I have a confession to make. Even though I have lived in Hebden Bridge for 26 years and have traversed the woodland paths in all possible directions and spent hours and hours on the meadows and lanes and I consider myself ‘a nature person,’ I rarely go up on the moors. I feel my cheeks burning when I tell you that I can count the number of times I have visited Stoodley Pike on one hand, I’ve only reached High Brown Knoll twice and I have only done ‘the’ walk over the moors to Haworth the once! I know it’s a bit ridiculous. This town is surrounded by moorland on all sides.
So many folk here in the valley live and breathe the moors and will head up there whenever they get the chance. And for so many, after a stint living in the dark higgledy-piggledy valley bottom most people move upwards, craving more sky, more light and wide reaching views, but I admit it’s never been my calling. I just crave the trees.
I do love it when I’m up there though, in summer with the skylarks dialling up above my head, the gritstone sparkling in the sunshine and the sea of white cotton grass dancing in the breeze.
Or in deep winter when it’s under the cover of snow and the boggy patches have frozen.
I appreciate the rich colours, the hazy views, the heather, the mosses, and my goodness the sound of the curlew is my favourite sound of all time. When I go up there I think, ‘This is amazing, I should come more often,’ but the next moment I’m thinking, ‘Can we go now? Which path takes me home?’
I still have much rewilding to do. I’m a work in progress.
I share my studio building with a definite moorland wanderer, Sheila Tilmouth, who, horrified at the threat of the mammoth wind farm proposal by Calderdale Energy Park on Walshaw Moor gathered together a large group of artists and founded the Peat Appreciation Society. Together they would raise awareness of this precious peatland ecology with artworks, talks, workshops and exhibitions and hopefully spread the word that protected peatland is NOT the place for thirty-four giant wind turbines. Through their collective work people would find out why that is in an engaging, educational and inspiring way.
I was invited to contribute but I didn’t really feel equipped, I didn’t have the peatlands under my skin (or my fingernails). I didn’t feel like I knew sphagnum and its friends. But I have kept my eyes and ears open. I have watched their work develop, I have seen Sheila tending to her baby mosses in the backyard, I have seen friends make work and run workshops with love and passion.
propagating sphagnums
And I’ve seen the whole thing become something big.
Their first exhibition is underway at Gibson Mill in the heart of Hardcastle Crags right now. I loved walking through the woods to go and see it and finding two floors of paintings, prints, textiles, sculpture, ceramics, drawings, illustrations, poetry, embroidery, audio, jewellery, basketry and even a peat cake!
Here are a few pictures of just a handful of the artists and their work. There are so many more to discover...
Ceramics by Katch Skinner
jewellery by Lauren Francesca
ceramics by Sue Turner
Basketry by Sara Abbott
embroidery by Macros and Moss
Sculpture by Sally Barker
lino cuts by Rachel Red
Illustrations by Mel Davie
and the cake by Vie en Rose!
At the same time as the visual artists were coming together, there was a group of writers with the same idea and together they created The Book of Bogs which was published at the end of last year and features the voices of over forty writers who love this landscape and want to protect it.
The Book of Bogs - cover by Angie Rogers
I’ve just been reading it and I have been lost in the sphagnum, the wild, the weather, the wonder, the birds, plants, creatures, history, politics, folklore, animism, the love and the loss...
I’ve learned so much about this precious and important place and how it used to be when it was flourishing, how the sphagnum moss filtered and purified the rain water and held it in the hills preventing flooding in the valley bottom. I learned how it was before the industrial revolution carried pollutants up and over the moors in the clouds and the rain began to degrade the plants and the soil. I learned how the bogs were/are drained and burned and owned by people who didn’t/don’t value the quiet and crucial work that they do and would rather the moorland became a playground for shooting grouse. 85% of our moorland is now ‘degraded’. Many people are working to restore it back to its former glory by propagating and re-plating the sphagnum but it will take a long time as peat only develops at 1mm per year.
Peat which is made of decomposing sphagnum and plant matter stores more carbon than the world's forests! Imagine that! How can giant wind turbines create ‘green energy’ if they have dug up all the peat that took thousands of years to form and released all of that carbon into the atmosphere?
Poetry and print by Lou Crosby
And I have learned how people feel when they are up there on Walshaw Moor. For some it’s their favourite place in the world, somewhere that time stops, a thin place, an edge. A place where it’s not always comfortable, where you might lose your footing, or your welly, or your way. Where you might meet the weather or a wisp or a ‘boggart.’ But that is all part of it. It’s a place where you might meet your own wild self…if you’re brave enough.
I shouldn’t be ashamed of being a little bit scared of the bogs. Their danger is perhaps their way of saying KEEP OUT, their way of protecting themselves so they can get on with what they are supposed to be doing without human interference. But sadly man came along and tried to get that ‘danger’ under control and dominate the landscape and now they have messed things up for the whole ecosystem.
All of these people expressing their love of this place in their art and their words and their desire to protect it has inspired me and I feel my world expanding a little. There is a new landscape to get to know - one that has been here all along but I only just got the invitation. Today, I felt a pull, an urge to get up high, to keep walking, beyond the woods, beyond the fields and up, up and up to hear the curlews, to look for Golden Plover, to put my hand deep into the sphagnum and say, ‘thank you, you are amazing!’
I got the calling.
That’s all thanks to the power of art.
The Peat Appreciation Society exhibition at Gibson Mill runs until 26th April. Check their opening times here. You can discover lots of their artists on their Instagram page here.
The Book of Bogs has been edited by Clare Shaw and Anna Chilvers and is available to buy now from any good book shop.
