Sheepfolds
Jul. 25th, 2005 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe spent Saturday with friends in Cumbria, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary - an excellent day in excellent company. And when fellow-guests asked us if we planned to drive straight home on Sunday, we said no, we were going to look for some sheepfolds first.
Potts Gill Fold is a rectangular enclosure, near a farm. Each corner has been built over a massive boulder. You'd think it was an old farm building - particularly well made, perhaps, but made for use: there's a pile of sawn logs in one corner. Which is true, but not the whole truth...
In 1996 Cumbria County Council invited sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to undertake a large-scale project of his choice; the only condition was that it must span the six districts of the county. The result was the Sheepfolds Project, to create a series of sculptures based on existing sheepfolds - stone enclosures into which sheep were gathered for a variety of reasons: counting, washing or rounding up strays. The project was initially intended to last for five years (1996 - 2000) and create one hundred sheepfolds; it was officially concluded in 2003 having completed 46 folds.
Last summer we took a seven mile walk around Casterton, which included a stretch of walled track on either side of which were a sequence of sixteen sheepfolds - small, squarish enclosures, mostly built into the corners of fields, and each containing a single large boulder, as if it were an outsize sheep that had been herded into its fold. The folds we saw yesterday were all different, from each other and from those folds.
The first two folds to be constructed were at Mungrisdale; the first is a circular enclosure, neat as a raised pie-crust, built from field boulders (that is, stones which have been cleared from the land to be cultivated, and heaped out of the way in a corner somewhere) and the stones from fallen walls. Across the beck and up the opposite bank, its counterpart faces it. It looks like a mound of boulders, stacked just anyhow - until you clamber through the stones hidden by the long grass and the thistles, and realise that you are looking into the entrance of a perfect circular fold, hidden within the chaos.
Milestone House Drove Arch Fold looked more abandoned than any of these: yet it lay just below the busy A6. We parked the car in the layby and peered down into the mass of nettles and breeze blocks, trying to work out which were the walls of the enclosure, and why it was called an "Arch" Fold - not, it turns out, because of anything thar was there to be seen, but because of a history that the sculptor had generated for it.
And so home, stopping at Melmerby for coffee and cakes at the Village Bakery, and to admire the Washfold: the rebuilt fold here consists of two linked enclosures by the beck, allowing sheep to be gathered and washed. It is unusual also in that Goldsworthy has added a further worked stone below the folds in the water. We wondered if the stone was intended to be submerged; but it has been a dry year, and its upper surface is well above the water.
Much of Andy Goldsworthy's work is ephemeral: his ice star, for example. With the sheepfolds he has made something durable; indeed, he has remade something which time had already unmade, to a greater or lesser extent. But since the folds, and the stone from which they are made, were already part of the landscape, the sculptor's personality is still hidden by his work. The project is also an invitation to look at the original stone enclosures strewn over the fells - those untouched by the sculptor - and see them, too, as created structures which adorn their landscape.
Potts Gill Fold is a rectangular enclosure, near a farm. Each corner has been built over a massive boulder. You'd think it was an old farm building - particularly well made, perhaps, but made for use: there's a pile of sawn logs in one corner. Which is true, but not the whole truth...
In 1996 Cumbria County Council invited sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to undertake a large-scale project of his choice; the only condition was that it must span the six districts of the county. The result was the Sheepfolds Project, to create a series of sculptures based on existing sheepfolds - stone enclosures into which sheep were gathered for a variety of reasons: counting, washing or rounding up strays. The project was initially intended to last for five years (1996 - 2000) and create one hundred sheepfolds; it was officially concluded in 2003 having completed 46 folds.
Last summer we took a seven mile walk around Casterton, which included a stretch of walled track on either side of which were a sequence of sixteen sheepfolds - small, squarish enclosures, mostly built into the corners of fields, and each containing a single large boulder, as if it were an outsize sheep that had been herded into its fold. The folds we saw yesterday were all different, from each other and from those folds.
The first two folds to be constructed were at Mungrisdale; the first is a circular enclosure, neat as a raised pie-crust, built from field boulders (that is, stones which have been cleared from the land to be cultivated, and heaped out of the way in a corner somewhere) and the stones from fallen walls. Across the beck and up the opposite bank, its counterpart faces it. It looks like a mound of boulders, stacked just anyhow - until you clamber through the stones hidden by the long grass and the thistles, and realise that you are looking into the entrance of a perfect circular fold, hidden within the chaos.
Milestone House Drove Arch Fold looked more abandoned than any of these: yet it lay just below the busy A6. We parked the car in the layby and peered down into the mass of nettles and breeze blocks, trying to work out which were the walls of the enclosure, and why it was called an "Arch" Fold - not, it turns out, because of anything thar was there to be seen, but because of a history that the sculptor had generated for it.
And so home, stopping at Melmerby for coffee and cakes at the Village Bakery, and to admire the Washfold: the rebuilt fold here consists of two linked enclosures by the beck, allowing sheep to be gathered and washed. It is unusual also in that Goldsworthy has added a further worked stone below the folds in the water. We wondered if the stone was intended to be submerged; but it has been a dry year, and its upper surface is well above the water.
Much of Andy Goldsworthy's work is ephemeral: his ice star, for example. With the sheepfolds he has made something durable; indeed, he has remade something which time had already unmade, to a greater or lesser extent. But since the folds, and the stone from which they are made, were already part of the landscape, the sculptor's personality is still hidden by his work. The project is also an invitation to look at the original stone enclosures strewn over the fells - those untouched by the sculptor - and see them, too, as created structures which adorn their landscape.
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Date: 2005-07-26 10:48 am (UTC)Something there is that likes a wall just fine, thank you!