outdoor culture blog

New Beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:21:00 +0000

New year, new beginnings. I've been developing three new outdoor art projects recently, and having a great time getting out of the house along the way.

Last month I spent a few days on Dartmoor with the (award-winning) artist Martin Prothero, walking, talking and wild camping at a few choice spots. Martin's got a unique take on environmental art - he's trained in fine art but is also a busy bushcraft teacher and environmental educator for people like Wildwise and the Somerset Wildlife Trust.

Martin's best known for his 'carbon light life' series - animal footprints caught on blackened glass and presented as art in light boxes. He created an installation of these for me in our Hide! project at College Lake in 2010, replacing the glass windows of a bird hide and lining its back wall with collaborative work made with local children.

Martin often strives to find ways in which the natural world can represent itself in art. He may frame and select, but it is often wildlife that does the composition. Our next project is attempting to apply that philosophy to the rivers of Dartmoor, beginning (we expect) with the Dart itself and its many tributaries. The project is likely to include sound recordings, live events, drawings and participatory walks. Funding permitting, we'll get going this summer.

On the same trip, I made this short film to introduce my own art project for 2012 - Wild Water. Thanks for the camerawork, Martin!

I'm interested in drawing attention to the way in which our relationship with water has been industrialised and de-personalised. We buy our tap water from companies that profit from extracting it from our river systems; we complain about leaks and hosepipe bans, but we also flush it down the loo; most of us drink too little of it and waste too much of it. Our behaviour is full of contradictions, and of course it is only when supply is restricted that we see our dependency on water for what it really is: a defining characteristic of our species.

'Wild Water' is a way for me to get back to a more honest relationship with water, and to remind people just how good a mountain stream can taste, flavoured by the rocks and soil of its journey. I like the idea that by bottling water as art, I am removing it from the planet's water cycle, containing it, commodifying it ... however desirable and inevitable its return to the system may be. Long after our extinction, water will continue to shape the landscape, as species come and go.

I've also been conspiring with artist Duncan McAfee, a regular Outdoor Culture collaborator. Duncan's work often takes sonic forms, exploring voice, language and story. We worked together on an audio guide and sound art pieces for the Sensory Trail at Burnham Beeches.

Duncan and I spent a weekend in Snowdonia planning a new piece, that has evolved out of discussions we've been having for some time about bothies - see this previous posting for the first incarnation of the idea. We stayed in one of my favourite bothies, Penrhos Isaf, that I've visited many times since first finding it in the dark forest of Coed Y Brenin three years ago and reporting on the experience here.

Duncan's vision is to bring together the cultural phenomena of bothies and traditional song, animating a number of buildings through acoustic performances by local people or visitors with a connection to the bothy. The bothy, like the song, is shared over time, transcending ownership and individuals. The project will result in a set of sonic portraits of places and people, presented as a publication and CD.

We had a good weekend at Penrhos Isaf walking in the forest, talking things through and staying up too late on Duncan's birthday. On Monday morning we were joined by Aled Thomas from the Forestry Commission, which owns the bothy. Aled had very kindly agreed to come and be interviewed for the project, and had a fascinating take on the building, that he first stumbled upon in the late 1970s. It's because of progressive thinking from people like him that the Mountain Bothies Association is allowed to maintain several open properties on Forestry Commission land. Aled gave us a real insight into the evolution of access and leisure as FC priorities alongside forestry, and he's a fantastic ambassador for the movement to re-connect our communities with the natural world.

It feels good starting the year with some embryonic concepts to work up, alongside the projects for which we already have the funding. As January comes to a close, we've just had the fantastic news of a major grant for a new project on a nature reserve in Oxfordshire. I'll put the details up on the Outdoor Culture website as soon as the funder will let me.

Just to make the year even more exciting, there's a major pan-England action research project in the offing, to stimulate, evidence and make the case for outdoor learning in green spaces, working with 200 schools over 3 years and substantial government funding: I just hope that whoever wins the tender to deliver it can build properly on the learning of Creative Partnerships programme of 2002-2011, and avoid repeating its mistakes. The project has a golden opportunity to spotlight green learning in the national education debate, and not a minute too soon.

