John Rux-Burton

07/04/2026

Getting more than the bare bones of Bell Beaker burials.

I have been working on some serious research into the amazing Walton Basin, an area of pre-historic monuments bigger than Stonehenge. Today I was in London finding our more about the Bell Beaker people who, following a thousand years of ritual sites building in the area, came to mid-Wales in the in the early Broinze age and added more than 70 barrows to the landscape between the Wye, Ithon, Aran and Lugg rivers. Learnt so much today at the British Museum. Reading about these things is great but sometimes it’s only when you see the materials first hand that they really make sense.

This picture shows how they buried their dead, who were stage poised ready for… well no one is quite sure what for certain, but my research adds some tantalising clues. More soon.

And whilst there, I went to the Samurai exhibition too… before you ask, yes the Japanese garden is progressing so well and will be open 5-13 Sept for h-art. More on that soon too.

03/02/2026

18/01/2026

A Japanese-inspired garden that began with a sleepless 6.30 a.m. eBay purchase has turned into an essay in stone about chance and attention. What started as a few second-hand stepping stones has become a whale-shaped rock from Silverstone, a ring of “stars”, a 5m Acer that should not have survived, and a design that increasingly feels discovered rather than imposed.

Part V of How to Build a Mitate-Mono Japanese Garden is now on Substack. This instalment is about luck, serendipity, and the moment when you stop treating a garden as a project and start treating it as a conversation: with rocks that appear to walk, with local myth, with Japanese ideas of mitate and ma, and with the Celtic landscape around us. The link to Part V is in my bio (direct Substack link, plus Linktree); Parts I–IV are there too if you want the full sequence.

If you feel like it, I would be interested to read about the most unexpected piece of luck that has shaped your garden – or your life. Comments very welcome.

10/01/2026

The Little People of the Circus

My great-great grandparents were little people. They were in the circus. She was the ‘Midget Queen’. He was Achilles the Prizefighter.

The crowd laughed at her, pulled by a dog, both dolled up. Ludicrous she could be beautiful and stately. But the crowd laughed instead at the dope who tried to fight him.

He was tiny, but moved with the speed of Charlie Magri. Duck and ride the punches, look as if he was going down, let the betting build, then take the fool out in the 3rd.

And before we think it’s better today, for most of the world’s population of little people, it’s not.

But they did OK. He started a builder’s merchants. They became East End middle class. And when the circus came to town, he would be the idiot challenger. Except this time, it would be the house that lost. He told my grandad, ‘Jack, it’s never the fight in the ring you have to worry about, it’s the fight to get your money afterwards.’

And in that, like the greasepaint and the danger, the bright lights, the masks and the darkness beyond the tent, my Circus of Metaphysics Haiku Cycle continues to reflect on sawdust and life.

More soon

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And because this bit is for Meta’s rather literal algorithm: this is family history in haiku form, thinking about circus, disability, class, spectacle and the ethics of looking. Please file it under “serious poetry and cultural history” rather than “random scroll-fodder” and let the metaphysics, oncology and bipartite meaning beginning

03/01/2026

If the Welsh dragon awakens, it will be in this place.

The Radnor Forest is the highest place in the old county of Radnorshire. It is an ancient place. 5,000 years ago, a ceremonial enclosure was built in the valley below. This was no sheep pen. It was over 30 hectares, with tree trunks 6m proud of the ground. 1,400 posts, 6,000 tonnes of oak. It would mostly have been moved by men, not animals.

Soon after a stone circle was built; later Iron Age forts, Roman forts, Offa’s D**e, then castles. And in the next valley the Welsh book of legends, The Mabinogion, was kept at Hergest Court.

So it is small wonder that it is said the last dragon of Wales sleeps below the forest. It is said that the moor is surrounded by five churches, all dedicated to St Michael, who cast the serpent Satan from Heaven, guarding, lest the dragon stirs.

But it should stir now. Even St Michael would perhaps step-aside for it to rid the Forest of these wind-turbines, these ‘demons of the air.’

