The Park at Night

Place Writing in the Dark

Dig into the field of Place Writing with me as your guide. Discover new ways of thinking and writing about home and place.

In the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Dorothy often mentions walking at night: ‘1st April, Walked by moonlight’ (p12). This diary entry was made in 1798 and I wrote on the printed page, Dorothy does a lot of night walking, something we don’t do much today. And then I noted in the margin, Has our ability to see by moonlight diminished over the course of two centuries?

I was provoked to consider how I was conducting my research into place writing. Well, perhaps not how I was doing it exactly, but when I was doing it. Because places, and all they contain both natural and manmade, sit beneath the sun and the moon; their rhythms are governed by the planets, not by the clock.

Personal Safety

I’m a regular visitor to my local country park, taking my walks between 11am and 2pm. I decided to adjust my practice and take myself there after dark. I’ve never been afraid of the dark but, for safety’s sake, I thought it better to have some company and my daughter agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to join me; it turns out that even as a mature adult she is afraid of the dark. We scheduled a midnight walk when the weather was dry, not freezing, in September. We would stick to the main paths and my son-in-law monitored our progress using a GPS portable tracker.

Light Pollution

The darkness of night is routinely shut out by blinds and curtains and lit by car headlamps and streetlights; night is for rest; night is for the nocturnal, not the diurnal like me and my daughter. Nights are polluted by light, especially in the town where I live. Would I notice the effect of the moon’s argent light on a monochrome landscape, or how it modified visibility through its different phases?

We entered the park via the road entrance. We swopped street-lighting for the starry obnubilating darkness of the carpark, and the place spoke of absence—no cars, bikes, dogs, walkers, joggers, or pram pushers, only us. Night visitors are not encouraged at the park, there were no lamps to light our way. We could have used our mobile phones as flashlights, but my daughter brought a head torch with her to save our phones’ battery power. Fear can be considerably mitigated by light, and I think even a small amount of it had the power to give confidence and calm nerves.

Night Walk

Linking arms, we struck a surefooted pace behind the flashing bright orb that bobbed ahead of us on the hardcore track. The path circles a meadow, but first it weaves through the trees at the edge of the woods and, there, the presence of tall black forms on either side of us made me feel slightly claustrophobic. I only noticed this when we left the wooded area and entered the open field into a different, capacious, kind of darkness. We turned off the torch to appreciate the contrast of tone. Ahead, the topography seemed smoothed out; it lacked perspective and the edges of things appeared neat and trim in the landscape. Details were reduced to such an extent that everything seemed to have been tidied away for the night. In the distance, on the other side of the meadow, the doubly dark soot-black tree line that marked the park’s perimeter was silhouetted by an urban glow, faint orange, that gently pulsed to the murmuring hearts of human occupation.

Moon and Stars

The waning Gibbous moon was painted blue, yellow, gold, and thinly veiled behind diaphanous cloud. And in the theatre of stars above, I wanted to identify a constellation but struggled to make patterns as twinkling lights played tricks with my eyes—a flash, then gone, another, briefly. An app came to my aid; I pointed my daughter’s phone to the sky and clicked. Ursa Major, the Great Bear, was drawn on the screen like magic, linking sparkling points of light in the northern sky. It looked down at us as we sat, bathed in liquid moonlight, on a bench.

We stayed a while, closed our eyes, until we felt recovered somehow. The hour was late; the digits on my phone had scrolled from one day to another; we had traversed from yesterday to today, yet I was in no hurry to go home. Closing my eyes again, I felt the Zephyr touch my face, gently, softly. Perhaps no-one had ever sat on this particular bench in the first hour of a new day. But then we roused from our dark-induced semi-slumber, moved our stiffening limbs, and got up to resume our noctambulation.

Returning to the starting point of our night walk, which was my front door, I noticed that lamp posts and traffic lights gave structure to the landscape. We picked up the pace on firm paths with good visibility. Dorothy Wordsworth had only the moon and stars to light her way, though she may have carried an oil lamp on the darkest of nights.

Had we left the moon behind? No, it was there, in the sky to our right, assisting our way home. Within fifteen minutes I had made a cup of tea and taken it to bed with me, and my daughter had driven the few miles to her house, where her husband waited, and her children slept.

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We took this walk a few years ago and sometimes now, when I wake in the night, I think about the time we spent on the bench, and the sense of awe we both felt.

Being awake and noticing the environment at different times of day, and night, is surely worthwhile if we wish to write about place.

I look forward to chatting with you in the comments!

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Credits & Links:

Photo is my own: The bench commemorates the short life of Ashley Edward Randall.

Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (1971), edition edited by Mary Moorman. London: Oxford University Press.