"We'll to the woods no more, the laurels all are cut. The bowers are bare of bay that once the Muses wore".

We walked the dog in the Chantries which were carpeted in bluebells. This is land on the Upper Greensand Ridge. It used to belong to someone who was mayor of Guildford in Henry VIIIs time and he got permission from the King to use the money he raised by selling the land to establish a priest in Holy Trinity to sing for his soul. Hence the name - Chantry. The view south is special because there is a gap in the Lower Greensand Ridge at this point and so you can see across the Weald to the South Downs. That gap was used by both railway (now closed down and converted into the Downslink Path) and canal as a route to the English Channel. Also you can see a long way West - the Hogs Back in profile and beyound into the valley of the upper Wey towards Alton.

I finally managed to find my copy of The Old Road written by Hillaire Belloc on his explorations at the start of the 20th century of the route from Winchester to Canterbury - which runs through the Chantries. Belloc thinks Farnham is the real strategic centre which controls this landscape - the point where the pre-Roman track from the English Channel at Dover to Stonehenge and the Medieval route from Canterbury to Winchester diverge. The first of these two routes interests me a lot although I haven't a clue how you might begin to find it is the landscape.

I am gradually getting to realise the symbolic density of this landscape around Guildford (say compared with the hign chalk land beyond Farnham). This is partly because the Wey must have been navigable a long way up - probably as far as Waverley Abbey (the first Cistercian House in England) - downstream from there are dotted several Tudor houses, some very grand indeed - Loseley Hall, now famous for icecream built from material from Waverley following its dissolution; Sutton Place which has recently been owned by various oil millionaires and has a surrealist and a minimalist landscaped garden; the Tudor manor which is at the heart of the Guildford College of Law.

Further downstream is the remains of Newark Priory at Pyrford. Then branching east from the Wey between the Upper and Lower Greensand Ridges is the Tillingbourne along which are another series of old sites - an Elizabethan powder mill, a garden laid out by John Evelyn, a house in Chilworth which still has medieval fish ponds in its garden. This is really neither town nor country but an extended formal garden.

Today there is an event at Merton Abbey on the River Wandle which flows off the chalk near Croydon and enters the Thames at Wandsworth. There is very little of the abbey left - just a couple of arches, one in the wall of a factory. But William of Merton founded Merton College Oxford, the start of the university. Apparently there is a link between Merton and Holy Trinity and so there is a general invitation to this event. Tempting. Just downstream for the abbey is the mill where William Morris processed cloth.

I managed a recording yesterday - a loop based on the line which starts this entry. In fact on the words "The laurels all are cut" - and then I recorded the two lines from the Vaughan Williams piece - vocal on flute and viloin line much lower on electric guitar. The loop is quite varied - it mixes some of Cathy Bell's original vocal against another loop I was using a fair amount about three months ago - mixes them in Traktor and takes the output as a WAV - which is played in Wavelab with some plug-in processes. This kind of musicmaking seems to be a lot to do with how you work the processing. There is a kind of lightness and density about the result - maybe this an effect I am after - a kind of echoe of the density of upper harmonics that Lamont Young achieves. But it will take a long while for me to work out of this stuff is any good.

If the postpostmodern world is about "back to the real" then one dimension of reality is acoustics and wave relationships. Lamont Young claims to be the founder of conceptual art - the stuff he produced with Fluxus around 1960. And conceptual art, you might see as a move away from the real. Certainly at St Martins in the late 60s were people like Gilbert and George and Richard Long who made art from activity. And in Long's case this was activity that was deeply embedded in the landscape.

Yvonne and her friend Kevin Western who came to lunch last Sunday are friends with Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize Finalist the same year as Sam Taylor Wood. Tacita's stuff links in (partly) with this tradition - she refers back sometimes to the lanscape spiral in the Great Salt Lake made at the end of the 60s. She also does sound works - Radio 3 broadcast a half hour piece from Berlin a few moths ago where she is now working - lots of leaves rustling. This is "back to the real" in another way. I have a tape somewhere of Richard Long talking about his work.