Have a great year y'all!

Urban Wild Camp

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:59:00 +0000

Don't get me wrong - I love festivals and occasionally use campsites, but I prefer a tent in splendid isolation. A flat, dry, grassy spot next to a stream or lake, away from footpaths, out of the wind, with a stunning view, high, remote and wild. Perfect.

I suspect that the happy campers of Occupy London Stock Exchange might also prefer the shores of Loch Enoch or the upper Dart valley to their concrete surroundings in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral. But this is purposeful tenting, seeking to confront rather than escape the injustices of modern life. And Occupy The Chilterns wouldn't have had the same impact, although its time may come if the government perseveres with the eco-vandalism of HS2.

I met a banker friend last night for a drink after work, and went via St Paul's to check out this urban wild camp. The protest is regaining its focus on corporate greed, now that the Church of England has come to its senses and stopped eviction proceedings. The campers' other landlord, the Corporation of London, is running a campaign in the run-up to the Olympics called 'Green to Gold', to promote awareness of the open green spaces it manages. Perhaps they could tempt the protesters to a nice leafy site on Hampstead Heath?

It's hard not to be impressed by the Occupy camp, with its democracy and idealism, and guy ropes lashed to storm drains (you try getting a tent peg into a pavement). What struck me most was there was so much dialogue going on, with protesters, reporters, passers-by, tourists, supporters and opponents all engaged in the creative thrum of discussion.

As a species, we've evolved a strategy to cope with the numbers of people we encounter in towns and cities: we don't acknowledge their presence, we avoid eye contact and we certainly don't start conversations about the cost of capitalism. If and when this bold urban camp is struck, the people left behind will go back to ignoring each other. But I don't think the voices of dissent this winter will easily be silenced, and this public debate is healthy. It's amazing what you can do with a tent.

Why Outdoor Learning?

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:59:00 +0000

I'm giving a presentation for teachers tomorrow as part of a day's exploration of outdoor learning at The Downley School near High Wycombe. Having to make the case for why a school might develop its outdoor learning has been a useful exercise, in that it's forced me to order my thoughts on the subject and collate some of the research I've been reading over the last couple of years. I thought I'd use this blog to record the thinking.

When adults over 30 recall their favourite places to play as children, their memories are overwhelmingly of outdoor locations. But current children are increasingly less likely to have these memories. Children in the UK today get about a quarter of the outdoor time that their parents did as children. There's been a social change: stranger danger, busy roads, neighbours we don't know, a general aversion to risk, the rise of screen time. My contention is that this change is bad for the environment, bad for society and bad for children.

The environment suffers because of our lack of awareness and understanding. Children who do not know and love the natural world will not grow up to look after it. Almost every significant conservationist across the world had transcendent experiences of nature in childhood: it follows that the way to produce environmentally responsible citizens is to immerse children in green spaces, so that contact can lead to a relationship and on to a sense of stewardship.

Society suffers because the sharing of outdoor space promotes social interaction and cohesion. Our buildings shelters us from each other as well as the elements. It is children playing together outdoors that creates community and the identity of place. With so few of us working the land now, a better understanding of food production and the management of finite resources is a precursor to sustainable living in cities and countryside alike.

Most of all, our indoor culture is damaging to children themselves. In his 2005 book 'Last Child in the Woods', Richard Louv linked the rise of childhood obesity, depression and behavioural disorders to the loss of children's outdoor experiences and called it 'nature deficit disorder'. People began to view our disconnection from nature as a public health issue.

Why do we need time in green space? One explanation from Dr William Bird, a UK-based GP and health consultant to various public bodies, is that modern humans still have the physiology of hunter-gatherers. We have existed in our current physcial form for about 200,000 years. We invented agriculture only about 10,000 years ago, compulsory schooling 400 years ago and industry even more recently. Our culture has evolved ahead of our minds and bodies, that were designed for different times. We are animals that are designed to play, learn and work best outdoors, in an environment where carbohydrates are scarce but physical activity is plentiful.

