The Beeches Came to Burnham

About a thousand people braved the sub-zero temperatures on Thursday night to come to Burnham's annual Christmas Fayre, organised by the local Lions Club.

Outdoor Culture's contribution was the production of a community project with artist Lynda Cornwell and the Burnham-based Mona Lisa Arts and Media, based at the Flux Gallery on the village High Street.

Lynda worked with a local youth group and some A-level art students to create four moving image projections of the ancient trees from Burnham Beeches, which we projected large-scale onto the buildings of Burnham High Street for the event last week.

The project was intended to re-connect the village with the forest that bears its name, and to play with the Christmas tree tradition by using light to celebrate nature in the dark time of the year.  And of course, creating the images gave the participants a reason to get out and enjoy Burnham Beeches, including a night walk under the moonlight.

The weather was really against us - the projector hire company insisted, just days before the show, that we house their equipment indoors and project out onto the street through windows, which meant re-thinking the four sites we had originally planned and getting last minute permissions to use people's upstairs windows (Thank-you The Olde Swan and Sherrif Mountford!).  Then there was the issue of the DVDs being edited in Newcastle and delayed in the post by the snow ...

Anyway, we got there with some bright creative thinking from production manager Tim Hand (eg mounting projectors in cars!) and the show looked great.  I particularly liked the way that traditional-looking landscape images morphed slowly into crazy neon fantasies.  The show repaid the time you invested in looking at it, and seemed to spark people's interest.

Well done Lynda, and thanks to Rhonda Fenwick, Tim Hand and his crew, Ruth Best, Stephen Spencer and Paul Sherrif.  Project funded by the Big Lottery Fund through Awards For All.

More images can be seen at http://www.lyndacornwell.blogspot.com/

Fire and Water; Moon and Moor

I lucked out with the weather on Dartmoor the weekend before last.

A familiar route from Postbridge over Hartland Tor and past the stone circle at Grey Wethers, skirting the edge of Fernworthy Forest and stopping overnight at Teignhead Farm (below).

If I cut dead wood from a forest and then burn it nearby, so that the carbon released from the wood can be re-absorbed by the trees and turned back into oxygen and wood, have I stolen the carbon or just borrowed it? 

What a gorgeous night - a fire to keep the chill at bay, starry skies and a fine moon.  Risotto, chocolate and a few nips of single malt.  Went to bed a happy human.

Woke up to find ice on the tent and frost everywhere the sun hadn't hit.  Filtered some tasty clear water from Manga Brook to fill my bottle.

After breakfast I wandered over Sittaford Tor and across the bog (squelch - one wet foot) to Statt's House, before winding my way back along the East Dart through Sandy Hole Pass, pausing for a cup of tea at the waterfall.

Returned to the car with a heady sense of wellbeing and satisfaction.  Got my Dartmoor fix.

Bothy Chorus at Kielder

I'm developing a project with the artist Duncan McAfee called Bothy Chorus.  The idea is to create a piece of sonic art that uses the buildings and immediate environments of bothies as musical instruments in a composition.  Duncan's piece will combine ambient recordings with new music performed live in the bothies and interviews with bothy users.

Bothies are simple buildings in the UK's remote mountain areas, maintained for free overnight use by anyone who needs shelter in the hills. Many are maintained by the excellent charity http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/  Originally used by farming families, shepherds or stalkers, bothies are now used in outdoor recreation by walkers, climbers, paddlers and cyclists.  'Bothying' has become a cultural phenomenon, and no wonder:  with a roaring fire and a roof over your head, it's a spacious and sociable alternative to wild camping.  How many other historic buildings can you stay in for nothing?

I've commissioned Duncan before for a project in Burnham Beeches and we've become friends.  He's a really interesting artist, whose work often takes sonic forms:  http://www.duncanmcafee.org/

Duncan's Bothy Chorus will explore ideas of shelter and wilderness; luxury and survival.  I hope that by sharing the mostly unheard sound worlds of a few choice bothies, we'll be able to communicate something of the value of these fragile resources, that help everyday people to access our beautiful outdoors.  Duncan's piece will be shared as a sound installation to tour a few galleries, accompanied by a publication and CD.

We're waiting on the outcome of a couple of funding bids before we can start in earnest, but we manageed to fit in a little pre-project research around the bothies of Kielder Forest in Northumberland a few weeks ago.

The trip sort of started badly, with a dull trudge along a forest track ending in the discovery that the Bothy at Kielder Head was closed for the summer.  Hmmm, that's a production error. A couple of hours from our start we were back at the car and heading for Roughside bothy on the other side of the massive Kielder Water reservoir.

This area feels very wild and remote, all along the England-Scotland border.  The mountains are relatively untrod, boggy and flat-topped, and mostly carpeted in pine plantations.  Footpaths, we soon discovered, can often exist only in the map-maker's imagination ...

