Square mile: finding freedom in bounded spaces

Grace Quantock explores her physical and psychic sense of place in the context of illness, industry, and a world in flames.

I realised chronic illness was changing my relationship with the landscape when I found that I had forgotten stars existed. It was 4am and I had just re-discovered the night sky; after years housebound, sitting in my wheelchair, tipped back to be bumped, painfully, down the steep steps to the street from our flat, I lay back and looked up, beyond the street lights and drew breath at the sight of a glittering shawl of night sky. I remembered walking the lanes around my village under starlight on crisp, hoar frost winter nights and damp mornings, dew drops hanging from every thorn, out early, before the moon had set. I used to know these stars, as part of my landscape, my community, my square mile of life.

Y filltir sgwâr (‘the square mile’) is a Welsh phrase which, according to David Austin, ‘signifies the small locality in which one grew up and lived and from which a core identity and belonging is drawn. It bespeaks a close-knit community of mutual support, kinship, and neighbourliness. As such it is an emotional and perhaps romantic response to the space around people, but it can nonetheless be drawn on a map. It is, therefore, a way into a landscape for an historian such as myself from both an individual and a collective perspective’.

Our experience of landscape is never singular or individual, precious as it is; it is part of many intersecting personal, ancestral, historic, embodied, precarious layers. My love of vintage style, not vintage values, extends beyond my clothing. I love the English country house aesthetic; the sweeping lawns, Lutyens benches, delphinium, hollyhocks, drifts of lavender humming with bees, weathered terracotta pots of peonies. It’s straw hats with trailing ribbons, trugs and Sissinghurst, foxgloves standing at the back of the borders. Chatsworth, Blenheim, the Lost Gardens of Heligan and sunken rose gardens blooming in the late afternoon sun, the haze of perfume so visceral you can almost see it floating towards you.

I love the art that’s been made from landscape, the tending and devotion that’s shaped green living things into something beautiful, shapely, stately and far from wild but still captivating. I hate the wealth that built these landscapes, of course: the violence of enslavement and the coal extracted from the earth taking health and wealth with it, leaving only carbon and slag behind.

I grew up walking the grounds of Tredegar House, my school uniform crest carried the Tredegar stag. Many people believe Wales wasn’t involved in the enslavement of people. Some say that Wales was the first place colonised by England but even with all the travesties perpetrated, I don’t believe these things are comparable. Actually, research shows Wales didn’t have the wealth to mount long transatlantic enslavement raids and shipping voyages. But the Tredegar Morgans who lived for 500 years in Tredegar House, were, along with other prominent Welsh families, investors in the Royal African Company, ‘a chartered monopoly that held exclusive rights to trade with West Africa and therefore to export enslaved humans to the Caribbean. The Morgans were shareholders’ writes Dr Chris Evans. I cannot look at these spaces without seeing the bodies they have been built on, all that broke to allow these lawns to be this smooth, the trees this stately, the vistas this sweet. It’s impossible for me to divorce the beauty from its context.

But I visited these gardens as a child and I loved the peace, the spaciousness, the time away from people; as a child with undiagnosed sensory needs, this was cherished. But of course, we had to leave those gardens and go home. They were not ours. There were gates; people were welcomed in and then put out again. Even as a small child, I knew that it felt wrong that the land could be owned by someone, that it could be fenced in and others fence out. I felt this, even living in the green and pleasant south-east Wales, surrounded as I was by forest and two fields away from the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. I love photos where I am in a green, beautiful place – hazy, unspecific, open, generous, sweeping. But that’s not my reality and it’s not the landscape I’m in a relationship with every day.

I contributed to an anthology of Welsh writers a few years ago and we were asked where we wrote, so it could be included in our piece. Perhaps I am endlessly parochial and pedestrian but I was somewhat confused by how special people’s writing places proved to be; a houseboat on the Menai Straits, an antique Edwardian desk, in an attic overlooking Conwy Bay, between London and Singapore. I could write nothing but my reality, not between anywhere, not an antique anything but from a council flat in the south Wales valleys. It felt bald, it felt disruptive, it felt like spoiling the party, the picture of aesthetic, creative, aspirational spaces.

