“We are tomorrow’s past…“
From ‘Precious Bane’ by Mary Webb
About Lost Content
Lost Content is a semi-autobiographical project exploring the cultural and literary landscape of Shropshire – the history, myths and legends that have shaped the county and which run much deeper than the nostalgic poems of A E Housman (1859-1936).
Background
Many a casual conversation about Shropshire will include a reference to ‘A Shropshire Lad’ – the nostalgic poems of the Victorian classical scholar, A E Housman, and his yearning for a ‘land of lost content’.
Shropshire is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places under the sun, but it also has a deep cultural and literary landscape full of history, myth and legend – a past shaped through conflict, industry and hardship.
The writer D H Laurence, in his short novel ‘St Mawr’, described the Stiperstones – a quartzite ridge in the South-west corner of Shropshire that has strong folklore associations with the Devil – as ‘One of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England’.
And, of that past, the Shropshire author Mary Webb wrote ‘The past is only the present become invisible and mute, and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.‘
As a Shropshire Lad myself, I wanted to make my own representation of Shropshire – of the place where I live now and of the place that I remember growing up in – before they too become invisible and mute…
(All images have been made with a vintage 58mm Helios 44-2 f2 lens – coincidentally, first released around the year I was born – and were shot ‘wide open’ at an aperture of f2 and, unusually for me, in colour)
Main image: ‘In Memory of…’ A memorial bench by the side of the River Onny, Craven Arms.
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All images © W N BISHOP