PART 2    

Looking back to January, I remember it as dull and cold, with the odd bright sunny day. I walked in the fields and drove around the area, exploring and assimilating – feeling the supportive strength of the landscape, and discovering many new delights: scattered hamlets nestling in the valleys, a deepening relationship with animals, wildlife, trees and vegetation, and the ever-changing skies…   and a disused sandstone quarry, which brightened me up no end.

  

In February, I started making a large spiral trench, about 6m. diameter, outside in the grass, and on days when I was not indoors hugging my thoughts and dreams by the wood-burning stove, and reading up on local history, it was good to wrap up warm and get down to some digging in the hard ground.  

The spiral gave me problems from the start. I had an idea of filling it with water, to reflect the sky, but the trouble was, the ground sloped downhill, and it was porous. I found this out the hard (but fun) way, involving much cement, a big tank full of water and a lot of little dams which I cut out of old plastic bottles. I could not get the shape right either, and spend days digging and re-digging the edges. Then, glancing up one day from my work, I saw a vivid mental image of some blue branches standing in deep snow, dropped everything and went off into the woods, abandoning the spiral for several months.

    

About this time we began to have cold but sunny weather, and some sleet.   There were snowdrops under the trees, and emerging daffodils, and I noticed a distinct upsurge of bird song as I happily went about my task of covering branches with blue paint. Signs of spring, yet snow was threatening. As I assembled the branches outside in the field into the piece I was now calling: ‘Reach for the Sky’, I expected it to start snowing at any moment. It grew darker and cold. I recorded the bare branches of trees thrashing about in the wind, and when the moon woke me at night, I sat up and watched it rush across the sky.    

I went for short winter walks, mostly in dark weather and cold sleety rain, absorbing the signs of previous human activity in the land. Stone everywhere - farm buildings, dry stone walls, sheep stells… and the remains of a more recent and short-lived past – derelict lime kilns and the grass covered bumps and hollows of coal mining and iron ore extraction.    

One day, I noticed fires spreading across the moors, and, talking to a neighbouring farmer, he explained that areas of heather were always burnt at this time of year to encourage new growth.   We talked of timing –   first the frogs, then the peewits and then the curlews, who came every year between March 13th and 16th. I was amazed. Believing I was already well-attuned to natural forces and life’s infinite cycles, this orchestration, this precision of natural occurrences filled me with sudden awe.   And also gratitude for my neighbour’s wisdom, living a tough life at a steady pace, and always finding the time to talk to a passing artist.

  

It started to snow early in March, and I took endless photos of ‘Reach for the Sky’. But it wasn’t very deep, and it was never the right moment for the right photograph. I knew there would be just a short, but precise time when it would all come together.   These days, I spent a lot of time on the computer: researching, admin, sorting images, ordering materials….   And every evening, I called home to discuss with my husband the latest complications and problems of our ongoing house-move, which had been going on for several months.   It felt like the dead of winter, yet only a week or so before, I had thought winter was over! Most of the time, I was tired, cold and stressed – struggling to find form in the studio; planning some now imminent school projects, and coping at a distance, with domestic upheaval. I felt split apart. And then in mid March, the heavy snow I had been waiting for arrived, cutting us off for several days just at the time when I was trying to exchange urgent documents by post with my solicitor in the south.

 

 I rushed outside excited as a child, threw a handful of red apples into deep snow and photographed them. Moreover, at last I got the crucial image of ‘Reach for the Sky’. 

 

By the end of the month the snow had cleared, though it was still extremely windy, rainy and cold. I managed to carry out some school projects, involving drawing activities and some   bracing trips to a local bastle. (Bastle are defensible mediaeval farmhouses unique to this border region).  

The day after my last school workshop, I went down to Devon   and spent an exhausting couple of weeks sorting domestic affairs and moving house.

 

 Back again at Highgreen, I felt deeply unsettled. There was a new mood in the air – birds flitting in the trees, a lot of sound and movement, and lambs, with their tiny cries and uncertain leaps, were everywhere. Ewes and their lambs lay contentedly together in the sunshine, and swallows moved into the big barn.   

