Exploring Birdlife in the Yorkshire Dales: Stories and Conservation

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Lapwing encountered near the side of the road in Silverdale

Yesterday I spent a happy few hours in the archive at the Dales Countryside Museum (DCM). I’m carrying out research for Cherish which explores the history and celebrates priority species birds in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. I’m looking back at various books and accounts where the authors talk about their experiences of birds in the dales and I started with the diaries of Marie Hartley and continued to the books of Richard Kearton (1862-1928) (illustrated with his brother Cherry’s (1871-1940) gorgeous monochrome photographs).

Richard and Cherry Kearton were naturalists and pioneers of nature photography. They were born and brought up in the Yorkshire Dales at Thwaite in Swaledale. For more information about their fascinating lives see this blog HERE

I began by looking at Birds’ Nests, Eggs and Egg Collecting which was published in 1890 and revised in 1896. Richard says “this book is not intended to encourage the useless collecting of birds’ eggs from a mere bric-à-brac motive, but to aid the youthful naturalist in the study of one of the most interesting phases of birdlife” and he goes on to share his ideas and philosophical approach to studying birds and their reproductive behaviour. In it he provides guidance on the subject of egg collecting and preserving and provides information about the nesting behaviour and eggs of individual species . He states that he hopes “that the Act of Parliament empowering County Councils to protect either the eggs of certain birds, or all birds breeding within a given area, will be of great benefit to our feathered friends”.

A plate from At Home With Wild Nature

Egg collecting was a regular past-time for naturalists during the nineteenth and early twentieth century and many children growing up in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1940s and 1950s may well have spent time doing so too. With this pastime often came the kind of general knowledge of nature and the landscape that has been lost amongst many of our current generation which is why I am encouraged by the recent successful campaign to instate a nationwide Natural History GSCE in schools.

Plate from Birds’ Nests, Eggs and Egg Collecting

The Protection of Birds Act 1954 made egg collecting generally illegal but there was also an earlier bill, The Protection of Lapwings Bill 1928, that I find particularly interesting. Lapwings are one of my selected birds for this project and I am very fortunate to see them fairly regularly. At one time they were abundant across the country, so much so that their eggs were taken in the thousands to sell as a culinary delight in London. In his book At Home With Wild Nature published in 1922, Richard Kearton says “I wish some epicure would try a boiled rook’s egg for breakfast and proclaim from the house-tops of Belgravia its superiority over that of the plover or lapwing. It would be a great boon to the latter bird, which is being slowly but surely exterminated, to the detriment of the farmer in particular, and the public in general”.

Kearton goes on to say “I have been an observer of bird life all my days, but never remember a time when members of the avian world were so purposefully persecuted as the present. It is no exaggeration to say that not quite ninety per cent of the nests, great and small, built in places accessible to public are wantonly destroyed”. He outlines his proposals to help protect birds in the preface of the book (see photos above).

I also read his thoughts on the rise in sheep farming and how he connected it to the decrease in the number of lapwings, wheatears and other moorland birds. I found a passage in which he also talks about “game-preserving” being a “disastrous business” to hen harriers. Coupled with the recent news of the successful prosecution of a game keeper who killed a hen harrier near Grassington, it is poignant that over a century later we are still encountering the same problems but they are now compounded by other threats to wildlife such as the rise in human populations and tourism, changes in agricultural practises and climate change.

Meeting Mary Colwell, Director of Curlew Action, at the Northern Curlew Skill Share in 2025

There’s a lot to do in order to help our precious wildlife which is why one of the highlights of 2025 for me was my participation in the Northern Curlew Skill Share event organised by Matthew Trevelyan of Nidderdale Natural Landscape. This brought together land owners, farmers, ecologists, artists, writers, poets (to name but a few interested parties) who shared the common goal of trying to pool resources and skills to help find ways to conserve the endangered Curlew. It reminded me of how it isn’t all ‘doom and gloom’ and that I can play a small part by raising awareness via my work. The YDNPA’s Nature Recovery Plan “sets out the Biodiversity Forum‘s aspirations for action between now and 2040, aiming to conserve and enhance the biodiversity within the National Park” and this, combined with the efforts of many individuals and groups across the Yorkshire Dales gives rise to hope that we can make a difference.

Should anybody reading this blog have their own memories of birds in the Yorkshire Dales that they would like to share, please do feel free to comment below or send me a message through my website HERE. I’d love to hear them.

