silhouette, echoing its form in miniature and blessing the wall with an arborescent facsimile. Now, wherever I go - I can’t stop seeing them.
Beyond the lichen shadowed lane, Cheesden Valley, tucked between Rochdale and Bury in Greater Manchester, is one of the least visited landscapes in these Isles - a wooded, gorge-like valley carved by glacial waters at the end of the last ice age. There are no signposts, car parks or visitor centres here - just the hush of isolation and the gnarled resistance of Hawthorn and tree-root.
To reach Jowkin Wood, which lies at its heart, you must navigate flooded paths and tangled undergrowth. But those who persist are rewarded. The woodland is classed as one of England’s ancient woods, with a continuous presence stretching back nearly 10,000 years. There are no neat gravel tracks or stiles - only desire paths made by deer, badger and boot, their routes pressed into the ground through instinct and memory. The air is saturated with the musk of leaf litter and damp bark, and every step feels like a slow unravelling of time.
There are forms here that defy naming - strange, otherworldly life cloaked in green and silver: Marchantia polymorpha, Mycena, Asteraceae. They rise out of the gloom like emissaries from another world. And yet, this world is just a few miles from the litter-blown pavements and car fumes of the town below.
On days when I’ve not felt quite myself, I’ve walked over to this place and have been lifted into another state of being - as if suspended, briefly, from the weight of the everyday.
I think it’s because there’s a clarity of message here - a kind of truth that asks nothing of you. Not the sort that needs proving or defending, but one that is simply known, absorbed. It moves through the rhythm of rainfall in the canopy, in the sound of water travelling beneath root and stone, in the slow unfurling of the fern. It’s a truth both ancient and immediate - and oddly straightening in these tangled times.
In the midst of this thickened, breathing space, I am reminded of something that unites these places - churchyards, crypts, woodland glades - each has become a kind of biota. They reflect one another in their ancient wisdom. They are rooted in time, but not in the hurried, linear time we tend to inhabit. Their time is slow and incremental - a time measured in rings of growth, in softened stone, in the gradual creep of moss across a name once chiselled by hand.
These places show us how much life grows where we expect only stillness. They are places that hold the potential to elevate the spirit and bring us closer together in appreciation of something greater than ourselves.
Some people spend vast sums to ascend in a capsule and glimpse the edge of the Earth through a porthole. But awe isn’t the preserve of altitude, nor is it subject to cost-benefit. It asks nothing but attention. It arrives freely, at the beck and call of our curiosity. It lives in lichen and churchyard, in the rhythm of woodland paths and mellowed, mycorrhizal earth. Whether in the shimmer of a church facade at dawn or the tangled root systems of an ancient wood, these places remind me that the infinite is often just beneath our feet.
I often stand in the stillness of these places and think of Ruskin’s words: “There is so much reason for singing in the sweet world when one thinks rightly of it.”
And perhaps, if we do sing – not loudly or to be heard, but through the awe we feel – we might each find small ways to move more gently, more attentively, through the world. In doing so, we make space for a kind of steady repair – something grounded enough to help us navigate the complexity of these times. A truth rooted in the living world, quiet but enduring, that we absorb as we go. A truth that, despite ourselves, finds its way into our lives – inevitably, joyfully, echoing through our hands in pattern, rhythm, and grace.
*Thanks to the highly talented Rowan Bridgwood for so evocatively capturing my thoughts and feelings.
"Because in my mind I'm seeing starlight,
One more time for my imagination,
I'm not high, don't let me be misunderstood."
If my words have resonated – if they’ve stirred something of the same awe you’ve felt beneath trees, before weathered stone, or under a wide sky – then perhaps you might consider supporting the Genius Loci Digest.
This work is sustained entirely by its readers. Every journey, every sketch, every shared moment of stillness is made possible by those who choose to walk alongside me. Your support helps keep me on the road, helps me listen more closely, and continue sending these reflections out into the world.
If you’re able to, I’d be deeply grateful.
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 14 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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