Lichen and Lagan-larking
Last Monday I cycled down the Lagan Towpath in search of lichen. I’d seen it the previous weekend (why didn’t I just get it then!?) and knew it was what I needed to complete a piece that had been gestating for close to a year now. As I remembered, there was lots of lichen to be found near the river, about halfway between the weir at Stranmillis and the Lockkeeper’s Cottage. But it seems I remembered wrong…
As I cycled further and further than I’d intended, failing to spot this lichen I was after, I thought about the previous week where the flooding had been so bad that the Lagan River, and the Lagan Canal, which cuts a straight path through several meanders in the river, had become one in places, submerging low bridges and making some paths inaccessible. I also thought about a music video I made in 2019 that used footage of the river that I’d recorded using my phone in a gimbal while cycling along this same path. I later mirrored the video to create a shifting band of green foliage, grass and trees framed by water above and below.
I had done a lot of one-handed cycling around then on various ventures down alleyways and occasional rivers, left hand on left handlebar, right hand outstretched gripping phone camera and gimbal. I did it so much that on one occasion, while cycling into the city centre, my left handlebar actually snapped off! A ‘catastrophic failing’ for a handlebar as one bike expert acquaintance later commented. ‘Shocking’ I agreed, failing to mention the repetitive strain it had been under for months. However, the bike was still cyclable, and I fancied moments after the event, that I could press on, one-handing it into town and sorting it out later… but then I was assailed by a vision of the other handlebar suddenly snapping off too, and me speeding downhill from Lanyon Station with no brakes, no steering… I digress.
I spotted the lichen, but I was sure I’d seen more, so continued on until the Lockkeepers Cottage before realising I’d passed the only place where I was going to find it easily. It was one of the rare occasions that the cottage was open, so I went in and had a quick tour of the two tiny rooms and a glimpse of the upper story where up to ten children once slept. Peter, the guide, was a font of knowledge about the Lagan and its wildlife and told a story about a seal that had visited further up the river as far as ‘Eel Island’. I’d never heard of Eel Island and it got me thinking about places with local nomenclature that do not make it to the likes of Google Maps. A river biologist I’d spoken to recently had mentioned Wolfenden’s Bridge, another place upriver, again the name of which isn’t on digital maps. I recalled Van Morrison referring to the Loop River behind the street where he grew up as Beechie River... Peter agreed to chat again and that I could record him on our next meeting as part of my Riverruns project.
I gathered the pale turquoise lichen in a cotton bag and stowed it in my panier, promising it that I would try to learn more about it, at least what it was called. As I was picking it someone had asked me what it was good for and I gave a stumbling explanation of what I was using it for. It was surprisingly dry in amongst the sodden tangled trees. Not wet like moss, but almost brittle.
Towards the end of my return journey, I stopped off again near Albertbridge. A sudden enormous rumble could be heard as diggers ferried huge mounds of broken hard core and turfed it on the water’s edge on the opposite bank. They must be making a new path down that stretch of the river from the bridge, past ‘Ferg’s Warehouse’ (try finding that on a map). On my side, the riverbank was a line of gravel and silt, scrubby plants, reed stubble and various bits of unidentified discarded shite. Thinking of Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) I locked up and tried to do a bit of Lagan mudlarking. According to Belfast’s River Manager, unlike the Thames, there is nowhere to do this type of activity safely on our principal river. However, undeterred, I had a go. I found four golf balls, two tennis balls, a scrap of bone, several broken shards of glazed ceramic, another more exciting bone that turned out to be the femur, tibia and fibula of a plastic Halloween skeleton, oyster shells, several flavours of vape, a broken Christmas tree bauble and a Thorinder ‘herb’ grinder (with magnetic kief tray). Not bad for half an hour. I told myself to wear gloves next time, returned to the studio to add the lichen to my new artwork to take to Dublin the following day, and started to think about what I should call it.