Cherish – Celebrating Priority Bird Species in the Yorkshire Dales

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As we begin 2026 and are dealing with the fluctuating winter weather across the country, my thoughts are turning to the project that I will be working on well into 2027. Cherish is the title and it will culminate in a joint exhibition with Sally Zaranko at the Dales Countryside Museum (DCM) in the summer of 2027. Using our own experience of the landscape, archival material from the museum and the Nature Recovery Plan for the Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNPA), the project will celebrate the priority bird species that exist across the YDNP thanks to its varied and distinctive landscape.

Bird’s Eye View, collagraph print inspired by the cattle grazed area of Ingleborough Nature Reserve where bird’s eye primroses thrive in spring and wheatears, meadow pipits and skylarks nest.

The idea has been in the back of my mind since working on the DCM’s Ink Inspiration project celebrating the life and work of Marie Hartley, their founder. During my research, I came across an entry in one of her diaries in the museum archives (see below). It was from 1947 and listed all the birds that she had seen in the Askrigg area. What particularly drew me to the list was the corncrake. These birds are now only very rarely seen whilst on passage through the dales due to changes in land-use & farming practises making it unfavourable for their successful breeding. In fact, many of the birds that Marie saw regularly are now red or amber listed species and I made a print called Marie’s List in response to that idea (read more about that HERE)

Marie Hartley’s bird list as found ink one of her diaries in the DCM archive.

“The Nature Recovery Plan (NRP) for the Yorkshire Dales National Park sets out the Biodiversity Forum‘s aspirations for action between now and 2040, aiming to conserve and enhance the biodiversity within the National Park“

I have chosen a selection of birds from the Category A & B lists in the plan, birds that appear on Marie’s List and ones that I encounter myself within the Three Peaks Area of the Yorkshire Dales. I hope that through my research and subsequent print work, I will join Sally in celebrating the fact that the YDNP has significant populations of these species within the UK and to make links between the varied habitats that support them. Between us we will also be drawing on the personal experiences of birds by people living and working in the dales through the oral history project.

Sumer is Icumen In, collagraph print from Charms and Murmurings. The cuckoo is one of my selected birds for Cherish

Following on from Charms and Murmurings, I will be exploring some of the cultural history of birds through folklore, place names, vernacular bird names and historical records. It is exciting to have this time to become fully immersed in a subject that I have had a lifelong interest in thanks to my parents particularly my mother who, following her degree and phd in zoology as a mature student, became an ecological consultant. It is so nice to be able to draw on her vast knowledge (and library!) and to have the kind of conversations that spark new ideas for prints.

Should anybody reading this blog have their own memories of birds in the Yorkshire Dales that they would like to share, please do feel free to comment below or send me a message through my website HERE. I’d love to hear them.

Corbie, bran, cigfran…AKA the Raven!

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Ravens have captivated me for most of my life and I am fortunate to live in an area where I see them often. When I summit Ingleborough there will invariably be a pair flying around and I see them when I am running over Plover Hill and Pen-y-ghent. These intelligent members of the corvid (crow) family are also the largest and the ones that feature most in the folklore and mythology of cultures from all over the world. (Below are just a few photos I’ve taken over the years, note the difference in size between the raven and the crow in the last photo!).

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum – my latest Collections exhibition with Josie Beszant & Charlotte Morrison – we are showing work inspired by the folklore, mythology and stories surrounding birds. Ravens feature in many of our pieces including our collaborative work ‘Corvid’. I made a template showing the primary and secondary wing feathers of a raven and we each made fourteen feathers that, when collected together, formed a pair of ‘wings’. I love the distinctive primaries on a raven’s wing that look like fingers stroking the sky.

The three of us at the opening of Charms and Murmurings
(l-r: Charlotte, Josie, me)

My collagraph feathers are inspired by the many places throughout Yorkshire that are named after ravens and also the Norse myth of Odin and his two ravens, Huginn & Muninn (Charlotte’s feathers are ceramic and Josie’s are paper collages).

