Some toil, especially that within soil, gives back as much as it takes. When we step onto a plot of land with nothing but a spade, a handful of seeds, and a willingness to sweat, we enter a silent pact with the weather. It is a labour of hope, balancing the beauty of what we hope to grow with the raw sustenance it provides. Our sweat is merely the currency in our transaction with the dirt.
On my plot, I have set a physical marker of this pact: a stone, shaped like the rugged old mileage stones you find at the forgotten corners of historic roads. Painted black, with the plot number resting on top, its sides carry words meant to weather the seasons. On the side looking out at the pathway is a truth from As You Like It:
"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
Standing on that plot, I truly do feel exempt from public haunt. The search for art within the dirt sits true in my heart.
But this stone did more than mark a boundary - it built a bridge. A fellow plot owner, taming her own patch of earth nearby, happens to be a true disciple of the Bard. When she saw the stone, she understood it instantly. It became a physical marker linking our quiet, muddy labour to a deeper, ancient current of human expression.
Ours has never been a friendship managed over weekend lattes and delicate brownies. It is a friendship forged in the shared hope for a good harvest, shared chagrin when slugs or drought mock our efforts and a shared love of the Bard.
It was that exact bridge that carried us away from the allotment plots on a sunny Sunday morning. Squeezing into a train carriage filled with roaring Arsenal football fans on their way to a parade, we were dropped straight into the chaotic, historic heart of London’s Southbank.
The Unforgiving Dirt of Bankside
Bankside is a place where the dirt gave birth to treasures. Today, the Southbank presents itself as a curated promenade of white concrete, towering glass structures, and manicured culture. But if you know how to look, you can still feel the grit of the old world pressing up through the paving stones.
In Shakespeare’s time, this wasn't a place of leisure; it was London’s raw underbelly. The North Bank, governed by puritanical law, pushed everything it considered unruly, dangerous, or beautifully alive across the river. Bankside sat safely outside the city walls. It was a frontier of survival and sensory overload, thick with the stench of tanneries, bear-baiting pits, and rowdy taverns.
This was the domain of the Winchester Geese!
These women - outcasts and sex workers licensed by the Bishop of Winchester - lived incredibly hard lives. A revenue stream for the Church, sanctioned to use their only remaining asset to make it through life and then in death, denied Christian burial in consecrated ground. They were outcasts in life and cast out in death, buried in the nearby Crossbones Graveyard.
Yet, it was precisely in this swamp of human struggle, standing ankle-deep in the Thames mud, that the Globe Theatre took root. The groundlings who paid a copper penny to stand in the dirt expected no pristine sanctuary. Under an open sky, they witnessed the highest art born from the lowest ground. The magic of Shakespeare wasn’t created in a vacuum of luxury; it was forged in the heat of reality. To deliver anything less would have seen the end of the Globe. Its roots sat in fertile soil where stories raged and the masks of society fell away, revealing the true fruits of a life of labour.
Gateways in the Concrete
You can still find the gateways if you are willing to look for them. You feel it at the Crossbones Cemetery gates, where thousands of brightly coloured ribbons are tied to the ironwork - a vivid, ragged memorial to the forgotten souls of London's past. The strewn ribbons, like a visual echo of the chaos of the past, jar violently against the clinical architecture of today. It stands as an unsanctioned monument to true life.
You feel it, too, inside the heavy timbers of the reconstructed Globe. That afternoon, my friend and I took our places for an adults-only performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a play often sanitised into a gentle, glittering fairy tale, but its bones are wild, dark, and unruly. It is a story of the consequences when humans venture into the untamed woods at night, stripped of their societal masks, leaving their fate to the chaotic whims of nature.
I have written before about the reality of local mud and that exact truth existed within this adventure, too. Even as I write this now, just 48 hours later, the London sun has been replaced by a thrashing wind, sideways rain, and a thundering sky outside my office window. I look out at the deluge as I type and smile. I accept the reality.
It is the same wildness that waits whether you are turning the winter soil of an allotment or stepping into the historic mud of Bankside. Dress it as we might in glass and steel, the foundations of the world are fixed in the dirt.
The Real Adventures
But is a play not just an illusion?
Certainly, some adventures are meant to be lived entirely within the landscape of the mind, but when we can find the physical gateways where our deepest imaginings align with reality, that collision of thought and touch is where adventures become steel! They become as real as a trek through a trackless forest, as brutal as a shale-strewn path where you fight gravity on the climb, and as soul-charging as a swim across a glassy lake beneath a full, fat moon on a clear night sky.
The modern world offers us plenty of gloss - smooth paths, predictable routines and curated experiences that require absolutely nothing from us. But the things that truly sustain us are always unpolished. They are found in the kinship of shared labour, the resilience of those who walked the Bankside mud before us and the ancient, stubborn magic that refuses to be buried under the concrete.
So, look for the sermons in the stones! Find the gateways that are still there, however hidden.
And never be afraid to get your hands dirty to find the truth.
Bones
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