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.

Eating with our eyes closed

Despite the best efforts of our celebrity chefs, this nation still seems to be in denial about where its food comes from. 

Our disconnection from the land has produced a society of squeamish supermarket shoppers who care more about appearance than truth, and who struggle to relate the living animals in our fields to the dead ones on our plates.

A bushcrafting friend of mine tells the story of a roadkill deer he saw on his way to work one morning. His colleagues were disgusted that he'd put it in his boot to butcher and preserve when he got home.   What once was normal behaviour has become unthinkable to most people. 

A head teacher in Kent has been forced to resign over a project in which pupils helped to rear a lamb, on the grounds that its slaughter upset some of the children:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article7022554.ece

What are children learning from this witch-hunt - that it's better to eat in ignorance?

Elsewhere, the artist Matthew Herbert was forbidden to record the slaughter of the pig whose entire life he has documented:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/matthew-herbert-pig-slaughter .  Whose agenda is served by this silence?

I'm all in favour of confronting reality.  Environmental art, and environmental education, should not be all fluffiness and sunshine.  It should communicate that humanity is part of a bigger system, that life is defined by the inevitability of its ending, and that nature is us.

Our need for food reveals us as the animals we really are.  Civilisation may allow us to look away from the killing, but our hunger always returns.  A little more self-knowledge would be good for us.

Through a gate into the woods

One project I'm currently working on is the creation of a woodland walk leaflet for the Roald Dahl Museum in my home village of Great Missenden, where Dahl himself lived.  The leaflet will offer a self-guided walk, with suggestions for family activities to do along the way, gathered from earth education practice and a few artist friends of mine.

On Wednesday, Feroze from the museum and I walked the route to test out the directions I'd written, which mostly worked but need a couple of tweaks.

It's thoughtful and green of the museum to encourage visitors to get out and enjoy the local countryside while they're here; and helpful to our high street economy if visitors stay local for longer.

Great Missenden is at the heart of the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty:  the landscape is always appealing, but it's unlikely that many visitors to the village will see it looking quite like this. 

The world was stunning in black and white on Wednesday.

Snow School

School closed?  Children bored of sledging?

Check out this set of snowy activities from Creative Star, an outdoor learning agency in Scotland:

http://www.creativestarlearning.co.uk/Flexviews/core/assets/pdf/creative%20star%20winter%20wonderland%20pack.pdf

'The best classroom and richest cupboard is roofed only by the sky'  Margaret McMillan

Human Animals

It's good to remember that people are wild animals, and can sometimes be fantastic flamingos:





Thanks to Gever Tully for sharing this clip.


Gever's visionary new book '50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do'  is out now and available through the US Amazon site:  http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Dangerous-Things-should-children/dp/0984296107/ 


Here's Gever presenting some of the book's ideas on ted.com http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Happy New Year!