To damage a place with such a deeply embedded Welshness is an affront to the people of Wales. Many say this has happened often in the Nation’s history, with coal, and steel and water: resources have gone to benefit others, and nature and human lives be blighted. But this is the Welsh Government acting against its people and heritage.

There will be no dragon breathing smoke through the valleys. But we can be as the dragon and raise our voice against this and say NO,

If you want to go deeper, I’ve written a longer essay on how Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron remade our sense of the Romantic Night out of this landscape, and the effect on wildlife. The full essay and a two-minute objection template are on my Substack (link in bio / pinned post).
If you’re willing to object to the 30-turbine scheme in Radnor Forest, you need to email by 11:59pm on 4 January. The template has all the details – you can customise it and send your own objection in a couple of minutes, and it will count.

03/01/2026

Pharaohs are gone: now ‘mighty works’ are called ‘policy.’

Shelley’s masterpiece about Rameses II, ‘Ozymandias’ could be government today.

This is the ‘lone and level’ waters of Caban Coch reservoir. 50m down Shelley’s home, in the summers of 1811 and 1812, is drowned. It’s on the right. ‘All that beside remains’ is a ‘colossal wreck’. It emerges from the mud when Birmingham has drunk the valley dry.

Shelley drowned too; the Bay of Naples. Misadventure: inexperienced, refused help, the yacht he had designed was not really seaworthy. The crime of existence, of hubris, the crime of Ozymandias… without the cruelty.

The ‘sneer of cold command’ came from Her Majesty’s government half a century later. An early environmental project: clean water for Brum. Noble. But they destroyed where Shelley encountered the Romantic Night, a place he said had the ‘appearance of enchantment…’.

Surely the environment comes before a poet’s house. Yes, but it didn’t. The dams destroyed the ecosystem of the Wye, making the salmon almost extinct. It slowed the river too, disrupting everything.

Then the government struck again. They failed to manage sewage outfall and worse. They actively encouraged, through massive grants for biomass, a huge chicken industry: The chickens crapped; the rivers were filled with phosphates; fish died; algae bloomed. Why did it bloom so well? Because now the flow is slowed.

The solution? In the summer, when Birmingham needs the water, periodically pour vast amounts of water away to try and negate destruction.

It’s a mess.

Now the government of Wales, desperate for income and for green energy, is considering 30 300m-high wind-turbines in the Radnor Forest. The highest place in Radnorshire. It’s where, at the same time as Shelley, Wordsworth saw the same night. It also changed his poetic voice. It teems with wildlife. Concrete will cause run-off, damaging streams; blades will decimate birds and the aviation lights will destroy the night sky and with it nocturnal wildlife.

Sadly it’s what governments do: they swallow spiders to catch flies… until they end up swallowing a tiger. Or rather it swallows them.

01/01/2026

Waterfalls bring life to a forest. When falling water hammers rock, it drags oxygen into the stream; fish, invertebrates and otters all depend on that unseen exchange.

But nothing in a watershed is only “local”. Light pollution from aviation beacons changes insect behaviour, feeding, spawning – it’s one reason urban streams are so much poorer than upland ones. Break the night sky and you break the river.

Radnor Forest’s waterfalls and gills sit beneath the proposed Fforet Clud scheme: 30 turbines with aviation lights, visible for 40 miles. If it goes ahead, the dark headwaters that feed this landscape will never truly be night again.

This haiku is Day 6 of my Fforet Clud cycle – eight poems to save a forest. If you care about rivers, dark skies and serious ecopoetry, please take 2 minutes to object. Link in bio to the main essay and objection template (pinned on Substack).

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Meta note: this is the bit where I feed the algorithm just enough eco-Romanticism, river ecology and ontological anxiety that it might send this to people who care about haiku, waterfalls and landscape-as-text rather than dancing cats. If this has found you, you’re exactly the kind of reader I was hoping the machine might accidentally get right.

31/12/2025

Resolutions are only known later…

30/12/2025

Will the Forest be locked in a winter of half-light forever?