So how is green space beneficical to modern children? The answers are simple and intuitive. Green space promotes physical movement, and such exercise is a wonderdrug, preventative of a dizzying array of health problems from diabetes to dementia. 71% of us think we get enough exercise, but half of us are mistaken in this: an estimated 31% of the UK get the exercise we need. Childhood obesity has doubled in 20 years. Proximity to green space is a significant determiner of longevity and reduces health inequalities, with low income earners in the greenest places living as long as middle income earners in the least green places.

There is also a green agenda in mental health policy. MIND published its' 'Ecotherapy' report in 2007, suggesting that doctors should prescribe green exercise as a treatment for mild depression, their research having shown it to be at least as effective as antipressants and therapy. Gardening, country walks and conservation work scored far higher than indoor forms of exercise, with participants reporting lower stress, higher self-esteem and a heightened sense of meaning and purpose. The UK currently spends about £300 million on antipressant prescriptions every year.

Green space can have a big impact on public wellbeing, as a less tangible but more spiritual need. The concept of 'biophilia' suggests that we are most at home when surrounded by other forms of life. Hosptial rooms with views of greenery have higher recovery rates than those without them. We feel more human when we are among other plants and animals: as hunter-gatherers, we are hard-wired to feel at home in the natural world, and abilities to understand, predict and exploit it have been naturally selected over millennia. Our culture labels the man-made as artificial, yet in truth we are a part of nature rather than separate from it: wildness is within us.

So outdoor learning is one way in which educators can respond to this situation, and help to create happier, healthier children with a more balanced relationship with the natural world. A growing body of research, mostly from the US, is also suggesting that green time can enhance children's performance and atainment in school. Children who spend time in green space experience fewer symptoms of ADHD. Children with three years of regular outdoor learning achieve higher scores in maths, reading, wrting, listening and thinking skills: significantly, their attendance and concentration are also much better. There is a campaign for a daily 'green hour' based on the claim that it aids 'learning readiness'.

Research in the UK on the acclaimed Forest School system, introduced from Scandinavia, found that pupils who do their lessons in a wood once a week, enjoy more confidence, better social skills, can concentrate for longer and have more developed motor skills and language abilities than their indoor peers. Forest School is an approach that any school can take up over time, and is probably the most systematic and robust educational vehicle we have for re-connecting our children with the real world around them. The teachers I know who have trained as Forest School leaders are passionately vocal about its merits.

Why outdoor learning? Because schools have an opportunity to redress the imbalance in children's lives, and to be part of the solution to nature-deficit-disorder, along with better urban design and public policy. Because outdoor learning creates happier and healthier children who do better at school and in life. Because it is a powerful tool that any teacher can take up and use in their practice. Because sometimes it's obvious that children in a building are like fish out of water, and it's hard to learn when you're drowning.

http://www.outdoorculture.com/

The Beeches Came to Burnham

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:16:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:48:00 +0000

The (Out)doors of Perception

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:09:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:17:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:41:00 +0000

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!

Atlantic Solstice

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:39:00 +0000

My family and I escaped the arctic wastes of the South East last week. The romance of the impending white christmas had worn off after a few days of sliding around on snow and ice, rescuing stuck motorists and trying to keep out of the way of cars coming sideways down the local hills.

We headed to Cornwall for a family Christmas under brighter skies, and it was like arriving in a different country - warm, sunny, snow-free and bathed in that wild Atlantic light.

This blog has been obsessed with light lately. It's a winter thing, I think. The pagan roots of Christmas are all about light in the darkest time of the year: the rebirth of the sun at the solstice signalling the start of the lengthening days. We bring the evergreen tree into the heart of our homes and illuminate it, as a reminder that light is returning to the world.

The Cornish love their Christmas lights, and there's no end of villages lit up with reindeers and Santas. Perhaps it's because the daylight is so impressive that the man-made lights have to work that little bit harder.