 

I had an Open Studio session coming up at the end of April, and worked flat out, finally getting to grips with the spiral, and filling it with mirror sheeting. I resurrected the blue branches, now considerably shorter, cleaned up my studio, and put up a display and some intelligent-sounding notices about my work. The weather was by now idyllic, and the increasing profusion of flowers, greenery and wildlife was staggering.    

My next piece was ‘Throughstones’, made, with assistance, from large sandstone slabs from a disused drystone wall in the Highgreen woods. I sealed imagery of local trees on to their top surfaces. One of the slabs was ridged with spectacular wave patterns, obviously formed millions of years ago, and I could not bear to cover this up, but turned it over, face down.  

 

 

 I continued my walks and   study, becoming more and more absorbed in my surroundings and finding ever-deepening levels of detail, and an underlying silence.

Walking up to the old lime kiln, the things I can hear are my breath, a curlew and the rasp of my waterproof jacket. 

   

Now I realise I am well on with the residency, and think maybe I should review my progress, and ask myself a few questions. For instance, just why do I spend so much time crawling about on the ground? But that is as far as it gets.   Everywhere is fresh and green. The swallows are circling and the lambs, now bigger, are lying in the road, just like their parents. There is water along side of the road down by Bellingham, after a few days of rain. The sky is washed clear again and the sun is shining, so I climb over a low wall, wander into the woodland, and sit on the grass looking up. Surrounded by the calming presence of the trees, I smell the wet grass and listen to the birdsong and the sound of nearby sheep.

 

 

Searching the web one day, for a book, I discovered the annual Rock Art Meeting was soon to take place near Wooler in the Cheviots - a couple of hours drive Northeast from Highgreen. I instantly decided to attend, and spend a couple of days beforehand walking in the area:

 

Saturday, 3rd June, near Wooler – a hot, sunny day walking alone. I am sharply aware of being in a different landscape: the rounded contours and strong presence of the Cheviots, the pinkish volcanic rock and the more rounded shapes of the stone in the walls. Even the sheep look different. I am alert, and sensing subtle differences in the light, the air, in vegetation and the movement of wildlife. Things I might not have noticed before coming to live in the silence of Highgreen. But the intense early summer green is the same, and the gentle background sounds of birds and sheep and running water. I climb the massive hill of Yeavering Bell up to the largest Iron Age hillfort in Northumberland.  Up at the top, it is like being in an aeroplane, and I let my gaze sweep around far distant horizons and well into Scotland.

I slightly lose my track on the way down, which leads me into a brief and exotic encounter with some wild goats. It takes me quite a while to get back to my car, by which time it has clouded over and I am tired. I am obliged to find a pub, and sit and watch the cricket on TV for quite some time.

 

Sunday, 4th   June – Attracted by the lure of the rocks and their ancient carvings, a large group of enthusiasts from around the country materialise outside a b+b near Wooler.   The day is bright and merry. Many of us do not know each other, but we are all keen to discuss our own particular take on these mysterious ‘cup and ring marks’.   As we trek from site to site, excitement grows and the talk becomes more and more animated. At each site more magnificent examples are revealed. Kneeling and crawling around the rocks; taking photographs; brushing away loose debris, and gently spraying the stones with water to make them glisten in the sun – we are drawn into an ever more intimate connection with the earth and our remote ancestors. One could only stand entranced, admire the skill of the carvings, compare one with another and speculate about their meaning and purpose.      

These annual meetings (RAMs), led by Gus van Veen and Jan Brouwer from Holland, have taken place since 1998. It is not a formally constituted club as such: a place, a time and a date are announced on the web, and people just turn up! After several years looking around the sites in Northumberland, it was decided that next year's meeting would take place in Dumfries and Galloway. Watch the websites below for further information.  

Here are a few images of the rocks we visited. They can be checked against other images and information on     http://groups.msn.com/RockArtintheBritishLandscape/  and http://rockartuk.fotopic.net/ or on the Beckensall Archive of Northumberland Rock Art at Newcastle University: http://rockart.ncl.ac.uk.

 

top left- 'West Horton 1b'; top right- 'Gled Law 2a'; bottom left- 'Buttony 1c'; bottom right- 'Buttony 4'.