Throughout 2020, I’m working with the North Lakes National Trust to on a socially engaged art project focusing on Crow Park in Keswick, as part of the Trust New Art programme. For more information please see the project page.
I sit down with Maurice Pankhurst, the National Trust Woodland Ranger for the North Lakes, and ask him about the ecology of Borrowdale. He's worked in the area for over three decades and I thought he'd give me a historical perspective on the valley, but over a few hours Maurice takes me on a journey from the beginning of time to the present day. He describes the formation of the mountains, the ice age, the arrival of different species over millennia, and the impact of plant, animal and human inhabitants.
'We think in such short timeframes,' he tells me, and this is a thought that has been echoed in several conversations I've had about Crow Park and the Lake District. Livi Adu, a geologist who works at Keswick Museum, talks about looking at rocks as a way of seeing through time. Roy Henderson, the Area Ranger for Borrowdale, tells me about his work with the National Trust, and the need for long-term thinking in landscape management – we need to imagine centuries into the future rather than thinking in short years.
Map of my conversation with Maurice Pankhurst, NT Woodland Ranger
Maurice taps on the map I'm drawing as he speaks, indicating Crow Park. 300 years ago you'd be standing in an oak woodland. It was felled in the mid 1700s and there was an outcry, but this act opened up a wonderful panorama that has formed the place we know now, and its role in shaping cultural ideas about the landscape. But there's a lot to tell before we get to that recent history. First we need to go right back to the formation of the mountains. 400 million years ago (I find it hard to think in these enormous terms) this would have been an Ordovician landscape, created by volcanic action and plate tectonics. 'This is the amazing thing about time,' Maurice tells me, 'back then you would have been stood where New York is today - the land surface of Crow Park was 3.5 thousand miles west of here.' He skips over a few million years, when apparently nothing much happened except the evolution of flowering plants.
The Ice Age began 200 million years ago, and there have been several interglacial periods. More than 10,000 years ago the most recent ice retracted, forming the landscape we see today. Later, when I meet Livi in wild weather out on Crow Park, she talks about the way the mountains and valleys were formed, describing the force of clashing tectonic plates and glaciers carving out valleys. In Livi's sweeping gestures, I imagine the volcanoes and ice as sculptors. The hill we're standing on is a moraine – debris deposited by a receding glacier, and Livi uses a hand-made compass clinometer to show us how geologists measure the angle of the land to figure out the direction a glacier was moving in.
Livi’s prototype for a hand-made clinometer, a tool for teaching geology
After the ice melted, it left rock and running water, and slowly plants moved in. Maurice points out that different species would have moved across the land mass, which was still connected to Europe. Lichens and bryophytes (mosses and liverworts – the 'cushion' plants) would have been one of the first lifeforms to arrive, reproduced by spores carried in the wind. Then trees came in – birch and willows, then pine and other trees. Fungi would have been in hiatus under the ice, waking up later as the temperature warmed. These were followed by larger plant-eating animals.
Maurice describes the view from Crow Park around 7000 years ago, during what's known as the Atlantic period. 'The temperature is 2-3 degrees warmer than today. It's warm and there's high rainfall. Forests have already formed, there's oaks, birches, pines. And this high rainfall and warmth had an amazing effect on one plant species – sphagnum moss. It absorbed colossal amounts of water. This species grew and grew, became the dominant species. Sphagnum released water that was very rich in hydrogen ions, which made it more acidic. This stopped tree seed germination and brought about an extinction event – trees didn't die but the seeds wouldn't germinate.' I imagine a valley of soggy cushions. The moss left a legacy of bogs and peat that is now a vital part of the landscape. Around 5000 years ago, the climate changed again and forests recovered. There would have been wonderful rich wildlife in Borrowdale, with the valley home to wolves, otter, beaver, roe deer, red deer, golden eagle, sea eagle, red kite.