I took these photos between 23 and 25 December, on the coast between Marazion and Porthleven. We're back in Bucks now, and not only is it still sleeting but the ice on our road never even melted. I miss the marine depth of that Atlantic light.

Northern Lights 3

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:23:00 +0000

James Turrell makes art out of light. But it's not lightweight.

I had a proper go in his Sky Space at Kielder Water last month, a few days before the rains flooded Cumbria. It was alreayd pretty wet, and I'd driven for two hours in the rain from Durham. Kielder Forest feels very remote.

The lake has a lot of outdoor art on its shores, and three bothies nearby. It sits in a sweeping valley that looks great from the Sky Space. The skies are the clearest in England, hence the sharp timber of Kielder Observatory, a short walk from Turrell's piece.

I wandered up the mountainside from the observatory. Paths came and went, and I stumbled through bogs, tree stumps and peat hags to get a good view over the valley.

It was raining again as I got back to the Sky Space, so the shelter was welcome. I stayed as dusk fell and the sky darkened. The rain fell on the gravel below the aperture in the roof.

The sky looked more and more like a blue earth suspended in the ceiling.

Turrell's talent is to get out of the way. The art is the viewer's experience, often of an interaction of light and architecture. The Sky Space is a different show every day.

http://www.visitkielder.com/site/things-to-do/art-and-architecture/art-and-architecture-list

http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

http://www.artfund.org/turrell/james_turrell.html

Northern Lights 2

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Lumiere Durham provided an entertaining trip to the North East this month, with sound and light interventions across the city, commissioned by Arthichoke Productions.

Obviously, some installations did more for me than others, but I loved the idea of transforming an evening walk around this historic city. I was reminded how important it is with site-specific art to have a strong starting point, which Durham's geography and architecture certainly provided.

One of the best elements of the event was 'Power Plant', a show in the Botanic Gardens produced by Simon Chatterton, centred on the work of the brilliant Mark Anderson, and originally commissioned by Oxford Contemporary Music. A succession of sound and light installations took you on a surreal journey through the darkened gardens.

The clear crowd-pleaser was Mark's 'Pyrophones' - a surround-sound fire organ. This is what it looked like in Liverpool last year:

Back in Durham's city centre, I was surprised to find that one of my favourite pieces was actually sited indoors, within the Cathedral. 'Chorus' by Mira Calix and United Visual Artists was a beautiful piece of music played through four static speakers and eight speaker/lights housed in pendulums that swayed and paused overhead, as the audience passed beneath them. I sat in a pew and watched the whole piece twice:

The North East can't be accused of not being ambitious in terms of large-scale outdoor arts events - next up is an illumination of the 87-mile Hadrian's Wall on 13 March 2010.

But for me the most poignant piece in Lumiere Durham was this simple light sculpture, produced from a drawing made by a prisoner at HMP Durham. How I take my freedoms for granted.

http://www.artichoke.uk.com/

Endangered Species

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Thanks to the Children and Nature network on twitter for pointing me towards this clip on You Tube: a wildlife documentary that manages to film a few children in their natural habitat: the last children in the woods.

Of course it's all good fun, but it strikes me that there's a connection to be made. As the population of outdoor children plummets towards extinction, more and more adults emerge disconnected from the natural environment and find it harder to perceive the effects of climate change, pollution and species loss that ultimately threaten humanity. So my hypothesis is that a trend in the population of outdoor children could predict a trend in the population of homo sapiens.

Ultimately, re-connecting children with nature is not altruistic. There are billions of other planets, but my DNA is stuck on this one.

Northern Lights

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:48:00 +0000

I drove up to Yorkshire a week ago for the last night of 'Odin's Glow', a public art event set in the village of Newton-Under-Roseberry.

The event comprised illuminations of Roseberry Topping, the mountain that overlooks the village, together with a number of installations and performances in the streets and spaces below, pedestrianised for the four nights of the show.

The event celebrated the Viking heritage of the area - Roseberry Topping is an anglisation of the Norse for Odin's Rock. So lots of runes and audio re-telling of Norse myths. In an odd bit of artistic direction, the event also covered the life of Caption Cook, who once lived there too. This made the evening feel a bit schizophrenic for me - the themes didn't really come together very well, and in my view a flawed compromise had been made somewhere in the planning process.

