Back Catalogue: Land Marks

For Back Catalogue, I share significant projects from the last few years. This content had a home on my old website and I want to keep it alive.

Land Marks [Hallam Moors] Drawings, 2023.

This is a land I have moved across many times.
This is a land I lived close to.
This is a land I left behind to come to a new one; Aotearoa.
This land and I share a name. 
This land is protected, but how and for who?
This land is a memory. 

A place in South Yorkshire, England, known as the Hallam Moors, as viewed from above. The land is managed by a national park authority these days. Blanket bog moors are of significant global importance due to large expanses of carbon sequestration. The marks on the land are where heather is cut, creating a distinctive patch work. It used to be burnt (I think I can recall seeing and smelling this) but cutting is now the dominant practice on these moors. Over centuries of burning and cutting, to make way for grouse hunting and sheep grazing,  heather has become the dominant species, and the cutting is a land management practice used to maintain a suitable food source -young Heather shoots- and habitat for grouse (a game bird). Left to grow tall and woody, the heather moorland would support a rich diversity of trees, wildlife and sequester more carbon.

The practice that keeps the moors looking as the many thousands of people who use the area for recreation have come to expect, is at odds with what the land, and us, really need. 

I wonder what the moorland was like before this became the norm. I imagine the Hallams (my family name that  originated in the area) who went before me, walking the moors when they travelled. I once lived very close to this place, and walked and rode my bike across it many times. I find myself missing it and wanting to know its stories.