Ravens are carrion eaters and, because of this, they were often associated with death and loss. They are also ‘talking birds’ that are able to mimic human speech and this is thought to be the reason that they appear as messengers in so many myths, often travelling between worlds, to bring news to their human companions. Back in 2000, I created a raven collagraph inspired by Celtic mythology and called The Messenger:

25 years later(!) I have chosen to explore the story of Odin’s ravens and for Charms and Murmurings I have created this piece entitled Thought and Memory:

Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Mind or Memory) would sit beside Odin – often regarded as the God of Ravens, the dead and warfare – and each morning he sent them out across the world and they would report back on everything they saw and heard. The names of the ravens are difficult to translate but Huginn is thought to represent the intellect/comprehension/perception and Muninn the emotions/memory/urges (to put it very simply). Whilst researching ravens, I came across an article that referenced a quote from the Poetic Edda called Grímnismál (in old Icelandic):

Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hverjan dag Jormungrund yfir;

óumk ek of Hugin, at hann aptr né komit, pó sjámk meirr um Munin.

A translation of this is:

Thought and Memory fly every day the whole world over;

each day I fear that Thought may not return, yet I fear more for Memory.

This really resonated with me and, coming at the idea from an ecological viewpoint, I wanted to depict Thought (Huginn) as living in the natural world that we see and experience physically and I have used the branches of an ash tree which directly links to the sacred ash tree (Yggdrasil) in Norse myth. I’ve created moths to fly among the branches symbolising thoughts and the spirit.

For Memory (Muninn), I depicted the roots of an ash tree with fossils caught amongst them representing the past, our memories and the underworld realm of the dead. The fact that Odin was an elderly man and that he feared losing Muninn more than Huginn made me think about the devastating disease of dementia. Losing our cognitive ability and short-term memories, we become lost in our own world unable to make sense of the here and now and often become physically lost both to our families and friends but also in reality when we can’t find the associations needed to navigate in the world around us. I am not really sure how this collagraph relates to my thoughts but I made it with them whirring around in the background.

NB some people believe that Huginn and Muninn were linked to Odin himself and that through shamanic practices he would send his own thought and mind journeying across the world. Ravens have often been a bird that humans and mythic beings were thought to transform into.

As is usual with my work, there are layers of thought behind it and some I won’t be able to verbalise for a while (there is something about ‘ash dieback’ in there I think!). I often create my prints from ideas that are more instinctive and come from experiences that link to things I feel but haven’t found a way to express in words. This is why I love to meet people at art fairs and discuss my work with them. At the Saltaire Inspired Winter Makers Fair last weekend, I had some wonderful discussions about my new work and found that visitors were providing insights that made me feel like shouting ‘yes, yes, that’s it!’.

Corbie – collagraph print

Finally, this last piece is part of my ‘animal, vegetable, mineral’ series that takes my feather collection as inspiration and links to manmade objects and the plant world. Here I have created collagraphs of a raven feather, a sprig of bog myrtle (sweet gale) and a piece of Viking hack silver which is actually from a former project. Bog Myrtle is thought to be a plant that the vikings used to create a drink which helped them ‘berserk’ before going into battle! There is an interesting article about the varied uses of the plant HERE.

Thank you to everyone that has visited the exhibition and for all of your feedback. I welcome your ideas and experiences about birds, folklore and my work so please do feel free to comment below.

Charms and Murmurings is on at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

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Gawk, Gawk, Gawky, Gog, Gok, Hobby and Welsh Ambassador are all names for the Common Cuckoo, a bird synonymous with so many different superstitions and folklore that it is hard to know where to start! For me it is very much a bird that heralds the coming of spring. I often hear one calling from a small copse near the quarry in Horton-in-Ribblesdale in April.

The migratory cuckoo flies to the UK from North Africa and is only with us for a short time but has given its name to many things including a number of plants. There are lots of cuckoo flowers including cardamine pratensis (aka lady’s smock) and lychnis flos-cuculi (aka ragged robin). Cuckoo Bread is another name for wood-sorrel, cuckoo buttons for spear thistle, cuckoo boots for bluebell and cuckoo’s eye for herb robert to name just a few.

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum, I have based two prints on the cuckoo. Here is the first:

This three plate collagraph depicts the cuckoo itself, two ‘cuckoo flowers’ and a cuckoo feather and it gains its title from the Medieval English round ‘Sumer is Icumen in‘. This is also known as the Summer Canon or the Cuckoo Song and roughly translates as ‘summer has come’.

Cuckoos are well-known for being ‘brood parasites’ which means that they don’t build their own nests and, once mated, the female lays her eggs in the nest of another bird such as a meadow pipit or dunnock. It is believed that the cuckoo’s resemblance to a bird of prey helps to frighten the host bird away from the nest allowing the cuckoo the opportunity to lay her egg. She can lay up to 25 eggs in different nests of her chosen species (they usually have a preferred host) and will replace one of the bird’s existing eggs with hers. The baby cuckoo develops very quickly and, on hatching, often kicks out the remaining eggs or hatched chicks from the nest. The host will then raise her huge alien baby as her own.