So we fared a little better with Roughside, bothy number two of the trip, finding the place empty and setting about getting a fire going as night and rain started to fall.  Then we got invaded by a group of teenage lads from Middlesbrough with a transistor radio and some very big knives.  So much for our quiet night - but then I guess you never do know who you'll end up sharing a bothy with.  They did share their beer with us, but conversation was awkward, and we ended up carrying out a lot of their rubbish the next morning.

The next day we set out for Wainhope bothy high above Kielder Water, walking up moutain bike tracks and forest roads in the absence of the footpath on the map.  Wow - what a jewell Wainhope is.  Set in a few acres of pasture holding back the forest, it's a beautiful two room bothy with an outbuilding for sawing and storing firewood.  The water from the neighbouring streams is pretty brown with peat, but there's a route marked by posts up the hillside to a perfect mountain spring.  I filtered the spring water just to be sure and it tasted absolutely gorgeous.

A forestry worker called Jacob turned up on his bike to liberate some food he'd stashed a day or so before, and we had a good chat about the bothy and the area.  Thanks Jacob for telling me about the Kielder Marathon in October - I'm hoping to persuade a friend of mine to run it next year as part of a film we want to make about the science of running.

Noone else turned up, and we had the place to ourselves for the night.  After dark, we went for a short wander and were treated to lots of shooting stars - although Duncan always seemed to be looking in the wrong direction ...

So it was third time lucky with our Kielder bothies, and we'll definitely come back to Wainhope if we get the funding for our Bothy Chorus project. 

With special thanks to Paul Hearne, the MBA volunteer who looks after Wainhope so well.

Traverse

A few pics here from last week's adventure in the Lake District with my friend Chris. 

Trail magazine recently featured a Lakleland 'Haute Route', a multi-day trip mostly following valleys across the Lakes.  We wanted to join up some of the ridges for a high-level alternative, wild camping along the way as much as possible.

We walked from Coniston in the South, to Mungrisdale in the North East corner of the Lakes, taking in 15 summits, of which 10 were new for me on this trip.  Our packs were pretty heavy with food for 5 days plus camping gear, although we'd also packed a few luxury items:  like 500 ml of absinthe ...

Day 1:  Old Man of Coniston, Swirl How, Great Carr, Little Carr.  Wild camp by the disused reservoir at Greenburn.  Gorgeous.

Day 2:  Crinkle Crags, wild camp close to the saddle at Three Tarns.  Exhausted by an earlier mistake in the fog that led to some extra downhill and then back uphill miles.  In the cloud or rain all day, couldn't see a thing.  The fog was so thick in the night, I didn't pee far from the tent.

Day 3:  Bowfell, Esk Pike, then down past Sprinkling Tarn to Styhead Tarn and up over Green Gable, Brandreth and Grey Knotts to the youth hostel at Honister.  Wow, a shower, a bed, real food, beer, cooked breakfast.  Funny conversations with a vicar called Tim and a social worker called Matthew.


Day 4:  High Spy, Maiden Moor, Cat Bells and into Keswick for dinner.  Out along the disused railway track for a stealthy wild camp in a meadow by a bend in the River Greta, in a steep wooded gorge.  Finished the absinthe watching bats from the river bank at dusk.  

Day 5:  Struck camp at dawn, while being devoured by midges.  Walked for a good hour before second breakfast at Threlkeld, then a stylish finish to the trip  up Hall's Fell Ridge over Blencathra and down the tongue to Mungrisdale and a car.  Fantastic views all day.


Cheers Chris - where next?

Mountain Moments

I'm off to the Lake District on Friday for a bit of a walking and wild camping mission with an old friend.  It's got me thinking about favourite mountain trips from the past ...

The lovely Janelle, coming down off Skiddaw, 2006.  Miss you, Aunty Nell.

Me on the Buttermere skyline, 2006

Wow, 2006 was a good year.  This is on Ben Lawyers in May.  Bex got totally sunburnt that day.  I've since lost the hat I'm holding, worn out those boots and got too fat for that t-shirt.  Ho hum ...

And here's my first trip to Wastwater, with Yewbarrow to the left and Great Gable in the background.  It's just so beautiful there it hurts.

A Brocken Spectre on Great Gable in 2007.  Never seen another one since.

Arthur's Pass, from Mount Bealey, South Island, New Zealand.  Awesome.  Just me and the keas up there.

Wild camping with Chris on Glaramara, 2008.  We had a few drinks and Chris nearly fell in a tarn.  How I laughed.  The next day we went up Scafell Pike and back down via the gorgeous corridor route.