But I love this home which reminds me of my grandmother’s home. It isn’t aspirational, it is a valleys village with potholed roads, libraries and facilities closing and many people using foodbanks. I’ve been harassed in these streets, grown stronger, grown weaker and been unable to access them for years, being able to see the sunset from the mountain again. Planted trees and grew a garden. Lived to eat the fruit from those trees and to share it.

The soil here is nearly pure clay. Older folks have told me how they used to come down to the land I now live on to get milk from Mr Jones, who owned the farm. He used the dipper into the churns and filled up their milk bottles if they came early. Our flat was built in the fifties, post war, with green space around it and a garden which has blossomed with roses, honeysuckle, peonies, daffodils, fruit and flowers everywhere you can fit a plant.

Grandma has a map on her kitchen wall. Everything had to be located; when we talked, everything was understood. We would look words up in her ancient King’s English dictionary, with the cracked brown leather cover and peeling gold lettering on the spine. We ate with atlases, poetry books, encyclopaedias and maps surrounding us. Grandma initially hated our smartphones and refused to get wifi in the house for many years to keep books as the primary source of information and to preserve talking, questioning and wondering. As I grew up, my sense of the world map expanded, becoming populated with stories, memories, information and understanding. But my embodied experience of the world was limited by lack of access. Growing up with chronic illness and from a working-class background, travel was confined to library books rather than aeroplanes. ‘We live in an area of outstanding natural beauty,’ my mother would remind us. ‘People come on holiday here.’ I had a visceral sense of the landmarks around my home, the lanes and hills, their stories and legends and our own family and ancestral lore laid on top of them. We mapped changes in how far we could walk as we grew, as the trees grew and fell around us.

But as I became more and more unwell, my capacity to explore the external world reduced and my adventures in our internal worlds, our emotions, our stories, increased. ‘People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.’ wrote Ursula K. Le Guin and I began to explore the fantastical creatures we are as humans, in writing and in therapy, realising I may not be able to explore adventuring out in the world, no dragons guarding hordes of gold but I needed to face internal fears that appeared as what most scares and overwhelms us.

On Sunday, Grandma asked me, as she does most weeks, ‘Have you been looking at moon lately?’ I had not. She was not pleased. ‘I miss the moon when I’ve not seen it. I say goodnight to it every night but I have to hunt as it moves around. It’s been rising over my bedroom, over the garage, so I could see it lately.’ The moon, the forests, the plants are friendly companions. She asked me once, putting down the newspaper.

‘Grace, when people say they want to “get back to nature,” what are they talking about?’

‘Well, you know. Getting in touch with nature again. Being outside, the seasons.’

She looked flummoxed. ‘But how can they be out of touch with nature?’

I looked at her. Thinking of the farmhouse she was brought up in, roughly partitioned with the cows wintering on the other side, going to sleep to the sound of their gentle sighs and cud chewing. How she went vegetarian when the village pig was slaughtered, after she and her friends grew up with him, used to lie in the straw, their heads resting on his big belly, laughing and chatting. I thought of her fear when we travel to Cardiff or Bristol, because it’s too far. How unnatural planes and boats are to her, whose travel was limited to the rough cattle ship ferries to and from Ireland. I thought of trying to explain cities and technologies and being cut off.

‘Not everyone is like you,’ I tried. ‘People don’t walk through the woods every day. They don’t grow flowers or make bread.’ Her square mile is deep, layered with the years of her life in this place, ancestors and descendants recalling and making stories along the lanes she walks.

When I first ventured outside after being housebound for many years, I saw it as being like Google Maps loading. For years I had explored the outside via Google Maps, videos, stories, now my internal map began to expand, getting filled in as I found accessible places I could travel to and be within. A new hospital, a library, a college, a new city. Finding an accessible bus route, a train route and which staff didn’t mind putting down ramps. As I am expanding, Grandma, in her ageing, had to handle the emotional and physical impact of the world she can access being reduced. She retreats now more into story, the worlds contained in page and memory.

