Caught by the River spent 2023 sentencing writers and artists to time in a tower in a far corner of these islands. Amanda Thomson, the sixth person to have served time in the Curfew Tower, remembers how the outside crept in…

IN

The Curfew Tower is a place that’s hard to imagine until you are within it and difficult to recall fully once you’ve left. The Tower itself is a place of dark corners and deep shadows, and even on the brightest days, there’s a coolness to the air that feels old. Twenty feet square at the base, tapering up to its height of forty feet; once you’re inside, you’re inside. 

Any larger movements the building allows seem always to be in a series of right angles. Across the kitchen, turn 90 degrees, walk a narrow hallway, make a 180 degree turn, 12 steps up (the top one might catch you out as it’s shallower than the others), another 180 degree turn and up eleven steps to another 180 degree turn. Fifty one steps from entering I reach my writing desk that fits perfectly into the recess of a small window, which I open slightly to let fresh air and outside noise in. 

There’s a slight drift towards brightness on the way up (depending on the day) and, heading down, a descent into mirk. A 90 degree turn instead of 180 degrees after hitting the bottom step leads to the dungeon. Some might feel a tingle on the back of their necks, and not quite able to venture beyond the doorway into it.

Red sandstone walls almost four foot thick separate any occupant from the outside. The windows are single-glazed and thin, and consist of six or twelve glass panes that form rectangles within a rectangle. There’s always the feeling of looking out through grids that direct the gaze north east, north west, south east, south west – following the roads in and out of the town. Sound comes through them in waves, pulses of life, but you can listen and look but not touch, and should you hear anything you’d like to be a part of, a conversation you’d like to join in or hear more of, the punchline to a joke, by the time you’ve gone downstairs and outside the people and the conversation will have moved on.

Maybe it’s the Tower’s very structure that lends itself to counting. I’m not normally this obsessive. Fifty one steps from your first step into the kitchen up to the living room. The pace along the hall from one landing to the stairs to another. Ground floor kitchen. First floor bathroom. The building encourages a vacillation between feeling safe and cossetted; confined and claustrophobic; connected and disconnected. The ease with which this feeling of being at a distance happens makes me wonder what we must do to keep our links to the outside world and all it contains active and close. And how we might choose to, or need to, protect ourselves from it sometimes?

One day I ventured out and north, across the Sea of Moyle to Rathlin Island, an ‘L’ shaped island six miles off the mainland and fifteen miles north from the Tower as the crow flies. I went to the north-westmost point in the island, and to the West Light, an ‘upside down’ lighthouse with its light at the bottom. It sits at a spot where, in the summer cliffs beyond, a quarter of a million seabirds reside. Walking down its stairs to get outside to a space where we could look over the cliff to the sea below, I imagine its keepers having much the same feeling as I have in the tower, the square-spiral rotation down the steps, this time to the light that sits at its bottom. I wonder if they would hear the cries of the 250000 seabirds above the roar of the swell and crash of the waves in constant pulse outside, even as the salt spray forced its way in by sheer force of will. I imagine how every surface would become salt-sticky.

Back at the Tower I start looking and listening for ingress and egress. A near constant pulse of traffic and chat, save for the early hours of the morning, keeps me connected in some way, and the street lights throw in a warm orange glow. A couple of times there’s a midnight flutter and a tap against the window, but the moths’ movements are too rapid to identify the kind, and anyway, I’m looking at their undersides and can’t see the pattern of their scales. I imagine the wing-shaped coatings of dust that might be left. The app What’s flying tonight tells me that if I were to venture out after dark I might find, amongst other species, lesser and large yellow underwings, small wainscots, rosy rustics and dark marbled carpets, and I know there might be bats roosting in the roof, tawny owls in the nearby trees, all kinds of things out there and yet invisible in the dark.

When I sweep the floor under a window there are thin flakes of broken tortoiseshell wings and an old, dry husk of what to me looks like it might have been a white ermine moth, but I can’t be sure. And that’s the thing, for all the interiority, the outside creeps in. Not just the noise. Sunlight casts rhomboid grids on the floorboards, rain rattles the glass, and wind will sometimes judder the window frames in a way that, in the middle of the night, makes you very aware that you’re in this place, on the third floor, on your own. Cobwebs decorate corners catching the morning sun and the jenny longlegs hang suspended in them. The steady thrum of humanity and the natural world ebbs and flows throughout; jackdaws nesting on the chimney pots in the houses across the road cackle and chatter, cars and motorbikes rev their engines, and laughter, sometimes singing, sometimes good-natured shouts make their way up too. 

And while the night time shields the world, daylight is a beckoning out to what’s beyond. The upper floors of the tower are almost at the same height to be able to see not just the crows’ nests but how the grasses and plants fringe the guttering and chimney stacks. Bright lichens cling to the window ledges; herb Robert and flat ferns have found homes in the mortar between the sandstone, and a cluster of midges hover in the bright morning sunshine just outside.  

The trees beyond the houses are starting to turn, and jackdaws flit between them and the aerials and chimney stacks and a cormorant flies over, telling me how close the sea is. One morning, the sun shines just about where the near-full moon was a watery presence behind thin cumulus clouds the night before, and it’s a bright, welcoming heat that echoes the warmth of the hellos and good mornings that greet me as I head out into the world. 

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Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who is also a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Originally trained as a printmaker, her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made. Her book ‘belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home’, published by Canongate, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing in 2023.