Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday 29 September 2025 at 07:57
The Writing Life: A Story From a Word
John Koenig, in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, gave a name to a feeling I’ve carried for years without knowing it had one: kenopsia — “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.” It is the echo that lingers after a crowd has gone home, the stillness of a fairground stripped of its music, the hollow air of a derelict school once filled with shouts and chalk dust. And the sad, melancholy feeling when observing documentaries filmed in Chernobyl or the underwater filming of the Titanic.
I know that feeling well. I meet it every time I take the ferry across to Rothesay and walk the stretch of land between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill. Once, this place was alive: fifty or sixty cabins scattered like little wooden boats moored on the green, a harbour for those of us who needed an escape from the city’s hard edges. It was nothing grand, just a handful of huts and a strip of distant shoreline, but to us it was a world apart.
Evenings then were stitched together with barbeque, song, burnt toast, and smoke. Campfires flickering under the slow-turning stars, voices rising in unison to the songs of the day, the scent of wheat and barns hanging in the air. Children ran barefoot through the grass, their laughter spilling into the sea breeze, while adults leaned back in deckchairs, faces tilted towards the sun as if storing its warmth for the cold months ahead.
Memory is a generous painter. It smooths and gilds, washes everything in the soft glow of once. Like a Potemkin Village, hides the reality. And in that glow, people seemed gentler, lighter, closer to the best of themselves. Perhaps it was the rare gift of unhurried time, or the way the sea loosened the knots of worry. Or the place itself invited kindness, as if the salt wind whispered, you can breathe here. You can be human here.
Now, when I return, the cabins are gone. The field is overgrown, nettles shouldering their way through what was once a path. The songs have fallen silent; the laughter has retreated into the soil. I walk through the meadow and cows stare at me as if I’m an imposter and they have a history on this meadow. I feel like a ghost in my own story, trespassing in a memory too fragile to touch. Kenopsia seeps from the earth like a scent, not emptiness, but the faint outline of presence, a whisper of all that once was.
Robert Macfarlane wrote that “landscape is not a backdrop for human drama, but a participant in it.” Standing there, I know this to be true. The land remembers. It remembers the clatter of cutlery from picnic tables, the hiss of sausages over a smoky fire, the hush of whispered promises under a summer moon. It remembers us — the ordinary people who once turned this patch of ground into a temporary kingdom of joy.
Such places ache because they remind us that time is both thief and gift. They show us what we’ve lost, but also what we once had and how deeply it mattered. The meadow between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill is no longer a holiday haven. Yet in walking it, I walk back into my own boyhood, into a world where joy was simpler and people seemed, if only for a moment, to rise into the best version of themselves.
Perhaps that is the strange mercy of kenopsia: that it is not simply emptiness but memory’s afterglow. It is the ghost light left on in the theatre after the play is over — a small, stubborn flame that says, something beautiful happened here.
The Writing Life: A Story From a Word
The Writing Life: A Story From a Word
John Koenig, in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, gave a name to a feeling I’ve carried for years without knowing it had one: kenopsia — “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.” It is the echo that lingers after a crowd has gone home, the stillness of a fairground stripped of its music, the hollow air of a derelict school once filled with shouts and chalk dust. And the sad, melancholy feeling when observing documentaries filmed in Chernobyl or the underwater filming of the Titanic.
I know that feeling well. I meet it every time I take the ferry across to Rothesay and walk the stretch of land between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill. Once, this place was alive: fifty or sixty cabins scattered like little wooden boats moored on the green, a harbour for those of us who needed an escape from the city’s hard edges. It was nothing grand, just a handful of huts and a strip of distant shoreline, but to us it was a world apart.
Evenings then were stitched together with barbeque, song, burnt toast, and smoke. Campfires flickering under the slow-turning stars, voices rising in unison to the songs of the day, the scent of wheat and barns hanging in the air. Children ran barefoot through the grass, their laughter spilling into the sea breeze, while adults leaned back in deckchairs, faces tilted towards the sun as if storing its warmth for the cold months ahead.
Memory is a generous painter. It smooths and gilds, washes everything in the soft glow of once. Like a Potemkin Village, hides the reality. And in that glow, people seemed gentler, lighter, closer to the best of themselves. Perhaps it was the rare gift of unhurried time, or the way the sea loosened the knots of worry. Or the place itself invited kindness, as if the salt wind whispered, you can breathe here. You can be human here.
Now, when I return, the cabins are gone. The field is overgrown, nettles shouldering their way through what was once a path. The songs have fallen silent; the laughter has retreated into the soil. I walk through the meadow and cows stare at me as if I’m an imposter and they have a history on this meadow. I feel like a ghost in my own story, trespassing in a memory too fragile to touch. Kenopsia seeps from the earth like a scent, not emptiness, but the faint outline of presence, a whisper of all that once was.
Robert Macfarlane wrote that “landscape is not a backdrop for human drama, but a participant in it.” Standing there, I know this to be true. The land remembers. It remembers the clatter of cutlery from picnic tables, the hiss of sausages over a smoky fire, the hush of whispered promises under a summer moon. It remembers us — the ordinary people who once turned this patch of ground into a temporary kingdom of joy.
Such places ache because they remind us that time is both thief and gift. They show us what we’ve lost, but also what we once had and how deeply it mattered. The meadow between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill is no longer a holiday haven. Yet in walking it, I walk back into my own boyhood, into a world where joy was simpler and people seemed, if only for a moment, to rise into the best version of themselves.
Perhaps that is the strange mercy of kenopsia: that it is not simply emptiness but memory’s afterglow. It is the ghost light left on in the theatre after the play is over — a small, stubborn flame that says, something beautiful happened here.
Image by Copilot