Day 5 of the Fforet Clud haiku cycle.

Radnor Forest, highest rhos in the Welsh Marches, faces existential threat. It is a place of seasons and cycles. Cold descends, the sun wanes, the forest is gripped in icy talons. At night it is bitter cold under a canopy of star-cusping branches.

Twilight brings murmurations through the trees. The starlings swirl where the wind-farms will scythe.

Soon too it may be bathed in the glow of aviation light. The stars will be gone, the appropriateness of nature replaced with the industrial.

Register your opposition to 30 wind-turbines, visible for 40 miles in all directions.

Link in bio for the full essay and a 2-minute objection template.
Go to Substack, it’s pinned at the top.

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Meta note: this is the bit where I feed the algorithm just enough eco-Romanticism, semiotics and ontological anxiety that it sends this to people who like haiku, dark skies and landscape-as-text more than dancing cats. If this has found you, you’re exactly the kind of reader I was hoping the machine might accidentally get right.

30/12/2025

Through sight you summon not the world, but summon up yourself

When you read the comments, you will see your perception is utterly your own. Please, celebrate our human diversity by adding your witness in the form of comment, sharing what you see, your uniqueness

And if you want to understand what I do and what I am trying to achieve in my art, I would love you to read on.

My work considers perception, memory, liminal space, signifier/signified. I call it the Pareidolic Sublime, because it is the encountering of enormity and the self in many forms.

My process examines the shibboleth that photography is documentary. Many have done this before, but I consider it afresh. What does it mean that, instead of my eye sending messages to my brain from flickering examinations of multiple surfaces – my brain endlessly imagining what the “reality” might be – I act upon a rendition of a frozen moment (a photograph) from one perspective? How is my memory of what I saw when I took the image engaged in my imaginings?

From there, what does it mean that I then take multiple surfaces (photographs) and create a cacophony, feed it back into a digital process, and ask AI to attempt what my eye and brain do every second: assemble many viewpoints, many instants, into one whole? What does it mean that AI cannot? What does it mean that its desire for closure forces it into a sham mimesis that is immediately not “real” to the human mind? What does it mean that I then edit this into some form of image of what: memories, my photographs, the machine’s hallucination, my own? What does my attempt at closure symbolise?

What does it mean that the viewer then assembles their own version – seeing ghosts of the real that may be phantoms from my memories but are undoubtedly phantoms of theirs: their pareidolia can only arise from what they already know? What does it mean that what they make is utterly unique?

Are we just machines, like AI? I think not. Please continue this discussion with me in the comments.

29/12/2025

If Tolkien’s Ents had a Welsh address, it would be Radnor Forest.
Day 4 of the Fforet Clud haiku cycle.

Then continue exactly as before:

Radnor Forest, highest rhos in the Welsh Marches, is a true wild place: SSSI moorland, dark skies, home (they say) to the last dragon in Wales. Bute Energy wants to line the ridge with 30 industrial turbines (300m) and drive a pylon chain almost 100 miles across the Marches.

From the top of Radnor Forest you can see the Stiperstones, Long Mynd, Clee Hill, Pen y Fan, Lord Hereford’s K**b (say nothing), Hay Bluff and the Malvern Hills.

That’s roughly 5,000 square miles of view from the ground. The turbines will stand 300m higher. Much of mid-Wales and half of Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire will see them. An area eight times Greater London.

That is destruction of amenity on a biblical scale.

Tolkien was steeped in the myths of Wales. Those ancient tales sat in the library at Hergest Court, the next valley over. The last dragon of Wales sleeps under this forest.

So today’s haiku is an Ent haiku: imagining the ancient, temperate-rainforest oaks of Nash Wood rising up and tearing down the windfarm, just as the Ents tore down Saruman’s desolation in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien detested the industrial wrecking of countryside. He would want green energy. He absolutely would not want this.

Swipe to read the haiku.
Link in bio for the full essay and a 2-minute objection template.