Wastwater, October 2008, when bad weather stopped the mountain marathon and the lake came up over the road.  I was stuck in Wasdale for a couple of days - good job it's mountain heaven up there.

January 2009 - the Rhinogs in Snowdonia looking far more benign than they felt at the top, where the ground was covered in ice and the wind was pretty nasty.  I stayed at Penrhos Isaf bothy for the first time, and impressed myself finding it at night in a very dark forest.

It's views like this that keep me climbing mountains.  It's a love affair to last a lifetime.

Learning With Leaves

I've been working with Turtle Canyon Media helping nursery school children to make a film about their experiences of Forest School at Farnham Common Infant School in Bucks.

The school is lucky to have a gorgeous mature wood as part of its grounds, and a ranger from nearby Burnham Beeches as one of its parents.  As trained Forest School practitioners, the staff deliver weekly sessions with the children in the woods, come rain or shine.

The school has been implementing Forest School as part of a wider drive to improve how it uses its grounds - the film is intended to show parents and governors, as well as other schools, what Forest School is all about.  With training and a little seed funding, every school in the UK could be doing it.

The finished film will combine the children's own accounts of Forest School with the adults' comments on why it is such an effective educational vehicle.  Most of the camera work is being done by 3 and 4 year olds.

Thanks to the Ernest Cook Trust for their financial support of this project.

Here's a trailer for the film - let me know what you think.

one hour among the flowers

 

 

 

The (Out)doors of Perception

David Suzuki suggests that we treat the world according to how we conceptualise it.

Our survival will be dependant on our ability to to revise our cultural beliefs, habits and perceptions of the planet and its resources. 



Open the doors ...

Circular

Last week I walked a route suggested by Deborah Martin in Trail mag - a circular route on North Dartmoor taking in Cosdon Beacon, Hound Tor, Wild Tor and Watern Tor.

The walk also took in two stone circles - White Moor and Scorhill - and passed the beautiful swimming hole at Shilley Pool.  I'll be back there for a wild camp later in the season.

Some sections needed a bit of navigational improvisation, linking up the unmapped paths that you find all over the moor, and which usually take you where you want to go ... except for when they just disappear into a bog.

I took what looked like a shortcut from Watern Tor, hand-railing the North Teign River along to Scorhill Down, that was mostly dry, although the few sections of bog-hopping probably made it slower than the higher and longer traverse in Deborah's instructions.

I love the expansive mystery of Dartmoor - its brutal emptiness makes distances illusory, and bad weather can change everything so quickly.  The modern world is distant.  Over ten miles I saw two humans from afar, a few ponies and some sheep.

Dartmoor does stone circles like nowhere else.  What happened to the Bronze Age people who lived here and dotted the moor with settlements and monuments?  One theory is environmental collapse:  once the forests were all felled, the hunting was over and the acidic peat soil was over-grazed and over-cropped.  Sounds depressingly plausible.

Whatever their original function, Dartmoor's stone rows and circles strike me as perfect art works in the landscape:  purposeful, social, universal, unfathomable.  Time has blurred its meaning, but the poetry endures.

   

Linear

The 'Illuminating Hadrian's Wall' event this weekend succeeded in creating a sense of occasion to mark 1600 years since the end of Roman Britain.  www.illuminatinghadrianswall.com   Quite an achievement really, as no-one I know remembers celebrating it before this weekend.   And how thoughtful of the Romans to time their departure so as to coincide with British Tourism Week!

The wall and its remains sketch a line from coast to coast, transformed by gas torches into a piece of giant dot-to-dot land art for about an hour on Saturday night.  The best site-specific art directs your attention to what is already there, and this was no exception.  The wall follows a natural, defendable ridge line for most of its route - a fantastic landscape feature to use as a starting point for outdoor art.

Famously built to keep the Scots out of England, the wall is now more of a connector than a barrier, attracting visitors from both nations and beyond.  The event linked the English North West with the North East, drawing audiences from both.  Carlisle and Newcastle are only 60-odd miles apart, but the intervening hills have created cultural distinctiveness to die for - you could hear both accents among the crowd.

The best part of the event was seeing so many people out on the ridge together, enjoying the landscape and the change from day to night.   Sadly, the visual spectacle of the illumination was for me rather eclipsed by modern light pollution:  traffic on the A69 created a far more solid and striking line of light than that along the wall. 

The next day, I paused in the Lake District for a quick hop up Blencathra.  The route from the valley bottom up Hall's Fell Ridge is a classic, with a rocky narrow finish bringing sudden and revelatory views when you emerge right at the mountain's summit.

 

Here is a ridge that is a buffer between sky and land; a ridge that takes you on a linear journey into another world of extreme beauty.  Ridges don't just connect places - sometimes they can transcend that and connect the individual to the universal.  Art doesn't have the monopoly on that.