LAND 31 A stunning dawn, the sky clear and the fields draped with delicate blankets of opaque mist. The rising sun would soon change everything, so setting up I had to decide whether to try to capture the mist or concentrate on the round church instead. I decided on the church, it having been a while since I tried a ‘slice painting’. Luckily, the changing light and sky made for an interesting composition.
I walked on, heading west on the cycle path, passing through fields and woodland, bordered by wildflowers, brambles and bushes. I poked around looking for tree frogs – of which there should be a healthy population in these parts – but without luck. Instead, I found some fungi, and a particularly confiding hare.
I stopped for breakfast at ‘Slaus Stene’, a well-known resting spot along the bike path. In the 90s a local retired farmer began carving granite blocks with images from Bornholm’s and Denmark’s cultural history. He cleared an area of scrub, dug a pond, and placed the stones in the garden. It is an eccentric and rather charming place, coincidently one of the very first places I visited with my family on our first trip to Bornholm.
A little later I found myself gazing at the moss-filled cracks in the road. They reminded me of a painting I had made a year or two ago of bacterial biofilm cracking on the surface of a puddle in Fanø.
I crossed the main road and headed south along a quiet road. It was high summer now – I passed fields with ripe wheat waving in the breeze while swallows and martins flitted and dipped overhead. I followed a track into a lovely mixed woodland that concealed a series of large lakes, old gravel quarries long since given over to nature. The forest was empty of people and even the birds were silent now. I felt keenly the changing of the seasons.
The wood bordered a maize field. I spent a long while trying to capture the different greens and how they fitted together. By the end of it my eyes and brain were exhausted.
I walked on through the forest and came across a huge ants’ nest, a veritable mountain of pine needles heaving with ceaseless activity. I painted a sheet of paper and left it on the nest, eager to see if their tracks or formic acid would leave traces on the paper.
My wanderings took me close to the coast and to one of my favourite walks on Bornholm. Here a pine forest borders the beach. Through wizened and twisted trunks and branches I caught a glimpse of the Baltic Sea.
I headed inland again, back into the forest, following for a while ‘The Green Ring’, a path system that partly encircles the port town of Rønne, Bornholm’s largest town and administrative capital. I stopped and painted a field of wild carrot and dock against a backdrop of Rønne’s industrial skyline.
Leaving the path I headed north towards Stubbeløkken, Bornholm’s largest granite quarry. First prospected in 1873, the quarry is now a huge and deep open wound covering 18 hectares and descending to over 116 metres – 53 metres under the surface of the sea. Over the decades more than 30 million tons of granite have been excavated from this quarry alone. More than a hundred quarries on Bornholm once employed thousands of men, but this is one of the last working quarries remaining. Against the darkening sky I painted the ghostly industrial skyline, accompanied by dystopian hum of heavy machinery – but also by the screeching of thousands of gulls, and the yikkering of the recently fledged peregrine young.
From here it was a short walk to Knuds Church, an exquisite little church with an immaculately kept graveyard. This was my destination for the day, and I was happy.
LAND 31
WEATHER REPORT – cloudy periods with sun in the afternoon. Temperature 17 – 21 degrees. Wind 3 – 8 m/s, from the SW. Hours of precipitation: 0 hours. Hours of sunshine: 10 hours.
STOPS with the BIVVY – 0
KILOMETRES WALKED – 19.15 km
DAY LASTED – 15h and 49 m
PEOPLE TALKED TO – 1
BIRDS SEEN and HEARD – 35 species (1 new: black redstart) = 123 species
LESSONS LEARNED – I benefited from my preparation and decent night’s sleep
IN MY HEAD – The party still, free diving, and the Wii game tanks.
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