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As Spring turns the key in the door of Summer…
Here we are — Woody and me, gearing up again.
The mornings are lighter, the roads are calling, and there's a kind of energy in the air that only Spring can bring. It’s the season of movement, of fresh paths, of unexpected turns that lead to ancient places.
But this isn’t just about me heading off on another leg of the camper-van-camino.
It’s an invitation.
The year is in full flux — but I’m just getting started. Over the coming months, I’ll be tracing stories through old stones and quiet lanes, pausing to sketch, to photograph, to listen. There’ll be new towns, hidden chapels, forgotten follies — places you might just want to visit yourself, with your boots, your bike, or your camper van.
There are some amazing places and remarkable projects lined up.
As well as sharing my back story, I’ll also be giving you:
- Ideas for places to explore – off the beaten track, but rich in history and meaning
- Photographic postcards from the road, full of light, shadow, texture, and time
- Reflections on wellbeing and place, written in rhythm with the seasons
- An honest look at life on the move – the beauty, the solitude, the surprises
This Digest isn’t just a newsletter. It’s a map of my movements and moods, a chronicle of connection — between past and present, person and place.
There’s a lot ahead. Let’s travel it together.
The Treasure Hoard Gazetteer
This is my gift to you.
The things in my gazetteer know more of me than I do of them. I share them with the gratitude that, through a strange quirk of career, I’ve had a certain freedom to be able to seek them out and photograph them.
I’m overwhelmed with a feeling that these things need to be communicated. My camera acts not only as a tool for recording but also a means of acknowledging their relevance and mine.
These treasures are significant because they have given me something beyond their physical presence and opened up portals to the past and the people that inhabit it. Marinated in myth, they are beacons that teach us that there are alternative, nourishing, and deep-rooted value systems that we are at liberty to engage with.
Check it out here and view the map:
Andy Marshall
A melody of lamps on Chester Walls.
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
The Pilgrim In Me
I carry with me at all times some words that have become, over time, my lodestar – my purpose.
“What each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in our human heritage – and pass it on… And to pass these precious fragments on is our mission.” – Michael Ventura, The Age of Endarkenment.
The experience I had today seems to underline that purpose with vivid clarity. It begins in Settle, Yorkshire – a place where my Grandad and Nana used to cycle through on their tandem. A place where generations of my family have visited often, and come back to over and over again.
Settle is a little hub of activity that has woven its path for centuries through the Yorkshire vernacular of rough-rubbled oolitic and weighty, randomly coursed, slab roofs. I love it here, not only for the memories, but also for its practicality. It’s one of the few places in England with something akin to a French aire – those modest, utilitarian stopovers for campers. So I can lodge overnight in the car park, surrounded by the wonky roofs and even wonkier hills, right in the heart of things.
With the full day ahead of me – and feeling like a lord and master over time – I visit all my usual haunts: breakfast at the Naked Man, a browse through the bookshop on the market square, coffee at the Folly on the hill. Then, finding myself in that rarified void of having absolutely nothing to do, I decide to walk the full stretch of road heading south out of town.
Just before a bend in the road, a glint from a window catches my eye. I walk over and find myself face to face with the most gorgeous Art Deco bay, cockled to the front of a late Georgian building. Such a sweet and sour combination, I think. It’s a joy to simply stand and observe – I love the patina, the shiny new aspiration jostling with the dislodged typography that says: ‘ootwear’.
I’m not in need of any footwear, but I pluck up the courage to step inside. As I close the door behind me and hear the click of the latch, I feel as though I’ve been air-locked into another era.
For someone so often immersed in the fragmentary, shape-shifting immediacy of this world, it comes as a shock to find myself, so suddenly, in a place rooted entirely in another way of being: the analogue, the mechanical, the time-worn, the weathered, the tactile, the paper-bound.
Places like this remind me of a forest's mycorrhizal network – this place, surely, would be a mother tree. The canopy above might heave and scatter with falling leaves and broken branches, but deep below, the silent understory holds strong. Here lies a node in a filament underpinned by deep-rooted, time-burnished relationships that speak of community, care, connection, craft, stewardship, responsibility and kinship.
There is a generational imprint here, embedded into the building – a kind of sanctity that embraces. It’s not just a memory of a family, or the wisdom and knowledge passed from one generation to the next, but a memory of the values that embellish the slow, incremental changes that come through continuity.
It is through the flesh and blood that flows through this place – that the veil between past and present becomes most transparent. This place feels sacred and holy in its aspect.
As I turn to leave, I notice something hanging beside the door – a bag that fits so snugly with my needs it almost seems designed for them. It’s a beautifully balanced container, a fibonacci folio. The strap reminds me of my first buckled school shoes. Its curves and lines work seamlessly to form a whole. The only purpose of all this artistry, this craft, this guile, is to find utility in the void between.
To think that this thing of beauty, redacted and reduced to ‘this pouch, this sack, this fanny-pack’ by modernity – could reflect so much of the rhythm and balance of the natural world. It mirrors the humanity of the person who crafted it. This is something for the pilgrim in me to carry, to hold within its void something of the holiness of this place.
I lift the bag from its hook and – as if from nowhere – the shopkeeper appears.
“I made that,” she says.
I can’t tell you how rare and electrifying it feels to meet the maker of something you covet. The personality behind the form – the one who stitched the straps, burnished the buckles, pinched in the piping. She holds the bag as though it were her offspring – and of course, it is. She’s particularly proud of the lining – the colour, the pattern. Her hands instinctively rub the piping as she tells me how her family have been making things like this since the mid-eighteenth century.
In sharp contrast to the chaos and shallowness of modern times, places like this offer a kind of rootedness that borders on the sacred. They are little pockets of sanity – enduring sanctuaries shaped by generations of care and craft.
These are holy places, not in the religious sense, but in their deep, rooted presence – a presence we can still access by visiting, or through the virtual portal of a photograph. They are sites of pilgrimage, reminders of another way of being – and now, these precious fragments matter more than ever. Because in the end, the quality of our lives depends on what we choose to pass on – and what we choose to carry.
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The Nelson's Bag.
And carry it I do. Every time I use the bag, something lights up inside – as if I’m taking a fragment of the maker, the shop, the family, the generations behind it, along with me. It is not just a container of things, but a vessel of spirit – a reminder stitched into cloth that the past still walks beside us, if only we choose to carry it.
Andy Marshall
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Comperandum
My Comperandums are designed to show how remarkably connected our places are. They are a useful resource for artists and designers and architectural historians. They're also wonderful to scroll through - to tap into. I update them every time I find a new subject.
Andy Marshall
Andy Marshall
Andy Marshall
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Andy Marshall
Divine Light: An Illuminated Journey
I've been travelling the length and breadth of England this last few weeks capturing images for a forthcoming book by Janet Gough on the remarkable stained glass in England's cathedrals.
I'll be sharing the story behind my travels soon in the Genius Loci Digest - but if you would like to follow the last part of the journey (and see the previous entries) subscribers can join my WhatsApp group. Just drop me a line and I will send over a link for you to join.
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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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