Maybe because of this unusual behaviour, the cuckoo has also become a bird associated with fertility, infidelity and lasciviousness. The word cuckold describes the husband of an adulterous wife who might unwittingly raise a child from that union as his own. It is linked directly to the cuckoo and appears frequently in the works of Shakespeare. Gowk is one of my ‘animal vegetable, mineral’ collagraph prints:

For this series I have taken feathers from my feather collection (it is extensive!) or referenced an online feather library for the animal part. The vegetable part depicts a plant and the mineral is based on a real or imagined manmade object. In this case we have an undertail covert cuckoo feather, arum maculatum (aka cuckoo pint) and a pottery sherd from a Delft birthplate. Cuckoo Pint gains its name from the word ‘pintle’ which is an old English word for penis and the fact that somebody once thought it resembled a cuckoo’s penis. I’ve always known it as Lords and Ladies but apparently that too is a rather suggestive name with it originally being written as Lord’s and Lady’s because someone thought the plant resembled the genitalia of both sexes! With regards to the plate, I have two sisters and my mum commissioned a plate for each of our births. The traditional blue and white Delftware had our names, birth dates and the time of our birth was shown on the clock. If you want to see what the whole plate looks like, they are still in production, an example can be seen here. I created a collagraph/drypoint pottery sherd as my artefact just showing a part of the cradle.

These are just two approaches to the stories surrounding the amazing cuckoo. Celebrated in festivals across the country, some believed that turning a coin in your pocket on hearing a cuckoo would bring good fortune whilst others thought the cuckoo’s habits could determine the outcome of the year’s harvest. There’s a lovely blog post by Jo Woolf in Argyll where you can read about more beliefs here

In my next post I will be talking all about the raven. If you’d like to see my work and the lovely pieces made by Josie Beszant and Charlotte Morrison, you can visit our exhibition at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November 2025.

Join Us for Bird Lore and Meet the Artist Events

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Since 2015, I have been working with artist Josie Beszant and ceramicist Charlotte Morrison on a project called Collections. We have been exploring the human urge to collect—why we gather, what we choose to preserve, and how objects can hold memory, meaning, and emotion. We have been developing our work through a series of exhibitions and residencies, including partnerships with museums and galleries. Eight years after our first collaboration with Ryedale Folk Museum, we were delighted to be invited back with an exhibition of new work called Charms and Murmurings.

The exhibition opens this weekend with two events at the museum – Bird Lore with Sally Coultard and Friends takes place from 11.30 – 12.30 when Josie and I will be chatting to the best selling local author and newly appointed patron of the museum about her latest book and our exhibition, both of which explore the fascinating folklore of birds. For more information and to book a place, click HERE

In the afternoon, Charlotte, Josie and I will be at the museum gallery from 2-4pm in a Meet the Artist event. We will be chatting to visitors and answering questions about our new work.

The exhibition continues until 2 November 2025 and over the coming weeks I will be writing about the collagraphs that I have made and the stories behind them. I hope you will join me in exploring the different birds that are loved and feared in our folktales and embedded in our language, place names, and traditions. 

Celebrating Meadows and Curlews! Two exhibitions to enjoy this summer.

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It has been a long time since I wrote anything but I have plans for ‘short and sweet’ in future so that maybe, just maybe I’ll write more often than once every year! This post is just to let everyone know that I have two exhibitions on at the moment.

I’m absolutely delighted that Within These Walls has a new venue. The Folly is an old and fascinating building housing the Museum of North Craven Life and also the award-winning The Folly Coffee House! My hangings are gracing the upper stair well and the rest of my project is exhibited in the top floor gallery space. The museum is at Victoria Street, Settle, North Yorkshire, BD24 9EY and is open:
Tuesday – Saturday and bank holiday Mondays, 11:00am to 4:00pm (last admission 3:30pm)
The Folly Coffee House is open:
Monday-Saturday 10:00am to 4:00pm

The other exhibition is a fabulous project called Cry of the Curlew coordinated by Paco Valera and Barbara Murray whose photos and poetry document the plight of the iconic curlews of the Yorkshire Dales. As a longterm curlew admirer and campaigner, I am delighted to exhibit my collagraphs and Migration series prints in this important exhibition that has been previously been shown at the Dales Countryside Museum.