However, it was great to walk through a rural village at night, transformed with light and sound, and the sense of occasion was palpable, even if some of the installations were a little underwhelming.

The star of the show was unquestionably the mountain of Roseberry Topping itself, dramatically illuminated by Filament, and stopping crowds at every spot in the village from which it was visible. An unforgettable sight.

Most photos from http://www.flickr.com/photos/blue-don/ - many thanks.

http://www.odinsglow.co.uk/

Bothy in the Black Mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:08:00 +0000

By the time I'd parked up at Gospel Pass and climbed onto Twmpa, the sun was setting and the colours were seeping out of the landscape. By the time I reached the head of the reservoir at Grwyne Fawr, I was relying on the moonlight and my headtorch to find the bothy that I knew was there somewhere ...

Every outing has its lessons: earlier this year I'd learned that if night is falling and you can see that your torch is running out of power, it's better to change the batteries before they completely run out in the middle of a dark wood. That kept me busy for a while.

This time, the lesson was that if you're heading to a bothy you've never visited before and arriving in the dark, it's a good idea to write down the grid reference rather than just memorise it. The dark plays havoc with your convictions: was it 227312 or 222713? Of course there was no mobile signal for me to call home and check.

After a brief but entertaining game of hide-and-seek, the bothy finally gave up its location at the bottom of a steep gorge where the stream flows into the dammed valley. It was fairly invisible from the path.

I love the moment when you push on the door of a bothy and let yourself into a stranger's house. Simple shelters are so luxurious when benighted in the mountains. This one was cute as a button: one small room with a sleeping platform upstairs, across the stream from a small copse of trees providing fuel for the woodburning stove. The previous occupants had done me proud, leaving new candles, dry wood, a whole bag of kindling, all of Saturday's paper and half a bottle of Sambucca!

With the stove roaring, dinner on and the candles flickering, I put my sense of euphoria down to the night walk, the stunning location and perhaps partly the Sambucca. I kept having to go back outdoors to admire the fat silver moon gleaming over the reservoir and the bulk of the Black Mountains.

In the morning I gathered some dead wood to replace what I'd used and spent a bit of time sawing it into logs for the next visitors. Karmic equilibirum established, I headed back up the valley and onto the long ridge of Waun Fach, the highest point in this Eastern section of the Brecon Beacons National Park. It was fun watching the gliders for a while, until I climbed into cloud and spent the next couple of hours following compass bearings in the fog. I bet the views are great!

I came back down into the visible world alongside the thick pine plantation of Mynyyd Du Forest, where I found a flat section alongside the river adorned with a succession of fire rings, at the end of the twisting road coming up from the South. It's amazing how well roads deliver litter into the landscape: I was a bit saddened by the plastic bottles, and bemused by the quantity of loo roll strewn around the woods: the lack of poo suggests that girls are to blame. Girls - drip dry or burn your loo roll!

I rigged up my tarp and gathered kindling and fuel as the evening swept in. Two other groups of campers drove in and joined me in ignoring the 'no camping' signs. Actually, it was one of those pictorial signs with a line through a tent, so I felt OK about my tarp. Perhaps the Forestry Commission should try education rather than prohibition, which clearly doesn't work.

I woke up warm and rested at dawn, and seized the day, breaking camp around 8am. As I climbed the opposite side of the valley to that explored the day before, the weather turned pretty nasty and I shortened my route back to the car. It was still three and a half hours of battling the wind and the sideways rain, but all good fun and I've seen worse. At least the ridge was broad enough to make falling off impossible. It's amazing how far your snot can fly in a mountain wind ... I wonder whether there's a record for that?

The bothy at Grwyne Fawr is maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association: you can subscribe for £20 at http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

Schools Without Walls

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000

I often say to people that education is full of assumptions that we forget to challenge. The system of universal schooling in the West is relatively young, and yet we cling to many of its orthodoxies as if they are ancient traditions.

