Limnology Richard Skelton
Special Edition

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‘What line did the river first write in the valley?
What sense, made over and over, now senseless?’

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Limnology takes the above quote as its starting point and explores the notion of this ‘line’ as both a series of words and a sequence of musical notes. The book assembles over 1000 ‘water-words’ from the dialect of Cumbria and its tributaries in the Germanic and Celtic languages, and presents them in a way which typographically imitates riverine processes. Letters cascade down the page, overlap, merge and gather, forming pools and streams. Intermingled with these visual pieces are poems and texts which explore, amongst other things, water creation myths, the roles of water creatures, both real and imagined, and the paradox of waterless rivers.

The accompanying 28-minute musical composition recreates the journey of a river from mountain rill to estuary, through the gradual accumulation of individual melody lines, swelling from near silence to almost violent intensity.