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Gareth Rees lives in Clapton with his wife and two daughters. He spends every day wandering Hackney, Leyton and Walthamstow marshes with his dog Hendrix, avoiding his family and the pressures of life. He records his observations on his blog  The Marshman Chronicles.

In a Hallowe’en special, Gareth takes us on a journey into the dark side of Dabbler Country…

Psychogeographers love to use the word ‘liminal’. The word means: “a subjective state of being on the threshold between two different existential planes.”

But forget about the theory. Come to the area behind Walthamstow marsh and you’ll understand its true meaning.

As you leave the marsh, a 5ft railway bridge forces you into a stoop. Like Alice, you shuffle through a looking glass, ankle-deep in black water. As you bring yourself upright you’re confronted with a country road; car park; train maintenance depot; danger of electrocution sign; wedge of field; gigantic wooden picnic table; and the silhouettes of water towers rising from a reservoir.

These disparate topographical features seem faked. It’s as if you’re standing in a double-exposed photograph – treble-exposed, even. Multiple zones captured on the same inch of camera film.

Follow the parade of pylons that leads from here and you’ll come to a place I call The Rave Hole. This series of enclosures in the scrubland is known as a venue for all-night raves.

It was on a bright Tuesday morning in July that I decided to carry out an investigation of the Rave Hole. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that this liminal space served more than one function.

But surprised I most certainly was…

Zone 1: The Approach
A steep incline took me from the footpath to a circle of grass scorched by fire. Hendrix sniffed at a singed can in a pile of ashes. This was nothing more than a gateway zone. We moved on.

Zone 2: The Rubber Cave
An archway of foliage led me into a cave formed by trees. Concrete slabs lay in a broken pile. Mysterious tangles of rubber tubing snaked from the rubble and disappeared under a wire fence at the foot of a pylon.

Near the rubble a twist of rope was tangled round a tree trunk. It looked like an effigy of a dead witch’s hair. Embedded in the ground below I found a bottle of something called DESPERADOS. Beer mixed with tequila. I shivered as I stooped to touch it. I don’t know why. As I did there was a crash in the canopy above. Two pigeons. They were fucking, fighting, one of the two. I find it hard to tell with birds.

I had an uneasy suspicion that I wasn’t the only human here.

ZONE 3: The Dancefloor
I walked out of the tree cave onto a green plateaux. A train rumbled past. Two scorched discs showed where the campfires had been. This must be the main rave area – a dance floor of sorts, energised by the pylon watching over it.

I squeezed through an opening in the trees and discovered a sheltered clearing. Bark had been stripped from the branches. The ground was littered with empty cans of Polish lager, Coke bottles, bog roll, plastic bags, a copy of The Mirror, crack pipes, a sock. A faint odour of bodily fluids wafted from the moss.

I took my photos quickly and left.

ZONE 4: The Cruising Tree
Outside this enclosure I followed a path of lightly trodden grass leading deeper into the scrubland. Now I was close the reservoir. Spikes jutted from a long mesh fence leading to two skeletal towers. On the other side of me ran the railway line. As I walked down this corridor I clicked away with my camera, Hendrix lolloping ahead.

That was when I heard the voices. Deep. Foreign . But a familiar accent.  Middle Eastern, perhaps.

At first I presumed there were workers on the rails. And then I saw them. In an enclosure sheltered by low branched trees, the figures of men. One was hanging by his hands from a branch, trousers down, boxer shorts round his ankles. Another was crouched before him. I could see another sitting on a felled tree trunk, watching and speaking.

Time stopped. I froze. Camera poised in front of me. Click – click – click.

The man swinging from the branch dropped to his feet, turned and stared. His partner hit the floor as if I was about to hurl a grenade. Hendrix was moving quickly towards them.

‘HENDRIX’. I shouted.

At the sound, time cracked open again. Now I was moving very quickly back to the Rave Hole, dog following. As I passed through the zones the stench of semen, piss and blood assailed my nostrils.  If it had been faint before, it was now overwhelming, like my brain had been hotwired and my nerve endings fried in ozone.

This psychosomatic smell chased me all the way to the path where I stopped to breathe the marsh air. Behind me, beyond the Rave Hole, were three men, perhaps pillars of their community, wondering whether I’d caught them on film.