Following on from - but more a prelude to - Scapa Flow. Wreckers & Lost Souls is really, in my mind the starting point for this album.

Inspired a few years ago by the chance finding of Hawker’s Hut, the rather eccentric Reverend Hawker and his adopted parish of Morwenstow in North Cornwall, England and the activities of Wreckers. Hawker’s Hut was a tiny hut or lookout, perched on the cliff edge overlooking the sea and constructed by Hawker using timbers retrieved from the Alonzo, a sailing vessel wrecked on the rocks below in 1843.

At that time the bodies of shipwrecked mariners were left on the tideline or buried in the cliffs and Hawker took it upon himself to properly inter them in his churchyard. The sailors had often drowned as the result of wreckers who would deliberately lure a ship onto the dangerous rocks below in order to plunder the cargo.

Thus Morwenstow church yard was full of sorrow. I found it overgrown and just like the church, rather neglected and underused. This just added to the sense that these poor working people had been forgotten - passed by. One can imagine Parson Hawker spending many hours in the hut looking out for stray vessels or writing poems and smoking opium often with his friends, Dickens and Tennyson - inspired by views of the Atlantic Ocean.

I returned home full of inspiration myself from the overwhelming melancholy of the place and set about creating a response which much to my surprise became these small, fragmentary, dissonant neo-classical pieces. This in turn became the springboard for the Scapa Flow project which sounds very different, symphonic and flowing, tonal pieces but their narrative started in that forlorn churchyard by the sea.