It had been said – but is mostly a myth – that ancient maps would contain the phrase, ‘Here be dragons’ for places that were unknown or uncharted. It is only the Ostrich Egg Globe and the Hunt-Lenox Globe of 1508 which use the phrase hic sunt dracones, ‘here are dragons’. The phrase used by medieval cartographers was Hic Svnt Leones – here are lions – to show unknown territories on maps.

I think of the Jewish sea monster, Leviathan, ‘On ancient maps, cartographers would draw a Leviathan to mark uncharted waters …. Moving under cover of darkness, unperceived, this technology of fugitivity is practiced by those whose existence has been criminalized and controlled. The Leviathan is a friend, lover, and protector of those escaping enslavement and incarceration. In Hebrew, the word “Leviatan,” can be translated as “accompanier of the feminine”,’ Rebekah Erev wrote. I love the image of the fugitive within the map, the unknown within the attempt to pin down and make known, that which we experience even if it cannot be seen.

I am fascinated by maps as I am by diagnosis, because it is a professional opinion formed into an authority. Someone has mapped a person, a body, an experience, a region and framed their understanding on paper. These papers, and the understanding, often change. Diagnoses change: for example, many people identified as ‘Aspie’ but Asperger’s Syndrome was reclassified by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, due to indistinct diagnostic criteria, as autism spectrum disorder. And it came to light through the research of Edith Sheffer that Asperger, although not an official member of the party, had his research shaped by Nazism and sent children he pathologized to their deaths. Names like that need changing. But many diagnoses are simply the best medical opinion thus far and likely to be influenced by research and medical breakthroughs.

My own relationship to my square mile is defined and redefined by both internal and external factors. By symptom flares, by work pressure, by climate crisis, by poor pavements, by harassment. I’ve had to redefine my concept of range in the context of chronic illness. I can’t explore further when a relapsing remitting pattern means I keep re-going over the same ground. Progress within my world looks different when you relapse, when you live with limitations. I wish I could tell you that having a smaller physical range has led to a deeper emotional and sensory range. But this isn’t that kind of story.

In mapping my square mile, I witness daily changes in the places within my reach. By noticing these small shifts in both my landscape and myself, my relationship with this space deepens through cherishing and attention. Yet, inevitably, someone will frame this as ‘inspirational’, commenting how ‘you can always find something to smile about’ or ‘if you can do it, anyone can.’ They'll muse about how interesting it is that my limited mobility makes me ‘really cherish what I have,’ bookmarking the corrosive pity with, ‘it just goes to show...’. What is shown by coaxing joy from struggle is never articulated.

It does not show anything beyond a dismaying lack of accessible pavements, transport and built environments. I am making what I can from this but don’t think that makes it enough. I want the same rights to access this world as anyone else. It is not about the small things, nor positive thinking; the joy I manage to create doesn’t compensate for exclusion; it’s not about slowing down and realising. This is the mistake people make and it baffles me. They celebrate my limits and that I can make a life within them rather than challenging them and imagining the lives we can all make beyond them. I do celebrate my life, but it’s not my resilience I celebrate as I don’t want to be praised for being good at getting hurt and surviving. Least people believe it is then alright to keep hurting me, since I spin such gold from the dross of suffering. But I ask, what could I spin with wool and not this straw they handed me? I do celebrate creativity and cherishing and community bringing to life our bodies and the spaces we occupy.

There’s so much pressure to be positive, to be inspirational, to say it’s fine, it doesn’t matter I can’t get to the loo or see the view, I get to see the backs of people’s heads and their untrimmed nostril hair as they face down at me – I’m just happy to be here. I’m so sorry but no.

There is an interplay between limitation and expansion. Each morning, I go out and pluck fallen leaves from the tiny pond. The pond is actually a butler’s sink we found in the garden fifteen years ago. It’s been a flower bed, where I grew anemones in velvety amethyst and carnation, all the cool colours of the paint box. It sat beside my green bench, holding a deity statue and Encens D’Auroville sticks of basil and clementine incense I stuck into the earth for daily meditation attempts. But of course, the drainage was poor and so it leaned against the water butt for many years. This summer, I dragged the sink out and sat it next to the bench, next to the fig trees and propped it up on ceramic pot feet, which I was given in a huge tub at the tip. Raising the sink gives space underneath for toads to hide, for the potential for newts. I needed a plug to fill the hole, universal plugs do not fit. I wanted to fill my pond, because I wanted to make this small difference. I wanted to believe that small could make a difference.