Here’s what Kendal Museum has to say:

The beauty and fragility of Curlews is highlighted through the stunning photography of Paco Valera and insightful prose-poetry by Barbara Murray. Inspiring artwork is on display by Sally Zaranko, Hester Cox, Judith Bromley, and Robert Nicholls, alongside the wire sculptures of Stephanie Smith. Swedish artists Emily Berry Mennerdahl and Jonas Böttern of Hillside Projects present work symbolising ecological collapse. A video and soundscape by June Gersten-Roberts features interviews with farmers on sustainability, along with Alastair McIntosh’s poem, Extinction set to the music of Loriana Pauli. A new watercolour work by Dr William Titley of In-Situ beautifully maps ‘The Curlew Way,’ as part of his Walking with Landscape project. A wonderful display by Curlew Recovery South Lakes will demonstrate the vital work they are doing to protect nests and support the delicate local population of these beautiful birds, as well as sharing ways you can get involved.

I’ll be taking a well-earned break in Scotland in August but when I return in September I will be starting new work celebrating some of our priority bird species of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Within These Walls: Hay Time in the Dales

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My print installation, Within These Walls, created for a field barn at Grassington Festival in 2017 displayed with a hay sled.

After seven and half months of intensive work on my calendar linocuts, five new monotypes and a new collagraph, my exhibition at the Dales Countryside Museum is open and I’m delighted with how it looks. Fiona and her team have chosen an array of artefacts that were used for haymaking in the Yorkshire Dales along with a wonderful archive of oral histories and photographs of the Irish workers that came over to Yorkshire each year to help with Hay Time.

You can watch two films at the exhibition: one is an introduction to my studio with a collagraph printing demonstration and the other is the 2 minute film Paul Harris created of my installation in the barn.

There are also cabinets with some of Marie Hartley’s original wood engraving blocks, and the prints that I made from them, showing scenes from hay making in the 1930s. I started this project back in 2014 when I moved to Horton-in-Ribblesdale and began walking a footpath through and past three local meadows. Throughout the year I observed the rhythm of sheep farming, the change of the seasons and accompanying weather conditions in the meadows. I was able to observe the many different species of plant that grew and the visiting wildlife to the meadows. It became apparent that they were really good examples of species-rich traditionally managed meadows and I began drawing the plants and making prints of the wildlife that came to them.

Cabinets showing my preparatory work

Over the years, I’ve become familiar with the meadows across the Yorkshire Dales and interested in ‘nature friendly farming’. This exhibition celebrates the ecological diversity of healthy hay meadows as well as their agricultural and cultural history with the hope that visitors can enjoy and understand the contemporary importance of these wonderful landscapes.

The exhibition runs until the 17th September 2023 and is open daily, 10am – 5pm. Entry to the exhibition is included in the museum admission fee:

  • Adults £4.90
  • Concessions (60s and over): £4.40
  • Under 16s: FREE
  • Carers: FREE

You can buy tickets on entry or plan your visit by clicking to book online HERE

A Year in a Meadow in Linocuts

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I’ve been beavering away on my meadow project and it’s time for a bit of an update. When I undertook my project with the Dales Countryside Museum back in 2019, I had always intended to create a series of linocuts as a homage to Marie Hartley’s gorgeous wood engravings but, as is often the case, I ran out of time and ended up sticking to collagraph. With this new opportunity to show my project at the museum I’ve been given another chance to achieve this goal. I decided that I will create 12 black and white linocuts that will illustrate life in a meadow over a calendar year. I have been taking note of everything that happens in our local meadows for the last eight years and have a wealth of photos, drawings and ideas. My neighbour that farms these meadows follows the traditional methods which means that she intermittantly grazes the meadows with a flock of ewes from September keeping the grass low enough to allow meadow plant seeds to germinate. In late October/November she introduces a tup to the ewes and he swaggers about the fields looking macho in his harness (it’s usually a texel and a friend rightly likened him to a nightclub bouncer). Then the ewes are back in with their lambs from early March through to the end of April. The fields receive a bit of farm ‘muck’ for fertilising at some point and then from May through to August, the meadows are empty of livestock and it is fantastic to see the speed at which the plants grow and the different species that are dominant at different times. The hay gets cut around mid-July and this year we were fortunate to witness the successful fledging of four curlew chicks.