Picture a school. Do you see a building?

Schools can't bear the whole burden of reconnecting our children with the natural world, but they can certainly do their bit. The Forest Schools initiative is one the best vehicles we have for helping schools to move lessons outdoors: it is systematic, sustainable and easily understood.

After a period of accredited training that can be fitted around their existing job, a teacher takes pupils out into a local woodland for half a day every week or fortnight. There's huge diversity in the practice, but commonly the subjects of the 'normal' curriculum are taught through the use of natural resources, and there is an emphasis on social and emotional development. Over time, pupils learn to use tools, to control fire and to manage their environment responsibly.

Surprise surprise, children who spend regular time outdoors find it easier to concentrate, show fewer symptoms of ADHD, develop better social skills, improve their creativity and outperform their indoor peers in academic achievement.

Research in the US has led to calls for a daily 'green hour' for children, as a pre-condition for effective learning. It's a start, and I sense that a more fundamental change is coming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Schools

www.forestschools.com

http://www.childrenandnature.org/

www.greenhour.org

In Search of Stone

noreply@blogger.com (Outdoor Culture) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:34:00 +0000

One of my favourite artists is the sculptor Peter Randall-Page. Based in Devon, just East of Dartmoor, Peter works mostly in stone, making art works that explore and reflect the patterns, geometry and mathematic relationships found in biology.

There's an etymological relationship between art, artifice and the artificial, but my interest is the opposite: I see art as a natural aspect of our behaviour as a species, just as other animals have their inevitable forms of culture. What I enjoy most about Peter's work is how alive and organic it feels. Somehow he intersects animal, vegetable and mineral, to make sculptures that look like a living part of the landscape.

I loved Peter's sculptures at the Eden Project and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and wanted to see more. After the pristine finish of the Eden commission, I was irrationally shocked to find his pieces in the Forest of Dean being colonised by mosses when I visited in 2008. Of course outdoor sculpture has to weather naturally, and the ageing of work is often intended by its maker, but initially I struggled with the contrast in presentation.

A year later and a year further on in my own outdoor arts career, I couldn't miss Peter's major exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (closes January 2010) and headed up the M1 earlier this summer.

It was fantastic to see so much of his work, but strangely unsatisfying to see it all in one place.

I guess I'd got used to the idea of searching for Peter's stones: making special journeys and enjoying the sense of discovery and the relationship between the work and its location. For me, Peter's work needed to occupy a more fertile space than it was given at YSP. And the continuous reminders of the 'no touching' rule hardly invited personal connection to the art. Of course I snuck a few touches while the stewards weren't looking: just to look is to miss half the point of sculpture.

The YSP experience reminded me how important environment is to my enjoyment of art, and made me want to re-experience Peter's work in a wilder context. The artist Jenny Kyle lives near Peter, and had told me before about a series of his sculptures installed around the Teign Valley in the early 90s by Common Ground. I got hold of a beautiful book about the project, 'Granite Song', with photos by Chris Chapman and some interesting essays. I learned that granite contains no fossils because it predates life on earth.

Armed with grid references and a few spare hours when passing through Devon this week, I set out to try to experience some more of Peter's art in a wilder and less formal context.

This piece, 'Passage', stands perfectly atop an avenue of old Beech trees across the valley from Castle Drogo, reached by an unmarked permissive path up the hill from the River Teign. The weathering of the stone has created the illusion of the lead inlay standing proud of the cut faces of the boulders. It appears to have stood there forever.

On an island in the River Teign downstream of Chagford sits 'Granite Song' itself, the first of the iconic split boulder forms that have become such a motif in Peter's work. It's exquisite - and in quiet counterpoint to its setting of woodland and rushing water. You'd miss it from the footpath if you weren't looking for it.

Perhaps it's special to me on its own account - it's pretty gorgeously curvy and pointy, and on a more intimate scale than many of the pieces carved after it. Or perhaps it's because I waded across a river and beheld it with all my senses that the joy of it still rings in my ears.