My therapist has been telling me for many months to go out to the garden. I talked, in sessions, about the fears I hold. I talked about trying to influence climate policy, about the impact of climate breakdown, the confluence of cascading collective trauma. They name the fires, you know, I tell her. In the US, they are so big and burn for so long, they name them. My friend was driving through California and was telling our writing group, and the others asked her how the fires were, when she drove past; the Creek Fire, I mean. Imagine a fire so big it is part of the landscape and they name it?

But she told me, go out into the garden. ‘I can’t do it’ I said. ‘I can’t play a little garden, while the mountains burn around me, while the seas rise, while people suffer, suffer in genocide. I can’t imagine playing, making gardens, making pretty posies while the world burns around me.’

A few years ago, there was a spate of wildfires in Wales. I was in Llantarnum Grange seeing clients and we could smell the smoke from Twmbarlwm, which is the mountain under which I grew up. We were told to stay inside, to keep the windows closed; the news reported it was teenagers, disconnected, discontented, lighting what they call grass fires. They spread across the mountains, up and down the valleys like lit fuses of dynamite, rocketing through our forests and green hills. But my therapist told me about her farm, how since she has been there the last few years, the swallows have come back, the house martins are returning. I thought of the birds I have seen flying over her farm, hearing the owls as dusk settled in.

I filled the pond with water until it rippled over the edges, figuring it would evaporate a little. I added a complicated solar-powered fountain, which initially sprayed so vigorously no water went back into the pond. It made a lovely tinkling noise. I ordered a tiny water lily to oxygenate it. My utter joy the day it flowered was miraculous, even for me to behold, preoccupied as I am with pain. I go out each morning, eager to see what the pond is doing, to hear the fountain playing. I once saw a pond skater on its surface. There are bird feathers, tiny ones, on the rim, so I think birds are drinking from it. We have a bird bath too and a bird table but a big black cat has adopted the covered bird table as his outdoor shelter when it rains.

But I sat on the bench and saw the trees we planted together and when the pond was ready. To hear the fountain playing, to sit and look at this little patch of land so surrounded now by trees that you can look up and instead of being hemmed in by flats, square by square around us, windows winking at every turn, we can now look up and see only leaves and sky.

The more I am out in my square mile, the more I am in community. I am in relationship with the land, the trees, with neighbours and local community members. And look, it’s the valleys. Yes, I get asked questions about my impairments, my dogs, when the bus is coming, the weather. And yet there are many disabled people on my estate. I am one of two wheelchair users on my road. My direct neighbours on our block are all disabled. And of course I’m asked less about disability as I age – perhaps it’s not as startling to see a woman as it is a young person in a wheelchair, or perhaps attitudes have improved through my lifetime (this isn’t true, I know from young disabled community members, but I wish it were).

These connections have reshaped my identity. I can be limited by the square mile or rooted in it; I can be constrained or held and contained – sometimes it’s both. Professor Mike Pearson, described y filltir sgwâr as the experience that ‘at the age of eight we know a patch of ground in a detail we will never know anywhere again. In Welsh it is called “y filltir sgwâr” – the square mile – and it exists in the Welsh psyche as one of a series of cognitive maps around home and locale’. The Welsh concept of y filltir sgwâr can be a practice of revisiting, repairing, renewing and restoring. We can lean into what is hidden, and what we will need to hold onto to cherish, preserve and survive alongside.

Grace Quantock is an award-winning psychotherapeutic counsellor, speaker and author of Living Well With Chronic Illness (Orion Spring, 2024), writing from the Welsh valleys where she explores the intersection of illness, presence and place. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent and The Times of London, and she speaks internationally on complex trauma, access and social change.