Marie Hartley’s wood engravings show some of the stages in the haymaking methods of the 1930s & 40s and my aim is to show contemporary methods with my images. I’m not an adept wood engraver (maybe one day!) but I am pretty competent at linocut, having done it on and off since I left college, and the look of it and way of working share some similarities with wood engraving. They are both relief print methods and so you are printing the raised surface of the block. The image is created by the removal of that surface with sharp tools. In effect, you are creating white areas that don’t print plus the block is a mirror image of the final print so it does require a bit of brain power to design in that way. I sometimes think that printmakers have very specific kind of brains in order not to feel befuddled all of the time!

In the above images, you can see the linoleum (made from a mix of linseed oil, cork dust, resin and gum pressed onto a jute backing). It is normally grey but I’ve stained the surface with printing ink so that it is easier to see the cuts that I’ve made. I also use a white gel pen to draw on some more complicated areas so that I don’t make mistakes when cutting. You can’t easily put back what you’ve cut away so it is important to keep track of what you’re doing.

I’ve taken some time to look at the work of other artists known for wood engraving and linocut and the research has been really enjoyable. Having printed all of Marie Hartley’s blocks, I’m very familiar with her work but I also looked at the engravings of artists such as Charles Tunnicliffe, Clare Leighton, Howard Phipps & Clifford Webb. It is interesting to see how they handle different skies, how much detail they choose to put in and what kind of stylisation they employ. I’ve chosen to keep mine quite illustrational and very much about a specific place so you’ll see Penyghent cropping up in a few. Here’s the first proofs for May & June, I may ‘tweak’ them a bit before I edition them next year:

The photos are of proof prints in my sketch book so I apologise for the quality of the images!

I’m also making a series of smaller square linocuts that will depict some of the diverse wildlife species that rely on the meadows, and the plants/trees growing on the fringes, for their food and shelter. There is a delicate balance at work with certain insects only eating specific plants and then birds and animals relying on feeding from the seeds of certain plants or eating the insects of the meadows and further up the chain you have birds such as barn owls looking for the shrews and voles that live in and on the edges of the meadows and birds such as curlews relying on sheltered places to nest and raise their chicks. I hope that this print series will help to communicate the ecological importance of these traditional meadows.

Studying the Meadows

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Looking across Ashes Pasture to a farmer cutting hay beyond.

For the majority of this year I have been working on what I call my ‘Meadows Project’. This is a continuation of the work that I started back in 2017 with my installation ‘Within These Walls’ and continued with a couple new prints inspired by haytime in the Yorkshire Dales as part of ‘View from the Fells: In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley’. As a result of a conversation with Fiona Rosher at the Dales Countryside Museum last summer, I’m delighted to say that I’ll be showing all the work created so far and a lot of new prints at the museum in the summer of 2023. It will be a joint exhibition with the DCM exhibiting their information and artefacts associated with hay making in the Yorkshire Dales.

I’m fortunate to have a number of excellent upland meadows very close to my home and I’ve been visiting a couple of them almost daily. To date, I’ve identified over 50 grass and wildflower species and numerous invertebrates. I’ve spent some lovely meditative days sketching some of the plants from life using Faber Castell Aquafaber pencils.

These drawings will be reference for new prints and I have the germ of an idea for a new installation piece. I’m also planning a series of black and white linocuts that tell the story of a contemporary dales meadows in a similar way that the gorgeous wood engravings created in the 1930s and 40s by Marie Hartley MBE showed us how haytime was done in the last century. Now that the hay has been cut, I will concentrate on developing some of the new work and plan to share that with you over the coming months.

My local meadows. We call them ‘Charlotte’s meadows’ after our neighbour as it is her family that farm them.

Back in the Meadows

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Pen-y-ghent seen from one of the beautiful local meadows on my daily walk.

I cannot believe that my last post was in 2020! I’ve been so immersed in all the myriad of things that I do as a professional artist that I haven’t given myself the time to sit down and write. I’ve decided that perhaps ‘little and often’ would be preferable to not at all. Over the next few months I intend to write about some of the projects that I’ve been involved in lately but my main topic will be ‘Within These Walls’, my ongoing work concerned with the upland meadows of the Yorkshire Dales.

There will be an exhibition next year in collaboration with the Dales Countryside Museum. They will be exhibiting their wonderful artefacts and information about Haytime in the Yorkshire Dales and I will be showing all of the print works that I’ve created for the project so far. So…watch this space and I’ll be back shortly.