Sphagnum moss. Image credit: Sdjurovic, Creative Commons
4-5000 years ago the first humans arrived - there's differing opinions of exactly when. One of the earliest and most dramatic remnants of this time is Castlerigg stone circle. Keswick Museum has some great displays telling the story of early human inhabitants here, including some very early artefacts from the area. Place names across Cumbria give clues of Viking and Norman occupation. Maurice talks to me about human impact on the landscape and his narrative moves forward to around 1000 years ago, when you'd start to see clearings in the forests, people building homesteads, coppicing, charcoal-making and then the beginnings of mining from the 13th century. There's a lot of mineral wealth in this landscape: Borrowdale is famed for the discovery of graphite (known as 'wad') and also deposits of copper, lead and borates. Mineral extraction turned the whole valley into a honeycomb, with mines everywhere. The world's first graphite discovery at Seathwaite made 16th century Keswick one of the wealthiest towns in Europe, and the centre of both official and illicit trade. The Derwent Pencil Museum features tales of notorious operators on the graphite black market, including the ‘Dandy Wad Stealer’.
If you stood on Crow Park in the 19th century, the view would be full of smoke – an industrial landscape busy with charcoal making, fires, mining, horses, mud. This is the view the Romantics encountered – the valleys shaped by centuries of farming and industry, set against steep mountains – it was the drama of these contrasts that inspired them. Maurice doesn't have much time for the Romantic’s version of the Lakes - 'They wrote very strange things about Borrowdale. They didn't come here to survive, they were wealthy people who waxed lyrical about something they didn't understand.' He talks about the people who worked there having a much deeper understanding of the land, and I reflect on the different ways to ‘know’ a place. It was around this time that ideas of conservation were born, a desire to protect and preserve a version of nature. Simultaneously during the Victorian era and rapid expansion of Empire, there was a huge hunger for collecting, categorising and moving plants. In Borrowdale you can see the living legacy of this time in trees such as cedar and sweet chestnut introduced by landowners ilke the Marshalls. Victorian ‘fern-fever’ also led to enthusiastic collection of many plants in the valley, endangering some of these species. At the edge of Crow Park on the wetland of the Isthmus, several ‘invasive species’ are growing, including knotweed, and skunk cabbage - both of which have made interesting journeys to get here.
1852 map of Cumberland showing minerals for extraction, including ‘Wadd’ (graphite)
Another major human intervention that shaped the Lake District we see today was the era of the 'monastic overlords', that Maurice describes as being like a mafia. From the 12th - 16th century the monasteries at Fountains Abbey and Furness Abbey owned and controlled a lot of land in Cumbria. 'All the monks had to wear woolly stuff. They introduced sheep farming and moved rivers to make more space for grazing.' The canalisation of rivers has a big impact on contemporary land management and flooding. Later, when I walk with Roy, he tells me 'it's a system that's breaking. Now we think about the whole valley as one catchment area, and recognise the need to return some land to natural floodland, to use vegetation to slow the flow of water, and to farm differently.' On Crow Park, the soil is badly compacted, the result of its use by humans, sheep and vehicles. Roy shows me the clumps of soft rush that punctuate the site, an indicator of boggy ground, and we squelch through mud to the top of the hill. He has a vision for changing this, a dream to turn the back of the hill into an orchard – leaving plenty of space for sheep, people, picnics and views, but bringing more life and free fruit to Crow Park. 'If you stand on here in the summer, it's quiet apart from traffic and people. But if you got fruit trees on here for the insects and the birds, it would be alive! We need to plant for the future.'
Imagining the future feels difficult at the moment, with the huge changes, challenges and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. But imagining is also necessary. The writer Marge Piercy, reflecting on utopian feminist fiction, writes: 'utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future.' Several years ago I worked with the artist Sonya Dyer who was developing a project centred around the question: ‘Who imagines the future?’ This question has stayed with me, and feels more important than ever. If old systems are broken, we need a multiplicity of voices to imagine and enact new ones.
Through the Crow Park project I'm aiming to work with people to explore diverse perspectives and generate future fictions from the site. I'm looking forward to the stories and images that come out of this collective process.
Thanks to Maurice Pankhurst, Roy Henderson and Livi Adu.