Vox Meditantis

14th September 2017

I’m writing this perched on what remains of the platform at Chalford Halt, though the nameplate disappeared decades ago and the rails were lifted in the seventies. Brambles have colonised the old waiting shelter, their thorny tendrils threading through broken windows like nature’s own graffiti. The September afternoon light filters through a canopy of ash and elder that has sprouted from the ballast, transforming this forgotten corner of the Cotswolds into something almost primordial.

Tomorrow, Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere after twenty years of faithful service, burning up in the alien skies it spent so long observing. There’s something profoundly melancholy about planned obsolescence, even when it serves science. I’ve been following the mission’s final days on Twitter, watching astronomers and engineers bid farewell to their mechanical emissary with genuine emotion. It strikes me that we live in an age where we know more about the rings of Saturn than we do about half the abandoned railway lines in our own countryside.

The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I sit, supposedly an archivist of the past, surrounded by the very decay I claim to document. Rosebay willowherb – that peculiar pink flower that springs from bomb sites and derelict ground – has colonised the entire cutting. During the war, people called it ‘fireweed’ for its habit of appearing wherever the Luftwaffe had done its work. Now it blooms equally well in the wake of British Rail’s quiet vandalism, transforming abandoned infrastructure into accidental wilderness.

I’ve been thinking about appetite lately, about what nourishes us and what we choose to consume. If someone asked me about my favourite foods, I’d probably give the expected middle-class response – artisanal sourdough, properly aged cheese, perhaps something about the superiority of farmers’ markets over supermarkets. But the truth is more complicated. What I truly hunger for are the stories that cling to places like this: the conversations of long-dead commuters, the dreams of Victorian engineers who believed they were connecting the world with iron and steam.

Yet even as I romanticise these fragments, I’m acutely aware of my own contradictions. I document decay whilst contributing to it simply by being here, iPhone in hand, uploading filtered photographs to Instagram like some digital age picturesque tourist. The Victorian railway builders would have understood Instagram, I think – both represent the human compulsion to capture and share experience, to impose narrative on the relentless passage of time.

Brexit negotiations grind on in Westminster whilst I sit among the ruins of British industry, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing another kind of dismantling. Not the dramatic collapse that produces romantic ruins, but the slow bureaucratic erosion that leaves nothing worth photographing. The EU withdrawal process feels like watching a relationship end through a series of increasingly terse emails – all the passion drained away, leaving only procedural efficiency and mutual incomprehension.

A family of wrens has nested in the old signal box, their cheerful song echoing off rusted ironwork. Nature doesn’t mourn our abandoned projects; it simply gets on with the business of living. The hart’s-tongue ferns unfurling from cracks in the platform walls know nothing of nostalgia or historical significance. They exist in an eternal present that my historian’s mind can barely comprehend.

Perhaps that’s what troubles me most about our current moment – not the loss of knowledge itself, but our diminished capacity for sustained attention. We live in an age of infinite information and vanishing patience, where the half-life of public discourse seems measured in hours rather than generations. The railway cutting around me took decades to achieve its current state of beautiful dereliction, but our collective memory seems to regenerate on quarterly cycles, each news cycle overwriting the last like waves erasing footprints in sand.

As I prepare to leave, I notice how the evening light transforms the abandonment around me. What seemed melancholic an hour ago now appears almost magical, the golden hour lending dignity to rust and ruin. Tomorrow, Cassini will become another kind of ruin, scattered atoms in an alien atmosphere twenty years and 3.5 billion miles from home. Perhaps that’s not tragedy but transformation – the same alchemy that turns abandoned railways into wildlife corridors, that lets hart’s-tongue ferns write their own verdant poetry across our discarded certainties.

The wrens are still singing as I pack away my notebook. Unlike me, they seem to have found exactly what they were looking for.

Mid-September 2017 saw the planned end of NASA’s Cassini mission and ongoing Brexit negotiations following the UK’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Cassini, launched in 1997, spent 13 years orbiting Saturn before its deliberate descent on 15 September 2017 prevented contamination of potentially habitable moons like Enceladus; its data transformed understanding of Saturn’s rings, atmosphere, and moons. In Britain, debates over sovereignty, trade, and regulation intensified as withdrawal terms were negotiated, culminating in the UK’s formal exit on 31 January 2020 and subsequent trade agreements. Parallelly, many disused railway lines – closed largely after the 1960s Beeching cuts – evolved into wildlife corridors and heritage trails.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate